Epiphenomenal Mind: An Integrated Outlook on Sensations, Beliefs, and Pleasure 1138351377, 9781138351370

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Epiphenomenal Mind

According to epiphenomenalism, our behavior is caused by events in our brains that also cause our mentality. This resulting mentality reflects our brains’ organization, but does not in turn cause anything. This book defends an epiphenomenalist account of philosophy of mind. It builds on the author’s previous work by moving beyond a discussion of sensations to apply an epiphenomenalist outlook to other aspects of mental causation such as beliefs, desires, pleasure, and displeasure. The first four chapters of the book argue for a dualistic theory of sensations and develop an epiphenomenalist version of dualism. The remaining chapters discuss propositional attitudes and valence. The author also responds to potential objections to epiphenomenalism by considering how sensations, intelligence, or understanding might be built into a robot. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in philosophy of mind who are interested in consciousness, mental causation, and how our mentality is situated in the world. William S. Robinson is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Iowa State University. He writes on a variety of topics in philosophy of mind. Previous books include Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness (2004) and, for a more general audience, Your Brain and You (2010).

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Epiphenomenal Mind An Integrated Outlook on Sensations, Beliefs, and Pleasure

William S. Robinson

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of William S. Robinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Robinson, William S. (William Spencer), 1940– author. Title: Epiphenomenal mind : an integrated outlook on sensations, beliefs, and pleasure / by William S. Robinson. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Taylor & Francis, 2018. | Series: Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 115 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031816 | ISBN 9781138351370 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy of mind. | Causation. | Senses and sensation. | Mind and body. Classification: LCC BD418.3 .R756 2018 | DDC 128/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031816 ISBN: 978-1-138-35137-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43534-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Preface 1 Sensations A Theory of Sensations 2 An Objection Raised and Answered 5 Identity Theory, and a Key Argument for QER 9 Further Alternatives 17 Summary and Conclusion 25

vii 1

2 Developing Dualism Complexity and Simplicity 32 Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 41 A Causal Essentialist Alternative 43

29

3 Epiphenomenalism Interlude: Hameroff and Penrose 49 Back to Epiphenomenalism (1) 52 Interlude: Russellian Monism 53 Back to Epiphenomenalism (2) 57

45

4 Experience as Such Transparency 65 Experiences as Such for Nonlinguistic Animals? 66 Experiences as Such for Us 69 Cognitive Phenomenology 73 Transparency Redux 75

62

5 Mental Causation States of Brains? or of Parts of Brains? 80 Objections and Replies 86 Shoemaker’s Subset View 90

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vi Contents 6 Believing and Desiring The Quasi-quotational View 94 Mental Causation Redux 104 Relations between Quasi-quotation and Some Other Views 107 Conclusion 116

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7 Robots Sensations 117 Intelligence 118 Understanding 124 Objections to Robotic Understanding 125 Relation to Robotic Consciousness 133 Searle’s Argument from Extrinsic Assignability 136

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8 Unconscious Processing ‘Controlling One’s Thoughts’ 140 ‘Expressing One’s Thoughts’ 143 Some Corollaries 153

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9 Valence What Is It Like to Like? 156 A Dispositional Account 161 A More Positive Account 162 Objections and Replies 167 James’s Evolutionary Argument 172

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Epilogue Dividing Mentality 177 Control Redux 180 Self-Causation? 182 Responsibility 184 Attitudes 185

177

References Index

189 197

Preface

A metaphor that has proved useful in explaining epiphenomenalism describes our minds as gifts from our brains. One aspect of this metaphor will be relatively easy for many readers to accept: our mental life is dependent on events in our brains. Some other aspects will likely meet with some resistance. For one thing, recipients of gifts generally do not control what is given to them; thus the metaphor suggests that our mental life is not under our control. Further, once received, gifts are generally taken away by their recipients; or they may have been sent to distant recipients. They are thus not generally able to have effects upon their donors. The suggestion of this aspect of the giving relation is that our mental life does not cause events in our brains. The burden of this book is that these contentious suggestions of the gift metaphor contain more than a grain of truth. Our mental life, however, has three important parts, which raise different issues and require different treatments. These are sensations; propositional attitudes (most prominently believing and desiring); and valence, or pleasure and displeasure. The differences among these aspects of our mentality are sufficiently great that no single definition of “epiphenomenalism” can be given that precisely fits them all. There is, however, a collection of considerations that go together very naturally and include rejections of certain claims about efficacy. This consistent composition of views that are similar in theme, although not exactly the same in formulation, is the “integrated outlook” of my subtitle. The first four chapters offer an account of sensations. Chapter 1 introduces a dualist, neo-Lockean view, offers an argument for it that is not based on conceivability considerations, and explains difficulties in several rival accounts of sensations. Chapter 2 formulates the Hard Problem as it arises for dualists, describes a possible approach for its solution, and explains attractions and difficulties for two alternative approaches. Chapter 3 distinguishes epiphenomenalism for sensations from epiphenomenalism for propositional attitudes. It focuses on epiphenomenalism for sensations and explains its merits in comparison to interactionist dualism, Hameroff and Penrose’s OrchOR view, and Russellian Monism.

viii Preface Recent literature has made much of the so-called transparency of experience. Chapter 4 argues for replacing transparency with a recognition of depth as a feature within our experience. This stance requires two further explanations, also found in Chapter 4. These are an account of attending to an experience as an experience, and a resolution of some questions that arise from discussions of cognitive phenomenology. Chapter 5 turns from sensations to beliefs and desires. The arguments here are quite different from those that apply to sensations. They begin with challenges to common views of the nature of believing, and end with support for rejecting a common view of causation of behavior by beliefs and desires. While Chapter 5 says much about the nature of belief, and especially what it is not, the view it presents would not be compelling without a fuller, more positive account of belief. Chapter 6 provides this positive account in the form of a ‘quasi-quotational’ view of what we are doing when we attribute beliefs to ourselves or others. This view has interesting relations to the work of several other writers, sometimes by way of direct independent support, and sometimes by way of objections and replies that lead to clarifications and indirect support. The views developed in the first six chapters are related to many concepts of interest to philosophers of mind. Theories involving these concepts often raise questions that one would naturally expect the account offered here to answer. Some of these – questions about sensations, intelligence, and understanding – are conveniently discussed by asking whether a robot could be built to instantiate the corresponding properties (and if so, how). These questions are addressed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 is centrally concerned with two other concepts: control (of our thoughts) and expression (of our thoughts). It draws corollaries concerning the ‘Global Workspace’ metaphor, Searle’s view of the ­relation between consciousness and unconscious thoughts, and ­cognitive phenomenology. Chapter 9 turns to the third part of our mentality: valence. This topic is important in its own right, and the first part of Chapter 9 explains a theory of valence and defends it against two rival accounts. A proper understanding of valence is necessary for the discussion of a formidable argument against epiphenomenalism that is due to William James. The second part of Chapter 9 explains this argument and completes the defense of epiphenomenalism for sensations by responding to it. The Epilogue begins by reviewing some main themes of this book and addressing the question whether the outlook developed here gives a sufficiently unified account of our mentality. It ends by drawing some consequences of the epiphenomenalist outlook that concern responsibility for our actions, responsibility for who we are, and attitudes toward ourselves and others.

Preface  ix This book builds on previously published work. Some of that work is summarized here, but complete discussions are not reproduced. In general, reasons for holding certain views are stated, but objections and replies are left to be found in referenced works. Objections and replies to newly developed points are, of course, provided here. Some of the new material is critique of views that have been recently developed by others. The emphasis, however, is on giving a positive understanding of the attractiveness of the epiphenomenalist outlook for which this book argues. I would like to thank Margaret Holmgren and Chris Schriner for helpful comments on parts of this book, and Bill Seager for holding my feet to the fire for all of it. I also thank three anonymous reviewers, each of whom contributed suggestions and comments on the penultimate draft that have led to many improvements in the final version.

1 Sensations

1. As one of my article titles has it, Red is the Hardest Problem. If we can achieve a full understanding of what red is, how it is in the world, how it comes to be in the world, we will have understood the problem of what consciousness is, and we will have solved the Hard Problem of consciousness. There is, of course, nothing special about red. Any color could occur in its place: so could taste qualities (sweet, oreganoish, vanilla-flavory) or odor qualities (sulfurous, floral, vinegary), sound qualities (C#, resonant, shrill) or tactile qualities (slick, rough, warm). Similarly, we could just as well focus on the qualities of our bodily sensations, such as itchiness or nausea. These qualities, and other qualities in the same sensory modalities, are known to philosophers as qualia. The term often extends to cover emotional qualities, such as the quality of the feeling one has when angry, or the feeling one has when embarrassed, elated, jealous, and so on. I take this extended use to be justified. Emotions, however, are complex, and I do not want to make my results here dependent on agreement about all aspects of the theory of emotions. So, I shall mainly be concerned with sensory qualia – qualities like those in the preceding paragraph. Qualia are qualities, which is to say that they can occur in more than one instance. We will eventually need to have a term that denotes an instance of a quale. We shall see, however, that how we are to conceive of an instance of a quale is a controversial matter. This chapter will address this controversy. Its broader aim is to explain a view of sensations that will, among other things, justify the claim of centrality for phenomenal qualities in the study of consciousness. It begins by explaining a neo-Lockean view that will then be supported with an argument that avoids reliance on conceivability. Later in the chapter, I compare this view favorably with several physicalist views. The result will be a substantial case for the need to develop dualism for sensations, a task that will be pursued in the following three chapters.

2 Sensations

A Theory of Sensations 2. We may begin with a view that has its roots in Galileo and Locke (although the physical details are updated). When we see a red object, light rays are reflected from its surface into our eyes. These light rays are electromagnetic disturbances and they are completely described by their energy and frequency (or, wavelength) composition. The character of the reflected light depends (a) on the character of the light that falls on the object, and (b) on the molecular structure at the surface of the object, which determines which percentage of each wavelength is reflected. When the reflected light encounters our retinas, it causes changes in opsins in our cone cells. These cone cells are specialized neurons, and they synapse onto other neurons in our retinas. The latter synapse onto further neurons, eventually causing neural activations in primary visual areas in the back of our brains. These activations have effects in neurons at many other places in our brains, and these effects may eventually lead to actions (through activating motor neurons). Some subset of these neural activations also causes an instance of red – an instance that may be called ‘our experience of red’, or ‘a red experience’. This instance of red is an episode of consciousness. Although Galileo wrote earlier, Locke’s use of “ideas” is more suggestive of the foregoing view than is Galileo’s location of sensory qualities in the “living body”. So, I shall call it a ‘neo-Lockean’ view. The neo-Lockean view is not a popular view today. But let us make explicit some claims that would seem natural if one held it. The most instructive corollary of the view is that it is committed to two senses of ‘red’. There is the red object: this is an object that can reflect light. There is the instance of red that is an episode in our consciousness: this is not an object that can reflect light. Moreover, the redness in our consciousness has a claim to be the central meaning of the term ‘red’; for it does seem that the meaning of the word ‘red’ is a color that we find in our conscious experience. The red that is in the object can be defined in terms of the red in consciousness. Namely, a red object is one that, in normal lighting conditions (e.g., daylight), will produce red in the experience of people with normal sight.1 In the sense of ‘red’ in which redness occurs in an episode of our consciousness, red objects are, on this view, not red. They are objects with surfaces whose molecules resonate at certain wavelengths. Resonating requires energy, so wavelengths at which molecules resonate are wavelengths at which energy is absorbed,  i.e., 1 Appeal to normality of sight is not circular, as it can be established by discrimination tests such as the Ishihara plates.

Sensations  3 not highly reflected, by the object. A full accounting of everything outside our bodies that is relevant to seeing things can be given in terms of reflectance percentages across the spectrum of frequencies to which our eyes are sensitive. Redness does not come into play until we ask what an object looks like to a normal person in normal lighting. If the normal result is experiencing red, then we call the object ‘red’. This latter sense of ‘red’ is redness by relation. To explain what that means, consider that healthy foods are not foods that are in good health; they are foods that produce good health in us. Analogously, red objects are not red in the basic sense; they are objects that produce red, in the basic sense, in our consciousness. 2 Neo-Lockeanism is sometimes vilified as an ‘error theory’. It implies that ordinary people are mistaken when they think that colors are literally out there upon the surfaces of objects. In a holdover from the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, this aspersion on the wisdom of ordinary people is often greeted with horror and disdain. Sometimes it is rather testily insisted that one use a different term – ‘phenomenal red’, or ‘red-ish’ – for the property (or, some may say, the alleged property) instantiated in experiences. This is so, despite the fact that the same objectors are quite happy to reject many other views that are commonly found highly intuitive by most nonphilosophers. The neo-Lockean view accepts that the correct, detailed theory of perception diverges from what most people who have not encountered the details of visual processes ordinarily think. But it is also true that the so-called ‘error theory’ does not impute any ordinary error to most people. That is, it is still true on the neo-Lockean view that bullfighters’ capes, certain pool balls or roses, old-fashioned fire engines and so on are red objects. That is, they really are objects that normally produce red in the consciousness of the normally sighted. It is not a consequence of the neo-Lockean view that most people are generally mistaken when they use color language for its ordinary, nonphilosophical purposes. But it would be only an implication of error of that kind that would be an objection to a view. Just to be clear, the neo-Lockean view does allow for ordinary cases of error. Cars of several colors look black under mercury vapor lamps; people can seem to be talking in low voices if one’s ears have not yet ‘popped’ after landing at an airport. These are cases where conditions are not normal, and one may be deceived if one does not take the abnormality into account (or, is unaware of it). They are cases where it is not true that the object in question would continue to cause the same sensations if conditions were normal. If one judges otherwise, one is making

2 Expressions of this view can be found in Russell (1912), in Chalmers’ (2006) essay on Perception and the Fall from Eden, and in many other places.

4 Sensations an error, and an error that has a special relation to how one is perceiving. But there is no suggestion from a neo-Lockean view that such errors are widespread. The widespread error is only the theoretical error of supposing that we are in direct contact with colors (and other phenomenal qualities) in external things, when in fact colors (in the basic sense) are only in our experiences that are caused by surfaces, light waves and neural events in locations from the retina to higher visual areas.3 3. On the neo-Lockean view, there is a natural suggestion for how to think of an instance of a quale. Namely, an instance of a quale is an episode of consciousness of a certain kind. Consider looking at a red rose, and then looking at a white one. A salient difference between your successive states of consciousness is the difference between the colors. The suggestion is that you have two episodes of consciousness, and at least one of the differences between them is the red of the one and the white of the other. This is not a difference that your consciousness is merely related to; it is a difference in the kind of consciousness you are having at each moment. The neo-Lockean way of looking at qualia suggests a dualistic view, and that is the way the view is to be understood here. Red objects such as roses and pool balls reflect light; instances of qualia do not. If, per impossibile, all the neural activations that cause an instance of redness in consciousness were to occur while brain surgeons had removed a portion of the skull and were viewing all the neurons involved, they would not see anything red (except, perhaps, blood, which they would see just the same if the person under the knife were experiencing any other color). Qualia, on the neoLockean view, are instantiated in consciousness, and consciousness, on this view, is not conceived of as an object alongside roses and stop signs. 4. The neo-Lockean way of looking at instances of qualia could be usefully captured by a terminology according to which an episode of consciousness that instantiates a given quale is called a sensation of the given kind. Or, to emphasize the fact that consciousness changes so rapidly, and that episodes of consciousness are events, we might call instances of qualia ‘qualitative events’. Or, we might speak of ‘red experiences’, ‘blue experiences’ and so on. We need to make a choice of terminology that will help us to be clear not only about the neo-Lockean view but also about rival views. To

3 Another line of support for theoretical error runs through metamers, which are reflectance profiles of distinct wavelength composition that produce indistinguishable sensations in normally sighted people. There is no unique physical property of object surfaces or reflected light composition that produces sensations of a particular color. Nor can one simply identify qualia with physical dispositions to produce sensations of a certain kind, as sensations produced by the same stimuli likely vary across species. For details, see e.g. Chirimuuta (2015).

Sensations  5 this end, I am going to restrict ‘qualitative event’ to mean ‘an episode of consciousness that is literally an instance of a quale’. On the other hand, I shall use both ‘F sensation’ and ‘sensation of F’ as generic terms, to mean items such that qualitative event theory is just one account of what they are. Those who do not like the neo-Lockean view will say that there are no qualitative events. They will still be entitled to say that there are sensations of various qualitative kinds; they will just have to give an alternative account of what sensations are. We shall soon look at some of these alternatives. This addition to neo-Lockeanism stretches the connection with the historical Locke to a degree that warrants introducing a new label. I shall use the one I introduced in Robinson (2004), namely, ‘qualitative event realism’ (often abbreviated to QER).

An Objection Raised and Answered 5. Before proceeding to discuss alternatives to QER, I want to state and respond to an objection to it. This objection was recently put to me by a philosopher who is not unsympathetic to the claim that dualism in some form may be true. “What”, he asked, “are the bearers of qualia?” Behind this question was a tacit assumption that qualia would need bearers. Such bearers might be brain events. In that case, qualia bearers would be perfectly respectable physical items, and dualists could accurately describe their view as ‘property dualism’, i.e., a dualism of properties but not of individuals that bear those properties. But if qualia bearers are not brain events, it looks as though one would need a special ‘substance’ to bear qualia, and this would be a more radical complication of one’s ontology.4 6. I do not think that brain events are bearers of phenomenal qualities. A brain event is the occurrence of a specific kind of activity in some group of brain parts. For example, if a certain three neurons were to fire at rates that stood in a ratio of 5:3:2 over some interval that would be a brain event of a certain kind. Now, suppose one said that such an event instantiated redness. What can that mean? It surely cannot mean that if one were able to observe those neurons when they were firing in that way, they would look red. Of course, it is perfectly intelligible that a brain event and a sensation can be related, such that one has a red sensation when and only when a certain kind of event occurs in one’s brain. 4 For those who are not aficionados, the view known as ‘substance dualism’ is regarded by many philosophers as close to lunacy, and the word ‘ectoplasm’ has been coined by critics as a term of ridicule for the alleged substance. When I tell philosophers that I am a dualist, they often respond not by asking “What kind of dualist?” but rather with “You’re a property dualist, right?” in a tone of voice that makes the question amount to a sanity check.

6 Sensations But that relation might be causation, or correlation. Declaring that the relation is instead one of instantiation seems to me to introduce a mysterious new kind of ‘instantiation’ that is not enlightening and merely serves to hide a problem. The generic type of our sample event is specified by its being a set of ratios of firing rates in a group of neurons. The particular duration, the particular neurons involved and the particular set of rates do not follow from the generic description; however, it does follow from that description that in each instance of the event type, there will be some duration, some neurons involved and some set of rates. This connection makes it natural to attribute the particular rate values in a particular instance to the event whose individuating description implies that the event will have some property of that kind. Similarly, a particular event of the type in our example will cost its possessor some number ei of ergs. This number does not follow from the specification of the event, but it is nomologically required that an event of this kind will cost its possessor some quantity of energy. Again, this connection makes it natural to attribute the particular value in a particular instance to the particular event of the given type. It is not a consequence of the description in our brain event example that there be any color, or indeed, any phenomenal quality at all that an instance of the specified event type should possess. An attribution of a phenomenal quality to such an event would thus be an attribution that is not underwritten by a generic connection; it would be an arbitrary assignment to the event as bearer by fiat. We should, however, avoid doing metaphysics by fiat. It may be objected that dualists are committed to a nomological connection between brain events and qualitative events. So, even on their view, there is a connection that could give a nonarbitrary underpinning to the attribution of phenomenal qualities to brain events. The dualists’ nomological commitment, however, is to the relation of causation. Causation already presupposes that the cause and the effect are distinct events. Thus, dualists face no inconsistency in allowing that brain events cause qualitative events while denying the kind of connection that would justify counting brain events as bearers of phenomenal qualities. Of course, there are many kinds of brain events besides the example I have used in this section. It may be that firing ratios offer too crude a description – perhaps absolute time intervals, or ratios of time intervals are needed to describe more defensible candidates for brain events that might be bearers of (or causes of) qualia. Perhaps dendro-dendritic connections or events in microtubules will prove important (­Hameroff & Penrose, 2014). Electromagnetic field theories like those of Pockett (2002) or ­McFadden (2013) may gain support. Perhaps some glial cells may turn out to have more to do with our mental life than mere provision of a

Sensations  7 kind of skeleton, or performance of repair and trash management roles (Fields, 2010; Anastassiou & Shai, 2016). The point that was made with my example would, however, apply to any such candidates. More generally, arguments that use neural firings or their properties and relations as illustrations can usually be easily adapted so as to apply to the other kinds of brain events. This generalizability should be assumed throughout this book, unless otherwise noted. 7. It might be thought that there is a problem in thinking of possible qualia bearers as events. But it is surely not our brain parts that are red, or tasty. Aside from pathologies such as tinnitus, our sensations arise, last for a brief interval, and are succeeded by other sensations. Supposing that our neurons are, e.g., red for a short time and then change to some other color would not relieve the arbitrariness of phenomenal quality attributions that was explained in §6. The only individuals that seem available for bearers are thus arrangements of transitory conditions in some set of brain parts. The parts are present before and after the sensation occurs; it seems it can only be brain-parts-in-a-state-of-activity of various sorts that could be plausibly nominated as candidates for bearers of phenomenal qualities. But that is just a long-winded way of saying that the available candidates for the bearers are events. 8. I reject brain events as bearers of phenomenal qualities, but I am not a substance dualist. The dichotomy ‘brain parts or special substance’ is a false dichotomy. To see that it is, consider the question ‘What is the bearer of negative charge?’ Well, if it’s a unit charge, the answer is ‘an electron’. Is an electron a substance? Is an electron an instance of negative charge inhering in a (material) substance? If my understanding of contemporary physicists is correct, the answer to these questions is ‘No’. The Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that varies in strength and direction at different places. At a point exactly two miles above the tip of the Washington Monument, that field will have a certain strength and direction. What is the bearer of those force and direction properties? We could say that the field has those properties at that point, or we could say that that spatial location has those properties. But fields and locations are not strong candidates for substances. 5 These examples show the inadequacy of the dichotomy. We do need a grammatical subject if we are to talk about phenomenal qualities and their instances, and we already have two at hand, namely, ‘sensations’ and ‘experiences’. But we need not think of sensations or experiences 5 Even Schaffer (2009) holds that the best view of substantivalism for spacetime treats it as a single substance. In any case, a view that held locations (in space, time, or spacetime) or fields to be substances that bear phenomenal qualities would be quite unlike the views commonly described as versions of ‘substance dualism’.

8 Sensations as ‘substances’ (unless we are willing to think of fields or locations as substances). ‘Event dualism’ is an obvious term to use for the dualism I have been describing. It seems to me to be free of unwanted suggestions and I believe clarity will be served if others follow me in adopting it. 9. It seems likely that someone will suggest that we say that consciousness is the substance in which phenomenal qualities are instantiated. Event dualists should regard this suggestion with suspicion. For them, consciousness is just the sum total of episodes of consciousness, and something is an episode of consciousness in the most fundamental sense because it is an event that is an instance of a phenomenal quality. Consciousness thought of in this way is the mereological sum of experiences, and experiences are by themselves as unmysterious as anything could possibly be. (Their relations to brain events are difficult to discover, but their qualities themselves are simply the qualities of our experiences.) From this point of view, it is retrograde to think of consciousness as a substance, and that conception should be firmly rejected along with its derisive cousins ‘mind-stuff’ and ‘ectoplasm’. In brief: Consciousness is not a ‘stuff’. There are, of course, many perfectly respectable uses of ‘consciousness’ other than the fundamental one just clarified. Most notably, we can properly be said to be conscious of the presence of some individual, or of the fact that some property is instantiated in our vicinity. For example, we may be conscious of (or, synonymously, aware of) Jones’s presence at a meeting – or, if the meeting involves a large number of people, we may not be conscious of that. We can be conscious of (or be aware of, or notice) the absence of any water pitcher at a conference table; or we may fail to be conscious of that. These uses of ‘consciousness’ concern what judgments we explicitly made, or did not make. They are not examples of episodes of consciousness in the most fundamental sense. In that sense, to be an instance of consciousness is to be an instance of a phenomenal quality. 10. In the remainder of this chapter we will consider some alternatives to QER. In the course of doing this, we shall see reasons in support of QER, which thus far has only been described. Before considering these views, however, we must briefly recognize that several of them (including QER) may be rejected on the ground that they are simply uncalled for. They are uncalled for because there are no sensations, no experiences, no episodes of consciousness to be accounted for. There being no such events is compatible with our being highly motivated to speak as if there were such events, but, as philosophers, we are not obliged to take such talk seriously. Instead, we can explain why we are motivated to speak of ‘experiences’, ‘sensations’ and so on by exposing a variety of confusions and misleading pictures that lead to such talk. We can explain the plausibility of such talk without allowing that it is actually about any real thing.

Sensations  9 These remarks summarize a view advanced by Daniel Dennett in his Consciousness Explained (1991); see also Pettit (2003) and Andy Clark (2000). Many philosophers have not been convinced by his discussion because it appears to them that Dennett merely denies a phenomenon – sensory experience – for which it is the business of philosophers to give some account. It has often been suggested that Dennett’s book was mistitled, and that titles such as ‘Consciousness Denied’ or ‘Consciousness Ignored’ would have been more accurate. I am one of those who think Dennett denies, rather than explains away, the phenomenon about which QER and several other views are theories. I am, however, not going to go into my reasons for rejecting his view. I have had my say about Dennett’s view and have nothing new to add regarding it. I refer interested readers to Robinson (1994, 2004, Ch. 9, 2014b). I shall adopt the term ‘phenomenal realist’ to describe those who reject Dennett’s view. Phenomenal realists accept that there is something that QER is an attempt to account for, even though they may offer a radically different account of it. Or, to invoke a terminological decision explained in §3, phenomenal realists agree that there are sensations, and that there are different kinds of sensations, corresponding to the different qualia.

Identity Theory, and a Key Argument for QER 11. QER commits us, inter alia, to the obtaining of certain causal relations among wavelength composition of ambient light, molecular composition of object surfaces, wavelength composition of reflected light, changes in cone cells, activations of neurons in the retina, activations of neurons in primary visual areas in the occipital lobe and activations of neurons in other brain regions. While empirical specification of these causal relations still requires much research, their existence and general outline may be taken as common ground among phenomenal realists. The same may be said for other senses. For example, odorant molecules enter the nose and act upon receptors in the olfactory epithelium, which causes neural events in the olfactory bulb that in turn cause neural events in the piriform cortex and further brain regions. QER says that some subset of brain events causes sensations. Since there are different kinds of sensations, there must be different kinds of causes of them, and these are taken to be different kinds of (collections or sequences of collections of) brain events – most likely, neural activations.6 Identity theory agrees that different kinds of sensations

6 We shall see more about collections and sequences of neural activations. For now, I will use just ‘neural activations’ for ease of reading; these are to be understood as generally involving many neurons, and not limited to instantaneous events.

10 Sensations correspond to different kinds of neural activations, and there is no reason why these should not be the same neural activations as those embraced by QER. But identity theory denies that the relation between neural activations and sensations is causal: instead, sensations just are neural activations. This view is stronger than merely claiming that the bearers of qualia are identical with bearers of N-properties, where the latter are specifiable in terms of rates of neural activations, duration of intervals of rapid firing, duration of intervals of quiescence, rates of change, ratios of any of the foregoing, patterns of connectivity among neurons and perhaps other similar properties. Common instantiation of properties is exceedingly familiar; besides bearing its color, for example, an orange bears the property of being round, and if it has been too long since it was picked, it may also bear the property of being squishy. On identity theory, the qualia and the N-properties are more intimately related than those properties of an orange. They are the same property. A frequent model is the property of being water and the property of being composed of H 2O molecules. In many contexts it would be thought odd to say that the liquid in a certain glass is water and is composed of H 2O molecules: that would be felt to be saying the same thing twice. Identity theorists would concede that to say something is a red sensation and has a certain N-property will not be intuitively felt to be saying the same thing twice; nevertheless the view is that (for some as yet unknown N-property), it really would be saying the same thing twice, just as in the case of water and H 2O. Further, no one would say that a collection of H 2O molecules causes water (or, causes there to be water). The relation is not causation but, instead, constitution. Identity theory draws a parallel and denies that the relation between sensations and collections of sequences of neural events is merely causal. Instead, a red sensation is a physical event that is constituted by physical items (e.g., neural activations) in certain relations, and each quale is a property that is the same property as the property instantiated by a physical event when it consists of events in certain kinds of physical parts, standing in a certain set of relations. This is in key contrast to QER, according to which brain events cause qualitative events but do not constitute them. 12. I have argued against identity views elsewhere (Robinson 2004, 2016) and will not summarize that work here. I do, however, want to indicate one easily understood line of dissent that is a corollary of the 2016 paper. It is a plain fact that our sensations give us no hint of the complexity of low level items that are involved in their causation. Our forebears of centuries ago could see, smell, and so on at least as well as we can, and there is no reason to think they could not attend to the phenomenal qualities in their sensations. But nothing about their visual experience

Sensations  11 suggested to them anything about light waves or dye molecules. Nothing about their experience suggested anything about neural activations. The smell of rotten eggs must have been familiar for millennia, but there is no hint of anyone having suspected the structure of H 2S. One cannot discover molecular chemistry by sniff. Let us call this plain fact ‘the silence of experience with regard to low level items’, hereafter abbreviated as ‘SELL’. Dualism permits a natural explanation of SELL. To wit: the phenomenal qualities in our sensations are properties that are distinct from properties such as surface spectral reflectances, or being constituted by certain kinds of atoms in certain bonding configurations. In general, properties of effects need not be found in the causes of their effects, and conversely. To give a homely illustration, an egg can be hardened by immersing it in boiling water, but the hardness produced is not to be found in the water or the heat, and the egg remains hard after it has cooled. So, on a dualist view it is not surprising that attending to our sensations does not reveal properties of its causes. When we attend to rotten egg smell, we attend to a certain property of our sensation (call it RES). The occurrence of a sensation with this property is an effect of a brain event of some kind (call this kind ‘brain event property J’, or ‘BEPJ ’) and more remotely, an effect of the presence of H 2 S in our nostrils. Since these are three different properties, there is no reason to expect that attending to the first should give us any hint of the other two. On identity theory, however, RES is the same property as either some brain event property or H 2S. In either case, it is a mystery why an RES sensation is not a brain event property sensation or an H 2S sensation. Dualism thus provides an explanation of an obvious fact for which identity theory provides none. That is a reason for preferring dualism. It may be tempting to take refuge in the idea that although RES = BEPJ , we don’t ordinarily realize that that is so because we have the concept of RES but lack the concept of BEPJ. But this suggestion is of no help, because if one is not a dualist, one is committed to providing a full accounting while using only materials available from natural sciences. Fundamental relations in natural sciences, however, are extensional, i.e., they permit substitution of identical items without change of truth value. So, for example, if A causes B, it doesn’t matter how we describe A or B. As long as our descriptions do indeed pick out A and B, it will be true that A (under whichever description) causes B (under whichever description). Similarly, if Jones’s house is next to Smith’s, then if Jones’s house is the largest one on the block and Smith’s is the smallest, then the largest house on the block is next to the smallest. Non-extensional relations do occur in our sciences. Well-known examples occur in biology, e.g., the relations of being selected for, or being

12 Sensations a function of. Cases of this kind, however, are regularly regarded as requiring reduction to (or construction from) less complex relations and, ultimately, to combinations of relations, all of which are extensional. For example, we may wonder how it can be that a certain mechanism in frogs was selected for catching flies rather than for catching small, dark, fast-moving objects, since these properties were co-extensive in the frog’s world. The beginning of an answer can, however, be given: Being a fly requires having a composition that has certain effects on ancestral frogs’ nutrition, while being small and dark is not causally relevant to nutrition.7 Full accounts of this kind are, in general, complex, and not necessary for practical purposes. But irreducible non-extensionality is as foreign to a physicalist world-view as would be, say, irreducible teleology in biology. It will be useful to have a term to remind us of this point. We may say that relations in our sciences are ultimately extensional, meaning that they are either extensional or constructible from relations, all of which are extensional. It is well known that explanation, unlike causation, is non-­extensional. So, for example, a window may be shattered by a red brick, and thus caused to break by an object that is red; but it is mass and rigidity, not redness, that explain why the window broke. Since we are in a context in which a claim about explanation is being made, this non-­ extensionality of explanation may appear to provide a loophole in the foregoing argument. However, this point about non-extensionality of explanation presupposes that we have two different properties – one that enters into explanation and one that does not. The non-extensionality of explanation can therefore be of no help to a theorist whose claim is that RES and BEPJ are the same property. Now, suppose there is some account that uses only extensional relations and is an account of how some person, s, acquires the concept RES. Every statement in that account will remain true if we substitute BEPJ for RES. But in that case we will not have any explanation of why the acquisition of the concept RES is not also the acquisition of the concept BEPJ. So, once again, where dualism provides a natural explanation of a fact (in this case, differential concept acquisition), identity theory provides none. The same argument will hold against the suggestion that RES = H 2S. It may remain tempting to suppose that RES can be the same property as BEPJ and that we can have distinct (and not logically related) 7 This example has been extensively discussed in Fodor (2008). His main point, that selection for is not a natural kind, is compatible with the view suggested here, that in each case, a true claim about what was selected for will be equivalent to a conjunction of claims involving only extensional relations.

