I imagine a bat does similarly with echo-location. Perhaps being a bat is very like being a human in the half dark (rod vision) - no colours, poor resolution, fuzzy objects.
Not all bats are the same - long eared bats are better at close work.
I hadn’t known or even supposed that the paper, which I read in my late teens/early twenties, was 50 years old. Makes me think (slowly obviously 🙄). I do so enjoy your weekly essays.
It was a shock to me too that the paper has hit the big 5-O.
When reading papers from a different time, its fun to see how our language has changed. In this one, I particularly liked the reference to a Martian scientist — that made me smile.
Thanks so much for your kind words, John. I do so enjoy reading your weekly comments.
I recently interviewed science fiction grandmaster Ken MacLeod and asked him how he goes about imagining what it's like to be an alien, to have a non-human way of interpreting reality. The conversation naturally touched on Nagel's essay, and on Dennett's "Where Am I?" and other related works.
MacLeod's 2005 novel "Learning the World" features a race of bat-like humans who act, in MacLeod's words, "like proper Edwardians." He told me that the impetus for the bat-people in "Learning the World" came from three sources: (1) Nagel's essay, (2) the 'alien space bat' trope in criticism of literary science fiction, and (3) a conversation he had with his late wife Carol, while riding a bus in Edinburgh. He told her that he was struggling to come up with a way to imagine being an alien, and she said "What about bats?"
In his "Corporation Wars" trilogy, MacLeod describes how two non-sentient asteroid-mining robots become sentient when they're having a territorial dispute and start throwing rocks at each other. As each robot anticipates the actions of the other, it creates a mental model of its opponent, which in turn includes a model of itself. This creates a Hofstadter/Dennett 'strange loop,' which leads to self-awareness. If you've read your Hofstadter and Dennett ('Gödel, Escher, Bach,' 'The Mind's I,' etc), you may find yourself laughing out loud as you read the description of the rock fight between two mindless robots igniting a galaxy-spanning revolution. I most certainly did.
My conversation with Ken will be the first episode of my forthcoming podcast "The Desired Effect," to be posted Real Soon Now.
I very much enjoyed seeing Ken MacLeod and Ian M Banks in conversation at the Edinburgh Book Festival many years ago. You have just brought the memory back :)
Yes, it will be on substack. I gently suggest that you sign up for Sundman figures it out!, which will automatically subscribe you to The Desired Effect, and you'll get a notice when the MacLeod/Sundman conversation gets posted.
I love this! I haven't read MacLeod's book yet, but I like the idea of using fiction to playfully subvert both Nagel's philosophical puzzle and the 'alien space bat' trope by creating literally bat-like aliens who behave like proper Edwardians. That's such a delight! And a great way to approach the question of alien consciousness.
The rock-throwing robots story also sounds brilliant.
Thanks so much for sharing this. I, like John, am very much looking forward to your podcast episode. If you are planning on covering more topics like this, "The Desired Effect" sounds like my type of podcast. Is that your plan? Will you cover other authors who explore consciousness and AI in their work?
I'm so glad that you liked my comment. I do worry about trespassing, for want of a better word, on other people's posts to mention my own stuff, so I'm delighted by your response.
My 'Desired Effect' podcast has the description 'A podcast about science, science fiction, literature, and technology.' We'll just have to see where it goes. I start with some recycled interviews with writers & scientists that I conducted between 7 & 15 years ago, as well as some recent interviews with social scientists and writers on the topic of the social science of disinformation (in the context of the election, obviously). I really hope to get them posted in the next day or two, but we'll see.
As described below I've had some friendly interactions with Doug Hofstadter dating back to 1980, but the last time I talked with him was around 2005. I'll certainly invite him to be a guest on The Desired Effect, but I'll be flabbergasted, frankly, if he agrees.
But as it relates to Nagel's essay and Hofstadter/Dennett ideas about consciousness, etc, I hope you'll check out my 3-part 'Scared firefighter up in the bucket' substack essay. Although it's ostensibly about the only time I ever got scared while engaged in firefighting operations during my ten-year firefighting career, it also touches on philosophy of mind, varieties of existential dread engendered by recent developments in 'large language model' AIs, the Jefferson Airplane song 'Crown of Creation,' and Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett — not only the theories of both gentlemen, but my personal & quasi-professional encounters with both of them, including an account of the time I went to dinner with both of Hofstadter and Dennett (and a few others), and Hofstadter regaled everybody there by reading aloud from an essay I had written in Salon in which I had ridiculed Dennett:
(That's the link to part one, but parts 2 & 3 come right after it.)
And if that's not enough, here's an additional essay, "Gödel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter, and Me, and me," in which I discuss not only my personal interactions with Hofstadter over many years, but also how his ideas pervade my novel(la)s, most particularly "Cheap Complex Devices," my fable about the inaugural 'Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative."
If you read & like any of these essays, we should most definitely talk about you being a guest on The Desired Effect. I expect we could have a fun conversation.
An excellent overview of the "what it's like" argument and the responses!
I particularly like that you covered Nemirow and Lewis' argument. Lewis in particular talks about the "hypothesis of phenomenal information", the idea that there are special facts that we only have access to subjectively. It's worth thinking about how strange these facts would be if they existed. It would be facts that we could never describe, analyze, or that ever make any difference in behavior. It wouldn't be information as a difference that makes a difference, but some causally impotent variety. This is our old friend, epiphenomenalism, something anyone arguing for special phenomenal facts has to grapple with.
I also like the coverage of Akins' points. Whenever something looks intractably mysterious, back up and look at the upstream causes and downstream effects. Once looking at the causal chain, do we still need a special intrinsic thing in between? Or does the causal chain itself give us the explanation we need?
