You have privileged access to the contents of your own mind that you don’t have to contents of other people’s minds, by virtue of the mundane physical fact that the neurones in your brain are connected to the other neurones in your brain but not to the neurones in other people’s brains.
You don’t just have a level of access, you have a type of access. Your access to your own mind isn’t like looking at a brain scan.
I’ve never been able to figure out if Thomas Nagel, in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, believes that the mere existence of this sort of privileged evidence about one’s own experiences tells us something about the nature of qualia/subjectivity.
The Mary’s Room thought experiment brings it out. Mary has complete access to someone elses mental state, from the outside, but still doesn’t experience it from the inside.
You don’t just have a level of access, you have a type of access. Your access to your own mind isn’t like looking at a brain scan.
From my Camp 1 perspective, this just seems like a restatement of what I wrote. My direct access to my own mind isn’t like my indirect access to other people’s minds; to understand another person’s mind, I can at best gather scraps of sensory data like ‘what that person is saying’ and try to piece them together into a model. My direct access to my own mind isn’t like looking at a brain scan of my own mind; to understand a brain scan, I need to gather sensory data like ‘what the monitor attached to the brain scanner shows’ and try to piece them into a model. This seems to be completely explained by the fact that my brain can only gather data about the external world though a handful of imperfect sensory channels, while it can gather data about its own internal processes through direct introspection. To make things worse, my brain is woefully underpowered for the task of modelling complex things like brains, so it’s almost inevitable that any model I construct will be imperfect. Even a scan of my own brain would give me far less insight into my mind than direct introspection, because brains are hideously complicated and I’m not well-equipped to model them.
Whether you call that a ‘level’ or ‘type’ of access, I’m still no closer to understanding how Nagel relates the (to me mundane) fact that these types of access exist to the ‘conceptual mystery’ of qualia or consciousness.
The Mary’s Room thought experiment brings it out. Mary has complete access to someone elses mental state, form the outside, but still doesn’t experience it from the inside.
Imagine a one-in-a-million genetic mutation that causes a human brain to develop a Simulation Centre. The Simulation Centre might be thought of as a massively overdeveloped form of whatever circuitry gives people mental imagery. It is able to simulate real-world physics with the fidelity of state-of-the-art computer physics simulations, video game 3D engines, etc. The Simulation Centre has direct neural connections to the brain’s visual pathways that, under voluntary control, can override the sensory stream from the eyes. So, while a person with strong mental imagery might be able to fuzzily visualise something like a red square, a person with the Simulation Centre mutation could examine sufficiently detailed blueprints for a building and have a vivid photorealistic visual experience of looking at it, indistinguishable from reality.
Poor Mary, locked in her black-and-white room, doesn’t have a Simulation Centre. No matter how much information she is given about what wavelengths correspond to the colour blue, she will never have the visual experience of looking at something blue. Lucky Sue, Mary’s sister, was born with the Simulation Centre mutation. Even locked in a neighbouring black-and-white room, when she learns about the existence of materials that don’t reflect all wavelengths of light but only some wavelengths, Sue decides to model such a material in her Simulation Centre, and so is able to experience looking at the colour blue.
In other words: the Mary’s Room thought experiment seems to me (again, from a Camp 1 perspective) to illustrate that our brains lack the machinery to turn a conceptual understanding of a complex physical system into subjective experience.[1] This seems like a mundane fact about our brains (‘we don’t have Simulation Centres’) rather than pointing to any fundamental conceptual mystery.
This might just be a matter of degree. Some people apparently can do things like visualise a red square, and it seems reasonable that a person who had seen shapes of almost every colour before but had never happened to see a red square could nevertheless visualise one if given the concept.
From my Camp 1 perspective, this just seems like a restatement of what I wrote. My direct access to my own mind isn’t like my indirect access to other people’s minds; to understand another person’s mind, I can at best gather scraps of sensory data like ‘what that person is saying’ and try to piece them together into a model
At this point, I can prove to you that you are actually in Camp #2. All I have to is point out that the kind of access you have to your mind is (or rather includes) qualia!
I’m still no closer to understanding how Nagel relates the (to me mundane) fact that these types of access exist to the ‘conceptual mystery’ of qualia or consciousness
The mystery relates entirely to the expectation that there should be a reductive physical explanation of qualia.
The Hard Problem of Qualia
Whilst science has helped with some aspects of the mind body problem, it has made others more difficult, or at least exposed their difficulty. In pre scientific times, people were happy to believe that the colour of an object was an intrinsic property of it, which was perceived to be as it was. This “naive realism”, was disrupted by a series of discoveries, such as the absence of anything resembling subjective colour in scientific descriptions, and a slew of reasons for recognising a subjective element in perception.