Sensations  13 concepts of it because we have different ‘modes of access’ to that one property. However, the accessing of RES by some mode (call it ‘M1’) must (according to physicalists) be the occurrence of some physical fact that is constituted by physical items in some set of relations. Physicalists will agree that the relations are all ultimately extensional; thus, there will be some physical fact that involves only extensional relations and is the occurrence of an accessing of RES through mode M1. Presumably, they will also agree that the unique property that is accessed by mode M1 is one of the properties that enter into the physical fact that is an instance of accessing that property by mode M1. But then, extensionality permits substitution. Thus, if RES is accessed by mode M1, and RES = BEPJ , then BEPJ is also accessed by mode M1. This result, however, removes the appeal to different modes of access as an explanation of how it would be possible for us to experience RES without having any inkling of the complexity involved in the instantiating of BEPJ. Resistance to this conclusion may come from the (correct) observation that properties may have more than one second-level (monadic or relational) property. This fact opens the possibility of indefinitely large sets of concepts that apply to the same property. For example, if red is Joan’s favorite color and is also Jane’s favorite color, then ‘Joan’s favorite color’ and ‘Jane’s favorite color’ denote distinct concepts that apply to a single property. Moreover, one cannot deduce the applicability of either of these concepts from the other. There is, however, no mystery here – no problem that seems to require an explanation of how we can have two concepts of one property. To apply this model in the present discussion, however, we would need to suppose that the relation we have to RES when we experience that odor is a relation that is mediated by a (second-level) property of the property RES. That is surely not the case: RES is the name of the property that we experience. Even if one were to think of RES as ‘the property that is normally experienced by humans with normal olfactory systems when in close proximity to rotten eggs in normal conditions’, one would be implying that RES is a property that we experience. The problem for identity theory to which I am calling attention is that we are unmediatedly related to RES in our experience, but not unmediatedly related to BEPJ in our experience. This fact has an easy explanation within dualism, but no explanation that is compatible with the commitments of physicalism and the claim that RES = BEPJ. It may be objected that we should instead consider thinking of RES as ‘the property that is normally produced in humans with normal olfactory systems when in close proximity to rotten eggs in normal conditions (and not normally in other ways)’. This formulation is question-begging in the present context; the definite article assumes rather than shows that there is only one such property. This defect is easily removed by

14 Sensations replacing ‘the’ with ‘a’. But when we do that, we are back to where we started. If we suppose there are two properties (RES and BEPJ), that satisfy the description we can easily explain SELL, and if not, not. That is a reason for preferring dualism. In light of the foregoing, it may be tempting to allow a concept acquisition account to have an irreducibly non-extensional relation. This suggestion, however, rescues the possibility of RES = BEPJ only by abandoning the close connection between rejections of dualism and commitments to explaining everything with the materials available in natural sciences. Some readers may be tempted to reject the foregoing line of reasoning on the ground that we do, after all, know how to reduce non-extensional accounts to fully extensional accounts. There is a well-known literature running from Sellars (1954; e.g., Chisholm and Sellars, 1957) through Dretske (1981), Fodor (1987), and many others that has succeeded in ‘naturalizing intentionality’. All we have to do is apply this body of work, and we will be able to explain how we can have one concept of a property but lack a different concept of that same property. There are some arguments in this literature about which I have doubts. But I fully accept that this literature already contains a set of good ideas that comprise a successful naturalization of intentionality. That is why there is no chapter on intentionality in this book. The naturalization of intentionality, however, can succeed because it can appeal to distinct properties in a way that identity theory for sensations cannot. This point can be sufficiently illustrated by considering just one of the leading problems that a theory of intentionality has to solve. To wit: How can it be that Jones believes she is looking at the morning star but believes she is not looking the evening star, even though the morning star = the evening star? A key point that permits solution of this problem is that the property of being the morning star ≠ the property of being the evening star. One individual thing (Venus) has both of these properties, but the properties remain distinct. Therefore it is possible for there to be extensional relations that relate a person (e.g., Jones) to facts involving one of these properties without those same relations holding between that person and facts involving the other property. This remark is a very abstract point about one aspect of intentionality, but it is exactly the point that blocks the transfer of successful naturalization of intentionality to a coherent version of identity theory. If one denies the distinctness of RES and BEPJ (and the distinctness of RES and H 2S), then one cannot make use of the point in the preceding paragraph. Without it, one has no explanation of the possibility of SELL. It may be suggested here that RES can be allowed to be distinct from BEPJ and H 2S in a way that will render the foregoing argument unsound while preserving the basic intent of an identity account. According to

Sensations  15 this suggestion, RES may be multiply realizable, so that sometimes an instance of it is, say, an instance of BEPJ, but on other occasions an instance of RES is an instance of BEPK or BEPL . On this view, RES will not be identical to any of its realizer properties, but each instance of RES will be nothing but an instance of a physical property. This suggestion, however, brings us no nearer to an explanation of SELL. Any single experience would be nothing but an instance of RES and some BEP (or, alternatively, some molecular structure) or other. Any particular case of accessing an experience by some physical mode that gave us experiential access to RES would have to be a case of accessing an experience by a physical mode that gave us experiential access to one or another of the complex physical properties whose instances putatively realize RES experiences. At best, multiple realization might explain why some RES experiences gave us a hint of one kind of complex physical circumstance while other RES experiences gave hints of other kinds of complex. As always, there are ways of phrasing the problem that make the foregoing points hard to see. Several of these are answered or forestalled in detailed discussions in Robinson (2016, forthcoming), to which I refer the interested reader. 13. Before considering further alternatives, I want to respond to two related lines of thought that are sometimes invoked in support of an identity view. The first of these claims that we ought to accept identity theory on grounds of simplicity. (See, e.g., the historical remarks in Kim, 2011 and, for a recent example, Tye, 2009.) It commits us to only one basic kind of entity, where dualism commits us to two. In reply, let me note that, of course, I accept Occam’s razor. However, I understand Occam’s principle to be ‘Do not multiply entities beyond necessity’, and I understand the ‘necessity’ involved to be explanatory necessity. Occam’s principle, at least on the interpretation I accept, does not say ‘Adopt the simplest possible view’ – which would be the view that there really is nothing. It says that if you have two explanations, adopt the simpler one. This understanding requires that considerations of simplicity are to be applied strictly after one has two explanations. But identity theory does not, in my view, provide a coherent explanation of sensations. So, its appeal to simplicity is just misplaced. 14. Closely related to this last point is an argument given in Block and Stalnaker (1999). On p. 24 we find the following (the point of which is to be applied to a posteriori identity between consciousness and some brain process): Identities allow a transfer of explanatory and causal force not allowed by mere correlations. Assuming that heat = mke, that

16 Sensations pressure = molecular momentum transfer, etc. allows us to explain facts that we could not otherwise explain. Thus we are justified by the principle of inference to the best explanation in inferring that these identities are true. Naturally, I agree with these claims as they apply to heat and pressure. I also agree that identity premises can combine with other premises to yield conclusions that match observations or other theoretical commitments, and that those conclusions might not be derivable without those identity premises. However, a derivation of a conclusion cannot be an explanation of why that conclusion is so if the premises themselves are as much in need of explanation as the conclusion. Block and Stalnaker make a very tendentious claim when they imply that identifying consciousness and some brain events will allow us to explain facts that we could not otherwise explain. The most they are entitled to is that that identification enables us to tell a story that might have been an explanation, were its identity premise not so much in need of explanation itself. This remark might be rejected on grounds provided by Block and Stalnaker soon after the passage just quoted. Note that it makes sense to ask for an explanation of the correlation between the two sets of events. But it does not make the same kind of sense to ask for an explanation of the identity. Identities don’t have explanations (though of course there are explanations of how the two terms can denote the same thing). The role of identities is to disallow some questions and allow others. (p. 24; emphasis in original.) The key point here lies in the parenthetical remark, which exactly locates the problem. We can concede that, in a certain sense, there is no explanation of why A = B; if they’re the same, they’re the same, and that’s that. But we will remain without explanations based on ‘A = B’ if we are puzzled as to how it could be that ‘A’ and ‘B’ are terms that denote the same thing.8 The argument given above from the difficulty of accounting for SELL shows that that is exactly the situation we are in. Even some physicalists recognize this problem: Papineau (2002) has gone so far as to give it a name, “the intuition of distinctness”.9 Block and Stalnaker challenge deniers of identity theory to say what the difference is between an identity like ‘water = H 2O’ and ‘consciousness = 8 Levine’s (2001) discussion of “gappy identities” does not specifically target Block and Stalnaker’s paper, but it gives a detailed and compelling explanation of the puzzlement to which I am referring. 9 For discussion of Papineau’s response to this intuition, see Robinson (2007a).

Sensations  17 some brain process’. This challenge can be answered as follows. In understanding ‘water = H 2O’ we have properties to work with that are distinct from the property of being composed of H 2O – properties such as liquidity (in a certain temperature range), transparency, ability to dissolve salt. The chemical theory of H 2O says that there is tight bonding between hydrogen and oxygen within the molecule, but not tight bonding between molecules (at temperatures above freezing). This fact explains why the molecules slide past each other with low resistance, and thus why collections of H 2O molecules flow. Other more complex stories about conditions necessary for light wave absorption and interactions of H 2O and NaCl molecules explain transparency and ability to dissolve salt.10 If brain events with BEPJ = RES sensations, and the explanatory situation is parallel, then there ought to be some intelligible story about how some set of relations among the items in an instance of BEPJ constitutes RES being exemplified. But despite four centuries in which the need for such a story has been known, we remain without a clue as to how to tell it.

Further Alternatives 15. Suppose that, for whatever reason, you don’t accept identity theory or QER. You might try one of three views that will be discussed in this section. The first of these is Functionalism. A simple version of the view can be put this way: (F) A red sensation of ours (for example) is whatever entity is normally caused in us exclusively by red objects (i.e., the ones that every normally sighted English speaker agrees is properly said to be red) and also causally contributes to our reporting red (in normal circumstances) as the color of the object.11 This description does not imply that what satisfies it must be a brain event, but it clearly does not exclude brain events as possible satisfiers. Functionalists generally take brain events to be the most plausible candidates for our sensations. In understanding functionalism, it is important to distinguish two readings of (F). To understand the difference, consider an at least apparently possible scenario. In the neuroscience of the future, let us

10 Much of Block and Stalnaker’s paper is designed to undercut the view that certain claims about water are a priori. It is thus relevant to note that I am not supposing that our knowledge that, e.g., water flows – or even that it appears to flow – is a priori. 11 Other relations may be added; for example, relations to behavior, e.g., a tendency to stop if the red object is also octagonal. For ease of reading, I am letting the reporting relation stand proxy for whatever more complete set of relations might be thought to be truly adequate.

18 Sensations imagine, we can identify exactly which neural events are caused by sensory inputs, and which ones causally contribute to which outputs. We find that what satisfies (F) in Jones, i.e., what is a red sensation in Jones, is a brain event of type BEP1. In Smith, however, the same set of relations – the same causal role – is performed by a BEP2 type event. Now, do we say C1 or C2? C1 The sensations that Jones and Smith have when looking at red things are different. If Jones’s sensation is red, then Smith’s must be of some other color (or, perhaps, of some quality that is not even a color). C2 The sensations that Jones and Smith have when looking at red things are the same. Namely, they are both red sensations. If we respond with C1, we are treating red sensations as having some non-relational nature that could fail to be repeated by items that play the same causal role. For example, eight balls in pool are usually black, but the same role in the game could be played by an eight ball that was, say, chartreuse. But if we respond with C2, we are saying that the redness of a sensation is not determined by the non-relational properties of what plays the causal role. The redness of a red sensation consists wholly and entirely of its position in the causal network. Let us call these ‘mixed’ and ‘pure’ versions of functionalism, respectively. A mixed version takes it that a red sensation has an intrinsic nature and relies on relations only to decide what to call that intrinsic nature – the label will go with the causal role. A pure version locates the redness of a red sensation entirely in the causal role facts.12 The two readings are often not explicitly distinguished, but once the distinction has been made, it seems clear that most functionalists have had the pure version in mind. 16. The mixed version of functionalism leaves us with a non-relational nature. This seems to be no dialectical advance. A neo-Lockean theorizes, say, a red sensation, and treats redness as a non-relational property of the sensation. The promise of functionalism is that it will allow us to eliminate the dualistic character of this view by providing a set of relations. But a mixed view evidently does not succeed in that project – it leaves us with a non-relational nature. It is not really an alternative to a neo-Lockean view. 17. The pure version avoids this problem, but many other problems have been raised against it, going back to Block (1978). Here, I will just

12 For more on these versions of functionalism, see Chapter 9, §§21–25.

Sensations  19 identify what I take to be a problem so fundamental that it is difficult to find a non-question-begging argument for it. It is a premise of my thinking about sensations that there is a clear difference between perception and thought. There are, of course, close connections between them. Most of the time in everyday life, we make perceptual judgments automatically and effortlessly. We have no sense of drawing an inference that Jones is wearing a blue shirt; we just see that the shirt is blue. But there is a huge difference between merely judging that Jones is wearing a blue shirt (perhaps because we believe what we’ve been told) and making the same judgment while seeing the blue shirt. This difference is that, in the latter case but not the former, one is having a blue experience. This blue experience is not relational. That is, it is the experience of (to be cautious) an apparently monadic property. That property occupies a position in the causal order in virtue of its instances: blue sensations have brain event causes. And blue stands in internal relations to other qualities. For example, it is more similar to green than it is to red. But for all that, there is something non-relational about it. It is a monadic term that stands in relations, and not merely a position in a network of relations. 18. Or so it seems to me. To reject the monadicity of blue is to hold that there is nothing to blueness other than facts of the form ‘It is more similar to color C1 than it is to color C2’. This seems incoherent to me because the same will then hold of other colors. For example, being C1 will just be occupying a position in color space that is more similar to C3 than it is to C4, and so on. Of course, colors we have already ‘placed’ in a set of color–space relations will occur as properties that stand in similarity relations used in identifying further colors. 19. My objection is not that this procedure is circular. It is rather that the circularity prevents actual attribution of properties to any instantiations, unless there is, somewhere, a non-relational occupant of position in the relational space. Of course, this remark needs explanation. To give it, we may remind ourselves of Wilfrid Sellars’ (1963a) Tess (Texas chess). In Tess, Volkswagens, Cadillacs, and so on are driven from one Texas county to another. Sometimes, when a car is driven into a county occupied by another, the other one is driven off to Oklahoma or New Mexico. Volkswagens mostly drive to adjacent counties and stop, Cadillacs drive any number up to eight counties away in several directions and other brands make journeys of other particular kinds. Why is this chess? It is chess because of the structure of relations among the counties, the makes of car, and their movements. That structure is isomorphic to a series of events that could take place on a board of 64 squares, with tokens that had crenellated or slotted tops, or looked a bit like horses, and so on. If some Texans are playing Tess, their trips

20 Sensations conform to the rules of chess. To discover that they are playing Tess is to discover that their trips exhibit a set of relations that are the defining set of relations for chess. 20. We are now ready for the crucial point. There is no difficulty in the idea of structures of relations, and there is no problem in regarding a structure of relations as defining a game. But to attribute being an instance of a relational structure to any actual case, one needs to be able to identify what is related by the relations in a non-relational way. In terms of the Tess analogy, you could never find out that the Texans were playing Tess unless you could identify, apart from that structure, that something was a Volkswagen, that something was a county, that something else was a Cadillac, and so on. This is why pieces of ordinary chess have distinctive shapes. But even if our memories were so good that we could keep track of identically shaped pieces, we would still need to be able to identify parts of the world as pieces, and other parts as black and white squares, in order to carry out an actual instance of chess playing (or an actual instance of recognizing that chess was being played). Analogously, we could not be in a position to ever attribute a particular color to any actual thing (including our sensations) if there were not something monadic about colors. We cannot see a position in color space as such; we have to see a color – an occupant of a position in color space – in order to know (or even believe) that we are either seeing a blue thing or having a blue experience.13 This point generalizes to causal-­ relation space. We cannot experience a position in causal-relation space as such. We may experience an occupant of such a position, but if so, we experience an instance of a non-relational property. These reflections have a fatal consequence for the pure version of functionalism. The only properties available on that view that are relevant to there being a red sensation (for example) are playing-a-(certain specific)-causal-role, and a brain event property instantiated by the realizer of that property (the brain event that plays the required causal role). The first is not something we can experience as such; an event’s having that property is not a plausible candidate for constituting a red sensation. But to hold that the realizer property is what constitutes a red sensation as a red sensation is to abandon the pure version of functionalism. Smith (in §15) would then not have a red sensation, despite having an event that plays the same causal role as Jones’s red sensation. (Moreover, we would be returned to the problem raised by SELL.)

13 Remarks in this and the previous section are related to views of Rosenthal and of Bird that will be discussed later. See below, §24, and Chapter 2, §13, respectively.

Sensations  21 21. A digression about sounds may reinforce the point of the last few sections. For those with perfect pitch, the following may not apply; but for those who, like me, lack perfect pitch, pitch is indeed a relational matter. C# for me really has nothing to it except that it’s a half tone above C and a half tone below D. And D is nothing but the tone a half step above C# and a half tone below D# – or, of course, the tone that’s one above C and two below F#, and so on. Nonetheless, I can hear a sound that has a pitch without having any ability to identify its pitch. There is a clear difference between silence and the striking of a bell, and hearing the bell depends in no way on making a judgment about its pitch. The sensation one has upon the striking has a presence and a positive character. That character stands in pitch relations, but its position in pitch space is not all there is to its character. Similarly, colors do have positions in color space. But as with sound sensations, position in color space is not all there is to the character of color sensations. Colors are the occupants of positions in color space. 22. The foregoing reasoning does not fail by proving too much. Being a pump is a perfectly respectable functional property. A thing is a pump iff it can be used (or was designed to be used) to move fluids from one place to another. That is a functional (i.e., relational) specification. But we would never be in a position to know something was a pump if we could not see fluids moving, or see a piston or a fan blade; and seeing these things is independent of prior judgments about what has the property of being a pump. 23. If you don’t like any of the three views identified so far, you may find comfort in some version of Representationalism. There is an innocuous form of this view, which says only that sensations represent properties of objects and places only a weak constraint on what is to qualify as the representation relation. This innocuous view is compatible with QER. To understand how, let us begin with the weak constraint. This is, that it is sufficient for X to represent Y if X is an effect of Y and, in normal conditions, is not an effect of anything else. Tye (1995) has usefully dubbed this relation “tracking”. Xs track Ys when the occurrence of an X is a good (not necessarily infallible) indicator of the presence of a Y. QER has it that sensations are effects that occur in virtue of properties of objects that cause impingements on our sense organs, and normally a sensation of a certain kind is a good indicator of the presence of an object of a certain kind. Your red sensations, for example, normally track the presence of red objects. So, proponents of QER (QERians) can wholeheartedly agree that there is a representation relation such that our sensations represent properties of objects.

22 Sensations More robust forms of representationalism are not so agreeable to QER. To put it roughly, more robust forms say that there is nothing to having a sensation other than having an internal event that represents (the presence of) a property of an object. Many representations make use of instantiations of properties that are represented, or properties of the same kind. There is a philosophical literature debunking some ideas about representation in ‘representational art’, but there is surely some truth in the common gallery goers’ distinction between representational and nonrepresentational paintings, and in such comments as ‘that painting represents Venice – there is the Doge’s palace, there is the Campanile, there is a gondola …’. In such works, the objects depicted have a color, and paint of some color (not necessarily the same color as what’s represented) is used to make the painting, and to represent some part of the depicted objects. If that is how we think of ‘representation’, then we will regard sensory representations as consisting of instantiations of qualitative properties – properties that may properly be denoted by the same words that denote, e.g., the colors of ordinary things. Ned Block has introduced the apt term “mental paint” for such instantiations. If you’re attracted to QER, you can accept mental paint as a metaphor for actual instantiations of qualia (red, sweet, C#, warm, etc.) and accept that events having mental paint track (and thus, in one sense, represent) the presence of ordinary things that are red, sweet, C#, warm, etc. The characteristic contemporary representationalist view, however, has as its main point, the denial of mental paint. On this more robust understanding of representationalism, neural events that track properties of ordinary things are not instances of colors, flavors, odors, etc. They represent colors, flavors, odors, etc. A quality like red is not instantiated at all in the internal, representing event: red comes into the sensing of red only as the property represented by the internal event. The representing events – the ‘vehicles’ of representation – are said to be ‘transparent’. One is said to ‘look right through’ them to the represented properties. The robust form of representation allows three views as to how the represented properties are actually in the world. (a) They may be the properties of objects that are also the causes of stimulation of our sense organs. A popular example of such a property is the reflectance profile of an object. This is a set of percentages of reflection of each wavelength in the ambient light. Another candidate example is compression waves in the air: when you hear a tone, you are representing the frequency of the compression wave. This view encounters the difficulty that when we see red, or hear C#, it certainly does not seem to us that we are representing anything so complex as a reflectance profile or compression wave. So, if we have representationalism + (a) it looks like we will have to account for how

Sensations  23 it is possible for a represented property to seem simpler than it really is. Of course, QERians have no problem here – they can say that sensations are qualitative events that are caused by objects, and the sensations can have properties that differ from the complex properties of their causes. But that is a mental paint view, which is just what most contemporary representationalists are trying to avoid.14 So, it may be tempting to say that (b) the represented properties are physical properties that depend on, but differ from, the properties that cause disturbances in our sense organs. For example, there is a physical property red, instantiated only in physical objects, that is intimately related to, but not the same property as, having a molecular structure of such and such kind, or having a reflectance profile of such and such kind. It is that property that is represented in our red sensations. And there is a warmth property that is distinct from mean kinetic energy, but also possessed by objects with high MKE, and it is that property that we represent when we have a sensation of warmth. A drawback of representationalism + (b) is that we now have physical properties that have no causal role – or, at least, no causal role in perception, and no identified causal role elsewhere. From the point of view of natural science, these are ‘extra’ properties that are needed for no scientific purpose and can be admitted, if at all, only by courtesy to the needs of philosophers. This is not a refutation of representationalism + (b), but it is a severe embarrassment for those whose fundamental orientation is physicalism, and whose understanding of physicalism is rooted in the commitments and practices of natural science. One can avoid this burden by turning to (c), the view that the properties that our sensations represent are nowhere instantiated in our world. They are real properties, but to be a real property, it is required only that it could be instantiated in some possible world. Red, warm, rose-fragrant are instantiated in some possible world, just not our world. Our sensations represent objects as having properties that they do not have, but that they might have had, if the world had been other than it is. This view puts great pressure on physicalism. Natural science recognizes natural relations, that is, spatial and temporal relations, those that can be expressed in terms of forces, and those that can be constructed from such materials. To fit the relation of representation into this scheme, one would have to explain how some event in our brains comes into a relation to a property that is nowhere instantiated in our world. Of course, one could say “Representation is a sui generis relation

14 If the statement of this point regarding (a) seems too brief, it should be recalled that the SELL argument, although stated mainly for RES and BEPJ, works just the same for RES and H 2S.

24 Sensations that holds between a neural event and a non-instantiated property whenever a certain set of physical relations holds between that event and a complex physical cause”. But that would just be a complicated form of dualism. To avoid such an outcome, representation would have to be reduced to (or constructed from) the obtaining of a set of physical relations. But according to (c), this reduction could not contain any instance of a physical relation to an instance of a phenomenal quality (because there aren’t any such instances in our world). 24. If the foregoing views do not satisfy, one may turn to Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories. These, however, are theories of consciousness, not directly theories of qualia. Briefly and generically, they say that an episode of consciousness occurs just when a certain kind of event that is not by itself a conscious event is thought of by its possessor in a certain way. Schematically, CE = [HOT – about – LOE] where CE is a conscious event, HOT is a higher-order thought, and LOE is a lower-order event. (‘HOT’ is a standard abbreviation for ‘higher-order thought’. ‘CE’ and ‘LOE’ are my own abbreviations.) According to the leading proponent of HOT theory, David Rosenthal, sensations are episodes of HOT directed upon LOEs of a certain kind, namely, events that occur in a sensory area – that is, in some part of us that is affected relatively early by stimulations of our sense organs. These LOEs have qualities in virtue of their position in a quality space, that is, in virtue of their position in the set of states that are possible states in the sensory area. When one is aware of one of these LOEs (i.e., when one has a HOT that is about it), one has a conscious sensation of a kind corresponding to the position of the LOE in its quality space.15 25. The description I have just given is an exceedingly bare bones account of a view that has been developed over many years with enormous sophistication and substantial arguments. I have gone into some of the details in Robinson (2004). Here, I will explain only one difficulty that has seemed insurmountable to me and to many others.16 15 See Rosenthal (2015) for details. Rosenthal has indicated (in personal correspondence) that while he (like most philosophers, including me) finds neural constitution to be the most credible view of the sensory area, it is no part of his theory of consciousness that that should be so. Because of this independence of reasons for neural constitution of LOEs and his theory of consciousness, the latter would retain its force even if LOEs (and for that matter HOTs) were constituted by ectoplasm. 16 My doubts about the comparative classification of qualities of events in our sensory areas will be evident from my discussion in §§18–21 above.

Sensations  25 26. The difficulty arises from the fact that thoughts can, in general, be false. Thus a HOT theorist must consider the possibility that a subject, s might have a HOT that is about an LOE with quality Q1 when s is not having an LOE that has Q1. Various responses to this ‘false HOT’ problem are possible, but the one given by Rosenthal seems to me to be the best response from the HOT theory point of view. This response is that in the false HOT cases, it would be subjectively for s just as if s were having the same HOT and an LOE that did have Q1. This stance, however, has the effect of making the LOE irrelevant to the account of conscious sensations. If there is no subjective difference between a HOT with and without a corresponding LOE, then the HOT itself is sufficient for being in the conscious state. Thus, if I have a HOT to the effect that I am having a blue sensation, I am in a state of consciousness of blue, whether or not there is an event that occupies a certain position in the relational space of my sensory area. This result, however, is equivalent to the view that having a blue sensation just is having a HOT that one is experiencing blue. This view does not provide an analysis of sensations, nor does it provide an explanation of their consciousness. It just redescribes a sensation as a certain kind of thought. The theory as thus developed reduces sensations to thoughts (of a particular kind). I believe that Rosenthal will accept this consequence of his stance regarding the false HOT problem. But for me, we have come to a disagreement so fundamental that I do not know how to proceed. It seems evident to me that there is a clear difference between thinking about something and perceiving something, and that the difference is that perception involves having sensations. If ‘thoughts’ in ‘higher-order thoughts’ is used in a way that respects this distinction (which I think is its normal use), then to say that sensations are a species of thoughts denies an evident distinction. If ‘thoughts’ is stretched in such a way that it covers sensations, then the HOT theory utterly fails in its promise to provide an analysis, or a theoretically enlightening story, of what it is to have a sensation.

Summary and Conclusion 27. Two themes run through the discussions in this chapter. The first theme is that the properties in our experience are simple, relative to the properties that physicalists are apt to suggest as being identical with them. The colors we experience are not absolutely simple: they have dimensions of hue, saturation and brightness, and most of them are mixtures of other colors. But no amount of dwelling on our experience will reveal anything close to the degree of complexity possessed by either brain event properties or external object properties that are correlated

26 Sensations with properties in our sensations. A reflectance profile is a set of reflectance percentages across many energy bands, but sensations of color give no sense of so many elements. Tastes and smells may be complex – for examples, go to your wine store and read the reviews – but they come nowhere near to revealing the complexity of the structures of the relevant molecules. We easily distinguish the horns from the strings in a symphonic passage, but no amount of reflection on the nature of what we hear would reveal the complexity of compression waves in the air. Nor do any of our experiences have properties with the complexity that our best theories would attribute to neural events with which our sensations are (at least) correlated. QERians have no problem here, since they can appeal to a difference between the structures in the causes of sensations and the sensation qualities that those structures cause; or, in traditional language, between the causes of appearances and the properties of appearances themselves. There is in general no problem in having properties in effects that are simpler than properties of their causes. The motion of the hand of a clock, for example, is simple relative to the complexity of the clockwork that produces it. But physicalists cannot appeal to such a distinction, because that would be to recognize a difference between, say, a color, and the properties (reflectance profile, molecular surface structure, or collections of sequences of neural firings) that cause it. To allow such an appeal would, in short, be to concede property or event dualism. Avoiding that concession while accounting for the relative simplicity of qualities in our experience requires physicalists to offer alternative accounts that are, in my view, tortured, implausible, and sometimes incoherent. A special case of this theme is the apparent continuity in some of our experiences. Colors, for example, spread over expanses. When we have a color experience, our best science tells us that there must be many neural events that occur in our brains. The neural correlate of our color experience is thus composed of thousands or millions of events in some groups of neurons. But the color expanse we experience just sits there in placid continuity. Again, when we sniff a flower, the fragrance can occupy our olfactory sense undisturbed for at least a second or two. Our science tells us that while we are enjoying the fragrance, millions of neural events are taking place, driven by the presence of a number of molecules in contact with our olfactory bulbs. Nothing of this seething bed of activity occurs experientially. All that is there is the constant presence of the sweet smell.17 17 Although I have used ‘continuity’ instead of ‘homogeneity’ those with some knowledge of history will immediately recognize this as a version of a point advanced by Wilfrid Sellars (1963b), commonly known as ‘the grain argument’. I add, however, that Sellars developed his point, in conjunction with a number of other concerns, to

Sensations  27 A second theme is that ‘representation’, and sometimes other relational words, is often used without sufficient care. Representation is a relation that is appealed to by physicalists. How, exactly, ‘physicalism’ should be defined is a vexed issue, but it seems clear that physicalism worthy of the name should claim to build the whole world from materials found in present natural sciences plus those found in future developments that would be recognized by contemporary thinkers as continuous with present understandings of science. (This description excludes both abandonments of commitments to natural science, and additions to it that cannot be understood as motivated by step-by-step developments in response to problems that are clearly statable within frameworks that are uncontroversially counted as scientific at the time the problems are stated.) One clear feature of natural science is that the relations to which it appeals are all ultimately extensional. This feature is so exceptionless that it deserves to be taken as a hallmark of natural science. Thus, physicalists should – and do – require that physicalistic accounts appeal only to relations that are either extensional or can be reduced to (constructed from) extensional relations.18 The representation relation is not, on the face of it, extensional. Thus, physicalists who appeal to it owe us an account of how it is to be reduced to extensional relations. But it is often not clear how they imagine this can be done. This absence makes it difficult to decisively refute representationalist proposals, but to invoke representation without a clear account of its reduction to extensional relations is evidently unacceptable. This problem can go unrecognized because, as noted earlier, it is widely accepted that intentionality has been naturalized. If, as is plausible, representation is a form of intentionality, then it can seem that there can be no deep problem about it. The flaw in this reasoning is that the intentionality that is plausibly naturalizable is the intentionality of believing and desiring. But representation is invoked in accounts of sensations. The distinctiveness of sensations can be overlooked – after all, sensations, beliefs, and desires are all aspects of ‘mind’. But it begs enormous questions to simply assume that what works for beliefs and desires can be taken over without

arrive at a distinctive and complex view, and this further development is also referred to as ‘the (second stage of the) grain argument’. There are many ways of criticizing the fully developed Sellarsian view that do not undercut the basic force of the point made in the text. See Robinson (1982a) and Richardson and Muilenberg (1982) for further discussion. 18 Behind the “and do” is the observation that several decades of physicalists have worked to “naturalize” intentionality. The effort expended on this endeavor would not be justified if it were thought to be acceptable to simply add intentionality as an unreduced, non-extensional relation, and count it as a part of natural science.

28 Sensations adjustment and applied to sensations. In Robinson (2016) especially, I have explained an obstacle to so doing.19 When I try to think through, in detail, how sensations could be physical, I cannot see how to make that view coherent. The details behind this inability are in the papers I have mentioned. Among physicalists are some of the best minds in philosophy, and there are very many of them. But when their proposals are examined in detail, there is always a gap, a fudge, a begging of the question, a claim of dubious coherence, a notion that is too unclear to bear the weight of an argument. The flaw is different in each case: there is no hope of a once-and-for-all refutation of physicalism. But if each case fails, and fails in a way that is similar to (although never quite the same as) the way other proposals fail, it is reasonable to reject the view. That rejection sets the project for the remainder of our discussion of sensations. It is time to turn more positively to QER. Some of the discussion will be to defend it, but the main focus will be to develop it.

19 I return to this point in the Epilogue.

2 Developing Dualism

1. The central aim of this chapter is to explain the Hard Problem of consciousness as it arises for dualists and to describe a possible solution to it. At the end, I will briefly consider two other approaches that hold some promise. To understand the core of this chapter, we need some elaboration of the dualism that was noted in Chapter 1, §3, and that is where I will begin. Instances of qualia may be said to occur in consciousness, or to be what sensory consciousness consists in. But consciousness is not a physical thing. Its episodes do not have a mass, and they do not offer resistance to penetration. Indeed, they are not strictly located, so it doesn’t make sense even to ask about their penetration by physical things. We shall see later that spatiality is involved in some episodes of consciousness, but this involvement does not provide them with a physical location, in the ordinary sense of that term. We can, if we wish, assign to sensations the locations of their causes. But this locating ‘by courtesy’, so to speak, does not give them location in any sense that would permit direct spatial relations between spatial properties exemplified in sensations and spatial properties of the distal causes of sensations. (These remarks will all be clearer when I discuss spatial properties in sensations.) Sensory consciousness is a series of events. On some familiar views of events (e.g., Kim, 1976), an event is completely characterized by an object, a property, and a time. If the “object” is assumed to be a physical object, this view may be an acceptable way of understanding physical events; but it would evidently be question-begging against dualism to build a requirement of a physical object into the definition of an event. The alternative that is assumed here is that an episode of sensory consciousness is an event that consists of an instantiation of a quale or (most usually) several qualia during a time interval of characteristically brief, but nonzero, and occasionally multi-second duration.1 2. The dualism to be developed in this chapter concerns sensory consciousness. One thing that this focus excludes is cognitive phenomenology. We 1 For further explanation of qualitative events, see Robinson (2004).