My own favorite counter example is that my laptop can never be in the same informational state as my phone. It can run an emulation of the phone in a virtual machine, but that won't be the exact same state, and it would always be the (virtual) phone running inside a laptop. So there's an uncrossable divide between my laptop and my phone. Yet no one is tempted to see that as having any deep metaphysical implications.
That's understandable! You wouldn't be the only one, that's for sure. Hopefully I'll be able to explain it in a way that makes sense to you. I'll be taking it slow. :)
I'm also looking forward to that post! If idealism can avoid the epiphenomenal trap, I'd have to see it as having an advantage against other forms of fundamental consciousness.
I'm glad you enjoyed Lewis' argument. His paper, What Experience Teaches keeps coming up in conversations around the knowledge argument. So, I'll talk more about it in the coming weeks.
The contention, it seems, is whether these subjective facts exist, and if they do whether they are separate from the physical. If they are separate then what would subjective facts actually do in a physical world? It's the ghost in the machine. The comparison to epiphenomenalism is spot-on. How could facts that are separate from the physical interact with the physical world, how would we even know they exist?
Akins arguments reminds me a lot of Daniel Dennett – sometimes what seems like an insurmountable mystery starts to dissolve when we look carefully at how the system actually works.
I love your laptop/phone analogy! I hadn't heard that one before. I might borrow it at some stage. Should I credit you, is it yours?
I only recently discovered David Lewis and have been surprised how much I agree with his takes on the mind. (His takes on modal realism, not so much. Although I haven't read him at length on it.) And that What Experience Teaches paper is epic. There's also some recordings of the associated lecture on the internet, which is interesting just to get a feel for him as a personality.
I think Dennett cites Akins for some of the views he discusses on qualia. So it seems he's more like her! Or more likely they influenced each other.
The specific laptop/phone analogy is mine, so borrow away! (I'm sure it was adapted from other examples I read or heard somewhere, but can't recall the lineage.)
Good post on a key topic. I've been amazed at how many don't get or misunderstand Nagel's point, so I'm looking forward to the second part of the series. The main point here is similar to the one in Mary's Room, that there is a difference between objective knowledge *about* and subjective knowledge *of*. You can never accomplish the mental states involved in subjective knowledge without the subjective experience. *Imagining* being a bat is not the same as *being* a bat.
Our consciousness is extraordinary in being the only topic of study that has both an outside and an inside. I think Nagel is right that, until we fully embrace this duality, we're never going to understand consciousness. This subjective/objective duality is the hard problem. How is it that anything physical can have such a thing as subjective experience? Nothing else in the universe we study does.
I'm not swayed by Lewis. What is the difference between learning a fact and gaining an ability? Especially when cast as the 'ability to remember'. What are you remembering if not facts? Akins seems to have lost the forest for the trees. I don't see any significance in that our subjective experience is irreducibly composite. I still know what redness is. I don't know what it's like to be a bat.
You're right! People often misunderstand Nagel's core argument. They think he saying something like "bats are weird and we can't imagine being them." But he's really just highlighting what he sees as the unique difficulty in studying consciousness: there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the objective, third-person scientific descriptions and the subjective, first-person point of view.
I'll gently push back a little on David Lewis' argument. Just to get your thoughts. His ability hypothesis, might be a little more subtle. I'm not sure he's talking about remembering facts -- he's talking about gaining new cognitive skills that go beyond factual knowledge. Learning to ride a bike, for example. Although you might remember facts about bike-riding, remembering the ability to ride is different. Reading a physics textbook about balance and momentum won't teach you how to actually ride a bike. You need direct experience to develop that practical know-how.
That said, I understand your skepticism about whether this fully addresses Nagel's concerns about consciousness. Even if we accept Lewis's view about abilities, it still feels like we might be missing the seeming -- the what it is likeness of riding a bike. The question, of course, is what is this seeming, does the seeming need to be explained?
There may be a definitional issue here. To me, gaining an ability *is* gaining new facts. Both involve mental states that re-program the neural net and allow recall. My response to Lewis's Vegemite example is that of course you learn a new phenomenal fact (just as Mary learns about red). Your ability to remember it is based on learning it in the first place. We can't "remember" what it's like to be a bat because we've never been one (and couldn't possibly ever be one). Indeed, not having abilities isn't surprising, but neither is not knowing something.
What I've always found interesting about Nagel's Bat (and Mary's Room) is how oddly resistive people seem to be to the notion of subjective facts even while seeming to fully acknowledge them ("illusionism" being a prime example). For me, a key point Nagel makes in this paper is to highlight subjective experience, the "something it is like". It needs to be a focal point.
Ah yes, I think I understand your point better now. And I agree. In language we might like to differentiate between different types of 'knowing'. Perhaps there is some utility in that for our everyday life. But in the end (if we think the brain has something to do with it), it's all the same kind of stuff.
The question really is about the what-it-is-likeness. The arguments are really about whether or not the what-it-is-likeness exists as something that needs to be explained.
It's assumption, of course. I base it on two observations. Firstly, that we know consciousness arises from brains, so I believe consciousness comes from what brains do. Nothing else does what brains do, so (without further evidence) nothing else has consciousness. Secondly, I don't believe in panpsychism theories because I think the combination problem rules them out.
Beautifully written piece, Suzi. Your voice as reflected in the examples and analogies you choose encourages readers to hang in there in the face of challenging ideas. Like you, I find the comments so interesting and enlightening in a unique way for Substack. Your work evokes thoughtful and deeply held positions in safe and sane conversations.
Differences among knowing and experiencing, knowing and sensing, knowing and imagining are core issues in literacy instruction. Disciplinary stances re epistemology shape what readers think about and do with texts. For example, a literature teacher might ask kids to BE the book. A history teacher might ask kids to emphasize with others in a figured world distant in time.
