David Chalmers: “When we visually perceive the world, we do not just process information; we have a subjective experience of color, shape, and depth. We have experiences associated with other senses (think of auditory experiences of music, or the ineffable nature of smell experiences), with bodily sensations (e.g., pains, tickles, and orgasms), with mental imagery (e.g., the colored shapes that appear when one rubs ones eyes), with emotion (the sparkle of happiness, the intensity of anger, the weight of despair), and with the stream of conscious thought.
“[That we have a sense of experiencing] is the central fact about the mind, but it is also the most mysterious. Why should a physical system, no matter how complex and well-organized, give rise to experience at all? Why is it that all this processing does not go on “in the dark”, without any subjective quality? Right now, nobody has good answers to these questions. This is the phenomenon that makes consciousness a *real* mystery.”[208]
Let me summarize what I consider to be an explanation for that ‘mystery,’ and then I’ll develop some further details.
When we see our friend Charles react to things, we cannot see the machinery that causes him to react in those ways—and so we have few alternatives to simply saying thinks like, “he is reacting to what he is experiencing.” But then, we must be using that word ‘experiencing’ as an abbreviation for what we would say if we knew what had happened inside some friend’s head—such as, “Charles must have detected some stimuli, and then made some representations of these, and then reacted to some of those by changing some of the plans he had made, etc.”
Furthermore, we ought to observe that, if your brain can begin to speak about some ‘experience’ it must already have access to some representations of some aspects of that event; otherwise, you would not remember it—or be able to claim that you have experienced it! So your very act of asserting that you have had that experience demonstrates that this ‘experience’ cannot be a simple or basic thing, but must be a complex process that is involved with the high-level networks of representations that you call your Self.
This means that the problem which Chalmers calls ‘hard’ is not really a single problem at all, because it condenses the complexity of all those many steps by squeezing them into the single word, ‘experience’ and then declares this to be a mystery.
What could make our sensations and feelings so difficult to talk about? You look at a color and see that it’s Red. Something itches your ear and you know where to scratch. That’s all there seems to be to it; you recognize that experience. No thinking seems to intervene. Indeed, quite a few philosophers have argued that the qualities of such sensations are so basic and irreducible that they will always remain inexplicable—because that is ‘just the way those things are’ and there is nothing else to an say about them.
However, here we shall will take the opposite view—that what we call sensations are extremely complex. They sometimes involve extensive cascades in which some parts of the brain are affected by signals whose origins they cannot detect—and therefore, would not be able to explain.
However, I do not mean at all to suggest that this complexity must be an obstacle to our ever being able to understand what a sensation ‘really is.’ Indeed, to recognize that a subject is complex is often the first step in the process of mastering it! This is can be seen as a principle that often applies to Psychology:
The “Easy is Hard Paradox”: The things that seem the simplest may actually be the ones that are the most complex.
In other words, if you wrongly insist that something is simple, then it will remain a mystery—because, if you are actually facing an intricate problem, then you are unlikely to find a path toward solving it, until you recognize how complex it is.
In particular, the mystery of ‘subjective experience’ won’t disappear until we recognize how it may engage many other aspects of how we think—including our highest forms of reflective thought.
§9-7. How do you know when you’re feeling a pain?
Common sense might answer that you can’t have a pain without knowing it. However, some thinkers disagree with that:
Gilbert Ryle: “A walker engaged in a heated dispute may be unconscious of the sensations in his blistered heel, and the reader of these words was, when he began this sentence, probably unconscious of the muscular and skin sensations in the back of his neck or his left knee. A person may also be unconscious or unaware that he is frowning, beating time to the music, or muttering.”[209]
Similarly, Joan might first notice a change in her gait, and only later notice that she’s been favoring her injured knee. Indeed, her friends may be more aware than she is, of how much that pain was affecting her. Thus, one’s first awareness of being in pain may come only after detecting other signs of its effects, such as discomfort or ineffectiveness—perhaps by using the kind of machinery that we described in §4-3.
If you think you feel pain, could you be mistaken? Some would insist that this cannot be because pain is the same as feeling pain—but again our philosopher disagrees:
Gilbert Ryle: “The fact that a person takes heed of his organic sensations does not entail that he is exempt from error about them. He can make mistakes about their causes and he can make mistakes about their locations. Furthermore, he can make mistakes about whether they are real or fancied, as hypochondriacs do.”
We can make such mistakes because what we ‘perceive’ does not come directly from physical sensors but from our higher-level processes. Thus, at first the source of your pain may seem vague because you have only noticed that something’s disrupting your train of thought; then the best that you can say might be, “I don’t feel quite right, but I don’t quite know why. It could be a headache just starting to hurt. Or maybe the start of a bellyache.” And while such feelings indeed might result from a pain, they could also result from other conditions that your mental critics misrepresent as caused by a pain.
Similarly when you are falling asleep, the first things you notice might be that you’ve started to yawn, or keep nodding your head, or making a lot of grammatical errors; indeed, your friends might notice these before you do. One might even see this as evidence that people have no special ways to recognize their own mental states, but do this with the same methods they use to recognize how other persons feel.
Charles: Surely that view is too extreme. Like anyone else, I can observe my behavior ‘objectively.’ However, I also have an ability—which philosophers call ‘privileged access’—with which I can inspect my own mind ‘subjectively’ in ways that no other person can.
208
See http://eksl-www.cs.umass.edu/~atkin/791T/chalmers.html and http://consc.net/papers/puzzle.html. For more details, see