30  Developing Dualism shall eventually see that I am a skeptic about cognitive phenomenology, but I am not here making any assumption about it. Remarks in this chapter are simply not intended to apply to it. To understand a further exclusion, consider Robbie, a robot that has no sensory consciousness. Later in this book, I will explain the possibility of other robots that do have sensory consciousness, but I stipulate that Robbie is not one of them. Robbie may nonetheless have detectors and be able to receive information from hearing the speech of humans or other robots. We could be uncertain whether some state of affairs had been detected by Robbie, and uncertain what it had learned from hearing speech. We might very well express such uncertainty by wondering whether Robbie was aware of a certain fact. We might explain a substandard performance on Robbie’s part by pointing to its lack of awareness of a certain fact, or explain a surprisingly successful performance by reference to Robbie’s having been conscious of a certain fact that we didn’t know it could have detected. These uses of “aware of” and “conscious of” are unobjectionable. But they are evidently part of a consistent description of a robot that lacks sensory consciousness, and thus they do not imply possession of sensory consciousness. They do not give a sense of “being conscious” to which the account in this chapter is meant to apply. In contrast, the dualism to be developed here does apply to images. These include dreams and afterimages. They include what happens when you follow an instruction to imagine (or visualize) a cardinal pecking at a lemon, and then to imagine a canary pecking at a strawberry.2 There are palpable differences in these latter events, and salient among them are differences in the colors of the imaged birds and fruits. These are directly presented differences in color. So, even though there is a distinctive difference between perceiving and imagining, images (or, to avoid tendentiousness for the moment, the having of images) are events that belong with sensations. 3. The main questions that require the development of dualism concern the relation of qualitative events to physical events. Chapter 1 has already introduced one such relation: Neural events cause qualitative events. This claim follows from two others: (1) Sensations are qualitative events, and (2) Neural events cause sensations. (1) is, of course, controversial. (2), however, seems to need little defense, so long as it is understood to be noncommittal about what the proper account of sensations may be. That there is a regular connection between impingements on our sense organs of particular kinds, and sensations involving a particular quality, can be verified by everyone, simply by repeatedly viewing objects of the same color (in the same conditions), sticking oneself with pins, plucking taut strings, and so on. To such observations, we may

2 Non-trichromats can instead imagine a tune played on instruments of different timbres.

Developing Dualism  31 then add the results of neurophysiology, which show that impingements on our sense organs cause activations of neurons in our brains. It is sometimes objected that causal relations require some time to elapse between the cause and the effect, and that this is a problem for dualism. The problem is that on the time-lapse assumption, we could imagine a scenario in which a neural event takes place, and then, before the sensation occurs, the brain in which that neural event occurred is annihilated. If the neural event caused a following qualitative event, the latter would occur when there is no brain for it to be occurring in. To avoid such a peculiar possibility, we must make the qualitative event simultaneous with the neural event; but then, the relation cannot properly be said to be one of causation. There are two good replies to this objection. (A) “Cause” indicates a dependency relation. Writers are free to stipulate that their own use of this term shall be restricted to dependencies between nonsimultaneous events, but they have no standing to insist that everyone use the term in that way. Others are equally entitled to use “cause” in such a way that both simultaneous and nonsimultaneous dependencies are counted as causal. My own preference is to bite the alleged bullet proposed in the objection; that is, to allow (B) that sensations follow their neural-event causes by some small temporal interval. I prefer this view only because processes in nature generally take time, and I see no reason why the production of sensations by neural events should differ in this respect. This stance will emphatically not license scenarios in which the series of sensations lags the series of its causes by minutes, days, or years. The view is rather that the causal laws governing the production of sensations by neural events have a definite time interval built into them. If a neural event occurs at t, the resulting sensation occurs at t + Δt, where Δt has a determinate value. We know that this value is small because we know that, e.g., the pain from a pin prick follows its cause by a very small interval. There may be possible worlds with causal laws different from ours, in which sensations follow their causes by long intervals, but in our world, the interval is exceedingly short. I am not worried by the possibility that a yellow sensation might occur 7 nanoseconds after the instantaneous annihilation of the brain in which its cause occurred. I don’t see any reason against this that does not depend on a question-begging denial of dualism. The question as to where such a sensation is located might seem to raise a problem, but we can extend the ‘courtesy’ in §1 to this case, and answer that it is located where the brain that caused it was located.3 3 Those who hanker for a substance at this point should review Ch. 1, §8. Some may count the ability of an event to occur after annihilation of its brain-event cause as a kind of independence that suffices to make qualitative events to be ‘substances’. That is a possible terminological choice, but it is risky, and I avoid it because it would invite confusion with views that require a substance for qualia to ‘inhere’ in, or that allow mental substances to outlast bodily annihilation by more than Δt.

32  Developing Dualism 4. The Hard Problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995), in its broadest formulation, has a general and a specific form. The general form is this: Why is there a correlation between the occurrence of certain kinds of brain events and sensations (sensations of any kind at all)? The specific form is: Why is such-and such particular kind of brain event correlated with such-and-such particular kind of sensation? Both forms of the Hard Problem in its broadest formulation can be answered in one way by holding that the correlation is, in fact, an identity. Dualists find this answer unacceptable. This rejection permits a narrower formulation of the Hard Problem as it is faced by dualists. For them, the general form is: Why do brain events (of any kinds at all) cause sensations (of any kinds at all)? The specific form is: Why does each kind of brain event that causes a sensation cause the particular kind of sensation that it does? I have given my answer to these questions in ‘Developing Dualism and Approaching the Hard Problem’ (DDAHP, Robinson 2014c). The next several sections contain summaries of some main points of that paper. Interested readers are invited to consult the paper itself.

Complexity and Simplicity 5. The main inspiration for the DDAHP response to the Hard Problem comes from the observation that qualia are much simpler than the properties of both their neural event causes and the distal causes of those neural events. (This relative simplicity is another way of expressing the key idea behind SELL – see Chapter 1, §§12 and 27.) The main idea of the response is that it is a law of nature that complexity of the kind found in neural (or other brain-event) causes of sensations results in instances of simpler properties. This is a conservation law: ConCAS A balance of complexity (of a certain kind – see below) and simplicity (in the sense in which qualia are relatively simple properties) is conserved. Thus a new instance of a (certain kind of) complex property requires to be offset by a new instance of a relatively simple property. What is conserved is not complexity, and not simplicity, but the balance of the two. The name for the conserved quantity is “complexity and simplicity”, or CAS; and the law is that CAS is conserved. The reason why certain kinds of neural events cause sensations is that those neural events have a certain kind of complexity, and conservation of CAS requires an offsetting event with the simpler kind of property whose instances are sensations. The reason why we must recognize a certain kind of complexity is that there are events in our brains that in some ordinary sense are highly complex, but that do not produce any sensations. (a) When we move,

Developing Dualism  33 there are highly complex events in our cerebellums that coordinate the contractions of the many muscles we use in turning our bodies into position for, say, reaching. Further cerebellar events coordinate the contractions of the many muscles in our arms that enable our hands to arrive at the desired object at the right speed, with the right preparation for grasping. But all this organization goes on unconsciously, i.e., there are no sensations that are characteristic of the cerebellar activity. We do have bodily sensations (kinesthetic, proprioceptive) that are the ways being in various positions feel, and we have bodily sensations of motion; but all of these are produced by sensors distributed throughout our bodies, not by the complex activity of neurons in the cerebellum. In later chapters, we shall see that (b) there is a large role played by unconscious mental processes. To have their evident effects, these processes must be highly complex; but they produce no sensations. They do lead to effects that are conscious – e.g., auditory imagery that composes our inner speech, overt utterances, and nonverbal actions. But there are processes that lead up to those effects that are not conscious, i.e., do not produce sensations or imagery as they unfold; and nothing in our sensations or imagery is as complex as those processes must be. Further, (c) the interactions between some brain events and some events in our enteric nervous systems are, by many measures, quite complex. But while we have sensations corresponding to some events taking place in our digestive tracts, normal operations of our CNS-ENS systems are not accompanied by sensations. This fact again suggests that neural interactions that do cause sensations have a complexity of either a specially high degree or of a particular kind.4 6. Despite having devoted many hours to the attempt to describe the complexity property that will be needed to make ConCAS more specific, I have not been able to arrive at a satisfactory view. The reason I am not discouraged by this failure is that the proper description of the relevant complexity property is plainly an empirical matter, and our current methods of investigating the brain are plausibly not adequate to revealing brain event properties in sufficient detail. I expect that it will be some considerable time before neuroscientists will be able to describe what is distinctive about the brain events that cause our sensations. Further, I do not believe that the human intellect is capable of even imagining all possibilities at any one stage of historical development. Instead, science teaches us not only what is the case but also what possible worlds there might have been. 4 It has been suggested that ConCAS cannot be right, because each additional instance of a neural event and its corresponding qualitative event will make the world more complex. This suggestion, however, misses the importance of ConCAS’s focus on complexity of a certain kind. Mere increase in numbers may be one sense of ‘complexity’ but complexity in that sense of the term is not a remotely plausible candidate for the kind of complexity that ConCAS says is conserved.

34  Developing Dualism It is not a flaw in Newton’s thought that he did not consider the possibility of relativity or quantum mechanics. The ability to coherently so much as conceive of those theories depended on development of thought after his time. In the same way, I think it is plausible that coherent conception of the kind of complexity that will be found to be distinctive of brain events that are correlated with our sensations awaits a more detailed understanding of relations to be found among events in our brains. This stance may appear to have an unpleasant odor of defending a view by appeal to our ignorance. Such a suspicion would be justified if we could not point to some clues that will likely guide future research. But in fact, we do have some clues. Moreover, the questions to which these clues are relevant must, someday, be answered by physicalists just as much as by dualists. The remainder of this section reviews some of these questions and clues. Let us start with (a) in section 5. Even physicalists must someday have a view that tells us what the difference is between events in our cerebellums and events in our sensory areas, such that the former do not correspond to sensations, while the latter do. Similarly with regard to (b): Our unconscious cognitive processing must be very complex, but even physicalists will someday have to provide an account that differentiates the kind of complex events that constitute our unconscious cognitive processing from the kind of complex events that correlate with our sensations. Sometimes appeal is made to the brain location of neural events. For example, visual sensations have some special relation to the visual areas in the occipital lobe, scents have a special relation to olfactory bulbs and the piriform cortex, sounds have a special relation to the auditory cortex, and so on. We need to be clear, however, that mere location is not a relevant variable in science. Space and time are not causal factors: Laws are supposed to apply to events whenever and wherever they occur. A brain region or location can legitimately be appealed to in explanation only in so far as it functions as a proxy for whatever particular kind of neural processing goes on in that location. Talk of special relations to dedicated sensory areas might lead to a misunderstanding, to the effect that I am proposing that a set of neural activations of some particular kind within a sensory area is sufficient for causation of a sensation. I do not hold such a view. My view is that it is an open empirical question just how much of what goes on in the brain is necessary and sufficient to cause a sensation. 5 When we find out the answer to this question, we must take the whole sheet of neural activations that are necessary and sufficient for a sensation to occur as the cause of

5 Crick and Koch (1998) say this: “The conscious visual representation is likely to be distributed over more than one area of the cerebral cortex and possibly over certain subcortical structures as well.”

Developing Dualism  35 a sensation.6 My hypothesis is that when neuroscience reaches a point where it can tell us what the causes of sensations are, it will be able to identify a brain event property (a very complex one) that is distinctive of sensations. ‘Distinctive’ means that the property will occur in all cases of sensations and will not occur in cerebellar or unconscious cognitive processes. I further hypothesize that when we have discovered such a property, we will be able to describe it in terms of a kind of complexity – a particular kind of interrelatedness – that will be a plausible candidate for entering into a law to the effect that complexity of that kind is always offset by the occurrence of an instance of a property that has the kind of simplicity characteristic of qualia. Let us have a name for the particular kind of complexity hypothesized here. I will call it “SR complexity” (sensation-related complexity). Again, let me stress that it is an empirical hypothesis that such a property will eventually be found. If nature turns out not to have the envisaged structure, dualists will have to return to the beginning and find some completely different line of thought. And let me repeat: Physicalists, just as much as dualists, should feel themselves committed to there being some kind of distinction among properties that divides brain events that (according to them) are sensations from those that are not. Let us return to further clues for this hypothetical development. The properties instantiated in our sensations come in families, commonly indicated by the phrase ‘sensory modalities’. In some sense, tastes are all more like each other than any of them are like sounds, which, again, are all more alike than any are to visual qualities. Within a sensory modality, one can imagine constructing a ‘bridge’, such that one can pass from one intra-modality quale to any other by a series of small steps between highly similar qualia. But there are no such bridges that we can imagine that will take us by small qualitative steps from a sound to a taste, or to a color, and so on.7 Now, it is not guaranteed as a matter of pure logic that the structure of sensory modalities must be reflected in a parallel structure of neural properties. But it is nonetheless a reasonable scientific procedure to look for a generic neural property that can have species 6 Chalmers (2010, ch. 3) tries to work out a view that distinguishes “core” neural correlates of consciousness from background, by looking at covariations only within “some constrained range of cases in which some aspects of normal brain functioning are held constant” (p. 74). But what I take the detailed discussion in that paper to show is that attempts to specify the range of cases are fraught with difficulties. 7 There are no such bridges constructible from properties instantiated in our (human) experience. But it is very likely that there are additional phenomenal properties that are instantiated in the sensations of other creatures, e.g., tetrachromatic birds, electric fishes, or bats. It is conceivable that if we take all the qualia of all possible creatures, bridges could be constructed from any quale to any other. That possibility does not, however, affect the point that neuroscience should take our own division of sensory modalities as a useful clue in discovering the generic property that is distinctive of causes of our sensations.

36  Developing Dualism that correspond to our sensory modalities. (Again, mere difference of location is not a scientifically respectable difference-maker; it can only be a proxy for difference of species of the generic neural property that are instantiated in different regions.) Similarity itself is a clue. It is plausible that whatever activation property correlates with an orange sensation is neurally more similar to the activation property that correlates with yellow than it is to the activation property that correlates with blue. It is not a simple matter to determine when dreams are taking place, but we are not totally bereft of ways of approaching the question of when they occur. There ought to be something that differentiates brains that are dreaming from those that are asleep but not dreaming. Finding this demarcator is a possible route to discovery of the constitution of SR complexity. A further clue comes from facts about intensity and extensity. By the former, I mean such phenomena as that sounds of the same pitch, and at least similar timbre, can be louder or softer, the same taste can be faint or strong (e.g., a mildly salty dish, a very salty dish). By the latter, I mean that colors and some tactile properties can be spread over a small area, or a larger area. Think, for example, of a white cue ball sitting by itself in the center of a pool table. Now imagine that the cue ball is replaced with a golf ball, while you remain at the same distance. There is a larger area of white in the sensation resulting from the former case than there is in the sensation resulting from the latter, and it is immensely plausible that there will turn out to be a corresponding ‘more of the same kind of thing’ in the account of the neural effects of these cases (i.e., in the neural causes of the sensations). Once again, this is not a logically guaranteed arrangement, but it is a reasonable expectation that should guide our neurophysiological investigation.8 Finally, physicalists and dualists alike presumably accept that our sensations occur very rapidly. Backward masking experiments show that it does not take more than a 40–60 ms exposure to result in a conscious, accurately reportable sensation (Kovács et al, 1995). We can respond accurately on a task that requires letter identification in less than 400 ms – and that, of course, includes processing beyond the mere occurrence of the sensation (Miller & Low, 2001). So, whatever may be the neural property that corresponds to our having a sensation, it must be one that can be instantiated in a brief period. This fact places a severe time constraint on the number of neural firings (or number of significantly different interval lengths between firings) that could be relevant in establishing the instantiation of a neural activation property. Perhaps 8 In Chapter 9 I will explain some relations between valence and sensations. These relations may also provide clues to what is a sensation and what is not, and thus to narrowing down the class of neural events that have the kind of complexity that is distinctive of neural causes of sensations.

Developing Dualism  37 shortness of time could be compensated for by largeness of number of neurons involved in the instantiation of the relevant neural property. 7. I remarked earlier that I have not been able to arrive at a satisfactory view of what the relevant complexity property might be. I am going to insert here an image that has seemed to me to be useful, if only in understanding the difficulty of finding such a property. This section is something of a break in the argument, so readers may wish to proceed directly to the following section, where the summaries of key points in DDAHP are continued. Figure 2.1 shows a pin impression toy. We can use this image to help us understand an array of values of properties of neural events, by supposing that the height of each pin represents the value of some property of a single neuron. Such a property might be a firing rate, calculated over some suitable interval. Or it might be the length of time since the last action potential in that neuron, or some other property. Now imagine that we have a greatly expanded array, in which there is one pin for each neuron in the brain. And let us imagine the array as it may change over time. Then we have a way of imagining a representation of waves of variation in a neural property. We can, that is, imagine a vast, complexly undulating “surface” composed of the ends of the pins. We can imagine that there are patterns in such undulations. Perhaps we would need to have several such arrays, where each represents the values of a different neural property, and analyze the relations among the undulations in several “surfaces”. If I were a mathematician, perhaps I could work out a way of describing such patterns that would permit a classification of kinds of pattern. I have not been able to do this. But it seems to me that there is no principled obstacle to our science eventually discovering both the details of

Figure 2.1  

38  Developing Dualism neural properties, and the mathematical tools that would be necessary to classify types of patterns in such undulating surfaces, and their relations. 8. An important virtue of the account summarized in sections 5 and 6 is that it answers a problem raised by J. J. C. Smart (1959, p. 143). I cannot believe that ultimate laws of nature could relate simple constituents to configurations consisting of perhaps billions of neurons (and goodness knows how many billions of billions of ultimate particles) all put together for all the world as though their main purpose in life was to be a negative feedback mechanism of a complicated sort. We have seen, however, that the fundamental law that is needed for a dualist answer – i.e., ConCAS – is not a law that holds between qualia and billions of neurons. It is, instead, a law that relates just two properties: the relative simplicity of qualia to a certain complexity property (dubbed “SR complexity”). However, Smart wrote of “laws” in the plural. It is plausible that he had another problem in mind, namely the problem of why each phenomenal property is correlated with just the particular neural property it is. This is the Hard Problem in its specific form, which can also be stated this way: Given a particular brain event with the right sort of complexity, why does it cause the F sensation that it does, rather than some other, incompatible G sensation? The answer given in DDAHP rests on two “Minimum Arbitrariness Principles”. To understand them, we should envisage the quality space of all possible qualities that could occur in the sensations of all possible instantiators of SR complexity. The principles are these. (MAP)  (a) So far as is possible, proximate effects of closely similar causes are closely similar; and (b) So far as is possible, proximate causes of closely similar effects are closely similar. There is a unique solution to the constraints that (MAP) (uMAP)  imposes. The “so far as possible” recognizes that the smoothest possible fitting of causes and effects may require that there are some significant discontinuities. MAP says that these are the minimum discontinuities, i.e., that any mapping other than the actual one between instances of properties with SR complexity and qualia would have more, or greater, discontinuities.9 An intuition behind MAP is that if it were false, there would be many, many ways of co-mapping brain events and sensation qualities, and no

9 The background that explains these principles in DDAHP makes significant reference to the work of Austen Clark (2000).

Developing Dualism  39 obvious reason why any one of these rather than any other should obtain. MAP is a principle of sufficient reason, tailored to the particular case of brain-event/sensation relations. In any world in which MAP and uMAP hold, the answer to the question of why this neural property (that has SR complexity) yields just this kind of sensation is that this relation is the only one that is compatible with MAP. These principles do not have a priori necessity, and so the dualism that is based on them cannot claim a priori necessity in the relation between neural events with SR complexity and sensations of particular kinds. (Nor is ConCAS itself claimed to be a necessary truth.) But unless we are causal essentialists, laws of nature are in general not necessary truths. So, it does not seem that there is an obstacle to accepting the dualistic view based on MAP, uMAP, and ConCAS as a naturalistic account that (together with neuroscientific discovery of actual neural properties with SR complexity) amounts to a scientific view of our sensations. Causal essentialism is plausible for some properties. For example, the proposal that electrons have no charge in some possible worlds strongly invites the response that there can be no ground for calling a chargefree particle in another possible world an “electron”. However, causal essentialism is at its least plausible in the case of qualia: there does not seem to be an analogous doubt about the possibility that red sensations could have causes in a different possible world that are different from its causes in this world.10 MAP and uMap do not rule out the possibility of different causes of (e.g.) red sensations in worlds that are quite different to ours. What they rule out is different causal relations between brain events and sensation kinds in worlds with brains like ours in which ConCAS is a law of nature. This ruling out does not rest on an assumption of causal essentialism, but it does rely on similarity essentialism. This is the principle that properties that are similar in one world are similar in all possible worlds. This seems acceptable. For example, “Orange is more like yellow than it is like blue” plausibly holds in all possible worlds. And the same goes for neural properties. Consider, e.g., a set of neural firings A, a set B that differs from A in a small difference of firing rate in one neuron, and a set C that differs from A in several large differences of firing rates. It is plausible that in all possible worlds in which A, B, and C exist, A is more like B than it is like C. Similarity is ubiquitous, and that is a reason for suspicion that the constraint provided by MAP and uMAP is too weak to be of any interest.

10 Bill Seager has suggested that a particle might nonetheless qualify as an electron if, say, its quantity of negative charge were just slightly different from the quantity of the positive charge of a (particle that behaved otherwise very much like a) proton. So, perhaps causal essentialism is not so plausible anyway. But even if causal essentialists can turn this suggestion aside, causal essentialism would remain implausible for qualia.

40  Developing Dualism This worry can be addressed by requiring that MAP and uMAP must satisfy two conditions. (1) The respect(s) in which causes of similar qualitative events are similar must be the same across all cases. So, for example, if it is having ratios of firing rates that are nearly equal that is a respect in which neural causes of two similar qualitative events are similar, then nearness (or not) of ratios of firing rates must count across all other cases in evaluating similarity of brain event causes. (2) The properties of brain event causes that are relevant to evaluating the satisfaction of MAP and uMAP must be intelligibly related to SR complexity. So, to continue the example, if nearness of firing rate ratios is a relevant dimension in applying MAP and uMAP, then SR complexity must be definable at least partly in terms of sets of firing ratios, or patterns of change in firing ratios, or some other property involving firing ratios. Since we do not at present know what property SR complexity is, it is not possible to give a detailed development of the theory surrounding it. The theory that proposes ConCAS, MAP, and uMAP includes the hypothesis that the abstract structure of relations just outlined will be found to be instantiated in properties that are actually correlated with our sensations. 9. The conservation law, ConCAS, is a very general law. It is not an a priori claim; it is a hypothesis that is offered as being part of the best explanation of the whole of what we need to account for. This is the same status that is had by laws such as conservation of mass-energy. Derivation of laws by deduction from a priori principles is something for which we may yearn, but it is not demanded by, and not achieved by, our sciences.11 They are not branches of mathematics. When we have very general principles, we can feel that we have genuine explanations even though we do not take the principles to be a priori or necessary. For example, we feel that we understand why water does not run uphill, when we think of its doing so as a violation of a conservation principle. I claim that ConCAS has the right degree of generality to give us the same kind of explanatory satisfaction. Of course, for acceptance of such a law to be open, one must first abandon the intelligibility-limiting, brute a posteriori necessities that are sometimes resorted to in defending physicalism. Some papers already referred to (e.g., Robinson 2014b, 2016) are aimed at raising the sense of dissatisfaction with such views. Now, it may, of course, turn out that I am wrong about ConCAS. Rejection of that hypothesis would be reasonable if we had a fully developed neuroscience that gave us exact knowledge of events across the whole brain, and we had a set of highly developed mathematical tools for analyzing patterns in such events, and we could find nothing that could be

11 Derivations of conservation laws based on Noether’s work are no exception, since the underlying symmetries are not knowable a priori.

Developing Dualism  41 construed as a kind of complexity and that was distinctive of brain events that are correlated with stimuli that are the distal causes of our sensations. But even if that possibility were to eventuate, dualists should be able to rescue something of value from the foregoing discussion. The form of the ConCAS plus MAP and uMAP proposal would still be a model for the kind of view dualists would need. And the point would still remain that explanatory satisfaction does not need deduction from a priori principles: inference to the best explanation is enough, provided the hypothesized principles are sufficiently general.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 10. I have said that I do not know what property SR complexity is. There is, however, a property that has been introduced by Giulio Tononi (e.g., in Tononi (2004); see also Oizumi et al. (2014)) that may be suggested as likely to be helpful in understanding SR complexity. I cannot go deeply into Tononi’s theory, but a few comments on this suggestion are in order. The property of interest is integrated information. Tononi (2008) describes it this way: “the amount of information generated by a complex of elements, above and beyond the information generated by its parts”. A collection of many parts that are not interconnected can have many states, and its being in one particular state thus represents a large amount of information. But this information is not integrated. To get high integration, parts of a system must be causally interconnected. Connection of everything to everything, however, does not yield high integration. Integrated information is a balance of specialization in subsets of a complex with easy communication of results in specialized subsets to other parts of the system. Tononi and colleagues have proposed formal ways of measuring the amount of integrated information (or, equivalently, of making the rough idea of integrated information more precise). These methods are not easy to apply and are still open to development. Some ways of specifying integrated information appear to have counterintuitive consequences, such as implying that certain kinds of machines to which few would attribute consciousness are in fact conscious, and that consciousness comes in many degrees.12 11. Despite these counterintuitive implications, I do not believe that we can rule out the possibility that some way of specifying the intuitive idea of integrated information may prove to be useful in narrowing down the field of candidates for SR complexity. That said, there is a way of putting 12 Scott Aaronson (2014) has provided a carefully constructed example of a machine that has high integration but has low plausibility as a candidate for being conscious. Tononi (2014) has replied directly, describing an even simpler machine and arguing that we should overrule our intuitions and hold it to be conscious – even when all its units are inactive.

42  Developing Dualism Tononi’s view that I want to resist. In Tononi (2004), for example, we find him arguing that “subjective experience is one and the same thing as a system’s capacity to integrate information”. And in Tononi (2014) he reminds us that “the heart of IIT is the claim that an experience is a maximally integrated conceptual structure” (emphasis in original). However, even if we supposed that only systems with high integration of information can be conscious, it would not follow that experiences are identical with those systems or with anything that happened in them. It is a very general point that where we find differences in things that exist, we should expect to find differences among their causes, and thus correlations. But identity claims cannot be based simply on correlations, because causation is an equally good explanation for them. 12. There is a more specific difficulty in Tononi’s formulation that goes deeper. Experiences are ephemeral; they begin, have some shorter or longer duration, and are succeeded by experiences of a different kind. Experiences thus cannot be identified with a capacity that is an enduring property of a system. (See the first quotation in the first paragraph of §11.) The connectivity of our neurons does, of course, change as we learn. But that kind of change happens in a time frame that is relatively long in comparison to the rapidity with which our experiences can change. For example, we can easily understand speech delivered at 180 English words per minute, or 3 per second. If the kind of experience we had were correlated with the capacity of our auditory system, rather than ephemeral events in it, we could not account for our ability to experience different sounds in such rapid succession. This difficulty can be overcome by following out a suggestion in another quotation from Tononi.13 “Over a certain time interval, each element of the grid specifies its cause-effect repertoire – how that element’s mechanism being in its current state (off) affects the probability of possible past and future states of the grid itself.” I understand this to say that there is a property of an element that is determined both by that element’s current state and the connectivity (and thus the set of possible states) of the system in which that element occurs. If that is right, then there could be a set of properties {Pi} such that which member of the set an element instantiated depended on the state of that element. Provided that the state of such an element could vary, differences among the Pi could correspond to differences in the kinds of experiences we had.14

13 Tononi (2014). The quotation occurs near the middle of the post, in item 2 under the subhead “Why certain grids may be conscious”. 14 The parenthetical “off” in the quotation should be ignored. Tononi is not saying that elements are always off; instead, he is reminding us of the assumed state of elements in the particular example he is using in the surrounding discussion.

Developing Dualism  43 If the state of an element can affect its cause-effect repertoire, presumably the states of other elements will also affect it. So it seems we have to imagine that the kind of experience one is having is correlated with a cause-effect repertoire that is dependent on the current states of elements in a system of causally interlinked elements. That kind of dependency is not a problem. Indeed, SR complexity and its various species presumably depend on relations among a fairly large set of elements. What does seem problematic is that cause-effect repertoires are sets of potentialities; sets of what would happen if certain variations were to occur (where it is assumed that only one of the possible variations will actually occur). Experiences, however, are actual occurrences. It is hard to accept that the cause of our having, say, a rose-fragrant experience is a set of potentialities determined by states of a set of elements (as contrasted with a set of actually instantiated properties and relations of those elements). This problem could be overcome if there were a brain event that was a representation of the relevant set of possibilities – a brain-event analogue of the last line of a calculation of the value of a set of Pi for elements of a certain system in a certain state. But there is no suggestion in presentations of IIT, nor is it plausible, that there are brain events that regularly occur, and that have the relation to other brain events that would make them representations of sets of possibilities.

A Causal Essentialist Alternative 13. In Section 8 of this chapter, I noted that causal essentialism is at its least plausible when the properties in question are phenomenal qualities. There is, however, a version of causal essentialism that permits an alternative solution to the general form of the Hard Problem as formulated for dualists. In this section I will briefly sketch this alternative. The version I have in mind is the dispositional essentialism that has been given an impressive defense by Alexander Bird (2007). The pure form of this view (Bird’s preferred form) holds that all properties are dispositional. This view has seemed to many thinkers to raise a regress problem. To get the flavor of this objection, we can follow Bird and represent a dispositional property (say, P) as the ability of whatever has P to bring about a manifestation of kind M upon receiving a stimulus of kind S. Symbolically: P = S o-> M. But now, if all properties are dispositions, S and M are dispositions. Thus, S will be, for example, S1 o-> M1, and M will be S2 o-> M2. And the full representation of P will be (S1 o-> M1) o-> (S2 o-> M2). If all properties are dispositional, we must reiterate this construction for the new Sns and Mns, and for their stimulus and manifestation properties, … and so on. The resulting construction must be either eventually circular, or infinite. Both alternatives leave us with a picture of many

44  Developing Dualism things that would be so if something else were so, but no way of understanding how anything actually is thus and so. To clarify what is problematic here, we may remind ourselves of Wilfrid Sellars’ (1963a) Tess, explained in Chapter 1, §19. The point of this analogy, we may recall, was that what makes something a pawn in chess is not the shape of the piece, but rather its position in a set of relationships. If Texans drive Volkswagens to adjacent counties, that can be a move in chess. Whether it is depends on whether there are, say, Cadillacs that are driven in certain other ways, and other makes that conform to certain patterns in their movements around Texas’ counties. The application I want to make of Tess starts with the question of how we might decide whether Tess is being played. We can do this by tracking the movements of various cars, and noting their kinds. But noting their kinds is identifying, say, a Volkswagen as such. What if we could not do that directly? What if all we could say was that x is a Volkswagen if it is related to something of kind F, where a thing is of a kind F only if it is related to something of a kind G … and so on? We might have a structure of relations that uniquely determined the positions of every kind in a system of kinds. But it seems we would never be able to say that this is an item that occupies a particular position in the system, unless at some point we could say “This is an H” without needing to consider what it is related to. This is all very informal, and it is not intended as a decisive argument. Its purpose is only to make it intuitive why someone might be bothered by the regress objection. Bird, of course, provides what he takes to be an answer to this objection. I do not find this answer satisfying, but I am not going to pursue the question of its adequacy further. Instead, I will describe a view that becomes available if the regress problem cannot be solved under the assumption that all properties are dispositional. A consequence of such unsolvability is that there must be some categorical properties somewhere. But there will still remain Bird’s strong reasons for holding fundamental physical properties (negative charge, for example) to be dispositional. Further, a corollary of the relative implausibility of causal essentialism for phenomenal qualities is this claim: If there are categorical properties at all, phenomenal qualities are good candidates. So, perhaps fundamental physical properties are all dispositional, phenomenal qualities are categorical, and phenomenal qualities must be instantiated somewhere in the universe, because that is the only way the regress can be stopped. That would be an answer to the Hard Problem in its general form. (The specific form would still require MAP and uMAP, or some other principles that would do similar work.) I am not advocating this approach, which I find less plausible than the ConCAS theory. But it seems no stranger than some of the views that have been advanced in response to the Hard Problem.

3 Epiphenomenalism

1. As some readers will be aware, I am a long-time defender of epiphenomenalism.1 Much of this work involves technical arguments that are too long to repeat here, and I am reluctant to offer them in a simplified, and therefore defective, version. Many of them are replies to objections to epiphenomenalism, and I am content to refer the reader to the sources in which these dialectical battles occur. Understanding what epiphenomenalism is, however, is essential to the aims of this book. In this chapter, I will explain the view (as it applies to sensations), provide some positive motivation for it, and clarify the relation of epiphenomenalism to the other parts of this book. Discussions of two rival views of sensations will also find a natural place in this chapter. 2. Here is a very bald statement of epiphenomenalism: Mental events have brain-event causes, and they do not have any effects. Effects that are commonly attributed to mental events are actually caused by brain events that include the brain events that also cause sensations. 2 This formulation is too bald to be useful. The reason is that ‘mental events’ is commonly understood to include both sensations, on the one hand, and beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes on the other. Sensations and propositional attitudes require very different treatment. I do not lay this down as a premise that everyone should find obvious. It is a conclusion based on the fact that the arguments required in the two areas are different, and that using an example from one area to illustrate a point about the other often involves simple confusion. The nature of the difference between these two parts of philosophy of mind will come out clearly as the book proceeds. Beliefs and desires, and the ‘mental causation’ issue

1 See W. S. Robinson, (1979, 1982b, 1999a/2015, 2003, 2004, 2006a, 2007b, 2009, 2010a, 2012, 2013, 2018). 2 There is a version of epiphenomenalism that allows efficacy of mental events upon other mental events, but not mental event efficacy upon brain events or upon behavior. This view has no attraction for me, and ‘epiphenomenalism’ as understood here should be read as denying efficacy tout court to sensations. What it comes to for beliefs and desires will be the subject of considerable further discussion.

46 Epiphenomenalism that attends them, will be taken up in later chapters. This chapter will concern epiphenomenalism for sensations, which is what I have been mostly concerned with in the works listed in note 1 to this chapter. 3. Epiphenomenalism for sensations (hereafter, in this chapter, simply ‘epiphenomenalism’) is the view that (a) our sensations are caused by brain events. (b) These same brain events also causally contribute to the production of further brain events, and eventually to behavior. (c) The behavior that is often said to be caused by our sensations does not occur in virtue of sensations or their qualities, but results instead from brain processes to which the brain events that cause our sensations causally contribute. Figure 3.1 is a familiar diagram for epiphenomenalism. ‘Stim’ is for an arriving stimulus, arrows with c in their middle represent causation, ‘S’ is for a sensation, the Pns are physical events (brain events), and ‘Beh’ is for behavior. The last might be reporting of a property of one’s sensation, or it might be a nonverbal action that is commonly regarded as depending on a sensation – for example, picking a particular banana from a bowl because it looks yellow (not too green, not too brown). The feature of this diagram that is most important for understanding both epiphenomenalism and the criticisms of it is that there is no causal arrow from S to anything else. In Chapter 2, §3, I considered an objection that causation cannot be simultaneous, and expressed a preference for a view that embraced a small time lag between a brain event and the sensation it causes. This preference is incorporated in an improved Figure 3.2, in which the offsets in the vertical arrow indicate the small time lag between the occurrence of P2 and its effect, S. In both diagrams, P1 is inserted before the cause of a sensation, in recognition that there may be considerable brain processing before we reach an event that causes a sensation. (I will return to say more about this toward the end of this chapter.) Multiple Ps are inserted between P2 and Beh S c Stim c

P1

c

P2

c

P3

c

c

P3 c

P4 . . . .

c

Beh

P4 . . . . c

Beh

Figure 3.1 S

Stim

c

P1 c

Figure 3.2

c | P2

Epiphenomenalism  47 in recognition that between these two items there may be a great deal of cognitive processing – linguistic processing in the case of reports, memory of relations between banana-skin color and state of ripeness, and so forth. 4. The primary motivation for epiphenomenalism is best understood by comparison to its main rivals, physicalism and interactionism. All of these views take behavior to require the involvement of physical events. They can be understood by their patterns of acceptance and rejection of the following three statements. A Sensations causally contribute to our behavior. B Sensations are nonphysical. C The causes of physical events are all and only other physical events.3 Physicalism rejects B, accepts A and C. Interactionism rejects C, accepts A and B. Epiphenomenalism rejects A, accepts B and C. I explained why I am not a physicalist in Chapter 1 and will not repeat that material here. I will, however, briefly explain why I am not an interactionist either. It is not quite because I accept C – that is, I do not exactly reason from physical causal closure plus acceptance of B to rejection of A. I do accept C, but I have even more credibility for a narrower version of C, that says that the causes of our brain events are all and only physical. This acceptance is based on respect for actual science. We do not know only about neurons and synapses; we know about the passing of ions across membranes, chemical cycles that raise the long-term efficiency of synapses, and the effects of glial cells that remove and recycle neurotransmitters from synaptic clefts. It is simply not credible to me that our behavior is not the combined effect of such processes. It is not credible to me that one day, we will trace back a series of causes from our muscles, to their innervating neurons, to the neurons presynaptic to those innervators, and so on, and finally come to a neuron of which we can only say it just up and fired, not because there was an ionic condition in some part of it, but for no physical reason at all. This remark might seem incompatible with my acceptance (see note 3) of the possibility of strictly causeless events, based on an interpretation of quantum mechanics. So, I need to explain why I do not think that allowing uncaused events on quantum mechanical grounds provides an opening for interactionism. The key point is that interactionism claims 3 Note that this formulation does not say that all physical events have complete causes. Maybe the best interpretation of quantum mechanics + neuroscience will show that there are strictly causeless events that then contribute to neural events and behavior. C says that to the extent that physical events do have causes, they are all physical. And that’s what my narrower version says about brain events.

