[asking]

Occasionally, he glances back at me to see if I am properly annoyed. I can cite other personal experiences, but my belief is that (at least) mammals are sentient beings.

To me, this is totally reasonable and consistent with what I know about animals. It's not that we can't EVER misread their intentions, but their behavior and thoughts are not opaque to us either. We are ourselves mammal, which have evolved to read one another's intentions and to read the intentions of animals that are not of our species. We recognize a predatory look, anger, fear. These mental states are universal, certainly in mammals, and probably in a lot of other vertebrates too. To propose that a predatory look that is followed by predatory behavior is not accompanied by predatory feelings seems contrary to common sense to me. (I'm not sure anyone is saying that... )

We experience what others experience. Perhaps it feels different to us, but if it causes us to behave in exactly the same way, by what measure do we posit a difference in the experience?

I've often wondered -- is my experience of the taste and flavor of, say, chocolate the same as anyone/everyone else's?

I think probably mostly. We know there are alleles that make some flavors taste bitter to some people and unobjectionable to others. It's quite likely that hay tastes better to a horse than it does to us. But chocolate *probably* tastes the same to you as your parents and most of your neighbors.

If someone hates chocolate, that suggests maybe it tastes different to them.

(Thank you for allowing me to get all that off my chest.)

Well, but don't stop.:)

[Akoue]

So we don't mean the ability to suffer, which, I gather, is the animal rights position. This seems like a simple definition I can at least grasp. I'm not sure what it means to be self aware (or how that's different from having consciousness), but to the extent that I can grasp it, I think self-awareness is far more general among animals than most people think.

Agreed (no surprise there!). I think the same goes for other sorts of cognitive ability. Dogs may not do linear algebra, but I'm quite confidant there is a rich and complex interior life behind those big brown eyes.

I don't think any animal goes around doing that. Maybe I'm the one who needs more coffee! I can't imagine a caterpillar looking at a leaf and saying to itself "I'm not that." Nor can I imagine a mouse having any doubt about being itself distinct from other individual mice, to say nothing of acorns and cats. I have the feeling we are speaking a different language.

No, of course they don't. And that's the point, they don't need to. They are aware of themselves without the need to check first with their surroundings in order to figure which object in their sensory field is "me". So not a different language so much as I was calling attention to something that, for you, is sufficiently obvious that attention needn't be called to it. Sadly, lots of people take a different view (remember those nasty Cartesians and their modern dog-fighting progeny).

I don't see how she could not if she can see the apple. I don't understand the point of this story. For me, the story raises the question of whether she would even be capable of seeing red. Kittens who were only allowed to see vertical lines during the critical period of vision development, later could not see horizontal lines or at least did not know how to interpret them (I know, awful). We have to learn to see during infancy.

I'm not so sure about that. We get exposed to new colors throughout our lives. We needn't have seen them during infancy in order to perceive them as adults. Adults can detect gaps in color spaces. But it is quite possible that people can be "spectrum inverted" relative to each other, so that the "raw feel" or qualitative character (what it's like) isn't the same for each. Subject 1 sees a red patch and it has a certain qualitative character. Subject 2 sees a yellow patch and it too has a certain qualitative character. The qualitative character is part of what it is for each subject to have that experience. If Subject 1 could see yellow from the point of view of Subject 2, if she could experience it as Subject 2 experiences it, she might very well think, "Huh, that's what red feels like to me", even though, of course, it is yellow. It's seems unlikely that such differences in qualitative character would be behaviorally detectable, and because of this it is difficult to see how any objective description of mentality could account for the qualitative character of experience. But to leave this out is to leave out a whole lot. There appears to be something irreducibly subjective about having a mental life.

I guess that's true. But I'd be very surprised if pain for my cat is different from pain for me. Same for hunger, pleasure, textures, colors, sounds. Occam's razor suggests that what seems the same is in fact the same. You can posit otherwise, but there's no great support for it. And good reasons to think that other vertebrates' perceptions are similar to our own.

But this is a real issue since part of what pain is involves there being something that it is like to be in pain. In a general way I certainly don't wish to quarrel with the claim that pain for a cat is still pain, anymore than I want to call into question that another human feels pain in at least something like the way I do. But what about the S & M subculture? Part of our commonsense understanding of pain is that it is associated with avoidance behavior. And yet some people don't exhibit avoidance behavior; they may not even wince or moan; they may in fact smile. Do we say that someone who's back is being wipped with leather straps isn't in pain because he is smiling and eager for more? What do we say about Severin in Venus in Furs?

Ockham's Razor cautions against the needless proliferation of entities in our ontology. Some people hold that these qualitative characters that we've been talking about are entities, called "qualia" (in the plural, "quale" in the singular), but I don't think we need to go that far at all. Let's just say that sensory experiences have a qualitative character that is accessible to the subject of the experience but that is not intersubjectively accessible. So the question doesn't turn on whether other species have any experiences in this sense, i.e. experiences which have a raw feel to them, but how we could ever know about the raw feel of experience to anyone other than oneself. If we lack intersubjective access to these features of experience, how can we ever be in a position to give a physical description of these sorts of mental states (i.e. mental states which have a raw feel)? Looked at in this light, it can appear (and does appear to a great many people) that a massive part of our psychology is closed to scientific understanding.

(By the way, I am not myself endorsing that view, although I do have some genuine sympathy with it.)

Wondergirl's point about chocolate may have a deeper theoretical bite than is apparent at first blush. I can't know what chocolate tastes like to you, because, of course, I can't experience chocolate from your unique point of view. What I can do is interpret your behavior: You tell me that this piece of dark chocolate is too bitter, that piece of milk chocolate is too sweet, etc. but I have to fill in the blanks by drawing on my own experiences of bitterness and sweetness. I can't even know what exactly words like "bitter" and "sweet" refer too in your mouth because they refer to qualitative features of your experience to which you alone have access.

