“Dear Dan—the shade of pink is real. In denying its existence, you are getting things backwards. The important methodological maxim to remember is that appearances are real. This does not mean that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an apple. It just means that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an appearance of an apple. It also does not mean that every time someone thinks there is an appearance of an apple, there is one. People can be mistaken in their auto-phenomenology—but not as mistaken as you would have us believe.”
Husserl, who was only concerned with getting phenomenology right and not with any underlying ontology, had a “principle of principles” which expresses the first half of what I mean by “appearances are real”:
everything originarily offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.
In Husserl, every mode of awareness is a form of intuition, including sense perception. He’s saying that every appearance has an element of certainty, but only an element.
Appealing to Husserl may be overkill, but the point is, there is a limit to the degree one can plausibly deny appearance. Denying the existence of color in the way Dennett appears to be doing is like saying that 0 = 1 or that nothing exists—it’s only worth doing as an exercise in cognitive extremism; try believing something impossible and see what happens.
However, people do end up believing weird things out of apparent philosophical necessity. I think this is what is going on with Dennett; he does understand that there is nothing like that shade of pink in standard physical ontology, so rather than engage in a spurious identification of pinkness with some neural property, he just says there is no pink. It’s just a word. It’s there to denote a bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions. But there is no pink as such, outside or inside the head.
He’s willing to take this drastic step because the truth of physics seems so nailed down, so indisputable. However, there is a sense in which we do not know what physics is about. It’s a black-box causal structure, whose inputs and outputs show up in our experience looking a certain way (looking like objects distributed in space). But that doesn’t tell us how they are in themselves.
If you take the Husserlian principle ontologically—conscious experience is offering us a glimpse of the genuine nature of one small sliver of reality, namely, what happens in consciousness—and combine it with a general commitment to the causal structure of physics, you get what I’m now calling Reverse Monism. Reverse, because it’s the reverse of the usual reductionism. The usual reductionism says this appearance, this part of consciousness, is actually atoms in space doing something. Reverse monism says instead: this appearance must be what some part of physics (some part of the physical brain) actually is.
If the usual reductionistic accounts of conscious experience were plausible as identities, reverse monism wouldn’t introduce anything new; it would just be looking at the same identity from the other end of the equation. However, the only thing these alleged identities have going for them, generally, is a common causal role. The thing which is supposed to be the neural correlate of blueness is in the right position to be caused by blue light and to get a person talking about blueness. But the thing in itself (e.g. cortical neurons firing) is nothing like blueness as such.
Now as it happens, all these theories about the neural correlates of consciousness (such as Drescher’s gensyms) are speculative in the extreme. We’re not talking about anything as well-founded as the Krebs cycle or the inverse square law; these are speculations about how the truth might be. So we are not under any obligation to consider the mismatch between subjective ontology and neural ontology which occurs in these theories as itself an established fact, that we just have to learn to live with. We are free to look for other theories in which an ontologically plausible identity, and not just a causally adequate identity, is posited. That’s what I’m on about.
Time and again you sweep aside the “bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions” Dennett refers to in his reply to Otto, in your appeal to the primacy of “redness” or “pinkness”.
This has some intuitive appeal, because “red” and “pink” are short words and refer to something we experience as simple. Your position would be much harder to defend if you were looking for “the private, ineffable feeling of reading Lesswrong.com″ as one commenter suggested: people would have an easier time denying the existence of that.
Yet—even though I’m not entirely sure that’s what this commenter had in mind—I would say there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between “the feeling of redness” and “the feeling of reading Lesswrong”. The feeling of seeing the color red really is a complex of dispositions, something cobbled together from many parts over our long evolutionary history. The more we learn about color, the more complex it turns out to be. It only feels simple because it’s a human universal.
The “feeling of reading LessWrong” can be analysed in great detail. There’s a classic work of phenomenology, Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art, which goes into the multiple “strata” of meaning which turn the examination of small black shapes on white paper into the imagination of a possible world. Participating in a discussion like this involves a stream of complex intentional experiences against a steady background of embodied sensation.