48 Epiphenomenalism causation by sensations (in virtue of their qualities), while quantum mechanics provides only possibilities with probability distributions. It does seem possible that there are events involving small items – perhaps the transition of an ion from one location to another – that are irreducibly probabilistic. But if so, they cannot account for the reliability of our reports of the qualities in our sensations. That reliability will require (what in any case seems plausible) that individual ionic motions be ‘swamped’ – that is, that our sensation reports (and nonverbal actions) be brought about by larger events that have the same effects in aggregate, irrespective of ionic details. An interactionist view would have to hold that it is these larger events that are caused by nonphysical sensations. That is, it would have to hold that these larger events occur regularly, not merely probabilistically, as effects that cannot be accounted for by application of physics to relatively large aggregations of physical parts. I do, of course, recognize that such a view is logically possible. So, I respect philosophical efforts to work out an interactionist view. But I also think there is a more theoretical difficulty for this view. Those who have read Chapter 2 will recall that I take the properties of sensations to be simple, relative to the complexity of their causes. This disparity was recognized long ago by Wundt (1912), who also recognized that any meaningful behavior of ours involves the occurrence of a large number of coordinated events. Even just to report that I have a red sensation, for example – even just to say ‘red’ – requires many muscles in the lips and tongue to contract in an orderly fashion. It is difficult to imagine how a relatively simple event such as a red sensation could target the large number of neurons that would be necessary to innervate the right sequence of muscular contractions. In contrast, the brain event causes of a red sensation are already highly complex.4 They are obvious candidates for events with the right sort of complexity, and the right sort of distribution, to drive the manifold activations that underlie our muscular competence. I am, of course, not claiming that a story that goes through a ‘bottleneck’ of a simple property is logically impossible. The point is that explanations that appeal to complex neural events throughout would be more parsimonious than explanations that would posit that a complex event first produces a relatively simple event, and then invokes a further process to explain how a simple event gets linked to one that is complex enough to produce meaningful behavior. Finally, I will briefly note that one objection that is often raised against epiphenomenalism is that it does not explain why the laws connecting brain events and sensations are what they are. Interactionism, however, faces the same sort of problem. There would have to be some laws that connected, say, the yellowness in a yellow sensation to the brain events

4 One need not accept the views about a special kind of complexity that were discussed in Chapter 2 to agree to this much.

Epiphenomenalism  49 that may (if we wish to report on our sensation) produce ‘yellow’ out of our mouths. But why should there be just these laws, and not others? Of course, all will recognize that the connection involves learning – those who grow up in Paris will say ‘jaune’. But this observation just pushes the problem back. If we think that learning is a matter of changes of synaptic strength due to temporal proximity of yellow visual stimuli and ‘yellow’ auditory stimuli from parents and others (for example), we can have an in-principle intelligible explanation of learning to report our sensations. Briefly, the brain-event causes of yellow sensations and the brain-event causes of auditory sensations of the sound ‘yellow’ will have a positive correlation, and that correlation can be ‘recorded’ in changes in synaptic weights in regions at which both of those causes have neural effects. But if we have to invoke an effect of the yellow sensation itself, we will have the problem of how, so to speak, the sensation quality ‘knows’ (or can ‘learn’) which are the right neurons to activate. 5 Or, if we suppose that a yellow sensation just causes some neural consequence or other, and that the contingencies of correlation among visual and auditory inputs enables the learning of connections that enable reporting and other yellow-relevant behavior, we will again be faced with an unparsimonious view. If those contingencies can explain our ability to learn words and appropriate nonverbal behavior, then causation by yellow sensations is not really doing any work in the account of that learning.

Interlude: Hameroff and Penrose 5. Since quantum mechanics has recently been mentioned, I should say something about a particularly well-known attempt to relate it to consciousness. This is the “Orch OR” theory (Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory) developed in recent decades by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. This theory has undergone some changes since its inception and it is still under development, but in Hameroff and Penrose (2014) these authors offer a detailed exposition of the view, its history, its support, its outstanding questions, and a number of options for further specification. I will not attempt to summarize this very rich and complex paper. There are two points I want to make, that will explain why I am not attracted to the view. The parts of the Orch OR theory that I will go into here are just those needed as background for understanding my doubts. 6. I assume that the reader is familiar with quantum mechanical superposition of states. The famous ‘measurement problem’, in brief, is that we never directly observe a superposition; we detect one state or another. But theories of quantum mechanics struggle to explain why. The ‘collapse’ of a superposed state into one of its component states does not 5 I have said a bit more about this aspect of interactionism in Robinson (2007a).

50 Epiphenomenalism (to put it mildly) fall out naturally from the basic equation of quantum mechanics. Many interpretations of quantum mechanics have been offered in response to this problem, and Penrose’s OR is one of them. OR is “objective”, that is to say, it is a real physical process. The “R” – the reduction – is a change from a superposition to a single state. Penrose’s theory proposes a (formidably complicated) measure of a relation between superposed states that can usefully be regarded as giving degrees of “distance” between the states. This distance can increase with time. When the distance exceeds a threshold, the superposition reduces to one of the superposed states. According to the theory it is such reductions that produce consciousness (or, perhaps, are “moments” of consciousness). 7. How much consciousness is provided by one instance of OR? The featured hypothesis derives from an observed “40 Hz” (actually, 30–90 Hz) wave detected by EEG. (Another possibility is mentioned, this one based on another EEG wave in the 4–7 Hz range.) One OR thus results in (or, is) a “moment” of consciousness lasting roughly 25 ms (or, perhaps, ~140–350 ms). A refinement of this suggestion holds instead that 40 Hz “moments” of consciousness each depend on a very large number of objective reduction events, in something like the way that a relatively slow succession of “beats” is produced by the very large number of oscillations produced by two instruments that are slightly out of tune. 8. The first problem that I see in this view is that, while the conditions for reduction are deterministic, the state to which a superposition is reduced is irreducibly probabilistic. We should, therefore, expect many cases in which our experience rapidly oscillates, but this is contrary to actual experience. So, for example, suppose we look at a clematis blossom in a fairly normal way – that is, for two or three seconds. A rich purple and a certain shape will be in our consciousness, and it will be stably there during that period. But that is 80 or more moments of consciousness on the featured hypothesis (or 8–14 on the alternative). There is no explanation in the Orch OR view of why such a succession of conscious moments should all be reductions to states of the same kind. Indeed, we should expect that they won’t be – i.e., we should expect that there would be reductions to different states, roughly in proportion to the probabilities associated with the various states in the superposition. Our experience should be expected to flicker among the qualities corresponding to the different possible reductions. One might suppose that it is the job of the “Orchestration” part of the view to take care of this problem. But orchestration – for example, coherence of quantum states across microtubules in many neurons – can at best limit the range of states to which a reduction is possible. It cannot, consistently with the quantum mechanical commitments of the theory, remove the probabilistic nature of the reduction (i.e., the reduction to different states in rough proportion to associated probabilities). It thus cannot account for the stability that characterizes our actual experience.

Epiphenomenalism  51 It may be thought that this stability problem can be solved by appeal to the quantum Zeno effect. 6 In some circumstances, the probability of one member of a pair of superposed states (say, B) increases with time since the last previous measurement that observed the other member (say, A) of the superposed pair. Immediately after an observation of A, the probability of observing B is very low. Thus, if one measures the system again after a very short time, there will be a high probability of observing A again. If one repeatedly makes rapidly following measurements, one would thus expect to repeatedly observe A. This theoretical prediction has received experimental support (Itano et al., 1990). If this effect applies to Hameroff-Penrose objective reductions, one might argue that successive reductions are measurements of our microtubular system, and that the quantum Zeno effect explains why, when conditions are stable (e.g., when we are looking at the same thing for several seconds), our successive ORs reduce to the same state, and thus support seeing the same color (for example). It is, however, not clear that the quantum Zeno effect can be sensibly expected to apply in the case of the Orch OR theory. That is because it is built into this theory that OR occurs when, and only when, the “distance” between superposed states has reached a certain threshold. The theory also allows for superpositions where both states have significant probabilities. Thus, the distance threshold has to be great enough to allow for reductions to either of two states with significant probabilities for each. In this theory, there could not be measurements that were packed too closely together to allow for enough time to develop sufficient distance between the superposed states. We should thus expect that there would be some occasions on which the apparent color of something we were looking at would change without there having been any change in lighting conditions or blood chemistry. Hameroff and Penrose might well accept this rejection of the quantum Zeno effect as explaining the stability of our perceptions. For there is a point in their article at which they briefly consider what lies behind our having the particular kind of experience that we have on particular occasions. They write: The particular selection of conscious perceptions and choices would, according to standard quantum theory, involve an entirely random process, but according to Orch OR, the (objective) reduction could act to select specific states in accordance with some non-­ computational new physics….” (Hameroff & Penrose, 2014, p. 59).7

6 See Misra and Sudarshan (1977); Itano et al. (1990). 7 The references given for the need for a new, non-computational physics are to Penrose (1989, 1994). These works make essential use of an argument that appeals to the work of K. Gödel. I have explained why this argument fails in Robinson (1992a).

52 Epiphenomenalism 9. The second objection is a more general complaint on the same theme. The outcome of reduction in the presentation of the theory is always just some moment of consciousness. There is nothing in the theory that even appears to explain why any particular reduction results in (or is) a moment of consciousness of any particular kind. It would be natural to speculate that inputs from, say, retinas would set up a superposed state in which a high-probability outcome is consciousness of a certain quality (e.g., purple, if the retina is being stimulated by a clematis blossom). But the theory proposes no mechanism as to how this might happen. It thus fails to provide any direction toward answering the Hard Problem in its specific form, i.e., the question why a particular kind of brain event should be correlated with any particular kind of qualitative event.

Back to Epiphenomenalism (1) 10. What I have said so far about motivation for epiphenomenalism is this. I reject interactionism for reasons given in §4, and I reject physicalism for reasons given in Chapter 1. Epiphenomenalism does, indeed, have its counterintuitive side, but I believe it is the best among uncomfortable choices. I also think it is a very natural view to hold if one dwells on the progress we have made in neuroscience. This is almost all I have to say about motivation, but there is one further point I would like to make. Physicalism licenses the claim that our sensations causally contribute to our behavior, and this agreement with common intuitions is often taken by physicalists to be a strong point in their favor. But this agreement is, in my view, often a hollow, merely verbal acceptance that ought not to carry any weight. To see why, consider the following statement, with which I believe physicalists will agree. There is, in principle (not, of course, in actual detail at the present time) an account of the causal history of our behavior that never mentions the quality of any sensation. The reception of stimuli can be completely described in terms of changes of physical state of sensory neurons – that is, in terms of changes in activity of sensory neurons, produced by mechanical pressure, vibration in inner-ear fluid, arrival of photons at the retina, particular molecules in the olfactory epithelium, and so on. The effects of sensory neurons on the neurons with which they have synaptic connections can again be accounted for entirely in terms such as neurotransmitter releases, synaptic gating mechanisms, and changes of electrical potential across neural membranes. The same kind of story can be told at each level of further penetration of a disturbance caused by a stimulus into post-synaptic, post-post-synaptic … and so on neurons. The same terms will be in principle adequate for describing what happens in

Epiphenomenalism  53 recurrent pathways. Sooner or later, some motor neurons will fire, and then we will need a few new terms to describe the interfacing of axon bulbs and muscle fibers. We need terms of no other kind to give as complete an account of the causation of what happens as is compatible with quantum mechanics. So far, this is also exactly what epiphenomenalists will say. Notice that terms for qualities of sensations – colors, scents, flavors, feelings of warmth, etc. – are completely absent from this account. So, how do physicalists differ from epiphenomenalists? They differ only because physicalists claim that some of the physical events are identical with sensations. The picture that physicalists offer instead of Figure 3.2 is given in Figure 3.3. However, as many physicalists will agree, there is no explanation of how a quality, such as yellow, can be in an event that is identical with some congeries of neural firings. Absent such an explanation, the view that physicalism saves causation of behavior in virtue of the kinds of sensations we are having is a hollow piece of ritual ideology. It provides no intelligible connection between yellow and neural events, no intelligible connection between the kind of sensation we are having and the behavior we exhibit. Apart from the incantation of an alleged a posteriori identity, it is structurally the same view as epiphenomenalism. In a slogan: A view that offers a complete causal account of behavior that never mentions phenomenal qualities cannot really be better off than epiphenomenalism. The tacking on of a brute assertion of identity should fool no one. At this point, many will be tempted to say that physicalism should not make an identity claim. Instead, it should hold that some physical events represent colors, scents, and so on. For reasons why I think this is no help, please see Chapter 1, § 23. Others may think that physicalism should be preferred on grounds of simplicity. For reasons against this view, please see Chapter 1, §§13 and 14.

Interlude: Russellian Monism 11. The slogan I offered a few lines above almost applies to another view that is somewhat popular at present and is often thought to be preferable to epiphenomenalism. This view is inspired by a few brief remarks made by Russell (1927a, 1927b) and is known as Russellian Monism Stim c

P1

c

P2 =S

Figure 3.3

c

P3

c

P4 . . . .

c

Beh

54 Epiphenomenalism (hereafter, RM). I have explained in detail why the difference in the reception of the two views is indefensible in Robinson (2018). Here I will limit myself to a simple account of what RM holds, a report of three conclusions from Robinson (2018), and one further point that was not included in that paper. 12. An important premise, shared by proponents of RM and many others, is that natural sciences tell us only about structural (or, relational) properties of fundamental physical entities and do not have anything to say about the intrinsic nature of those properties. For example, negative charge is a property such that its instances (electrons) repel other instances of the same property and attract instances of positive charge. Mass is resistance to being moved and is known through what happens when a body stands in certain spatial relations to sources of forces. But what these properties are in themselves is a question that natural science is not equipped to address. This circumstance leaves open the possibilities that the intrinsic natures of fundamental physical properties are phenomenal qualities, or that they are protophenomenal qualities (where these are qualities that will someday, somehow provide an explanation of phenomenal qualities). The distinctive claim of RM is that one of these possibilities is how things actually are. 13. One conclusion reached in Robinson (2018) is that even if electrons are, say, intrinsically blue (and even if they are intrinsically blue sensations), the occurrence of an electron in our brains is not eo ipso one of our blue sensations. This is evident from the fact that we always have electrons in our brains, but we are not always having a blue sensation. Since there is no kind of sensation that we are always having, this point generalizes to all phenomenal kinds: their being instantiated in physical particles in our brains is not what it is for us to have a sensation of that kind. Nor is it the same thing as our having a sensation of any other kind (since, again, if it were, there would be some sensation kinds that we would always be having, because we always have fundamental physical particles in our brains). 14. A frequent objection to epiphenomenalism can be put this way: It violates the powerful Causal Intuition that our sensations have effects in our behavior, and have those effects in virtue of the kinds of sensations they are. For example, it seems we report that we have a blue sensation in part because the sensation we are having is blue. Or, we select a yellow banana in part because the sensation we have when we look at that one is yellow. The second conclusion in Robinson (2018) is that RM violates this same Causal Intuition. Care is required to formally establish this point,

Epiphenomenalism  55 but its plausibility can be seen quite readily. First, I ask my readers to review the inset statement in the second paragraph of §10 above. Second, notice that everything in that statement is acceptable to proponents of RM. Of course, such proponents will want to add something to that statement – namely, that phenomenal or protophenomenal qualities are the intrinsic natures of constituents of the physical structures mentioned in the statement. The third step is to recognize that this addition fails to give our sensations any explanatory role in the production of behavior. The explanation of our behavior is given solely in terms of structural relations. The (postulated) dependence of these relations on instantiations of phenomenal or protophenomenal qualities in fundamental particles does not show any dependence on our sensations (because, as explained in §13, those instantiations are not our sensations). The slogan I introduced near the end of §10 does not quite apply to RM. That is because proponents of RM can fairly claim to mention phenomenal qualities (or, at least, protophenomenal qualities) in their account. They are what provide the structures that our physical sciences tell us about. However, a corollary of the point made in §13 can be put this way: to mention a phenomenal quality as an intrinsic property of a fundamental particle in our brains is not to say anything whatever about our sensations or the qualities of our sensations. The same point holds even more obviously for mentions of protophenomenal qualities of fundamental particles. It should thus be clear that a slightly revised slogan does apply to RM: A view that offers a complete causal account of behavior that never mentions a phenomenal quality of our sensations cannot really be better off than epiphenomenalism. 15. It is a natural addition to RM as so far described to hold that some arrangements of fundamental physical items (and a fortiori some arrangements of phenomenal or protophenomenal qualities) constitute our sensations – where an arrangement is some collection of items standing is some particular set of physical relations. On this conception, there will be some laws that describe regularities among particular kinds of arrangements and particular kinds of our sensations. The third conclusion drawn in Robinson (2018) that I want to record here is that the qualities of sensations that these laws connect to physical arrangements are not qualities in virtue of which anything in our behavior takes place. Again, a formal argument has to be somewhat complex, but the point is easy to see. Phenomenal or protophenomenal qualities of fundamental physical particles fix their structural relations, and then, in principle, everything that happens in our physical bodies is a consequence of their physical constitution and those structural relations. The postulated laws that are supposed to connect arrangements of phenomenal or protophenomenal qualities of fundamental particles to phenomenal qualities of our sensations would be an additional set

56 Epiphenomenalism of laws that are not derivable from the physical laws. Thus, those laws could have been different without making any difference to our behavior. The properties of our sensations that result, according to those laws, from arrangements of physical items, are thus not properties in virtue of which anything in our bodies happens. This view is structurally identical to epiphenomenalism. One may, of course, reject causal closure of the physical, or at least a consequence of it that says that everything that happens in our physical bodies is a consequence of their physical constitution and the physical, structural relations among their parts. One could then consistently claim that phenomenal qualities in our sensations made some sort of difference in the physical world. But to adopt these views would be to adopt interactionism; and that would not be to rescue RM, but to abandon it. 16. Proponents of RM typically claim that the (phenomenal or protophenomenal) intrinsic natures ground the structural properties of their bearers. Accepting this claim may seem to give phenomenal (or protophenomenal) qualities, and thus consciousness, a special and satisfying relation to our behavior, even if that relation is not strictly speaking a causal one. This appearance is hollow. To say that phenomenal qualities ground basic physical relations is to commit to there being some truth that has the same form as this claim: Electrons repel each other because they are blue. This is not enlightenment. It is an utter mystery how such a claim could be true. A natural thought here would be that there might be other phenomenal qualities that would make more sense as grounds of physical relations. For example, pain seems a natural candidate to initiate the physical action of withdrawal. But here, we need to remember that imagining pain as grounding, say, the +1/2 spin of some of the electrons in our brains is not imagining one of our pain sensations. (If it were, we would be in pain all the time.) Nor is having spin of +1/2 a withdrawal or an initiator of a withdrawal. ‘The electron curved this way in the detector because its intrinsic nature is pain’ is no better than ‘The electron repelled its mate because its intrinsic nature is blue’. It cannot, of course, be quite so evident that switching to protophenomenal qualities instead of phenomenal qualities will result in all the same problems. But reflection on the foregoing discussion should make it clear that substitution of protophenomenal for phenomenal qualities makes little difference to the reasoning. Except for the plausibility of the relation between pain and withdrawal, the phenomenal qualities were arbitrary examples; thus substituting protophenomenal qualities will yield the same results. What that substitution does bring with it is (a) an enormous promissory note to someday, somehow explain how phenomenal qualities arise from protophenomenal qualities. Presumably, this

Epiphenomenalism  57 will have to be something better than anyone has been able to provide for how phenomenal qualities arise from congeries of neural events, but we currently have no idea how this note is to be paid off. (b) The move to protophenomenal qualities does not come with any examples. These alleged qualities are known only as qualities that someday, somehow will contribute to an explanation of how phenomenal qualities come into the world. It is, of course, difficult to derive any contradictions from a view so thinly described. But that is not because it is a better view; it is because it has minimal content. For example, if we are asked to imagine that there might be a truth of the form ‘Electrons repel each other because they are P*’, where P* is some protophenomenal quality, we will have an exceedingly weak grasp of what we are supposed to imagine. If we find that we have less sense of mystery in this case than we do when we put ‘blue’ in the place of ‘P*’, that is due only to increase in vagueness. Perhaps it will be suggested that we should give up grounding and settle for the view that it may be a contingent law of nature that connects an intrinsic property to a physical relation. We would, for example, give up the idea that electrons repel each other because they are blue, and say only that electrons, which are intrinsically blue, also stand in a relation of mutual repulsion. Epiphenomenalism, however, would contain all the actual explanations of behavior that would be part of such a view, and it would be a more parsimonious account. That is because (i) Epiphenomenalism and the suggested view would overlap in their acceptance of physical laws, and whatever explanations can be given in those terms. (ii) Since the intrinsic natures cannot be our sensations, both views would need laws connecting arrangements of physical items to our sensations. (c) The suggested view would also posit an additional set of laws relating phenomenal or protophenomenal intrinsic natures to physical relations. Epiphenomenalism would have no need for this extra set of laws.

Back to Epiphenomenalism (2) 17. Epiphenomenalism was not mentioned in the development of ConCAS in Chapter 2. It is thus natural to ask how these views are related. The answer is that the ConCAS view is implicitly epiphenomenalistic. The key to understanding why this is so is that the ConCAS view contains no means of varying sensations or their qualities other than by varying their brain event causes. It is true that ConCAS, being a conservation law, is symmetrical in its form. So, in principle, increasing simplicity would require a corresponding increase in SR complexity. But the ConCAS view has no model for increasing instantiation of relatively simple qualities other than by means of increasing amount of SR complexity on the physical side. Thus, the application of ConCAS is asymmetrical, i.e., it always goes in the direction from physical complexity to qualitative simplicity.

58 Epiphenomenalism When neuroscience discovers what exactly SR complexity is, we will understand how the physical world can bring into being events that have that kind of complexity. The requirement imposed by the conservation law, plus the demands imposed by MAP and uMAP, will then justify holding that those events cause the corresponding sensations. (This parallels the claim that adding water to one end of a U-shaped tube causes the level at the other end to rise. Behind this causal claim is the conservation of energy law.) Since the ConCAS view describes no way of independently bringing about a sensation, it offers no way of applying ConCAS in a reverse direction, i.e., no way of generating a claim that a sensation has caused a brain event. I suppose that I cannot prevent someone from thinking up a theory of how we could add something to the ConCAS view, so as to provide for independent variation of sensations. I do not see that what I have stated so far is formally incompatible with such a suggestion, but I do not see how to add any such view. So, I will now add exclusion of independent means of varying sensations as a formal principle of the ConCAS theory. A theory that added to ConCAS a proposal for a means of independently varying sensations would be sufficiently different from the account put forward here that it should get a different name. 18. I turn now to a speculative suggestion concerning causation of sensations. I put this suggestion forward tentatively. If it pans out, it would provide some interesting properties. That is not a reason to accept it. It is, however, a reason for explaining it with sufficient clarity to see that it is a coherent suggestion. The suggestion is that it might turn out that causes of sensations – physical events with SR complexity – necessarily occupy durations. That is, they are sequences of events, rather than states, where the sequences are what instantiate SR complexity. This suggestion runs against the grain of our usual way of thinking in classical physics. Laplace’s demon, for example, knows the state of the whole world at one time, and all the applicable laws. This information determines the state of the world at any later time. We need not look at the history of how the initially given state arose. This last remark may not be strictly true. To determine the future, we need to know not only positions, but instantaneous velocities. These, however, can be defined only as limits reached as we take ever narrower temporal intervals around the time of the initial state. So, perhaps a Laplacean picture presupposes a small quantity of history – just enough to provide grounds that determine instantaneous velocities. What we have learned from chaos theory – the ‘butterfly effect’ – complicates the Laplacean picture. For long-range prediction, Laplace’s demon must be supposed to know exact values of real numbers. Some of these will be infinitely non-repeating, and it is thus problematic to

Epiphenomenalism  59 suppose them knowable. However, if we specify a finite time, and a definite, nonzero maximum error, we will be able to specify finite decimal expansion lengths of real numbers that will be sufficient for determinations within that time and within the error interval. We can thus imagine the Laplacean demon succeeding in determining temporally nearby states from the initial state and laws, within very narrow limits. We can approximate to the Laplacean view of each nearly instantaneous state determining the ‘next’ nearly instantaneous state, which determines the ‘next’, and so on. The suggestion I want to make is that there is another possibility, which may hold for causation of sensations by brain events. This is that the properties in virtue of which a physical event causes a sensation (of a particular kind) are properties of sequences of brain events. Just as a pattern in fabric (e.g., striped; paisley) necessarily requires spatial extent in order to be instantiated, it may be that relevant patterning in brain events is patterning in sequences, and thus necessarily takes nontrivial time to be instantiated. Causation is a relation of events in virtue of their properties. I see no contradiction in causation of a sensation by an event in virtue of a property that requires a non-instantaneous time in order to be instantiated. Visual processing begins in the retina, but we are not conscious of retinal states (Koch, 2004). Color vision requires activation in the considerably later area, V4 (Zeki, 1999). In ordinary conditions, our visual awareness involves color perception, and it may depend on thalamic and/ or frontal neural participation. It does not follow that we must think that the cause of a visual sensation is an effectively instantaneous state that occurs at a certain point in the processing in V4, or an effectively instantaneous state that occurs later, and in a larger set of neurons. It is open to us to hold that the cause of a sensation is an event that instantiates a certain kind of pattern (one that is a species of SR complexity), such that instantiating that pattern property necessarily requires a sequence of events spread over some nontrivial time. On this conception, what happens in early vision – even as early as events in the retina – may be relevant to the character of an event that takes place over the range of, say, 50–100 ms. That is, the relevant causal property may be that there is a sequence of events that has a certain set of relations holding among its constituents, where the holding of these relations requires an unfolding of events over a nontrivial time.8 An advantage of this ‘efficacy of sequences’ picture is that it allows for a relatively large number of event types to occur within the brief time

8 One possible way to think of this invokes properties of undulations in the pin impression toy analogy in Chapter 2, §7. Such undulations would require nontrivial time for their instantiation.

60 Epiphenomenalism it takes for sensations to arise. For purposes of illustration, consider a sheet of N neurons each of which might be effectively in, say, one of 3 levels of firing rate. The sheet would have 3N possible states. Now, suppose that we divide a sequence into p ‘periods’ – i.e., small temporal intervals where we take an average reading within each interval. Then there will be (3N)p possible sequences. This larger number of sequences (i.e., larger relative to the number of states available at any single instant), should help with the problem of providing for a large number of different possible sensation qualities within a brief time. There is another possible advantage of looking to sequence properties as the physical causes of sensations. Our sensations certainly can change abruptly, but they can also change very gradually. This kind of ‘continuity’ might receive some explanation from the sequences as causes view. On that conception, we can imagine that a sequence from t1 to t8 (say) has a certain character, and that a property of this sequence is that in virtue of which the owner of the relevant brain has a certain kind of sensation. If the world changes slowly and the owner does not move abruptly, it will be likely that the relevant properties of sequences from t2 to t9, t3 to t10, and so on will be similar; and thus, by MAP, give rise to sensations of similar kinds. Stepping away from details, the picture that incorporates the present suggestion is one on which there is a second kind of dualism, in addition to the dualism of relatively simple properties and SR complex properties. To wit: the physical world is the territory of (near) instantaneous state production by briefly preceding (near) instantaneous states. The phenomenal world is the territory produced by events that require physical properties that have temporal ‘thickness’ – physical (SR complex) sequences. In the remainder of this book, I will have further occasions to refer to causation of experiences by brain events. Such remarks are always to be taken as leaving it open whether the brain event cause is a near instantaneous event or a sequence, as outlined in this section. 19. I will close this chapter with two sections that are designed merely to connect epiphenomenalism to discussions in later chapters. The topic for the present section is William James’s ‘evolutionary argument’ against epiphenomenalism. This argument will be discussed in detail in Chapter 9, where I will provide an explicit statement of the argument. The only point I want to make about it now is that it does not argue for efficacy of sensations in virtue of their specific qualities such as what color or taste is involved, or whether they are feelings of nausea or itches. It argues for efficacy of sensations in virtue of their being pleasant or unpleasant. To evaluate James’s argument, we thus need to have some background about issues concerning valence. That will be provided in Chapter 9. It is indeed an important part of the defense of epiphenomenalism to respond

Epiphenomenalism  61 to James’s argument. I am not shirking the duty of giving this response, but only putting it off until the required background has been developed. 20. There is an extensive literature on the topic of mental causation. Since sensations are, on my view, included in what comes under the ‘mental’, the epiphenomenalism of this chapter is, broadly speaking, a contribution to that topic. The contemporary mental causation debate, however, is mainly focused on propositional attitudes, primarily beliefs and desires. These items are not sensations, and the account to be given of them will be significantly different from the account for sensations. The discussion of the present chapter cannot be taken over in any simple and direct way, so as to apply to beliefs and desires. When I turn to these latter items, I will offer an account that seems natural for an epiphenomenalist about sensations to hold, and that will, of course, be consistent with my account of sensations. But it will have a different structure and it will be based on independent considerations. It will be part of an epiphenomenalist outlook, but it will not have the same structure as epiphenomenalism for sensations. Before turning to mental causation, however, I want to collect some reflections on the character of our experience. I believe they have some interest in their own right, but they are also necessary to respond to some issues concerning the ‘transparency’ of experience. These issues must be addressed because some misunderstandings of the nature of our experience threaten to undercut the plausibility of QER, and therewith the epiphenomenalist view of sensations for which this chapter has offered explanation and support.

4 Experience as Such

1. The Qualitative Event Realism that was developed in Chapter 1, and that has been in the background of subsequent discussions, runs sharply against a widely held view. This view claims that experiences are ‘transparent’; that we ‘look right through’ them to the objects of our perception. Experiences do not instantiate phenomenal qualities: they represent them, and represent them as being in objects external to ourselves. Early sections of this chapter argue that while there is a grain of truth in the transparency view, it has been misunderstood. A better way of locating that grain of truth is provided. This account, however, requires a new answer to the question of what exactly we are doing when we think about, or attend to, experiences as events in their own right. Later sections of this chapter explain this question and develop an answer to it. 2. In Robinson (2004) I argued at some length that the character of some of our experience is three-dimensional.1 I will not repeat all of the argumentation here, but I do want to explain what this claim means, and present it so that it will have at least some plausibility for the reader. Let us begin with visual experience, and let us remind ourselves of a point in Russell’s (1912, e.g.) sense datum theory. Visual sense data were typically of one color or another, and they were also typically of some shape or other. One could have a red and round sense datum, a blue and triangular sense datum, and so on. Sense datum theory has come in for extensive criticism, and I am not proposing here to resurrect it. 2 I mention it in order to call attention to a

1 I use ‘experience’ in this chapter because it is so frequently used by others, and because I want it to be clear that I am not presupposing particular claims I have made about sensations. 2 I’ll record just one objection. Classical sense datum theory requires there to be a mental act that is acquainted with a sense datum when we have an experience. But this act is mysterious, and it is a problem for Russell, because strands of his view require us to be acquainted with such acts, but (as Russell was well aware) it is at least questionable whether we have any such acquaintance.

Experience as Such  63 kind of objection that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been made against sense datum theory. It has not been alleged that the view was phenomenologically wrong in holding that color and shape are properties in our experience. It has been denied that the sense datum theory was correct in holding that color and shape are in an experience by way of being properties instantiated in sense data, but it has not been alleged that the sense datum theory was wrong in trying to account for both color and shape properties in our experience. No one has said “Yes, colors are somehow in our experience, but what’s this nonsense about expanses of particular shapes?!”.3 3. I shall take it as agreed, then, that the geometrical property of shape is somehow in our experience. Whatever account of experience one wishes to offer, it must somehow say how the shapes of color expanses come into the account. Now, my view is that, in exactly the same sense in which shapes are in our experience (however that may be), so is depth. Sense datum theorists sometimes got this wrong. Russell, for example, sometimes appeals to what an artist would have to draw, in order to make a realistic (or, ‘representational’) drawing. If one thinks in this way, one will argue that a sense datum normally caused by looking at a round dinner plate from usual angles (i.e., from anywhere but straight above its center) is actually elliptical. It is peculiar to offer arguments about the character of our experience, and we should not be persuaded by this one. It is a plain fact that although, in special circumstances, a round plate can look elliptical, most of the time round plates look round and tilted (relative to our direction of gaze). But you cannot have an experience of a tilted round plate without having, so to speak, ‘room for the tilt’ – that is, without a space that includes nearer and farther regions. It is also a plain fact that our visual experience does not come to us like a flat canvas. The farther rim of the cup on my desk, for example, just plain looks farther away than the nearer rim. Our visual experience is spread out. Most will already agree that it is spread out in two ­dimensions – up-down and right-left. But, in exactly the same sense, it is spread out in a third dimension – near-far. Berkeley (1713/1954, e.g.) said that distance is but a line turned endwise to the eye. The point seems to have been that distance is a kind of inferential product, one that could not be in our experience. This is a mistake, perhaps brought on by thinking about artistic representation. What is true is that what an artist puts down on paper could be exactly the same in the two cases (a) a larger cup at a longer distance and (b) a

3 Dennettians will deny experiences as realities. I am not addressing them here. My intended interlocutors here are experiential realists of one stripe or another.

