Knowing what it's like to be conscious
I came across this comment from @J
Quoting J
It left me pondering how I know what it's like to be conscious if I can't know what it's like for other people. Wouldn't I need something to compare or contrast it with? I wasn't thinking about the ineffability issue. It would be closer to a private language problem, where I wouldn't be able to speak confidently about continuity of consciousness. I wouldn't be able to say it's this and not that. Maybe I have to assume other people experience things differently so I can say pinpoint something unique about me? Is it my POV that's unique?
Thoughts?
Quoting J
And thus for consciousness. I can't know what it's like to be someone else,
It left me pondering how I know what it's like to be conscious if I can't know what it's like for other people. Wouldn't I need something to compare or contrast it with? I wasn't thinking about the ineffability issue. It would be closer to a private language problem, where I wouldn't be able to speak confidently about continuity of consciousness. I wouldn't be able to say it's this and not that. Maybe I have to assume other people experience things differently so I can say pinpoint something unique about me? Is it my POV that's unique?
Thoughts?
Comments (53)
As for others, it's a safe bet that they are beings just as I am - that everyone is 'me' but from their own unique perspective. Hence the maxim to 'treat others as you yourself would be treated'.
Do you remember much about your thoughts and sense of consciousness (or self/awareness) at the time, or do you mostly remember yourself just being there, almost as if you were an observer?
I reckon it's the latter. So that means, different beings capable of consciousness can have varying states of consciousness. Compare a young child capable of basic conversation and decision making and a full grown intellect such as yourself. You're both conscious, but your depth or recognition of your own consciousness is simply far greater almost to the point of it being an entirely unrecognizable or distinct depth and level of existence. Same with someone mentally handicapped versus someone "neurotypical." It's also possible they may be able to experience the same things you do but for whatever physical or other reason are unable to express or share that they do.
Only humans? Or all conscious creatures?
Why do you say that?
I have a friend who's coined the term "The Impossible Problem" to describe this wrinkle in the Hard Problem. (And yes, @Wayfarer, this is the very same question we're examining from different angles in the other thread.) My friend means the problem of actually experiencing another person's consciousness. Why does this seem impossible? It creates a dilemma: If I experience your consciousness as myself doing so, that is clearly not what it's like for you -- there's no observer or alien presence for you. But if I don't do this, and instead simply have your experience (how? but that's a different question), then I haven't experienced it -- my "I" is not present to do any experiencing. Either way, it doesn't seem possible that I can ever know what it is to be you (leaving aside the somewhat ambiguous "what it's like".)
This doesn't mean, of course, that it's unreasonable to suppose that being someone else resembles being me. The resemblance gets less and less close as we move through the animal kingdom.
We're talking about the most simple, center of everything sort of experience, like the ITT theory graphic:
check it out.
Let's call it the intrinsic perspective (for lack of another name?). Schopenhauer speculated that there is only one of these, and it's universal, each person thinks they own it. So Schopenhauer would agree with your friend, not because I don't have access to that most basic level of consciousness, but because if I could "download" your experiences, I might balk at the parts I'm not prepared to deal with. You don't balk because you're use to it. So right there, I'm not experiencing you as you. So here, the definition of self is about a certain history rather than raw intrinsic perspective, right?
I have more questions about how you think this relates to the hard problem.
This is a great graphic, thanks.
Quoting frank
Yes, yet another aspect of the impossibility -- not only do we have our experiences, but we have our attitudes toward our experiences, our "experience of experience," and that would presumably be different for you and me, even if we somehow shared the 1st-level experiences.
Quoting frank
So do I! And if you've been following my discussion with @Wayfarer, you see that not everyone agrees on exactly how to characterize the hard problem. I read Chalmers as saying it's a scientific problem, hard but potentially solvable through scientific inquiry. Whereas I think Wayfarer sees Chalmers as being closer to the New Mysterian position of McGinn and others.
What are your questions about hard versus impossible?
Wayfarer is mistaken. Chalmers is non-mysterian. He thinks that in order to create a scientific theory of consciousness, we need to posit first-person data as an explicandum, in much the same way gravity was posited by Newton without any accompanying theory. A mysterian would say any such project is hopeless from the start.
Chalmers has talked about pan-psychism as exemplifying the kind of theory we might start with: just accepting that consciousness is a property of our little universe, and go from there.
Our worldview tends to say that intrinsic perspective (or subjective experience), is located in isolated pockets, inside skulls? Mine is separated from yours by a region of air. Could you see yourself questioning that assumption?
This is me speculating about his position. He may not think this at all.
Quoting frank
Yes. Do you know Galen Strawson's book, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature? A very good argument for the plausibility of panpsychism.