Just the other day, I spent an hour or so struggling with finding a dividing line between nonfiction and fiction. The view from nowhere, the scientific stance, is always a view from somewhere, in my thinking, which renders “knowing” something inseparable from human perspective. I can’t conceive of what it is like to be a bat or an earthworm, but I feel like I know what it’s like to be a golden retriever. If I looked at bats or earthworms or even golden retrievers scientifically, my subjective sense probably wouldn’t change.
I also think of Circe’s pigs in Homers epic. Odysseus saw his sailors transformed into pigs, rooting around in the mud in front of the witch’s home. She made sure the men kept their human consciousness embodied in pigs. A reader must know what it is like first to be a pig, second to be a human embodied in a pig, third to be a reader thinking about a human consciousness embodied in a pig—and then figure out what to do. Reading from nowhere, the scientific perspective, the text is a physical artifact with potential value to linguists, literary theorists, anthropologists, historians, etc.
I’ve read about the 3e approach to thinking about AI vs human consciousness. Human consciousness is embodied (echolocation etc.), embedded (situated in culture and history), and enacted (shows up in daily life). Not so of AI? What are your thoughts on 3e?
"The view from nowhere, the scientific stance, is always a view from somewhere, in my thinking, which renders “knowing” something inseparable from human perspective"
Yes! It's so funny to come across this point as I was just writing a post about this very topic, a post called "The View from Somewhere".
Thank you so much, Terry. Controversial topics, especially those that impinge on some of our dearly held beliefs, can be challenging. When I started writing on Substack I was not expecting to find a community of people so willing to share their time and thoughts in such a wonderfully thoughtful and kind way. I am amazed and feel grateful everyday.
I agree with you (and Tina) on your point about the view from nowhere is always the view from somewhere. Even when trying to be unbiased, we can't. We can't leave our experiences and knowledge behind.
On embodied cognition. Recently, I've been spending a lot of time reading and contemplating this idea. For many years computational functionalism has been the key theory in the cognitive sciences. There was a time when I thought computational functionalism might be THE answer. But there's some issues with it that have always bugged me. Embodied cognition has been gaining popularity in the cognitive sciences recently. And I think a lot of the claims make a lot of sense. I can see some issues though -- especially with the more extreme versions. In the end, I think we can learn a lot from embodied cognition, but I don't think it's the whole story.
btw, just because some cognitive scientists seem to be moving from a computation functionalist view towards an embodied cognition view, I don't think these views are necessarily opposing.
Thank you, Suzi, for such a clear description as always. It’s hard to tell what your opinion is from this — which is as it should be.
Reading your description of incrementally learning a little more about how a bat experiences the world makes me think that Nagel choosing a bat was just a distraction. All the arguments about not knowing what-it-is-like to be a bat apply just as much to the man sitting next to me. I don't know what it is like to be him either. The batness is just a distraction.
Thanks, Ragged Clown! I'm trying to be the View From Nowhere ;)
I agree, I don't think the paper is really about what we can and cannot know about bats.
The curious thing is that in the paper Nagel does say, "My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat".
He also says, "I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up the point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case."
This seems like an odd statement to make given his main argument.
Yes, I think you're right, Suzi, in pointing out Nagel's paper about subjective experience has been mischaracterized. Not because he thinks the "what it's like-ness" can be adequately understood in purely scientific terms after all, or that it cannot be understood in any way whatsoever, but because he sees room for a different kind of objective study of experience—in other words, a kind of phenomenology.
I happen to have the quote already typed out from one of my blog posts, which is convenient. :)
"This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. Though presumably it would not capture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences. We would have to develop such a phenomenology to describe the sonar experiences of bats; but it would also be possible to begin with humans. One might try, for example, to develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually, but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision.— “What is it like to be a bat?”
I'm not sure what sort of 'phenomenology' he has in mind since he doesn't seem to have a conceptually neutral starting point in his description of phenomenology (which makes me wonder if he's thinking of phenomenology in a loose sense of the word, not referring to phenomenology in the 'continental' philosophical tradition), but I think here he's onto something! Curious to hear your thoughts about this in your upcoming posts.
That quote struck me too. He talks a lot more about possible methods in his later work. It's interesting to see how his views have developed over the years.
The essay "The Psychophysical Nexus" at the end of his book "Concealment and Exposure" is an enlightening read. He spoke about these ideas recently at the scientific study of consciousness conference in NY. Given it was a scientific conference, his ideas were seen as quite controversial.
This presentation is included as the second (and final) chapter of his new book, What It Is Like to Be a Bat (50th anniversary edition).
His views, as I see them here, are closely aligned with Spinoza's idea that mind and matter are two aspects or attributes of a single underlying reality.
I see continental phenomenology to be wanting to bracket questions about the physical world to focus on pure experience. If I'm right, then I don't think Nagel wants to do that. He explicitly states that he "suspects that conscious mental properties and their neurophysiological conditions are not distinct but are inseparable aspects of some one thing"
I have never tasted Vegemite, but as a Brit, I know and love the taste of Marmite. I couldn't describe it, and I doubt very much I learned a new ability from the first experience. But I do occasionally crave the experience of Marmite on buttered toast.
I have no doubt that science can try and break down the molecules, but that, as stated, is slight of hand. That and water is a very strange substance.
There's a lot of talk in the comments about the gap between the objective and subjective, but of equal importance in my opinion, is the gap between subjective and subjective. As Nietzsche put it in *Genealogy of Morals,* "the healthy can't understand the sick." More touching, perhaps, are André's words about his wife in *My Dinner with André,* where he says that he suddenly observed that his wife, in a photo he'd always thought was sexy, looked unhappy. This leads to the inability of one person to grasp what it's like to be another person at all. (In this vein I was glad to see the reference to Douglas Hofstadter, who had a field day with similar questions.) Of course all this is going to be relevant to the question of how much a thing looks and acts like consciousness before we accept it as so and accord it moral agency...
