This week, Chris Eddy will be speaking on this topic. He says:
“After canvassing all current theories of consciousness in The Oxford Companion To The Mind, (1987) Dennett writes as follows: “We seem to be back to our unanswerable question, which suggests we should find a different way of looking at the situation. … It is a familiar theme in discussions of consciousness that human consciousness is somehow tied to our capacity for language … Developing this idea … will almost certainly demand of us a revolution in our habits of thought about these issues …” The Blackwell Companion To Consciousness, 55 articles all peer-reviewed, fails 20 years later to rise to Dennett’s challenge: according to its Index, the word “language” appears on no more than 16 of its 725 pages. Science is in denial about the relation between consciousness and language.
Scientism is the ideology according to which the sciences provide the only source of reliable knowledge, but I claim that creatures like ourselves can be understood most coherently and comprehensively as responsible agents whose interlocutory relations imply interpersonal commitments and entitlements which can be logically analysed and therefore systematically taught, e.g., in the form of the Golden Rule. If this claim is true, Scientism is false, because the question of how we ought to conduct our relations with each other can then be answered authoritatively in philosophical terms. These are the stakes between philosophy and science, so it’s not surprising if the sciences prefer not to tangle with, but rather to draw attention away from, the philosophy of language and its implications, preferring instead to engage publicly in ritual combat with Traditional Religion, – the opponent they know they can beat.
In this talk I shall present a principled basis for distinguishing between the general alertness of dumb animals such as the Antelope and the focused (analytic or aesthetic) attentiveness which characterizes consciousness as it appears in discursive creatures such as ourselves, typified by the Wine-taster, and I shall argue that there are good Darwinian reasons why the latter would not have evolved in dumb animals for whom unconscious information-processing can achieve all that is required for survival.”
Come along this Friday to hear more and to make your own contribution.
This is the link I promised to post
With reference to my talk on Friday, you have sent me the link to a video with the headline, “Animal Consciousness Officially Recognised By Leading Panel Of Neuroscientists,” and I must assume that you did this not as a joke, but because you believe that the pronouncements of this “Panel” have the kind of scientific authority to which they implicitly lay claim, along the lines of, e.g., the International Panel on Climate Change, so that their pronouncement ought to settle the matter for all responsible persons.
I did not ask you to send me this link, but you have taken the step of sending it to me publicly and thereby publicly asking me to give it my attention. Well, I have given it my attention and all I ask in return is that you go on record here publicly in writing: I want you to declare that you accept the authority of this “Panel” and believe, accordingly, that the question of consciousness in dumb animals ought now to be regarded by all responsible persons as settled in the affirmative. You need only say “I do”.
If only the pronouncements of the “impartial” International Panel on Climate Change would settle the matter for all responsible persons.
Can I remind you of the motto of the Royal Society,,,’Nullius in verba’.
Science follows evidence, not authority.
Just thought that folks might be interested in what an international panel of researchers summarising over 2000 peer reviewed published papers had to say.
Here is an opinion piece from New Scientist:
In July of this year, the question was discussed in detail by a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge for the first annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference. Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, spent the latter part of his career studying consciousness and in 1994 published a book about it, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul.
The upshot of the meeting was the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which was publicly proclaimed by three eminent neuroscientists, David Edelman of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, Philip Low of Stanford University and Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology.
The declaration concludes that “non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
My first take on the declaration was incredulity. Did we really need this statement of the obvious? Many renowned researchers reached the same conclusion years ago.
Nevertheless, we should applaud them for doing this. The declaration is not aimed at scientists: as its author, Low, said prior to the declaration: “We came to a consensus that now was perhaps the time to make a statement for the public… It might be obvious to everybody in this room that animals have consciousness; it is not obvious to the rest of the world.”
You might find this useful for your reply
Click to access CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
And while I’m at it I’ll post this, not because I’m confusing the argument about having a pre-frontal cortex with the possession of language but because several times it touches on your puzzling remark at the end ”….if dumb animals were conscious they’d want to commune with us, to dance with us and improvise music with us”
you didn’t really say that, did you Chris?
Yes….it struck me that it would be like dogs claiming that if humans were really conscious we would engage in bottom sniffing with them……or bonobos expecting us to engage in mutual masturbation with them….
Forgive me if I take a little time to make my response as concise as possible. Meantime, please continue to chat among yourselves. I am delighted at last to have drawn my chief opponent into a public debate in writing, i.e., on the record.
Don’t forget to mention how insidious you think Attenborough is as well for presenting animals on our TV screens..
The haughty (“Can I remind you”) tone of your response to my challenge is not easy to justify: it was you, not I, who posted a video headlined “Animal Consciousness Officially Recognised by a Leading Panel of Neuroscientists”. What is the word “officially” if not an appeal to the authority of an “office”? Your “Just thought folks might be interested” marks a tactical retreat that will not deceive the fair-minded. This is why, when serious issues are at stake, I prefer written argument to the hit-and-run of spoken conversation where rhetorical tricks like this are only too plausibly deniable.
The problem with “Nullius in verba” is that it is too easily becomes the sacred text of an empiricist fundamentalism according to which “evidence” and “the facts” are wholly extra-linguistic. We have “evidence” that a given liquid is acidic if we have verbal agreement (a) that “it turns blue litmus paper red”, (b) that “turning blue litmus paper red is evidence of acidity” and (c) that “there is no property of the liquid other than its acidity which could account for the change of colour” (e.g., that the liquid is not red paint). It is only within discourse that facts or evidence can come into existence. Applying this point to the question in hand, Daniel Dennett says the following in his entry on “Consciousness” in “The Oxford Companion To The Mind”:
“Are other animals conscious? … Could a computer or robot be conscious? … Certainly good answers to these questions will depend heavily on empirical discoveries about the behavioural capacities and internal circumstances of the various problematic candidates for consciousness, but about every such empirical finding we can ask: what is its bearing on the question of consciousness, and why? These are not directly empirical, but conceptual questions, and answering them is not an alternative or competitor to answering the empirical questions, but an essential preliminary – or at least an accompaniment.” (p.160-1)
I accept the Cambridge Declaration if it can be understood as claiming that a neurological substrate is necessary for consciousness. I welcome that claim for two reasons: firstly, because it rules out not only disembodied consciousness, but also any kind of pan-psychism, i.e., the idea that consciousness can be attributed in some sense or in some degree to whatever it is at the most fundamental level that the universe is composed of. But I challenge the implications of the Declaration on two rather ambiguous points: firstly, if the claim that dumb animals have “the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours” implies that they do actually exhibit such behaviours, I reject it; secondly, if the claim that the neurological substrates “generate consciousness” implies that those substrates are not merely necessary, but are actually sufficient for consciousness, then I reject that also.
On the other hand, I wish explicitly to dissociate myself from the so-called neo-Cartesians: for me, the basis of consciousness is not the neo-cortex or any other part of the brain; it is the relations between speakers established by their participation in discourse.
For the benefit of those, like Gerry, who were not at the meeting, let me restate my case as simply as possible.
(1) If responsiveness to sensory stimuli can occur unconsciously in humans, as in “subliminal perception”, – “the major development for consciousness research in the last 50 years” (Frith & Rees; Blackwell), – then such responsiveness in dumb animals’ cannot be urged as a reason for regarding them as conscious.
(2) Just as the complexity of a bodily organ gives us no good reason for thinking it was designed by conscious intention, (e.g., by a God) so the apparent complexity and intelligence of an animal’s behaviour give us no good reason to believe it was directed by conscious intentions (e.g., by a soul, self or person: note that Crick, in the title of his book, explicitly uses the word “soul” as a synonym for “consciousness”).
In the latest video posted by John, the one that focuses on refuting the neo-Cartesians, the presenter appeals at one point to our intuitive recognition, when we look into the eyes of higher mammals, that they are conscious, but my points (1) and (2), above, suggest that this intuition is not to be trusted. Indeed it is my contention that this “intuition” reflects an extremely pervasive animist superstition with deep cultural roots, (partly analysed by Charles Taylor in “A Secular Age”) catered to now by endless nature programmes on tv, in which shaman-presenters like Attenborough commune with the animal spirits on our behalf. Notice how often such professed adherents of naturalism use words with distinctly non-naturalistic implications such as “magical” and “miraculous”, and listen to the cheesy music that accompanies the typical nature programme, evoking feelings of sublime grandeur that serenely transcend the unedifying spectacles of killing, eating and competing displayed on screen.
(3) Attention is necessary for consciousness.(Jesse Prinz, et al: Blackwell) Attention is a focusing which, like a searchlight, illuminates its target, but not the surrounding darkness: consciousness, by definition, can’t be directly conscious of its own limits, i.e., of what it isn’t conscious of, which suggests that our intuitions about it may well be misleading (or misled by wishful, ideological thinking).
(4) Language evolved because it directs the attention and action of groups and thereby confers power. You have power over me if you can influence how others treat me. Because we have language, we are held responsible, by others and by ourselves, not only for our actions, but also for the direction of our attention. To be conscious, therefore, is to have a conscience: consciousness as we know it is “normative”.
(5) To be conscious of sensory qualities we must pay attention to them the way a Wine-taster focuses his attention on the various “notes” that he can taste in the wine, and to do so he must reduce his general alertness, i.e., shut out stimuli presented to his other senses. What animals need for survival is not the focused attention of consciousness, but a general alertness, i.e., a readiness to respond. The Antelope at the waterhole cannot afford to pay attention to the taste of the water it’s drinking, but must be generally alert for any indication of the approach of a predator. Conscious (analytic, aesthetic) attention to particulars would reduce general alertness and would therefore not have evolved. Animals respond to, but are not conscious of sensory qualities. The intense alignment of an animal’s behaviour on a particular object, e.g., a cheetah’s pursuit of an antelope, is best understood not as an aesthetic or analytic consideration of the antelope, but as an alertness to, i.e., a readiness to respond to, the antelope’s next move, all of which could be achieved by unconscious information-processing, – as Alan Winfield would probably confirm.
(6) Language allows the wine-taster’s attention to be directed responsibly, i.e., in accordance with the demands of his profession, and distraction resisted. Dumb animals’ attention can’t be responsibly directed and they can’t resist accidental distraction by a stronger stimulus. (See Richard Dawkins on “The Attention Threshold Model”: Dawkins speaks of “attention” where I would prefer to talk of “alertness” because there is nothing in animals to suggest the aesthetic or analytic attitudes we associate with attention). Dumb animals, therefore, can’t be attentive and can’t, therefore, be conscious.
(7) Sensation, I suggest, is not a form of consciousness; sensations are events which can be objects of consciousness, but only for conscious beings. This distinction between consciousness and its objects seems to me a reasonable one because without it we might find ourselves having to recognise every object of which we were conscious as requiring its own distinct form of consciousness; thus consciousness of blue would be a different form of consciousness from consciousness of green, which, while not obviously absurd, is theoretically rather cumbersome. Furthermore, if it is accepted that attention is necessary for consciousness, it follows that sensation can be a threat to consciousness: the more salient the sensation, the more likely it is to distract and monopolise attention, preventing you from focusing responsibly on your conscious projects; and, it is not easy to see how what can be a threat to consciousness could itself be a form of consciousness.
This is a difficult point to make because it entails that dumb (and therefore non-conscious) animals, even though they respond to intense sensations that we would call painful, do not experience pain. I am of course aware that this sounds like nonsense to us, but unfamiliar concepts often sound like nonsense; think of the early reactions to General Relativity and Einstein’s own reaction to Quantum Theory. All I ask is that those who wish to rubbish the idea should deal with it directly rather than via the objection that it would seem to permit cruelty to animals. I hope the next point will help to clarify the matter.
(8) “There’s something it’s like to be conscious” is a familiar statement in Consciousness Studies. To identify a sensory quality we have to attend to what it’s like and what it’s unlike. Likeness and difference are abstract ideas of relations between objects which can be grasped only through language: experience is constructed between interlocutors. Being me is in some ways like, but in other ways unlike being you: to bring out these likenesses and differences in our experience we have to name them, distinguish them and define them, i.e., we have to focus attention on them and thereby make them objects of consciousness. Thomas Nagel’s question, “What is it like to be a bat?” is meaningless: it’s not “like” anything to be a bat; bats have no means of grasping ideas of likeness and unlikeness, no consciousness of the sensory qualities to which they can be seen to react, painful or otherwise. There are no non-verbal equivalents of similes and metaphors.
(9) To be conscious of meaning, we need to make implications and inferences explicit as objects for our attention, which is possible only in complex sentences with conditional clauses: “If you say red, does that also imply pink?” (Robert Brandom is particularly good on this.)
(10)“Self-consciousness” isn’t a different kind of consciousness, merely one which takes the Self as its object. To be “self-conscious”, we must direct our attention to the idea of a “self”: a story.
David Attenborough recently introduced his latest tv series with the statement, “There is one story that unites us with every living creature on the planet,” the implication being that stories are something we have in common with dumb animals, which is simply false. Stories are linguistic forms through which we share experience, but stories cannot exist for dumb animals and therefore cannot unite us in communion with them. We can tell stories about animals, but they can have no consciousness of those stories because they have no language. Of course stories can be represented in non-verbal forms, e.g., cartoon-strips, but we can understand the connections in a cartoon-strip only because we have a language in which we can, if necessary, make those connections explicit. We understand concepts like courage, cowardice, determination, laziness, cleverness and stupidity which make stories emotionally significant for us, but animals don’t: they have nothing that distances them from the processes of which they are part, nothing that allows them to represent those processes to themselves as sequences of particulars onto which attention can be directed.
(11) Consciousness seeks communion: if dumb animals were conscious, they’d want to commune with us, e.g., to dance with us and improvise music with us, – but they don’t. (Yes, Gerry, I really did say that.) It is a commonplace among students of language that music and dance are associated in some way with the development of language between humans and my suggestion is not that these activities are species-specific to humans, (in the way that the activities you mention are species-specific to dogs and bonobos) but that they would be likely to appear in any species between whose members language was also developing.
Language involves the use of sentences, i.e., of commands, questions and statements, and it is my contention (a) that the very first sentences spoken between humans must have been one-word sentences, (b) that they must have been imperatives (commands, invitations, pleas, etc), and (c) that one-word imperative sentences in our modern languages are living remnants of that first stage of language-development among our ancestors. I also contend that the activities of dance and music are best understood as imperative in form: if I start beating out a rhythm I am seeking your attention and in effect inviting you to do something appropriate in response, e.g., clap your hands.
I would concede the possibility that dolphins might be regarded on this basis as having some kind of proto-linguistic capacity because they do show signs of improvising bodily movements in response to those of humans in a way that bears some resemblance to dance. This would suggest that dolphins are not actually “dumb”, i.e., that they may already be using imperatives in their vocal exchanges. It would actually be very difficult to tell if they were using vocal imperatives, because presumably, as in humans, no dolphin using an imperative would be automatically obeyed by all other members of the group and different members of the group would be uttering different imperatives at the same time.
That is more or less the case I want to argue. I hope that anyone who wants to take issue with these points will do so in writing rather than by posting yet more videos.
Finally, I was delighted by the research mentioned in the anti-neo-Cartesian video showing that almost any statement about consciousness is generally received more credulously if what sounds like “neurological evidence” is cited in its support: this means that anything paraded as “scientific evidence” is now just as likely to be a source of superstition as an antidote to it.
John & Gerry, I think any fair-minded person would agree that the shared attitude expressed by you in response to my point about dancing and music commits you either to exposing the absurdity of my further explanation of that point in my last post or to modifying somewhat your tone of derisive incredulity.
(Gerry: “you didn’t really say that, did you Chris?” John: “Yes …. it struck me that it would be like dogs claiming that if humans were really conscious we would engage in bottom sniffing with them …. or bonobos expecting us to engage in mutual masturbation with them …”)
Since, like me, you are both now retired, you cannot plead pressure of time as an excuse for not engaging with me, – but I’m not trying to rush you, gentlemen; indeed, I hope to receive a carefully considered response, because it is only by confronting my opponents’ position at its strongest point that I can most usefully develop my own.
A word about videos: I do not regard it as an acceptable response to my position to ask me to watch a video any more than to ask me to read a book, for two reasons: (1) It implies that my interlocutor presumes himself qualified, as if he were my academic supervisor, to determine that I haven’t done enough research: let him then imagine, if I were similarly presumptuous in my attitude to him, the books I might require him to read; and (2) My interlocutor is not committed to any particular statement made in a video produced by someone else, so that, if I make the effort to take issue with it, he is not bound to make an effort to justify it, and my effort would then be wasted, e.g., my questioning the implications of the word “officially” in the headline of that first video posted by John.
I just want you to be aware that I think you owe me a response, but …. entirely in your own time.
Posted by Gerry on John Little’s behalf:
I will leave it to others to judge which of us is the haughtier.
Time allows me to comment on only your first two numbered points for now. OK, here goes….
1. As you say, I have several times pointed out the importance of non-conscious (System 1) information processing for humans. But you only told half of the rope-joining story. When asked for a reason why they thought of swinging one rope, most of the subjects confabulated …eg ”because it had a hook attached to it so it reminded me of a pendulum.”
I draw two extra conclusions
(i) that language gives us no real insight into the workings of our own minds
(ii) that many of the reasons we give for our actions are simply confabulations
2. You still don’t seem to understand the point I tried to make at the meeting.
If a creature is found with a completely NEW organ, like nothing possessed by its parents, then that WOULD be evidence for design.
Now I accept that much animal behaviour could plausibly be the result of evolved behaviour patterns, say like the waggle dance of a bee. Such behaviour is moulded slowly over aeons of time until it becomes either ‘hard-wired’ or easily learned. But a novel adaptive response to a new problem, not part of the repertoire of the species, not due to training, observation or stumbled on through trial and error, cannot be explained in this way and seems to me to be evidence of thought (image driven) and indeed of consciousness. I will give just 3 examples,
i) the chimpanzee Sultan piling crates to reach a banana
(ii) the Caledonian crow, dropping pebbles into a narrow tube half full of water to bring a floating meal worm close to the top
(iii) the chimps solving a similar problem (getting a peanut at the bottom of a vertical tube) by either taking mouthfuls of water and spitting in the tube or simply urinating in it.
I would post videos but you don’t seem to like them.
I’m not clear whether you accept my point (1) as it stands or reject it.
You seem to reject my point (2) on the grounds (a) that the animal behaviour you mention is intelligent and novel, which I accept, and (b) that intelligent novelty is necessarily a mark of “consciousness”, – but you’ll have to give me a reason (other than an appeal to intuition) for accepting that.
As you know, Chris, there is no universally agreed ‘mark of consciousness’, not even the possession of language. (You must be familiar with the literature on Zombies). Not even ” if dumb animals were conscious, they’d want to commune with us, e.g., to dance with us and improvise music with us ” (I think I fail that one by the way).
You think that the behaviour of animals can be explained as the product of unconscious information processing (something you have compared in the past to reflexes, even to rusting). The examples I gave are a challenge to that view. I THINK they are a mark of consciousness because anytime I have come up with a novel solution to a novel problem I have been conscious (often of an image in the case of mathematical puzzles). How about you?
The fact that you and I engage with each other seriously as interlocutors is an unequivocal indicator that we regard each other as conscious: there is just no way you can be involved in this dialogue and still pretend to doubt my consciousness. After all, if you can engage with me in this dialogue and still doubt my consciousness, you must also doubt your own, which is absurd: you can’t seriously pretend that you might be a zombie without realising it.
Furthermore, no one who engaged with us could pretend to doubt our being conscious, so I conclude that recognising another as a participant in discourse is universally acknowledged implicitly as a recognition of that other’s being conscious, so I deny your claim that there is no universally agreed mark of consciousness.
I agree, however, that there are no universally agreed marks of consciousness OTHER THAN participation in discourse, i.e., no other SUFFICIENT conditions for attributing consciousness, and what I’m trying to do is to work out what the NECESSARY conditions might be, (Sorry about the capitals: I’m not trying to shout, but italics don’t seem to work on wordpress) and I want to be as rigorous as possible, so I am not willing to accept intuitive criteria.
There is no necessary connection between intelligence and consciousness: unconscious behaviour can be intelligent and conscious acts can be stupid. Language, which in my book endows us with consciousness, does so by endowing human groups not with intelligence, but with power, and it is only too characteristic of us humans to have recourse to power, when we have it, rather than intelligence, particularly in our relations with each other.
Your point about novelty is intuitively appealing, and the examples you give of animal behaviour are very impressive in that respect, but there is no NECESSARY reason to deny that a robot (or zombie) might be capable of those feats, – and remember, I’m looking for necessary reasons, because I think intuition is only too easily led by ideology. You say, “I THINK they are a mark of consciousness”, but, as I’m sure you will agree, your having that belief is not in itself a sufficient reason for me or anyone one else to have it.
I conclude therefore that you have failed to refute my points (1) and (2). What about the rest of my argument?
Not so fast buddy. Since when did your judgement become infallible?
You simply assert things and think that will do…….
‘that recognising another as a participant in discourse is universally acknowledged implicitly as a recognition of that other’s being conscious’.
Read the literature.
Of course I THINK you are conscious, but that’s for the same reason I think novel problem solving is conscious….ie because it seems implausible that it can be done any other way.