I haven't. Does he talk about the problem of other minds?
Can't remember. I took a quick look through the book but couldn't find anything. Not to say it isn't there -- the book has an unusual set-up -- a long target paper by Strawson, then replies by about 16 philosophers, then a long response to all of them from Strawson. So it's hard to find stuff, and the index didn't help. But an excellent book nonetheless.
Time is something we frame in time. It seems so inherent to the human condition that we tend to think of it as inflexible.
Even taking into account our conscious subjective appreciation of time -- a narrow window of attention -- relative to the semi-conscious and unconscious 'appreciation,' there is still something of a covering-over going on in terms of the homunculi account of time.
At the very least it seems to me that conscious subjectivity is distributed in a specular sense from multiple temporal instances. How else could anything be apprehended without having a fundamental atemporal aspect?
Even if we view consciousness ar large as a simulation -- meaning representation of -- how would it be possible to hold such appreciation of in a distilled instant? We are not photons, yet we live in a finite respect like photons, able to experience change firsthand.
I said it was a bit mad :)
Never took to Colin McGinn, although enjoyed his scathing review of Paula Churchlands materialist baloney. Besides, 'New Mysterian' sounds like a band name. I simply reference the original paper (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness) as a stepping-off point. Chalmers wants to redefine science to accomodate the first-person perspective.
One reaction this provoked was Daniel Dennetts essay The Fantasy of First-Person Science. Dennett argued that the very idea of a science based on private, first-person data is incoherent (ridiculous, even!) Science, in his view, can only proceed on the basis of what is publicly observable and intersubjectively testable. Strictly objective, right? He was wary of granting privileged epistemic authority to introspection, which he regarded as unreliable and uncheckable. To resolve this, he proposed heterophenomenology, a method in which the researcher treats subjects reports of their experiences not as direct windows onto consciousness, but as neutral data to be interpreted. If a subject says I see a red afterimage, the scientific claim is not that an afterimage exists as described, but simply that the subject reported seeing one, a fact which can be combined with other behavioural and neurological evidence. For Dennett, this move rescues science from what he saw as the illusion that first-person testimony could form a scientific foundation.
Dan Zahavi responded in Killing the Straw Man that Dennetts picture of phenomenology is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Dennett assumes that phenomenology is a species of naïve introspection, committed to the incorrigibility of private reports and the construction of a first-person science in that sense. Zahavi insists that this is precisely not what phenomenology is. For Husserl and those who followed him, phenomenology is not a catalogue of inner episodes, but a disciplined investigation of the structures of experience itselfintentionality, temporality, embodiment, and above all, intersubjectivity. Phenomenologists have long recognised that introspection can be fallible and misleading; their project is not to defend subjective reports as infallible data, but to uncover the fundamental patterns through which experience arises, which are themselves shared and already presupposed in any science. In that light, Zahavi argues, Dennett is fighting an enemy that doesnt exist. His heterophenomenology might be a corrective to old-fashioned Willhelm Wundt-style introspective psychology, but it is not a correction of phenomenology, which never claimed what he attributes to it.
[quote= Paraphrased from Marcels The Mystery of Being] A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by which it can be attacked and reduced. A mystery, by contrast, transcends any conceivable technique; it is not reducible, because it is a situation in which the inquirer is him- or herself a participant.[/quote]
Which I think is much nearer the mark.
I understand what you're saying. My theory is that the conception of time is related to anticipation. Agriculture creates anticipation throughout the year: farmers plant around the spring equinox, they wait all summer to see how the crop will do, they harvest around the fall equinox, and then wait all winter for the next spring.
All of that requires being relatively stationary. You can't be nomadic and farm, and being stationary is how people were first able to mark out the solar calendar.
As you say, if you're looking at the whole calendar, your vantage point seems to be outside of the passage of time, in some eternal spot.
Do you think consciousness has to remain a mystery in Marcel's sense -- that the presence of the inquirer makes the phenomenon irreducible to explanatory language, to "technique"?
Metaphor and Language
Let us speak of metaphor. The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. But what an understatement! For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things. There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, which I shall call the metaphrand, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, which I shall call the metaphier. A metaphor is always a known metaphier operating on a less known metaphrand. I have coined these hybrid terms simply to echo multiplication where a multiplier operates on a multiplicand.
It is by metaphor that language grows. The common reply to the question what is it? is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, well, it is like. In laboratory studies, both children and adults describing nonsense objects (or metaphrands) to others who cannot see them use extended metaphiers that with repetition become contracted into labels.2 This is the major way in which the vocabulary of language is formed. The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex.