This is such a great point. Even within our own subjective experience there seems to be unbridgeable gaps. I'm probably in the best position to know what it was like to be 5-year-old me. But I don't really know. Adult me doesn't really know what it was like to be 5 year old me. Heck, I'm not even 100% sure 'today me' knows what it was exactly like to be me 2 weeks ago. Memory is a strange thing! But perhaps these limitations aren't bugs but features.
Interesting question! The second statement -- what it is to be -- often comes up in discussions about the self. For instance, what makes someone seem like the same person over time? So, in questions about self consciousness the "what it is to be" question becomes central. But the "what it is like" question seems to be more important for discussions about phenomenological consciousness. But, you raise a great point, should these questions be discussed in the the same conversation?
I think we should be discussing the difference. The *like* question involves understanding consciousness in an out-dated way. It puts us in the role of the homunculus sitting on top of the bat’s consciousness observing it through our own experiences. It invites us to think about what echolocation feels like for us and then by extension, the bat.
To me, it feels like the wrong approach, since we know the search for our own little inner man has yielded no results.
Of course, I understand that inhabiting the isness of a bat is impossible, but I think attempting to do so will open up more space in our collective understanding of consciousness.
That's where I'm at, too. What seems like a simple question -- what it's like to "be" easily leads us down a problematic path. It taps into our assumptions that there is an "I" to be found. When I read statements like, "greater objectivity... does not take us nearer to the 'real nature' of the phenomenon"... I wonder what the "real nature" is meant to be. I, too, can't help but think it's a search for the homunculus. To me, it seems the quest to find consciousness is often a quest to find something that's not actually there -- so it will not be found.
I was in a somatic experience class and was told to feel/imagine my tail bone moving. The teacher suggested that my tail bone was drawing a circle, but I thought immediately of my dogs, and I started to feel like I had a tail. Then she told us to move the tail bone forward and backward. So I was a dog and I moved my tail way forward, toward my chest, and I felt that there was something dangerous to me and I was protecting myself. Of course I know that when a dog moves his tail to his chest he/she is self-protecting. But I actually felt it – the danger and the need to protect myself.
I am looking forward to parts 2-4 to see how this fits.
I've been wondering what it is like to be someone else since I was six. I don't know. I'm not even certain I know what it's like to be me.
It often strikes me that we might confuse the quality of consciousness with the nature of consciousness. My intuition* tells me Nagel is making an argument about the nature of consciousness, whereas Lewis are talking about quality of consciousness.
I also think there's a subjective - subjective gap when we frame the argument as ability/quality. I don't really know what it feels like to be me, because the quality of my consciousness has varied significantly.
But the nature of my consciousness? That persists. I think.
*intuition, in the sense of all of my knowledge and experience and reasoning point me in that direction in a way I can "feel"
What a fascinating thought! Let me see if I understand:
When you talk about the quality of consciousness varying significantly -- do you mean things like how your conscious experience changes between being tired vs alert, or happy vs sad, or focused vs distracted? Even the difference between what consciousness feels like as a child versus an adult?
But you suggest there's something else too -- the nature of consciousness -- that persists through all these changes. I'm really curious what you think this persistent thing might be. Is it something like the basic fact of there being "something it is like" to be you at all, regardless of what that something is like at any given moment? or is it that we can't fully know "what it's like to be me" because "me" keeps changing?
The quality of consciousness I mention does include differences between childhood and adulthood, and maybe extremes in mood - but not sure about discrete states such tired versus alert. Maybe? Variations in the quality of my consciousness are ongoing, I think, but by significant here I'm thinking of what it was like after I was in a coma. My brain was intact when I awoke, but it went quiet. And I was very much still me, and that persisted. I was a sentient being capable of complex things, but what it felt like to be me during those two years was entirely different than before or after recovering (I had rTMS). This enduring difference really highlighted for me that the state of my consciousness is different from the what it is to be (have?) a consciousness.
I spent a lot of time contemplating what this persistent thing is. The thing that has a nature. I think it's not merely that there is something to be like at all, and maybe that's a property of consciousness? I was a consciousness even when I would have said it feels like nothing, although the nothingness of it is also a feeling. I'm inclined to think that consciousness is a specific kind of behavior of matter and energy, and that's the thing that persists until death occurs, or you know, until your GCS score is 2. What it feels like, the quality of it, changes, so I can only really know what it feels like to be me at this moment in time.
So in short, the nature of consciousness has a quality to it, and nature endures, but quality does not. I think.
Thank you for sharing your experience. That's a life changing experience. I can't imagine you could go through something like that and it not have a huge impact on you.
When life gives you a brain, try to keep it! -- I love this!
That's what happens if you ride your motorcycle with your mouth open!
Zen and the art of bat qualia?
I need to reread it. It was 50 years ago.
Dog's brains integrate scent with much of the rest of the brain.
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/33/6392
I imagine a bat does similarly with echo-location. Perhaps being a bat is very like being a human in the half dark (rod vision) - no colours, poor resolution, fuzzy objects.
Not all bats are the same - long eared bats are better at close work.
Like birds, bats live much faster than we do.
Thanks for the link Malcolm! I'll have to remember that one when I get to... what is it like to be a dog?
Yes, I did read that fruit bats can't echolocate? I believe that has something to do with the way their ear bones developed.
Sorry - now I check I'm out of date. The fruit bat - primate link seems to have lost favour.
Halloween! Bats! Philosophy! Made my day 🎃!
I hadn’t known or even supposed that the paper, which I read in my late teens/early twenties, was 50 years old. Makes me think (slowly obviously 🙄). I do so enjoy your weekly essays.
Happy Halloween!
It was a shock to me too that the paper has hit the big 5-O.
When reading papers from a different time, its fun to see how our language has changed. In this one, I particularly liked the reference to a Martian scientist — that made me smile.
Thanks so much for your kind words, John. I do so enjoy reading your weekly comments.