That said, I am inclined to agree with Nagel that the more similar an organism is to us the better sense we are likely to have of the qualities of its experiences. So a cat may not be so difficult to interpret as a mollusk. But with the cat as with other humans, we have to translate their behavior into our own cognitive idiom: I see you stub your toe and yell "Ouch!' as you hobble away. I infer on the strength of your linguistic and other behavior that stubbing your toe caused you pain. And I do this because I recognize those behaviors as the one's I too exhibit when I stub my toe. We don't seem to be able to abstract away from our own subjective point of view and this makes it very difficult so much as to communicate in a public language about what it is like for us to have the experiences we do. Just try to describe to someone who has never tasted chocolate what the experience is like. As thorough and accurate and your description may be, it's not going to be sufficient to elicit in them the same experience. They have to taste it for themselves to know what it is like.

But, if you give credence to biology and evolution, it's unlikely that perceptions are going to be substantively different. Why would they be? Our cells are the same, our tissues and organs are the same. Why should the one thing that's difficult to assess be different in any substantive way?

Isn't this to beg the question against the anti-materialists (of which I am not one, even though I seem to be speaking up for them at the present time)? If you assume that mentality is determined by our physiology, then sure, it's a natural supposition. But if you don't assume that, if you hold that mental states aren't physical states of an organism, then there is no reason to suppose that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

[Akoue]

I am no philosopher but have this deep need to respond to the animal sentience thing. Is my (soulcat) Thomas Jefferson aware of himself and his environment and therefore reflectively self-aware, conscious of himself as to his place in the world? I say yes. When he lies on top of my opened-up morning newspaper and I shoo him away so I can read about the newest antics of ex-Gov. Blago or Sen. Burris (both of whom seem to lack sentience, btw), he moves over to the corner of the table and not only faces away from me ("Hrrrumph!") but also sits so his tail does a rhythmic sweep-sweep-sweep back and forth over the surface of the newspaper, thereby interrupting my reading, making it difficult to turn the page, and annoying the heck out of me. Occasionally, he glances back at me to see if I am properly annoyed. I can cite other personal experiences, but my belief is that (at least) mammals are sentient beings.

I am, of course, with you on this. I am deeply puzzled by the view, apparently still held by a great many people, that animals lack sentience in any meanignful sense of that term. Were I to withhold the ascription of a complex mental life to the cats and dog with which I live I would be utterly helpless to make any sense at all of our interactions.

I've often wondered -- is my experience of the taste and flavor of, say, chocolate the same as anyone/everyone else's? I can use many adjectives to describe the senory experience of chocolate, but when push comes to shove, does everyone else have the same experience?

You can see with my response to asking that I decided to steal your chocolate example and run (amok) with it. I share your puzzlement. And although I have some familiarity with the range of possible answers to this question, my jury is still out. In other words, I'm not entirely sure what I think. One of the reasons I started the thread, actually. I tend to think that both sides make a pretty convincing case... which is a problem if, like me, you aren't comfortable with cognitive dissonance.

This reminds me of Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Color Blind, the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap, where Dr. Sacks visited an isolated community in which a number of islanders had been born achromatopsic, i.e. totally colorblind. Despite that supposed disability, they were able to describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, light and shadow. Or, in contrast, Sacks' story "The Case of the Colorblind Painter" in which he introduces the reader to an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, the inability to perceive color due to brain damage.

(Thank you for allowing me to get all that off my chest.)

I hope there will be more to come. Please?

[asking]

We needn't have seen [colors] during infancy in order to perceive them as adults.

Yes and no. If we don't see certain things in infancy, during critical periods, those part of our brains that would process those things can atrophy. That doesn't mean we can't see them at all later. But it does impair perception. What the following actually translates into as experience, I'm not sure.

Although the ocular dominance columns do not require visual experience for their formation, they can be altered drastically by post-natal visual deprivation occurring during the critical period. In their classic studies, Hubel and Wiesel showed that visual deprivation causes shrinkage of the eye's ocular dominance columns in the cortex. This phenomenon is presumed to contribute to the occurrence of amblyopia. Shrinkage of the ocular dominance columns reflects a loss of input from laminae of the lateral geniculate body conveying information from the deprived eye. This loss of input means that fewer cells are available in the cortex to handle information emanating from the deprived eye.

Dr. Jonathan Horton - UCSF

I think it would be hard to get through infancy without seeing several shades of red unless the person was completely blind.

People who recover their vision late in life cannot process the information from their eyes as we do, or at least that's what I've heard, that they just see meaningless patches of color.

It is quite possible that people can be "spectrum inverted" relative to each other, so that the "raw feel" or qualitative character (what it's like) isn't the same for each.

I accept that this is possible. I accept that senses vary in how they operate--which has a clear biological basis. For example, some garter snakes like to eat slugs. Others won't touch them. They are revolted. Separate from the senses is perception as a product of the brain (or mind, depending on your bent).

It's seems unlikely that such differences in qualitative character would be behaviorally detectable,

It MIGHT be possible to see differences in brain imaging. But even then there would be no external trait to associate that with, so still no way to ever know how something looks like inside someone's mind. If it doesn't affect the physical body or behavior, then it's inaccessible to study. And, frankly, there's no evidence that it exists.

Part of our commonsense understanding of pain is that it is associated with avoidance behavior. And yet some people don't exhibit avoidance behavior; they may not even wince or moan; they may in fact smile.

Certainly there are differences in pain perception and also the psychological states that different people associate with pain. Some people are terrified of pain, some people can distance themselves from a fair amount of it. Likewise there are people who feel no pain due to (I guess) genetic anomalies. And you say, people who are attracted to modest amounts of it.

I'm not arguing for no variation in perception. But I am arguing that in most mammals, pain is an unpleasant experience, by definition. And while some people may feel no pain at all (and so jump off buildings and break their legs), such variants are anomalous not only among humans, but among vertebrates generally.

Looked at in this light, it can appear (and does appear to a great many people) that a massive part of our psychology is closed to scientific understanding.

Okay. No one will ever know if you see yellow to my red. Or if Wondergirl tastes bittersweet to my milk chocolate. But I'm not yet convinced that this is a massive part of our psychology. There is good behavioral evidence that pain perception varies. Of course, preferences vary and we know they have a physical basis. But the mechanism for that is not likely to be something totally inaccessible to science.

If I prefer yellow because to me it looks like your red, and you prefer red because it looks like red--so that we both really prefer the interior experience of red--all you've really done is redefine a way of understanding color preferences, and without being able to demonstrate that your mechanism has any reality.

That said, I am inclined to agree with Nagel that the more similar an organism is to us the better sense we are likely to have of the qualities of its experiences.

I agree. Same brain, same experiences (within limits).
But similarity isn't only a function of relatedness, it's also a function of habits. Think of parrots. They are social, fruit-eating, tropical animals that move in three dimensions--a lot like our ancestors. We are not related but we both have color vision, talk a lot, socialize with others. We have a lot in common with parrots.

From my perspective, if you can't evaluate a mental state from behavior or other physical measures, it effectively doesn't exist.

Just try to describe to someone who has never tasted chocolate what the experience is like. As thorough and accurate and your description may be, it's not going to be sufficient to elicit in them the same experience. They have to taste it for themselves to know what it is like.

Well, some of that inaccessibility is because the sense of smell is connected to the older parts of the brain and our vocabulary for odor is hugely impoverished. By comparison, it's relatively easy to describe how something looks or how we feel. It's even possible to describe pain in fairly accurate terms despite its subjective nature.

But... if you hold that mental states aren't physical states of an organism, then there is no reason to suppose that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

Why would I assume that some natural expression of an organism is totally unrelated to its evolutionary history, its genetics, its development, or its lifelong experiences?

I am laughing. But quite seriously, why would I assume that? I could likewise assume that about a great many things. I could assume that blood pressure, which is certainly affected by thoughts, is not just a biological problem but a psychological or theological one. Once you make that assumption, you are outside of science and you are operating without rules that can be tested against reality (from my perspective). Since science is consistently predictive--that is, it works--I'm satisfied to stay in my cozy box.

[Akoue]

I think it would be hard to get through infancy without seeing several shades of red unless the person was completely blind.

Hence Jackson's thought experiment.

The question isn't what's serviceable: For nearly all non-philosophical purposes it works perfectly well to assume that Mary-style cases never present themselves. But the question here is what is a mental state, and to answer this question we have to consider counterfactuals. Thus, what would it be like for Mary, etc. The question I asked isn't on its face an empirical one, although a case can curely be made that the answer to that question is. But I don't think there's anything problematic about casting about for an account of mentality that isn't just an empirical generalization from cases but that is criterial, that speaks to counterfactual cases. I don't think that's idle--at least, not on its face.

I accept that this is possible. I accept that senses vary in how they operate--which has a clear biological basis. For example, some garter snakes like to eat slugs. Others won't touch them. They are revolted. Separate from the senses is perception as a product of the brain (or mind, depending on your bent).

Sure, but the issue isn't about whether senses differ in how they operate. The issue is whether there is something irreducibly subjective about mentality and what, if anything, that means for the prospects of a science of mentality.

It MIGHT be possible to see differences in brain imaging. But even then there would be no external trait to associate that with, so still no way to ever know how something looks like inside someone's mind. If it doesn't affect the physical body or behavior, then it's inaccessible to study. And, frankly, there's no evidence that it exists.

Inaccessibility to (scientific) study certainly doesn't entail absence of evidence. There are lots of things that aren't objects of scientific study: aesthetics, literary studies, etc. These aren't science, but they aren't fantasyland either. And, as it happens, I have plenty of evidence, as do you. My evidence is that there is something that it is like for me to be me, to have the experiences that I have; and yours is that there is something that it is like for you to be you and have the experiences that you have. It's just that this evidence isn't intersubjectively accessible. Maybe you want to say that means it doesn't count as evidence. But testimony does, and there's plenty of testimonial evidence for its existence. Again, it would be question-begging for the purposes of this discussion to assume that the standard of evidence is what counts as evidence in the physical sciences, this because we aren't taking it for granted that mentality is an object for scientific scrutiny. That can't be assumed; it has to be argued for. My interest is less in the question whether science is the measure of all things than whether mental states are through-and-through physical. If they are, then it is a further question whether and how they are to be studied scientifically.

I'm not arguing for no variation in perception. But I am arguing that in most mammals, pain is an unpleasant experience, by definition. And while some people may feel no pain at all (and so jump off buildings and break their legs), such variants are anomalous not only among humans, but among vertebrates generally.

Fair enough. But notice, then, that the definition of pain is one that invokes its qualitative character and not its physical properties. And there is good reason to favor this sort of definition: Pain is multiply realizable, which is to say that the sensation of pain can be realized in different sorts of physical systems. The physical realization of pain may be very different in humans than in octopi or extraterrestrials. This suggests that pain is not identical to any given physical property or event and so is not itself physical, even though its realizations are physical. Behavioral criteria for pain also fail since although the vast majority of the members of a population will exhibit avoidance behavior in the face of pain some members do not. Behavior cannot therefore serve as a criterion for being in pain. There are regularities, that much is uncontroversial; the controversy erupts when we try to discern anything like a criterion (even a really long disjunctive criterion) for pain.

A really long disjunctive criterion might look something like this: A subject S is in pain just in case S exhibits behavior x, or S exhibits behavior y, or S exhibits behavior z...

The list of disjuncts would have to be massively long, and it would leave us without a way of handling counterfactual cases (like extraterrestrials or massively abnormal human beings, say). And at some point at least some of those disjuncts are going to overlap with the criteria by which other states are defined, this because for some people pain looks like pleasure.

Okay. No one will ever know if you see yellow to my red. Or if Wondergirl tastes bittersweet to my milk chocolate. But I'm not yet convinced that this is a massive part of our psychology. There is good behavioral evidence that pain perception varies. Of course, preferences vary and we know they have a physical basis. But the mechanism for that is not likely to be something totally inaccessible to science.

Whether the mechanisms of variation are accessible to science or not, the qualitative properties of experience are. Science cannot even look for the physical realizations of these properties because it would first have to describe them. But they aren't even linguistic. The question whether this account for a massive part of our psychology is something that may or may not have stakes. I'm inclined to think that it is, in fact, of great importance, and fundamentally related to our ability to have an interior life at all. And surely interiority, access from within, is a huge deal.

If I prefer yellow because to me it looks like your red, and you prefer red because it looks like red--so that we both really prefer the interior experience of red--all you've really done is redefine a way of understanding color preferences, and without being able to demonstrate that your mechanism has any reality.

Color preferences is peripheral to the central point, though. Color preferences surely are related in all sorts of ways to color experiences, but it is the experiences that are the issue. If the preferences turn on the experiences, and the experiences aren't accessible outside the subject's point of view, then it is difficult for me to see how there could ever be anything like an adequate account of the mechanisms of preference. Not that I really care why some people prefer blue to green. They are clearly just bad people if they do.

I agree. Same brain, same experiences (within limits).
But similarity isn't only a function of relatedness, it's also a function of habits. Think of parrots. They are social, fruit-eating, tropical animals that move in three dimensions--a lot like our ancestors. We are not related but we both have color vision, talk a lot, socialize with others. We have a lot in common with parrots.

This paragraph threw me. I don't think I understand what you're saying.

From my perspective, if you can't evaluate a mental state from behavior or other physical measures, it effectively doesn't exist.

I guess a lot turns on what you mean by "effectively". If you mean that it isn't an object of study by the physical sciences, then sure. But I can't see any good reason why that should the standard of existence. Science is just one field of human endeavor, it isn't the be all and end all, even of knowledge. To say that mentality is something that science cannot explain isn't at all to say that mentality doesn't exist. And, besides, that begs the question against the anti-materialist. This is in no way a shot at science. It's just to say that there are certain things for which science isn't a good tool. After all, being a good chemist doesn't make you a good art critic.

Well, some of that inaccessibility is because the sense of smell is connected to the older parts of the brain and our vocabulary for odor is hugely impoverished. By comparison, it's relatively easy to describe how something looks or how we feel. It's even possible to describe pain in fairly accurate terms despite its subjective nature.

The word "fairly" is doing a lot of work there.

Why would I assume that some natural expression of an organism is totally unrelated to its evolutionary history, its genetics, its development, or its lifelong experiences?

I'm not suggesting that you assume any such thing. I am just pointing out that there is an alternative to materialism, in fact there are several, and to assert that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality begs the question against those. If mental states are in each case realized in some physical system, then the mental states aren't identical to a physical state of the system but similarity of physical constitution would guarantee similarity of mentality. But that is something that has to be argued for, otherwise it is question-begging.

I am laughing. But quite seriously, why would I assume that? I could likewise assume that about a great many things. I could assume that blood pressure, which is certainly affected by thoughts, is not just a biological problem but a psychological or theological one. Once you make that assumption, you are outside of science and you are operating without rules that can be tested against reality (from my perspective). Since science is consistently predictive--that is, it works--I'm satisfied to stay in my cozy box.

Again, you're not being asked to assume that. I'm simply saying that you can't *assume* that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

And, again, there is a question whether when we talk about mentality we are outside of science. That's what the argument is about. Which view is the right view, and why? The physical sciences are very successful regarding physical phenomena. But we aren't entitled just to assume that mental states are physical phenomena. That's precisely the point under consideration. Besides, psychology isn't exactly a rigorous science in any case.

[Wondergirl]

People who recover their vision late in life cannot process the information from their eyes as we do, or at least that's what I've heard, that they just see meaningless patches of color.

Sight needs far more than the simple ability to open one's eyes and let reality in. Perception is a learned thing and an acquired taste. Infants begin to make visual sense of the world by looking at, for instance, faces that peer into the stroller or crib (there have been many studies using face shapes, familiar/stranger faces, irregular faces). As an individual matures, his view of the world feeds off his past experiences with three-dimensional space, the physical details of particular settings, and the predictable shapes and colors of various items.

In another Sacks' book, An Anthropologist On Mars, Virgil is a man who saw little until having cataract surgery at age 50. Sacks calls Virgil's behavior after cataract removal that of a "mentally blind" person—someone who sees but can't decipher what's out there. Virgil's perceptual identity, his sense of himself (unlike those who've developed normally), was tied to experiences that had nothing to do with sight. He was used to touching objects to "see" them; with sight he became visually overloaded, closed his eyes, and pretended he was still blind. Often confused, he even begged to become blind again.

[Akoue]

Yes. But not as a separate entity.

The mind is distinct from the body in the way that the behavior of a crowd is distinct from the behavior of individuals. You can see this effect when looking at traffic patterns, flocks of birds, and groups of cells. To me the mind is just a word for higher order function of the brain, an emergent property. So in a sense it is distinct. It does not reside in individual neurons, but in the interactions among all of the neurons.

I really like what you said here, and have been meaning to ask you to say a bit more about what you have in mind. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked prattling on about colors and whatnot. Anyway, could I ask you to elaborate on what you have in mind, since it looks both promising and very interesting to me. Also, I'm kind of counting on your expertise to put a couple of good examples to it!

Pretty please!

[asking]

The issue is whether there is something irreducibly subjective about mentality

I have completed conceded this point.
(That is, for now, there is no way to objectively evaluate our inner impressions. So for now it's purely subjective. I think that could change at some point.)

and what, if anything, that means for the prospects of a science of mentality.

That's another issue. If you define mentality as everything within the mind that it not subject to description and, apparently, the ways in which two minds MIGHT differ, then "mind" is by definition inaccessible to science. There cannot be a science of something that cannot be detected.