64  Experience as Such smaller cup at a shorter distance. But this fact cannot show that our experience does not contain depth. At best, it shows something about the intricacy of the causes of depth in our experience. One way to bring home the experiential character of depth is to do the following little experiment. Look out the window, and put a hand over one eye. Keep looking, with your hand still over the one eye, for about 20 seconds. Now remove the hand. If you are like me, there will be a sudden, palpable ‘3-D’ effect, similar to that of a 3-D movie, or a stereopticon. This is as directly an experiential difference as there ever is, and should put paid to the notion that depth cannot be an experiential property. It is a little puzzling as to why the 3-D aspect of visual experience does not seem to disappear immediately when the one eye is covered. Perhaps it does in others, but when I do this experiment, I don’t notice the difference until the restoration phase when the hand is removed. I am not sure of the explanation for this, but here is a candidate that seems to be coherent. When the hand is first placed over one eye, memory supplies what vision no longer provides. This ‘compensation’ fades just gradually enough to escape attention – we know that this can happen, from certain change blindness experiments where, e.g., the color of a large object gradually undergoes a very significant, but unnoticed, change. It may be that it is only when the hand is removed that the change happens rapidly enough to be noticed. If this explanation proves correct, the ‘3-D’ aspect would be characteristic of normal binocular vision, but not remarked because of its constant presence. Coming back to sense datum theory for a moment: I do not mean to imply that sense datum theorists always got the point about depth wrong. H. H. Price wrote of red bulgy sense data caused by viewing tomatoes. One cannot have a bulgy sense datum without a spatial range in which the bulging parts are closer than some other parts. 4. The point about depth is easiest to make by using visual examples, but once the point is clear, it is easy to extend it to some other senses. Sounds, for example, often have an experienced location. Bodily sensations have a location in the body, the place where they are felt. This is often a small part, although, of course, one can feel achy all over during the flu. Unless one is having a headache, a pain will have a location ‘out there’ in one’s body, and not in the head, where its brain-event cause is located. Tastes generally pervade the mouth, but if a large fragment of a peppercorn lands in just the right place, one can sometimes have a taste located on one side of the tongue. One can be warm all over, but one can also have a warmth sensation located at some relatively small region of one’s skin. And so on. In contrast, smells do not seem to have either shape or depth. The place where they are coming from is not in the experience but is attributed on the basis of where we have to put our noses to get the most intense sensations.

Experience as Such  65

Transparency 5. Representationalists have been fond of talking about ‘transparency’ of our experiences. The thought behind the use of this term is that we ‘look right through’ our experiences to the objects that they represent. It appears that some representationalists believe that the transparency of experience supports their view that the nature of an experience is exhausted by its being a representation of some properties of an object. To clarify this remark, let us remind ourselves of Chapter 1, §23. Parts of some paintings represent the color of an object by colored paint; e.g., a white unicorn might be represented by a white patch of paint of a certain shape.4 Such a patch represents, but it also has a nature of its own, and it is by means of this nature that it represents what it does. That is not what representationalists have in mind. Their view is that there is no nature by which an experience represents what it does. An experience may have a neural constitution, but in general it does not represent neural constitution of any kind. Its experiential character is nothing other than its representing of the property of some external object. There is no whiteness, for example, in your experience of a painting of a white unicorn; whiteness enters the situation only as the represented property of the paint on the canvas. In Chapter 1, I expressed some difficulties for representationalism. The point I want to focus upon now is that the so-called transparency of our experiences is not a good argument in support of that view. To think otherwise is to confuse the phenomenological fact of depth in our experiences with a theoretical claim about the analysis of experience. The phenomenological fact is that our visual experience is three-­ dimensional. The brown that we attribute to the cigar in the ashtray is phenomenologically ‘out there’. It is ‘out there’ even if we are hallucinating. The non-phenomenological claim concerning representation cannot follow from this phenomenological fact. This point may be conceded, but it may still be claimed that representationalism is needed to explain the phenomenological fact. That is, it might be thought that the apparent three-dimensionality of experience is explained by saying that we look right through the experience to the world, and the world is three-dimensional. This view, however, would harbor a confusion. Since misrepresentation is possible, the facts about what is in the world do not by themselves explain why those facts are what we represent the world as being. The three-dimensionality of the world is, of course, available as (part of) a cause of the three-­ dimensionality of our experience of the world. But it is not available to

4 Many colors are represented in paintings by paints of a color different from what is represented; e.g., a part of a white unicorn that is in shadow will be represented by paint that has a somewhat bluish cast. All analogies have limits, and this complication is best taken as indicating where a limit of the ‘mental paint’ analogy lies.

66  Experience as Such replace the three-dimensionality of experience that represents the world. The three-­dimensionality of experience is the putative explanandum. It may be causally explained partly by appeal to the three-dimensionality of the world, but it is a confusion to think that it is explained away (i.e., shown not to be a reality) by the three-dimensionality of the world. I have seen, more than once, a leading philosopher talk about transparency in a conference presentation setting. At a certain point, the verbal part of the presentation expresses the view that what is experienced is not ‘in here’. The nonverbal part is the raising of the hands so that they point at the speaker’s head. This performance is followed by an expression of the fact that the objects we experience are ‘out there’. At this point, the hands go away from the speaker’s head, out toward the audience. All this is given with every appearance of having made some important philosophical point. Of course, it does no such thing. 5 The view that experiences literally instantiate qualia and are caused by brain events does not imply that what is experienced appears as located inside my brain. To the best of my knowledge, no one holds such a view. The three-dimensional character of our visual experience is implicitly recognized by all. It is just often misdescribed.

Experiences as Such for Nonlinguistic Animals? 6. The recognition of experiences as instantiating properties leads to the question of what the difference is between thinking of, or attending to, our experiences as experiences, and having experiences in the normal course of perception. Representationalism has one answer to this question: ordinary perceptual experiences are representations of external things and their properties. Experiences do not instantiate properties that we can ordinarily attended to; they are brain events that are known only through theories that seek to explain the causes of our representing particular things and properties on particular occasions. If we dissent from this view and hold that experiences are instances of phenomenal qualities, we must find some alternative account of what the difference is between attending to an experience as such and having experiences in the course of perceiving the worldly things that cause our experiences and that we are primarily engaged with most of the time. To find such an account, we may begin with the observation that we are descendants of nonlinguistic animals, and our mental abilities have come from additions and revisions to those of nonlinguistic animals. A methodological corollary is that we should go as far as we can in trying to think of how mental abilities can work in a nonlinguistic animal.

5 For a different approach to a similar conclusion, see Amy Kind (2008).

Experience as Such  67 Of course, at some point a complete philosophy of mind must also account for how language arises and explain just what advantage it offers. But linguistic ability is something to be accounted for in the end. The starting point should be nonlinguistic animals, and the explanation of language must be given as an intelligible development from a nonlinguistic background. Lest I raise expectations that will be disappointed, I disclaim the ability to provide such a complete account. But the desiderata of such an account are clear. What I am concerned with in this section is whether there can be, in a nonlinguistic animal, a distinction between (a) its having experiences in the normal course of everyday business and (b) its having an attitude in which it attends to the experience as such. In attempting to consider this question, I am going to assume that Fido has sensory experiences more or less like ours, and that at least most of the time, Fido is occupied with its world – its food, the playful or threatening manner of other dogs, its master’s behavior that may indicate change in mood or preparations to go out, and so forth. What could it be like for Fido to slip into an attitude of regarding its experiences as such? Could there be anything that would answer to this description? I have no argument to show that the following is the maximum we can suppose in this line, but I will try to justify the view that what I will describe is compatible with plausible canine (and, of course, many other mammals’) abilities. My account crucially involves a notion of taking seriously. This is not a verbal matter, nor is it an episode of consciousness. It is a disposition. An organism takes its experiences seriously when it is disposed to act on the basis of what it perceives. This disposition is distinct from whatever reflection or justification a linguistic organism may offer. It is a disposition that Fido is presumably in most of the time. If Fido sees (or smells) another dog, Fido is normally disposed to engage it in some way. Whether the engagement is playful or antagonistic will depend on particular features of the other dog’s movements (and perhaps odors?). Here again, I believe we can all imagine that Fido’s response to these features takes them seriously. That just means that it is disposed to adjust its behavior in light of perceived features of its situation. Now, it seems to me to be possible for Fido to have an experience that it does not take seriously. The most plausible case would be an experience whose causes are so abnormal that besides causing the experience, they induce a period of time during which normal action dispositions cannot automatically lead to an immediate outcome. Imagine, for example, that Smith has a rubber mask in his pocket that will make his head look larger and that will show a lot of bared teeth. Smith goes out into the yard and plays at throwing a stick and having Fido retrieve and return it. After a while, Smith throws the stick and, while Fido is racing toward it, Smith whips out the mask, dons it, and crouches. Let’s

68  Experience as Such suppose that the stick was thrown upwind. When Fido retrieves the stick and turns around, it will see an apparently much-altered creature. Fido might be unfazed by the transformation, but we need not suppose linguistic abilities on Fido’s part in order to imagine a conflict in Fido’s dispositions. It normally runs toward Smith, but now what is visible looks quite different from Smith. Fido might return the stick anyway, without missing a beat. But it is also possible that the perception of Smith’s radically different appearance would disrupt its normal response. For a moment, it might be immobilized. Habit incipiently mobilizes returning the stick, but the new input may cause disruption of that disposition without immediately providing another. At that moment, Fido is, presumably, having a visual experience; but it is not (not yet, anyway) taking it seriously. It is, for a moment, not responding to it with any of its organized responses to items in the world (i.e., it is not being caused by the causes of the experience to make any response just yet). We do not have to attribute any linguistic abilities to Fido in order to imagine further that a particular kind of episode of consciousness accompanies this moment. If we had it, we might describe it as a feeling of confusion, or as a “What the devil?!” feeling. Fido has no ability to describe anything, but that is no obstacle to its having a feeling that is caused by (and, in it, caused only by) the sudden suspension of its having a disposition to take one definite action or another. It will be convenient to have a name for this feeling. I shall call it the ‘Hunh? feeling’. I do not mean that Fido says “Hunh?” to itself! The term is to be understood as a term of art for the feeling just indicated. 7. It is possible for Fido to be in a state that exhibits a primitive approximation to intentionality. The transformed Smith may be attended to. Or, more accurately, something may be in the focus of Fido’s attention. We know that it is the transformed Smith, but we are supposing Fido to be confused and not yet able to mobilize an action. Fido can generally recognize familiar objects in precisely this sense: When it sees a familiar object, its brain enacts processes that, most of the time, lead to ordinary successes in the presence of that familiar object. For example, seeing its food bowl not empty, it approaches and eats. Seeing its master put on a coat, it presents itself at the door. In the peculiar case I have imagined, Fido does not recognize what it sees – in the same precise sense. That is (we are supposing) it has not (yet) had its brain processes converge on any action. It is in a kind of suspension – but, we are plausibly supposing, it is having a visual experience. Its brain processes are, in effect, searching for a convergence on some response, but until such a resolution is found, the experience is just there. Contrary to normal life, the experience is unattached to a place in an ongoing series of actions. The experience is there, and so is the Hunh? feeling. Both are receiving some degree of attention. Perhaps that is all we should say. But it is

Experience as Such  69 compatible with our nonlinguistic presupposition that, in the imagined situation, these two aspects of Fido’s awareness are ‘bound’. One aspect of this binding might consist in a tendency for causes of episodic memory of the experience (a mental image of it at a later time) to also cause an accompanying image of the Hunh? feeling. Further, the binding could have an aspectual character, in the following sense. Fido is not surprised by the look of the lawn, the sky, or the house outside of which it and Smith have been playing. It is that toothy apparition that is being focused upon while the Hunh? feeling is present. Needless to say, Fido has no theory of any of this. I have to theorize in order to convey what state it is about which I want to say something. The state itself is just an experience and a feeling, where the feeling is of, or directly concerned with, a particular aspect of that experience. 8. I have used the term “attention”. Attention is a very large topic and I do not intend to go deeply into it. But attention is generally thought of as selective, and so there is a possible objection to my having said that both an experience and a feeling are receiving some degree of attention. In response, I shall just note that objects of attention can be complex. Yes, we can attend to a single peppercorn that has escaped our transfer to the grinder and is just sitting there on a kitchen counter. But we can also attend, for example, to the delay between the flash of a firework and the bang caused by the same explosion. This requires that we attend to both the flash and the bang. If we can do that, we can surely attend to both an experience and a feeling. It is possible to hold that a fine grained analysis would show that we oscillate our attention, rapidly alternating between the flash and the bang. Let that be so; still, we would never notice the delay between the flash and the bang unless in one way or another the two objects can be brought together long enough for a temporal comparison to be made. However it is that that works, it is plausible that a similar mechanism could bring together an experience and a feeling. I have also used the term “bound”. This is not the same binding as obtains between color and shape. The toothy shapes in Smith’s mask are, for example, bound to whiteness, while the hairy ear-shaped parts are bound to, say, brown. I am not suggesting that the Hunh? feeling is bound to Fido’s visual experience in the same way. Their connection is more like the connection between pleasure and the aspect of a situation in which one takes pleasure. I will be saying more about this kind of connection in Chapter 9, §§3–7.

Experiences as Such for Us 9. At the beginning of §6, I identified the topic of understanding our experiences as experiences. The remarks about Fido form a first step

70  Experience as Such toward this understanding, but they are only a first step. They broach the possibility of an experience that is not swept up in a series of unproblematic ongoing responses. This is not yet an account of how we can intelligibly write about our experiences as such. Let us try to see what more needs to be added. When we philosophize about our experiences, we are not generally surprised or puzzled in any way. Virtually all readers of these words will have tried out the Brain in a Vat (BIV) hypothesis: Maybe I’m a brain in a vat, and this coffee cup I seem to see, this keyboard, this cigar in its ashtray, don’t exist at all and I’m just having experiences as of seeing them caused by computer inputs managed by an evil scientist. We can entertain this idea, even though the cup, the keyboard, and the cigar in its ashtray are all ordinary, familiar objects that cause no puzzlement, and that are surrounded by a wealth of dispositions for their ordinary use. There is no Hunh? feeling that goes with having the experience, even when we are considering it just as an experience. What I would like to understand is how the entertaining of the idea of experiences as experiences becomes possible. The first step we took with Fido will be relevant to this project, but it is clearly not the end of it. A useful intermediate case is that of a wax apple. A real apple in a bowl mobilizes some cognitive responses. I do not mean that we particularly attend to every apple that we are in any way aware of (although, of course, we may attend to apples on particular occasions), but if we notice an apple at all, we register an edible. We form unconscious expectations. By this, I mean that there is nothing in our inner speech about the presence of an apple, nor any mental images of eating, or doing anything else with respect to it. Nonetheless, we would be surprised if, for example, it disappeared. Suppose, now, that we are hungry and pick up the apple. We do not say to ourselves “When I bite into this I’ll get a sweet or tart juice”. We may be continuing a conversation as we pick up the apple. Nonetheless, we have unconscious expectations. These will be revealed instantly if, upon biting, we get no juice, but only a hard resistance that slides on our teeth in a way that no apple ever has done. So far, we have another case of an experience that is highly likely to be accompanied by a Hunh? feeling. But now let us shift to a somewhat later time. We have returned the ‘apple’ to the bowl, putting our teeth marks out of sight. We now know it’s a wax apple. But it still looks like an apple. That is to say, we have a visual experience, and there is some tendency to mobilize the same naïve unconscious expectations that we had before we knew its waxy nature, but there is also an expectation that conflicts with those. We are no longer surprised by anything in this situation, but

Experience as Such  71 we still have a ‘distancing’ from our usual unconscious expectations that are caused by the ever-so-lifelike surface properties of the wax apple. Although the usual expectations are unconscious, we are somehow aware of the conflict (or, the ‘distancing’). We regard our experience with a jaundiced eye. We do not take it seriously, in the normal way. The state I have tried to describe does not seem to me to require language. It seems to be sufficient that experience has taught me that this item (the wax apple) is no ordinary apple. Of course, I have to use words to say what I mean. But I do not see why Fido could not try biting a wax apple, be surprised, bite again, learn that this item is not like the other apples, and come to be in a state of conflict – conflict, that is, between what it usually mobilizes when it is caused to have apple experiences like this one, and the attitude it is now taking toward this item. Something like the Hunh? feeling might well accompany this condition. Once the surprise has worn off, however, the remaining feeling might be better described as an attitude of suspicion, wariness, and/or perplexity. Our having removed the element of surprise brings us closer to an attitude of regarding experiences as experiences, but we are still not quite there. I can consider the experience produced by viewing objects on my desk without entertaining the idea that they are made of wax, or that they really are mere appearances fed to me as a BIV. The minimal addition that gives us what we need seems to be this. We need to pretend that we have an attitude of suspicion, while not actually having it. We have to imagine that we are distancing ourselves from our ordinary responses, while in fact those ordinary responses remain fully in place. This pretense is a relatively sophisticated cognitive ability, and perhaps it is beyond Fido’s ken. But it is not essentially an affair of language. It is a transference of an attitude of suspicion that occurs naturally in abnormal cases (like the masked Smith and the wax apple) to thoroughly normal cases. When we make this transference, we are regarding our experiences as experiences. We are imaging a state of suspension of habitual dispositions, even while in fact they are not suspended. We can, of course, imagine being in a state of suspension of belief that we are not actually in, without regarding any experience as an experience. Perhaps, for example, we know where our young children are, but we can still imagine not being sure about that and the anxiety that might attend such a state. But what our suspension of belief is about in this case is our children’s location. In contrast, when we regard an experience as such, we are in the first place attending to an experience, and our pretense is about that experience (even as we have no real doubt of its veridicality). 10. If the foregoing account is approximately correct, we have some additional support for the three dimensionality of visual experience. That comes as a corollary to the point that regarding an experience as an

72  Experience as Such experience is not a theoretical hypothesis (which would require linguistic formulation). It is not an inference. It is, instead, a change of attitude that consists in an addition to experience – namely, the addition of a pretended distancing, or suspicion, or wariness about taking our experience seriously. I do not mean that we have to say to ourselves that we are thus pretending. The addition is just a feeling – one that is, however, directly about our experience. Again, if the foregoing is approximately correct, we have some support for resisting the Dennettian idea that our talk of experiences is merely the result of bad theorizing. This is, of course, not a proof that Dennett’s view is wrong. Instead, it makes resistance to his view more coherent, by offering a positive account of what regarding an experience as such comes to, without making it a theoretical hypothesis (good or otherwise). Since the difference between ordinary experience and regarding an experience as an experience comes by an addition to the former, it leaves the experience itself unchanged. If the world’s objects look to be at different distances, that feature remains when we regard an experience as an experience. There is no difference of ‘in here’ as opposed to ‘out there’ when we shift from normal, everyday taking seriously to regarding experiences as experiences. A corollary of this point is that the foregoing reflections have captured what is plausible in claims about the ‘transparency’ of experience, while offering no ground for a representationalist or anti-mental-paint account of experiences. 11. I remarked that Russell was sometimes taken in by considering what an artist would have to draw to make a ‘realistic’ representation of a scene. We have to be very careful in drawing conclusions from facts of this kind. But the appeal to the “artists’ set” itself is quite understandable in discussions of the kind Russell was mounting. It is a way of introducing a kind of distancing from the normal dispositions that constitute the taking seriously of our experiences of the world. It does not require suspicion, but it does require something quite similar, namely a setting aside of normal dispositions, or adopting an interest that makes them irrelevant. 12. We have seen that regarding experiences as experiences does not require actual surprise or actual belief in such things as the presence of wax apples. At a minimum, mention of these cases helps exposition, and in particular the identification of the kind of feeling that we pretend to have about experiences when we regard them as experiences. But cases of genuine surprise and actual error may be causally required for minds such as ours to develop the ability to distance ourselves from our normal taking seriously. This is, of course, not a philosophical claim. It is a psychological hypothesis – in principle testable (although

Experience as Such  73 I have no experimental design in mind). Its plausibility comes from the fact that most discussions of experience begin with examples that involve one or another kind of perceptual error. 13. Descartes featured the kind of error associated with dreams. While we are dreaming, we take our dreams seriously (although, since we are fortunately paralyzed, no bodily movement ensues).6 When we wake up, we set them aside, without ceasing to remember them (for a short time). The additional feeling in this case might best be described as a kind of wonder. This is another species of distancing from our normal taking seriously. 14. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to add that a rich source of distancing is philosophizing about experiences.

Cognitive Phenomenology 15. This chapter was not motivated by considerations having to do with cognitive phenomenology. It has turned out, however, that there is a similarity of theme between the results here and my two papers on that topic (Robinson, 2005, 2011). I do not intend to go deeply into cognitive phenomenology here; I have little to add to what is in the two cited papers. However, I will explain the similarity I’ve just claimed. Charles Siewert (2011) has given a probing critique of my 2005 paper. His focus is exactly on the points at issue, and his discussion of examples is detailed and extremely plausible. He exhibits hard cases for my view. I am not going to undertake here a detailed discussion of individual cases. I will, however, explain a key theme that would underlie my responses to all of them. Sufficient background for the present discussion can be given by reference to ‘sudden realization’ cases (although these are not the only cases Siewert identifies or to which the key theme applies). Here’s an example. Jones was not a brilliant law student, but he worked hard. When he passed the bar, he felt a strong sense of achievement. It was his first victory in his battle with alcoholism. If I have succeeded with this example, you have just experienced a cognitive surprise – a shift of sense that seems phenomenologically palpable. You read the first two sentences and understood them, and

6 I am assuming non-lucid dreaming. Never having had lucid dreams, I am not able to say much about them. I gather from reports of others that there is some kind of distancing from the dream experience as it unfolds in a lucid dream.

74  Experience as Such then that understanding was overturned, and you had to give a different sense to “passed the bar”. This reversal seems to have a definite “feel” to it. Proponents of cognitive phenomenology take cases like this to provide evidence that there is a positive phenomenology of understanding as we read or hear sentences in our native language. Because of the reference to Jones’s law studies, you had one understanding of “passing the bar” when you first read it, and that had a phenomenological aspect. Then, when you read the third sentence, that was replaced by the phenomenology of a different meaning for those three words. These different phenomenologies are held to be specifically cognitive, i.e., not merely collections of sensory or imagistic materials. My own outlook is different. I think that when things are going smoothly – when there is no problem, no ground for suspicion – there is no phenomenology of thought as such. There is plenty of phenomenology of one sort or another – there is the visual experience of the words on the page, there are often emotional feelings that accompany what we are reading, there are often mental images that pass through our minds that are related to the sense of what we are reading. But, I hold, there is no “noniconic” phenomenology (i.e., no nonverbal, nonemotional, nonimagistic phenomenology) of the meaning of the sentences we are reading. Now, when some problem arises, there is a change in our phenomenology. This change is, however, not the arrival of phenomenology of the meaning of the new interpretation. It is instead a phenomenology of distress, or frustration.7 A set of different images often tumbles forth. For example, you may have had an image of Jones reading a letter informing him of success on the bar exam. Now, suddenly, that is supplanted by an image of a saloon, with Jones striding on with his back to the building. The theme of my response to Siewert’s hard cases is this. The phenomenology of problematic cases is not an indicator of the presence of a reverse phenomenology in normal cases. It does not follow from our having a sense of not having understood, in problematic cases, that there is a regular positive sense of understanding in nonproblematic cases. What there is in normal cases is instead an absence of feelings of distress or confusion, an absence of radical changes in our imagery, or sudden shifts in the content of our inner speech and, correlatively, an absence of surprise at what we are imagining or saying to ourselves. 7 In Robinson (2011) I describe my view as “frugal”, which contrasts both with “liberal” and “stingy”. I allow for some feelings, such as feelings of confidence, familiarity, and of something’s being amiss, that might be rejected by stingier thinkers. But such feelings are not distinctive of either distinct propositions or of distinct propositional attitudes; so my frugality also contrasts decisively with the liberality that is typical of those who claim that there is cognitive phenomenology.

Experience as Such  75 The parallel theme in the discussion of this chapter is that regarding an experience as an experience is not an indicator of a positive phenomenology of taking our experiences seriously. When things are going smoothly (which is the vast majority of the time), our brains just mobilize our responses. We have our experiences; we don’t regard them in any way at all. It is only when there is some cause of distancing from the smooth course of our normal responding that we have an additional, phenomenological, sense of distance of one kind or another. When we have that, we are regarding our experiences; we are regarding them as experiences.

Transparency Redux 16. The reflections starting in section 6 of this chapter are not familiar. That is because they are unnecessary if experience is thought to be transparent. But when transparency is replaced by three-dimensionality of experience, and thus experiences are allowed to have their own character, it then becomes important to explain what our mental attitudes are, in normal intercourse with the world, and in the special case of philosophizing about experiences as such. The reflections starting in section 6 are thus a required part of a package that presents a view that captures the facts that lead contemporary philosophers to emphasize transparency, while working out an alternative that avoids common mistakes. Most notably, it avoids the error of thinking that regarding one’s experience as such involves thinking of them as presenting what they are of as ‘in here’ or ‘inside one’s head’.

5 Mental Causation

1. The long range aim of this chapter is to say something useful regarding issues coming under the heading of ‘mental causation’. I cannot, however, proceed directly, because in my view most discussions of mental causation are based on a mistaken conception of beliefs and desires. Earlier parts of this chapter will thus be devoted to disentangling errors. A more constructive account of what we are doing when we attribute beliefs and desires will be given in Chapter 6. In what follows, I will focus on beliefs. Readers are herewith put on notice that most of what I will say about beliefs is to be understood as applying to desires, even when the latter are not explicitly mentioned. Sometimes I will be considering cases in which both beliefs and desires are in play. 2. The mental causation debate is customarily conducted in terms of mental states, of which beliefs are supposed to be leading examples. This choice of term is an early sign of confusion. One might have thought that if causation by beliefs were at issue, it would have been more natural to conduct the discussion in terms of mental events, rather than states. This better terminology, however, would immediately force proponents of mental causation to classify beliefs as events. This classification is problematic. My belief that, say, Henry VIII composed some worthy music has resided in me for many years, although it has only infrequently had any discernable relation to my behavior. Now, it may be argued that ‘event’ is elastic enough to apply to very long times. From the point of view of the history of the universe, the coming into being of a star, the various stages of its fuel consumption, and finally its destruction, can be regarded as a several-billion-year-long event. But even so, calling my belief about Henry VIII an ‘event’ grates on the ear. Calling it a ‘state’ seems much more natural and fits the long-term character of beliefs. 3. Some readers will be inclined to dismiss the last section and complain that I am ignoring the fact that the states at issue in discussions of mental causation are occurrent beliefs. Despite the ‘state’ talk, the discussants in mental causation debates really do understand that the candidates for causes are events – they just call them ‘occurrents’.

Mental Causation  77 But what, then, is an occurrent belief? The grammar of the phrase suggests that it is a belief that occurs, but there are reasons to think of beliefs as dispositions. Beliefs can sometimes change rapidly, as when new evidence is presented, and some jurors may reverse their opinion about a defendant’s guilt several times in one day. But beliefs often last for years. And even when they change in the light of new evidence, they seem to be the kind of thing that will last a good long time, unless more new evidence dislodges them. So, perhaps there are two kinds of beliefs. One is a disposition, the other is an occurrent. But there are many cases where, if we affirm mental causation at all, we would want to affirm causal relevance of beliefs we have held for a long time. Perhaps I find myself in a sheet music shop. I look to see if they have anything by Henry VIII. Why am I doing that? There might, of course, be any number of reasons, but a straightforward one (and one illustrative of the usual kinds of reasons) would be that I think he composed some worthy music and have a desire to play some of it. If we affirm mental causation, surely we would want to say that I am searching in the H section in part because of my belief about Henry. But because of which belief? The dispositional one or the occurrent one? It will not do to say that these are really the same. Part of the background of the mental causation debate is the assumption that mental states are physically realized. According to current neuroscience, the prominent candidates for realizers of dispositional mental states are synaptic strengths. Perhaps the condition of dendro-dendritic connections will prove relevant, and perhaps conditions of some glial cells are also involved. Like synaptic strengths, however, these conditions would have to be long-standing conditions, if they are to be parts of the physical realization of (the categorical bases of) our dispositional beliefs. Occurrent events must have different realizers. They must be activations that arise on particular occasions and last for relatively brief times. So, our question, “Which belief does the causing – the dispositional one or the occurrent one?” is well motivated. If we say “the dispositional one”, we have to explain how dispositions can be causes of behavior. If we say “the occurrent one”, we face several questions. What is an occurrent belief? How is it related to the dispositional one? Did the dispositional one cause the occurrent one? If so, how does a disposition cause an occurrent? If not, what explains why my occurrent beliefs usually agree with my dispositional ones? (By ‘agree’, I mean that, normally, if I have a dispositional belief that p, an occurrent belief about the same topic will be a belief that p rather than a belief that ~p, or a belief that the probability of p is about half.)1 1 Of course, we do not have dispositional beliefs about what we will perceive in novel circumstances. So, our perceptual beliefs will have no dispositional beliefs to either agree with or not agree with. The discussion in the text is not about perceptual beliefs; nor are these the usual focus of mental causation debates.

78  Mental Causation 4. I do not mean to suggest that there are no answers to these questions. The line that seems to me the most plausible to take, for a proponent of mental causation who appeals to a dispositional/occurrent belief distinction, is that a dispositional belief that p just is a disposition to have an occurrent belief that p on certain kinds of occasion. Occurrent belief is the way a corresponding dispositional belief manifests itself. It is exceedingly difficult to give a non-question-begging and noncircular account of what the ‘certain kinds of occasion’ are, but it seems plausible that it is a normal part of human cognitive capacity to have some idea of what these are. For the belief I have been using as an example, the kinds of occasion that might contribute to ‘triggering’ a manifestation of the dispositional belief are such things as finding myself in a sheet music shop, or someone else’s introducing into a conversation either Henry VIII or 16th-century music. What is the manifestation that occurs in an occurrent belief? The only conscious occurrents that seem relevant here are either (a) an inner speech affirmation of p or (b) an overt affirmation of p. 2 Now it is surely not the latter that causes behavior relevant to believing p. Our overtly saying ‘p’ is a piece of behavior; it is not a plausible candidate for a cause of other behavior that goes with it. For example, I might say to a friend “Henry VIII composed some worthy music, I’m going to go look to see if they have anything by him”. It is not plausible that the cause of my walking to the H section is my having said that. Instead, my declaration is one behavioral effect and my walking toward the H section is another. If the occurrent belief is a cause of these behaviors, it is an event in the brain. I think we should say the same about our inner speech declarations. My going to the H section is not an effect of my inner speech declaration. That inner speech had to have a brain event cause, and the plausible candidates for my walking to the H section lie in the causes of that brain event. I regard inner speech as a series of conscious auditory and perhaps kinesthetic images (often accompanied by some visual imagery and ­various feelings).3 Readers will know from Chapter 3 that I am an

2 Imagery can accompany inner or overt speech; e.g., one might have an image of ­Henry’s portrait, a sheet of music, or an instrumental ensemble. These plausible accompaniments, however, are not specific to the belief. They might even accompany an affirmation that Henry’s music was awful. 3 There is more about inner speech in my papers on cognitive phenomenology (Robinson, 2005, 2011). I hope it will be recalled (from Chapter 4, §15) that I am a skeptic regarding cognitive phenomenology. That is sufficient to explain why it does not appear on the list in the next paragraph of the text. But it should be independently clear that the points made in the preceding two paragraphs of text would apply to cognitive phenomenology. For example, suppose there were a phenomenological episode of understanding the meaning of one’s overt or inner declaration, “Henry VIII composed some worthy music, I’m going to look to see if they have anything by him”. That is still an implausible candidate for a cause of my walking to the H section.

Mental Causation  79 epiphenomenalist about sensations (of which images are a special case – see Chapter 2, §2) and will correctly conclude that I regard inner speech as inefficacious for that reason. But the preceding two paragraphs explain the plausibility of denying efficacy to our inner speech on grounds independent of epiphenomenalism. Overt speech, other actions, inner speech, and other imagery seem to be what we are conscious of, and none are good candidates for identification with occurrent beliefs, where the latter are supposed to be causal contributors to actions that are rationalized by our beliefs and to imagery that is appropriately related to our beliefs. What remains is the possibility that the items just mentioned are caused (in part) by postulated unconscious occurrent beliefs. 5. Occurrent beliefs were suggested in the first place because our actions and our having of imagery seem to be events, and so should have events as causes. If we could find no other events that are candidates for causal contributors to our actions and imagery, then perhaps it would be reasonable to postulate unconscious occurrent beliefs. In fact, however, such unconscious occurrents are not reasonable postulations because we have sufficient alternative occurrents that are available to trigger manifestations of our dispositional beliefs – and we need those in any case. For example, there will be some events in my recent past that, as we ordinarily say, ‘bring Henry VIII to mind’ – that is (given that they are inputs to this particular brain, in the particular state it is in at the time), they cause my inner speech and related behavior on this particular occasion. The dispositional belief is the disposition to have such inner speech and behavior upon stimulation by certain kinds of recent events and to have other, related inner speech and behavior upon stimulation by certain other kinds of recent events. The better view at which we have now arrived recognizes no occurrent beliefs. It is a view in which recent events that have affected us cause neural inputs in a brain that is already in a complex state of synaptic (and perhaps we must mention dendritic and glial) organization. The effect of these inputs upon that organized brain is the production of behaviors and of inner speech, and of agreement among these. We know very little about how our brains are able to do this. This is not an objection to the view. If we were to hypothesize occurrent beliefs, we would also have to say that we know very little about how our brains manage to produce the right (sets of) occurrent belief(s), what an occurrent belief is, and how an occurrent belief produces behavior that is appropriate to it. Occurrent beliefs offer exactly zero by way of further explanation. 6. Some readers will be bursting with impatience to see mention of a matter I have ignored until now. This is the fact that reasons for actions

80  Mental Causation do not consist of beliefs alone – they include desires. If we take reasons to be causes, it will be some combination of beliefs and desires (and typically several of each) to which we attribute causation. This point has been familiar at least since Geach (1957) used it against Ryle’s reductive view.4 Geach imagined a professional gardener whose employer’s tools were lying about in the garden. The gardener has noted the approach of some very dark clouds, and it would be natural to expect that collecting the tools and returning them to his employer’s shed would be a manifestation of his belief that it will soon rain. This gardener, however, hates his employer and has just been fired. Quite especially because he expects rain, he leaves the tools where they are. In the following sections, I will explore some difficulties that this complexity of our reasons introduces.

