January 18, 2022

Guidelines for Short Papers Each paper must be double spaced, justified on the left side only (turn off right-hand justificat

Guidelines for Short Papers Each paper must be double spaced, justified on the left side only (turn off right-hand justification) in Times Roman 12-point font (or equivalent), with margins of at least 1 inch. Papers must be no longer than 2 pages.I will stop reading at the bottom of the secondpage. Do not attempt to summarize every aspect of the paper! This exercise is designed to help you learn how to identify and summarize the core argument(s) in anarticleaccurately and succinctly.You may but are not required tooffer some critical insight into the assigned reading. This can take the form either of agreeing or disagreeing with the author(or both)and explaining why you agree or disagree. To do this you need to spell out the author’s position enough so that your own remarks have some context. If you wish, you may focus your attention on a particular argument or part of a paper, as long as it is central to the main issue and not a peripheral point. It is your choice which readings you write on, but you must hand each paper in on the class in which we will discuss the material you wrote about. For example, if you wish to hand in an assignment on Flanagan and Polger’s paper, it is due at the beginning of class on February 27. So please pay close attention to the reading schedule. However, the reading you are to do this paper on is 21.Excerpt from Seager, William. 1999. Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment. London; New York: Routledge Pages 72-84 of the attached pdf article I will provide a copy of the reading for you to use and read as a word attachment. Please follow the guidelines and directions above. You must read the reading and then follow the directions stated above to write the short paper. I have attached both the reading you are to use for this short paper as well as an example of a short paper written by an A student in our class on a different reading/topic that you can look at to see how it should look. Thank you and im looking forward to seeing the work you do on this short paper. The reading you are to do this short paper on is a pdf and the sample is a word document.

Lack of instructions

21.Excerpt from Seager, William. 1999. Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment. London; New York: Routledge

Pages 72-84 of the attached pdf article

I will provide a copy of the reading for you to use and read as a word attachment. Please follow the guidelines and directions above. You must read the reading and then follow the directions stated above to write the short paper. I have attached both the reading you are to use for this short paper as well as an example of a short paper written by an A student in our class on a different reading/topic that you can look at to see how it should look. Thank you and im looking forward to seeing the work you do on this short paper. The reading you are to do this short paper on is a pdf and the sample is a word document.

In his essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat, Thomas Nagel argues that regardless of the validity of physicalism, it is still impossible for humans to understand how physicalism could be true in that a complete physical description of consciousness is not possible. Nagel claims that the explanatory gap is unbridgeable since consciousness is necessarily subject to a particular point of view and any attempt to objectively understand consciousness is therefore rendered incomplete.

Nagel posits, first, that consciousness is not a strictly human phenomenon. Rather, there are other organisms which experience consciousness. From their consciousness, and their consciousness alone, Nagel concludes that there is what it is like to be that organism. Nagel calls “what it is like to be that organism” the subjective character of experience. For Nagel, the reductionists must describe the subjective character of experience to a physical phenomenon, since, if base properties and all subsequently determined properties can be described in terms of physical properties then their resultant mental properties (consciousness) should be describable in terms of physical properties. However, for Nagel, this is the most difficult task of the physicalists since “every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.” (437)

To demonstrate the relationship between subjectivity and point of view, Nagel uses the experience of a bat. Bats use echolocation in order to perceive certain characteristics of real things (their size, motion, distance from the bat, etc.). While humans are also able to perceive these characteristics, due to the difference in sensory modalities, the way in which we do would be radically different from the way bats perceive these characteristics of reality. Nagel explains that even the limited ability to imagine oneself as a bat would merely constitute imagining oneself behaving like a bat and would not constitute any understanding of what it would be like to be a bat. Further, lacking the same sensory modalities as bats we do not have the correct experiential terms for describing what it would be like to be a bat. Nagel holds himself only to the claim that humans cannot describe the experience of a bat since we are not of the same type of being as a bat. That is to say that we are so different in our senses that we, humans, could never correctly describe the subjective character of experience of a bat. Nagel later uses the example, “Red is like the sound of a trumpet,” (449) to show the vanity of attempts at such descriptions between beings with differing sensory modalities (here between one with and one without vision). However, Nagel refuses to claim that all subjective characters of experience can never be described. He admits that humans may be able to understand a description of the subjective character of others’ experience since we are of the same type (beings with similar sensory modalities.) Nagel does not give a definitive divisor between types but posits only, “The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.” (442)

Nagel notes that humans and intelligent Martians, who’s physical makeup and sensory modalities are completely different from our own, may be able to come to the same conclusion regarding the physical phenomena that constitute a rainbow, or clouds, or lightning. However, the Martians could never understand the human conception of these things in the same way that we could not understand a bat’s conception of these things. The problem, for Nagel, in understanding the subjective character of experience is that it is ordinarily the role of the sciences to describe reality in terms of objective descriptions. However, since the subjective character of experience is necessarily subject to a particular point of view, any attempt to objectively describe it would be a step further from a correct conception. Nagel asks, “Does it make sense … to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me?” (448)

Nagel concludes, noting that the pursuit of understanding consciousness may allow for objective descriptions of consciousness, but ultimate understanding of consciousness will not be possible until the question of subjective and objective is first answered.

Bibliography Nagel, Thomas. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" The Philosophical Review, 1974: 435-450.

HOT THEORY: THE MENTALISTIC REDUCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Box 3.1 • Preview

The higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness asserts that a mental state is conscious if it is the object of a thought about it. Given that we have some naturalistically acceptable understanding of thoughts independent of the problem of consciousness, HOT theory promises a mentalistic reduction of consciousness. Then, the naturalistic account of non-conscious mind – which is presumably relatively easy to attain – solves the whole mind–body problem. HOT theory makes substantial assumptions . It assumes that the mind’s contents divide into the intentional (or representational) and the non-intentional (qualia, sensations). It assumes that consciousness requires conceptual thought, and what is more, requires apparently pretty sophisticated concepts about mental states as such. It assumes that no mental state is essentially a conscious state. It comes dangerously close to assuming that consciousness is always and only of mental states. Not all these assumptions are plausible, and they lead to many objections (e.g. can animals, to whom the ability to engage in conceptual thought may be doubted, be conscious; what is an unconscious pain, etc.). Some objections can be deflected, but problems remain that engage the generation problem and prevent the mentalistic reduction from going through successfully.

Philosophers have always been attracted by projects aiming to reduce consciousness to Something Else, even if this reduction might require a more or less radical reconception of our understanding of consciousness. They have been motivated by the hope that, as compared to consciousness, the Something Else would prove more tractable to analysis and would fit more easily into the physicalist world view (here it is perhaps encouraging that, compared to consciousness, almost anything else would possess these relative virtues). In the tradition of Descartes, consciousness was supposed to exhaust the realm of the mind, which itself thus became something immediately apparent and open to the mind’s own self inspection (inasmuch as conscious states of mind were somehow essentially self- intimating). There is of course something intuitively appealing to such a thesis

Seager, William. Theories of Consciousness : An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Group, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculwlu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=169266. Created from oculwlu-ebooks on 2020-04-07 21:28:23.

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but we have long since lost any sense that it must be true and are now happy to countenance legions of unconscious mental states and hosts of cognitive processes existing beneath or behind our conscious mental states. As we saw in chapter 1, even Descartes ended up endorsing a form of the view that finds cognition, or cognition-like phenomena outside of consciousness. A second traditional idea, one stemming from the empiricist heritage, is that there are basic or ‘atomic’ elements of consciousness which are pure sensory qualities and from which all ‘higher’ states of consciousness are constructed, either by complex conjunction or mental replication, or both. Hume, for example, calls these atomic elements the simple impressions.1 The impressions are the truly immediate objects of consciousness and their occurrence is supposed to be entirely independent of thought. The radical proposal of the HOT theories is to deny this last claim. What if consciousness were in fact dependent upon certain sorts of thoughts which themselves were part of the now admissible zone of unconscious mentation?

The appealing possibility is that consciousness is somehow a definable relation holding between certain mental states, where the latter do not already essentially involve consciousness and, of course, are in themselves less puzzling than consciousness itself. A mentalistic reduction of consciousness would have several virtues. The explanation of consciousness in terms of mentality would avoid the direct explanatory leap from consciousness to the physical, a leap which has always seemed somewhat to exceed philosophy’s strength. If consciousness can be reduced to anything at all, it is evidently more plausible that it be to something already mental than directly to brute matter. Yet mental states which do not intrinsically involve consciousness can be seen as ‘closer’ to the natural, physical world, and so this sort of reduction promises to build a bridge across our explanatory gap, supported by intermediate mental structures which can be linked to both sides with relative ease.

In order to evaluate such a project we require a precise specification of, first, the relevant non-conscious mental states and, second, the relation between them that is to account for consciousness. One such reductive theory, distinguished by its clarity and detailed presentation, has been advanced by David Rosenthal, first in ‘Two Concepts of Consciousness’ (1986) and then in a series of papers that have appeared over the last decade (see for example 1993a, 1993b, 1995). My aim here is to review Rosenthal’s theory and to argue that, in the end, it fails to reduce consciousness successfully. I will not claim outright that any theory of the sort we are considering must similarly fail, but I confess that the wide scope and extensive development of Rosenthal’s theory makes me doubt whether there are other theories of this sort which differ significantly from it. Thus I hope my objections will possess a quite general applicability.2

Rosenthal begins by dividing mental states into the two traditional, and presumably exhaustive, classes: intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs, hopes, expectations, etc.) and phenomenal or sensory mental states (e.g. pains, visual sensations, etc.).3 For now I’ll follow Rosenthal in this distinction, but it is in fact a substantial assumption which I shall doubt for much of the rest of this book, and

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one that is curiously unsupported by the details of the HOT theory. Rosenthal understands this distinction in terms of a division of mentalistic properties, so:

All mental states, of whatever sort, exhibit properties of one of two types: intentional properties and phenomenal, or sensory, properties. . . . Some mental states may have both intentional and phenomenal properties. But whatever else is true of mental states, it is plain that we would not count a state as a mental state at all unless it had some intentional property or some phenomenal property.

(1986, p. 332)

The first demand of theory specification is then met by asserting that no mental states are intrinsically or essentially conscious. This sweeping assertion would appear to be necessary to ensure the completeness of the theory, for otherwise there would remain a species of consciousness – the essential, non-relational sort of consciousness – for which the theory would offer no account. The claim that mental states are not intrinsically conscious is most plausible for the intentional states and least plausible for the phenomenal states, but there are some intuitive grounds for both. It is undeniable that we frequently ascribe intentional states of which we claim the subject is not conscious, even as we also claim that these intentional states are part of the causes and explanation of the subject’s behaviour. As for phenomenal states, Rosenthal offers this:

Examples of sensory states that sometimes occur without consciousness are not hard to come by. When a headache lasts for several hours, one is seldom aware of it for that entire time. . . . But we do not conclude that each headache literally ceases to exist when it temporarily stops being part of our stream of consciousness, and that such a person has only a sequence of discontinuous, brief headaches.

(1986, p. 349)

Of course, this is contentious, for one naturally wants to draw a distinction between the headache and the persistent condition that underlies it. The ache, which is the mental component, is indeed discontinuous but we allow the persistence of the underlying cause to guide our speech, even though the underlying cause is occasionally blocked from having its usual effect on consciousness. One wants to say that the ache is a sensing of this underlying condition and this sensing is not continuous. By analogy, if we are watching a woodpecker move through a dense wood for an extended time we will not actually be seeing the bird throughout that time. We nonetheless say that we watched the woodpecker for an hour. However, on Rosenthal’s side, I should point out that in cases where the headache can be felt whenever attention is directed towards it we are, I think, rather more inclined to say

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that the headache itself persisted even during the time it was not being consciously experienced. This sort of neglected but continually accessible sensation is quite common. If, even upon introspection, nothing was felt we would be reluctant to say that the ache might still ‘be there’, whether or not the underlying condition persisted. Of course, such considerations do not sever the relation between certain mental states and consciousness, but they do make that relation more complex.

Box 3.2 • Essential HOT Theory

For α to be a conscious mental state, the subject must have a higher-order thought about α. But not just any sort of thought, brought about in any sort of way, will do. Roughly speaking, we can say that for α to be conscious one must have the ‘properly’ acquired belief that one is in α. So HOT theory defines consciousness as follows:

α is a conscious state of S if and only if (iff) (1) S is in the mental state α, (2) S has an ‘appropriate’ thought about α (we’ll call having

this thought ‘being in the state T[α]’; the content of T[α] is something like ‘I am in state α’),

(3) S’s being in α causes S’s being in T[α], (4) S’s being in α does not cause S’s being in T[α] via inference

or sensory information. Each clause is necessary to avoid potential objections. It follows from HOT theory that to be conscious of anything is to be conscious of it as something- or-other. Every state of consciousness is ‘aspectual’. This follows from the fact that every thought must be, so to speak, structured from concepts. But it does not follow from HOT theory that anything has an essential conceptual aspect under which one must be conscious of it. It also follows from HOT theory that one can’t be conscious without having beliefs (i.e. the appropriate higher-order thought). But it does not follow that when one is conscious of a mental state that one is conscious of a belief. To be conscious of such beliefs requires yet higher-order thoughts about them.

In any case, I don’t want to press this point since HOT theory may offer an explanation of why we tend to think that consciousness is intrinsic to certain mental states. This involves the second specification task, the delineation of the relation between non-conscious mental states that accounts for consciousness. Rosenthal explains it so:

. . . it is natural to identify a mental state’s being conscious with one’s having a roughly contemporaneous thought that one is in that mental state. When a mental state is conscious, one’s awareness of it is,

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intuitively, immediate in some way. So we can stipulate that the contemporaneous thought one has is not mediated by any inference or perceptual input. We are then in a position to advance a useful, informative explanation of what makes conscious states conscious. Since a mental state is conscious if it is accompanied by a suitable higher-order thought, we can explain a mental state’s being conscious by hypothesizing that the mental state itself causes that higher-order thought to occur.

(1986, pp. 335–36)

Thus it is possible to maintain that if we tend to think of certain sorts of mental states as essentially involving consciousness this can be explained as the mistaking of a purely nomological link for a ‘metaphysical’ one. It might be, for example, that pains are normally such as to invariably cause the second-order thought that one is in pain and that abnormal cases are exceptionally rare (and, needless to say, rather hard to spot). In fact, this does not seem at all implausible. The machinery of philosophical distinctions mounted above is then seen as merely a case of philosophical error forcing us into an unnecessarily complex view of pains. It is literally true, according to the HOT Theory, that a pain – in possession of its painfulness – can exist without consciousness of it, but in fact almost all pains will be attended by consciousness of them, in virtue of causing the appropriate state of consciousness. One might even hope to account for the strength and constancy of this nomological link by appeal to its evolutionary usefulness. Rosenthal comes close to making this point (while actually making another) when he says: ‘. . . people cannot tell us about their non-conscious sensations and bodily sensations usually have negligible effect unless they are conscious. So non-conscious sensations are not much use as cues to [bodily] well being . . .’ (1986, p. 348). Nature would not likely miss the chance to entrench a causal connection between sensations, whether of pleasure or pain, and consciousness that is of such obvious biological benefit. Still, I believe that there remain serious difficulties with this view of the consciousness of phenomenal mental states, but it will take some effort to bring out my worries clearly.

Before proceeding let me introduce a piece of notation. We will frequently need to consider both a mental state and the second-order thought to the effect that one is in the former mental state. I will use Greek letters for mental states and form the second (or higher) order mental states as follows: the thought that one is in mental state α will be designated by T[α]. If necessary, we can allow this construction to be iterated, so the thought that one is in the mental state of having the thought that one is in the mental state α gets formally named T[T[α]], and so on. This notation allows a succinct characterization of HOT theory:

For any subject, x, and mental state, α, α is a conscious state iff (1) x is in α, (2) x is in (or, more colloquially, has) T[α],

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(3) x’s being in α causes x’s being in T[α], (4) x’s being in α does not cause x’s being in T[α] via inference or

sensory information.

Note that for a to be a conscious state, the subject, x, must be in T[α], but x will not normally be conscious of T[α] as well. This would require x to be in the still higher-order state T[T[α]]. Such higher-order thoughts are entirely possible but relatively rare; we are not usually conscious that we are conscious (of some particular mental state) and HOT theory’s explanation of this is quite satisfying. HOT theory has many other virtues which are well remarked by Rosenthal himself.

Still, the definition as it stands fails to mark a crucial distinction the neglect of which can lead to confusion. We must distinguish between α’s being a conscious state of the subject x and x’s being conscious of α. Sometimes HOT theorists as well as objectors appear to be conflating the idea that the subject has a second- order thought about α which makes α a conscious state with the idea that the subject is conscious of α in virtue of having the second-order thought. I think it would be an unfortunate consequence if HOT theory entailed that one could be conscious only of mental states. Most conscious states have an (intentional) object; a conscious perception of a cat has the cat as its object and the subject in such a state is conscious not of his state of consciousness but rather of the cat, that is, the intentional object of the state of consciousness. In fact, it is very rare for anyone to be conscious of a mental state, at least if it is a mental state with its own intentional object, and despite the philosophical tradition it is entirely mistaken to define consciousness as an apprehension of one’s own mental states. So in a spirit of improvement and to forestall confusion, we can emend the definition as follows. If α is a conscious state and the intentional object of α is ∈ then we say that the subject is conscious of ∈ (in virtue of being in the conscious state α). There may be, and Rosenthal assumes that there are, conscious states that have no intentional objects. In such cases, saying that a is a conscious state is equivalent to saying that the subject is aware of α. For example, if we suppose that pains are ‘purely phenomenal’ states with no intentional objects then to be conscious of a pain is just the same thing as the pain being conscious. But even here we must be cautious. To be conscious of a pain in this sense is not to be conscious of a pain as such. This is a much higher level affair demanding a state of consciousness whose intentional object is the pain, conceived of as a pain. We shall shortly see how attention to these distinctions can be important and can fit rather nicely into the HOT theory.

It is worth digressing here to consider a line of objection to HOT theory which I think ultimately fails. But the objection is interesting in at least three ways: it endorses its own radical transformation of our notion of consciousness and the reply to it reveals some subtle strengths of the HOT theory as well as bringing out certain features crucial for the defence of a representational view of consciousness. The attack is mounted by Fred Dretske (1993). Dretske’ s objections

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fundamentally depend upon a distinction between an experience’s being conscious and someone’s being conscious of that experience, and the claim that the former does not imply the latter. If Dretske is right about this we have not only a powerful challenge to HOT theories, but also a substantial and, I would say, very surprising extension of our knowledge about consciousness. However, I will try to show that Dretske’s objections cannot be sustained, revealing on the way some subtle strengths of HOT theories of consciousness.

Dretske follows Rosenthal’s use of some key concepts in setting forth his objections. Some states of mind are conscious and some are not: state consciousness is the sort of consciousness which conscious states enjoy. Conscious states are always (we think) states of some creature which is conscious: creature consciousness marks the difference between the conscious and the un- or non-conscious denizens of the universe. Creature consciousness comes in two flavours: transitive and intransitive. Transitive creature consciousness is a creature’s consciousness of something or other; intransitive creature consciousness is just the creature’s being conscious. Dretske allows that transitive creature consciousness implies the intransitive form, or

(1) S is conscious of x or that P ⇒ S is conscious. (1993, p. 269)

Furthermore, transitive creature consciousness implies state consciousness:

(2) S is conscious of x or that P ⇒ S is in a conscious state of some sort. (1993, p. 270)

A further crucial distinction is evident in (1) and (2) – the distinction between what Dretske calls thing-consciousness and fact-consciousness or the distinction between being conscious of an object4 and being conscious that such-and-such is the case.

Dretske’s basic objection to HOT theories, although articulated in a number of ways, can be briefly stated in terms of some further claims involving these distinctions. The most significant is that, in a certain sense, state consciousness does not require creature consciousness. That is, Dretske allows that states can be conscious without their possessor being conscious of them or conscious that they are occurring. Consider, for example, someone who is consciously experiencing a pain. By hypothesis, this is a conscious experience. Dretske’s claim is that it is a further and independent question whether this person is conscious of the pain or is conscious that he or she is in pain, and one which need not always receive a positive answer. If Dretske is correct, then HOT theories would appear to be in trouble, for they assert an identity between a state’s being a conscious experience of pain and the possession of the belief than one is in pain.

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We must, however, re-emphasize a subtlety of the HOT theory here. The belief that one is in pain, which according to HOT theories constitutes one’s consciousness of the pain, does not itself have to be and generally will not be a conscious state. One would be conscious of this belief only via a third-order state, namely a belief that one believed that one was in pain. Thus one cannot refute the HOT theory by claiming that it is possible for one consciously to experience pain without consciously believing that one is in pain, that is, without being conscious of a belief that one is in pain. HOT theories cheerfully embrace this possibility. This is important because Dretske does not

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Guidelines for Short Papers Each paper must be double spaced, justified on the left side only (turn off right-hand justificat

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