Loved this🦇💕🤓
Thanks, Jasmine!
You're welcome😊
I recently interviewed science fiction grandmaster Ken MacLeod and asked him how he goes about imagining what it's like to be an alien, to have a non-human way of interpreting reality. The conversation naturally touched on Nagel's essay, and on Dennett's "Where Am I?" and other related works.
MacLeod's 2005 novel "Learning the World" features a race of bat-like humans who act, in MacLeod's words, "like proper Edwardians." He told me that the impetus for the bat-people in "Learning the World" came from three sources: (1) Nagel's essay, (2) the 'alien space bat' trope in criticism of literary science fiction, and (3) a conversation he had with his late wife Carol, while riding a bus in Edinburgh. He told her that he was struggling to come up with a way to imagine being an alien, and she said "What about bats?"
In his "Corporation Wars" trilogy, MacLeod describes how two non-sentient asteroid-mining robots become sentient when they're having a territorial dispute and start throwing rocks at each other. As each robot anticipates the actions of the other, it creates a mental model of its opponent, which in turn includes a model of itself. This creates a Hofstadter/Dennett 'strange loop,' which leads to self-awareness. If you've read your Hofstadter and Dennett ('Gödel, Escher, Bach,' 'The Mind's I,' etc), you may find yourself laughing out loud as you read the description of the rock fight between two mindless robots igniting a galaxy-spanning revolution. I most certainly did.
My conversation with Ken will be the first episode of my forthcoming podcast "The Desired Effect," to be posted Real Soon Now.
Looking forward to hearing this. Will it be on substack? All the best, John.
I very much enjoyed seeing Ken MacLeod and Ian M Banks in conversation at the Edinburgh Book Festival many years ago. You have just brought the memory back :)
Yes, it will be on substack. I gently suggest that you sign up for Sundman figures it out!, which will automatically subscribe you to The Desired Effect, and you'll get a notice when the MacLeod/Sundman conversation gets posted.
Will do. Thanks again. All the best, John.
Hi John!
I love this! I haven't read MacLeod's book yet, but I like the idea of using fiction to playfully subvert both Nagel's philosophical puzzle and the 'alien space bat' trope by creating literally bat-like aliens who behave like proper Edwardians. That's such a delight! And a great way to approach the question of alien consciousness.
The rock-throwing robots story also sounds brilliant.
Thanks so much for sharing this. I, like John, am very much looking forward to your podcast episode. If you are planning on covering more topics like this, "The Desired Effect" sounds like my type of podcast. Is that your plan? Will you cover other authors who explore consciousness and AI in their work?
Suzi!
I'm so glad that you liked my comment. I do worry about trespassing, for want of a better word, on other people's posts to mention my own stuff, so I'm delighted by your response.
My 'Desired Effect' podcast has the description 'A podcast about science, science fiction, literature, and technology.' We'll just have to see where it goes. I start with some recycled interviews with writers & scientists that I conducted between 7 & 15 years ago, as well as some recent interviews with social scientists and writers on the topic of the social science of disinformation (in the context of the election, obviously). I really hope to get them posted in the next day or two, but we'll see.
As described below I've had some friendly interactions with Doug Hofstadter dating back to 1980, but the last time I talked with him was around 2005. I'll certainly invite him to be a guest on The Desired Effect, but I'll be flabbergasted, frankly, if he agrees.
But as it relates to Nagel's essay and Hofstadter/Dennett ideas about consciousness, etc, I hope you'll check out my 3-part 'Scared firefighter up in the bucket' substack essay. Although it's ostensibly about the only time I ever got scared while engaged in firefighting operations during my ten-year firefighting career, it also touches on philosophy of mind, varieties of existential dread engendered by recent developments in 'large language model' AIs, the Jefferson Airplane song 'Crown of Creation,' and Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett — not only the theories of both gentlemen, but my personal & quasi-professional encounters with both of them, including an account of the time I went to dinner with both of Hofstadter and Dennett (and a few others), and Hofstadter regaled everybody there by reading aloud from an essay I had written in Salon in which I had ridiculed Dennett:
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnsundman/p/a-scared-firefighter-up-in-the-bucket
(That's the link to part one, but parts 2 & 3 come right after it.)
And if that's not enough, here's an additional essay, "Gödel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter, and Me, and me," in which I discuss not only my personal interactions with Hofstadter over many years, but also how his ideas pervade my novel(la)s, most particularly "Cheap Complex Devices," my fable about the inaugural 'Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative."
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnsundman/p/godel-escher-bach-douglas-hofstadter?r=38b5x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
If you read & like any of these essays, we should most definitely talk about you being a guest on The Desired Effect. I expect we could have a fun conversation.
Thanks, John! I'll add those articles to my reading list. Looking forward to it.
An excellent overview of the "what it's like" argument and the responses!
I particularly like that you covered Nemirow and Lewis' argument. Lewis in particular talks about the "hypothesis of phenomenal information", the idea that there are special facts that we only have access to subjectively. It's worth thinking about how strange these facts would be if they existed. It would be facts that we could never describe, analyze, or that ever make any difference in behavior. It wouldn't be information as a difference that makes a difference, but some causally impotent variety. This is our old friend, epiphenomenalism, something anyone arguing for special phenomenal facts has to grapple with.
I also like the coverage of Akins' points. Whenever something looks intractably mysterious, back up and look at the upstream causes and downstream effects. Once looking at the causal chain, do we still need a special intrinsic thing in between? Or does the causal chain itself give us the explanation we need?
My own favorite counter example is that my laptop can never be in the same informational state as my phone. It can run an emulation of the phone in a virtual machine, but that won't be the exact same state, and it would always be the (virtual) phone running inside a laptop. So there's an uncrossable divide between my laptop and my phone. Yet no one is tempted to see that as having any deep metaphysical implications.