Of course there are odd people who deny your assertion. Philosophers mainly.
Or maybe it’s like Searle says….when you interact with others you just have to assume they are conscious. And that applies to his dog too.
Or this from David Papineau. ” That might seem a bit odd, to say that this issue is going to be decided on moral grounds but if you ask why this issue matters, why it’s important to decide which things are conscious and which aren’t, surely the most obvious reason is the moral reason – it makes a difference to how you are going to treat them. So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to go at it backwards, to think about how you ought to interact with those beings and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not.”
But to return to your assertion…’that recognising another as a participant in discourse is universally acknowledged implicitly as a recognition of that other’s being conscious’.
Well then, a single dissenting voice is enough to show that you are wrong.
How about this one…
The `zombie problem’ is the problem of consciousness, stated in a particularly provocative way. Given any functional description of cognition, as detailed and complete as one can imagine, it will still make sense to suppose that there could be insentient beings that exemplify that description. That is, it is possible that there could be a behaviourally indiscernible but insentient simulacrum of a human cognizer: a zombie …. Suppose there is a world much like our own, except for one detail: the people of this world are insentient. They engage in complex behaviours very similar to ours, including speech, but these behaviours are not accompanied by conscious experience of any sort.
Todd C. Moody, associate professor in philosophy at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
But of course I accept CREATIVE use of language as a criterion of consciousness. It’s just that you are setting the bar ridiculously high.
You are ruling out not just animals but infants, the demented, those with locked in syndrome(?) and possibly many of those wandering our streets.
If you were to adopt the prevailing pattern of distinguishing at least two levels of consciousness…..the basic level (Phenomenal-Block… Primary-Edelman…. Core-Damasio) and more advanced level (Access- Block…. Secondary-Edelman ….Extended-Damasio) we could agree that language allows us to do some pretty impressive stuff. But for you language ‘endows us with consciousness’.
Just how does it do that ? The taste of a new fruit that I cant find words to describe? So much of phenomenal experience from an itch to an orgasm cant be captured by words….though I seem to remember you think it can.
On another tack
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/can-we-talk-to-the-animals
Warning…..contains video clips….
As I understand it, my points (1) and (2) are still in dispute. To avoid confusion, I should like to understand your position on those points before we move on to discussion of other matters such as those mentioned in your final paragraph.
I do maintain “that recognising another as a participant in discourse is universally recognised implicitly as a recognition of that other’s being conscious”, except that on rereading I’m embarrassed by the number of times “recognition” appears in that sentence, so let me recast it more carefully. I claim that
“to participate in discourse is implicitly to recognise your interlocutors’ consciousness so that to deny it entails a contradiction.”
You and I are engaged in discourse with each other, but that engagement is comprehensible only in terms of the objective norms to which we are both subject in the eyes of everyone else. If what we are engaged in is discourse, the exchanges between us cannot be described merely in terms of our reactions to each other as would be the case with dumb animals or zombies, because we are both very mindful of how we shall be judged by our audience. It is not the other that either of us is seeking to convince: it’s the whole Speechworld.
We are aware that we are exposed to a judgement that we cannot always anticipate because we know that we do not always see ourselves as others see us, so the information necessary for the understanding of our discursive behaviour is not in our nervous systems: it’s out there in the world. I claim that we cannot engage in discourse, i.e., be responsive to the norms of discourse as they are for our audience and for ourselves, (non-contradiction, non-arbitrariness, fairness, etc) without being conscious, because, as I hope you will agree, responsiveness to judgement in accordance with abstract norms is universally recognised as an unequivocal mark of consciousness.
It is possible, of course, that you could be mistaken in thinking me conscious when in fact I was a zombie, and believe that we were engaged in discourse when in fact we weren’t, but my point is this: in so far as you are committed to engaging with me in discourse, you are committed to regarding me as conscious, so that, if, after trying to engage with me, you came to the conclusion that I was not conscious, you would then immediately cease trying to engage with me; but, so long as you try to engage with me, you do so only on the assumption that I am conscious. Your attempt to engage with me logically commits you to the belief that I am conscious just as surely as it implies a demand that I recognise you as conscious.
I therefore reassert my logically justified claim that there is one, but only one condition SUFFICIENT in itself for attributing consciousness, namely participation in discourse, and that what we should be trying to do is establish the conditions that would be NECESSARY for attributing consciousness, which is what the rest of my argument is concerned with.
I realise I haven’t contextualised my argument clearly enough, so here’s a further summary of what I take the position to be:
My points (1) and (2) assert that responsiveness to sensory stimuli is not a sufficient condition for attributing consciousness.
You assert that there is no sufficient condition for attributing conscious, so that my points (1) and (2) are irrelevant to the question of how consciousness is to be attributed.
I say that there is a sufficient condition, namely, participation in discourse, and that, therefore, my points (1) and (2) are relevant.
You say ”It is possible, of course, that you could be mistaken in thinking me conscious when in fact I was a zombie, and believe that we were engaged in discourse when in fact we weren’t, but my point is this: in so far as you are committed to engaging with me in discourse, you are committed to regarding me as conscious, so that, if, after trying to engage with me, you came to the conclusion that I was not conscious, you would then immediately cease trying to engage with me; but, so long as you try to engage with me, you do so only on the assumption that I am conscious”.
A feature of our arguments is that it seems to me you smuggle assumptions into terms without realising it. Take the word ‘discourse’ which for you means ‘conscious discourse’. This can be seen if you replace ‘discourse’ with ‘playing chess’. Imagine I am playing chess over a computer link. Am I committed to regarding my opponent as conscious? And suppose I discover that I have been playing with a chess computer. Would this mean I would break off the game?
For me, “conscious discourse” is a pleonasm: if it’s discourse, then, as demonstrated in my last post but one, it’s conscious by definition. I do not acknowledge the existence of unconscious discourse. The idea that discourse is conscious by definition is not an idea I’ve “smuggled into” the argument: I’ve stated it explicitly and argued for it in that post.
I claim that participating in discourse, typically by making statements and thereby making yourself responsible for justifying them to your interlocutor in accordance with objective criteria (non-contradiction, etc), commits you to assuming that your interlocutor is also a responsible agent who can be held responsible for any statements he makes, and that the relation in which individuals hold each other responsible are essentially conscious relations. If you deny this, I can’t see what it would cost you to just say so.
It is well-known that it is possible to “play chess” by matching yourself in one sense against a chess-player and in another sense against a chess-program designed by a software engineer, but there is no sense in which you could regard a computer as an interlocutor who could hold you responsible for your speech-acts and be held responsible by you.
I have to say I’m surprised that you don’t concede my points (1) and (2), however provisionally, – for purposes of the argument, – and move on to my other points where I think you would be able to give me a much harder time.
Incidentally, I don’t know whether there are any limits of length applying to exchanges like this on wordpress, but, if we run up against them here, can I suggest that we continue this discussion under your talk on Near-Death Experiences.
Discourse….to talk or converse; to reason; to treat formally….(Chambers).
OK so you haven’t ‘smuggled’ consciousness in so much as done it in full view.
Still has ‘the advantages of theft over honest toil’ it seems to me.
Suppose you have no behavioural or visual clues to who your conversation partner is. Could you tell if you were engaged in discourse?
This wouldn’t be a problem with ‘are you playing chess?’. The answer would be yes.
I don’t think the issue here is language…..I imagine that you and I might want to converse with a philosophy computer that could ask questions and point out inconsistencies in our answers etc. (elementary forms – questionnaires – already exist on the internet, as do programmes like ‘Eliza’ that ask probing questions. And with voice-recognition/language-processing software coming on by leaps and bounds it might not be long…) Note that such a machine might not be ‘programmed’ in the old fashioned sense….its neural net may have been trained to recognise inconsistencies by way of interaction with top philosophers (as with ‘expert systems’). Grant it the ability to give and demand reasons….and answer questions (Watson) ….and boy does it obey your ‘objective criteria’ (non-contradiction etc)
If so, the key is the line ‘ individuals hold each other responsible’.
How would that work in a case like this when it might be a person …or not.
If this is an assumption (see above) it amounts to assuming that they are conscious. So it’s not done by force of logic at all.
I claim that ascriptions of consciousness are ‘judgement calls’.
That’s not to say that all judgements are equally good…..evidence does matter.
But you can set the bar very high….as you do (though not so high it excludes other people as some do) or much lower. I would like to set it at the ability to feel pain and while I don’t think that the ‘total’ consciousness of a fish (say) is the same as mine, in this respect I think it might be close. Want to hear my evidence?
New on the net…..interesting discussion.
“We’re in a period of transition with respect to how we think about animals,” said environmental philosopher Eileen Crist. After centuries of seeing the animal kingdom as a hierarchy with humans on top, of treating animals as purely instinct-driven biological machines, “cognitive ethology is opening up a new terrain. Knowledge itself is fluid and changing right now”
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/reconsider-the-rat/
I feel the need to clarify what we’re disagreeing about, and I propose the following:
(i) We do make a distinction between non-normative relations between machines, dumb animals or zombies and the reciprocally normative relations between interlocutors in discourse. (Evidence: we think it wrong to treat dumb animals as responsible; we don’t begin to treat children as responsible until they begin to engage in discourse, and we don’t treat them as fully responsible until much later; we judge that some individuals are incapable of discursive relations through mental incapacity and that they can’t therefore be held responsible). I think you agree.
(ii) The question of whether, in any particular case, we are engaged in one of those kinds of relations or the other is always a judgement call and one therefore about which we can be mistaken. I think you agree.
(iii) But, if we judge that we are engaged in discourse, it follows (i.e., we must necessarily judge) that our interlocutors are conscious. I think you want to disagree, because:
(iv) If you agreed to (iii), you would have agreed that there was a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for attributing consciousness, namely, your judgement that you were engaged in discourse. You would have acknowledged that to say, “I think we’re engaged in discourse, but I don’t think you’re conscious” entails a contradiction.
(v) If you agreed that there was a sufficient condition for attributing consciousness, you would have agreed that points (1) and (2) in my original argument were relevant to the question of how consciousness should be attributed and would then be unable to resist my proposal that the next thing is to determine what the NECESSARY conditions for attributing consciousness should be.
So my question is this: Do you agree with (iii) and, if not, why not?
I thought I had made myself plain. For me (and the Chambers dictionary) engaging in discourse does not necessarily have the magical property that it has for you. No more than playing chess.
If the discourse is sufficiently elaborate of course I would come to the judgement that my partner (remember no visual clues) was conscious. Surely you accept that simple discourse would be insufficient. And the asking for, giving and challenging of reasons might not be enough in a few years time.
Does ‘I am engaged in playing chess but I don’t think my opponent is conscious’ entail a contradiction?
Time to move on?
Want to hear about fish?
“The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?”
― Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation
You think consciousness is the gift of language, I think it is the gift of biology.
And the implication of your position is that animals cant suffer (what would non-conscious suffering look like?). You aren’t so much a neo-Cartesian as a plain and simple Cartesian.
Here’s Voltaire ”Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins (nerve fibres). You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible?
http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volanima.html
You say,
“If the discourse is sufficiently elaborate of course I would come to the judgement that my partner (remember no visual clues) was conscious.”
I take that as your agreeing to my point (iii), above.
When you say, “Surely you accept that simple discourse would be insufficient,” I think you are making the point that I made in my point (i), above, so we agree.
I take it you agree then that participation in the kinds of discourse characteristic of those recognised as normally competent human speakers is a sufficient condition for attributing consciousness.
We can now, as you say, move on, and that takes us to point (3) in my original argument, i.e., the claim that attention is a necessary condition for consciousness. My original argument was constructed in such a way as to lay a foundation for dealing coherently with the question of pain, and the point about attention is a crucial step in that argument.
Do you accept that “Attention is necessary for consciousness”?
I take it that you agree with my point that until we define what features of discourse are evidence of consciousness we have not gone very far.
And I think that ”the kinds of discourse characteristic of those recognised as normally competent human speakers” is so question begging that it leaves me speechless. Your discussion in i) just makes the point. What level of discourse does a child have to achieve before she magically becomes conscious?
Your position is ‘when a sufficiently high level of discourse is achieved it is sufficient to infer consciousness’.
For it to be a SUFFICIENT condition the conclusion would have to be inescapable, not merely highly likely.
Whatever…. it seems clear to me that you have fallen far short of showing that ‘discourse’ is a sufficient condition for attributing consciousness. Judgements would always be subject to error, as they are in the case of ‘chess playing’.
I take it that you wish to avoid the issue of animal suffering.
A SUFFICIENT condition that ‘n squared’ is even is that n is a multiple of 100.
But you don’t have to be a multiple of 100. There are lots of other examples like 14 and 68.
So even if it were true that discourse is a sufficient condition for consciousness we would still have to wonder are only humans conscious or are there lots of other examples. Is discourse necessary? Or is it like being a multiple of 100….setting the bar too high.
So lets agree to disagree and move on to the necessary conditions.
And to start I have no problem with your (3).
But your (4) is another matter……..
I do not wish to avoid the question of “animal suffering”; I just wish to approach it in an orderly manner. So I ask again: Do you agree that attention is necessary for consciousness?
I just said I did…..though I would say that attention is the devoting of more mental processing resources to some stimulus (including internal ones such as a memory). I don’t mind the searchlight analogy.
Philosophers sometimes draw a distinction between attention and awareness.
Do you?
I even (almost) accept the first 7 words of 4..’Language evolved because it directs the attention’.. though I would say this is ONE of the things language does.
You just assert this as if it is universally accepted. It isn’t. You are much more likely to see the statement ”We do not know why language evolved”.
‘To direct attention’ is certainly a plausible theory but there are alternatives.
After that you just pile on the questionable assertions…..
A tutorial
Click to access ASSC10_CK.pdf
The only claim I make that I believe everyone is logically bound to accept (whether they actually accept it or not) is the one we have already put behind us, i.e., that to treat someone as an interlocutor is to treat him as conscious.
I am pleased that you accept that “attention is necessary for consciousness” because we can put that behind us also. (For the purposes of my argument, which is very specific, I don’t need to invoke a concept of “awareness”:)
As for the claims I make thereafter, I do not pretend for a moment that they are universally accepted: I recognise that they are questionable and I would not be at all insulted, but rather the reverse, if you were to tell me that some of the claims I make are original to me.
If you accept my claim that one of the things language does is to direct attention, that is enough for me: I see no point in insisting that that is all it does because that would not be relevant to the question of necessary conditions for attributing consciousness.
I believe the agreement that attention is necessary for consciousness and that language directs attention is sufficient to make intelligible the distinction between the interpersonally-normative focusing of the wine-taster’s “attention” and the non-normative, organically-driven “general alertness” of the antelope at the waterhole.
I claim that the wine-taster is directed by interpersonal norms to pay attention to, and resist distraction from, the taste of the wine, but that the antelope’s alertness involves no normative requirement to pay attention to, and resist distraction from, the taste of the water it’s drinking, but only an organically driven readiness to respond to any sound or smell that might indicate the presence of a predator.
If attention is agreed between us to be necessary for consciousness, and if this distinction between attention and alertness is intelligible, I feel entitled to claim, at the very least, that it is intelligible to say that “the antelope is not conscious of the taste of the water it’s drinking”.
So, let’s forget about whether it is universally agreed: I want to know whether that distinction is intelligible to you?
You will have seen this slide in Koch’s presentation above….
Attention and consciousness are distinct neuronal processes,
with distinct functions.
• Often – and in particular under laboratory conditions – what
we attend to we become conscious of.
• However, one can also attend to objects or events without
becoming necessarily conscious of their attributes.
• Likewise, we can become conscious of something without
attending to it.
So though I personally think that attention is necessary I want you to register that a top consciousness researcher seems to think otherwise. I have his book and will try to find out why.
What I did find almost risible on the night was your description of an antelope drinking. Apart from the ‘how the hell would you know?’ reaction, I would like to draw your attention to Iain McGilchrist’s talk (and book The Master and his Emissary). Your antelope has only one hemisphere, and even that one isn’t fully functional.
”Differences between the hemispheres in birds, animals and humans ultimately relate to differences in attention, which have evolved for clear reasons of survival”. (I.McG) Remember he talked about how even a chicken will be able to scan its surroundings for possible threats (right H) whilst paying focussed attention to the detail of the corn and pebbles so it doesn’t eat the latter(Left H). These are two different forms of attention (neither requiring language) which Koch refers to as ‘Bottom-up’ and ‘Top-down’ (I think). Your antelope has only bottom-up attention….driven by external events like the movement of some grass or the snapping of a twig. You call it ‘alertness’, but what happens when the twig snaps…the antelope’s head snaps up….it looks in the direction of the sound….it gives it attention (bottom up because driven by the sound). You seriously think it doesn’t pay attention to potential threats?
You play this game where what should be called (a form of ) attention is called alertness and magically ceases to be attention. You make a distinction only by ignoring the way ‘alertness’ triggers attention. What else is it for? Reflexes don’t need alertness.
But animals also have top-down attention….driven (for example) by visual images or task goals…internal events. The sort of animal problem solving I have given examples of above, or even, as Paul described, a cat waiting patiently by a chest of drawers that it has seen a mouse scurrying under.
(I mentioned a bloodhound looking for a scent it has lost.) You can even see the neural correlates in the brains of humans and animals using fMRI machines…. Increases of activity in the same areas in the case of visual attention.
Now no one is denying that language can sustain, direct and inform attention (the pattern of eye movements responds to different verbal instructions in Koch’s presentation). But this doesn’t mean that attention (or consciousness) is impossible without language.
Finally, you seemed to suggest that your wine taster could resist the distraction of a possible predator given the normative power of language.
I think not.
When one “top consciousness researcher” disagrees with others, ordinary joes like you and me have to work it out for ourselves; fortunately, you agree with me that attention is necessary for consciousness, so we can move on.
You say you found my account of the antelope drinking “risible”, but I think you must agree that risibility is in the I-deology of the beholder. Go back four centuries and denying the existence of the afterlife would have been regarded as risible.
When you ask “How the hell do you know?” you completely misread the status of the claims I am making: unlike Thomas Nagel, I do not claim to know that there’s something it’s like to be a bat; I do not claim to “know” what it is (or feels) like to be an antelope; I merely offer a theory to account for its observable behaviour, and all I claim for the theory is that it’s intelligible, i.e., it’s not obviously absurd and therefore not “risible”.
I gloss “alertness” as “readiness to respond”. The example I give in the summary of my talk, above, is that of the cheetah whose behaviour is apparently wholly aligned on its prey: I suggest that this alignment can be explained entirely in terms of the cheetah’s alertness (i.e., readiness to respond) to its prey’s next move, so that we do not need to suppose an aesthetic or analytic concern on the cheetah’s part with the sensory qualities of its prey. This explanation applies also to Paul’s cat’s readiness to respond to whatever next emerges from the mouse’s last place of refuge.
I accept the distinction between external and internal stimuli, e.g., between a sudden noise or smell and a developing hunger or thirst, as drivers of behaviour, but these are non-normative; that is to say, they are not motives for which it is meaningful to attribute responsibility to a dumb animal, i.e., to say that it “ought” to respond to them or “ought” not to be distracted from them. The wine-taster, by contrast, is aware that he “ought” to pay attention to the taste of the wine and avoid distraction; he is conscious of this responsibility even though he may fail to act in accordance with it; and he can have this consciousness only because he is a participant in discourse.
You say, “Finally, you seemed to suggest that your wine taster could resist the distraction of a possible predator given the normative power of language.
I think not.”
The point about the wine-taster is that drinking for him involves the duty of attending to the sensory qualities of the wine. The wine-taster is, in that sense, an example of responsible resistance to distraction, but I did make the obvious point that wine-tasting is not a life-and-death matter, so no one would hold the wine-taster responsible for deserting his professional duties in the presence of a predator: it is, after all, a question of the norms that apply to his role. There are, however, much more serious duties that can require you to risk your life, and these are what separate the heroes and saints, who recognise their responsibilities and act accordingly, from the cowards who don’t.
Would you answer this bit….”You call it ‘alertness’, but what happens when the twig snaps…the antelope’s head snaps up….it looks in the direction of the sound….it gives it attention (bottom up because driven by the sound). You seriously think it doesn’t pay attention to potential threats?”
And how did language ever get off the ground if there wasn’t a creature (without language) capable of attention?
I think the 4th paragraph in my previous post provides all that is needed to answer the question about “what happens when the twig snaps”: the antelope becomes ready to respond to whatever threat emerges from that direction. I think my example of the cheetah makes the point even more clearly, that the observable alignment of an animal’s behaviour can be fully explained in terms of a readiness to respond, so that there is no need to suppose the kind of attentive (aesthetic or analytic) attitude that language makes possible.
Language could get off the ground in the form of what (in the philosophical literature) are called “RDRDs”, i.e., reliably differential responsive dispositions. Language begins with unconscious responsiveness, but, as its sentences develop in complexity, gives rise to attention, as in “Is it blue or green?”
If you want to discuss theories of the origin of language, we could go into those later: I don’t want to get diverted from the course of our discussion of consciousness, particularly as we are now approaching the questions that you were anxious to raise earlier about suffering.