A philosopher’s stance on the fundamental nature of reality is called an ontology. The success of science in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has led many philosophers to adopt a physicalist ontology, basically the idea that the fundamental constituents of reality are what physics says they are. (It is a background assumption of physicalism that the sciences form a sort of tower, with psychology and sociology near the top, and biology and chemistry in the middle , and with physics at the bottom.
The higher and intermediate layers don’t have their own ontologies—mind-stuff and elan vital are outdated concepts—everything is either a fundamental particle, or an arrangement of fundamental particles)
So the problem of mind is now the problem of qualia, and the way philosophers want to explain it is physicallistically. However, the problem of explaining how brains give rise to subjective sensation, of explaining qualia in physical terms, is now considered to be The Hard Problem. In the words of David Chalmers:-
″ 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.”
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
Now, maybe Nagel doesn’t say all that, but he’s not the only occupant of camp #2.
Poor Mary, locked in her black-and-white room, doesn’t have a Simulation Centre. No matter how much information she is given about what wavelengths correspond to the colour blue, she will never have the visual experience of looking at something blue. Lucky Sue, Mary’s sister, was born with the Simulation Centre mutation. Even locked in a neighbouring black-and-white room, when she learns about the existence of materials that don’t reflect all wavelengths of light but only some wavelengths, Sue decides to model such a material in her Simulation Centre, and so is able to experience looking at the colour blue.
That doesn’t prove anything relevant, because Mary’s sister is not creating or using a reductive physical explanation. Maybe her visualisation abilities, and everybody elses , use non physical pixie dust. Nothing about her ability refutes that clam, because it’s an ability, not an explanation.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to then that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question “would she actually know about nuclear fusion” could only be answered “yes, of course....didn’t you just say she knows everything”? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
In other words: the Mary’s Room thought experiment seems to me (again, from a Camp 1 perspective) to illustrate that our brains lack the machinery to turn a conceptual understanding of a complex physical system into subjective experience.[1] This seems like a mundane fact about our brains
The fact that we have experience at all is mundane...yet it has no explanation. Mundane and mysterious just aren’t opposites. We experience gravity all the time, but it’s still hard to understand.
Yes, but the actual explanation is obviously possible. One access is different from another because one is between regions of the brain via neurons, and the other is between brain and brain scan via vision. What part do you think is impossible to specify?
The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
Riding a bicycle. And you need to instantiate a brain state to know anything—instantiating brain states is what it means for a brain to know something. The explanation for “why it seems to be unnecessary in other cases” is “people are bad at physics”.
Or you can use a sensible theory of knowledge where Mary understands everything about seeing red without seeing it and the explanation for “why it seems that she doesn’t understand” is “people are bad in distinguishing between being and knowing”.
I mean, there is physicalist explanation of everything about this scenario. You could have an arguments on the level of “but people find it confusing for a couple of seconds!” against physicality of anything from mirrors to levers.
And you need to instantiate a brain state to know anythinh
No, knowledge can be stored outisde brains.
Mary understands everything about seeing red without seeing it and the explanation for “why it seems that she doesn’t understand” is “people are bad in distinguishing between being and knowing”.
Or people insist by fiat that they are the same, when they are plainly different.
You don’t just have a level of access, you have a type of access. Your access to your own mind isn’t like looking at a brain scan.
The Mary’s Room thought experiment brings it out. Mary has complete access to someone elses mental state, from the outside, but still doesn’t experience it from the inside.
From my Camp 1 perspective, this just seems like a restatement of what I wrote. My direct access to my own mind isn’t like my indirect access to other people’s minds; to understand another person’s mind, I can at best gather scraps of sensory data like ‘what that person is saying’ and try to piece them together into a model. My direct access to my own mind isn’t like looking at a brain scan of my own mind; to understand a brain scan, I need to gather sensory data like ‘what the monitor attached to the brain scanner shows’ and try to piece them into a model. This seems to be completely explained by the fact that my brain can only gather data about the external world though a handful of imperfect sensory channels, while it can gather data about its own internal processes through direct introspection. To make things worse, my brain is woefully underpowered for the task of modelling complex things like brains, so it’s almost inevitable that any model I construct will be imperfect. Even a scan of my own brain would give me far less insight into my mind than direct introspection, because brains are hideously complicated and I’m not well-equipped to model them.
Whether you call that a ‘level’ or ‘type’ of access, I’m still no closer to understanding how Nagel relates the (to me mundane) fact that these types of access exist to the ‘conceptual mystery’ of qualia or consciousness.
Imagine a one-in-a-million genetic mutation that causes a human brain to develop a Simulation Centre. The Simulation Centre might be thought of as a massively overdeveloped form of whatever circuitry gives people mental imagery. It is able to simulate real-world physics with the fidelity of state-of-the-art computer physics simulations, video game 3D engines, etc. The Simulation Centre has direct neural connections to the brain’s visual pathways that, under voluntary control, can override the sensory stream from the eyes. So, while a person with strong mental imagery might be able to fuzzily visualise something like a red square, a person with the Simulation Centre mutation could examine sufficiently detailed blueprints for a building and have a vivid photorealistic visual experience of looking at it, indistinguishable from reality.
Poor Mary, locked in her black-and-white room, doesn’t have a Simulation Centre. No matter how much information she is given about what wavelengths correspond to the colour blue, she will never have the visual experience of looking at something blue. Lucky Sue, Mary’s sister, was born with the Simulation Centre mutation. Even locked in a neighbouring black-and-white room, when she learns about the existence of materials that don’t reflect all wavelengths of light but only some wavelengths, Sue decides to model such a material in her Simulation Centre, and so is able to experience looking at the colour blue.
In other words: the Mary’s Room thought experiment seems to me (again, from a Camp 1 perspective) to illustrate that our brains lack the machinery to turn a conceptual understanding of a complex physical system into subjective experience.[1] This seems like a mundane fact about our brains (‘we don’t have Simulation Centres’) rather than pointing to any fundamental conceptual mystery.
This might just be a matter of degree. Some people apparently can do things like visualise a red square, and it seems reasonable that a person who had seen shapes of almost every colour before but had never happened to see a red square could nevertheless visualise one if given the concept.
At this point, I can prove to you that you are actually in Camp #2. All I have to is point out that the kind of access you have to your mind is (or rather includes) qualia!
The mystery relates entirely to the expectation that there should be a reductive physical explanation of qualia.
The Hard Problem of Qualia Whilst science has helped with some aspects of the mind body problem, it has made others more difficult, or at least exposed their difficulty. In pre scientific times, people were happy to believe that the colour of an object was an intrinsic property of it, which was perceived to be as it was. This “naive realism”, was disrupted by a series of discoveries, such as the absence of anything resembling subjective colour in scientific descriptions, and a slew of reasons for recognising a subjective element in perception.
A philosopher’s stance on the fundamental nature of reality is called an ontology. The success of science in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has led many philosophers to adopt a physicalist ontology, basically the idea that the fundamental constituents of reality are what physics says they are. (It is a background assumption of physicalism that the sciences form a sort of tower, with psychology and sociology near the top, and biology and chemistry in the middle , and with physics at the bottom. The higher and intermediate layers don’t have their own ontologies—mind-stuff and elan vital are outdated concepts—everything is either a fundamental particle, or an arrangement of fundamental particles)
So the problem of mind is now the problem of qualia, and the way philosophers want to explain it is physicallistically. However, the problem of explaining how brains give rise to subjective sensation, of explaining qualia in physical terms, is now considered to be The Hard Problem. In the words of David Chalmers:-
″ 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.”
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
Now, maybe Nagel doesn’t say all that, but he’s not the only occupant of camp #2.
That doesn’t prove anything relevant, because Mary’s sister is not creating or using a reductive physical explanation. Maybe her visualisation abilities, and everybody elses , use non physical pixie dust. Nothing about her ability refutes that clam, because it’s an ability, not an explanation.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to then that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question “would she actually know about nuclear fusion” could only be answered “yes, of course....didn’t you just say she knows everything”? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
The fact that we have experience at all is mundane...yet it has no explanation. Mundane and mysterious just aren’t opposites. We experience gravity all the time, but it’s still hard to understand.
And because there is a physicalist explanation for the difference of access, there is physicalist explanation for qualia and the problem is solved.
It is not an explanation to predict that one thing is different from another in an unspecified way.
Yes, but the actual explanation is obviously possible. One access is different from another because one is between regions of the brain via neurons, and the other is between brain and brain scan via vision. What part do you think is impossible to specify?
The qualia. How does a theory describe a subjective sensation?
Riding a bicycle. And you need to instantiate a brain state to know anything—instantiating brain states is what it means for a brain to know something. The explanation for “why it seems to be unnecessary in other cases” is “people are bad at physics”.
Or you can use a sensible theory of knowledge where Mary understands everything about seeing red without seeing it and the explanation for “why it seems that she doesn’t understand” is “people are bad in distinguishing between being and knowing”.
I mean, there is physicalist explanation of everything about this scenario. You could have an arguments on the level of “but people find it confusing for a couple of seconds!” against physicality of anything from mirrors to levers.
No, knowledge can be stored outisde brains.
Or people insist by fiat that they are the same, when they are plainly different.