States of Brains? or of Parts of Brains? 7. It used to be fashionable to talk of what is in one’s ‘belief box’ and ‘desire box’. The contents of these boxes were supposed to be distinct propositions, and their distinct brain state realizers could interact to produce behavior appropriate to the relevant contents of each box. The resulting view has a pleasing air of mechanism about it, making us feel that we have a grip on how the mind works. Unfortunately, this pleasure is based on a nonsensical illusion. One route into its problems begins with a return to the infelicity of the terminology of states. If a belief is a state, is it a state of a brain? Or is it a state of a part of a brain? Boxology suggests the latter, so let us begin with that. A reasonable question is “What makes it the case that a proposition is stored in a belief box?” After all, no one expects that invasive brain surgery will reveal a brain part labeled ‘Belief Box’ – and if one did suppose that, it would not matter unless the label could be ‘read’ by the brain, which again, no one supposes. Setting these silly extensions of the metaphor aside, it seems clear that the only criterion for a brain part’s being the storer of a belief in one’s belief box is a functional one; namely, that part must contribute to behavior in such a way as to cause that behavior to be (or at least tend to be) appropriate to the sense of the stored proposition. This requirement makes the status of any proposed brain part (say, BP1) hostage to what happens in the rest of the brain. To see what this means, and why it is so, consider that the brain might have another part (BP2) that is connected to BP1, and that has the function of reversing what would otherwise have been BP1’s contribution. If such a BP2 were

4 Chisholm gave similar arguments in his (1957).

Mental Causation  81 present, BP1 would be the disbelief box. So, that a brain part is the storer of a proposition in a belief box depends on what lies outside that part – in this case, it depends on the absence of a part that functions like BP2. This point can be illustrated even in rather simple machines. One might, for example, think of a gear’s being in a certain position as representing that an alarm clock is to start buzzing at a certain time. After all, we may set the time by turning a knob until a needle points at a position on a clock face that corresponds to the time we desire to be awakened. But in fact, the position of the gear represents nothing by itself. It is only because it is connected to the clock that it represents the alarm time. Moreover, not just any kind of connection will do – it must be a connection such that the arrival of the clock in a certain state triggers the alarm. And the connected item must be a clock; i.e., it must be a device such that it is possible in normal conditions to set it to the correct time, and for it to then track the passage of time fairly well. One might accept this point, but still hold that given the surrounding architecture, it still makes sense to think of the position of a gear as ‘storing’ a ‘belief’ that a certain time is right for starting the buzzer. Perhaps this can be made out in the alarm clock case, where the surrounding is fairly simple and effectively constant. People, however, learn new things all the time, and their desires can change with the degree to which they have recently been satisfied, with age, with change of circumstances, or with change in the availability of alternatives. Which behavior a belief may lead to depends on what desires are salient at a particular time, and also on what other beliefs are present. Thus, a project of identifying brain parts that store beliefs by considering how variation in inputs would affect behavior, supposing the brain-state surroundings to be held constant, does not make even in-principle sense. The point to which I am calling attention does not apply to functional parts in general. A heart could not move blood if it were not attached to a system of blood vessels. That does not prevent us from identifying a heart as having the ability to pump blood in virtue of properties it has whether or not it is connected to a vascular system. Likewise, parts of brains have properties that they would retain if removed from a brain, and that explain their abilities to affect other brain parts. The claim I am urging here is that beliefs and desires cannot be correctly thought of as grounded in intrinsic properties in an analogous way. Beliefs and desires involve representation, and representation essentially depends not just on intrinsic properties of parts, but on the relations parts have among themselves and to the world. I have used very simple examples to focus attention on a key point, but it should be evident that the conclusion is quite general. For a brain part to contribute the sense of a proposition to the production of behavior, it would have to contribute to producing behavior appropriate to both it and to something in at least one other brain part (a part that ‘stores a

82  Mental Causation proposition in the desire box’). Whether it would do so would depend on there being some connection (however indirect it may be) between the two parts, and on the nature of that connection. In general, one would not have a belief that p unless the connections among other parts that allegedly realize the storage of other beliefs and/or desires were such as to produce a variety of appropriate behaviors under a variety of conditions. Thus, the status of a brain part as storing p in the belief box would logically depend on the way in which many other parts of the brain are or are not connected to it. Boxology offers a picture in which we can regard the status of a brain part as independently the storing of a proposition in a belief box, but this picture is a cartoon that cannot be taken seriously.5 The preceding six paragraphs drew consequences of the assumption that belief states were states of parts of brains. What of the other alternative, that a state that is a belief is a state of a whole brain? In that case the state of the brain that realizes the belief that p will be the same state of the brain that realizes the belief that q, and the desire that r (become the case), and every other belief and desire of the subject in question. The idea of our various beliefs and desires interacting to cause behavior will reduce to the idea of one state’s interacting with itself to produce behavior. This conception adds exactly zero to the obvious truth that our behavior is causally dependent on the activities of neurons. (I shall say more about this alternative below.) Boxology is not so popular now, and it may seem that I am beating a dead horse, or belaboring a straw man. This suspicion is misplaced. So long as one talks of mental states and assumes they either are or are realized by physical states, those physical states must be states of something; and the plausible candidates for the something are brains, or parts of brains.6 Neither yields a helpful picture of causation by beliefs and desires. Of course, one can oscillate between these two conceptions. That does not remove the unhelpfulness, although it may help to make it invisible. Countless papers over recent decades contain a diagram that is some variant of Figure 5.1.7 The vertical lines in such diagrams represent realization of the upper item by the one below it. The solid (bottom) arrow represents complete physical causation of P* by P, which is usually

5 This argument supersedes an argument for a similar conclusion in Robinson (1990) that Lars Dänzer (personal communication) has shown to be flawed. 6 I hope it will be clear that I have nowhere assumed that a brain part is a neat, spatially compact unit. Let a brain part be as wispy and extended a bit of neural netting as you like: it remains the case that what effect a state of its activation will have on behavior depends crucially on the nature of its connectivity to the rest of the brain. 7 The seminal causal exclusion argument that drives the debate associated with this diagram is due to Jaegwon Kim. See his (1993, 2005).

Mental Causation  83 assumed as common ground.8 The dashed (top) arrow represents mental causation: this is the bone of contention. Sometimes a similar diagram has an additional arrow running from M to P*. This is held to represent downward causation of P* by M. In these familiar discussions, M and M* are said to be mental states, of which beliefs and desires are taken to be examples. M* might, for example, be a state of believing a proposition that is inferred from a belief that is represented by M. Or, M* might be an intention that follows a mental state, M. (It is not usually mentioned that, if M* is an intention to carry out some action, M had better be a state of believing something and desiring something. It is also not usually represented that sooner or later, mental states are supposed to cause behavior – i.e., that sooner or later, the structure in the diagram should lead to a diagram in which the top right corner is ‘B’ instead of ‘M*’, where the ‘B’ would represent behavior, and the ‘P*’ below it would be the neuromuscular realizer of that behavior.) If M is a mental state, its physical realizer, P, is presumably also a state (a physical state). In principle, this state might be discovered to be a state of one’s liver; but in fact, the only plausible candidates are brain states, and this is again part of the common background in the relevant discussions. But if P and P* are brain states, they are either states of whole brains, or states of parts of brains. The foregoing discussion thus applies to the numerous discussions of mental causation that are conducted within the framework of the diagram in Figure 5.1.9 M = = = => M* | | | | | | P =======> P*

Figure 5.1 8 As always in this book, ‘complete physical causation’ means ‘as complete as is compatible with quantum mechanics’; i.e., it allows for strictly causeless events, which, however, will conform to statistical laws. 9 Dretske’s (1988) treatment of beliefs and desires is hard to classify with respect to the issues discussed in this section. Some passages in his fifth chapter strongly suggest that beliefs and desires are to be identified with indicators and receptivities (respectively) that are evidently states of parts of brains (although this is not explicitly stated). However, even in this chapter it is recognized that such indicators and receptivities can be beliefs and desires only if they are caught up in a much larger system of relations that would involve many other brain parts. At the beginning of his ­Chapter 6 (p. 137) Dretske describes the “model” he has developed so far as “too simple to capture the enormously rich interplay of beliefs, desires and behavior in cognitively and conatively developed animals such as humans”. This theme is developed insightfully in the remainder of that (final) chapter and leads to a view that – especially with regard to “explicit beliefs” – is far more consonant with the outlook I develop in this chapter and the next.

84  Mental Causation 8. To summarize: The view that each belief and desire has a state of a brain part as its realizer is incoherent. We have to pretend that there is some fact about a brain part that is sufficient ground for saying that it is the realizer of the belief that p, when in fact what its possessor believes depends on facts about the connectivity among brain parts, and thus on facts that lie outside the supposed brain-part realizer of the belief. A subject’s believing or disbelieving p is compatible with any brain part being in any state you like.10 There is no point in continuing a discussion of mental causation that is based on a background that embraces such incoherence. 9. The other possibility – the view that beliefs and desires are grounded in whole brain states – is more coherent, but embracing it will change our view of the mental causation debate. On this alternative, P (the item in the lower left corner of Figure 5.1) is the realizer of our entire mentality. As noted in §7, on the entire-­mentality assumption, there can be no talk of our mental states interacting with each other to produce later mental states or behavior. That would be P’s interacting with itself to produce P*; which is nonsense, unless it is just a way of affirming the following nearly truistic point: P, the realizer of our entire mentality at t1, evolves, under laws of nature and reception of further inputs, into P*, the realizer of our entire mentality at t2. To see how this stance affects our understanding of mental causation, we may consider an important source of resistance to it. This source is the desire to accommodate the intuition that some actions would have been done just so long as a person believed p, irrespective of which one of the possible grounds for p that person might have, and irrespective of what other things a person believed. This intuition comes from common sense, and does not depend on having any knowledge or even suspicion about brain states. Someone in 1,600 could perfectly well have observed that sometimes people come to the same beliefs for different reasons, i.e., on the basis of different evidence. One person saw blood on Jones’ clothes, another didn’t, but noticed Jones’s uncharacteristic silence when the subject of Smith’s murder came up. Both come to the belief that Jones is the murderer, and both may act similarly, avoiding Jones, for example, or reporting their suspicion to the sheriff. The difference in their beliefs about what evidence they have does not matter to their holding the same

10 We get the same result if we conduct the discussion in terms of supervenience and supervenience bases. It is not true that there could not be a difference in a belief (for example) unless there were a difference in a certain brain part; for if the connectivity of that part had been different, its possessor’s (linguistic and nonlinguistic) behavior might have been different in many possible ways.

Mental Causation  85 belief and having some tendency to report it, and neither do differences in unrelated beliefs or desires. This intuition seems to point us back toward a ‘pool table picture’ in which we think of beliefs as isolatable items that reside in a separate brain location from desires, from irrelevant beliefs, and even from relevant beliefs, such as those about one’s evidence.11 If we take that road, we will be puzzled as to whether such isolatable items have their effects in virtue of their physical constitution, or in virtue of their mental property of being a belief. But if we reject the view that a belief can be isolated in a brain part, this question cannot arise. 10. I will shortly turn to some objections to the line of thought I have been developing, but first I want to extend it a little, and say what the problem of mental causation comes to on the entire-mentality view. It is a fact that we use belief- and desire-talk with some success. In the next chapter I will attempt to say something useful about how we can do this, but for the moment all I need is the fact. We should not overstate this fact. People are not perfectly rational, they often fail to see consequences of their beliefs, and we often don’t know enough about them to avoid being surprised by what they do. But nonetheless, there is a general concordance between what people say and what they do, and we find most others sensible enough that we don’t regard them as unpredictable aliens. There is a large literature in experimental psychology (e.g., Nisbett & Wilson, 1977a, 1977b; Wegner, 2002) that shows we do not always know our real reasons, and novelists and philosophers have given us insight into self-deception. Nonetheless, most of the time we are engaged in some fairly long series of activities that make sense in the light of what we want and what we believe.12 We sometimes review what we are doing and go over our reasons for an extended course of action. Sometimes we find a problem that we had missed. But over fair stretches of our activities, our reasons seem to us to make sense of our behavior. What people say and do is an effect of the state of their brains and incoming stimuli. What we would dearly like to know is how the organization of their brains provides them with coherence in their daily activities, and the concordance between speech and action that we observe. It was an attractive model, to imagine brain parts as embodying beliefs, and interactions of brain parts as paralleling inferential moves. Or we might think of the cue ball of desire interacting

11 I introduced the ‘pool table picture’ metaphor in Robinson (2010a). 12 We do not generally say “I believe p”, unless we mean to be tentative. We just assert p. But assertions are typical expressions, or symptoms, of what we believe.

86  Mental Causation with the ten ball of a belief to cause an action. But we have seen why we must give up that picture. The problem is that we have nothing at present with which to replace it.13 This rubbing of our noses in our ignorance is a powerful motivation to continue with the brain part picture. But it is not an objection to the ­entire-mentality alternative. The fact is that we do not know how the mind works. We think we know the micro-story: it is an affair of neuro-­ synaptic (and possibly dendro-dendritic and glial) transactions. But just how it is that such events and connections can come to be organized so as to permit the success of attributing wants and beliefs to people remains an unsolved problem. How the brain is organized so as to permit general coherence of sequences of actions (including the general concordance of speech and action) is not known. This is the problem of mental causation that ought to engage our best minds.14

Objections and Replies 11. The first objection I want to take up stems from what might be called the ‘holistic’ character of the entire-mentality view. To crystallize this objection a bit, we can put a consequence for beliefs in this way: That S believes that p is not a fact that can be grounded in a state of a brain part. Instead, it is a fact that is at least about the organization of S’s brain as a whole. Now, this ‘holistic’ character may raise a suspicion that I am dismissing the idea that there can be important differences of role played by different brain parts. This suspicion will offend the partisans of modularity. They may suspect that I am preparing the ground for an equipotentiality thesis – the view that any brain part can serve any function. They may suspect that I am working toward a thesis to the effect that the only principle of psychological explanation is associationism. They 13 Which is not to deny that work in predictive processing led by Friston (2009, 2013, e.g.) is extremely promising. However, a strong advocate of this approach, Andy Clark, recognizes there is much to be done: “It may be, however, that learning about some highly abstract domains requires delivering structured symbolic inputs; for example, using the formalisms of language, science and mathematics. Understanding how prediction-driven learning interacts with the active production and uptake of external symbolic representations is thus a crucial challenge….” (Clark, 2013, p. 243). For discussion of difficulties in some other approaches to understanding our minds, see Lake et al. (2017) and the Open Peer Commentaries immediately following. 14 G. M. A. Segal (2009) has a very interesting paper that ranges widely, and that I take to offer some support for my critique of the brain part view. His notation for the ideas in Figure 5.1 is this: M = F, M* = G. Realizers of Ms are m(F)s and realizers of G are m(G)s. Segal focuses on exactly the right point when he says that this picture “shrieks for explanation. Consider the m(F)s. They all share two properties: (a) they are bases for F and, further, (b) they all tend to cause the occurrence of a base for G. That is a remarkable correlation and there must be some explanation for it” (p. 99).

Mental Causation  87 may point to such works as Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002) as a source for numerous references to studies that support a modular approach to the understanding of mind. These suspicions are misplaced. An organized brain does, of course, have parts, and its effects depend on the interactions among its parts. It has parts at many levels – individual neurons, cell assemblies, columns, areas such as MT, V4, the so-called ‘face recognition area’, larger ‘organs’ such as the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, pre-frontal cortex, and so on. The organization of neural wiring differs in different areas. Many areas have reciprocal connections with several other areas, but not everything is directly connected to everything. What follows from the foregoing sections is emphatically not a denial of different roles for different brain parts. The claim is only that it is incoherent to locate beliefs and desires in brain parts, or to think of a brain part as contributing a belief or a desire to the mental economy. That S believes p is a global fact about the organization of S’s brain. This global fact cannot be explained by putting a belief that p into a supposed brain part. It can be explained only by a theory that identifies other, less rich, roles of brain parts and explains how various brain parts, performing their different, more limited roles, and being connected in the way they are, give rise to the kind of brain organization that grounds the global facts about S. We are very far from having a theory that answers to this description. 12. Some readers may think we are not so far from having a theory of mind after all, on the ground that we understand how computers work, and we can regard the brain as a computational mechanism. In this section and the next, I will explain why I think this is a most unpromising reflection. But first, let us have a bit of clarification. It goes against the grain to say straight out that the mind is not computational. However, if we press on the notion of ‘computation’, it often turns out that a sufficient condition for being computational is being caused. Behind this sufficiency is the following line of thought. If a process is a series of causes, then it can be described as a series of events related by physical laws.15 Laws can be represented as rules, and rules can be reflected in a computer program. So, wherever there is a causal process, there is, in principle, a computer program such that executing it on appropriate data would provide a sequence of outputs that parallels the events in the process. So, in principle, we can have a computer model of the mind.

15 I do not mean that one cannot coherently propose a theory of causation that does not involve laws. I assume only that it is part of the background for many thinkers, that causation in the brain is succession of events in the brain according to physical laws of nature.

88  Mental Causation If we had a map of, say, Harriet’s connectome, and a detailed theory of neurons, synapses, and perhaps dendro-dendritic connections and glial operations, we could, in principle, have a computer that would tell us exactly what a given sensory input would cause by way of events in Harriet’s brain and what muscular contractions would ensue. Evidently, we are very far from having such a theory. And if we did, it would not tell us what Harriet believed and desired. Of course, if we ran our program long enough, on a wide selection of possible inputs, we might be able to visualize her behavior and translate her laryngeal and lingual movements into speech sounds. Then we might use our usual resources of understanding speech and interpreting behavior to draw conclusions about her beliefs and desires. We might instead envisage a program that operates on larger brain parts, i.e., collections of neurons, not individual neurons. We already know that none of the parts will be her beliefs or desires. But perhaps we will one day find a way of dividing up brain parts into modules, such that we understand thoroughly what each module does, and which ones are connected to which others, with exactly which strengths in Harriet’s brain. We could then write a program that operated on considerably fewer items of data but would still yield a series of outputs that paralleled the series of events in Harriet’s brain. But again, we are long way from knowing what modules we have, or even what principles we must use in order to discover the functions of our brain parts.16 It may seem that I am ungrateful for the advances that have been made in scanning technologies. This is far from being the case. It implies no disrespect to those who conduct scanning experiments to point out that the relation of experimental results to theory of mind is mediated by many assumptions and is fraught with alternative interpretive possibilities. Consider, for example, the insula, which ‘lights up’ in many studies. This is a fairly small brain region, but it is large enough to accommodate several small but intricate networks. It is thus a reasonable question whether multiple studies are showing us one module (i.e., the same processing task) occurring in many different kinds of experimental design, or whether they are showing us several modules being called upon for different tasks? If it is one module, what is it contributing? Is it, perhaps, like the file clerk in a law office, who is involved in nearly every one of the lawyers’ cases but contributes a function that would not tell us much about legal processing? – Experimental methods have resources to answer such questions, progress is being made, and there is every reason to expect continued progress. But the task of sorting out such matters is large, and we are only beginning.17 16 Van Orden et al. (2001) explain some theoretical difficulties in modularity research. 17 For an excellent discussion of the problems indicated in this paragraph, see Rathkopf (2013).

Mental Causation  89 13. A second problem for easy application of computer analogies is that our brains are not computer-like, and their elements operate slowly by comparison to the operations in our computers.18 Single neuron tracings have an impressively digital look. Action potentials (firings, spikings) of a neuron have the same energy, and rise and fall rapidly. But once we move beyond this fact, the appearance of digitality completely disappears. For example, neurons fire at various rates, depending on recent inputs, and average firing rate over a second or fraction thereof is a continuous variable. Neurons synapse onto their postsynaptic neurons at various distances from the zones in the latter that determine when the next firing of those postsynaptic neurons will occur. Some synapses are on the cell body itself; some are on dendritic sites close to the cell body; some are on dendritic sites at various distances farther from the cell body. Distance is a continuous variable.19 The effect of a presynaptic neuron upon a postsynaptic neuron is thus mediated by continuous variables of firing rate of the presynaptic neuron and distances of its synapses from the postsynaptic neuron’s spike triggering zone. Neurons can receive inputs from thousands of other neurons. Some of these are excitatory and some are inhibitory. Conditions determining the firing, or not, of a neuron thus depend on an average of recent inputs. Because of the different distances from the spike triggering zone, ‘recent’ must refer to a small temporal range, not a temporal point. The average is, again, a continuous variable. Some of this complexity may be somewhat reducible. Some neurons have many more synapses upon a given postsynaptic neuron than others, and perhaps the ‘meaningful’ firing rates can, for practical purposes, be reduced to two or three (e.g., very rapid, medium, and so slow as to make no practical difference). But even if such a practical reduction is possible, there will still be continuity in the average of excitatory and inhibitory inputs. It is not clear what brain event should correspond to one ‘operation’ of a computer, but a plausible candidate is the passing of a change in the spike triggering zone of a presynaptic neuron to an effect in the same zone of one of its postsynaptic neurons. If that is taken as an ‘operation’, then series of operations occur at a rate of about 100 per second (Feldman, 1985). (Of course, there are billions of neurons in various states of activation at each time.) Successive cycles in computers are measured in billions per second. That is what is meant by saying that the elements of

18 For other work on topics in this section, see Robinson (1992a, 2014). 19 Continuity of space and time will not strictly hold if space and time are quantized at an extreme microlevel. It is difficult to imagine that this possibility will affect the points being made in the text.

90  Mental Causation brain processing are very slow compared with the elements of processing in computers. Llinas et al. (1994) found evidence for a ‘sweep’ running in the anterior to posterior direction across the brain. This might be taken to be a kind of ‘clock’ for brain operations. But the rate of the sweep was only about 40 times per second, which would make sequential brain processing very slow indeed. If one wishes to apply computer analogies to brains, one must first identify some respect in which the brain is like a computer. This must be something stronger than the mere fact that the brain’s neural-level parts are physical objects and thus change their state according to causal laws. And it must be compatible with achieving real-world outcomes in real-world times, using relatively slow elements. We do not now have any such way of regarding brains as computers. ‘Computers’ in this section has meant the familiar sequential devices that this term most usually brings to mind in most people. Artificial neural networks have great promise and are likely to prove essential to explaining how we can do so much so fast with such slow individual elements. However, “How can the brain make us intelligent?” and “How could an ANN be designed so as to provide a device with human-like cognitive abilities?” are virtually the same questions; and we are a long way from being able to answer either one. 20 14. These observations naturally lead to some questions regarding artificial intelligence. Those questions will be addressed in Chapter 7.

Shoemaker’s Subset View 15. One of the most interesting developments in the discussion of mental causation is S. Shoemaker’s work on physical realization, and his subset view (Shoemaker, 2007, 2010). The question I want to work toward is how the subset view stands to the entire-mentality view described in this chapter. I begin with a brief summary of the gist of a key point in the subset view, which I will state in terms of the diagram in Figure 5.1. P is one realizer, among other possible realizers, of M. Given either P or M, and given the assumed structure (perhaps with concurrent inputs), we are nomologically guaranteed to get M*. So, both P and M have a prima facie claim on causally contributing to M*, and the question is why we should allow M a causal role, in the face of the truth that P is sufficient to bring about M*? A short answer would be that P has irrelevant causal detail. This answer, however, needs a bit of explanation. 20 For a rich discussion of the nature and magnitude of the difference between recent ANN models and human thinking, and approaches to reduce that magnitude, see Lake et al. (2017) and the associated Open Peer Commentaries.

Mental Causation  91 If we allow that M has causal powers at all, one of its effects will be M*. P also causes M*, but its doing so proceeds through its causing the particular state P*. M does not have the power to cause P* – for we might have had M with a different realizer, and in that case we would have had M but not P* (i.e., we would have had some other realizer of M*). So, P has more effects than does M (namely the particularities that distinguish P* from other realizers of M*). Alternatively expressed, M’s causal powers are a subset of P’s causal powers. It seems reasonable to regard P’s ‘extra’ causal powers as irrelevant to M*. If we allow that, then there is a reason for singling out M as the cause of M*. M is the event that has the relevant set of causal powers for bringing about M*, without extraneous causal powers. 21 16. Readers will already understand why I believe it is fruitless to discuss this view upon the usual assumption that appropriate substituends for ‘M’ are beliefs or desires or belief-desire combinations. But we can ask whether a parallel to Shoemaker’s point can be made if we imagine M to be the entire mentality of some person, s, at some time, t1, and P to be the entire brain state that realizes that mentality. The corresponding question will be whether s’s entire mentality, M*, at a subsequent t2, is caused by P or by M, together with inputs arriving in the interval [t1, t2). To make out a parallel to Shoemaker’s argument, we will have to hold that P has some consequences that are additional to those of M (while, of course, including all those that M has). To do this, we will have to suppose (a) that s’s physical state has some consequences for P* (i.e., the realizer of M*) such that (b) those consequences make no difference to s’s mental state. It seems that such a supposition is coherent. For example, M might have two possible physical realizers that differ in some very small way – say, a small difference in the position of a potassium ion. And perhaps this difference would lead to a comparably small difference in the position of some other ion at t2. Finally, this difference might be too small to make any difference to s’s mental state at t2 (or at any later time). On these plausible assumptions, P will have an effect at t2 that is extraneous to s’s entire mentality – as well as, of course, causing P*, i.e., everything that is required to be the physical realizer of M* at t2. M, which is assumed to cause M*, will not have that extraneous effect. So, at least prima facie, it has the same kind of claim on efficacy that the M of Shoemaker’s argument has. 17. Perhaps this conclusion will be regarded as vindicating mental causation, near enough. We must, however, keep in mind that this 21 This is all my way of putting these matters, but I believe I have sufficiently captured the spirit of Shoemaker’s detailed presentation. For some criticisms and Shoemaker’s responses, see Antony (2010), Kim (2010), Melnyk (2010), and Shoemaker (2010).

92  Mental Causation version of mental causation is a non-reductive physicalism, not a version of interactionism. It is thus committed to the claim that there is a physical explanation of our behavior. One might accept that claim, but hold that the most one could say would be that the brain causes our behavior. It would, however, run severely against the physicalist grain to reject the view that the brain’s causation of our behavior can be further explained, at least in principle, by the properties of its parts and the effects brought about in some of those parts as a result of inputs from other parts. Almost all of those who reject interactionism, with its departure from physical causal closure, will accept that there is a systematic set of causal relations among brain parts of various kinds that (together with sensory inputs) results in our behavior being what it is. Earlier sections of this chapter have argued against the view that brain parts are, or are realizers of, or storers of, beliefs and desires. The result of §16 concerned a view that concurs in this rejection of the pool table picture. But if we also reject interactionism and accept that our behavior results from causal relations among brain parts, then we are committing ourselves to the view that there is, in principle, a causal explanation of our behavior that does not mention any item that is a belief or desire, or a realizer or storer of a belief or desire. That commitment will seem to some, including the present author, to be epiphenomenalism for beliefs and desires, near enough, even in the light of the conclusion of §16. 18. It is important, however, to state this conclusion correctly, as: (1) Complete causal explanations of behavior can (in principle) be given by reference to causal relations among parts of brains, none of which are beliefs, desires, or their realizers or storers. This statement must not be abbreviated as: (*1) Beliefs and desires are not causes of our behavior. The reason is that if (*1) were used apart from the context of this chapter, it would be likely to be read with a brain part view in mind, i.e., as saying that beliefs and desires are realized in brain parts, but those parts have no effects in our behavior (or, have no effects in our behavior in virtue of being realizers of beliefs or desires). The burden of this chapter is that the first conjunct of such a view is nonsensical. We should not use a formulation that will be likely to appear to endorse a nonsensical view. (*1) can be read in a way that makes it true, i.e., it can be understood as equivalent to “It is not the case that beliefs and desires are causes

Mental Causation  93 of our behavior”. But since this is not the most likely reading (outside the context of this chapter), it remains important to insist on (1) and to avoid expressing epiphenomenalism about beliefs and desires in the form of (*1). 19. To sum up: We offer reasons for what we do; we rationalize our actions by saying why we did them, and the sentences we use affirm what we believe and describe what we want. It is tempting to point to occurrent beliefs and desires as causes of what we do, but I have explained why I think there is no good way of working out such a picture. Nonetheless, although we are sometimes mistaken about our real reasons, most of the time what we say about what we do and what we actually do fit together pretty well, and (barring unforeseeable unfavorable circumstances) many sequences of our actions eventuate in consequences that are intended to be and in fact are at least somewhat pleasant to us. The question that ought to occupy us is how it is possible for a brain to provide this kind of coherence in our (linguistic and nonlinguistic) behavior. I do not have an answer to this question. I believe we will someday have one, but not for quite a while. I also think that having a coherent positive conception of what it is for us to believe p and desire q (to become the case) might contribute to finding the answer. In the next chapter, I will try to say something useful in this direction. The result will support an epiphenomenalist outlook in two ways. First, the rejection of the pool table picture is likely to be easier to accept if we have a firmer grip on what kind of view of beliefs might be able to replace it. Second, we shall see, in the next chapter and in Chapter 8, how deeply dependent we are on processes that are not ordinarily accessible to our consciousness.

6 Believing and Desiring

1. In the beginning of a discussion of belief should be the verb. The noun form is secondary, and its relation to the verb form is this: Whenever a person said to believe, it is implied that there is an answer (known or unknown) to the question “What does that person believe?”. The answer must take the form of a sentence, and that sentence is the person’s belief. Among a person’s beliefs, for example, might be these: War in the near-East will continue for a long time; the stock market is due for a correction; Henry VIII wrote some worthy music; Quito is due South of Philadelphia; and so on. It may be suggested that we ought rather to say that sentences like these express a person’s beliefs. This is an acceptable formulation, but it is apt to mislead. It suggests that there is a belief in a person that the sentence reflects, and it is but a small step from that to thinking that there is a localized something in a person’s head (or, mind) that causes that person to utter a sentence that expresses the belief. If we take this step, we will have slid back to the states of brain parts view rejected in Chapter 5.1 We can accept the use of ‘expression’ (of beliefs) if we regard certain utterances as symptoms of a person’s believing. Like being ill, a believing is a global fact about a person’s condition. One way that condition manifests itself is in speech, i.e., in the affirming of certain sentences. Normally there are other manifestations of a person’s believing s, namely, that person’s engaging in some nonlinguistic behavior. In the following section, I will introduce a theory of what we are doing when we attribute beliefs to ourselves or others. Later sections explain several relations that this view has to work in related areas of philosophy of mind.

The Quasi-quotational View 2. The primacy of the verb form means that the best approach for the present chapter is to begin by asking what it is for a person to believe

1 I explain this point in more detail in Chapter 8.

Believing and Desiring  95 s (where ‘s’ is one of that person’s beliefs). 2 The view to be advanced here gives this short answer: For P to believe s is for P to be disposed to behave like a person who says ‘s’. I call this ‘the quasi-quotational view’ of believing. There is another way to give a short formulation of the quasi-­ quotational view. A person believes s when the attribution of believing s to that person is correct; and such an attribution is correct when the person is in fact disposed to behave like a person who says ‘s’. Of course, at the moment these formulations are mere oracular pronouncements. The burden of this chapter is to explain the quasi-­ quotational view and support its value. 3 3. A basic principle for what follows is that speaking is doing. In the rarefied superstructure of, say, philosophical writing like the present effort, the doing is pretty obscure. Maybe I will die before finishing, and no one will ever read what I’ve written. Maybe it will be read and have miniscule effect. The intention, however, is to cause changes in the way readers think – changes that I hope will eventually contribute something toward a better understanding of how the mind works. Children learn early on how to say “I want ….”, and “No”. Of course, producing these words does not always have the intended effect, but they would not be learned if they did not raise the probability of things going better, from the child’s point of view. To do something by speaking is to have an effect. Unless you are singing your speech at glass-shattering pitch and volume, the compression waves in the air caused by your vocal cord vibrations will have minimal effects on inanimate objects. The important effects of speech are effects on people who hear what you say. If language is learnable, these effects must have some degree of predictability. I do not mean that anyone is able to stand aside and list the effects of saying something. I mean only that it is part of learning to speak, that one comes to have implicit, largely unconscious, expectations of what is (more) likely to happen if one says one thing rather than another. When we are not doing philosophy, we have no theory of such expectations. But we must have them, and we must tacitly know about

2 As in Chapter 5, I intend a parallel treatment for desires throughout, but with one exception. One typically says what one believes simply by uttering a sentence, but one says what one desires by saying “I want ….”, where the dots are filled in by an indication of a sentence that one wishes to become true. 3 My previous work on this view can be found in Robinson (1986, 1988). I am encouraged by the fact that Christopher Gauker (2011) has, quite independently and from a different starting point, arrived at a view that has several consiliences with the view presented here.

96  Believing and Desiring them. As hearers of a request, we know what we are being asked to do, and what to expect from the speaker if we comply or fail to comply. As hearers of assertions, we also have expectations. A simple example occurs if, e.g., our child says that a friend is coming to visit, but a parent has recently called and told us the friend is sick. We expect surprise and disappointment when we tell the child this news. As adults, we have learned to lie, and to deceive by our words without actually lying. But we could not learn to do this unless our words raised expectations, and we could not learn to do it unless we tacitly knew what expectations our words would raise. These expectations have to do with our future behavior. There is a hall of mirrors aspect to linguistic interaction. We tacitly know what expectations we will raise by our speech, and others tacitly know that we know this. They tacitly know what expectations we will have of them if they respond by saying one thing rather than another. A child who asks for ice cream is behaving like a person who wants ice cream. If one bite is taken and the rest rejected, we will conclude that the child didn’t really want ice cream (or, at least not that kind of ice cream). The rejection is not behaving like a person who wants ice cream. A child who says a friend is coming is behaving like a person who expects the friend’s arrival. If no surprise is evident when informed of the friend’s inability to come, that is not behaving like a person who believed the friend would come. The ordinary or default stance that we take toward people who say ‘s’ is that they will, in the future, behave in a manner that is consistent with expectations that they raise in us (and that they tacitly know their speech will raise in us). For them to believe what they say is for them to bear out these expectations. Of course, they may not bear out these expectations, even if they are not intending to deceive. Sometimes people do not know what they really believe. That cannot, however, be the usual case; for if it were, talk about beliefs could not play the role that it actually does play. 4. There is a large obstacle to accepting the idea that there is a way of behaving that is “behaving like a person who says ‘s’”. This is the fact, already mentioned in Chapter 5, that any belief is consistent with any behavior, provided that desires are adjusted appropriately; and any desire is consistent with any behavior, provided that it is accompanied by an appropriate set of beliefs. Just to remind, Geach’s (1957) example showed a professional gardener whose belief that it will soon rain might be followed by collecting the gardening tools, or not, depending on the absence or presence of a desire for revenge. One can desire a cure, and believe a medicine effective, but still not take it out of religious concerns. One can believe it is snowing and head for shelter or, like Emperor Henry IV, remain outdoors for political reasons. Examples of this sort are endless.