This might be a good point to summarize the argument so far, and may I say how grateful I am for your willingness to engage in it with me, because the need to deal with your challenges has already forced me to develop some of my arguments further, as will be evident below:
My argument is as follows:
Responsiveness to sensory stimuli can occur unconsciously in humans, so the observable responsiveness of dumb animals to sensory stimuli cannot be taken as a sufficient condition for attributing consciousness.
Attention is a necessary condition for attributing consciousness.
Discursive relations direct attention and resist distraction in accordance with norms: nothing other than language does this.
Therefore discursive relations are necessary for consciousness.
Your counter-argument, I think, is as follows:
Even participation in discourse is no sufficient condition for attributing consciousness, but, just as human speakers strike each other intuitively as conscious, so dumb animals strike many human speakers intuitively as conscious, particularly in their responses to pain.
My response to the counter-argument is as follows:
To treat me as an interlocutor is to treat me as responsible,
and I couldn’t be held responsible for an event of which I couldn’t have been conscious,
so to treat me as an interlocutor is necessarily to treat me as conscious.
Whether our engagement with each other is that of interlocutors is for each of us a matter of intuition, of course, and intuitions can be wrong;
but you could not be a participant in discourse except in relation to other such participants, so that, if you take yourself to be a participant in discourse, there must necessarily be many others whom you treat as interlocutors and who treat you as such;
and, if others whom you treat as interlocutors also treat me as an interlocutor, you will need to have reasons acceptable not just to yourself, but also to them to deny that I am an interlocutor and therefore conscious;
so my status as an interlocutor depends not on the intuition of any individual (who might want to deny me that status on grounds of race or sex), but on relations between members of a community to which we both belong, and that community is in fact the whole Speechworld.
So, your treating me intuitively as an interlocutor necessarily commits you to treating me as responsible and therefore as conscious; but, if there are animals you don’t treat as interlocutors, and don’t treat as responsible, there is no other way of treating them (e.g., as being in pain) that necessarily commits you to treating them as conscious.
And this takes us neatly into point (7) in my original schema which is about sensation and pain.
On reflection let me modify the penultimate paragraph in my previous post, as follows:
“So, my being treated as a participant in discourse by those who treat you as a participant in discourse makes it a necessary presumption for you that I am a participant in discourse, and therefore responsible, and therefore conscious; and it remains a necessary presumption for you until such time as you can gain the agreement of those others to the contrary.
This means that, if others treat me as an interlocutor and therefore as conscious, you MUST treat me as an interlocutor and therefore as conscious, whatever your doubts, until you can persuade those others to cease treating me as such: i.e., you are not entitled unilaterally to treat me as not conscious.
If those who treat you as an interlocutor, and therefore as conscious, treat me as an interlocutor, that is a SUFFICIENT REASON for you to treat me as conscious.
But, if there are animals you don’t treat as interlocutors, and don’t treat as responsible, then, – whatever your intuitions may be, – there is no other way of treating them (e.g., as being in pain) that commits you, as a matter of logical necessity, to treating them as conscious.”
You seem to have backed out of this discussion, and it may be you think you can pretend you’re entitled to do so on the grounds that I haven’t adequately answered your challenges; e.g., you may pretend that I’m unwilling or unable to discuss the question of animal suffering, but I don’t think you can get out of it that easily.
You quoted Voltaire’s expression of moral outrage at Descartes’ practising vivisection on dogs without anaesthetic, implicitly treating me, on account of the arguments I had offered, as an appropriate target for that expression, but I don’t think you are in a position to defend that implication, for the following reasons:
(1) I believe that, on consequentialist grounds, you are not opposed to medical experiments on animals, involving vivisection, on condition anaesthetics are used.
(2) In Descartes’ time, surgery was carried out without anaesthetics on humans because there were no anaesthetics, and people at that time were used to watching criminals being publicly tortured to death, so that some allowance must be made for historic differences in what an otherwise normally virtuous person might have regarded as acceptable: in other words, by the standards of his time, Descartes’ position on vivisection can’t reasonably be offered as evidence of his moral depravity; so I think you must tell us how a consequentialist ought to judge Descartes in the circumstances of his own time.
(3) Furthermore, although Voltaire was also opposed to the use of torture on humans, you have stated your support for the position of Dick Cheney’s friend, Alan Dershowitz, which is that torture ought to be forbidden by law, but that a state functionary who practised torture should have available to him at law the defence of “necessity”, which is effectively to say that torture can sometimes be necessary, i.e., that it is not absolutely forbidden. If you think it could be necessary on some condition to torture humans, whom you know to be conscious, I assume you could also have thought it necessary on some condition (e.g., if it could lead to improved surgical techniques) to subject dumb animals to the torture of vivisection without anaesthetics.
If you can’t answer these challenges, I think we have to conclude that the moral outrage implied in your use of that quotation was just a touch synthetic.
Three quotes from you: ”Dawkins speaks of “attention” where I would prefer to talk of “alertness” because there is nothing in animals to suggest the aesthetic or analytic attitudes we associate with attention). Dumb animals, therefore, can’t be attentive and can’t, therefore, be conscious”.
” I think my example of the cheetah makes the point even more clearly, that the observable alignment of an animal’s behaviour can be fully explained in terms of a readiness to respond, so that there is no need to suppose the kind of attentive (aesthetic or analytic) attitude that language makes possible”.
”…so that we do not need to suppose an aesthetic or analytic concern on the cheetah’s part with the sensory qualities of its prey”.
Words still mean what you want them to mean. Back to the dictionary(Oxford)….
Attention…Notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important:
So what’s all this about ”the kind of attentive (aesthetic or analytic) attitude that language makes possible”. Let’s say (for now) that this defines ‘a possible human level of attention’. So our poor animal cant reach these dizzying heights of attention. Does this mean it cant give something ‘attention’ in the dictionary sense? Of course not. And a little introspection would show you that most of the time we don’t reach those levels of attention either.
The stuff entering an animal’s sensory systems is processed initially by non-conscious (system 1) ‘modules’. Sometimes this is enough…for most movement the cerebellum (which contains many more neurons than the cortex in humans) seems to be entirely unconscious. But animals have the capability of switching extra processing power to certain incoming information (eg when the sound of a twig breaking is heard). This is giving something attention…’Notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone or something as interesting or important’. Nothing fancy. But not ‘rusting’, not reflex, not general awareness, not alertness. A focusing on some things at the expense of others.
Something we see in our pre-linguistic infants, pets and wild animals.
If you are saying that attention has to have aesthetic and analytic features before giving rise to consciousness then most of the time we are not conscious.
A few simple examples:
I wake in the middle of the night with a pain. I focus attention on it. I give it my attention.
I am driving. Something moves in my peripheral field of vision. I focus attention on it. I give it my attention.
I am drinking at a waterhole. A bush rustles off to my left. I focus attention on it. I give it my attention.
In the African bush, if you or I heard a twig snap, we would react initially exactly as the antelope does, by turning to look in that direction with a heightened alertness (i.e., readiness to respond) to any sign of a predator; but we would then look to see (i.e., focus our attention on) whether there was, for example, sufficient cover in that direction within which a predator might be concealed. The difference between these two descriptions is, I think, fully intelligible, and my claim is that, in what we ascribe to the antelope to explain its observable behaviour, we do not need to go beyond that alertness which I gloss as “readiness to respond”, and, if we do not NEED to, then, by Occam’s Razor, we ought not to, particularly if doing so comes at the cost of endorsing such an excess as pan-psychism or something like it.
The dictionary is merely a record of the ways in which words have been used historically and can’t be taken as an authority on the way they should be used in the future. As evidence for this, if you visit the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary, you will see that history set out in detail, showing how meanings have changed in the past, suggesting that they will go on changing in the future, and I conclude that there is no reason why precisely the kind of theoretical considerations I have raised here shouldn’t modify our understanding of the words “alertness” and “attention” from now on. Indeed, that is one way of describing my purpose in making this argument: changing the meanings of words is an essential aspect of human creativity. (Even the Shorter Oxford has enough historical material to establish my point.)
I entirely agree that consciousness in humans is not like an electric light which is either on or off: as I see it, attention is an activity requiring an exertion of energy and the extent of their ability and/or willingness to make that exertion, and what they direct it towards, are among the most important ways in which human individuals differ from each other. This is why, as you know, I define the purpose of education as the development of consciousness, with consciousness being defined in turn as the ability to pay attention.
Can we now proceed to the question of “animal suffering”?
Currently engaged in my 4th reading of Robert Brandom’s “Making It Explicit”, I came across the following: “In the preface to the ‘Begriffschrift’, Frege” (the father of modern logic) “laments that, even in science, concepts are formed haphazardly, so that the ones employing them are scarcely aware of what they mean, of what their content really is. When the correctness of particular inferences is at issue, this sort of unclarity may preclude rational settlement of the issue.” (P.107)
The way the concept of “consciousness” was formed in Consciousness Studies seems to me to offer a perfect illustration of Frege’s point. My attempt to distinguish between “alertness” and “attention” is an attempt to clarify the concept, as is my claim, which I hope we can get onto soon, that sensation, and therefore pain, is not a form of consciousness, but only one of its possible objects.
If my answer to your previous question was somehow inadequate, I hope you will explain why, but I hope you will also offer some kind of answer to my questions on the Voltaire/Descartes issue. Meanwhile, here’s another question for you:
Earlier in this exchange, you sent me the following quotation from David Papineau:
” That might seem a bit odd, to say that this issue is going to be decided on moral grounds but if you ask why this issue matters, why it’s important to decide which things are conscious and which aren’t, surely the most obvious reason is the moral reason – it makes a difference to how you are going to treat them. So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to go at it backwards, to think about how you ought to interact with those beings and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not.”
Well, let’s apply Papineau’s Principle to the following example:
In Yellowstone National Park wolves were exterminated by humans; as a consequence the elk population exploded, leading to environmental degradation through overgrazing; wolves were then reintroduced on ecological grounds, i.e., as a “natural” way of controlling the elk population, which allowed the environment to recover. But a wolf-pack kills elk in much the same way as a stag-hunt with dogs kills a stag, so, if the objection to stag-hunting with dogs is that it is intuitively perceived as a cruel way of killing stags, causing them “terror” and “pain”, the same objection ought to apply to the reintroduction of wolves.
Ecology is thought of as a science and therefore enlightened, so here’s the relevance of Papineau’s Principle: Does reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone on ecological grounds imply a belief that elk don’t “suffer” or that they do, but their suffering doesn’t matter, and which of those beliefs is morally the more deplorable?
I am entirely happy to draw a distinction between alertness and attention so long as attention has the usual meaning. Animals clearly show both, as I explained above. What you are calling attention, with its analytic and aesthetic properties, needs to be called something else….or you invite confusion.
Interestingly you did the opposite trick on the night with ‘sensation’ which my Chambers dictionary defines as ‘consciousness of a physical experience resulting from a certain bodily condition or from stimulation of a sense organ’. You allowed animals sensation but what it means for you is something like ‘non-conscious information processing’.
Words cant just mean what you want them to mean.
All rhombii are squares if what you mean by a square is any quadrilateral with equal sides.
Copernicus presented a reasoned case for changing the meaning of the word “sunrise”, Einstein gave a reasoned case for changing the meaning of the word “gravity”, and I am giving a reasoned case for changing the meanings of the words “attention” and “sensation”. I can use those words in my revised sense to communicate intelligibly with anyone who accepts the reasoned case I have presented, but you ask me to accept an argument from authority, with the Chambers Dictionary as your sacred text, which denies me the right to do that. As Galileo might have said to the pope, “You cannot be serious!”
You have also attempted, by quoting Voltaire and Papineau, to present my position as immoral, but (as your subsequent silence seems to acknowledge) my counters to those moral challenges were unanswerable from your position.
I do not ask you to admit that I am right, only that my position is not as “risible” as you at first supposed, i.e., that it deserves, at the very least, a respectfully systematic refutation.
Are you seriously comparing yourself to Copernicus and Einstein?
Sorry …cheap shot.
Did they really change the everyday sense of sunrise or gravity?
The words certainly survive in their original sense. Or did they deepen our understanding. Bit of both?
Did you give ‘a reasoned case for changing the meanings of the words “attention” and “sensation”’ or did you just change them by fiat.
If you did I missed it.
Or do you by ‘reason’ mean that it suits your argument. You add or subtract properties in a motivated but not a reasoned way.
If I said ‘that’s not a square because it isn’t purple’ wouldn’t you reach for a dictionary?
Because that’s how I feel.
Re ‘moral charges’….I would say dangerous rather than immoral, but no, my silence is simply lack of time (plus losing the will to live).
Next post will be on pain.
OK Here goes…Pain.
First let me say that I don’t deny that the possession of language transforms consciousness. Just that language doesn’t create consciousness. There is a more basic form of consciousness (which we all experience) … let’s call it (after Block) phenomenal consciousness … you know, qualia and all that stuff.
So we can start with Voltaire’s argument (amplified by the Cambridge conference statement) that it is curious that animals possess all of the nerve fibres and brain regions [and brain activity] necessary for (conscious!) sensation of pain if they don’t actually experience it. Question 1.
Braithwaite [2010] looked at the physiology of human pain. The initial stage of pain is an unconscious damage detection that is done by specialized receptors in the skin called nociceptors. These send a signal to the spinal chord which can cause a reflex response [so far no need of consciousness]. The signals go first to the limbic system [a set of brain structures associated with emotional response] and the dopamine system [associated with pain experience in humans].
We also know that human pain experience is modified by internal opioids. Endorphins flood the space between nerve cells and usually inhibit neurons from firing, thus creating an analgesic effect. When endorphins do their work, the organism feels relief from pain [analgesia]. They alter the conscious experience of pain. Fish have such systems too. Curious if they never feel pain in the first place.
Braithwaite also showed that fish respond to externally administered analgesics like morphine in a way strongly suggestive of the lessening of phenomenal pain [more likely to feed using a damaged mouth, lessened heart-rate and lots more].
In a curious way I think that pain evolved so you could ignore it. You cant ignore a reflex. But when you are in pain you can register the pain but choose to go on eating/ hunting/ fighting/ having sex. When under serious threat the brain releases opiate like substances [endorphins] to help dim the pain qualia.
So the question is why should fish respond to internal and externally administered analgesics if they have no (conscious!) sensation of pain?
Question 2.
Here is what Grey says about such evidence in his book Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.
”We COULD maintain that, nonetheless only human beings experience pain, just as we could maintain a Ptolemaic view of the heavens despite the observations made by Copernicus etc. But it just isn’t parsimonius to do so, especially since observations like these can readily be multiplied many times over”.
Not to mention other types of evidence.
Yes, I do compare myself to Copernicus, in strictly pragmatic terms: Copernicus argued that there was an intelligible alternative to the Ptolemaic (geocentric) system and I am arguing that there is an intelligible alternative to regarding dumb animals as conscious.
You know how I deal with your Q.1., i.e., via the distinction between the SUFFICIENT condition for attributing consciousness (i.e., participation in discourse) and neural mechanisms which are the NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT condition. Consciousness is not an empirically observable phenomenon, but, if everyone who treats you as a responsible interlocutor (and therefore necessarily conscious) also treats X as such, then that is a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for you to treat X as such, (i.e., you are BOUND to do so), but there are no other sufficient conditions for doing so.
Dumb animals exhibit one of the necessary conditions for consciousness, i.e., a working brain, but not the sufficient condition. This is what Grey concedes when he says “We COULD maintain that, nonetheless, only humans beings experience pain”. I also think this is where Papineau’s Principle applies: if you are bound to treat me as conscious, then it is reasonable to assume that I am conscious, otherwise not.
As for your Q.2., I have proposed that sensation is not itself a FORM of consciousness, but only one of its possible OBJECTS, so that pain is an event OF WHICH you can be conscious IF AND ONLY IF you are a conscious being.
I am suggesting, then, that, though animals’ bodies respond in a predictable manner to sensory stimuli which exceed a certain intensity, we are not bound to say that they are “conscious” of those stimuli because, quite simply, we are not bound to admit that they’re conscious, and, if we’re not bound to admit they’re conscious, then, by Occam’s Razor, we ought not to, i.e., it is theoretically more parsimonious not to, so Grey is wrong about that.
This is the relevance of my applying Papineau’s Principle to the elk and the wolves in Yellowstone: it was open to science to say that culling the elk by shooting would cause less pain and terror than allowing them to be hunted to death by packs of wolves, but ecological science determined that it was better to let the wolves do it, so, by Papineau’s Principle, it must be the view of science that elk have no consciousness of terror and pain.
Specifically, with reference to fish: Are you proposing, contrary to Grey, that responsiveness to analgesics is a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for attributing consciousness? After all, I imagine elk also respond to analgesics.
Copernicus made the point that we weren’t BOUND to accept the geocentric theory; I am making the point that we aren’t BOUND to regard dumb animals as conscious, and that we can remove unnecessary complexity from our theory by ceasing to do so.
I hope that, in reply, you will address the conceptual points I have made in answer to your questions rather than producing yet more “evidence”.
What I mean by “conceptual points” is this:
You acknowledge that your belief in the consciousness of dumb animals is intuitive, and your intuition is obviously closely connected with the sentiments expressed in Voltaire’s expression of revulsion at vivisection without anaesthetic and with Papineau’s Principle.
You claim that neurological observations tell us about consciousness in so far as they correlate with your intuition.
But my claim is that your intuition is incoherent because:
(1) When I risk a visit from the ALF by offering a defence of vivisectionist Descartes based on your own publicly professed consequentialism and your commitment to science, you have no answer.
(2) When I apply Papineau’s Principle in conjunction with the judgements of ecological science, – which I assume you endorse and from which it follows that elk are not to be regarded as conscious, – you again have no answer.
Remember, it is you who makes the positive claim that dumb animals are conscious and the burden of proof must therefore lie with you; I merely observe that we do not need that hypothesis. It is your intuition which is on trial here, so that intuition had better be coherent, and you cannot refute the charge of incoherence by evading it.
I find your last two posts incoherent…..but at least it’s nice to have your antipathy to evidence in print…. ”I hope that, in reply, you will address the conceptual points I have made in answer to your questions rather than producing yet more “evidence”.
My reply will necessarily go over old ground….but you don’t seem to be registering or reporting my position accurately. As you don’t like evidence (and have not engaged with Question 2) I will here focus on the conceptual as you request.
We both agree that having a working brain is a necessary condition for consciousness. I think we do not know the sufficient conditions….if we knew how qualia are generated (the hard problem) then I guess we would.
You think ”if everyone who treats you as a responsible interlocutor (and therefore necessarily conscious) also treats X as such, then that is a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for you to treat X as such, (i.e., you are BOUND to do so), but there are no other sufficient conditions for doing so”.
But I think you are setting the bar too high…..let me explain.
What we really want is the ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’……..because they show where the bar should be set…..but you don’t get them if you think you can treat them separately. For something to be a square it is NECESSARY to be a quadrilateral OK? To be a square it is SUFFICIENT to be a quadrilateral with two pairs of parallel sides, one pair purple, one pair green, with all sides equal to 10 cm, and every angle equal to 90 degrees. OK?
So what are the NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT conditions?
I know…..do you? And there is no unique formulation.
So with consciousness. I happen to agree that a sufficiently complex level of discourse will persuade me that you are conscious but do I need to remind you
1. You have never specified which features are necessary….simple discourse already won’t do and as computers and AI advances you will have to move the goalposts…..remember chess!
2. For a logician you can never PROVE yourself conscious to me. It’s something I refer to as a ‘judgement call’ that I make.
Which brings me to ”quite simply, we are not bound to admit that they’re conscious, and, if we’re not bound to admit they’re conscious, then, by Occam’s Razor, we ought not to, i.e., it is theoretically more parsimonious not to, so Grey is wrong about that.” I could have predicted that response…..but remember Occam’s razor cuts both ways. On this criteria, as I am not bound to attribute consciousness to you, it is more parsimonious for me to NOT attribute consciousness to you.
I repeat: Consciousness is not an empirically observable phenomenon, but, if everyone who treats you as a responsible interlocutor (and therefore necessarily conscious) also treats X as such, then that is a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for you to treat X as such, (i.e., you are BOUND to do so), but there are no other sufficient conditions for doing so. Let me spell it out:
IF you demand to be treated as an interlocutor and therefore as responsible and therefore as conscious, (since you cannot be held responsible for an act of which you could not have been conscious),
THEN you are bound to treat as conscious whoever is treated as an interlocutor by those to whom you make that demand,
BECAUSE not to do so would be to undermine your own claim to be treated as conscious;
AND you do in fact demand that no other speaker refuse to treat you as an interlocutor and therefore responsible and therefore concious,
AND there is no one to whom you could make that demand who would refuse also to treat me as an interlocutor,
SO you are bound to treat me as an interlocutor and therefore as responsible and therefore as conscious as long as everyone else does,
UNLESS you were willing to have your own claim to consciousness denied, which I think even you would regard as absurd.
I offer this as a logical proof that you are bound to treat me as conscious.
Now, please, can we talk about Voltaire, Decartes, Papineau and the elk.
It just doesn’t work, Chris….” if everyone who treats you as a responsible interlocutor (and therefore necessarily conscious) also treats X as such, then that is a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for you to treat X as such, (i.e., you are BOUND to do so), but there are no other sufficient conditions for doing so”
If everyone who treats you as a man (and therefore necessarily human) also treats X as a man, then that is a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for you to treat X as such, (i.e., you are BOUND to do so)….. Even if this were true it would not mean that the property of being human is restricted to men.