A random glance at the etymologies of common words in a dictionary will demonstrate this assertion. Or take the naming of various fauna and flora in their Latin indicants, or even in their wonderful common English names, such as stag beetle, ladys-slipper, darning needle, Queen Annes lace, or buttercup. The human body is a particularly generative metaphier, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the cheeks of a vise; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailors voyage, or cricket field; and so on and on. Or the foot of this page. Or the leaf you will soon turn. All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication....
Your... aggressive, willful approach to interfering with other people's threads used to infuriate me.
It is a first-person phenomenon, so-called experience, that anything with the ability to experience knows what it is like to have such a certain experience rather than other experiences, given what you are, where you are, etc.
I came the same conclusion. If you tried to say anything about what's unique about your own experience, it would be a description of your history and present location.
Correct! :wink:
It's the other way around. We assume that other people have consciousness "like me". Based on what they do or say, I can understand what they're saying based on my own experience. In other words, it's as if I am putting on the shoes of the other person and seeing things from their perspective, except it's my own.
That's why it's not particularly puzzling why - when someone has a broken leg, or even a cut and say, "it hurts", we understand what they mean, because that's what we would say if we were in a similar situation.
There are exceptions of course, some people are born feeling no physical pain (rare exceptions) and there are psychopaths, people lacking in empathy - but they're a small fraction of the whole human species. So, I'd argue you already know what it's like to be in the consciousness of someone else. Also, reading a good novel also helps.
Just thinking it through, but what if you say "it hurts" in certain situations because you're a natural born mimic? Over time, you learn to associate certain actions with certain feelings, but you have no language for the feelings other than what you learned from copying? Like this:
I think the example is way simpler. Yes, babies do what the video is showing, but that's not the same thing.
It's very common, as in you are walking on the street a fellow civilian gets hit by a rock or bitten by a dog - whatever. Or you find him injured and he says his leg hurts, you may either see an injury or assume the pain is not visible to the eye. You don't doubt he is in pain.
But you are not puzzled as to why he is saying his leg hurts, you would do the same thing in his position if your leg hurt too.
Or even migraines, they are very hard to detect, but if a person says, "I have a massive headache", you immediately understand and empathize, because you've head headaches before.
Right. I think my point might be too obscure. Let me tell a story.
I was once sitting in a cafe and I found myself becoming agitated and angry. I couldn't pinpoint why. But I eventually realized what it was: without consciously registering it, I was looking at a man with an angry look on his face. I realized I'd experienced empathy that wasn't mediated at all by the intellect. There was just: anger, and I thought it was mine, but it wasn't. I was experiencing this other guy's feelings as if they were my own.
My point is, all this about distinguishing my feelings from someone's else's: that's all higher level intellectual functioning which attends to identifying threats, and so manages things like motive and my feelings versus yours.
Without the intellect setting out borders and providing explanations, there is just emotion. It doesn't belong to anybody. It's just there. Does that make sense?
McGinn thinks it's an intractable scientific problem, that it's so complex we can't feasibly tackle it. Marcel was an existentialist, he didn't understand it as a problem to be solved but a reality to be accepted.
Buddhism has 'theories of consciousness', beginning with abhidharma, and elaborated over subsequent millenia. But the aim was never to 'explain consciousness'. It was to address the cause of suffering, dukkha, and its ending. Buddhism was always phenomenological, right from the outset. It never posited that the self and world were separated in the way that modern science does. In translations of the early Buddhist texts, the expression 'self and world' is often encountered, as they are understood to be co-arising, in modern parlance. (This is where there are convergences between modern phenomenology and Buddhism, e.g. Merleau Ponty and Buddhism)
Quoting frank
It does. It's an argument against solipsism. Solipsism takes as its starting point the claim that my consciousness is the only thing I am indubitably certain of. But this claim depends on the sense of mineof ownershipwhich is itself a mental construct rather than a self-evident given. What is indubitable is consciousness as such, not its appropriation as my consciousness. If the mine is deconstructed, then solipsism evaporates, because the certainty lies only in consciousness, not in its supposed exclusivity to a solitary self.
Descartes could have more accurately said cogitatio est, ergo esse est 'thinking is, therefore being is.' What is indubitable is the occurrence of thought, not the existence of an enduring ego.
This is good, and relates back to a discussion on Descartes I was having with @Ludwig V a while back, based on Bernard Williams' book about D. There's a middle-ground alternative too: We can posit a thinker as indubitable, along with the occurrence of thought, without having to characterize that thinker as "an enduring ego." If I'm not mistaken, Paul Ricoeur suggests something like this, connecting the "ego" in "cogito ergo sum" with the conscious "I" and pointing out that the unconscious or pre-conscious (or even cosmic consciousness) might be what truly endures.