Color experience is certainly not beyond further analysis, even at the phenomenological level. The three-dimensional model of hue, saturation, and intensity is a statement about the nature of subjective color. The idea that experiences are ineffable is just wrong. We’re all describing them every day.
No amount of intricate new knowledge about the way that color perception varies or the functions that it performs can actually abolish the phenomenon. And most materialists don’t try to abolish it, they try to identify it with something material. I think Dennett is trying to abolish phenomena as realities, in favor of a cognitive behaviorism, but that is really a topic for Dennett interpreters.
Instead, I want to know about your phenomenology of color. I assume that in fact you have it. But I’m curious to know, first, whether you’ll admit to having it, or whether you prefer to talk about your experience in some other way; and second, how you describe it. Do you look at color and think “I’m seeing a bundle of dispositions”? Do you tell yourself “I’m not actually seeing it, I’m just associating the perceptual object with a certain abstract class”?
I’m not sure I ever “look at color” in isolation. There are colors and arrangements of color that I like and that I’ll go out of my way to experience; I’m looking forward to an exhibition of Soulages’ work in Paris, for instance.
When I look at a Soulages painting my inner narrative is probably something like “Wow, this is black… a luminous black which emphasizes straight, purposive brushstrokes in a way that’s quite different from any other painter’s use of color I’ve seen; how puzzling and delightful.” It’s different from the reflective black of my coffee cup nearby, the matte black of my phone handset or the black I see when I close my eyes. When I see my coffee cup I’m mostly seeing the reflections, when I see the handset it’s the texture that stands out, when I close my eyes the black is a background to a dance of random splotches and blobs.
When I think about my perception of black in all the above instances I am certainly thinking in terms of dispositions and of abstract tags. There isn’t a unitary “feeling of black” that persists after these various experiences of things I now call black.
“Dear Dan—the shade of pink is real. In denying its existence, you are getting things backwards. The important methodological maxim to remember is that appearances are real. This does not mean that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an apple. It just means that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an appearance of an apple. It also does not mean that every time someone thinks there is an appearance of an apple, there is one. People can be mistaken in their auto-phenomenology—but not as mistaken as you would have us believe.”
Husserl, who was only concerned with getting phenomenology right and not with any underlying ontology, had a “principle of principles” which expresses the first half of what I mean by “appearances are real”:
In Husserl, every mode of awareness is a form of intuition, including sense perception. He’s saying that every appearance has an element of certainty, but only an element.
Appealing to Husserl may be overkill, but the point is, there is a limit to the degree one can plausibly deny appearance. Denying the existence of color in the way Dennett appears to be doing is like saying that 0 = 1 or that nothing exists—it’s only worth doing as an exercise in cognitive extremism; try believing something impossible and see what happens.
However, people do end up believing weird things out of apparent philosophical necessity. I think this is what is going on with Dennett; he does understand that there is nothing like that shade of pink in standard physical ontology, so rather than engage in a spurious identification of pinkness with some neural property, he just says there is no pink. It’s just a word. It’s there to denote a bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions. But there is no pink as such, outside or inside the head.
He’s willing to take this drastic step because the truth of physics seems so nailed down, so indisputable. However, there is a sense in which we do not know what physics is about. It’s a black-box causal structure, whose inputs and outputs show up in our experience looking a certain way (looking like objects distributed in space). But that doesn’t tell us how they are in themselves.
If you take the Husserlian principle ontologically—conscious experience is offering us a glimpse of the genuine nature of one small sliver of reality, namely, what happens in consciousness—and combine it with a general commitment to the causal structure of physics, you get what I’m now calling Reverse Monism. Reverse, because it’s the reverse of the usual reductionism. The usual reductionism says this appearance, this part of consciousness, is actually atoms in space doing something. Reverse monism says instead: this appearance must be what some part of physics (some part of the physical brain) actually is.