Again you simply state ”but there are no other sufficient conditions for doing so”
but you need to demonstrate that, not assert it.
The fact that A is a sufficient condition for B does not mean that the only instances of B are to be found in the set of things with the property A.
Draw a Venn diagram.
Being a square is a sufficient condition for being a rectangle…..but not all rectangles are squares.
So even if it were true that I am Bound to treat you as Conscious it doesn’t follow that creatures lacking the status of ‘ a responsible interlocutor’ also lack consciousness.
Sorry to labour this point. You have to find necessary and sufficient conditions.
Let me try to be helpful….you assert that attention is necessary for consciousness (plausible) and that sophisticated language is sufficient to demonstrate consciousness (plausible). Now whilst I accept that language is a powerful sustainer and director of consciousness, I deny (even from my own experience) that language is necessary for attention. (Raw attention, not your fancy aesthetic, analytic attention). A conductor directs an orchestra but an orchestra can produce music without one.
I notice you carefully avoid dealing with the argument in its more explicit form, which is further expanded as follows:
(1) IF you demand to be treated as an interlocutor
(2) AND therefore as responsible
(3) AND therefore as conscious,
(4) (SINCE you cannot be held responsible for an act of which you could not have been conscious),
(5) THEN your demand commits you to treating as conscious all those to whom you make that demand, but also whoever else is treated as an interlocutor by them,
(6) BECAUSE not to do so would be to undermine your own claim to be treated by them as conscious;
(7) AND you do in fact demand that no other speaker refuse to treat you as an interlocutor and therefore responsible and therefore concious,
(8) AND there is no one to whom you could make that demand who could refuse also to treat me as an interlocutor,
(9) IF those he treated as interlocutors also treated me as such;
(10) SO you are committed to treating me as an interlocutor and therefore as responsible and therefore as conscious as long as I am treated as such by those by whom you demand to be treated as such,
(11) UNLESS you are willing to have your own claim to consciousness denied, which I think even you would regard as absurd,
(12) AND,
(13) IF you’re committed to treating me as an interlocutor, and therefore as conscious,
(14) THEN that is a sufficient reason for you to do so.
Do you continue to deny that your demand to be treated as an interlocutor implicitly binds or commits you to treat me, with all due respect to Occam’s Razor, as conscious?
You want me to believe that you think elk are conscious, so tell me: Do you believe elk suffer terror and pain when they’re hunted to death by packs of wolves? … I’m intrigued to see how long you can continue to avoid answering this question.
You say:”Let me try to be helpful….you assert that attention is necessary for consciousness (plausible) and that sophisticated language is sufficient to demonstrate consciousness (plausible). Now whilst I accept that language is a powerful sustainer and director of consciousness, I deny (even from my own experience) that language is necessary for attention. (Raw attention, not your fancy aesthetic, analytic attention). A conductor directs an orchestra but an orchestra can produce music without one.”
OK, I embrace your helpful attitude.
When you say, “I deny (even from my own experience) that language is necessary for attention”, I would have to reply as follows:
Notice that I have not made any appeal to my own experience because my experience is shaped by my assumptions, which are largely those of my culture. This doesn’t mean that I am incapable of recognising novel phenomena, but only that my perception of them will be shaped by my existing assumptions, and it is only in reflective mode, when I begin to discover contradictions among those assumptions thrown up by the terms in which I describe the novelty that I recognise the need to change the assumptions.
One large and interesting stock-in-trade of yours has been an exposure of the illusions to which consciousness is subject, and I would appeal to that as grounds for suggesting that your own experience of attention is not to be trusted. For example, I am sure you would not have guessed from your own experience how limited your visual field actually is when reading if you hadn’t seen the experimental evidence.
By “aesthetic” I mean nothing more “fancy” than, for example, the discrimination of colours. My point is that dumb animals may respond differentially to colours, but I invoke the principle that sensory responsiveness can occur unconsciously and therefore does not provide a sufficient reason for attributing consciousness. Speakers can also respond differentially but unconsciously to colours, and my claim is that language directs attention onto those differences in ways which make them conscious; also that language so reshapes our responses that it is always implicitly involved in any conscious discrimination, whether we experience that involvement or not. This is not a claim that is open to refutation from introspection/experience, for reasons given in the previous paragraph.
Furthermore, your example of an orchestra is hardly relevant, for the obvious reason that the players will have to agree verbally which piece they are going to play, otherwise they might all be playing different pieces, which might not really sound much like “music”.
Right! I’ve answered your question about attention as helpfully as I can. Perhaps you could now address the elk question.
First a couple of points…
1.”Furthermore, your example of an orchestra is hardly relevant, for the obvious reason that the players will have to agree verbally which piece they are going to play, otherwise they might all be playing different pieces, which might not really sound much like “music”.
Jazz.
2. What sort of logical connector is ‘demand’…..do we really go around demanding to be treated as an interlocutor….you move in some very strange circles.
3. You seem to have missed my point that even if treating someone as an interlocutor means that you take them to be conscious (and ignoring the possibility of being mistaken….which you do) it does not follow that consciousness is restricted to your band of interlocuting buddies.
4. ”Do you continue to deny that your demand to be treated as an interlocutor implicitly binds or commits you to treat me, with all due respect to Occam’s Razor, as conscious?” I have never demanded it Chris….it’s all much more tacit than that.
Now elk…”You want me to believe that you think elk are conscious, so tell me: Do you believe elk suffer terror and pain when they’re hunted to death by packs of wolves? ”
Yes.
Of course they do.
Do you want me to refer to evidence?
.
Do you then reject the ecologists’ policy of reintroducing the wolves rather than having the elk culled by marksmen?
Depends if you want to reintroduce wolves. I have no position on this without hearing the arguments. Ecosystems are complicated. People who care about trees tell me it’s better to allow small forest fires to avoid much bigger ones. It may be that unrestricted breeding of deer destroys their ecosystem.It cannot be justified by reduction of pain ( unless it can be argued that hunters leave many wounded deer to die in agony) – I’d have thought that was pretty obvious.
Only a moron thinks that foxes don’t feel pain but there are those who try to justify fox hunting on other grounds.
There would be less pain if people didn’t play rugby, I suppose.
Here is some of the evidence I am talking about:
http://www.grandin.com/welfare/fear.pain.stress.html
And here is some more: Patrick Bateson is professor of ethology (animal behaviour) at the University of Cambridge
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/deer-hunters-must-call-off-the-dogs/101360.article
”However, even these initial conclusions scarcely prepared me for the astonishing changes in the physiology of the hunted deer.
Using blood samples, I found that the absolute level of stress hormones in hunted deer are as high as have ever been found in red deer and do not differ from the level in animals with very serious injuries. The carbohydrate resources for the muscles are totally depleted in animals that have been hunted for long periods. At an early stage in the hunt acidity of the blood is very high and the level of haemoglobin in the plasma jumps to eight times that found in undisturbed animals. Much of this is probably due to the break-up of the red blood cells. In longer hunts, extensive leakage of enzymes from muscles occurs. In some deer these levels are so high that they are likely to be due to actual muscle damage.
In short, many of the physiological changes are seriously maladaptive and would not be expected to occur normally. The pattern of the data suggests that the hunted animals are extremely frightened as they try to escape”.
And here is a later version giving the legal/political position now:
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2009/11/hunting-and-science/
And whether or not you think reintroducing wolves is a good idea Bateson is clear about hunting with hounds:
”The method of killing a deer, however. is surely irrelevant to the broader ethical issue raised by hunting with hounds. Those who follow the hunts enjoy themselves. If it is known that the hunted animal is likely to suffer, is this practice morally different from the baiting of bulls or any other deliberate act of cruelty? I completely agree with Christine Nicol that science can and does play a role in the ethical stance taken by the public. In the case of hunting deer with hounds, some people argued that the deer enjoyed the experience. The deer were “playing” with the hounds. The evidence from the combined studies of behaviour, physiology and ecology argued against strongly against such a view. The ethical question is then clearly posed. Should a human cause suffering in a sentient animal because the process gives him or her pleasure?”
In all of this debate I have never seen it argued that animals are INCAPABLE of feeling fear or pain because they lack consciousness. If it was a credible position you’d have thought the pro hunt lobby would have grabbed it with gusto.
I repeat what I said in my post on Feb. 15th:
“You acknowledge that your belief in the consciousness of dumb animals is intuitive, and your intuition is obviously closely connected with the sentiments expressed in Voltaire’s expression of revulsion at vivisection without anaesthetic and with Papineau’s Principle.
You claim that neurological observations tell us about consciousness in so far as they correlate with your intuition.
But my claim is that your intuition is incoherent because:
(1) When I risk a visit from the ALF by offering a defence of vivisectionist Descartes based on your own publicly professed consequentialism and your commitment to science, you have no answer.
(2) When I apply Papineau’s Principle in conjunction with the judgements of ecological science, – which I assume you endorse and from which it follows that elk are not to be regarded as conscious, – you again have no answer.
Remember, it is you who makes the positive claim that dumb animals are conscious and the burden of proof must therefore lie with you; I merely observe that we do not need that hypothesis. It is your intuition which is on trial here, so that intuition had better be coherent, and you cannot refute the charge of incoherence by evading it.”
(By the way, I don’t doubt Bateson’s evidence, but remember my quotation from Dennett: “about every such empirical finding we can ask: what is its bearing on the question of consciousness, and why?” That is the issue between us.)
You say you “have no position” on the reintroduction of wolves; very well, neither have I; but it was you who quoted Papineau, so the question is this: Does Papineau’s Principle or does it not have, for you, a decisive bearing on the wolf/elk issue? If it does, why do you “have no position? If it doesn’t, why did you quote it?
And what of Voltaire: was that quotation equally opportunistic?
”You acknowledge that your belief in the consciousness of dumb animals is intuitive”…. just show me where. A pure intuition or an element of intuition (ie involving evidence)?
I hope it’s not where I say it’s a ‘judgement call’ because that would be gross.
Ask me that again, if you like, when you’ve answered my question about Papineau and Voltaire.
No ..it’s OK….I’ll wait.
If you insist.
You quoted the Cambridge Declaration, which says,”non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states”. The word “substrates”, here, means the physical conditions that necessarily underlie conscious states. To proceed as the authors of that Declaration do to claim that the presence of those substrates is sufficient “evidence” of the presence of conscious states requires a leap of faith that I call “intuitive”.
Now can we address the questions I have asked about your use of quotations from Voltaire and Papineau?
For the benefit of anyone else who is following these exchanges, here is the passage you quoted from Voltaire:
”Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins (nerve fibres). You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible?”
This was my challenge to your use of that quotation:
“You quoted Voltaire’s expression of moral outrage at Descartes’ practising vivisection on dogs without anaesthetic, implicitly treating me, on account of the arguments I had offered, as an appropriate target for that expression, but I don’t think you are in a position to defend that implication, for the following reasons:
(1) I believe that, on consequentialist grounds, you are not opposed to medical experiments on animals, involving vivisection, on condition anaesthetics are used.
(2) In Descartes’ time, surgery was carried out without anaesthetics on humans because there were no anaesthetics, and people at that time were used to watching criminals being publicly tortured to death, so that some allowance must be made for historic differences in what an otherwise normally virtuous person might have regarded as acceptable: in other words, by the standards of his time, Descartes’ position on vivisection can’t reasonably be offered as evidence of his moral depravity; so I think you must tell us how a consequentialist ought to judge Descartes in the circumstances of his own time.
(3) Furthermore, although Voltaire was also opposed to the use of torture on humans, you have stated your support for the position of Dick Cheney’s friend, Alan Dershowitz, which is that torture ought to be forbidden by law, but that a state functionary who practised torture should have available to him at law the defence of “necessity”, which is effectively to say that torture can sometimes be necessary, i.e., that it is not absolutely forbidden. If you think it could be necessary on some condition to torture humans, whom you know to be conscious, I assume you could also have thought it necessary on some condition (e.g., if it could lead to improved surgical techniques) to subject dumb animals to the torture of vivisection without anaesthetics.
If you can’t answer these challenges, I think we have to conclude that the moral outrage implied in your use of that quotation was just a touch synthetic.”
For the benefit of anyone else who is following these exchanges, here is the passage you quoted from Voltaire:
That’ll be me.
Think your setting up a straw man with the Voltaire quote used by John.
Bring your argument back to that of animals having no conscience.
The Voltaire quote is the biggest gun in John’s rhetorical armoury: I aim to show that it is a damp squib.
Then ,onward. Enjoy your banquet of words ,I’ll intervene no more.
First: You say
You quoted the Cambridge Declaration, which says,”non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states”. The word “substrates”, here, means the physical conditions that necessarily underlie conscious states. To proceed as the authors of that Declaration do to claim that the presence of those substrates is sufficient “evidence” of the presence of conscious states requires a leap of faith that I call “intuitive”.
That IS gross. Why the scare quotes around evidence? They are giving evidence that animals are conscious.(As opposed to you who simply asserts, on the basis of a very questionable line of ”reasoning”, that they are not).
Where do they say that this evidence is sufficient in the technical, logical sense (not that you understand it). They judge that it is enough. When is evidence EVER ‘sufficient’ in the technical, logical sense?
Can you see that your claim that I think that my attributions of consciousness are intuitive is simply a gross distortion of my position. I think that though they (as judgements) contain an ELEMENT of intuition they are basically evidence based.
Before I turn to Voltaire can I ask if there is anything that you would consider good evidence of consciousness in animals (apart from them singing and dancing with us)?
Just checked….the word ‘sufficient’ is nowhere in the Cambridge Declaration.
Here’s what they do say: ”Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that
humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness”.
If you cant see the difference I give up…….another case of the careless use of language, in this case sufficient in its ordinary sense of ‘enough’ for reasonable people, and its logical sense of entailing an inescapable conclusion.
On to your Feb 20th offering:
This bit really made my day…”so I think you must tell us how a consequentialist ought to judge Descartes in the circumstances of his own time”.
How about asking a man of his time………. like (dare I say it)….Voltaire.
Evidence for the substrates of consciousness is not, as such, evidence for consciousness. This is the point Dennett is making when he says “about every such empirical finding we can ask: what is its bearing on the question of consciousness, and why?”
The evidence that certain neurological phenomena are the substrates of consciousness might be a sufficient (in the ordinary sense of “reasonable”) basis for taking the presence of those phenomena as evidence of consciousness IF BUT ONLY IF there were no good reasons for not making that intuitive judgemental leap. My contention is only that there are good reasons for not making that leap and, so long as they remain unrefuted, that judgement remains unsafe.
You characterize the reasons I offer as “risible”, but they could be truly risible (i.e., laughable) only if they were absurd in the logical sense of entailing a contradiction, which you have not demonstrated.
I see you are determined not to take responsibility for your quotations from Papineau and Voltaire. It is not my purpose here to assess Voltaire’s intellectual integrity, but to challenge yours. If you quote Voltaire at me it must be because YOU think his accusations of barbarity can reasonably be directed at ME, and that is a position for which YOU are responsible. I think your use of Voltaire was entirely opportunistic: you did not imagine that there might be a coherent answer to his hysterical, sentimental rant.
This is the Papineau quotation:
” That might seem a bit odd, to say that this issue is going to be decided on MORAL grounds but if you ask why this issue matters, why it’s important to decide which things are conscious and which aren’t, surely the most obvious reason is the MORAL reason – it makes a difference to how you are going to treat them. So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to go at it backwards, to think about how you ought to interact with those beings and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not.”
Then, on Feb. 13th, when challenged on the accusation that my position has “immoral” implications, you retreat from Papineau’s use of the word “moral”: you say, “Re ‘moral charges’….I would say dangerous rather than immoral”.
You rely on this sort of appeal to an intimidating popular moral sentiment to silence my reasoned challenges to the inference you want to make from “substrates” to “consciousness”. Without the support of that sentiment, you would find it very difficult to treat my arguments as “risible”. I think any fair-minded person would feel that, having brought the charges of barbarity and immorality against me, you are obliged to do something more than answer my question with another question, as in the final line of your last post.
I offer this restatement of my position in response to points on which you challenged my previous formulations, e.g., on Feb 15th and 17th.
(1) There is one and only one logically sufficient condition for attributing consciousness, so that, if you admit that this condition applies in a particular case, then you are logically bound to attribute consciousness in that case: “logically bound” in the sense that to deny it would entail a contradiction.
(2) If you demand of others, however implicitly or tacitly, that they treat you as a responsible interlocutor, and therefore as conscious, that is a sufficient condition for you to treat those others as responsible and therefore as conscious.
(3) If you deny that you do, however tacitly or implicitly, demand that I treat you as a responsible interlocutor, you thereby (implicitly or tacitly) entitle me and everyone else to dismiss your every utterances, including that denial, as meaningless, i.e., as having no meaning that any nameable individual can be held responsible for. (When you say on Feb 17th, “ I have never demanded it Chris….it’s all much more tacit than that’, you admit that the demand is tacit or implicit in all relations between speakers, which is precisely what I claim. Typically the demand is made explicit only when it meets practical resistance.)
(4) To say that there is one and only one logically sufficient condition for attributing consciousness DOES NOT MEAN that you are logically bound to deny the presence of consciousness where that condition does not apply.
(5) But, if there is only one sufficient condition for attributing consciousness, it is an OPEN QUESTION whether there are any good reasons for attributing consciousness in cases where the sufficient condition does not apply, most notably in dumb animals.
(6) I do not positively assert that dumb animals are not conscious; I only offer coherent grounds for thinking that there may be necessary conditions for attributing consciousness, e.g., attention, which exclude dumb animals and that the reasons commonly given for believing that dumb animals are conscious are not good ones.
(7) For example, by your own testimony, your strongest reason for believing that dumb animals are conscious is that their bodies are very obviously subject to pain; my counter-argument is that pain is not a form, but is rather an object, of consciousness: it is an event you can be conscious of, but only if you are a conscious being. This has the strange-sounding implication that animals may be subject to pain without being conscious of it, but there are stranger things that science has asked us to try to get our heads round.
You say: (7) For example, by your own testimony, your strongest reason for believing that dumb animals are conscious is that their bodies are very obviously subject to pain;
Come off it, Chris, you keep asking me to stop giving you evidence and focus on your argument. I haven’t even given you a quarter of the evidence that animals are conscious.
So shall I ignore (NB not accept) your argument for a while and concentrate on giving you some more evidence?
Quiz question: Who said this?
And I think these two dimensions—the normative dimension and the
rational dimension—are what set us apart from beings that can feel but can’t think.
Robert Brandom, whose views we can discuss if you like.
But I repeat: I see you are determined not to take responsibility for your quotations from Papineau and Voltaire. It is not my purpose here to assess Voltaire’s intellectual integrity, but to challenge yours. If you quote Voltaire at me it must be because YOU think his accusations of barbarity can reasonably be directed at ME, and that is a position for which YOU are responsible.
I took a look at Brandom to see if I could make more sense of what you were saying. I was pleased to note that he does not deny that animals can feel.
I also note that he shares your irritating habit of stealing words and making them mean something else, in this case the word ‘think’. What I take him to mean is something like reflective, deliberative thought which is so high level that, of course, it probably rules out animals. It also rules out a lot of humans. The sort of adaptive problem solving in novel situations that I referred to above:
i) the chimpanzee Sultan piling crates to reach a banana
(ii) the Caledonian crow, dropping pebbles into a narrow tube half full of water to bring a floating meal worm close to the top
(iii) the chimps solving a similar problem (getting a peanut at the bottom of a vertical tube) by either taking mouthfuls of water and spitting in the tube or simply urinating in it…
these apparently don’t constitute evidence for any sort of thinking. I wonder what he thinks is going on… rusting? reflex?….do you know?
Now lets get Papineau out of the way. Your absurd posturing ”But I repeat: I see you are determined not to take responsibility for your quotations from Papineau and Voltaire.” ….you live in a different world, Chris (Brandom’s?).
Here is the context. What I said was:
”Of course I THINK you are conscious, but that’s for the same reason I think novel problem solving is conscious….ie because it seems implausible that it can be done any other way.
Of course there are odd people who deny your assertion. Philosophers mainly.
Or maybe it’s like Searle says….when you interact with others you just have to assume they are conscious. And that applies to his dog too.
Or this from David Papineau. ” That might seem a bit odd, to say that this issue is going to be decided on moral grounds but if you ask why this issue matters, why it’s important to decide which things are conscious and which aren’t, surely the most obvious reason is the moral reason – it makes a difference to how you are going to treat them. So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to go at it backwards, to think about how you ought to interact with those beings and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not.”
I thought that these were interesting points of view to discuss. (Clue ”Or maybe it’s like..” Apparently I have breached the laws of discourse. I apparently have to endorse every quote (or allow you to do it on my behalf).
So let me offer my stance on these two:
On Searle I think there is a lot in what he says but as I HAVE said we can go beyond ‘gut instinct’ and offer evidence (for people and dogs being conscious). But evidence is never proof (think creationism or even flat earth) though it can be pretty conclusive. Well for reasonable people….