Believing and Desiring  97 In the face of this fact, how can one say that there is anything that is behaving like a person who believes s or like a person who desires that q? The answer relies on two points. One is that many desires and beliefs are common to human beings. No one wants to go hungry, be too cold or too hot, be injured, and so on. There are many facts about which we are rarely ignorant – whether we are indoors or out, whether other people are present, whether we are nauseated or in pain, what country we are in, what national or ethnic group we belong to, and so on and on. Over vast stretches, mention of a single belief or desire, together with our general understanding of human cognitive and conative properties, will be sufficient to raise generally accurate expectations of some of the things people will do. The other point is that we often mention more than just one thing that a person believes. Sometimes we mention several things a person believes; sometimes we indicate what they want, too. This is especially the case if any of the relevant beliefs or desires are unusual. When we assume common background and are informed of a few of the things a person believes and desires, we have enough to go on to have fairly accurate expectations of some of the actions a person will do, or would do if certain circumstances arose. There is, of course, no certainty in all this: we may remain ignorant of other things a person believes and desires. But, over vast stretches of our lives, we are accurate enough to make social life possible. 5. What we have seen so far is that learning to speak is learning to do things by speaking – learning, that is, to have certain kinds of effects on others by speaking. As hearers, we have effects produced in us by speakers. These effects must be fairly reliable; otherwise language could not be used to accomplish anything. Although speakers do not normally think of what they are doing as producing effects in others, the learning of a language involves learning what effect on others we may expect our words to have. There is a way of extending the range of the effects of a speaker’s words beyond those who were within earshot of those words. Hearers can ‘put others in the picture’ by repeating the speaker’s remarks – that is, by directly quoting the speaker’s remarks after “So and so said ‘….’”. Fully competent speakers are aware of the possibility of being quoted. They are aware that some reactions to some statements may bring criticism upon them, and they are aware that the range of possible critics can be extended by their being quoted. 6. There is another way in which the effect of speech can be extended beyond the immediate audience, and of which competent speakers are also aware. This is indirect speech or, as I shall call it, quasi-quotation. Quasi-quotation has some advantages over direct quotation.

98  Believing and Desiring A speaker may use pronouns that are tied to individuals by surrounding context. For example, others may have been talking for some time about Smith. At some point, Jones says “He’s dishonest”. If one is limited to quotation, one would have to put others, who were not present, in the picture by saying “Jones said ‘He’s dishonest’ and the subject of conversation at the time was Smith.” It is more economical to say “Jones believes that Smith is dishonest”. This represents Jones to third parties as a person who says “Smith is dishonest”, even though that string of words is not what actually left Jones’ mouth. Assuming Jones is a fully competent speaker, she knows that her words may eventually bring censure if she is wrong. She knows that someone may come to Smith’s defense, even if she is right. She knows that she may be quoted and quasi-quoted. She has taken an action that has consequences, some of which she is aware of. If she is normally competent, she is prepared for those consequences. When others quasi-quote her to those not present, the consequences of her action ripple out, and she knows that that may happen. There are other advantages to quasi-quotation. Jones, for example, may misspeak in a way that is automatically corrected by present hearers. For example, she might have actually said “Smith’s lack of honesty is less than anyone realizes”, but the ensuing conversation might have maintained consistency only if she were taken to have meant ‘greater’ instead of ‘less’, and everyone present may have taken her to have been tripped up in her double negative. If constrained to direct quotation, a retailer of her remark would have to repeat it, and then go into an explanation of how the context made it clear that the correct expectations of Jones’s future behavior would have been more accurately indicated by some other words. But the expectations that Jones’ hearers justifiably formed can be well raised in third parties by telling them that Jones believes Smith to be dishonest. I am not suggesting that hearers will explicitly think of each expectation that Jones’s remark raises in them. They will form them, nonetheless. For example, suppose they later learn that Jones has recommended to her father that the latter should hire Smith as a financial officer in his business. They would naturally be puzzled. Of course, there are various explanations. Perhaps Jones has acquired new evidence and has changed her mind. Perhaps she hates her father so much she’d like to see his business fail. The point for us is that her recommendation would violate our expectations. We would think she is not behaving like a person who says “Smith is dishonest” and we would be curious as to what is going on. If we have put others into the picture by saying that Jones believes Smith is dishonest (even though “Smith is dishonest” was never uttered by her) we will raise in them the same expectations – the same propensities to be surprised by possible further developments – that we have formed.

Believing and Desiring  99 Sometimes a speaker clearly implies something that is left unstated. We form tacit expectations that we would have formed if it had been stated. It is as if the speaker had said it. It may be convenient to report that the speaker believes s, where ‘s’ is the unstated sentence. We may, of course, be wrong in our inference, but our report will raise the same expectations in third parties that were raised in us by what the speaker actually did say. Views are often expressed in several sentences, and it is often hard to recall a speaker’s exact words. But we may remember the gist of what the speaker said quite well. Quasi-quotation allows us to report gist. Speakers can use words that we deem socially unacceptable, and that we would not be comfortable quoting in some settings. We can nonetheless raise the same expectations about their future behavior by ­quasi-quotation that uses polite words of similar strength. If we quote a speaker of another language, we have to use the original, and then offer a translation. Quasi-quotation allows us to just offer the translation. Karl says “Es regnet”, we tell our friends “He thinks it’s raining”. Our friends would normally come to expect Karl to behave like a person who says “It’s raining” – i.e., they would come to have the same expectations that they would have had if they had heard Karl and had understood German. Speakers can utter sentences in a tone that forms an essential part of the meaning (e.g., they may speak derisively, sarcastically, approvingly). One way to put others in the picture would be to quote while using the same tone. But one may not fancy oneself such a good actor, or it might be unpleasant to imitate a person whose tone suggests enthusiasm for a proposal of which one disapproves. One can lead others to have the same expectations regarding a speaker that they would have had if they had actually heard the speaker’s words by attributing a belief that s, even when the speaker actually said ‘~s’, but said it in an ironic tone. 7. The mention of ironic tone raises a worry that the quasi-quotational account will be circular. If one can speak ironically, one can also speak sincerely. If believing that p is behaving like a person who says ‘p’ sincerely, and saying ‘p’ sincerely turns out to be saying ‘p’ while believing it, then believing p will have been ‘explained’ in terms of believing p – i.e., no explanation at all will have been given. What saves quasi-quotation from this coal pit is that there is, and must be, an asymmetry between irony and sincere, or straightforward, or ordinary speech. Irony depends on mutual understanding that the tone or surrounding context is intended to negate the straightforward sense of whatever was said. Such an understanding requires that there is a straightforward sense of what was said. Speaking ironically is a skill

100  Believing and Desiring that can be acquired only if there is already in place a foundation of nonironic communication. Behaving like a person who says ‘p’ is behaving like a person who says ‘p’ in the ordinary, entry level way. When we say things in the ordinary, entry level way, we are (barring simple confusion) saying what we believe or want or are considering. But what it is to use the ordinary, entry level way is not defined in terms of belief or desire; it is the way of speaking that must be in place in order for irony or deception by language to be possible. 8. To sum up, speaking raises tacit expectations about future behavior in hearers. Reports to third parties who were not present, phrased in terms of what speakers believe, put them in the picture, i.e., raise the same tacit expectations in them. To say that someone believes s is to raise expectations that they will behave like a person who says ‘s’, without committing ourselves to the claim that they actually uttered ‘s’. These expectations are not listed, and it is not assumed that they could be listed. They are in us as propensities to be surprised at violations of them, and as propensities to draw certain inferences if we learn other things about what the speaker believes and wants. 9. Section 9 of Chapter 5 discussed an example in which two people shared a belief, but had different reasons for it. The quasi-quotational view enables us to say a little more about such cases. Two people share a belief if they affirm the same sentence, and if they are in fact disposed to behave like a person who affirms it. Their saying it (non ironically) contributes to expectations. However, what we will expect from each person depends on many facts that we know or assume about that person. Such facts will typically include more than one statement. To recur to that same example, being told that both A and B believe Jones is a murderer would lead us to expect that they will do something in the way of being wary of Jones and something in the way of furthering the chances of Jones’s arrest. But any more specific expectation will depend on having additional information about what A or B believes, and what they want. For example, if we learn about the difference in their reasons for believing Jones is a murderer, we will not expect them to tell the same story to the sheriff. Since blood is more direct evidence of wrongdoing than suspicious silence, we may have different estimates of the likelihood of their reporting to the sheriff at all. We might also learn that B is Jones’s brother. That would very likely lead to considerable revision in our expectations about what B may do. More generally, facts about a person’s status or abilities may be relevant to our expectations. A and B may both believe that person P needs medical attention. If that is what we are told, we will have

Believing and Desiring  101 different expectations about A and B if we know that one is a doctor and the other is not. 10. Geach introduced his gardener in opposition to Ryle’s (1949) dispositional analysis of mental terms. The view in question was that talk about beliefs was talk about dispositions. Saying of people that they believe it will rain is saying, among other things, that if they go out, they’ll take their umbrella. The ‘other things’ are likewise conditionals expressed in behavioral terms. In principle, then, we could replace belief talk with long lists of conditionals expressible in behavioral terms. In showing that no behavioral conditional follows from a belief statement, but at best from a belief statement plus a desire statement, Geach put paid to the idea of even in-principle replaceability of mental language by behavioral disposition language.4 11. The quasi-quotational view of belief ascription that I have been presenting makes essential appeal to tacit expectations about behavior. For this reason, it may be confused with the Rylean project. It should be clear, however, that my project is not reduction of mental language to nonmental language. I agree that being told that Jones believes s would not by itself give rise to expectations about Jones’s behavior. That is why I have pointed out that normal adults know a lot about normal desires and beliefs, that we are typically told more about the subject of a belief attribution than just one belief or one desire, and that reporters of another’s beliefs generally include exceptional beliefs or desires of the attributee, if they are aware of them. My view is like Ryle’s in one important respect. I have been strenuously resisting the idea that a belief is something like an internal inscription, either in a mental medium or in a brain part. I have been saying instead that to attribute a belief is to convey something about the attributee’s internal organization – not by listing behavioral expectations, but by causing our hearers’ brains to bring about the same tacit expectations that would have been caused in them if those hearers had heard the attributee say ‘s’ (where s is the reported belief). Of course that whole brain organization is also an organization that underlies the attributee’s desires and other beliefs. So, while the importance of tacit behavioral

4 The dialectic here is closely paralleled by the dialectic of physical object statements and their alleged reducibility to sets of conditionals expressed in terms of sense-­contents. The role of Geach’s example is played here by the argument given by Chisholm (1957), to the effect that physical object statements do not by themselves entail what observers will observe. To derive observational consequences, one must make several assumptions about the world, and one cannot reduce them all to sense-content statements without circularity.

102  Believing and Desiring expectations in my account may be a source for confusion between my project and Ryle’s, the projects are distinct, and Geach’s defeat of Ryle’s project is not an objection to mine. 12. It is an interesting question why Ryle himself did not anticipate Geach’s criticism. A plausible answer is that normal beliefs and desires are, well, normal. So, they come very easily to mind. When the example is put forward of someone going out and expecting rain, it ever so naturally occurs to us that an umbrella (or at least some kind of rain gear) will be taken. Without some particular reason for it to do so, the idea will simply not occur to us, that people might be so overjoyed by the ending of a drought that they want to feel the rain on their skin, or that standing unprotected in a cold rain might be a way of atoning for their sins. This observation seems to me to support what I have saying about our background of knowledge about normal beliefs and desires. For assuming such a background explains in a quite natural way how Ryle’s view could have had initial plausibility, and no other explanation seems as plausible.5 13. I have noted that people can lie and can deceive with words without actually lying. They can also affirm something in order to provoke a reaction, and later explain they were only kidding. They can suffer slips of the tongue; they can be confused as they speak; they can mislead inadvertently because they are mistaken about the meaning of a word. They may create a false impression of extensive knowledge in some area by correctly using a technical term, even though their background in that area is quite thin. Despite all these possibilities, what people say without special markers that they are not to be taken seriously is normally a reflection of the actual state of their brains’ organization. By this I mean more than just that when people utter a string of words, their brains were just then organized in such a way as to cause the utterance of those words. I mean that, normally, what people say is symptomatic of a brain organization that will produce other behavior (verbal and nonverbal) that fits with what they say. Remember that learning to speak requires tacit learning of likely effects of one’s speech. People tacitly know what kinds of expectations their words will cause in others. Their brains are organized so that what they say in a straightforward manner generally fits with the expectations they know their words will raise. 5 Here again, the dialectic surrounding phenomenalism offers a parallel. Physical object statements can seem to imply what we will observe because we normally rely on our background knowledge of the normal, and the possibilities of hallucination, deception by mirrors or odd lighting conditions, etc. do not immediately occur to us.

Believing and Desiring  103 There are a few pathological liars, but most people do not want to have a reputation as a liar. Such a reputation interferes with doing things by speaking. The default stance toward others’ apparently ordinary utterances is that their words express what they believe, that is, that the tacit expectations they raise in their hearers will be borne out in their future behavior. As always, such expectations do not flow from a single statement; they depend in addition on what we know about people in general, and on other things we know about the particular speaker’s beliefs and desires, and sometimes about the speaker’s official position or special abilities. What people say has a primary place in the foregoing account, and in our lives. When people say ‘s’, they are (trivially) thereby behaving like a person who says ‘s’. Often, the easiest way to find out what a person believes is to ask and listen to the reply. But of course, nonlinguistically behaving in ways that fit with the sense of what has been said is another way of behaving like a person who says ‘s’. The primacy of language in the foregoing account should not obscure the importance of our ability to make sense of what a person does by looking at what they nonverbally do. And our own brains are organized in such a way that we are often led to describe a person whose nonlinguistic behavior we have observed as behaving like a person who says ‘s’, or as a person who believes s. The behavior we have observed raises expectations in us about that person’s future behavior, and – without being able to list those expectations in other ways – we can express them by saying what we think a person believes. We can, of course, make mistakes due to faulty reasoning on our part, or to the bad luck of not having been able to observe a person in circumstances that would have revealed some unusual beliefs or desires. This susceptibility to error evidently does not undercut the general usefulness of our practice of attributing beliefs and desires. 14. We sometimes attribute beliefs to (nonhuman, nonlinguistic) animals. It may appear that my account so far makes nonsense of this practice. If so, that would be an objection to the account. In fact, however, the account is just the same and makes sense of belief attribution to animals. Although it seems odd to say so, attributing the belief that there is food behind the cupboard door to Fido is tantamount to saying that Fido is like a person who says “There is food behind the cupboard door”. Of course, expectations raised by attributions of beliefs to Fido are conditioned by the knowledge that Fido is a dog, with only a dog’s cognitive abilities, and with the desires we expect of a dog. This condition is analogous to our forming different expectations on the basis of knowing that someone is a shop owner, or a hermit. We won’t expect Fido to grasp the cupboard door by its handle, but we will expect signs of excitement when Fido’s master approaches the cupboard. We won’t

104  Believing and Desiring expect shop owners to leave when they come to believe that a busload of tourists is about to arrive, but we might well expect that of a hermit. 15. The statements I mostly have in mind as leading to belief attributions are not statements of the form “I believe that s”. They are, instead, simple assertions that s. First person ‘belief’ contexts are tricky. Sometimes, “I believe that s” is an indication of tentativeness; e.g., there is nothing linguistically odd about saying “I believe Aunt Tilda is arriving on Tuesday, but I’m not sure”. However, when used contrastively, first person belief statements can have roughly the opposite effect. In “You think she’s arriving on Wednesday, but I believe she’s coming on Tuesday”, I am affirming my confidence that she’s coming on Tuesday. If her nephew says simply “Aunt Tilda is arriving on Tuesday”, we will be entitled to tell someone who didn’t hear him say that, that he believes she will arrive on Tuesday. 16. Behaving like a person who says ‘s’ does not mean behaving in a way that is optimal with respect to all the things a believer believes and desires. This is because our cognitive capacities are not unlimited. We may simply fail to think of some good ways of achieving our goals. We may make mistakes in reasoning. The expectations that are raised in us when we learn what people believe and want are those that are normally suggested – and learning our language is, in part, tacitly learning what those normal suggestions are. There is thus no inconsistency in the following scenario. A has known B for a long time and has good reason for a substantial list of belief and desire attributions to B. A also has a less than high opinion of B’s cognitive abilities. A thinks that the best thing for a person with B’s beliefs and desires to do would be to X. But A also thinks that B will never figure out that X would be a good course of action. Instead, A thinks, B will make a common mistake, or will fail to consider an unusual possibility, and so will miss seeing the value of doing X. Y will appear to B to be the best thing to do. The expectations about which normal speakers tacitly learn are dependent on what most people do when they say certain things and are normally endowed and not possessed of special abilities or special relations to their circumstances.

Mental Causation Redux 17. The main intuitions that drive us toward allowing mental causation are these. First, we know that in many cases, people would not have done what they did if they had not believed what they believed. John would not have driven to the airport when he did if he had not believed that Aunt Tilda was about to land there. An agent would not have authorized

Believing and Desiring  105 a raid so soon if she had not believed that the kingpin of the target group was about to leave the country. In other cases, we single out a belief as particularly relevant to an action. Why is Jones needling Smith? It’s because he believes (perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly) that Smith has insulted him. Why is Jane making a trip to the grocery store, when, although there are things she will buy there, there’s nothing she couldn’t very well get along without for a few days? She believes John will be working there, and that she’ll probably have a chance to talk with him. Thirdly, we think that in both the foregoing kinds of case, there are many differences that would make no difference as long as the belief were present. Beliefs may be held with various degrees of confidence, but so long as the degree is above a certain threshold, the exact degree doesn’t matter. John may have any number of different reasons for believing that Aunt Tilda is coming on Tuesday, but these differences make no difference, so long as he does believe that that’s when she’s coming. People who share one belief can differ in many others. So long as the differences are irrelevant to a certain action, they may behave in the same way. These facts may suggest a model that is one version or another of the pool table picture, i.e., the view according to which beliefs are realized in brain parts and have effects by interacting with other beliefs and desires that are realized in other brain parts. But they do not imply such a picture, for the view I have been presenting also accommodates these intuitions. Behavior is generated by organized brains that have been stimulated in various ways. To believe something is to be organized in such a way as to have one’s behavior develop in ways that are consistent with being a person who affirms s, where s is the belief in question. Attributing a belief locates an action in a larger pattern of behavior; it says that the action was one symptom of an organization that also underlies other (verbal and nonverbal) actions that would be forthcoming under appropriate circumstances. To say that A would not have done action X in absence of having believed s is to say that the action was a manifestation of a set of dispositions, all of which are toward behaving like a person who says ‘s’ in various different circumstances (where the circumstances include various conditions of desiring and of believing other things); and that if A’s brain had supported most of A’s same dispositions, but not the disposition to behave like a person who says ‘s’, X would not have been done. The point that the relevant feature is what is believed, not its exact degree of confidence, or the manner in which the belief was arrived at, or what other beliefs may be held, is captured by noting that a brain organization that underlies a set of dispositions can vary in many respects, without failing to support that set. Or, in short, the property of a whole brain, that it is organized in such a way as to support a set of dispositions of a certain kind, can be realized in different ways.

106  Believing and Desiring 18. The main difference between my account and the pool table picture is that the latter gives a false sense that we have a grip on a causal theory of how actions are brought about. We think: We have a belief realized in one brain part, and a desire realized in another part, and these interact so as to bring about an action. But this picture is incoherent. The quasi-quotational view does not commit us to a false sense of security about our grip on how the brain causes intelligible behavior. Unfortunately, it does not offer a replacement causal account. It points to the fact of brain organization, but it does not explain how such an organization can work. This lack may provide a motive for resisting the view. But the plain fact is that we do not know how the brain can be organized so as to produce behavior that makes as much sense as it does over long periods of time. The pool table picture is incoherent and we do not yet have a replacement. The quasi-quotational view at best lifts the scales from our eyes and puts us at the beginning of a properly conceived investigation. 19. Our language about beliefs and desires contains suggestions of two roles. One is causal. People acted as they did because they believed certain claims and desired certain outcomes. The other is dispositional. This role is suggested by remarks to the effect that if a person really believed s they would not be doing what they’re doing. For example, a business owner says he believes in the equality of women. Then someone says “If you really believed women were equal you would not be paying them less when they’re doing the same job as men”. This remark says, in effect, that equal pay for equal work is a symptom of belief in equality (by taking its absence to indicate absence of genuine belief). It is not prima facie incoherent to begin to theorize about beliefs by building on either one of these suggestions. But it is incoherent to take both as fundamental. If one tries that, one can only end up in a circle. If a belief is (partially) constituted by a disposition to do X (given certain other beliefs and certain desires), it cannot also be the cause of the manifestation of that disposition. If dormitive power of a drug is constituted by its takers’ tendency to fall asleep, then it cannot sensibly also be regarded as the property in virtue of which the sleep is caused.6 A natural response would be to say that a belief in the causal sense can be the categorical basis of believing in the dispositional sense. However, (a) If we think of such categorical bases as embodied in parts of a brain, we fall afoul of Chapter 5’s criticisms of the pool table picture. (b) If we 6 The same problem affects concepts. To possess a concept, sometimes, is to have a certain kind of ability. But on many occasions, having a concept is supposed to be able to explain that ability. Moving back and forth between these understandings can produce an illusion of explanation, but no lasting satisfaction.

Believing and Desiring  107 think of such categorical bases as embodied in the overall organization of the brain, we can have an intelligible view. But if we are clear about what we are then saying, we will recognize that it amounts to the same as this: Our behavior is produced by sensory inputs falling upon an organized brain. This is a true statement. The advantage of putting it this way is that it no longer suggests that we have explained anything by making it.

Relations between Quasi-quotation and Some Other Views 20. Robert Gordon (1986, 1995, e.g.) developed the idea of mental simulation and initiated a considerable literature about it (e.g., Goldman, 2006). A key idea in this view is that when we simulate, we do not derive consequences about the behavior of other people from explicitly stated principles. Instead, we use our cognitive abilities ‘offline’ – that is to say, we use our reasoning upon premises that we may or may not accept ourselves. We imagine ourselves believing and wanting what another believes or wants, and allow our considerations to flow from adopting that picture, while maintaining sufficient distance that we do not act upon practical conclusions that we may draw. This idea goes very naturally with that of tacit expectations. When we learn, or imagine, what others believe and want, our own cognitive abilities are engaged. We do not know how our cognitive abilities work, and we do not have explicit premises from which we derive expectations. Nonetheless, when we think ourselves into another’s set of beliefs and wants, we form a picture of their world view, within which we have some (albeit limited) sense of ‘knowing our way around’. Without having explicitly anticipated possible future eventualities, we are in a condition in which we will be surprised by some future behaviors of that other person, and in which we will receive other reports of their doings with a sense of fitting our expectations. We do this with the same sense of ease that we often have when circumstances that were never explicitly anticipated arise in our own lives. (Of course, there are also difficult cases where we do not feel we know what to do, and have to stop and deliberate intensively in the face of new circumstances.) The claim that we simulate does not imply that there can be no theoretical accounting of how we manage to do it. It implies only that whatever that theoretical account may be, we are not ordinarily aware of it, and we do not use premises corresponding to statements in such a (putative) theory in reasoning about other people. Instead, we engage our reasoning ability. When we do that, unconscious expectations and unconscious processing are free to proceed as they do when we are simply thinking for ourselves about what we should verbally or nonverbally do.

108  Believing and Desiring 21. Those who utter moral judgments expose themselves to possible censure from others, who may make contrary judgments. They also expose themselves to possible charges of hypocrisy if, in the future, their own behavior is at odds with their moral declarations. Uttering a moral judgment is thus a significant action, and it is so in part because it leads to expectations by others about the declarer’s future behavior. Adult speakers have tacit knowledge of something about what sort of expectations their words are likely to raise. In this respect, moral judgments are like judgments about nonmoral matters. That is to say, there is such a thing as behaving like a person who says ‘s’, regardless of whether that sentence is a moral judgment or not, and speakers’ behavior is guided by their tacit understanding of the likelihood of raising such expectations. A noncognitivist metaethics holds that moral judgments are very different from judgments about nonmoral matters. It might seem puzzling, therefore, that nonphilosophers have no hesitation in talking about moral beliefs. However, on the view I have been advocating, this lack of hesitation is to be expected. Attributing beliefs to people is saying something about them; it is putting others into the picture of what to expect from them, by depicting them as people who say ‘s’. We have expectations about people who say ‘s’ when ‘s’ is a moral judgment, just as we do when ‘s’ is a nonmoral judgment. So, it is quite natural that nonphilosophers should use ‘Jones believes that s’ indiscriminately for cases in which ‘s’ is a moral or a nonmoral judgment. It is also understandable that moral judgments should enter into apparent logical relations, even if they are not true-or-false statements. A person who says ‘s and t’ raises expectations that go with having said ‘s’ and also having said ‘t’, regardless of the moral/nonmoral status of ‘s’ or ‘t’ (thus ensuring at least an analogue of Simplification). Or, consider the move from A It’s wrong to steal. B Jones has stolen. C Wrongdoers ought to be punished. to D Jones ought to be punished. Now, imagine that person P says (with every appearance of sincerity, and no appearance of cognitive confusion) “A & B & C”. Other things being equal, hearers will naturally expect P to assent to D, if asked, and to behave in ways that tend to lead to punishment for Jones if circumstances put P in a position to do so. The fact (if it is a fact) that A, C and D are neither-true-nor-false would not interfere with the raising of such expectations. That is why we can have a parallel to modus ponens,

Believing and Desiring  109 and universal instantiation, even if A, C and D are not true-or-false sentences. Of course, P may not behave as we naturally expect. Maybe Jones is P’s friend or close relative. Maybe P’s acting to raise the probability of Jones’s punishment would be too onerous. This is not an objection to the view developed here. We have seen that expectations raised by one or a few statements sometimes have to be altered in light of further knowledge about a person, in cases where no moral judgments are involved (for example, Geach’s gardener). These reflections are not offered as an argument for noncognitivism. The same expectations would be raised by the stating of moral judgments whether or not the sentences are properly credited with having a truth value. (The raising of expectations is insensitive to the truth-value status of the sentences used.) The conclusion is only that the view of belief attribution advocated in this chapter provides a way of deflecting one line of objection against noncognitivism. 22. If we take an entire-mentality view, there are no occurrent beliefs. A fortiori, there are no occurrent beliefs to introspect. We cannot, therefore, learn the term ‘belief’ (or, ‘believe’) by picking up on a correlation between introspected beliefs and utterances of ‘belief’/’believe’ by surrounding adults. How then could we acquire a term that means what ‘belief’ or ‘believe’ means? Our answer should be compatible with Dretske’s (2004) distinction between our knowing what we think and our knowing that we think. Small children will unhesitatingly give definite answers to some questions. They can think and when they confidently answer a question, they are saying what they think. But there is a stage at which they can give confident answers, but have not yet acquired the concept of believing (or thinking, in any sense, and in particular in the sense of ‘thinking’ in which that is equivalent to believing).7 So, they are not in a position to know (or believe, or doubt, or consider) that they are thinking (or believing). It takes more complex examples to establish that the way in which adults, who do have all the relevant concepts, know what they think, is different from the way in which they know that they think. I refer readers to the cited paper for Dretske’s argument for this, which I find cogent. The conclusion can be briefly indicated as follows. When we say what we think, we are normally authoritative. There is no question 7 Descartes used ‘think’ to cover even having sensations. In contemporary usage, ‘thinking’ covers working something out, when one doesn’t (yet) have a belief about it. A friend who suggests an activity and then says “What do you think?” is asking about what you want to do. But often, “What do you think?” is just a slightly less formal way of asking what you believe about a current topic of conversation.

110  Believing and Desiring but that we know what we think. But thinking is a mental event, and to know that we have a mental event requires a further, and different kind of, ground from knowing what its content is. Here is a sketch of how the concept of belief might be acquired. The first step is that there will be a correlation between occurrences of ‘say’ and ‘believe’ (and ‘think’). A child might hear, e.g., “Jones says ‘s’ but I don’t believe him”, “Jones says ‘s’ and I believe that too”, “Jones believes that ‘s’, but I wouldn’t say that myself”. Or, a conversation might go this way: Parent:  Johnny says Child: Didn’t. Parent:  You say you

you took his toy.

didn’t, Johnny says you did. Who am I to believe? Why would Johnny say that if you didn’t take his toy?

It is plausible that there is enough correlation in remarks and conversations of this sort to support a tacit first-pass understanding of a child, to this effect: When people say ‘s’, s is what they believe (where ‘s’ is a sentence in indicative mode). Of course, children will soon learn about the possibility of lying. They will also sometimes be puzzled, because hearing what others have said will lead them to expect some behavior on their part that proves not to be forthcoming. But the first pass theory can be revised to allow for exceptions without breaking the connection that, other things being equal, believing that s and saying ‘s’ are intimately related. Since, as we’ve seen, saying ‘s’ and behaving like a person who says ‘s’ are also correlated, the connection between believing that s and behaving like a person who says ‘s’ will also be established. Further moves are obvious. Small children know they are people, and learn to apply generalizations to themselves. It is a small step from (roughly) “People believe what they (indicatively) say”, to “I believe what I (indicatively) say”. Knowing what I believe is then no more difficult than knowing what I say. If I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what I believe. If I’m asked what I believe, and I do have a belief, all I have to do to answer the question about what I believe is to say whatever I have to say about the topic at hand. I am not, of course, suggesting that any of these inferences are explicitly made. Only when children grow up and find themselves in a philosophy class will it occur to them that affirming “I believe that s” is conceptually more sophisticated than just asserting that s. This account satisfies the desideratum of consistency with Dretske’s distinction. To know what we believe, we just say what we think. But, on the account I have been advocating, believing that s normally involves behaving like a person who says ‘s’. Even if you do know that you behave like a person who says ‘s’, you do not know that merely by saying what seems right to you about the subject matter of ‘s’. You have to have some

Believing and Desiring  111 reason to think that your behavior conforms, and will continue to conform, with expectations that you raise by saying ‘s’. This view is much more specific than Dretske’s statement about what is required for knowing that you believe. But it is compatible with his view that a mental state is “a state whose possession of content is c­ onstituted, in part, by a network of external relations” (Dretske, 2004, p. 395). 23. Uriah Kriegel (2015) has argued that there is a phenomenology of cognition, a distinct phenomenology of conation, and a distinct phenomenology of entertaining a proposition.8 These phenomenologies are phenomenologies of the propositional attitudes; Kriegel holds that their differences cannot be accounted for merely by considering differences among the propositional contents. In Chapter 4, §15, I explained some doubts about cognitive phenomenology. It should not be surprising, therefore, that I also dissent from Kriegel’s view. My own view on this topic has two parts. First, whether we are believing, desiring, or entertaining a proposition is reflected in what we say, both overtly and in our inner speech, and also in our imagery. If we want something, we will say “I want ….”, “It would be great if ….”, “I’d sure like it if ….” and so on. We may also imagine ourselves acting, i.e., either doing what we like (if that is an activity) or doing something to get what we want (if that is a thing, e.g., a certain kind of food). If we are merely entertaining a proposition, we are likely to say such things as “Suppose that s, then what?”, “If ‘s’ were true, then it would have to be that ….”, “I wonder whether s”, and the like. If we affirm something categorically, and what we affirm doesn’t contain anything about wanting or supposing and their ilk, we are saying what we believe. Secondly, there can be lots of emotional phenomenology, and certain further phenomenologies, that accompany beliefs, desires and entertainings. Such phenomenology is not required. For example, I believe Quito is due South of Philadelphia, but I can detect no particular emotion that goes with that. (Although, I recall being surprised when I first came to know it.) Similarly, I do want to have dinner tonight, but I’m not hungry now, it will be an ordinary dinner (not a special banquet or a dinner with special guests) and I have no particular emotion about it. But in some cases – cases that are noteworthy in some way, and thus lively material for philosophical examples – there will be associated emotions. Belief in the outcome of certain elections may be accompanied by elation or distress, belief that a lover is seeing another may be accompanied by

8 Kriegel’s very rich treatment also affirms a distinct phenomenology of imagining, and considers and rejects some other candidate phenomenologies. My discussion here will be concerned only with the three candidates mentioned in the text.