And, as it happens, I have plenty of evidence, as do you. My evidence is that there is something that it is like for me to be me, to have the experiences that I have; and yours is that there is something that it is like for you to be you and have the experiences that you have.

Nope. I do not concede this at all. Each of us knows the experience of being "me." But what is at issue is whether your subjective experience (not counting differences in sensory apparatus and other physical inputs) is different from mine and for that, we have no evidence at all--either for or against.

Again, it would be question-begging for the purposes of this discussion to assume that the standard of evidence is what counts as evidence in the physical sciences, this because we aren't taking it for granted that mentality is an object for scientific scrutiny. That can't be assumed; it has to be argued for.

I don't use the "begging the question," so I had to look it up.
Wikipedia says, "a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises."

If I understand the term, it would appear that the same argument can be made back?

That is, if you assume there's a difference between two minds, all physical things being equal, then your premise implies your proposition.

I assume either (1) IF there's a difference as you define it, it's inaccessible to inquiry (through science) or else (2) if there's no difference, the thing does not exist and is inaccessible to scientific inquiry.

Fair enough. But notice, then, that the definition of pain is one that invokes its qualitative character and not its physical properties.

No. Something can be both qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) and still completely physical. Qualitative phenomena are available to science. Are we using "qualitative" differently?

...
Oh, I don't agree with any of what comes next! I don't want to argue with every line though...

A subject S is in pain just in case S exhibits behavior x, or S exhibits behavior y, or S exhibits behavior z...

The list of disjuncts would have to be massively long, and it would leave us without a way of handling counterfactual cases (like extraterrestrials or massively abnormal human beings, say). And at some point at least some of those disjuncts are going to overlap with the criteria by which other states are defined, this because for some people pain looks like pleasure.

I think you'd find this all very difficult to demonstrate. It's contrary to my understanding of both animals and pain. In any case, I'm not sure where it gets you in this discussion. So there are many varieties of pain experience. Then what?

Whether the mechanisms of variation are accessible to science or not, the qualitative properties of experience are. Science cannot even look for the physical realizations of these properties because it would first have to describe* them. But they aren't even linguistic. The question whether this account for a massive part of our psychology is something that may or may not have stakes. I'm inclined to think that it is, in fact, of great importance, and fundamentally related to our ability to have an interior life at all. And surely interiority, access from within, is a huge deal.

*Not describe, but detect.

But, as I understand you, you've limited interiority to just those things that are undetectable--like what red looks like. There is so much else that IS detectable and accessible to science. Why limit your inquiry to what cannot be known?

Not that I really care why some people prefer blue to green. They are clearly just bad people if they do.

Yes. Just awful people. I once knew someone like that. He came to bad end.

This paragraph threw me. I don't think I understand what you're saying.

I meant a human mind might be more similar to a parrot's than to a gopher's even though we are more closely related to a gopher. A mere digression.

I guess a lot turns on what you mean by "effectively". If you mean that it isn't an object of study by the physical sciences, then sure.

Yes. That's what I mean, if by physical sciences you mean science.

But I can't see any good reason why that should the standard of existence.

What's accessible to science is not the standard of existence.
But it's the standard of what interests scientists. When scientists discovered they could detect extrasolar planets, they became extremely interested in them. Before that, they were a matter of conjecture. When technology exists to tell us whether two people sense chocolate in the same way, science will be all over it.

To say that mentality is something that science cannot explain isn't at all to say that mentality doesn't exist.

It isn't about science explaining mentality. It's about being able to ask any coherent question at all. Those are distinct propositions. I want to convey that clearly.

Also, you talked at the beginning about a *science of mentality,* so I'm still on that.

I'm simply saying that you can't *assume* that similarity of physical constitution guarantees sameness of mentality.

Just to be clear, at no point in this discussion have I assumed that. I'm good at maintaining two possibilities in my head at once. But in this case, they lead to the same outcome, which is that we can't know. At least not yet as far as I know.

And, again, there is a question whether when we talk about mentality we are outside of science.

If you define it as I think you have, yes.

That's what the argument is about. Which view is the right view, and why?

I consider this unknowable.

But we aren't entitled just to assume that mental states are physical phenomena.

Nor are we entitled to assume that mental states have no physical basis.
We are left having to accept that we can't answer this question.

[asking]

Sight needs far more than the simple ability to open one's eyes and let reality in. Perception is a learned thing and an acquired taste. Infants begin to make visual sense of the world by looking at, for instance, faces that peer into the stroller or crib (there have been many studies using face shapes, familiar/stranger faces, irregular faces). As an individual matures, his view of the world feeds off his past experiences with three-dimensional space, the physical details of particular settings, and the predictable shapes and colors of various items.

In another Sacks' book, An Anthropologist On Mars, Virgil is a man who saw little until having cataract surgery at age 50. Sacks calls Virgil's behavior after cataract removal that of a "mentally blind" person—someone who sees but can't decipher what's out there. Virgil's perceptual identity, his sense of himself (unlike those who've developed normally), was tied to experiences that had nothing to do with sight. He was used to touching objects to "see" them; with sight he became visually overloaded, closed his eyes, and pretended he was still blind. Often confused, he even begged to become blind again.

Yes and Interesting examples.

Reading today, I learned that newborns cannot see much in the first two months, as if they were looking through wax paper.

[Akoue]

(That is, for now, there is no way to objectively evaluate our inner impressions. So for now it's purely subjective. I think that could change at some point.)

Yes. Some people want to argue that it is not in principle possible (that it is logically impossible). I am not one of those people.

That's another issue. If you define mentality as everything within the mind that it not subject to description and, apparently, the ways in which two minds MIGHT differ, then "mind" is by definition inaccessible to science. There cannot be a science of something that cannot be detected.

I hope I didn't advocate that view of mentality, at least I didn't mean to. The inaccessibility point only holds for some features of mentality. Man, things would really be messy if that were true of all of it. Yikes!