Professor Bateson argues that pain, suffering and distress are necessarily defined in terms of subjective human experience, but that we can use a combination of behavioural and physiological responses – such as are seen in humans in these states – to attribute subjective experiences like fear or stress to animals. Progress is being made in exploring more directly the extent to which in human and other species pain, hunger and other subjective states are comparable. This involves a range of techniques such as examining brain wave patterns or designing cognitive tasks that we know require the use of certain brain regions in equivalent human experiences which are reported as conscious. (Yes I endorse this BTW).
On Papineau… I think it is a very interesting take on the Problem of Consciousness. My initial reaction was negative (I tend to think it’s a scientific problem) though I agree with him on ” it makes a difference to how you are going to treat them”. I tried to make that point at your talk when I said that if animals are not conscious then they cannot suffer and it would be as silly to prosecute a modern Descartes as it would be someone who had taken apart a TV set to find out how it worked.
But…”to go at it backwards, to think about how you ought to interact with those beings and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not”… seems to me to abandon the search for scientific evidence in favour of ‘gut feelings’ or intuition.
Another foray into Planet Brandom ” It is not my purpose here to assess Voltaire’s intellectual integrity, but to challenge yours. If you quote Voltaire at me it must be because YOU think his accusations of barbarity can reasonably be directed at ME, and that is a position for which YOU are responsible”.
Depends whether you have been nailing dogs to doors and cutting them up.
I wouldn’t know about that. Would you deserve ‘accusations of barbarity’ if you had?
I was accusing you of being WRONG not of being a monster. Though I have pointed out that you are taking a dangerous position. Would you accept responsibility if someone persuaded by your arguments cut up a cat?
Though I note that since your talk your position seems to have softened and you now declare yourself an ‘agnostic’ on the question of animal consciousness.
Welcome to the club.
But would it be fair to ask are you a 5% agnostic (almost certainly NOT conscious)….a 50% agnostic (no balance of evidence either way) or a 95% agnostic almost certainly conscious). I am happy to declare myself a 99% agnostic on this. I find the evidence comparable to that for a spherical earth and an earth that is billions of years old.)
Can we turn to that evidence?
Vivisection without anaesthetic, even for scientific research, given that anaesthetics are now available, would be indefensible. I’m sure you will want me to explain why, which I’ll be happy to do, but not until you have told me whether you accept my consequentialist defence of Descartes’ vivisectionist activities at a time when anaesthetics didn’t exist and their discovery couldn’t have been predicted. (reposted on Feb 20th) I think a “yes but” or “no because” answer would be acceptable, but I think it has to be clearly “Yes” or “No”.
This exchange has obviously been very frustrating for both of us because we have wanted to talk about different things: you have wanted to talk about what you regard as the empirical evidence for consciousness, but I have wanted to focus on Dennett’s prior conceptual question of why any empirical finding should be taken as evidence for consciousness.
I maintain that your demanding, however tacitly or implicitly, to be treated by others as an interlocutor and therefore as responsible and therefore as conscious commits you to (i.e., is a sufficient reason in the logical sense for) treating as an interlocutor (and therefore as conscious) anyone to whom you (tacitly or implicitly) make that demand. The consciousness you are thus bound to attribute is not a physical state: it is essentially a normative status, in the sense that it has implications for how you ought to be treated.
You argue that cases in which consciousness as a normative status is typically attributed can be correlated with certain physical (typically neurological) phenomena. You then want to insist that all cases in which those phenomena appear, e.g., dumb animals, can be treated as conscious, and you recognise that this is not a valid inference, but you want to pursue it because you are committed to a naturalistic ideology and can see no other way of naturalising consciousness, i.e., of treating it as an object of study for the natural sciences, as Crick proposes in his “Scientific search for the soul”.
I see no prospect of converting you to my perspective, which you regard as “risible”, and I see no prospect of your converting me to yours, so it looks as if our discussion has come to an end, except for one point: you think my perspective is not just wrong, but “dangerous”, and I can’t see that it is any more dangerous than your own, which is the point of my insisting that you deal with my defence of Descartes’ vivisectionist activities.
Bill Williams.
I would like to offer my thanks to Gerry for not terminating this fascinating and informative discussion on consciousness and where it might be found.
Also to John for so patiently and genuinely responding to Chris, who has shown his belief in his intellectual prowess is indeed a formidable force.
Chris has in the past argued for these extended written discussions and he has stood up to the keyboard with alacrity.
The irony he masters is a tribute to any author. The subtle wit of the deepest unreliable narrator abounds.
This is how he has persuaded John to divulge his true thoughts on these pages…teased his consciousness. Conflated the word conscious with conscience…a sly provocation. How could John resist?
Chris is clearly a heroic thinker. Rodin’s Thinker was of Chris.
Thinking and consciousness are entwined…inevitably linked.
This is why Rodin’s poser is constipated, stymied and ready for action no time soon.
Thinking is how we conduct our rational mind. It’s thoughts. The rational so valued by man.
It is no coincidence that Rodin who adored women should portray The Thinker as a man…Based on Dante I believe.
Thinking messes us up. We need to think but not to the point of confusion…not to the point of madness. Mind can feed into thoughts and these new thoughts go back into our mind. …A new situation. Novelty abounds. Often too much novelty for understanding, we are confused by paradox and mystery…neither of which exist outside our mind.
And here thinking on the topic of language and Chris’s implausible claims for it…he has become confused by his thoughts and fallen into the inevitable pit of hubris that kills imagination, feeling and understanding at the intuitive level.
Intuition is not animist supernatural rubbish Chris.
Women use intuition more than men and it works very well for them. Intuition is much faster…Brain>emotion>feeling cannot be reversed. A woman feels what she feels and is ready to act on it. She doesn’t want to live in a world of probability…she doesn’t want virtual food or shelter for her child. Intuitive women are risk averse.
Animals use intuition. They probably have no need for thought. And yes…I can’t prove it. And for me that’s just fine…
I’m intelligent enough to recognize that there are some things that I will not know and I’m not so insecure as to think that it matters one jot…As Feynman said, ‘Whatever man thinks, nature doesn’t give a shit.’
Consciousness is simply thinking about thinking…nothing more than that.
There is a rude phrase that sums it up well…have a little think.
And as Christopher always brings ‘discourse’ back to language and his ‘responsible interlocutors’, so shall I.
Language is just another form of signing. Another tool…but a very inadequate one. Some people put their phone under their chin to enable signing with both hands.
We all know the inadequacy of words.
The antelope in discussion is way ahead of any of us in Christopher’s ‘attention’ game.
It’s water isn’t delivered by Wessex Water. Does Chris believe that an antelope would drink poisonous water because it can only spread awareness generally?
I could go along with that a little way but then I would also have to include man. What man contemplating a new cleavage is ‘attending’ when he thinks the next ejaculation will feel different from the last. Men risk all for a screw. And that’s ok. It’s obviously how it is supposed to be.
Wine tasters were a national joke. What was her name?…talking rubbish as she swished it around. The ultimate example of the inadequacy of words. ‘Wheelbarrows of…etc.’ How many words?
Describe blue.
The inadequacy of language is clear from the posts.
This is a very long discussion since just the 16th of January…84 posts and nothing sorted. Nothing at all. All language…Chris forum…his domain. Nothing sorted and he throws some accusations around.
I have attended quite a few meeting in the last three or four years and always the same line…’responsible interlocutors’.
He uses the word responsible irresponsibly. Here in this exchange he favours his followers over those on a video. He favours those who agree with him and tries to manipulate meaning to suggest his authority.
You can see from exchanges that Chris and I have had on this site that he dismisses my word on the grounds that I’m not qualified to talk with him. That is true…I’m not ‘qualified’ but I’ve never been accused of being inarticulate. I thought it was language that I was using to question Chris beliefs.
Because of his rude and bullying manner I’m not prepared to enter into discussion with him on this site again but I’m happy for the benefit of others to list the multitude of idiotic positions that he takes… Someone just ask.
When I first went to the meetings I was impressed that people should have a valuable interest that would fill their Friday nights. The more I heard of Chris the more doubtful I became about its sensibilities.
One evening… I think it was after a Camus lecture, I could be wrong…He launched into a tirade against John Gray. “Writes a book every year…has to be rubbish.” Something like that. Longer though. Much longer. It was a tirade.
I looked into John Gray, and except for one step that he refuses to take, I’d say he is quite close to the mark. So thank you Chris for that.
But I do feel, reading through this 84 post blog that it is time for Chris to resign.
He has had years to explain his position to John Little who is so patient and knowledgable as chairman. Always language…on and on. I have heard him being rude to visiting lecturers and it appears his hubris is too large for him to see how insulting he can be. Not challenging… Insulting.
He was once asked on the matter of morals, ‘If nature permits a ‘sin’ can we call it a sin? Isn’t nature perfect…how can anything be wrong?’
Sarcastically from Chris…”Brilliant. I’d get that written up if I were you.’
I thought this is what philosophy was about. But who am I to know?
What I do know is that it appears to me that the president is more interested in the sound of words than their meaning because if he questioned their meaning…not just the meaning that suits him…he would see how uselessly vague words are.
This is a problem for him that he will never wish to address… which is why I suggest that the group could be more productive without him. Not necessarily producing stuff he’d agree with…that’s not what the group might be about.
I have been asked by someone who has not been a party to this conversation what I mean by the word “consciousness”. It’s a good question.
The Cambridge Declaration quoted above states that animals are “conscious”. “The Blackwell Companion To Consciousness” has the word in its title. I believe these uses are best understood via the subtitle of Francis Crick’s book, also quoted above: “The Scientific Search for the Soul”.
If it were generally accepted that the “Soul” could be an object of study for the natural sciences, not only Theology, but also Philosophy would be out of business, and this must be an aim for anyone who subscribes to the ideology of Scientism (or Naturalism), which I defined above as the belief that the natural sciences are the only source of reliable knowledge.
Replacing the word “Soul” by the word “Consciousness” is a rhetorical trick which works in two important ways: (1) It subtly occludes the idea of “a being which knows itself subject to judgement”, (i.e., a conscience) which was the traditional idea of a “Soul”; (2) It redirects attention from the Soul as responsible agency to sentience, which is the kind of physical process that science is properly concerned with; and (3) It implies that a natural-scientific study of sentience will eventually tell us all we ever needed to know about the Soul (so that Theology and Philosophy become redundant).
I believe this programme has a further complex motive: by insisting on the consciousness and thus the capacity for suffering of dumb animals, it portrays itself as “humane”, but, by down-playing interlocutory relations, it avoids having to discuss moral and political issues in terms of what the Declaration of Independence calls “the consent of the governed”, thereby allowing action in violation of the Golden Rule, – the use of torture in particular and terroristic acts generally, – to be discussed in purely consequential terms.
I prefer not to talk about “consciousness”, but in order to engage my opponents and justify the role of Philosophy in the face of their dismissive expressions, I have to meet them on their territory and demonstrate its incoherence. I am happier talking, as Robert Brandom does, about “sapience” and “sentience”, as follows:
“We are sentient creatures as well as sapient ones, but our sentience is different from that of those who cannot give and ask for reasons. Described in the language of physiology, our sensing may be virtually indistinguishable from that of non-discursive creatures. But we not only sense, we also perceive. That is, our differential response to sensory stimulation includes non-inferential acknowledgement of propositionally contentful doxastic commitments. Through perception, when properly trained and situated, we find ourselves passively occupying particular positions in the space of reasons.
“We are practical creatures, as well as linguistic ones, but our purposive activity is different from that of those who cannot give and ask for reasons. Described in the language of physiology, our motor activity may be virtually indistinguishable from that of non-discursive creatures. But we not only produce performances, we perform actions. The performances we produce include non-inferential responses to acknowledgements of propositionally contentful practical commitments. Through action, when properly trained and situated, we can respond to the particular positions we occupy in the space of reasons by actively altering the non-discursive environment.
“Our mammalian cousins, primate ancestors and neonatal offspring – who are sentient and purposive but not discursive creatures – are interpretable as perceiving and acting only in a derivative sense. An interpreter can make sense of what they do by attributing propositionally contentful intentional states to them, but the interpreter’s grasp of those contents and of the significance of those states derives from mastery of the richer practices of giving and asking for reasons for the sort of doxastic and practical discursive commitments that are not attributed to these simpler folk. The activities they are interpreted as engaging in do not suffice to confer anything recognizable as propositional contents on their states, attitudes and performances. Our discursive practice makes us autonomous in a sense in which their non-discursive practices do not.”
(“Making It Explicit”, pp. 276-7)
Do you remember your comment about my January 2014 talk Dognition:
”I want to make a record here of the point I made last night, that you managed to spend more than an hour talking about the mentalities of animals and humans without mentioning the word “conscious” or “consciousness”, and only used the word “conscious” twice in response to questions from other people.
I asked, near the end of the discussion, whether you thought the word “consciousness” had become redundant, (rather as for some people the word “soul” seems to have become redundant) so that you could say everything you needed to say about mentality without using it, but you explicitly denied that this was the case and insisted it was a necessary word. I then asked, – if the word “conscious” was so important to you, – what part it played in your account of mind, i.e., what kind of philosophical work it was doing, and you really didn’t answer the question, admitting that you’d hoped not to have to discuss it because of the confusion surrounding it.”
That was you, wasn’t it? And when Bill Williams commented:
”I make no attempt to speak for him but if John said that he had hoped not to have to discuss the philosophical consequences of ‘conscious’ in mind because of the confusion surrounding it…or if that is a fair representation of what he intended, I feel that is a very intelligent response.”
….you took him to task, adding:
”Next term I shall be RETURNING to the subject of consciousness in my talk on “The Antelope and the Wine-taster” in which I shall show that the reasons commonly given for believing dumb animals are conscious do not stand up to critical examination.” (emphasis mine).
So now to hear you say:
”I prefer not to talk about “consciousness”,
I just cant stop laughing…..well you have to excuse me from declaring Bill Williams and myself totally vindicated.
On Francis Crick: one is never very sure whether titles, and in this case subtitles, are chosen by the author or the publisher (with an eye to sales). Crick has very little to say about souls (‘I have no need for that hypothesis’ just about sums it up) but what he has to say is all in pages 3-7 of the book which you can access on the Amazon website (click on ‘Look Inside’).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Astonishing-Hypothesis-Scientific-Search/dp/068480158
I have no problem with Brandom, except that he has a dictionary stuck in his throat and he, though not as bad as you, has an irritating habit of making words like perception and thinking take on special features which are lacking in ordinary, and even scientific, discourse. But at least he tells you.
So all this time when I thought we were talking about animal consciousness we were talking about whether animals have souls, right?
So that’s why any attempt to give evidence that animals have consciousness (for which at the basic level I am quite happy to use the word ‘sentience’) is like water off a (sentient but soulless) duck’s back. Words fail me…..
If you think switching the topic to one of souls is going to clear things up you are seriously deluded.
Brandom never mentions souls btw. Wise fellow.
I do prefer not to talk about consciousness, but I am obliged to do so in order to confront the positions taken by my opponents who, e.g., quote the Cambridge Declaration at me as something I ought to take note of.
I should prefer to discuss sapience and sentience, a la Brandom, but my opponents (like the rest of our audience) haven’t read Brandom and aren’t familiar with his arguments; consequently, to confront those opponents (who routinely sneer at philosophy as having no “quality control”, and want to talk only about scientific evidence) I come onto their ground and read, e.g., the Blackwell Companion To Consciousness and base my arguments on that.
If you admit that the concept of consciousness is surrounded by confusion, – which is, after all, my position, i.e., that it is incoherent, – what was the point of your quoting the Cambridge Declaration?
As for your laughter, I am reminded of a moment in Plato’s “Gorgias” when Socrates says, “What’s this, Polus? Laughing? Is this a new type of proof?”
I’m glad you’ve taken up the cudgels again because I’m still waiting for you to explain to our readers why my defence of Descartes’ vivisectionist activities might be “dangerous”. After all, if such an explanation were readily available and allowed you to score a point or two, why would you hesitate?
A serious interlude on the topic of the Papineau and Voltaire quotations whilst the “opponents”…not my term, regroup.
Chris Eddy Feb12.
From David Papineau: ” That might seem a bit odd, to say that this issue is going to be decided on moral grounds but if you ask why this issue matters, why it’s important to decide which things are conscious and which aren’t, surely the most obvious reason is the moral reason – it makes a difference to how you are going to treat them. So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to go at it backwards, to think about how you ought to interact with those beings and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not.”
To answer Papineau’s proposition: The human interaction with other animals is that we will kill them… You will have noticed that is what we do, and despite our conscience we believe that it is morally correct that we should be free to do so.
Papineau: “So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to go at it backwards, to think about how you ought to interact with those beings and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not.”
This I see as a fallacious argument… One that has always been the justification for man ignoring his instinctive feeling of guilt when killing animals.
We do indeed look at the situation backwards…We want them dead. This is what our interaction is to be. We start there. At the end.
…Then we decide if they are conscious or not, as Papineau suggests. We say, “Of course they are not conscious as we are…they feel no pain as we do.” So the inconvenient “ought” in “ought to interact with them” is avoided. Pushed aside.
This line of thinking has never salved my conscience.
I have shot several red deer and stalked many more.
I believe that they feel pain… that foxes feel pain.
The game keeper thought that they felt pain.
My conscience was clear… I was behaving badly to the deer. Willingly. I was violating the existence of the deer. What gave me that right? I’m a human with a gun.
This willingness to understand the situation saves me from indecision and allows a clear understanding of the situation.
I don’t accept the gamekeepers line about “They need to be culled before the winter sets in”, and certainly not the line that they aren’t conscious. For me, winter is a deer’s form of death… one of many…managed by evolution, and so was the wolf.
Man and a gun is evolution too, though it’s crude in comparison to winter and a wolf, and doesn’t appeal to me as preferable. I killed and gralloched because I am a meat eater prepared to experience what his freezer entails.
I don’t get Papineau’s logic…”and decide on that basis whether they’re conscious or not.” ????
Chris Eddy 20Feb.
Voltaire:
”Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins (nerve fibers). You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible?”
You will see that there is no mention of anesthetic in this quotation, such material not existing for another two hundred years…and I don’t know who introduced the anesthetic diversion into this debate. I don’t care.
Voltaire’s accusations in the quote, the Barbaric label, and “machinist”, are as much relevant to the friendship element of the quotation as to the suffering pain one…
”Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive”. “Surpasses man so prodigiously” is obviously heart felt and the cause of the horror reaction.
Voltaire defends the dog against vivisection from an emotional point of view with the physical realities as support. Intuition. He feels that the dog can feel its loss of dignity. Its trust and friendship painfully betrayed. Sympathizes with its loss.
Descartes was crudely groping for ‘evidence’ using a knife…”machinist”. Voltaire made his judgement clear.
Intuition shouldn’t be sniffed at if what we hear of the Atomists is true. 600BC. They didn’t measure their beliefs or see them in a lens… Didn’t search a soul.
…And Polus replied, “The words are the proof, the laughter is embarrassed reaction.”
Just to keep the site warm while you work on your answer to the Voltaire/ Descartes question …
You say: “On Francis Crick: one is never very sure whether titles, and in this case subtitles, are chosen by the author or the publisher (with an eye to sales)” and thereby make my point very neatly: this is a struggle for authority in the eyes of a popular audience between Scientism/Naturalism on one hand and Philosophy on the other, … which could explain why you used Voltaire’s “enlightened” rant.
You say: “I have no problem with Brandom, except that he … has an irritating habit of making words like perception and thinking take on special features which are lacking in ordinary, and even scientific, discourse”. Which bit of Brandom’s position is it, then, that you “have no problem with”?
2012 20th April: What is consciousness? Chris Eddy.
“If consciousness is a state of the brain, an electro-chemical relation between neurons, then we must look to biological science for our understanding of it; however, if, as I think, consciousness is a relation between organisms mediated by language, whereby attention is focused onto objects, ideas and sensations, then not biology, but history, sociology and philosophy must be our guides to understanding it. Thomas Nagel asked “What is it like to be a bat?” and concluded that it is not ‘like’ anything: I agree, and, in the perspective I shall offer, nothing is ‘like’ anything unless you have a language in which to construct the idea of ‘likeness’.”
[Me: As an aside here are two quotes from Nagel’s paper, What is it like to be a bat? :
”Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.)”
”I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience.”
So do you agree with Nagel, Chris? Had you even read his paper??]
2013 Friday 27th September: Consciousness Revisited. Chris Eddy.
2015 16th January: THE ANTELOPE & THE WINETASTER Chris Eddy
2015 March 2
I do prefer not to talk about consciousness, but I am obliged to do so in order to confront the positions taken by my opponents who, e.g., quote the Cambridge Declaration at me as something I ought to take note of.
Chris Eddy
This is getting surreal.
The first mention of the Cambridge Declaration was in reply TO YOUR THIRD TALK ON CONSCIOUSNESS.
If this is a topic you’d prefer not to talk about then I’d hate to find one you did want to talk about.
OK Voltaire.
”Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins (nerve fibres). You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible?”
”The Voltaire quote is the biggest gun in John’s rhetorical armoury: I aim to show that it is a damp squib”. CE
I have no idea why you think this is your trump card.
Descartes maintained that animals cannot reason and do not feel pain; animals are living, organic creatures, but they are automata, like the mechanical models of swans, ducks etc. popular at the time. This is a dangerous doctrine. If you are going to assert it you had better be right. (I know you don’t care about consequences but some of us do).