I don't recall being in such a situation explicitly, but it wouldn't be alien either. As in, you are in crowd of people who are crying over a sad event or excited over something important, you find yourself either sad or happy without exactly knowing why, unless the event in question specifically relates to you.
But I also think the point your making is kind of similar to what I was saying. That you got angry because you were mirroring someone, you knew he was angry because when someone is angry that's how they tend to behave "like you".
But I think this amplifies to almost everything: love, pain, laughter, proudness, humiliation, etc., the reason you can feel it from others is because it comes from you too. And I'd suspect that that's how other people relate to each other, with this "like me" attitude, exceptions being granted.
How can you anticipate though. That is where our reasoning breaks down.
Quoting JI don't need convincing, but it certainly sounds like something I should read. Thanks.
There's anticipation in agriculture, where the farmer waits for the last frost date. There's anticipation in music, as when you clap along to the beat. What you're anticipating there is a single moment in the future. Everyone anticipates the same moment and claps at the same time.
Panpsychism fan?
You can't know what the other person's beetle is like. You can speak about your experiences, but ultimately the words you use are defined by how you use them, not by your internal state. So when you say "I feel pain," the word "pain" just means how people use it, but because the word only means how it is used and it does not have a referent of your internal pain does not suggest you don't actually have pain.
Where I've used "pain," the same holds for the word "consciousness." That is, "I am conscious," or "I am aware," or whatever you wish to convey is definable by the words as they're used, not by the internal state.
When you seek to discuss the actual internal state as to what it is, the private sensation, you are outside what Wittgenstein would allow language to do. You're discussing metaphysics. Language isn't for that sort of discussion because meaning is use, not meaning is internal referent.
So, as to how you know that you are conscious? You experience it. You are therefore conscious. "Knowing" is a loaded term because it requires a justification, so it's more consistent just to say you are in pain without saying "I know I am in pain because I feel pain" which might implicate a metaphysical conversation about homonculi. The consistency of your word usage is controlled by public correction, not by consistency of the internal referent.
I think.
So when someone tells me they're in pain, we aren't investigating an internal state, because language doesn't do that. It's more that they're announcing that they're conscious of something bad? And they're using language to give a warning, ask for help, or just get acknowledgement?
Beyond that, we have to be satisfied that we don't have any linguistic fingers that can't touch consciousness?
Heh
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15877/property-dualism/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16075/consciousness-is-fundamental/p1
Wittgenstein discusses how language is used, not the mystery in your head. So it's not that he's denying your inner world. He's just saying it can't be spoken about directly. That's not to say you can't say "I feel pain" and be understood, but our understanding is based upon how we as a community use words, not based upon me knowing whether your inner referent (your beetle) is the same as my inner referent (my beetle). We don't speak of beetles, except as words, not as beetles.
I agree. All I know of consciousness is that I am conscious. All the words I have to speak about it are community property, gaining meaning in practical situations. I think there is an implied commonality in the fact that we use the same words. And this sense of commonality extends to the whole world, where thunderstorms seem angry, and quiet meadows seem happy.
I think at the point we decide that you have some quality of being that belongs uniquely to you, we're laying a particular worldview over the scene. We could just as easily believe that our common language about experience has an external referent in something like the mind of God that dwells all around, and we participate in it, resonating with it, injecting our own emotions into it like a cloud. We just don't have that worldview, so we imagine distinct pockets, containing unknowable beetles.
As you say, this is metaphysics that goes beyond the character of linguistic expression. So it's not just that I can deem experience in itself as beyond language, the whole scheme that distributes beetles into boxes is also trying to express something beyond language.
I think that means that to the extent that your experience is private, what I'm talking about is your history, your unique POV, all the external trappings of personhood, with the expertise at lawyering and the owning of things.
It is more or less this that flumoxes me.
Is time discrete? If not, or if so, how can we have any appreciation of it?
It appears to be both. If we're listening to music and clapping along, awareness of is in the anticipation, and then the gratification of all clapping at the same time, a single moment. But at other times, it feels like a flow.
This is Aristotle territory.
I understand what you're saying, but I think it's relative. If you're watching the passage of time, you're stationary. But you're also in the stream of time, moving past various points, the points in time are stationary. The distance between you and the American Revolution grows bigger every day. You're the one that's moving, not the revolution.
For me, at base, it's not my anger or your anger. It's just anger. Telling who it belongs to is an intellectual matter.
Although I wonder if, had he been loud about it, you would have been "drawn in". Knowing what was going on, maybe you would have only been annoyed at the guy with no self-control.
Everyone is me.
Everywhere is here.
Every when is now. :smile: