Neurath's Boat

Real Experimental Philosophy

Most people don't know about the lab work we have to do in our profession. Fortunately, I've never been zapped by a malfunctioning enknowledgetron; sadly, despite what you read in the comics, in real life such a thing is usually lethal and never grants super-powers.

What is it like to be a bat?

So Scribefire seems to be misbehaving; perhaps some incompatibility with Firefox 3 or something.  As a result, this initially appeared as a blank post.  Still, it was a short one; easy to reconstruct.  I just linked to this post from cocktail party physics, and noted that reading things like that tended to make me think I'd learned a little bit more about what it is like to be a bat.  Which, of course, also leads me to be ever more skeptical of those arguments that I can't know anything about that.

Experimental philosophy

Apparently there's some monstrous new survey up. I am suspicious of web surveys as a methodology, because of the obvious dangers of bias in the sample, but of course methodological perfection is generally unobtainable, and research which falls short can be very valuable in suggesting new theories to test; it just shouldn't be taken too seriously as proving anything. So I'm going to take it, and recommend it to others.

A circle

I've recently been re-reading Langton's Kantian Humility, and pondering a problem connected with her discussion. It seems to me that properties must be identified by what they do. After all, we can come to know about them, and how could we do that except via their effects? Langton argues for a thesis along similar lines, and attributes this view to Kant as well, though she confines the thesis to phenomenal (in the Kantian sense) properties.

However, two Humean theses also strike me as plausible. First, I agree with Hume's rejection of substance. Things are just bundles of properties. Second, I accept a Humean account of causation; causes just are regularities in the occurrence of events.

Combining these views produces a tight circle. Properties are determined by their causal powers, and causes are determined by the pattern of occurrence of properties. Intuitively, this is not a happy situation. This is perhaps part of the reason for Langton's endorsement of Kantian things-in-themselves, with unknowable intrinsic properties; the intrinsic properties of the things in themselves determine their behavior, so they enable an escape from the circle. The perfectly natural properties of Lewis may also be a way out of the circle.[1]

I do not find any of the escape routes plausible. I'm more inclined to think that, contrary to appearances, no escape is necessary. Causal determination is perhaps necessarily asymmetric, but it is clear that whatever form of determination is going on here is not causal. Logical determination is often symmetric. That may not be what the situation involves either; surely what's going on is some sort of metaphysical determination, which many at least would distinguish from logical determination. But whether it's distinct from logical determination or not, it isn't clear to me that it couldn't share logical determination's capacity to be symmetric.

There are, admittedly, other issues raised by simply embracing the circularity rather than trying to find an escape, but I will postpone them for future posts on this topic.

[1] It would also be possible to escape from the circle by supposing that we do know intrinsic properties in the case of conscious experience, in the form of Humean simple impressions, or in what the moderns call qualia. But of course such a thesis would be absurd.

A strange controversy

I follow some of the discussion of the DDT ban myth, often carried out on Deltoid.[1] The controversy is interesting for the lack of apparent motive for those who spread the myth. Nobody makes or stands to make huge profits manufacturing or using DDT; those who spread the DDT ban myth are not shills for some DDT industry in the way the global warming denial crowd are shills for the energy industry. The best theory I've encountered is that this is an effort to discredit the environmental movement in general, encouraged by factions threatened by environmentalism in other ways (like the energy industry, of course).

I mention this now because Lambert's recent attack on a spreader of the DDT ban myth mentions one example of stupidity so breathtaking I can't help but share it with others. Apparently, this J F Beck fellow that Lambert is criticizing believes that it isn't abusive to call someone a "toady." He even defends this claim when challenged on it, saying on one occasion that "toady" means "sycophant" (which isn't abusive?) and later just sticking to his guns and insisting it isn't abusive without explanation. Even some of his supporters seem confused by his determination on this point.

[1] For those who are unfamiliar, here's the short version. The myth is that some sort of global DDT ban has been responsible for millions of deaths due to malaria caused by mosquitoes which could have been killed by DDT. In fact, there has never been a global ban on DDT use. Anti-malaria policy is a complicated area in which mistakes have certainly been made, but it is well established that mosquitoes can develop DDT resistance. Such anti-DDT efforts as there have been have primarily sought to ban its use in agriculture, and efforts to prevent such use probably helped make use of DDT against malaria more successful by slowing the development of DDT resistance in the mosquitoes. Even if the efforts to cut down on DDT use did reduce its use for anti-malarial purposes as well (a point which is hotly debated; read Lambert's blog for lots of discussion and links), the resistance issue makes it quite unclear whether using DDT more aggressively would have saved any more people at all, or whether instead any benefits would have been offset by hastening the development of DDT resistance in the mosquitoes.

Barnes on continental philosophy

Leiter bashes Jonathan Barnes for his dismissive attitude toward continental philosophy, alluding to "two hundred years of philosophy since Kant on the European continent." Barnes almost certainly goes too far, but Leiter's response seems to me to be equally ill-informed. "Continental philosophy" does not refer to philosophy done on the European continent any more than a "continental breakfast" is a breakfast eaten on the European continent. It's a much more specific term than that, and much less geographical than its name suggests. The analytic/continental divide did not exist prior to the 1930s, so there has not been two hundred years of continental philosophy for Barnes to dismiss.

Barnes may confuse the issue by mentioning philosophers from before the 1930s in discussing this question, but he identifies the philosophers he mentions as heroes of the analytic and continental tradition, and does not claim that they were all members of the respective traditions (his lists also don't put all philosophers from the European continent on the continental list, since, again, it's not a matter of geography).

Why zombies are inconceivable (short version)

Consciousness does work.  My being consciously aware of various things motivates me to react in various ways, to do things in response.  The zombie scenario claims that consciousness has been removed, and everything else left the same, with "everything else" including the work that consciousness does getting done.  But that's impossible; if consciousness is removed, what it does won't get done unless something else does it instead (and the zombie scenario is certainly not supposed to be adding any substitutes).

To put it another way, if in a physical duplicate world the work consciousness does is still getting done, something physical must be doing the work in that world.  But if it's a physical duplicate world, whatever it is that is doing the work in that world is also present in this world.  But in this world consciousness is doing the work.  So whatever that physical thing that's doing the work is must, after all, just be consciousness.

This didn't end up being as short as I expected.  Still shorter than the last two posts on the topic, I suppose.

Trying to do better

Feminist Philosophers provide a link to an essay on "how to mentor someone who doesn't look like you." I did find it slightly surprising that Professor Wong reported encountering so few philosophers of East Asian heritage, since my dissertation supervisor at Brown was of Korean descent, and before I jumped ship from Santa Barbara, I'd been working with a professor whose ancestry was Japanese. Admittedly, they were also each the only East Asians in their respective departments. Kind of an odd coincidence that I ended up connecting with both of them (even more oddly, they were both undergrads at Dartmouth together, though I don't think they knew one another at the time).

Anyway, check out Wong's tips.

More phenomenal content!

My previous post generated no counter-examples, just a claim that I had changed the subject. It is possible that I was insufficiently clear, so I'll start by stressing something I may not have stressed sufficiently.

The point of the depth perception case was to show that within a single subject, phenomenal characteristics seem to track force and vivacity; something's seeming to be at arm's length depends on how strongly my various ways of perceiving depth are pushing me to believe it's at arm's length, and doesn't depend on which of the various ways is active.

Conversely, absences of phenomenal content track absences of force. For example, blindsight is sometimes mentioned when the topic of phenomenal consciousness comes up; this involves the absence of qualia, but seemingly the acquisition of information via the visual system. It could thus support arguments that qualia are inessential to the functions of perception. But those with blindsight are merely better than chance at identifying features of the visual field they claim not to perceive; they come nowhere near being as good at this as those with normal sight, and in general the information they receive through blindsight has far less influence on them than the information a normally sighted person receives through ordinary visual perception (trivially, nothing they perceive leads them to make comments on what they're seeing, but there are lots of other ways in which the influence is weaker or absent as well). Thus, it is quite easy to account for this phenomenon on my theory; these people get very little force and vivacity from stimulation coming through their eyes, so they don't get anything like our usual perceptual qualia.

To take another case where the role of awareness, its associations and effects, track its phenomenal feel, consider learned abilities to perceive. Words we recognize sound different from words in a foreign language; listening to them feels different. Similarly, a trained musician's experience of a symphony or a wine expert's experience tasting a wine is different from that of a novice (or so such people report, comparing their experiences to before they acquired their expertise). Again, the training changes what the awareness does, and it ends up feeling different.

It is, of course, open to someone to steadfastly insist that no matter how closely differences in phenomenal feel track differences in the functional activity of the mind, there's still a distinction between the feel and the functional activity. But it seems to me that at some point it becomes unreasonable to keep insisting that there just have to be two different things here.

Still, I suppose I'm biased. It just seems obvious to me that consciousness does something, so for me the question is what does it do, and any defects in any functional account merely indicate that we haven't quite gotten the function right yet. I have difficulty wrapping my mind around views which take seriously the possibility that consciousness could be functionally inert. But one must be able to take that seriously in order to take zombies seriously, and lots of people seem to be able to do that. I confess I don't know what it would be like to be able to do that.

A phenomenal theory!

So, I've been thinking a lot about qualia, and trying to get a paper together on why they shouldn't be seen as such a problem for materialism.  It seems to be generally accepted that features of mental life which can be analyzed functionally are not problematic for materialism, so my line is that, contrary to superficial appearances, qualia can actually be adequately characterized by their functional role in our minds.  I propose that what is characteristic of qualia is something like what Hume called "force and vivacity"; their tendency to bring associated ideas to mind, and enliven ideas in the sense of making them more believed or plausible.