Nope. I do not concede this at all. Each of us knows the experience of being "me." But what is at issue is whether your subjective experience (not counting differences in sensory apparatus and other physical inputs) is different from mine and for that, we have no evidence at all--either for or against.

Yes, thank you for correcting me. You're absolutely right.

I don't use the "begging the question," so I had to look it up.
Wikipedia says, "a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises."

If I understand the term, it would appear that the same argument can be made back?

That is, if you assume there's a difference between two minds, all physical things being equal, then your premise implies your proposition.

Yes, that would be question-begging. The non-materialist would have to adduce an argument to show that the difference is a difference in non-physical properties. That can't be taken for granted without begging the question against you. And it wouldn't be enough to say something along the following lines: Science cannot show that these properties by virtue of which two minds differ are physical properties, therefore materialism is false. That would also beg the question against you.

(I probably haven't given this impression so far, but I actually think that non-materialism is a much harder view to defend than is materialism. The real trick, as I see it anyway, is getting the right sort of materialist view in place. I asked you to flesh out a claim you made earlier because I suspect it points in the direction of a form of materialism that has good prospects.)

I assume either (1) IF there's a difference as you define it, it's inaccessible to inquiry (through science) or else (2) if there's no difference, the thing does not exist and is inaccessible to scientific inquiry.

That seem fair to me. My apologies for ascribing to you a stronger claim that you intended. I'll be more careful next time.

No. Something can be both qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) and still completely physical. Qualitative phenomena are available to science. Are we using "qualitative" differently?

I don't think we're using it differently. One thing I really should have been more clear about is this: If there are qualitative inversions of the sort I've described in previous posts, that wouldn't show that materialism is false. It would only show that materialism cannot be proven to be true.

...
Oh, I don't agree with any of what comes next! I don't want to argue with every line though...

Why do I have the feeling I just dodged a bullet?

But, as I understand you, you've limited interiority to just those things that are undetectable--like what red looks like. There is so much else that IS detectable and accessible to science. Why limit your inquiry to what cannot be known?

I definitely don't want to restrict interiority to just these undetectables. I only mean to say that they are an important part of our interior life. But you're right: There's lots that's interior and is detectable. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to ask people how they feel or what's on their minds.

It isn't about science explaining mentality. It's about being able to ask any coherent question at all. Those are distinct propositions. I want to convey that clearly.

Absolutely. The point about asking coherent questions is one that is very much on my mind/in my brain.

Just to be clear, at no point in this discussion have I assumed that. I'm good at maintaining two possibilities in my head at once. But in this case, they lead to the same outcome, which is that we can't know. At least not yet as far as I know.

Oh, I definitely know better than to underestimate your cognitive abilities! Ooh, boy!

But it did look to me like that was being taken for granted. In any case, I have a better understanding of where you're coming from thanks to this post (i.e. the one I'm responding to this very now).

Nor are we entitled to assume that mental states have no physical basis.
We are left having to accept that we can't answer this question.

I agree with the first and disagree with the second. In fact, as I've mentioned, I think you've already suggested a plausible answer to the question whether mental states are physical phenomena. Also, if a non-materialist can demonstrate that it isn't logically possible for mental states to be phenomena, that would be an answer to the question. I guess what I am saying is that I don't believe this to be a question that is irresoluble until such time as science answers it definitively. (I'm not ascribing that view to you; it's just something lots of people say--"when we have a complete science all these questions about the mind will have been answered"... as if we have any idea what a "complete science" would be or even look like.) In fact, I posted the OP confidant that there is a lot we can learn about this, and that there are many questions that we are able to answer. But, then, as is pretty obvious, I don't take it for granted that it is an empirical question awaiting a scientific answer. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. We won't know unless we keep digging into it.

[tonyrey]

Our primary data are not things but thoughts. We infer the existence of physical objects from the evidence of our senses. So Descartes was not so far from the truth. It is uneconomical and incoherent to regard a multitude of thoughts, sensations, feelings and images as our starting point. A more adequate and intelligible explanation is that they occur within an intangible entity we call the mind. Our starting point is therefore the mind rather than the brain.

To argue that all mental events are produced by events in the brain overlooks the limitations of the brain. It is a physical organ functioning according to the laws of science and cannot control itself because it has no control-centre - whereas we make decisions for which we held responsible. An ape has a highly developed brain but it cannot distinguish between good and evil, lacks the power of abstract thought and is incapable of self-determination.

The only way to evade the conclusion that the human mind transcends the body is to regard a person as an advanced ape which has invented meaningless sounds and symbols like "truth", "goodness", "freedom", "justice", "purpose" and "love". Yet this hypothesis is self-destructive because it presupposes insight into the nature of reality and therefore the ability to arrive at the truth!

[asking]

tonyrey,

I will take you on respecting at least part of this argument.

It's not at all clear that an ape cannot distinguish between good and evil or that an intermediate ape would regard justice as a "meaningless sound."

First of all, just for example, there is evidence that apes and even monkeys have a strong sense of fair play. This is, apparently, particularly well developed in females, make of that what you will. They will pass up good food rather than allow themselves to be treated unfairly.

Second, there are two kinds of good and evil--those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined. For example, were you to try to kill an ape's baby, I'm sure she would consider that an evil. Likewise, a lioness. But if you offered either creature shellfish, I seriously doubt either would object (although they might not partake). And neither would I, despite being unquestionably human. And yet for many people eating shellfish is proscribed.

Obviously, these are extreme examples. You may be able to come up with evils that are universal of among humans, but not found in our close relatives. But that is true of a lot of traits and such patterns are characteristic of inherited traits, whether in families close to home or in the greater families of evolutionary lineages.

[asking]

(That is, for now, there is no way to objectively evaluate our inner impressions. So for now it's purely subjective. I think that could change at some point.)

Yes. Some people want to argue that it is not in principle possible (that it is logically impossible). I am not one of those people.

I had an idea how this could be done in principle. There are examples of people who have lost the connection between the two halves of their brain. You can show an object to one eye that the corresponding half of the brain cannot see.

