from the notebook...
-
-
-
What is it like to be a bat ?
(Original text by Thomas Nagel)
Consciousness creates problem for mind body explanation and is often ignored. The form may vary, but the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means the organism has mental states and there is something to be like that organism. This subjective character of experience is not captured by any reductive analysis. It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior.
It is impossible to exclude phenomenal features of experience from a reduction the same way that one excludes the phenomenal features of an ordinary substance from the physical or chemical reduction of it eg like explaining them as effects o minds of human observers.
Facts of what it is like to be X are very peculiar, so peculiar that some may doubt their reality or significance of claims about them. Bats have experiences, they’re mammals, and yet, they’re fundamentally alien form of life. There is something that it is like to be a bat.
Bat sonar is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that the experience is something that we can experience or imagine. There is difficulty in understanding what it is like to be a bat. I may understand what it would be for me to behave like bats behave, but its not the same as knowing what it is to be a bat. I ma limited by my own experiences and I cannot perform any algebraic functions of addition, subtraction (or combinations thereof) on my previous experiences ad come to know what it is to be a bat. Even if I were neurosurgically altered to be a bat, at this time I cannot fathom what it would be like. So if we extrapolate form our own experiences what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incomplete. We believe bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger and lust, and they have other perceptions beside sonar, but in addition, they have a subjective experience beyond our conceivability.
If there is intelligent alien life, its as hard for them to conceive what it is like to be human like us, even if they did ascribe mental states to us. The experiences may not be describable in language, and in some ways if it is, it could be understood only by the likes of us.
It is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts that a human being will never posses the requisite concept to represent or comprehend, simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type. The bat example draws the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in human terms,we can recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state of comprehend them.
The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with the enterprise to explaining. The, if the facts of experience – facts what it is like for the experiencing organism – are accessible only from one point of view, then it’s a mystery how the true character of experiences can be revealed in the physical operation of that organism.
A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightening, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightening or clouds or the place these occupy in our phenomenal world. Objectivity can be thought of as a direction in which understanding can travel and in understanding the phenomenon like lightening, it may be legitimate to go as far as one can from a strictly human viewpoint. But in the case of experience, it is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from th eparticular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat ? But if experiece does not have in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how could a Martian observe my brain states (mental processes) from a different point of view ? Or how could a human psychologist observe them from another point of view ?
In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, towards a more accurate view of nature of things. Experiece, however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea from moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. It appears unlikely we can get closer to real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human view and striving for a description in terms of beings that could not imagine what it was to be like us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it take us farther away from it.
In discovering sound to be a wave phenomenon in air or any other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, ad the auditory human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced. The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.
Most of the neobehaviouism of the recent philosophical psychology results from the effort to substitutean objective concept of mind for the real thing, in order to have nothing left over which cannot be reduced. Id physical theory of mind is to explain subjective character of experience, if mental is indeed physical, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo physical processes.
Physicalism is not false. OTOH, physcialism is a position we cannot currently understand as cureently we do not have any conception of how it may be true. Physicalism - mental states are states of the body, mental events are physical events even if we do not know which states they are. When we are told X is Y, we know how it is supposed to be true, but that also depends on our conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by ‘is’ alone. But when the two things are disparage, it may not be clear how that could be true. We may not know how the twp paths could converge, and what kind of things they converge on, and a theoretical framework needs to be supplied to enable us to understand this.
People are told that all matter is energy but despite knowing what ‘is’means, they never form a conception of what makes this claim true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental events is a physical event, we require more understanding of the word ‘is’. The idea how mental and physical can refer to the same thing is lacking.
Davidson has argued that if mental events have physical causes and effects, they must have physical descriptions. His argument applies to intentional events, but sensations are physical processes although we may not understand how. Davidson’s position is that certain physical events have irreducible mental properties but we cannot conceive how we came to this conclusion.
Does it make sense to ak what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me ? What is it to have a fundamentally objective characteristic? May an objectie phenomenology needs to be devised with goals to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings capable of having those experiences. One might develop concepts that can be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was to see. Aspects of objective behavior that admitted objective description might be better candidates for objective explanation of a more familiar sort. |