What are the facts? (Yes, I know you don’t care about those too).
In his book on Descartes, André Gombay points out that there are various ingredients to the claim that he vivisected live dogs. Firstly, Descartes was taught by Jesuits, and part of the school curriculum at the time apparently involved vivisection. A visitor to one such school in the 1650s (shortly after Descartes’s death) reports that children nailed dogs to planks and dissected them, considering their cries of pain to be “nothing but the noises of some small springs that were being deranged”. Secondly, it is also true that Descartes did undertake some anatomical dissection, and whilst he does not actually say so, it is likely – Gombay suggests – that “many of these observations were on live animals.”
Of course if he is seeking to increase the sum of human knowledge (perhaps for the benefit of humankind) then this might be seen as a partial or even total justification. Like research involving animal suffering today, some of which I would consider justified. (It’s why we have referral to ethics committees).
As far as I know nothing of significance came out of his animal research….but that may be his poor judgement or just bad luck.
What concerns me more is the effect his extravagant ideas had on the subsequent history of animal welfare. He does seem to have believed that the howls/screams of dogs being cut up are not really cries of pain, but simply mechanical noises (“deranged springs” or rusty joints) without real consciousness. And his ideas were influential.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire
Epic.
…And totally predictable.
Plato to Blackwell and there has been no understanding of consciousness or any number of topics about which humans enquire of themselves.
If there is anyone out there who is genuinely interested in finding a different and useful way of looking at this situation please get into conversation via Email with billwilfredwilliams@gmail.com.
My qualifications are the obvious ones and my attitude could be summed up as, “If your answer isn’t accessible to everyone… it probably isn’t the answer.”
(1) I welcome your finally conceding that, before the discovery of anaesthetics, if a vivisectionist were
“seeking to increase the sum of human knowledge (perhaps for the benefit of humankind) then this might be seen as a partial or even total justification. Like research involving animal suffering today, some of which I would consider justified.”
AND, it is perfectly clear from his own words that it is to the scientific vivisectionist specifically that Voltaire is addressing his rant
“they dissect it alive IN ORDER TO SHOW THE MESENTERIC VEINS (nerve fibres)”.
Your concession confirms what I claimed, that the Voltaire quotation, AS YOU POSTED IT, expresses a sentiment which you actually repudiate on scientific and consequentialist principles. As I see it, you hurled its emotive rhetoric at me in an opportunistic spirit and then, when I called you out, you evaded conceding the point for as long as you possibly could, – which is what I mean by “hit-and-run” tactics.
(2) You say of Descartes that
“What concerns me more is the effect his extravagant ideas had on the subsequent history of animal welfare.” (A point you could have made without the emotive quote from Voltaire. You could have asked me straightforwardly what implications my position had for how animals should be treated.)
(3) But you go on to say, “(Descartes) does seem to have believed that the howls/screams of dogs being cut up are not really cries of pain, but simply mechanical noises (“deranged springs” or rusty joints) WITHOUT REAL CONSCIOUSNESS.”
This sentence makes sense only on the assumption that you accept “cries of pain” as incontrovertible evidence of (i.e., a sufficient condition for attributing) “real consciousness”, which I deny. Let me be clear: I do NOT flatly deny that dumb animals suffer “pain”. My position involves the nuance that, IF you want to insist that, by definition, “pain” entails “consciousness”, THEN I deny that dumb animals suffer “pain”. On the other hand, IF you are willing to entertain the idea that the bodies of dumb animals can be racked by “pain” without their being “conscious” of it, THEN I am willing to speak of animals as suffering “pain”.
I have argued above that “pain” is something of which we are conscious, because we are conscious beings, but it is simply impossible for us to imagine what it is for a body to be “in pain” without being conscious of it; the idea, however, is not obviously absurd (i.e., it entails no contradiction) UNLESS “pain” has been predefined as conscious. (If you feel tempted once again to invoke the authority of your Chambers Dictionary, I note that you have not refuted my earlier arguments about how the meanings of words are determined.)
As I’ve said before, if you want me to talk about the ethics of our relations with dumb animals, you have only to ask, but I don’t want it to obscure the significance of the distinction I draw between “pain” and “consciousness”.
(4) On Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”, it’s true that I hadn’t read Nagel’s paper: I had merely picked up a wrong idea of what he’d said, – as you very properly pointed out on the night in 2012 when I gave my first talk on that subject. Having since read the paper, I maintain, however, that in what he said Nagel was wrong, and I refer you to the following passage, point 8 in the amplified hand-out for my “Antelope” talk, above:
“There’s something it’s like to be conscious” is a familiar statement in Consciousness Studies. To identify a sensory quality we have to attend to what it’s like and what it’s unlike. Likeness and difference are abstract ideas of relations between objects which can be grasped only through language: experience is constructed between interlocutors. Being me is in some ways like, but in other ways unlike being you: to bring out these likenesses and differences in our experience we have to name them, distinguish them and define them, i.e., we have to focus attention on them and thereby make them objects of consciousness. Thomas Nagel’s question, “What is it like to be a bat?” is meaningless: it’s not “like” anything to be a bat; bats have no means of grasping ideas of likeness and unlikeness, no consciousness of the sensory qualities to which they can be seen to react, painful or otherwise. There are no non-verbal equivalents of similes and metaphors.
(5) Now let me deal with what it is difficult not to see as a deliberate misinterpretation by you of the statement from me that you quote:
‘“I do prefer not to talk about consciousness, but I am obliged to do so in order to confront the positions taken by my opponents who, e.g., quote the Cambridge Declaration at me as something I ought to take note of.”
Chris Eddy
This is getting surreal.
The first mention of the Cambridge Declaration was in reply TO YOUR THIRD TALK ON CONSCIOUSNESS.
If this is a topic you’d prefer not to talk about then I’d hate to find one you did want to talk about.’
I didn’t actually know about the Cambridge Declaration until you brought it to my attention. I had made it quite clear that the representative of the contemporary Consciousness Movement on which I based my talk was the Blackwells Companion (2007). The reason why I mentioned the Cambridge Declaration in that sentence was to make the point that, since you had quoted it at me, it was not something you could dissociate yourself from or take no responsibility for.
You cannot really be asking me to believe that, when you read the sentence you call “surreal”, you really thought, – as you imply, – THAT I WAS TRYING TO PRETEND that it was the Cambridge Declaration which first drew my attention to the whole modern discourse of consciousness.
My concern with “consciousness” is that (as I see it) it is used, – for the purposes of an ideology of Scientism/ Naturalism, – to blur the distinction between sentience, which can be understood in purely physiological terms, and sapience which cannot. Your style of interaction suggests to me that you don’t really want to understand the arguments I have to offer, but just to silence them so that you can continue to talk about what you call “the evidence” without having to examine what Dennett calls the “conceptual question” of what it could validly count as evidence FOR.
This is you on Feb 25th:
”Vivisection without anaesthetic, even for scientific research, given that anaesthetics are now available, would be indefensible.”
Tell me….what would be the POINT of giving an animal anaesthetics on your view??
If you wanted to stop it writhing you could give it a muscle paralysis agent like curare. Why do we waste money giving animals the same type of anaethetics that we give humans?
Here we go again…a couple of definitions:
‘Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively’
‘The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness’.
So what does sentience mean on Planet Brandom?
Jan 28th,,,you say
I claim that participating in discourse, typically by making statements and thereby making yourself responsible for justifying them to your interlocutor in accordance with objective criteria (non-contradiction, etc), commits you to assuming that your interlocutor is also a responsible agent who can be held responsible for any statements he makes
So when you misrepresent the views of Nagel on a public forum, have your attention drawn to the fact, yet leave the statement uncorrected for two years
…….is that an example of ‘responsible for any statements’ you make?
When I made my last post I assumed that Chris had finished, Voltaire being answered… but I see that the topic of consciousness has returned.
I have on several occasions in these pages made the statement that consciousness is thinking about thinking, and nothing more. I would like to expand that.
To be conscious is to be aware and to respond…
When we experience consciousness our response to being conscious is a mental one…thought. This is what our mind is. It is our thoughts forming. Thinking. And as in Nagel’s “it’s like”, our experience of consciousness…our awareness of our mind…is “like” thinking about our mind.
Therefor I say that consciousness is thinking about thinking. I think that this is useful to know and easily understood.
And then I have suggested, “And no more.” It is nothing more than this… I have a reason.
When Nagel asks “What is it like to be a bat?” it is not a meaningless question. It is a question which has the answer, it is not like anything else to be a bat.
It is then clear that we are in no position to presume anything about a bat. We can make empirical observations and feel our intuitions but we should be aware of which are which if we are to know what we understand.
When Chris suggests that we should ask what it’s like, AND WHAT IT’S UNLIKE he is making the step which leads humans to so much of their confusion as typified by the thousands of words thrown in desperation here.
When I told Chris that John was being intelligent to resist talking about consciousness because there is so much confusion surrounding the topic, this is where I was coming from… The confusion is man-made and deliberately so.
In his latest post Chris suggests some of man’s motives…”for the purposes of an ideology of…”, and Chris has motives of his own…His PL crusade.
If we want UNDERSTANDING we should not invent. We should stay clear of the ‘hard’ subject…Subjectivity. At least recognise it for what it is.
Consciousness is thinking about thinking…nothing more.
6th March. Eddy.
“There are no non-verbal equivalents of similes and metaphors”.
“To identify a sensory quality we have to attend to what it’s like and what it’s unlike. Likeness and difference are abstract ideas of relations between objects which can be grasped only through language: experience is constructed between interlocutors.”
Both wrong. ‘Farts like a horse’ has the equivalent of the sound of a horse farting.
Eddy has his notions back to front. I think that he doesn’t understand ‘experience’ as used in the philosophical sense.
The only way that experience can be useful in gaining understanding is if it can be concise. It must be pared to the minimum and even that might not be sufficient…Might not define. We must always be ready to accept that we might not be able to understand.
Similes are divergent. They confuse the topic. There are myriad similes we might use for comparison purposes. But comparing is not the game.
We need a definitive “like”… Nagel’s “like”.
Metaphors are yet more divergent… deliberately so, and both similes and metaphors take us into the realm of the narrative. Experience is not a story. Experience must stay an experience.
And storyville is where we go if we ask not only, “To be like.” but add, “what’s it unlike” as Eddy asks us to. Experience is not a comparison exercise. Experience is experience.
An example: Joy. Have you experienced joy?
Now, I want you to understand that I’m not asking you describe to me some joyous occasion that you’ve had. I don’t want you to think of the opposite of joy… joy / pain.
I want you to recall joy. The joy experience. It will probably be a feeling…for me there is no word. And that feeling is the “it’s like”.
The recall will be sufficient if we are going to use the experience ourselves…to philosophize perhaps. But if we want to discuss it with others the only way we have of doing this is to use the word joy and hope that they have a similar feeling associated with it. We might be able to tell by looking in their eyes as they contemplate the word joy. Then we have a chance of dialogue.
The more narrative the less the prospect.
An example: Ice. Have you experienced ice?
A simple one in common dialogue: Frozen water. But this will not have been your experience of ice. There’s a splat of science in the word ‘frozen’ and this will be a distraction…it creates a narrative. We imagine the transformation process…perhaps even snow.
Your experience of ice has to be cleaner than that if you can work with it. Pared down.
Imagine you have an ice cube in your hand. “It’s like.” …Cold solid clear becoming watery.
Watery…Adjective not noun. We should not make that step.
What evidence do you have that it’s water? None at all. But that’s fine. That’s the point. Let’s recognize that we don’t know that it’s water. Then we go on from there. That’s how philosophy could get somewhere.
Eddy might have said, similes and metaphors cannot ever be precise.
Eddy might have said, experience constructed between interlocutors is a construct. Subjective fiction…that’s all.
You ask, “What would be the POINT of giving an animal anaesthetics on your view??
If you wanted to stop it writhing you could give it a muscle paralysis agent like curare. Why do we waste money giving animals the same type of anaesthetics that we give humans?”
I think this is a good question which takes us to the heart of the problem we, as conscious beings, have in responding to evidence of what I’m happy to call “pain” in animals (on condition that the word “pain” not be construed as evidence of “consciousness”).
For us, – and this is the point I want to establish, – a pain exists only as an event we’re conscious of, and we’re conscious of it as a force which threatens to destroy our ability to direct our attention to the purposes with which we identify ourselves as responsible agents. We can imagine acquiring a technique (hypnotism, meditation etc.) which would enable us to turn our attention away from a pain; after all, much of Eastern spiritual practice is concerned with precisely that; but I think it is impossible for us to imagine what it would be “like” (because, as I claim, it wouldn’t be “like” anything at all) for the body of an organism which couldn’t identify itself as a responsible agent, (and therefore had no purposes with which it was identified) to be racked by pain.
As conscious beings, we recognise pain as something bad, and we recognise the resemblances between our own reactions in the face of pain and those of dumb animals, so it is an intuitively appealing argument that pain is bad not only in conscious beings, but also in non-conscious organisms whose pain-behaviour resembles our own. This presents itself to us as a good reason for not casually inflicting pain on dumb animals and this would motivate using on animals the same kind of anaesthetics we would use on ourselves. (Whatever its behaviour, I would never believe that a machine could suffer pain, but, even if you could give me neurological “evidence” that pain doesn’t afflict the bodies of dumb animals, my intuition would probably still make me want to use anaesthetics, – just to be safe.)
That intuition, however, is not equally appealing to everyone and I strongly suspect that it is culturally determined; but, even with those like you and me whose culture makes it appealing, we make no attempt to stop dumb animals inflicting pain on each other (e.g., wolves or African wild dogs hunting elk or wildebeest to death) and wouldn’t think it right to do so; but we have a tendency to be inconsistent, e.g., using the law against people who hunt stag with dogs: why should being hunted by dogs be any worse for a stag than for elk or wildebeest? Equally, if those dogs were under the direction of humans, I don’t see how that would make it worse for the stag than if they were hunted only by wolves; consequently, I don’t see that humans who hunt a stag with hounds can be accused of treating animals “inhumanely”, and the same would apply to fox-hunting.
I think there is an enormous amount of hypocritical self-righteousness involved in the idea put about by Peter Singer that you can give meaning to your life by committing yourself to making the widening circle of humane concern ever wider; the sentimentality is present already in that quote from Voltaire where he singles out “this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously” and to my nostrils it stinks of ideology.
I’ve tried here to answer your question directly. I would be grateful if, before moving on to other matters, you would tell me which parts of my answer you accept, which you don’t, and why.
As for my mistake about Nagel’s views, I admitted on the night that I hadn’t read his paper, and was publicly corrected by you as to its contents. I’m not sure what exactly you’re accusing me of. I have corrected you on certain matters at various times in the past, but haven’t expected you to appear thereafter in sackcloth and ashes.
Chris Eddy 8th March.
“why should being hunted by dogs be any worse for a stag than for elk or wildebeest? Equally, if those dogs were under the direction of humans, I don’t see how that would make it worse for the stag than if they were hunted only by wolves; consequently, I don’t see that humans who hunt a stag with hounds can be accused of treating animals “inhumanely”… ”
This is a good example of how conflating “it’s like” leads to confusion…
This is what happens.
“why should being hunted by dogs be any worse for a stag than for elk or wildebeest?”
Eddy is clear about this…And yes, there is no reason that I know of to suppose that it would be. Surely that seems clear.
Eddy again. “Equally, if those dogs were under the direction of humans, I don’t see how that would make it worse for the stag than if they were hunted only by wolves…”
Nor do I. … Eddy is still clear.
Eddy, “CONSEQUENTLY, (emphasis mine) I don’t see that humans who hunt a stag with hounds can be accused of treating animals “inhumanely”…”
Although Chris claims clarity still, he is actually confused now.
Being a stag is not “like” being a human. Being a wolf is not “like” being a human. And when a wolf hunts a stag we do not know what it is like for either of them.
We can guess, we can ‘feel’… but the feelings are human ones. We can make assumptions but we can never KNOW.
As humans we make moral decisions for ourselves. Talk of a moral code. It’s human stuff. We recognize this and try not to impose it on other animals…though we do judge them as being wild and cruel.
And at the moment there is a sentiment against humans enjoying hunting with hounds. It has several roots. It is presently judged to be “inhumane”… A human code agreed by interlocutors.
“Consequently” Eddy says…. Not consequently at all.
If humans breach a human ‘moral’ code it is clearly ‘inhumane’ behaviour. They are rightly accused. End of.
I’m not upholding the ‘morals’ or the ‘inhumanity’ opinions…And I have not confused myself.
I am free to think clearly about the morality issues involved because I recognize that humans aren’t stags or hounds and we can only assume a position in the situation.
If this seems to be pedantic I can explain it’s importance: We give ourselves ‘authority’, ‘dominion’ over animals on the basis of conflated logic.
Consciousness is in this camp.
Sentience and sapience. These are not useful words to use in place of conscious or consciousness.
For me, conscious means to be aware and to respond to that awareness.
Consciousness means that we are aware of our mind and its works.
One could be sentient and unconscious…In a coma. Sentience requires no response.
Sapience…What the hell is that? That is getting vague.
We cannot look to solve our problems by circumnavigating them…I’ll stick to the topic and call it consciousness.
And until I hear a definition I prefer, I’ll stay with: Consciousness is thinking about thinking. This is more than sentience. Sentience has no element of the mind self-awareness…no awareness of itself.
Nobody has ever agreed with me about my definition. They don’t always disagree…there is always the atmosphere that this is not enough…they want more than this.
When I explain that this is just a position for consciousness, and that the topics that they want to tag to it are separate ones… ones that we can easily go on to discuss, they look disappointed. Lost. They want to make that tag.
Consciousness has a history. It’s been a promise. It’s supposed to mark us apart.
And so it might…Apart from what though? From something superior or from something inferior? How would I know? Why do I need to know? Can’t I judge my situation as it arrises. I’m conscious enough to do this. I don’t need to lean on consciousness as a vehicle to self-belief. I can feel my mind at work.
The tag is often a free ride for an ideology… I’ll leave you to think of some.
‘Humans are unique,’ we think… ‘We have our consciousness.’
As a species we are unique. Absolute fact… and there aren’t too many of those.
As individuals too. No misnomer there.
But the tag is not the cause of our uniqueness. It’s incidental…effect unknown.
And then we go on to make value judgements that usually assume that this uniqueness, distinction, is superior in some sense. Where do we get this idea?
I’ll go back to animals but my argument is as valid for say…foot-ball hooligans or thieves. Dustmen…People we like to dislike.
…A dominant lion lazing in the shade of a tree after a meal. It’s pride enjoying it’s catch. A large wildebeest, old but not thin…food enough for a week. Easily caught and going down well.
That lion is certainly conscious…none of us doubt that. Does it have consciousness though? This is how we put it down.
I have absolutely no idea if it has consciousness.
It is sensible to know that there are some things that humans cannot know. A lion is not like anything else. It is unique. I’m able to make assumptions about it but assumptions are all they will ever be. Never useful facts…Why bother? I’m not going to. What is the point? … And I can hear it coming… ‘So that we can make moral decisions about lions.’
Don’t be daft…Based on empty words that are not facts?
We will make our decisions and call them moral. We have consciousness and a conscience. Ideology. We have to lie to ourselves. Morals are expedient. ‘Benefit mankind’, we say.
If I think of that lion under a tree I would find it demeaning to it to say it had consciousness. …A thought bubble over it’s head from a cartoon saying ‘THINKS’.
Contemplating its mind…pondering on this and that. Trying to be rational. Rodin’s lion? It might well be, but my instinct says no. Intuition is quicker…suited to its needs.
Many men have lost touch with intuition…buried it with rational, and are very proud of having done so. Ask women.
Intuition can serve humans too. It avoids confusion which not only leads to mistakes, it leads via mistakes to depression… Our most serious ailment, and one that is certainly on the up.
Consciousness better than conscious? Who am I to know?
I once kept a parrot. It was an Amazon Green and unlike the Grey it had a fully feathered face. Except for a little ring of wrinkly skin around it’s eyes. It had little eyelashes that are apparently not hairs but an adapted feather. Black and as fine as silk.
Beside the usual parrot mix of seeds I always gave her peanuts in their pods. I liked watching her get them out…never one dropped.
Quite often she would pick one up for a different purpose. To use as a tool. A sponge.
Instead of making a hole in the pod that was wide enough for the peanuts to roll out, this hole was small and the nuts stayed in. She then collected soft white down…there was plenty of it about.
I never shut the door of the cage and she’d stand on top grasping it and try to take off. It was a daily routine. Fluffy white down all over the flat.
As she collected it she packed it tightly into the little peanut pod hole until it was a soft strong wad sitting on the end of the makeshift handle and this pad she dipped into her drinking water and retired to a perch.
A parrot’s grip looks clumsy but the delicate care with which she washed her eyelashes and the surrounding skin was obvious to see.
When visitors saw this and when I recount the story the response is always, ‘That’s amazing.’ BUT NO IT’S NOT…It is only amazing if you have a preconception about parrots that’s inaccurate. Why bother to make silly pronouncements about tool users? Are we that insecure?
