[MD] Consciousness & Moq.

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Krimel and DT:
You don't see how that resembles the distinction between pre-conceptual experience and definable concepts? You don't see how that relates to the distinction between dynamic and static?

DT replied:
No I don't, not based on what I've read of Chalmers so far. I'm only half way through and trying to correlate with James by rereading bits of his, so it's slow. Pirsig as I have said does not say much directly and substantive about consciousness so you just have to keep him in the back of your mind.


dmb says:

After looking at the most recent responses from you guys it seems pretty clear that we need to back up. It seems to me that both of you are pretty foggy about what the problem is. Krimel, for example, has somehow managed to equate pre-conceptual experience with the unconscious. That's just not what we're talking about here and the hard problem of consciousness is not about unconsciousness. For example, Pirsig says that Quality is the first thing you know, James says pure experience is the immediate flux of life and that we act on it, and Dewey distinguishes it the conceptual with the non-conceptual with the simple terms "known" and "had". In each case, we are talking about the immediately felt quality of conscious experience. We're just talking about the distinction is between feelings and thoughts, between qualia and conceptual knowledge. 

Chalmers laid the problem out in a 1995 paper. I'd guess that his 1996 book grew out of this paper. Here's now Chalmers explains the hard problem:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”.


dmb continues:
Let me repeat the central question, just in case you missed it. "Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?" Chalmers is saying we don't have any good explanations for that. He's saying that physical explanations seem to be adequate for the relatively easy problems of consciousness, but then there is the hard problem. In that same paper he says, "The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods." 

Seeing the color red, for example, can be pretty well explained in terms of physics, optics, neural processes and the like. The physical processes involved in this kind of explanation are so straightforward that it's really not much different than explaining how a camera works. This explanation becomes nearly worthless, however, when we start to ask what it is like to see red. Why should a particular wavelength of light striking the retina evoke all the feelings you might associate with red? Painters don't use red simply to accurately reflect red objects, they use it to evoke feelings. Why should acoustic waves evoke so much feeling that you gotta dance? Physical explanations can't explain why the blues are blue. If you're in Amsterdam, red means one thing and if you're in Moscow it means quite another but in both cases the inner meaning can be evoked by exactly the same shade of red.
In terms of the difference between physical processes and the what-it's-like-ness of experience, it doesn't even have to be that rich. Let's say you are a genius scientist who also happens to be blind. You could have a perfect understanding of every physical property and process involved in seeing the color read and yet you'll never know what it's like to see red. The former simply does not explain the latter. That's the problem with physicalist explanations of consciousness. Chalmers is saying that physical processes can only explain so much. 
"This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere."

Again, let me repeat the salient lines. "There is an explanatory gap between the functions and experience" and "a mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap".

When I think about this gap between functions and experience I can't help but think of the gap between Krimel's version of James and my version. As I see it, your emphasis on "perception" has turned James's pure experience into a mere function. See, I've never denied the existence of these processes and functions as you seem to think. But I have repeatedly objected to that kind of explanation as reductive and irrelevant. I sincerely hope that Chalmer's framing of the hard problem will help you see what I mean. Chalmers is saying these functional explanations can't explain the felt experiences that arise from them. Likewise, pure experience can't be explained in terms of perceptual processes, let alone equated with them. That would be like trying to explain the quality of a road trip in terms of gas mileage or oil temperature. They are certainly involved in the road trip but that's just not what we're asking about.