If it were possible to connect and disconnect the two halves of the brain at will you could separately show a colored object to one half of the brain and then the other and then, after a bit, let them talk to one another about what they saw. If, furthermore, one side of the brain was a transplant from another person, you MIGHT have an answer to your question. This is obviously not technologically possible now, but it's not unimaginable. And there might be a way to do it with animals that I have not thought of.

[asking]

That is, if you assume there's a difference between two minds, all physical things being equal, then your premise implies your proposition.

Science cannot show that these properties by virtue of which two minds differ are physical properties, therefore materialism is false. That would also beg the question against you.

It would only show that materialism cannot be proven to be true.

Let me clarify. I don't think materialism can ever be proven to be true, at least not through science. In order to prove materialism, you would have to disprove the existence of anything nonmaterial, which, by definition, is inaccessible to science.

Importantly, I hedged in the first statement when I said "all physical things being equal," because all physical things can probably never be equal.

why do I have the feeling I just dodged a bullet?

You just wore down a friendly opponent with a headache.
If you want me to go back...

Nor are we entitled to assume that mental states have no physical basis.
We are left having to accept that we can't answer this question.

... I think you've already suggested a plausible answer to the question whether mental states are physical phenomena. [[Minds as emergent properties, like flocking behavior in birds, or foot and vehicle traffic.]]

I want to make another distinction and expand on what I just said. I can--in principle-- make an argument for a materialist explanation for the mind that is coherent, far reaching, and predictive. But this does not disprove a non materialist mind, for the following reason. We can never explain every last detail of brain behavior--including the mind and what people call consciousness--based on the physical properties of the brain. We cannot do this anymore than we can predict the exact final placement of every molecule of a cake rising in the oven. In order to make a predictive model of the brain that was so exact as to rule out a non material role for a sense of self, you would need two identical brains, which (I believe) it is not possible to create.

Therefore, no matter how good the science, there will always be room for someone to argue for a non material role in the mind. It may not explain anything that I would consider interesting, since presumably science would have explained all the juicy stuff, but you cannot rule it out entirely.

Plus, see my more general argument about materialism above. You can never rule out what is not apparently there but someone insists is there...

(I can likewise argue that a rising cake is not simply a physical process but that it has a spiritual essence that determines how good it will be, and no one can prove me wrong.)

Also, if a non-materialist can demonstrate that it isn't logically possible for mental states to be phenomena, that would be an answer to the question.

All I can say is, good luck with that.

[Akoue]

I had an idea how this could be done in principle. There are examples of people who have lost the connection between the two halves of their brain. You can show an object to one eye that the corresponding half of the brain cannot see.

If it were possible to connect and disconnect the two halves of the brain at will you could separately show a colored object to one half of the brain and then the other and then, after a bit, let them talk to one another about what they saw. If, furthermore, one side of the brain was a transplant from another person, you MIGHT have an answer to your question. This is obviously not technologically possible now, but it's not unimaginable. And there might be a way to do it with animals that I have not thought of.

I've always thought brain-transplantation has interesting implications for all of this. For instance, if another's brain were transplanted into my head would I retain his memories, and would I retain them as my own? Presumably, yes. What if two consciousnesses could merge, by establishing an informational link between two brains? Here we could have two consciousnesses merging into a single consciousness--if materialism is true (and maybe even if it isn't).

I have only one complaint. Why did you have to bring up experimenting on animals? Dammit! Couldn't we just do experiments on morally unsavory humans? I know several whose services, I mean brains, I'd be prepared to offer.

[Akoue]

Yet this hypothesis is self-destructive because it presupposes insight into the nature of reality and therefore the ability to arrive at the truth!

I don't get how this follows. Even if we accept your premise that the primary givens aren't extra-mental objects but rather mental states themselves, it doesn't follow from this that we have no purchase on the nature of (extra-mental) reality.

[asking]

I really like what you said here, and have been meaning to ask you to say a bit more about what you have in mind. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked prattling on about colors and whatnot. Anyway, could I ask you to elaborate on what you have in mind, since it looks both promising and very interesting to me. Also, I'm kind of counting on your expertise to put a couple of good examples to it!

Pretty please!

Okay. After checking definitions at Wikipedia, I think I can say I am talking about "weak emergence." So, for example, the simple attraction between two masses we know as gravity doesn't immediately suggest stars with systems of orbiting planets and moons, which appear to be engineered, but in fact that is what you get. Planetary orbitals are an emergent property of moving masses in space that are interacting with one another. I'm sure there's a more elegant way to say this.

If you look at a section of an impressionist painting up close, you see patches of color that have no pattern or meaning. But if you step back and look at the whole painting from several feet away, a beautiful image emerges. No matter how much time you spend going over the painting with a magnifying glass, you are unlikely to see the whole picture unless you study it at the correct level of complexity.

Often, when we look at a the behavior of, say, five different molecules in a cell, we don't see what role they play in the whole body over the course of a lifetime--in other words, how they interact with all the other molecules and cells in the body to create higher orders of function and pattern. The same is true of genes.

For example, the hungtingtin gene, whose mutant allele causes Huntington's Disease is expressed in cells all over the body. As far as anyone knows, Huntington's is a disease of the brain. What does the protein huntingtin do in these other cells? Does it matter if it's the mutant form or not in these other cells? I'm digressing here and arguing for complexity, but it's related to emergent properties. Simple rules that govern the interactions of simple objects can lead to complex properties.

Consider the moon's influence on the tides. The moon's gravity pulls on our oceans. Daily changes in water level affect the ecology and evolution of intertidal animals and seaweeds in ways that can only be studied by looking at these communities. (Most of these organisms would not even exist if we had no moon.) If you brought them into the lab and studied them individually--or ground them up and looked at their constituent molecules--you would never be able to decide why they do the things they do, let alone THAT they do them. To find out what they do and why, you need to study them do in situ-- at least for a time.