And we have no way of knowing if she learned to make her toilette, was it an instinct or perhaps she invented it? Even if most other parrots do it…we still know nothing about her. She might have been without the instinct and copied it. Who’s to know? She was about twenty, probably born in Britain in captivity.
I wonder if she still gets peanuts…perhaps her partner does her eyelashes for her now.
You say, “Here we go again…a couple of definitions:
‘Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively’
‘The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness’.
So what does sentience mean on Planet Brandom?”
Okay, I’ll respond to these questions now on the understanding that we’ll finish dealing with the anaesthetics question before discussing anything else.
I mention Brandom’s name not as that of an authority, but as the author of ideas of which I have been able to make what seems to me very good use, though I do not claim to understand his ideas at all fully, and there are matters on which I think Brandom is wrong. What interests me is not what he has to say about sentience, which he deals with entirely in behavioural terms, but his account of how sapience arises out of the RELIABLY DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSIVE DISPOSITIONS or “RDRDs”, – specifically the linguistic RDRDs, – of sentient creatures. (Another way of putting this is that he enables me to understand how a world of meaning came to exist in the midst of a meaningless universe.)
At the centre of Brandom’s account is the practice of INTERPRETING whereby we make EXPLICIT what we see as IMPLICIT in whatever performance, discursive or otherwise, we are attempting to interpret. One of his starting-points is Dennett’s work on the Intentional Stance, and he takes over from Dennett the idea that interpreting is something that only discursive creatures can do, and that it is discourse which enables us to view performances as having implications that can be made explicit. For Brandom, the ability to make explicit what seems to us implicit in a performance depends on our language having the expressive resource exemplified by the “If … then” or conditional construction: If (you say) it’s a dog, then (you can be interpreted as meaning) it’s a mammal.
Furthermore, discourse enables us, from our different individual perspectives, to have different views of what any performance implies, and Brandom takes Dennett’s point that the only reliable basis on which we can choose between different interpretations is their success in predicting future performances by the same performer or species of performer, the point being that a particular interpretation must be understood as “implicit” not in the sense of something physically embodied, but only as something which can take the explicit form of an interpretive assertion for which reasons can be given and which can in turn serve as a reason for further inferences.
If, however, you were to insist that, – for the idea of “making an implication explicit” to be meaningful, – what is “implicit” must have some kind of physical embodiment which would count as the cause of the performance, Brandom argues (in effect) that it is impossible to specify what counts as THE performance in anything but perspectival terms: just as we can have different views of the intentions implicit in a performance, so it is impossible to specify non-perspectivally what (in absolutely exact and exhaustive terms) constitutes the performance, which means that, even if the interpretation we adopt has allowed us to predict all subsequent performances correctly, we cannot be certain that our next prediction won’t fail. (The relevant stuff is in Ch.1. of “Making It Explicit”, which is quite easy reading; it’s only in Ch.5 that the going gets really tough.)
For Brandom, the intentionality of dumb animals is DERIVED from its interpreters, which contrasts with the ORIGINAL intentionality which characterizes not each of us speakers individually, but only the discursive relations in which we as individual speakers participate. Intentionality (or meaning) is determined always IN a community, though not BY a community (or Mr Chambers).
The parrot was a present from me to a partner and from day one it seemed to be a ‘one person affection’ animal.
When Judy walked past the cage the parrot, sitting on top, would stretch its lowered head forward and down revealing the scrawny skin between its feathers. It wanted Judy to scratch its ancient neck. Wanted to establish affiliation with her.
When I walked past it would reach out to peck me and pecked I sometimes was. A unique wound…the parrot leaves no parts to heal and drops the amputation disdainfully at your feet. Further affiliation to Judy I suppose.
The day Judy left me was much like any other. She had her bags but she often took those on weekends. It wasn’t a happy scene. A few tears. Judy said goodbye to Blue, the amazon green.
That same day, as I cautiously circled the cage, vaguely wondering how I was going to change its drinking water…tend to the bloody thing…down went its head. It showed me where it liked Judy to poke it with her painted nails.
I wasn’t falling for that one…Cowardice prevailed. But I couldn’t ignore it. I had to test it and I ventured forth again. Head back down and a beady parrot stare.
Third time I was brave. You’d understand if you’d been bitten by a parrot…the pure white flesh scoop. Then the little red dots…lots of them…tiny at first until the blood flows freely for hours.
…No peck. The new bond was established within in hours of Judy leaving and I felt a stupid honour in the new role bestowed upon me.
Had blue learned the meaning of some words? Had Judy’s goodbye been somehow understood?
Or had the atmosphere of her leaving told Blue that Judy wasn’t coming back?
I pondered this for a while…perhaps Blue had run out of peanuts…my sons only phone me when they want something. Does consciousness set us so far apart?
But Judy wasn’t that diligent… Blue must often have been short of nuts.
I have no idea what actually happened in Blue’s head. There might easily be connections I know nothing of…I’d be surprised if there weren’t, wouldn’t you? Can you live with that?
The mistake that I’m not going to make is to interpret as explicit what could only be witnessed as implicit because I like my interpretations to be factual. Understanding has to be absolute fact.
If I say, ‘It’s a parrot’, then I can be interpreted as talking about a bird.
It would be to misunderstand me to assume that I was talking about a bird.
This is not a conundrum.
‘Pay attention Williams’, my teachers used to say. ‘The poem is about a parrot stupid boy.’
Bill, with all due respect, it’s hard enough conducting this kind of exchange with one person at a time; with more than one it’s impossible.
Chris, yes.
Christopher Eddy 9th March
“I mention Brandom’s name not as that of an authority, but as the author of ideas of which I have been able to make what seems to me very good use, though I do not claim to understand his ideas at all fully, and there are matters on which I think Brandom is wrong. What interests me is not what he has to say about sentience, which he deals with entirely in behavioural terms, but his account of how sapience arises out of the RELIABLY DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSIVE DISPOSITIONS or “RDRDs”, – specifically the linguistic RDRDs, – of sentient creatures. (Another way of putting this is that he enables me to understand how a world of meaning came to exist in the midst of a meaningless universe.)”
“At the centre of Brandom’s account is the practice of INTERPRETING whereby we make EXPLICIT what we see as IMPLICIT in whatever performance, discursive or otherwise, we are attempting to interpret.”
When Chris says, “(Another way of putting this is that he enables me to understand how a world of meaning came to exist in the midst of a meaningless universe.)” he is making a fair summary of the motive force behind mankind’s efforts at understanding…and if he will excuse a personal note…sounding a good deal more personable than his “sentient being” image allows.
I haven’t been the only one criticize the practice of manipulating meaning and words on these pages. Words are very open to this practice…they are made for the job.
And when we hear of Brandom advocating his manipulation of explicit and implicit interpretations we know his motive and his tools.
The aim sounds laudable: ‘To enable us to understand how a world of meaning came to exist in the midst of a meaningless universe.’ Implicit: That is to say create meaning.
This is what we do… What we try to do. Create a world of meaning in an effort to understand.
Brandon’s philosophy and our linguistic interchanges can be manipulated endlessly for this purpose and these posts here are evidence of that.
It’s not just Eddy and the wine taster: This Friday, 20th February 2015 from 7.40pm at the Friends Meeting House, Paul Archer and John Little will be debating ‘Defending the Blank Slate’… Where a lawyer is desperately trying to identify a starting point. To snatch something definitive from statistics in an effort to give meaning in a meaningless universe.
But this meaning is not something to be bestowed. It exists or doesn’t. There is no more to it than that. It is not manipulated by man… When we try to do this all that we manipulate is our mind and confusion is generally the result.
Most of us will have an agreed understanding of Darwinism. An evolutionary process… Nature if you like.
Whilst Darwin spoke of all living things, man has placed himself at he focal point and manipulated from there. A pint of Guinness is a product of evolution but how many humans would be free to see it as such. We have manipulated our minds. Confused ourselves. Lost our perspective of where we are.
Dawkins told Joan Bakewell that man had stepped outside of evolution…he later corrected himself.
This is why we feel a lack of meaning. The mist of confusion shrouds us all. We feel lost.
Meaning is what our mind…our thought process…is targeted at. It interprets the factors surrounding us and dishes us up our experience. But when we feel lost it gropes in the dark. Any clue will do, and it’s interpretations become implications and these wander in the clouds.
This is not the basis of understanding. It is a created meaning if that’s what you want. You could have belief in it if you wanted too but it is not understanding. It’s AN understanding created by you.
…So the meaning aspect…let’s look at that.
It’s a question into the unknown isn’t it?
Expanding Darwinism to acts of evolution and then on to this being natures method seems solid… We exist as products of nature.
The dictionary definition of nature does what it can to divide man from nature but that doesn’t work for me. It might for Dawkins though.
And nature organizes the universe…Do you go along with that? Planet Earth, Jupiter, Mars.
The universe that Eddy finds meaningless.
What is the meaning of blue? That’s easy because we aren’t nervous about blue. It has no meaning to us beyond a sensory perception upon which we attach personal associations.
And if we go to life in general…not just human life…a similarly casual response.
It is surely natural for us to think of man as being our prime interest and when we come to human life our attitude naturally changes. There ought to be a ‘meaning’ to mans life we say… We want a meaning no matter what.
So where is nature on this? Does it have a ‘meaning’ for the universe? For man?
We exist, and would have done without Descarte’s ‘I think…’.
I believe the universe exists and to try to understand it’s existence I go to the ‘It’s like’ principle. And I find it to be rather ‘like’ natures life force. I place it there. Meaning?…Wobbly. I wouldn’t find meaning an applicable term for it.
We can identify consequences arising from it’s existence but this doesn’t give us an answer to the, Why? I’d say there isn’t an answer to that because it isn’t a sensible question to ask.
In the human realm I see life as a gift…although without all the gratitude stuff. It’s a gift…take it or leave it…that’s where I am.
And if this sounds ungrateful of me, I think you might be making presumptions in your campaign to understand. You are presuming that nature holds a special place for man in giving us existence. I would say that nature favours equally. Nothing specific to us. Nature has no special place for man.
If you have trouble with this one, change viewpoints. Ask yourself…Does nature prefer Earth to Jupiter?
When we have the confidence to stop inventing and implying a clarity exists. This is not being simplistic. It is not simplifying the complicated… That is another method that cannot lead to understanding.
By not inventing we avoid creating those complicated notions that bog us down.
The answer will sometimes be…no answer. That is an answer in itself. Wrong viewpoint? Not a sensible question? Get understanding from here.
Chris, I woke this morning worried about making implications explicit.
Your posts of the 9th and 10th and mine of the 10th as well.
I want to be responsible in my reply to you and I’m not sure how you might have interpreted my, ‘yes’ on the 10th.
Indeed, it was very difficult for me to interpret your sentence, (as in set of words complete in itself), …although that was actually my problem. For it to be explicit it seemed incomplete. Perhaps you or Brandom could help me understand.
Leaving aside “with all due respect” for now, we come to…”it’s hard enough conducting this kind of exchange”.
Well that has been patently obvious…one hundred posts about consciousness from conscious people who are actually in possession of the commodity they are trying so ineffectively to describe.
Now the way that I interpreted that, having read all the stuff, was that this was your “kind of exchange”. Yes? It seemed to be so typical of you. Implicit. Was that a fair implication of mine?
So the answer from me was affirmative. Yes I agree, you have difficulties there. Is my reasoning good enough to satisfy you of my reason? That’s that bit.
But that leaves me short on understanding the other part of the sentence…the piece about numbers.
I had never realized that the ‘interlocutors’ you constantly refer to could only number two… Surely not. How does that work out? More explanation please.
Obviously it is my responsibility to try to interpret what might be implied by you.
Firstly perhaps…You feel that it would be easier to talk with John Little were I not adding my comments on what you say.
That would seem most unlikely though wouldn’t it?… You had eighty or ninety posts in comments before I joined in. So that would not be a reasonable argument for you to make or for me to infer as explicit. Comment please.
Second possible interpretation of your words…That eighty posts between two interlocutors establishes a situation that has its own right of exclusivity. Surely not.
One might equally say that it was high time someone else expressed a view. Nothing explicit here for me. What would Brandom say?
Then there is the point that this is a comment window on the subject in hand. That should surely have the possibility of being more broad than a forum for just two interlocutors. Your response would help me here.
Perhaps it is that you and John are the ‘qualified’ ones…How about that as an interpretation. Perhaps you feel that I should step down in deference. Is that what you imply?
I can’t agree to that. I have only made nine comments, all of them on topic. You should be able to handle a common person putting his hand in.
I’ll leave my conundrum for you to explain. I look forward to it. And as to “all due respect”…I take it that I have the right to a view on if you have given me that.
John, it’s now 6 days since your last post: have you withdrawn from this exchange or are you just taking a break?
In case you have decided to withdraw from this exchange, I want to try to sum up my impressions of it from the beginning.
First of all, it is clear that something very important is at stake not only in general terms, but also for you and me as individuals. As you say, you think “consciousness” is the gift of biology and I think it is the gift of language. You think an understanding of how we function as evolved organisms can tell us how we come to be responsible agents or persons, but I think only an understanding of how we function as speakers can tell us that.
In other words, each of us is peddling a different creation-story, each of which supports a different conception of responsible agency, of personhood and therefore of social and political relations: for example, you think that actions such as enslavement and torture can be justified in certain circumstances by appeal to their consequences, while I believe that they’re absolutely unjustifiable, regardless of the consequences, because that is implicit in the status discourse gives to a speaker’s ability to give or withhold consent. Each of us appeals to a different set of discourses as authoritative (in the sense of giving us the relevant kind of understanding), – you to those of biology and neurology and I to those of philosophy and sociology, and, though we see no chance of converting each other, each of us is keen to persuade third parties, – particularly the young, – to recognise that authority.
The difference between us is thus as fundamental and comprehensive as that between any two religions or ideologies, and, given the depth of that difference, it is remarkable that we have managed to continue these exchanges for so long with so few insults being exchanged. I believe you’re profoundly wrong in a way that is characteristic of our times, but also interesting in itself, and I’ve benefited enormously from having you there in the Philo as a foil against which to develop my own thought: if I’d not had you to disagree with, and had you disagreeing with me, I would have had far less motive to explore the issues in such depth as I have. Besides, I think the tension between our developing positions has been one of the most powerful motors driving the Philo, and that others therefore have benefited from it also.
Stop trying to move the goalposts….responsible agency indeed!
No, this was a debate about whether animals are conscious, not about whether they are responsible agents.
”Each of us appeals to a different set of discourses as authoritative”.
Ah yes….but not all set of discourses are equally valuable….Disney films?
Remember the debate in the 70’s about whether bees could fly. On one side the aeronautical engineers pointing out that by the then-known laws of aeronautics bees did not have what it takes to fly, and on the other side the empiricists.
The problem with theoretical arguments like yours is GIGO as they say in the trade (garbage in, garbage out).
For an example of what it is to genuinely want to find out whether animals are conscious try this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/do-lobsters-and-other-invertebrates-feel-pain-new-research-has-some-answers/2014/03/07/f026ea9e-9e59-11e3-b8d8-94577ff66b28_story.html
Or you could stick to your philosophy and sociology texts.
You say, “Stop trying to move the goalposts….responsible agency indeed!
No, this was a debate about whether animals are conscious, not about whether they are responsible agents.”
But responsible agency was one of my goalposts because, if you treat me as a responsible agent, you are IPSO FACTO treating me as conscious. Your failing to grasp this point may explain why we have so comprehensively failed to arrive at an understanding. I don’t see how I could have done more to make this point explicit.
See my Feb 16th post:
“(1) IF you demand to be treated as an interlocutor
(2) AND therefore as responsible
(3) AND therefore as conscious,
(4) (SINCE you cannot be held responsible for an act of which you could not have been conscious),
(5) THEN your demand commits you to treating as conscious all those to whom you make that demand, but also whoever else is treated as an interlocutor by them.”
I’m sorry my attempt at magnanimity fell on such stony ground.
John, if you aren’t too exhausted I’d value your opinion of a posit.
I frame it around the torture topic you spoke of.
I would think that your position that it is wrong but sometimes unavoidable is shared by most humans. That leads you into a difficult bind… One that I would find impossible sort.
How could one be satisfied where the ‘unavoidable’ threshold began?
It’s the old morality problem… How much compromise? One for five? Four?
I would like to propose a different approach…
Humans kill, injure and inflict pain on innocent people constantly and always have. There is no reason to believe that these wounds cause any less pain than torture might… So I’m saying that the word torture is a loaded one in pain terms.
We find torture distasteful. We do it none the less.
Morals are expedient…but our ‘good intentions’ shield us from responsibility.
So why not drop the ‘Human Morality’ claim?
If we took the position that all our ‘atrocities’ are allowed by nature we would be doing nothing more atrocious than recognizing how humans actually behave. Morality has not worked. Short term at least, nature approves of us.
Then we make an important gain:
We are no longer deluded about how we behave or what our intentions are.
So now when you are trying to make the torture or not decision you will be faced directly by the situation. The responsibility becomes yours and yours alone. A personal ethic if you like.
You might or might not do it but you will have no mandate from the delusion that inhumane is committed by any other animal than man.
On March 2nd, John accepted Bill as a party to these exchanges, declaring them both “vindicated” by some tortuously laboured misinterpretation of my position, so it’s hard to see how he could justify failing now to respond to Bill’s challenge, which is delivered, after all, in the most amicable of tones and with none of the ponderous sarcasm that habitually characterizes his references to myself; and, since it was my own position that John described as “dangerous”, I look forward with an almost indecent interest to his response.
The ponderous sarcasm is sometimes imagined by Christopher and sometimes underestimated.
I am not challenging John and I’m pleased that my tone is friendly…you see John doesn’t use expressions like “accepted Bill as a party to these exchanges”.
I will remind Chris that the Philo is supposed to be an open exchange…at least that was my understanding of it.
Chris has the attitude that all this is about “opponents and challenges”. He is stifling and boring with nothing vital to say.
It is he who is the “point scorer”…He has no interest in my posit other than as ammunition against his chosen “opponent”.
Chris is being disingenuous, and I wasn’t being sarcastic when I suggested that he should resign.
I make no demand upon John to answer my posit. I imagine that he is pretty tired of philosophy and the Philo will be lucky to keep him if Chris doesn’t go. Surely that is clear.
Chris
No, I don’t think I misunderstood.
We are not in dispute about whether animals are responsible agents.( No).
I dont think we are in dispute about whether to be a responsible agent you have to be conscious. (Yes….with a few reservations)
What we are in dispute about is whether to be conscious you need to be a responsible agent / language user.
Your March 13th post misrepresents the argument, as I think anyone who has being following it, or who heard your talk, will see.
You set up necessary and sufficient conditions for what I will call ‘Chronsciousness’ (similar to what others call access or narrative consciousness) but claim that you are talking about consciousness in general,
It’s like saying the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a rectangle are to be a quadrilateral with four right angles and a pair of adjacent sides equal (ie over prescribing it) then denying most rectangles are rectangles.
I could agree with everything you say on March 13 and still ask ‘what’s that got to do with whether animals are conscious’?
I repeat….you move the goalposts.
Bill
I accept what you say about the difficulty of making moral judgements on this issue, but the same problem is there for the deontologist. Remember you have to answer the problem of what constitutes ‘torture’…..threatening them?, shouting at them?, slapping them?, imprisoning them?
Those who claim that torture can never be justified, whatever the consequences (even if it is the death in screaming agony for everyone on earth), seem to me to be fanatics. Would you really put such a value on your own integrity that you would sacrifice everyone you loved (or just everyone) to preserve it?
Have a listen to this podcast (Philip Pettit on Philosophy Bites)
http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/5/3/3/53350985e1a37c23/Philip_Pettit_on_Consequentialism.mp3?c_id=3729805&expiration=1426443379&hwt=008e003eb2170cb96fdf912fac0ff6ea
It’s pretty much my position.
Your comment ”If we took the position that all our ‘atrocities’ are allowed by nature we would be doing nothing more atrocious than recognizing how humans actually behave. Morality has not worked. Short term at least, nature approves of us.”…..worries me.
Human moral systems are attempts to IMPROVE on nature. Remember the line from African Queen…” Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
I don’t think we find moral rules in nature….what is adaptive is not to be equated with what is good. If, for example, our ancestors have survived through repeated genocides, cannibalism and the oppression of women it would seem to be stretching a point to say nature ‘allows’ or even ‘approves’. Ditto meat eating. Today we have a choice. I go for nature’s ‘benign indifference’ (Camus).
With moral systems I always draw the parallel with bridge building. There are lots of ways of doing it (rope, wood, stone, metal etc) but not all ways are equally effective (out of egg boxes?). So with moral systems….don’t write them off unless you think we would be better off without them. Try to find one that does ‘work’ or works a little better. But be aware of the ‘crooked timber of mankind’ that you have to work with.
In general the aim is the general welfare of mankind (or all sentient beings) but this is a choice….not one you can derive logically or read from nature. (I am not saying that reason and science/psychology are not important in designing systems).
I didn’t understand your last line ‘You might or might not do it but you will have no mandate from the delusion that inhumane is committed by any other animal than man’. If you mean that only humans can be inhumane then of course I agree.
Thanks for your interesting comments.
You say:
“We are not in dispute about whether animals are responsible agents.( No).