"This is our old friend, epiphenomenalism, something anyone arguing for special phenomenal facts has to grapple with."
Not true for idealists! :)
But as you know I'm with you on the problem of causal incompetence, even if for different reasons. I have a post coming up about this issue.
Oh, I'm very much looking forward to that post.
I've been trying to really understand the idealist claims. It's so counterintuitive to me.
That's understandable! You wouldn't be the only one, that's for sure. Hopefully I'll be able to explain it in a way that makes sense to you. I'll be taking it slow. :)
I'm also looking forward to that post! If idealism can avoid the epiphenomenal trap, I'd have to see it as having an advantage against other forms of fundamental consciousness.
Thanks so much Mike!
I'm glad you enjoyed Lewis' argument. His paper, What Experience Teaches keeps coming up in conversations around the knowledge argument. So, I'll talk more about it in the coming weeks.
The contention, it seems, is whether these subjective facts exist, and if they do whether they are separate from the physical. If they are separate then what would subjective facts actually do in a physical world? It's the ghost in the machine. The comparison to epiphenomenalism is spot-on. How could facts that are separate from the physical interact with the physical world, how would we even know they exist?
Akins arguments reminds me a lot of Daniel Dennett – sometimes what seems like an insurmountable mystery starts to dissolve when we look carefully at how the system actually works.
I love your laptop/phone analogy! I hadn't heard that one before. I might borrow it at some stage. Should I credit you, is it yours?
Thanks Suzi!
I only recently discovered David Lewis and have been surprised how much I agree with his takes on the mind. (His takes on modal realism, not so much. Although I haven't read him at length on it.) And that What Experience Teaches paper is epic. There's also some recordings of the associated lecture on the internet, which is interesting just to get a feel for him as a personality.
I think Dennett cites Akins for some of the views he discusses on qualia. So it seems he's more like her! Or more likely they influenced each other.
The specific laptop/phone analogy is mine, so borrow away! (I'm sure it was adapted from other examples I read or heard somewhere, but can't recall the lineage.)
Looking forward to the rest of this series!
Good post on a key topic. I've been amazed at how many don't get or misunderstand Nagel's point, so I'm looking forward to the second part of the series. The main point here is similar to the one in Mary's Room, that there is a difference between objective knowledge *about* and subjective knowledge *of*. You can never accomplish the mental states involved in subjective knowledge without the subjective experience. *Imagining* being a bat is not the same as *being* a bat.
Our consciousness is extraordinary in being the only topic of study that has both an outside and an inside. I think Nagel is right that, until we fully embrace this duality, we're never going to understand consciousness. This subjective/objective duality is the hard problem. How is it that anything physical can have such a thing as subjective experience? Nothing else in the universe we study does.
I'm not swayed by Lewis. What is the difference between learning a fact and gaining an ability? Especially when cast as the 'ability to remember'. What are you remembering if not facts? Akins seems to have lost the forest for the trees. I don't see any significance in that our subjective experience is irreducibly composite. I still know what redness is. I don't know what it's like to be a bat.
Looking forward to the next posts!
Good point about the similarities to Mary's room.
Thanks!
You're right! People often misunderstand Nagel's core argument. They think he saying something like "bats are weird and we can't imagine being them." But he's really just highlighting what he sees as the unique difficulty in studying consciousness: there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the objective, third-person scientific descriptions and the subjective, first-person point of view.
I'll gently push back a little on David Lewis' argument. Just to get your thoughts. His ability hypothesis, might be a little more subtle. I'm not sure he's talking about remembering facts -- he's talking about gaining new cognitive skills that go beyond factual knowledge. Learning to ride a bike, for example. Although you might remember facts about bike-riding, remembering the ability to ride is different. Reading a physics textbook about balance and momentum won't teach you how to actually ride a bike. You need direct experience to develop that practical know-how.
That said, I understand your skepticism about whether this fully addresses Nagel's concerns about consciousness. Even if we accept Lewis's view about abilities, it still feels like we might be missing the seeming -- the what it is likeness of riding a bike. The question, of course, is what is this seeming, does the seeming need to be explained?
There may be a definitional issue here. To me, gaining an ability *is* gaining new facts. Both involve mental states that re-program the neural net and allow recall. My response to Lewis's Vegemite example is that of course you learn a new phenomenal fact (just as Mary learns about red). Your ability to remember it is based on learning it in the first place. We can't "remember" what it's like to be a bat because we've never been one (and couldn't possibly ever be one). Indeed, not having abilities isn't surprising, but neither is not knowing something.
What I've always found interesting about Nagel's Bat (and Mary's Room) is how oddly resistive people seem to be to the notion of subjective facts even while seeming to fully acknowledge them ("illusionism" being a prime example). For me, a key point Nagel makes in this paper is to highlight subjective experience, the "something it is like". It needs to be a focal point.
Ah yes, I think I understand your point better now. And I agree. In language we might like to differentiate between different types of 'knowing'. Perhaps there is some utility in that for our everyday life. But in the end (if we think the brain has something to do with it), it's all the same kind of stuff.
The question really is about the what-it-is-likeness. The arguments are really about whether or not the what-it-is-likeness exists as something that needs to be explained.
You say, "Nothing else in the universe we study does [have subjective experience]."
How do you know that?
It's assumption, of course. I base it on two observations. Firstly, that we know consciousness arises from brains, so I believe consciousness comes from what brains do. Nothing else does what brains do, so (without further evidence) nothing else has consciousness. Secondly, I don't believe in panpsychism theories because I think the combination problem rules them out.
Oh ok, I’d be inclined to the opposite view and say we know from the hard problem consciousness doesn’t “arise” from brains.
Where do you think it arises from?
I like idealism, which means I don’t think it arises from anything, since consciousness is the only substance.
Ah, okay. What do you think about the assertion that consciousness only manifests in brains?
Beautifully written piece, Suzi. Your voice as reflected in the examples and analogies you choose encourages readers to hang in there in the face of challenging ideas. Like you, I find the comments so interesting and enlightening in a unique way for Substack. Your work evokes thoughtful and deeply held positions in safe and sane conversations.
Differences among knowing and experiencing, knowing and sensing, knowing and imagining are core issues in literacy instruction. Disciplinary stances re epistemology shape what readers think about and do with texts. For example, a literature teacher might ask kids to BE the book. A history teacher might ask kids to emphasize with others in a figured world distant in time.
Just the other day, I spent an hour or so struggling with finding a dividing line between nonfiction and fiction. The view from nowhere, the scientific stance, is always a view from somewhere, in my thinking, which renders “knowing” something inseparable from human perspective. I can’t conceive of what it is like to be a bat or an earthworm, but I feel like I know what it’s like to be a golden retriever. If I looked at bats or earthworms or even golden retrievers scientifically, my subjective sense probably wouldn’t change.
I also think of Circe’s pigs in Homers epic. Odysseus saw his sailors transformed into pigs, rooting around in the mud in front of the witch’s home. She made sure the men kept their human consciousness embodied in pigs. A reader must know what it is like first to be a pig, second to be a human embodied in a pig, third to be a reader thinking about a human consciousness embodied in a pig—and then figure out what to do. Reading from nowhere, the scientific perspective, the text is a physical artifact with potential value to linguists, literary theorists, anthropologists, historians, etc.
I’ve read about the 3e approach to thinking about AI vs human consciousness. Human consciousness is embodied (echolocation etc.), embedded (situated in culture and history), and enacted (shows up in daily life). Not so of AI? What are your thoughts on 3e?
Beautifully said, Terry.
"The view from nowhere, the scientific stance, is always a view from somewhere, in my thinking, which renders “knowing” something inseparable from human perspective"
Yes! It's so funny to come across this point as I was just writing a post about this very topic, a post called "The View from Somewhere".
Thank you so much, Terry. Controversial topics, especially those that impinge on some of our dearly held beliefs, can be challenging. When I started writing on Substack I was not expecting to find a community of people so willing to share their time and thoughts in such a wonderfully thoughtful and kind way. I am amazed and feel grateful everyday.
I agree with you (and Tina) on your point about the view from nowhere is always the view from somewhere. Even when trying to be unbiased, we can't. We can't leave our experiences and knowledge behind.
On embodied cognition. Recently, I've been spending a lot of time reading and contemplating this idea. For many years computational functionalism has been the key theory in the cognitive sciences. There was a time when I thought computational functionalism might be THE answer. But there's some issues with it that have always bugged me. Embodied cognition has been gaining popularity in the cognitive sciences recently. And I think a lot of the claims make a lot of sense. I can see some issues though -- especially with the more extreme versions. In the end, I think we can learn a lot from embodied cognition, but I don't think it's the whole story.
btw, just because some cognitive scientists seem to be moving from a computation functionalist view towards an embodied cognition view, I don't think these views are necessarily opposing.
Thank you, Suzi, for such a clear description as always. It’s hard to tell what your opinion is from this — which is as it should be.
Reading your description of incrementally learning a little more about how a bat experiences the world makes me think that Nagel choosing a bat was just a distraction. All the arguments about not knowing what-it-is-like to be a bat apply just as much to the man sitting next to me. I don't know what it is like to be him either. The batness is just a distraction.
Thanks, Ragged Clown! I'm trying to be the View From Nowhere ;)
I agree, I don't think the paper is really about what we can and cannot know about bats.
The curious thing is that in the paper Nagel does say, "My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat".
He also says, "I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up the point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case."
This seems like an odd statement to make given his main argument.
Yes, I think you're right, Suzi, in pointing out Nagel's paper about subjective experience has been mischaracterized. Not because he thinks the "what it's like-ness" can be adequately understood in purely scientific terms after all, or that it cannot be understood in any way whatsoever, but because he sees room for a different kind of objective study of experience—in other words, a kind of phenomenology.
I happen to have the quote already typed out from one of my blog posts, which is convenient. :)
"This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. Though presumably it would not capture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences. We would have to develop such a phenomenology to describe the sonar experiences of bats; but it would also be possible to begin with humans. One might try, for example, to develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually, but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision.— “What is it like to be a bat?”
I'm not sure what sort of 'phenomenology' he has in mind since he doesn't seem to have a conceptually neutral starting point in his description of phenomenology (which makes me wonder if he's thinking of phenomenology in a loose sense of the word, not referring to phenomenology in the 'continental' philosophical tradition), but I think here he's onto something! Curious to hear your thoughts about this in your upcoming posts.
Thanks, Tina.
That quote struck me too. He talks a lot more about possible methods in his later work. It's interesting to see how his views have developed over the years.
The essay "The Psychophysical Nexus" at the end of his book "Concealment and Exposure" is an enlightening read. He spoke about these ideas recently at the scientific study of consciousness conference in NY. Given it was a scientific conference, his ideas were seen as quite controversial.
This presentation is included as the second (and final) chapter of his new book, What It Is Like to Be a Bat (50th anniversary edition).
His views, as I see them here, are closely aligned with Spinoza's idea that mind and matter are two aspects or attributes of a single underlying reality.
I see continental phenomenology to be wanting to bracket questions about the physical world to focus on pure experience. If I'm right, then I don't think Nagel wants to do that. He explicitly states that he "suspects that conscious mental properties and their neurophysiological conditions are not distinct but are inseparable aspects of some one thing"
I have never tasted Vegemite, but as a Brit, I know and love the taste of Marmite. I couldn't describe it, and I doubt very much I learned a new ability from the first experience. But I do occasionally crave the experience of Marmite on buttered toast.
I have no doubt that science can try and break down the molecules, but that, as stated, is slight of hand. That and water is a very strange substance.
There's a lot of talk in the comments about the gap between the objective and subjective, but of equal importance in my opinion, is the gap between subjective and subjective. As Nietzsche put it in *Genealogy of Morals,* "the healthy can't understand the sick." More touching, perhaps, are André's words about his wife in *My Dinner with André,* where he says that he suddenly observed that his wife, in a photo he'd always thought was sexy, looked unhappy. This leads to the inability of one person to grasp what it's like to be another person at all. (In this vein I was glad to see the reference to Douglas Hofstadter, who had a field day with similar questions.) Of course all this is going to be relevant to the question of how much a thing looks and acts like consciousness before we accept it as so and accord it moral agency...
This is such a great point. Even within our own subjective experience there seems to be unbridgeable gaps. I'm probably in the best position to know what it was like to be 5-year-old me. But I don't really know. Adult me doesn't really know what it was like to be 5 year old me. Heck, I'm not even 100% sure 'today me' knows what it was exactly like to be me 2 weeks ago. Memory is a strange thing! But perhaps these limitations aren't bugs but features.
I keep expecting the discourse to explore the difference between “What it’s like to be a bat” and “What it is to be a bat”.
Can anyone provide insight as to why this is?
Interesting question! The second statement -- what it is to be -- often comes up in discussions about the self. For instance, what makes someone seem like the same person over time? So, in questions about self consciousness the "what it is to be" question becomes central. But the "what it is like" question seems to be more important for discussions about phenomenological consciousness. But, you raise a great point, should these questions be discussed in the the same conversation?
I think we should be discussing the difference. The *like* question involves understanding consciousness in an out-dated way. It puts us in the role of the homunculus sitting on top of the bat’s consciousness observing it through our own experiences. It invites us to think about what echolocation feels like for us and then by extension, the bat.
To me, it feels like the wrong approach, since we know the search for our own little inner man has yielded no results.
Of course, I understand that inhabiting the isness of a bat is impossible, but I think attempting to do so will open up more space in our collective understanding of consciousness.
That's where I'm at, too. What seems like a simple question -- what it's like to "be" easily leads us down a problematic path. It taps into our assumptions that there is an "I" to be found. When I read statements like, "greater objectivity... does not take us nearer to the 'real nature' of the phenomenon"... I wonder what the "real nature" is meant to be. I, too, can't help but think it's a search for the homunculus. To me, it seems the quest to find consciousness is often a quest to find something that's not actually there -- so it will not be found.
I'm loving this series and hating it too... it takes so much time out of my day... it leaves me in full ponder for hours after reading.
Thanks again for opening my world up.
Hahaha, sorry :)
It is fascinating, isn't it! I've been thinking about these topics for more than 20 years, and I'm still not bored by it.
I was in a somatic experience class and was told to feel/imagine my tail bone moving. The teacher suggested that my tail bone was drawing a circle, but I thought immediately of my dogs, and I started to feel like I had a tail. Then she told us to move the tail bone forward and backward. So I was a dog and I moved my tail way forward, toward my chest, and I felt that there was something dangerous to me and I was protecting myself. Of course I know that when a dog moves his tail to his chest he/she is self-protecting. But I actually felt it – the danger and the need to protect myself.
I am looking forward to parts 2-4 to see how this fits.
I've been wondering what it is like to be someone else since I was six. I don't know. I'm not even certain I know what it's like to be me.
It often strikes me that we might confuse the quality of consciousness with the nature of consciousness. My intuition* tells me Nagel is making an argument about the nature of consciousness, whereas Lewis are talking about quality of consciousness.
I also think there's a subjective - subjective gap when we frame the argument as ability/quality. I don't really know what it feels like to be me, because the quality of my consciousness has varied significantly.
But the nature of my consciousness? That persists. I think.
*intuition, in the sense of all of my knowledge and experience and reasoning point me in that direction in a way I can "feel"
Does that make any sense (ha)?
What a fascinating thought! Let me see if I understand:
When you talk about the quality of consciousness varying significantly -- do you mean things like how your conscious experience changes between being tired vs alert, or happy vs sad, or focused vs distracted? Even the difference between what consciousness feels like as a child versus an adult?
But you suggest there's something else too -- the nature of consciousness -- that persists through all these changes. I'm really curious what you think this persistent thing might be. Is it something like the basic fact of there being "something it is like" to be you at all, regardless of what that something is like at any given moment? or is it that we can't fully know "what it's like to be me" because "me" keeps changing?
The quality of consciousness I mention does include differences between childhood and adulthood, and maybe extremes in mood - but not sure about discrete states such tired versus alert. Maybe? Variations in the quality of my consciousness are ongoing, I think, but by significant here I'm thinking of what it was like after I was in a coma. My brain was intact when I awoke, but it went quiet. And I was very much still me, and that persisted. I was a sentient being capable of complex things, but what it felt like to be me during those two years was entirely different than before or after recovering (I had rTMS). This enduring difference really highlighted for me that the state of my consciousness is different from the what it is to be (have?) a consciousness.
I spent a lot of time contemplating what this persistent thing is. The thing that has a nature. I think it's not merely that there is something to be like at all, and maybe that's a property of consciousness? I was a consciousness even when I would have said it feels like nothing, although the nothingness of it is also a feeling. I'm inclined to think that consciousness is a specific kind of behavior of matter and energy, and that's the thing that persists until death occurs, or you know, until your GCS score is 2. What it feels like, the quality of it, changes, so I can only really know what it feels like to be me at this moment in time.
So in short, the nature of consciousness has a quality to it, and nature endures, but quality does not. I think.
When life gives you a brain, try to keep it!
Thank you for sharing your experience. That's a life changing experience. I can't imagine you could go through something like that and it not have a huge impact on you.
When life gives you a brain, try to keep it! -- I love this!