If the usual reductionistic accounts of conscious experience were plausible as identities, reverse monism wouldn’t introduce anything new; it would just be looking at the same identity from the other end of the equation. However, the only thing these alleged identities have going for them, generally, is a common causal role. The thing which is supposed to be the neural correlate of blueness is in the right position to be caused by blue light and to get a person talking about blueness. But the thing in itself (e.g. cortical neurons firing) is nothing like blueness as such.
Now as it happens, all these theories about the neural correlates of consciousness (such as Drescher’s gensyms) are speculative in the extreme. We’re not talking about anything as well-founded as the Krebs cycle or the inverse square law; these are speculations about how the truth might be. So we are not under any obligation to consider the mismatch between subjective ontology and neural ontology which occurs in these theories as itself an established fact, that we just have to learn to live with. We are free to look for other theories in which an ontologically plausible identity, and not just a causally adequate identity, is posited. That’s what I’m on about.
Husserl couldn’t know what Dennett knows about the biology, psychology and evolutionary history of color perception.
Time and again you sweep aside the “bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions” Dennett refers to in his reply to Otto, in your appeal to the primacy of “redness” or “pinkness”.
This has some intuitive appeal, because “red” and “pink” are short words and refer to something we experience as simple. Your position would be much harder to defend if you were looking for “the private, ineffable feeling of reading Lesswrong.com″ as one commenter suggested: people would have an easier time denying the existence of that.
Yet—even though I’m not entirely sure that’s what this commenter had in mind—I would say there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between “the feeling of redness” and “the feeling of reading Lesswrong”. The feeling of seeing the color red really is a complex of dispositions, something cobbled together from many parts over our long evolutionary history. The more we learn about color, the more complex it turns out to be. It only feels simple because it’s a human universal.
The “feeling of reading LessWrong” can be analysed in great detail. There’s a classic work of phenomenology, Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art, which goes into the multiple “strata” of meaning which turn the examination of small black shapes on white paper into the imagination of a possible world. Participating in a discussion like this involves a stream of complex intentional experiences against a steady background of embodied sensation.
Color experience is certainly not beyond further analysis, even at the phenomenological level. The three-dimensional model of hue, saturation, and intensity is a statement about the nature of subjective color. The idea that experiences are ineffable is just wrong. We’re all describing them every day.
No amount of intricate new knowledge about the way that color perception varies or the functions that it performs can actually abolish the phenomenon. And most materialists don’t try to abolish it, they try to identify it with something material. I think Dennett is trying to abolish phenomena as realities, in favor of a cognitive behaviorism, but that is really a topic for Dennett interpreters.
Instead, I want to know about your phenomenology of color. I assume that in fact you have it. But I’m curious to know, first, whether you’ll admit to having it, or whether you prefer to talk about your experience in some other way; and second, how you describe it. Do you look at color and think “I’m seeing a bundle of dispositions”? Do you tell yourself “I’m not actually seeing it, I’m just associating the perceptual object with a certain abstract class”?
I’m not sure I ever “look at color” in isolation. There are colors and arrangements of color that I like and that I’ll go out of my way to experience; I’m looking forward to an exhibition of Soulages’ work in Paris, for instance.
When I look at a Soulages painting my inner narrative is probably something like “Wow, this is black… a luminous black which emphasizes straight, purposive brushstrokes in a way that’s quite different from any other painter’s use of color I’ve seen; how puzzling and delightful.” It’s different from the reflective black of my coffee cup nearby, the matte black of my phone handset or the black I see when I close my eyes. When I see my coffee cup I’m mostly seeing the reflections, when I see the handset it’s the texture that stands out, when I close my eyes the black is a background to a dance of random splotches and blobs.
When I think about my perception of black in all the above instances I am certainly thinking in terms of dispositions and of abstract tags. There isn’t a unitary “feeling of black” that persists after these various experiences of things I now call black.