I dont think we are in dispute about whether to be a responsible agent you have to be conscious. (Yes….with a few reservations)
What we are in dispute about is whether to be conscious you need to be a responsible agent / language user.”
I agree that the question of whether language is necessary for consciousness is a part of what is at issue between us, but I had said: “You think an understanding of how we function as evolved organisms can tell us how we come to be responsible agents or persons, but I think only an understanding of how we function as speakers can tell us that.”
If the position I attribute to you here is not yours, please say so because this is obviously a central aspect of any dispute about the significance of language.
To Bill you say:
“I accept what you say about the difficulty of making moral judgements on this issue, but the same problem is there for the deontologist. Remember you have to answer the problem of what constitutes ‘torture’…..threatening them?, shouting at them?, slapping them?, imprisoning them?
Those who claim that torture can never be justified, whatever the consequences (even if it is the death in screaming agony for everyone on earth), seem to me to be fanatics. Would you really put such a value on your own integrity that you would sacrifice everyone you loved (or just everyone) to preserve it?”
I say: “Torture entails subjecting to fear and/or pain without his consent an individual who is helpless and in your power, and therefore poses no threat to you.”
That’s what torture is; now I invite you to define “integrity”.
Torture entails subjecting to fear and/or pain without his consent an individual who is (currently) helpless and (currently) in your power, and therefore poses no (immediate personal) threat to you (or others).
For goodness sake…
If a person were in dialogue although not responding relevantly…would that person be conscious?
Chris…….did you bother to listen to the podcast?
I take the usual sense of integrity…..strict adherence to moral and ethical principles.
But to stick to a principle WHATEVER THE CONSEQUENCES (Fiat justitia ruat caelum …… “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”) constitutes fanaticism in my book.
Petit refers to this (in the context of truth telling – though he does discuss torture)
as …”just mad” (at 10.50). I agree.
John…..your last post wasn’t entirely what you meant. Even a low down consequentialist might be sticking to an ethical principle. Might even put a great value on his personal integrity. But to value your own integrity over the well being of those around you does not seem to me particularly praiseworthy.
A bit like a would be martyr with his eyes set on heaven ignoring the suffering he might causing by his actions on earth.
John…..Have you started talking to yourself?
What do you mean…’started’?
Chris…..you say “Torture entails subjecting to fear and/or pain without his consent an individual who is helpless and in your power, and therefore poses no threat to you.”
What if he is helpless and in your power but DOES pose a threat to you (atom bomb in city….release of a lethal virus etc)? Torture away?
Clarification please.
Earth calling John , come in John.
Denying all a place in eternity is another scenario ??? Very serious for a believer.
You say, “I take the usual sense of integrity…..strict adherence to moral and ethical principles.”
Sidgwick treats egoism as a moral principle: would adhering strictly to egoism, – i.e., acting opportunistically in accordance with what you conceive of as your interests, – confer “integrity” in your sense?
“Integrity”. Simple question Simple answer: Yes or No?
“Torture”. If he’s in your power, then, whoever actually threatens you, – e.g., his accomplices who are still at large, – it isn’t he, so you can’t plead defensive necessity to justify torturing him.
I wonder if Chris has ever answered with a ‘simple’ yes or no.
But surely Chris, by your argument on interlocutors, if he has not consented to be “in your power”, you have no right to detain him at all. You must let him go immediately…Isn’t that so? Integrity.
And if you were to be relevant and accept the time element that I added to your definition of torture, (my last post)…perhaps you, (Chris) could consider torturing him in anticipation of him not being justifiably in your power any longer. Integrity. You can’t. Integrity won’t let you. Integrity in tact…But your argument has fallen apart.
Now he’s free. Free to get you if he chooses. Are you going to wait?
Integrity… Yes or No. Take longer if you want…why not? It’s not a simple matter at all.
And what about bullying Chris?… Your word ‘fear’ in your torture definition 17Mar.
I’m sure I’m not the only one to detect a bullying tone in your posts. Are you an intellectual bully Chris? Challenges, directions and orders.
I do love an absolute fact when I come across one…here are two for you to ponder:
1. I have had no support on these pages in asking for your resignation.
2. I have had no criticism on these pages in asking for your resignation.
Let me offer an alternative definition of “integrity”:
“not proposing or doing what you can’t coherently justify”.
If you accepted that, the next step would be to define “coherently justifying”.
Chris…as you know I have always disagreed with you about whether words
are as useful as you seem to argue. I took up your open challenge on this site many months ago. You were saying that your ‘opponents’ had no coherent criticism to make.
Although it will be of no interest to you, I admire and identify with your determination.
Some of the sarcasm that you accused me of then wasn’t directed at you. It wasn’t sarcasm at all…At a meeting I once put a proposition to you which you dismissed out of hand with the sarcastic words, “Really, I’d get that written up if I were you.”
Well, I have to thank you for that because I have written it up, along with a lot more philosophy that you would hate, in the form of an accessible novel.
Some of the material that I have said to you was directly from what I was writing at the time. I remember you pouncing on “stupid”…I was writing at the time that there are fewer questions than we pose. That we ‘need’ an answer no matter how stupid our question.
I wasn’t always being personal.
It would be good if we could continue the current stuff…I’ll take that liberty now.
You say….”Let me offer an alternative definition of “integrity”:
“not proposing or doing what you can’t coherently justify”.
If you accepted that, the next step would be to define “coherently justifying”.
I like to imagine that you could just lean back in your rocking chair, (not an insult…I enjoy my rocking chair), and have a smile with me over your words, “alternative definition”.
‘Alternative definition”. What the hell is that? Definition or not? Alternative morality too? This is where you loose me Chris. Your faith in words…they let you…us… down.
And as you know we then go on to disagree about defining “coherently justifying”.
It absorbs you but surely your intelligence could be better used. Your word games are no better than crosswords. Get onto philosophy…look for sensible answers to sensible questions and we would all be better off.
This is an extract I wrote about the word ‘justify’ as it was being used by Amis/Levi. Auschwitz is the topic. Language the subject:
‘Justify my claim for you…Again? That’s what I thought I’d just done. Not good enough for you my friend?
Ok…I’ll use the word JUSTIFY. Meanings… Threefold.
We will ignore ‘Neatly setting typeface’ . That’s obviously not the right one for here.
‘Make righteous in the sight of God’…I doubt God said much about language…this meaning is right on the fringe of what we want.
‘Show or prove to be right or reasonable’…That’s what you want of me. That’s what you want me to do.
…So now we have show, prove, right and reasonable coming into this…as defining justify. Well.
I’m not going to look up show because I suspect that’s going to go all over the map but can I say that to me show isn’t quite the same as prove.
Prove for me is to cover each and every possible case…know what I mean? No exemptions. Almost always impossible.
Show might be to just give one example of something or another. ‘This example shows the possibility…’
But the definition gives us the choice between show or prove. So I could go for show…it’s the easy one of the two.
Right. Now that’s difficult. Very difficult… Right by whose standards? Who’s the judge? There has to be an accepted framework here…and surely that framework will alter depending on what topic is being justified. Right has me completely stumped. As hard to use as prove.
Reasonable sounds easier at first…less judgmental… but buried within its own reasonableness is a vagueness that makes it itself impossible to pin down. Who could agree what was reasonable?…’No music after 23.00? Time off work to take the hamster to the vet?’…what on earth is reasonable?
Back to justify…So I have to prove that what I say about language is right or show that its reasonable or prove that its reasonable or show that its right…
You’ve got me. No I can’t justify it…and that’s because of the words. The language we have is inadequate to convey anything specifically. It always leaves room for interpretation or doubt.
Show that it’s reasonable is the easiest…still impossible though.
And If you could do that who would need to justify? It goes around and around.
It is unclear how any resolution could occur.’
And I don’t see how you can’t smile at “alternative definition”…For weeks now you and John have been swapping the words you have chosen. Never ‘defining’ anything in a useful way.
I ask ”What if he is helpless and in your power but DOES pose a threat to you (atom bomb in city….release of a lethal virus etc)? Torture away?”
Chris, I am not trying to be difficult, but I would be genuinely interested in an answer to THIS question…..not a different one. No accomplices….this man has planted a bomb that you cannot escape (or a mechanism for releasing a virus that will in all probability kill you). You might be able to get details of the mechanism and stop it happening. HE represents a threat to you.
You see I don’t understand what your position entails. If someone comes at you holding a knife you are entitled to do what it takes to stop him. If he comes wearing a suicide bomber’s jacket and is holding the ‘switch’ in his hand again you can do what it takes to stop him. If he has planted a huge bomb in the city and is holding the information you need to disable it in his head…..you can do nothing?
And another issue….why when self-defence is an allowable excuse for causing him harm (ie not having a stain on your integrity), is the defence of those you love not? A tad selfish I would have thought.
I will answer your question, but my definition of “integrity” is crucial to my way of answering it, so I must ask you: Do you or do you not accept that definition?
It was you, not I, who first mentioned “integrity” as something that might be dispensed with in difficult situations, so I think I’m entitled to press the point. You gave a definition which I then questioned, as follows:
“You say, “I take the usual sense of integrity…..strict adherence to moral and ethical principles.”
Sidgwick treats egoism as a moral principle: would adhering strictly to egoism, – i.e., acting opportunistically in accordance with what you conceive of as your interests, – confer “integrity” in your sense?”
You, I think, recognised the trap you’d walked into: either you would have to withdraw your definition or acknowledge that it was not a definition of “integrity” in “the usual sense”, so you evaded my question.
After your protracted silence, I offered you an alternative definition, that “integrity” consists in “not doing what you can’t coherently justify”, and asked you to accept it, but you chose not to respond to that because, I suspect, you recognise that “integrity” thus defined is something that, by definition, you can never justify dispensing with in even the most difficult situations. On the other hand, my definition is so undeniably right that you can’t very well be seen to reject it, so silence is your only secure position. “Concede nothing!”
Instead you belabour me with questions about what I would do or think myself entitled to do in such-and-such conditions: you want me to talk about action without having first established an agreed framework within which action can be coherently judged, but I’m not going to do that. I shall assume, without asking you explicitly to concede, that you are willing to accept my definition of integrity for purposes of argument, so that we can then move on to the question of what you have to do for any proposal in order to “justify” it.
What do you mean by “justify”?
Well done Eddy. You won easily. Congratulations…bravo. A fusillade of prevarication. No one could possibly equal that.
Commiserations to John but you were never in with a chance. Not complicated enough. Your reply to me, ‘that you weren’t quite happy with “allowed”… preferred, ‘benign disinterest’, is far too much in agreement. I’ll go along with that. And if human atrocities are not allowed by nature, how do they occur John?…Chris wouldn’t have fallen for that.
You grasp for hubris in saying we should improve on nature. Wasn’t Charlie the basic model and their saviour a flood? Hepburn dropped her ‘high minded’ ways. If nature isn’t perfect what model of perfection is there to behold?
We deliberately complicate our lives. Let’s see us as we are.
“Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.”
MOST HUMANS DELIBERATELY COMPLICATE THEIR LIVES
THE COMPLICATIONS CREATE CONFUSION
THAT CONFUSION PREVENTS UNDERSTANDING
A perfect example…16th January until now…Wine tasters and antelopes…
Chris, you do talk a load of, not to mince words, crap. If l was knocked down by a bus you would take it as proof that I conceded the argument to you.
Does it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe, my ‘silence’ is because I have better things to do?
But what makes this curious is that far from evading your question I had already answered it…..here’s what I said at 10.10 (after posting at 9.38)
.John ….your last post wasn’t entirely what you meant. Even a low down consequentialist might be sticking to an ethical principle. Might even put a great value on his personal integrity. But to value your own integrity over the well being of those around you does not seem to me particularly praiseworthy.
OK I’ll change a word to make it fit your challenge:
Even a low down egoist might be sticking to an ethical principle. Might even put a great value on his personal integrity (which for an egoist might involve not pretending to be something you are not). But to value your own integrity over the well being of those around you does not seem to me particularly praiseworthy.
And note that Sidgwick is taking a very broad view of ethics in which egoism is called an ethical principle in the sense of a ‘rational procedure’ for deciding what to do. Most of us today would take a narrower view of ethical principles.
“Crap”? “Risible”? These are terms of abuse rather than rational criticism, – playing the man rather than the ball.
If “integrity” consisted, as you pretend, in rigid adherence to a principle, however arbitrarily chosen, no one would expect it of you; but integrity IS expected of you, so I propose again that “integrity”, as most people intuitively understand it, consists in “not doing what you cannot coherently justify”.
Do you accept that definition for purposes of argument? If so, we can address what is involved in “coherently justifying”.
This is the sort of crap that annoys me:
”You, I think, recognised the trap you’d walked into: either you would have to withdraw your definition or acknowledge that it was not a definition of “integrity” in “the usual sense”, so you evaded my question.
”After your protracted silence, I offered you an alternative definition, that “integrity” consists in “not doing what you can’t coherently justify”, and asked you to accept it, but you chose not to respond to that because, I suspect, you recognise that “integrity” thus defined is something that, by definition, you can never justify dispensing with in even the most difficult situations. On the other hand, my definition is so undeniably right that you can’t very well be seen to reject it, so silence is your only secure position. “Concede nothing!”
The plain fact is that I hadn’t visited the website for a week until last night.
That’s all my silence signified. If you will stop psychologising breaks in this discussion, I will carry on.
By the way I will shortly be cowering in Cumbria, terrified that your penetrating discursive power will expose yet more of my feeble arguments.
Which will give you plenty of time to consider your answer to the question, What is it to justify coherently?
This was a discussion on whether animals have consciousness. It’s one thing to move the goalposts but you have switched pitches, if not games. No, I don’t want to go down that tired old path….we meet it too often at the philsoc….disagreeing about what justification is, what consent involves etc. I’ll pass on that one (though no doubt you will try to provoke me).
But I will return to integrity.
“I take the usual sense of integrity…..strict adherence to moral and ethical principles.” Yes, I will defend that definition. It implies pluralism.
It seems to me that any (coherent) moral philosophy will generate its own conception of ‘integrity’. Yours is certainly not the only one…..read Bill on the slipperiness of words.
We both would reject ‘egoism’ as an ethical principle (to me ethics has to be concerned with the welfare of others) but I will accept it for the purposes of debate with my stated reservation: ”note that Sidgwick is taking a very broad view of ethics in which egoism is called an ethical principle in the sense of a ‘rational procedure’ for deciding what to do. Most of us today would take a narrower view of ethical principles”.
So I think there could be a egoist version of integrity (see above). Certainly I think there is a Nietzchean version (though I do not admire either).
And I don’t admire your version either. In fact it seems to me you have an egoist version, though you cant see it. It’s not a material egoism but it IS a spiritual egoism….an egoism of the soul.
You once rewrote ”For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” as ”For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his integrityl?”
My probing you in the past on issues like the exceptional use of torture make it clear that your version can be stated as ”For what shall it profit a man, if he shall SAVE the whole world, and lose his integrity?”.
You have an egoist’s over-evaluation of your own integrity combined with an egoist’s concern with profit.
Your defence of torture depends upon your being able to claim that you do it on behalf of the many who might otherwise be harmed. The claim is effectively that they authorize you to do it in their names. But they can authorize you only if each of them individually can justify doing so; i.e., each of them individually is in the same position as yourself of needing to justify it, and my argument is that none of you individually can justify it, which means that, however many of you there are, the number of those who can justify it and therefore authorize you to do it in their names is zero.
Anyway, let’s get back to consciousness, – your comfort-zone. The following is a development of point 7 in the summary I posted on Jan 22:
(7.a.1) “Consciousness” is generally agreed to be “intentional” in the sense that it is always consciousness OF some “object”.
(a.2) The objects of consciousness can be either “concrete” (i.e., material things or events such as a flashing light or a pain in the neck) or “abstract” (i.e., ideas such as “relation” or “quality”).
(a.3) Except where it takes itself as its object, consciousness is, in principle, distinct from its objects (i.e., the consciousness of a flashing light is not itself a flashing light whereas the consciousness of consciousness is itself necessarily consciousness).
(a.4) Sensations are mere events; they aren’t intentional; they aren’t “about” anything; they have no objects, only causes; they are effects, not expressions.
(a.5) Interpretations of sensations (e.g., medical diagnoses) are subject to normative assessment (e.g., as true or false, correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate), but sensations themselves are not.
(a.6) Reactions of dumb animals to sensory stimuli can be interpreted as intentional (i.e., as themselves implicitly interpretive), but only by beings who are capable of judging the interpretations (not the reactions) in normative terms.
(a.7) If consciousness is necessarily intentional, then sentience can’t be a form of consciousness.
To put what I think is the same argument in another way:
(7.b.1) When we speak of “consciousness”, we speak necessarily only of what we can say about it, and what we can say about it we can share or have a common consciousness of.
(b.2) And we can share or have in common a meaning for the word “consciousness” only through what we can say about it.
(b.3) Fundamentalist empiricism is wrong: Experience (i.e., what we’re conscious of) is not a given. Anyone who has been trained in any activity, whether scientific, artistic or athletic, knows that his ability to distinguish, name and characterize the features of that activity allows him to have, and therefore to share, a much deeper and more complex experience of it than was possible for him before he’d had, – and therefore for anyone who’d not had, – that training.
(b.4) So the word “consciousness” can MEAN for us only what we can say about it, and we have no warrant for claiming that any speaker (let alone any dumb animal!) has conscious experience of an object or event of which he can say nothing.
(b.5) I can share the consciousness (the knowledge and understanding or meaning) of your pain if you tell me about it, – and I can worry about it on your behalf, even if you don’t worry about it yourself, – but I can’t share the pain about which I worry on your behalf.
(b.6) So sentience, which can’t be shared, can’t be a part of what we mean when we speak of “consciousness”.
(b.7) “Consciousness”, therefore, must be identified with sapience, i.e., with our capacity for knowledge, meaning and understanding, which is the gift of language, – not with sentience.
What I call the Consciousness Movement (as represented by, e.g., the Blackwell Companion and the Cambridge Declaration) seek bundles sapience and sentience together under the general category of “consciousness”, takes sentience as the paradigm of that category, and pretends that both sapience and sentience can be studied together in naturalistic terms.
I see this as a bid by the ideologists of scientism/naturalism to wrest authority in moral and political matters away from philosophers and theologians, and, by implicitly downgrading the role of discourse in the instituting of our statuses as responsible agents, it seeks to downgrade the role of consent in determining what counts as a justification, replacing it by consequential calculation in quantitative terms.
Correction: 2nd line of penultimate para., remove “seek”.
Chris, You seem to make little distinction between the state of being conscious and consciousness.
Sentience is a prerequisite for being conscious. This must be followed by an ability to respond to these perceptions, react with awareness, before ones said to be conscious.
Consciousness has a further dimension beyond sentience and the reaction… It’s being aware of the awareness. Mindfulness of ones mind.
This is what I sum up as, ‘Thinking about thinking.’
If you don’t see this difference…fine.
Your points b.1 to b.5 only describe the inadequacy of words and they make little sense to me.
B.1.2. Tautology and you assume objectivity in word interpretation.
B.3. ‘Much deeper’, ‘more complex’…Waffle.
B.4. So a dog does a stool and sniffs it and scratches around it without saying a word. Has it had a conscious experience Chris?
Can a hermit have consciousness?
B.5. Because you cannot share the pain,(and certainly not the experience…we have different pain thresholds), there is nothing that you can share meaningfully beyond the information that you are talking to someone who is feeling pain. You aren’t talking about consciousness. You are trying to talk about information.
And you ‘bundle’ words together for the convenience of your argument. Conflate, I would say. You throw out the words ‘knowledge, understanding and meaning’ as though they were given components of consciousness.
Only the awareness element of these words applies to consciousness. No more than that. Yes…you have to be aware to have knowledge or to understand or grasp meaning…but more beside. This extra element is not a requirement for consciousness. A confused person can have consciousness. Their conscious experience will be without knowledge or understanding. They can react to their perceptions none the less. Their consciousness will be aware of their own confusion.
B.6.7. You ‘bundle’, in order to separate, sapience with sentience. I don’t know if your egotism is separate from your ideology…it obviously suits you to conflate sapience and sentience. …Dismiss sentience which you seem to lack, favouring sapience, (attempting to appear wise), to which you aspire. Neither word defines conscious or consciousness. Never mind.
Chris, …One that John is apparently tired of hearing from you,”What is it to justify coherently?”
There is a limiting factor to the words JUSTIFY and COHERENTLY. The words stand in the way of an answer…they do however vaguely describe a position that can be addressed meaningfully.
As a definition one could go no further than: TO AUTHENTICALLY FOLLOW ONES PERSONAL ETHIC.
This contains no value judgement because value judgements are a personal view.
Don’t ignore the word ‘authentically’…genuinely you, born of your experience.
No more “justification” is required and “coherence” is built in.
This is my last word on this thread.
1. Consciousness involves intentionality.
2. Sensations do not.
3. So sensations cannot be conscious.
Garbage in, garbage out.
To paraphrase Weinberg….To get intelligent people to believe crazy things…that takes philosophy.
Rules of thumb:
If you can represent an argument as garbage only by misrepresenting it, it’s probably not garbage.
Those who sneer at “philosophy” or “theology” or “sociology” or “science” should provoke only our pity.