If anyone has got this far, here's your reward, flocking starlings in Rome.
YouTube - Mesmerizing Starlings - Rome

The pattern of their movements -- as a flock -- is an emergent property of their individual interactions with one another. No single bird is responsible for the pattern--which is neither random nor hierarchically imposed by a leader. Yet there is a pattern that is based on simple interactions between each bird and those immediately nearby it.

Cells in developing embryos behave in similar ways, adjusting their movements and differentiation according to who is nearby and thereby creating beautiful and functional forms.

In the movie below, you can see individual cells marked with different colored dyes moving into the interior of a ball of cells in a process called gastrulation. These embryos are not human, but human embryos also gastrulate, which is the first stage in the formation of layers of tissues. All animals and plants are made of layers of tissues, which are an emergent property of groups of cells.

Notice that all the red cells disappear into the interior of the embryo.
http://academic.reed.edu/biology/pro.../spider-05.mov

Edit: To clarify, two things are occurring here. The cells are dividing so that there are more and more smaller and smaller cells, and they are also "invaginating" into the interior of the ball of cells to form the gastrula. There is no one gene that directs this process. It's the product of individual interactions among cells. (In fact, some eggs can get pretty far in development without any nuclear DNA at all.)

[tonyrey]

tonyrey,

I will take you on respecting at least part of this argument.

It's not at all clear that an ape cannot distinguish between good and evil or that an intermediate ape would regard justice as a "meaningless sound."

First of all, just for example, there is evidence that apes and even monkeys have a strong sense of fair play. This is, apparently, particularly well developed in females, make of that what you will. They will pass up good food rather than allow themselves to be treated unfairly.

Second, there are two kinds of good and evil--those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined. For example, were you to try to kill an ape's baby, I'm sure she would consider that an evil. Likewise, a lioness. But if you offered either creature shellfish, I seriously doubt either would object (although they might not partake). And neither would I, despite being unquestionably human. And yet for many people eating shellfish is proscribed.

Obviously, these are extreme examples. You may be able to come up with evils that are universal of among humans, but not found in our close relatives. But that is true of a lot of traits and such patterns are characteristic of inherited traits, whether in families close to home or in the greater families of evolutionary lineages.

asking,

Some animals have a rudimentary sense of fair play just as they have a rudimentary language but this is far removed from abstract concepts of justice like the universal right to life. They are not considered responsible for their behaviour or capable of self-determination or sacrificing themselves for an ideal.

Your view that there are two kinds of good and evil- those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined - implies that morality is no more than a convention. If it were, there is no reason why we should not choose to be unconventional and kill those who prevent us from acquiring power or wealth - provided that we are skilful enough to remain undetected. In other words, the right to life is regarded as no more than a useful fiction...

Your last paragraph suggests that all our thoughts, values and decisions are ultimately determined by our heredity and environment.. Do you believe that is the case?

[asking]

asking,

Some animals have a rudimentary sense of fair play just as they have a rudimentary language but this is far removed from abstract concepts of justice like the universal right to life. They are not considered responsible for their behaviour or capable of self-determination or sacrificing themselves for an ideal.

Your view that there are two kinds of good and evil- those that are almost universally agreed on among social animals and a great number that are culturally determined - implies that morality is no more than a convention. If it were, there is no reason why we should not choose to be unconventional and kill those who prevent us from acquiring power or wealth - provided that we are skilful enough to remain undetected. In other words, the right to life is regarded as no more than a useful fiction...

Your last paragraph suggests that all our thoughts, values and decisions are ultimately determined by our heredity and environment.. Do you believe that is the case?

tonyrey
The two kinds of moral distinctions were intended to answer this question. Those that are universal among social animals are, I think, basically hard wired. Or perhaps some combination of hard wired and learned. This is an important distinction. Our tendency to learn language is hard wired; the specific language we learn as infants is learned. Likewise our tendency to learn to walk at age two is hard wired;our style of walking as adults is partly learned.

On the other hand, proscriptions against eating certain foods or wearing certain clothes are clearly "social conventions," although I think that is a rather weak way to put it. Cultural mandates are much stronger than the word "convention" suggests. But perhaps you were engaging in some rhetorical play.

As for your assertion that animals' sense of fair play is "rudimentary" compared to ours, I don't think there's any evidence for that.

Here are some of the 10 commandments.
Either they are social conventions OR you will get into trouble if you do something different*, whether you are a human being or a chimpanzee. I put a star next to the ones that would cause trouble in a troop of chimpanzees.

Both animals and humans sometimes do them anyway. We have proscriptions against these sorts of things because we humans often do them and they cause social disruption. We do not have proscriptions against things that we never do or which do not cause social disruption.

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (By social agreement only.)

*12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

*13 You shall not kill

*14 You shall not commit adultery. (You shall not be near a female in heat when an alpha male or his buddies are nearby.)

*15 You shall not steal.

*16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

*17 You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

[asking]

I've always thought brain-transplantation has interesting implications for all of this. For instance, if another's brain were transplanted into my head would I retain his memories, and would I retain them as my own? Presumably, yes.

I would think the memories would be your new friend's but that this person would not feel himself at all, as he would be experiencing a different qualitative existence with different hormonal responses from almost every hormone system in the body.

What if two consciousnesses could merge, by establishing an informational link between two brains? Here we could have two consciousnesses merging into a single consciousness--if materialism is true (and maybe even if it isn't).

This isn't out of the question in the future, since a lot is being done technologically to allow brains to receive input from sensing devices or, alternatively, to control mechanical devices.

I have only one complaint. Why did you have to bring up experimenting on animals? Dammit! Couldn't we just do experiments on morally unsavory humans? I know several whose services, I mean brains, I'd be prepared to offer.

Sorry. I knew this would be upsetting, but it is in fact how things get done still. I feel that it's not honest to sweep it under the rug and not acknowledge all those little lives. It's legitimate to protest and accept ignorance of all kinds of things as a reasonable price. It's not legitimate to just not mention it (I think).