112  Believing and Desiring jealousy. One may just want to have a beer, but on a hot afternoon, the prospect of a cold beer at the 19th hole may be accompanied by an almost palpable delight. One may just wonder whether it will rain this afternoon, but trying to figure out whether one will make it through the security check in time to catch one’s plane may be conducted in a sea of anxiety. The ‘further phenomenologies’ I have in mind are feelings such as familiarity or confidence, and valence.9 These too are not required accompaniments of beliefs, desires, or entertainings. I believe that phenomenological resources of the kinds I have identified, none of which are specifically cognitive, conative, or peculiar to entertaining a proposition, are rich enough to provide for all the variety present in our phenomenology. Kriegel, of course, argues for a contrary view. In the next sections, I will address what I take to be his most persuasive line of reasoning. 24. The argument begins with an analogy taken from Balzac’s Father Goriot (1835/1966). This novel includes a statement that everything in it is true. Kriegel notes that this statement fails to incline us to treat the novel as more than a story. “Nothing Balzac can say inside the story can make it more than a story” (Kriegel, 2015, p. 43). “Likewise”, Kriegel continues, “nothing going on inside the content of a mental act can embody a genuine commitment to the truth of what it represents”. If that is so, then commitment to truth – which is present in believing, but not in desiring or merely entertaining – must come from outside the content of the act. The only other candidate for explaining how we know whether we are believing, desiring, or entertaining a proposition is the type of the mental act, that is, the attitude taken toward the propositional content. Since we know without inference whether we are believing, desiring, or merely entertaining a proposition, these different attitudes must have a different ‘feel’ to them, i.e., a distinct phenomenology. Ancillary support for this line of thinking comes from the fact that we can, and often do, eventually endorse a proposition that is the same as one we have been entertaining for some time. (See Kriegel, 2015, p. 65, 105. A similar point for believing and desiring is made on p. 43.) Since the propositions are the same, the difference between believing and entertaining must lie outside the contents, and the only other candidate is that the difference lies in the attitudes. A further support comes from the fact that “animals and infants can believe that p even when they lack a concept of truth. Without a concept of truth, however, they would be unable to form propositional attitudes

9 I say a little more about such feelings at the end of Chapter 8, and much more about valence in Chapter 9.

Believing and Desiring  113 whose contents have the concept of truth as constituent” (43). I take the point of this to be as follows. If animals and infants can believe p while lacking a concept of truth, the content of their mental acts cannot have the form “‘p’ is true”, but only the form ‘p’. But then, the difference between their believing p and their desiring p cannot lie in the content. But if not in the content, then, since there is no third alternative, it must lie in the attitude. 25. This last case requires some special treatment, to which I will return, but I will begin with the main line of my response to the first two points. In my view, these trade on an ambiguity surrounding the term ‘content’. Kriegel’s discussion treats the contents as relatively simple propositions. Suppose, for example, ‘p’ is ‘We’re having pizza for dinner’. We can believe that, we can desire that, and we can entertain it while working out whether we think it will be so. But there is another possible use of ‘content’, in which it corresponds to the sense of what we actually say to ourselves in inner speech. Let us mark this usage with the term ‘contentº’. The contentsº in our three cases are different. We might just say “We’re having pizza for dinner”, and unless there are special circumstances or additional surrounding speech, that would normally be a statement of what we believe. We might, however, say “I hope we’re having pizza for dinner” or “I wonder whether we’re having pizza for dinner”. Those involve a common proposition (‘We’re having pizza for dinner’), but they are different contentsº. Contentsº offer a third place to locate differences among believing, desiring and entertaining. The contents (no superscript) are the same; the difference of attitude lies in the presence or absence in our overt or inner speech of terms such as ‘want’ and ‘wonder whether’. Phenomenology of attitudes is thus not needed. Knowing whether we believe, desire, or are entertaining a proposition is no more difficult than knowing what we say. “But how do we know what we should say?” The answer that seems most phenomenologically plausible to me is that there is no ‘how’ to such knowledge. Compare, for example, what happens when we name the color of something. How do we know what word to apply? It seems to me that there is no ‘how’ in this case. Of course, we had to learn our color words when we were young. But as competent speakers, we do not interrogate ourselves as to what color word to use; we just say what color the item in question has. We do not have to introspect the phenomenology of the meaning of, say, ‘blue’, in order to know whether that is the right word to bring out when we intend to describe what we see, and we see something blue. I believe it is the same way when we say what we believe, or want, or what we are trying to decide about. We had, at some point, to learn the

114  Believing and Desiring words ‘believe’, ‘want’, ‘wonder whether’, and so on.10 But as competent speakers, we do not interrogate ourselves about how we ‘feel’ with regard to some proposition. We say that we believe we’re having pizza for dinner, or that we want to have pizza for dinner, with as little internal interrogation as when we say that the tomato must not be ripe yet because it is still green. No such interrogation is needed. When we imagine particular cases of propositional attitudes, we naturally imagine them along with an accompanying emotion; and that may seem to bestow a richness on our knowledge of our propositional attitudes that is not captured by contentsº and the denial that we need a means by which we tell whether we believe, desire, or are entertaining some proposition. But – as should be clear from the discussion of emotional phenomenology in §23 – beliefs and desires can occur with opposite emotional phenomenology, and entertaining can occur with or without anxiety. Emotional phenomenology can thus be only an accompaniment to believing, desiring, or entertaining, and not that which constitutes the nature of a particular attitude. The same conclusion should also be clear from the fact that some emotions, e.g., jealousy, are equally accompaniments of a belief that someone else will obtain the object of one’s desire, and a desire for something one believes only someone else will obtain. 26. The appeal to contentº will, of course, not work for (nonlinguistic) animals. However, it is plausible that they do not know that they are believing or desiring. So, we will not need an account of such self-­ knowledge in their case. For an animal to believe something about, say, where food is located, is for that animal to behave like a person who says “There is food at location L” – so far, of course, as is compatible with its being an animal of its particular kind. This will often amount to little more than going fairly directly to L when it is hungry. Animal desires for food or mates will generally be correctly attributed if they are foraging or approaching potential mates rather than, say, sunning themselves. 27. Similar remarks apply to pre-linguistic infants. The remaining case to consider is that of young children who have concepts of believing and desiring (and maybe entertaining), but not yet that of truth. Could they know whether they were believing some s rather than desiring that s (become the case)? Yes. If one has the concept of truth, one can always say what one believes by saying that such and such is true. But we do not need the

10 Recall §22 for remarks about how ‘believe’ may be learned. It is plausible that similar accounts can be given for ‘want’ and ‘wonder whether’.

Believing and Desiring  115 concept of truth to say what we believe: we just say what we believe. Likewise, one can say “I believe that ‘s’ is true”; but one can equally employ the concept of belief by saying “I believe that s”. If we want something, what we say will be different – we will say “I want such and such”, or “I want things to be such and such a way”, and so forth. Our youngster can know whether she says “s”, or “I believe that s”, or “I want that s”. And, let us not forget, her phenomenological accompaniments are likely to be different. If she says “I believe that s”, she may be expressing either lack of confidence or the opposite (unlike the usual case in which she says simply “s”). If she wants ice cream, but doesn’t know whether or not it will be forthcoming, she’ll have an anxiety that won’t be there if uncle Harry has promised to take her to the ice cream store. (I am, of course, assuming that uncle Harry does not have a record of broken promises.) That said, we should also note that it is somewhat difficult to imagine a child being in a position of not yet having the concept of truth, but yet being so reflective as to ask the question “Am I believing that p or desiring that p?” We should also distinguish (a) ‘knowing that one desires ice cream’ (equivalently, knowing that one desires that one will soon have ice cream) in the reflective sense of knowing that one is desiring that one will soon have ice cream rather than believing that one will, from (b) ‘knowing that one desires ice cream’ in the less reflective sense of merely knowing that it is ice cream that one wants. A child may just say “Ice cream!” in a certain tone of voice, that everyone will understand to be demanding ice cream. If the question “How does the child know that it wants ice cream?” is asked in this situation, the answer is that there is no ‘how’ to it: uttering “Ice cream!” in that tone is behaving like a child who wants to have some ice cream. The child does not first have to do anything to figure out that she wants ice cream, any more than you have first to do something to figure out how to, say, reach for a spoon. 28. At the risk of disappointing some purists, I want to acknowledge my acceptance of some phenomenologies that do not fit neatly under sensory, imagistic, or emotional phenomenology. First, while I do not ‘hear voices’, I believe I can imagine what that would be like, and I am quite sure that that is not what my inner speech is like. There is a clear difference between hearing what is said and saying something, and I think there is an analogous distinction for inner

116  Believing and Desiring speech. This difference is, of course, no support for cognitive phenomenology, since we say to ourselves (and do not merely hear) what we believe and what we want and what we wonder about. Second, I recognize a feeling of familiarity. One can, for example, have a sense that one has seen someone before, without being able to say who it might be, or where one might have previously encountered that person. One may also say to oneself in inner speech that a certain person looks familiar; but that is a comment to oneself about the feeling one has, not what constitutes having that feeling. Third, some sensations are pleasant, some are not. The pleasantness of a sensation is not a belief about it, it is not another sensation, and it is not an emotion (although it is often accompanied by emotions). I will have more to say about pleasure and displeasure in Chapter 9.

Conclusion 29. The explanations in §§20–28 strengthen the quasi-quotational view of belief and desire attributions. Part of their contribution is to show consiliences with other views that have independent support. Another part consists in responses to likely sources of objection to the quasi-­ quotational view. The quasi-quotational view is not part of traditional epiphenomenalism, which has been a doctrine about sensations (namely, that they are inefficacious and caused by brain events that also causally contribute to behavior). I regard it as part of an epiphenomenalist outlook on mentality because it puts in focus the importance of causes of our behavior that are not part of our consciousness. Chapter 5 already arrived at the conclusion that the interactions of brain parts that leads to our behavior cannot be thought of as interactions among our beliefs and desires (not even as interactions among brain-part realizers of beliefs and desires). The ­quasi-quotational view of this chapter offers a way of looking at our beliefs and desires that concurs with this result. We can attribute beliefs and desires because our brains are organized in such a way as to support an organization of behavior that enables us to have reasonable expectations about what people will do. This account of belief and desire attributions makes no suggestion that beliefs and desires are causes of behavior; instead, the fact that one has a certain belief or desire is the fact that one is organized in a certain way. The facts about that brain organization on which our organized behavior depends are not facts of which we are normally conscious; they are facts that must be learned by investigations of brain operations that we are only beginning to understand.

7 Robots

1. Some questions about our mentality can be illuminated by carefully considering whether, and if so how, we might build a robot that has some property of interest. This chapter considers some issues of this kind. It will redeem a promise from Chapter 2, §2 concerning the possibility of a robot with sensory consciousness. It will also address some issues concerning intelligence and understanding. There are well-known views about these properties that suggest a need for some addition to what this book recognizes as required for a full account of our mental life. It is thus necessary to explain why we are not actually forced to accept such additions.

Sensations 2. According to the view developed in the first two chapters, sensory consciousness (which, in this chapter, I will abbreviate to ‘consciousness’) involves instantiation of phenomenal qualities. To make a conscious robot, therefore, we have to give a robot a ‘brain’ that can cause such instances. In Chapter 2, I explained that the causes of qualitative events are physical events that have SR complexity. So, what we would need to do to build a conscious robot is to build a robot with a ‘brain’ that can get into ephemeral states that have SR complexity. Those who are skeptical of the ConCAS, MAP and uMAP theory can adopt a more general stance that is still compatible with dualism. It is highly plausible on a variety of views that there will be some physically specifiable characteristic that is common to those brain events that do cause sensations, and absent from those brain events (e.g., cerebellar events) that do not cause sensations. The project of building a conscious robot can then be conceived as the project of building a robot with a ‘brain’ that can harbor events with that characteristic. 3. It is an empirical matter whether it is possible to build a ‘brain’ of microchips that could have events with SR complexity (or whatever alternative characteristic one might suppose to be distinctive of brain events that cause sensations). Timing may be crucial for SR complexity, and it

118 Robots might turn out that neural structures are the only structures compatible with the laws of physics that can produce the right kind of timing relations. But no such empirical assumption is built into either the theory of Chapter 2 or a more general approach that says only that there is some characteristic that is distinctive of causes of sensations. Thus, as far as we know, it may be possible to build a conscious robot.

Intelligence 4. The next question I want to address concerns the relation between the project of building a conscious robot and the project of building an intelligent robot. In order to address this question, we need first to say something about how to understand ‘intelligence’. A foundational paper in this area is Turing’s (1950) “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. I have argued elsewhere that Turing was on the right track, and reflection on his work has led me to the following working definition of ‘intelligence’. Intelligence is the ability to respond appropriately to a wide range of novel circumstances.1 ‘Appropriately’ is a vague term. We can improve it somewhat by stipulating that it is not the same as optimality. A move in chess, for example, might be quite an intelligent play, even though it is not the best move that could have been made in that position. What is appropriate depends on what purposes are assumed in the background, and what is believed by an agent. This dependence makes it very difficult to generalize about what is appropriate, but it is not so difficult to recognize cases of it. For example, imagine a robot that does my grocery shopping – I’ll call it ‘Shoppie’. Shoppie routinely takes a bus to the store, but today that route is closed due to flooding. Its memory includes a map of the bus system, and it calculates that taking two other buses will avoid low ground and get it to the store. It walks a few blocks, takes the other buses, does the shopping, and returns the same way. Since this new combination of routes takes longer, and the weather is warm, it omits getting the ice cream that was on its shopping list. When I point out that the ice cream is missing, Shoppie explains about the extra travel time and warm weather. I believe most readers will agree that this scenario is one that illustrates Shoppie as doing several things that are ‘appropriate’ in a sense that is relevant to intelligence. ‘Wide range’ is also a vague term, but useful nonetheless. As with ‘appropriately’, it is difficult to make this term precise, but we can narrow it 1 See my 1992b for fuller discussion. A similar understanding is implicit in part IV of Descartes’ (1637) Discourse.

Robots  119 down a little bit. First, ‘wide range of circumstances’ does not mean ‘all circumstances’. It is compatible with being intelligent that there are some circumstances that would leave an intelligent entity unable to respond in any remotely appropriate way. An intelligent entity may also sometimes be confused, or simply fail to think of some fact that would have made its behavior more appropriate to circumstances if it had been brought to mind. Second, ‘wide range of circumstances’ contrasts with ‘restricted range of circumstances’. If a robot performs well at a restricted task, e.g., just piling objects on top of one another so that the stack does not fall over, that will not be ‘wide’ enough to support an attribution of intelligence. A famous example of a restricted task is Weizenbaum’s (1976) program Eliza. This program fooled many people into thinking they were being truly understood by the device with which they were interacting. But if one tries to converse with it on any topic other than one’s (real or feigned) psychological problems, the answers become obviously inappropriate. 2 ‘Novel circumstances’, in the working definition above, means ‘not previously encountered or explicitly considered’. There are some occasions on which one anticipates a problem and asks others for advice. If the problem is difficult and one works out a good solution oneself, that is an example of using one’s intelligence. If one is told what to do by others and carries out their recommendation, that requires less intelligence. The idea behind ‘novel circumstances’ is that unanticipated problems often arise, and one works out the response for the first time ‘on the fly’, that is, by oneself, and in a reasonably short time (short enough for the response to be effective). The robot example of two paragraphs ago illustrates the point. The unavailability of the usual bus route was not known until shopping day, and Shoppie (we imagined) worked out an alternative in time to use it to complete the shopping. If this sort of thing were the only thing a robot could do, we might not want to concede intelligence to it, but if a robot can respond similarly well over a wide range of different kinds of novel circumstances, we would, and should, regard it as intelligent. 5. A possible resistance to this last claim comes from a generalization of Ned Block’s famous objection to a suggestion of Turing’s that is commonly known as ‘the Turing test’. The Turing test is essentially as follows. A human and a machine (a computer, in Turing’s paper) communicate with an interrogator using only a teletype. Interrogators cannot see the participants, who are identified only as X and Y, but they can ask questions and read the responses. The human tries to cooperate (i.e., respond in such a way that interrogators will be likely to think it 2 To my mind, most of Eliza’s responses are inappropriate even within its restricted task. But, as noted, many people were impressed by the acuity of their ‘analyst’.

120 Robots is human); the machine tries to fool the interrogator into thinking it is the human. After some finite period of questioning, interrogators have to declare which one – X or Y – is the human, and which the machine. 3 Turing envisaged a series of trials of this kind. If interrogators consistently made correct declarations, that would not show that the machine was not intelligent – for the machine might be intelligent, but have some telltale stylistic tic that would be distinctly unhuman. Or, it might be more accurate or faster than humans would normally be. But if interrogators were right only about half the time, that would show that the machine had intelligence. The assumption behind the Turing test is that human-like conversational exchange requires intelligence. If interrogators often make wrong declarations, that shows that machines can produce human-like conversational responses, and thus they must have intelligence. Block’s (1981) construction directly challenges this assumption. That construction involves a team of humans who work out responses to all the conversational initiatives that interrogators might ever use, alphabetize them, and store them in a computer. Interrogators might follow up with various further initiatives, and the team works out and stores further responses in such a way that, in their judgment, whole strings of initiatives, responses, further initiatives, further responses, and so on always have a human-like conversational character. It will be convenient to have a term for this procedure; let us call it ‘canning’. In a Turing test, this ‘Block machine’ performs in a human-like way, and interrogators can be expected to guess right only about half the time. But this machine is not intelligent. It is a vast look-up device, with no more intelligence than a grocery-store bar code reader system. Since the Block machine is evidently logically possible, it is logically possible that a machine could ‘pass’ the Turing test, yet not be intelligent. One response to the Block machine (aka, the ‘Blockhead’) is to say that responses generated from previous canning are not ‘novel’ in the intended sense of the term, i.e., they are not ‘new’, or not previously faced by the entity whose intelligence is in question. A more insightful response is to hold that the Block machine shows that we cannot take passing the Turing test as a definition of intelligence. But the effort required for successful canning over a series of trials with various interrogators would be so large that the probability that we would ever be actually faced with such a machine is very close to zero. Thus, the Turing test remains viable as a test of intelligence, in the sense that if a machine were to ‘pass’ the Turing test, we would justifiably

3 For other interpretations of the ‘Turing test’, and objections and defenses, see the papers in Minds and Machines v.10 #4 (2000) and v.11 #1 (2001). These issues mark the 50th anniversary of Turing’s famous paper.

Robots  121 reject the hypothesis that it was a Block machine, on the ground of extreme improbability. The more plausible hypothesis by far would be that the machine was intelligent.4 The generalization of Block’s argument for robots would involve imagining a robot that had been canned with instructions for what to do in every circumstance in which it might find itself, barring only those circumstances whose probability is exceedingly low. The point just made applies even more strongly to this case. That is: Such a robot may be logically possible, but if we observed a robot maneuvering around the world, carrying out its tasks successfully amid a wide variety of real world circumstances, we would thereby have wonderful evidence that it was not merely a canned machine, but had a way of creating new responses to new circumstances. In short, it would have intelligence. 6. Now that we have clarified ‘intelligence’, we are in a position to see that the project of building a conscious robot and the project of building an intelligent robot are distinct. Nowhere in our clarification of ‘intelligence’ did we find a reference to SR complexity. Nowhere in our discussion of SR complexity did we find a reference to ability to respond appropriately to a wide range of novel circumstances. This point does not require acceptance of the ConCAS theory in Chapter 2. Recall that I am using ‘sensation’ to indicate experiences such as whiffs of odors, auditory sensations one has upon hearing a string being bowed or plucked, pains and itches, and so on (and experiences that involve combinations of such items). The ConCAS account is a theory about sensations, but the term ‘sensations’ designates phenomena of which the ConCAS account is only one theory. That understood, we can now notice that the clarification of ‘intelligence’ made no reference to sensations. We can aim at building a computer or a robot that has intelligence without aiming at building a computer or robot that has sensations. This point can be accepted by an identity theorist about sensations. Such a theorist will need to suppose that there is some neural property that distinguishes neural events that are sensations from those (taking place in cerebellum, for example) that are not sensations. The project of building a device that responds appropriately to a wide range of novel circumstances can be undertaken without aiming to build a device that can instantiate whatever that neural property may turn out to be. At this writing, one of our leading examples of artificial intelligence is IBM’s Watson. Considerable publicity has been given to the 4 Turing regarded ‘intelligence’ as a vague term, and proposed questions about machines’ abilities as replacements for questions about machine intelligence. Subsequent discussions, however, have mostly ignored this nicety. Turing himself never mentions a “Turing test”. The computing machines and humans with which the judges interact by teletype are playing what Turing called an “imitation game”.

122 Robots size of its data set, its ability to process its voluminous data, and its ability to generate answers to questions or moves in a game that have not been canned into it. To the best of my knowledge it has never been claimed that Watson feels anything, or has any sensations whatsoever. More importantly, no one to my knowledge has thought that absence of sensations for it would provide any reason to deny that it has intelligence. 7. It is compatible with the claim of §6 that it could turn out that sensations are required for intelligence. For example, it might be discovered that after all, Watson has events that do have SR complexity, and that it needs to have such events in order for it to process its data in a way that is able to produce its impressive results. It would be inappropriate for a philosopher to take a stand on a plainly empirical matter. But it is appropriate for me to observe that there is not the slightest reason to suppose such a view. One could, of course, try to add something to Watson that would cause SR complex events. But the possibility of enriching Watson in that way does nothing to undercut the points that the artificial intelligence project is distinct from the artificial sensation project, and that we have no reason to think that success in the second would somehow fall out automatically from success in the first. 8. There is another kind of question about intelligence and sensations that requires a distinction within artificial intelligence. I will introduce the terms ‘regular’ and ‘premium’, which are derived from the gasoline grades. I use these terms because it is clear that both regular and premium products are real gasoline. Similarly, regular AI and premium AI are both real intelligence. Regular AI is artificial intelligence such that understanding how it is done would not enlighten us about how our brains make us intelligent. Premium AI is artificial intelligence such that understanding how it is done would enable us to explain how our brains make us intelligent.5 9. This distinction opens a space for the following possibility: Regular AI does not require SR complexity, but premium AI does require SR complexity.

5 The regular/premium distinction is different from Searle’s (1980) weak AI/strong AI distinction. It is a distinction within Searle’s strong AI. Further, one of Searle’s formulations of strong AI says it is the claim that “the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states and that the programs thereby explain human cognition” (1980, p. 417). This description runs together what I regard as two different matters – regular AI (literally having cognitive states) and premium AI (having cognitive states in such a way as to explain how we have them).

Robots  123 Whether this is actually the case is another empirical question on which I do not take a stand. But it is plausible that this relation may hold. Intelligence has evolved, and the organisms that have it have sense organs and complex neural systems. It would not be strange to discover that the neural construction of sensory processing areas places constraints on the neural organization of the downstream neural constructions that lie between sensory areas and motor areas. It would not be surprising to find that our brains cannot make us intelligent in the particular way that they do unless they contained areas in which events took place that have SR complexity. Animals have sensory systems, and we can think of the whole set of sensory neurons as an ‘input layer’, or sensory array. Animals’ movement in the world depends on the contraction of many muscles, and we can think of the totality of muscle-innervating motor neurons as the ‘motor array’. Brain neurons that are not parts of either array have evolved to improve the relation between these arrays – ‘improve’ in the sense of making it more likely that the events in the motor array that follow events in the sensory array will tend to enhance the animal’s fitness. Looked at in this way, the problem of explaining how our brains make us intelligent is the problem of explaining how processing between the two arrays works. One approach to such an explanation likens our brains to computers. This approach faces an important hurdle. Computer inputs (lines of code, data sets) are not much like sensory arrays. So the use of computer analogies requires us to explain how our brains first convert sensory array inputs to something like computer inputs. Consider that even a ‘concrete’ term such as ‘table’ is highly abstract in its way: seeing a table could involve any of a vast number of events in our sensory array. An explanation of how our brains make us intelligent must explain how a brain that must receive sensory array input and generate motor array output can also produce ‘classifications’ of inputs that are effective in organizing the motor array output. On the other hand, if we do not use computer analogies, it is difficult to explain how our brains enable us to engage in reasoning that approximates to logical inference. I do not have an explanation of how our brains make us intelligent. The work mentioned in Ch. 5, note 13 is promising in this direction, and I believe we will eventually find a good explanation; but there is much work yet to be done. 10. The converse relation (i.e., SR complexity requires premium intelligence) is less plausible. Nearby species such as chimpanzees have sensory systems highly analogous to our own. It is plausible that some of the events in those systems have SR complexity. While chimpanzees have some degree of intelligence, it is plausibly considerably less than our

124 Robots own. If these assumptions are granted, it follows that our intelligence depends on features of neural organization that are not completely determined by the presence of SR complex events in our brains. Parallels to this reasoning become progressively stronger as we move farther away from primate abilities. For example, it is plausible that rabbits have sensations, but there are surely aspects of our intelligence for which a full understanding of rabbit intelligence would not provide much enlightenment.

Understanding 11. John Searle (1980) propounded a famous argument that focuses on understanding. In effect, this argument concedes that a computer might pass a Turing test (and thus, in my own terms, possess intelligence). But, Searle holds, that would not show that it understood any of the sentences it might produce for the interrogators’ inspection. There may be some temptation to say that an entity could not have genuine intelligence unless it understood its words. I have no standing to legislate others’ use of terms that are, after all, in common use outside of philosophers’ discussions. However, the ability to respond appropriately to a wide range of novel circumstances is a genuine ability and deserves a name. Turing’s (1950) title was “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, and ‘intelligence’ is what a large number of papers use as the name for what the Turing test is supposed to be a test for. So, in this book I will stick with ‘intelligence’ for the ability to respond appropriately to a wide range of novel circumstances. Searle’s term, ‘understanding’, will be used for something that he argued to be additional to that ability. 12. There is a very large literature devoted to Searle’s argument, generally known as the ‘Chinese Room Argument’. I am not going to review that here. I am not going to explain the Chinese Room Argument in any detail, because I have done that twice elsewhere (Robinson, 1992b, 2014a). All I will do here is to say what I think the key issue amounts to, and where I think Searle went wrong. This much is required to understand some conclusions I will draw later on. 13. In a nutshell, the problem Searle raises for computer understanding is that its symbols (whether internal, or in its output) have no ‘wordworld’ connections – that is, no nonverbal connections with the objects or properties that its words mean (i.e., with what they mean when we use them). A computer that produces a human-like conversation about, say, gardening cannot recognize a rose (it has no sense organs) and it can’t prune a rosebush, no matter how good its statements might be about how to select appropriate places to cut. It may have a very interesting

Robots  125 ability to connect words with other words in sensible and innovative ways, and it may help us see possibilities that we would otherwise not have imagined, but its ability is all just a matter of connecting words to other words, without any way of attaching any of them to actual things. It manipulates the words we use because its program embodies rules of grammar, logical inference, and relevance, but these manipulations have no relation to anything except other words. 14. Searle’s central error was to generalize this good point to robots. He does, indeed, explicitly consider “The Robot Reply”, which concedes that computers do not understand their words, but holds that the required connections between a robot’s words and things in the world are present if a computational device drives a robot that successfully interacts with the real world. Searle’s treatment of this Reply is, however, disappointing. It consists in little more than claiming that his argument against computer understanding generalizes to robots. This response does nothing to address the point that robots, unlike computers, have detectors and motors that do enable them to interact with both verbal and nonverbal things. For example, Shoppie reads “bananas” on its list, and recognizes bananas among the objects in the produce section, selects a bunch, and puts it in the cart. Since robots, in this discussion, are assumed to have the word-world connections whose lack is what prevents computers from understanding, the reason for computers’ lack of understanding exactly does not generalize to robots. It may be thought that Searle could claim that robotic understanding must still be absent, on the ground that all the robot gets from its detectors is strings of 0s and 1s. However, what we get from our own sense organs is (a) neural impulses and (b) sensations. Searle did not argue that robots do not have understanding because they have no sensations.6 Nor did he argue that understanding is already present in impulses of sensory neurons. Nor is it plausible to suppose so: It is not evident why signals consisting of 0s and 1s should be any less relevant to understanding than signals consisting of relative quiescences and elevations of neural firings.

Objections to Robotic Understanding 15. There is another line of resistance to the possibility of robotic understanding that needs to be addressed. If an entity understands a word, it understands the meaning of that word, it knows what that word means,

6 Others may want to make such an argument, and I will consider that approach later in this chapter.

126 Robots it knows what that word represents, or what it is about. In short, an understander of words is an entity that has intentionality. But it might be held that even if Searle’s argument was inadequate, our imagined robot does not have genuine intentionality. Maybe intentionality is (as Searle puts it) an essentially biological phenomenon. Intentionality is a complicated topic. Most of what I might say about it has been well stated by others, so I will not have much to add here. It is necessary, however, to explain how I conceive a key issue about intentionality. At one extreme, there is a view put forward by Gustav Bergmann (1955) in which intentionality (or, “meaning”) is an unanalyzed, fundamental, sui generis pseudo-relation between a mental act and a state of affairs.7 A similar view was held by Chisholm (see Chisholm and Sellars (1957)), for whom the aboutness of words depends on their expressing thoughts, but the aboutness of thoughts is fundamental and not further analyzable. The opposing view is that there is no single, special relation (or pseudo-relation) of aboutness. Instead, an utterance (overt or inner) has aboutness (and is about some particular state of affairs) in virtue of the holding of a great many relations, all of which are ordinary physical relations such as proximity, correlation, or causation. 16. Accepting the second point of view opens an agenda for finding the specifications for just which set of relations must be in place for intentionality to occur. There remain many disagreements about details. But there is a mountain of excellent work in this line (see Ch. 1, toward the end of §12 for some references), and it is immensely plausible to me, and I believe to a majority of philosophers who concern themselves with intentionality (though not to all of them), that there is some development of the ideas these thinkers have provided that can constitute a theory of intentionality that ‘naturalizes’ it – that is, gives an account of it that uses only physically respectable, i.e., extensional, relations. 17. It would be misleading to abbreviate the naturalization of intentionality by saying that intentionality has been shown to be an extensional relation after all. A sentence (overt or inwardly uttered) is about something, and the thing or state of affairs that it is about may or may not exist (or, obtain). (Whereas, as may be recalled from Chapter 1, extensional relations require their relata to exist in order to be instantiated.) The claim of naturalization is that there is some way of specifying kinds of physical items and extensional relations among those items such that,

7 ‘Pseudo-relation’, because relations require existence of their terms for their instantiation, but a mental act can mean a state of affairs that does not obtain.

Robots  127 for example, Jones is planning to hunt unicorns if and only if a set of items of those kinds in those relations exists. We have seen in Chapter 1 that another term is commonly used for intentionality, namely ‘representation’. This term affords a convenient way of stating a principle concerning intentionality; to wit, where there is representation, there is always the possibility of misrepresentation. 18. We can use Shoppie to illustrate what a naturalizing view of intentionality looks like. If all we did was to get a robot to produce ‘bus’ in response to pictures of buses, that would not convince us that it understood what a bus was. We have, however, supposed that Shoppie can not only recognize buses, but also use them. When the right one arrives, it boards it. It can give an intelligible description of what buses are for and can report on some limitations, e.g., that drivers won’t take you to places not on the route. We have supposed that it adjusts its behavior in light of such facts. If we erred by giving it an out of date or ambiguous map, it might reach a wrong conclusion about the possibility of getting to a certain place by a certain bus route, and it might act on that wrong conclusion, in a way that would make perfect sense if its information had been accurate and clear. If its reasoning capacity were no better than our own, it might occasionally draw wrong conclusions, and act on them, even if all its data were correct and unambiguous. Resulting actions would be errors, but they would still be errors about bus transportation (not about, say, gardening methods, or existence of unicorns). The point here is that, if we imagine that a robot has a rich web of detection abilities, action abilities, and abilities to connect these kinds of abilities in useful ways, we can understand how the hallmark of ­intentionality – namely, the possibility of misrepresentation – can be embodied in it. When we imagine this rich background, it becomes implausible to say “The robot talks a good game, but it doesn’t understand what a bus is.” There would be a good sense to saying that a robot did not understand certain things. For example, perhaps we enjoy doing the gardening ourselves, and therefore have never informed Shoppie about lawnmowers, rakes, or pruning shears. It has never been in the garage, and thus has never had occasion to ask what such things are for. As a result, there might be many things we might say about gardens that Shoppie would not understand. That possibility, however, is no obstacle to its ability to understand what it says (and what we say) about buses, shopping, and many other things that have been present to its sensors. For each of us there are some areas of human knowledge with respect to which we are similarly ignorant. 19. There is a line of resistance to this point about robots that can be put forward by someone who agrees that intentionality can be naturalized. The key premise in this resistance is that the naturalization of

128 Robots intentionality requires an appeal to evolutionary history. The plausibility of this premise, such as it is, comes from the difficulty of interpreting any single piece of behavior (whether linguistic or nonlinguistic). In the last two chapters we have seen that any piece of behavior might be a symptom of almost any belief, provided the agent has a certain set of desires, and it might be a symptom of almost any desire, provided the agent has a certain set of beliefs. It may seem that the only way to have an objective end to this ‘belief-desire circle’ is to adopt a guiding assumption that any organism that has beliefs and desires must have mechanisms of belief formation and desire formation that derive from such mechanisms in ancestors that gave those ancestors, on average, some advantage in fitness. If we adopt this principle, we will have access to some noncircular reasons for attributing beliefs that often track reality. We will have an objective limit on the degree of fancifulness that it would otherwise be difficult to establish. Now, if we apply this principle in a very simple way, we can argue that robots do not have an evolutionary history and therefore they lack a necessary condition for their words to mean anything. We could conclude that they do not understand their words, even if we humans can make good use of their verbal productions by adopting the simple strategy of treating those verbal productions as meaning what they would have meant if another human had said them. 20. One line of response to this line of thought would be to argue that robots are created by humans, who do have an evolutionary history; and to argue further, that the connection of robots’ words to things through their connection to humans (through the humans’ process of creating the robots) is enough to enable the robots’ words to have meaning. On this view, robots would understand their own words, and the words that humans direct toward them. I do not reject this line of response, but I prefer another line that goes deeper. To get at this line we need to look at another case that makes a more decisive break between a linguistic organism and our evolutionary history. 21. This case is Davidson’s (1987) Swampman. A freak lightning strike in a swamp annihilates you and produces your exact molecular duplicate (out of distinct atoms of the same kinds).8 This duplicate has no evolutionary history. Indeed, it has no history at all; so in what follows I will target an historical requirement (with an evolutionary requirement being a special case of that).

8 For purely stylistic reasons, I have replaced Davidson’s example (namely, himself) with ‘you’.

Robots  129 Your inner speech consists of words that you understand – words that are about (or, refer to) things in the world. If you were standing where Swampman is in the swamp, you might see an odd looking tree, and you might say to yourself “What a peculiar tree!”. Your inner word ‘tree’ would mean tree, and you would understand what you said to yourself. Swampman, being in every respect physiologically like you, has the same inner events produced by light reflected into its eyes by the tree, and says to itself “What a peculiar tree!”. But if we adopt the historical requirement, Swampman cannot mean anything by its words and doesn’t understand what it says to itself. 22. This application of the historical requirement has never seemed to me remotely plausible. It seems to me that the moment Swampman interacts with an external object the entire set of interpretations of its words is settled and is the same as yours.9 It is caused to say ‘tree’ by a tree. Its production of ‘ground’, ‘up’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘branch’, ‘grass’, ‘water’, and so on and on will have the same relations to that tree as your productions of the same words would have. For example, you are disposed to agree that trees grow up out of the ground. Swampman has exactly the same dispositions. Its ‘tree’ is causally connected to a tree the moment it sees the tree, and its related words are connected to other things in the same way yours are. If we follow out dispositional paths for use of words directly related to perceptual inputs, words related to those, words related to words related to perceptual inputs, …, and words related to actions that immediately follow them, we will have the same results for Swampman as we would have had for you. Swampman will share all your tendencies to revise your beliefs under particular presentations of new evidence, all your ways of correcting your mistakes, and all your answers to questions about how its words are to be understood. These parallels give solid grounds for mapping Swampman’s words iso-­ interpretively to yours.10 23. If one accepts this view of Swampman, how should one reply to those who are worried that lack of definiteness of interpretation would follow upon abandonment of an historical requirement? I believe there is quite enough richness in the present to determine those interpretations that are determinate. The dispositions mentioned in the previous section cannot, of course, be evidence for interpretations of our words or our 9 This statement is not to be read as excluding the possibility that the interpretation of some of your words is indeterminate. It implies only that indeterminacy of interpretation of Swampman’s words occurs where, and only where (if at all) there would be similar indeterminacy in interpretation of your words. 10 For a related argument that supports the view taken here (despite not mentioning Swampman), see Robinson (2005).

130 Robots behavior; but their manifestations can, and the dispositions themselves are present facts. Further, there are many facts that we might call ‘default facts’ about beliefs and desires. For example: People try to avoid causes of pain. Healthy young people who are not deprived of other needs devote some of their time to raising the probability of sexual intercourse. Those who are cold will try to get shelter or clothing. People have true beliefs as to whether they are inside some structure or outdoors, whether or not they are naked, and whether or not they are within 30 feet of an animal about the size of a bear. Any of these facts about beliefs and desires can fail to obtain in special cases. The point is that those are special cases. Absent special circumstances, we can rely on the default facts, and there is no practical problem of interpretation. Recall that in learning language, one has to learn tacit expectations of how others will react to what one says. Such learning would be impossible if there were no regularity in people’s reactions. Such regularities are default facts. Anyone might misunderstand you, or have a surprising reaction to what you have said; but it is part of many of your utterances’ meaning what they do, that there is a typical reaction for which typical speakers have tacit expectations. The meaning of other utterances (when they are truly clear!) can be fixed through overlaps with words and grammatical structures that occur in utterances for which there are typical reactions. 24. It may still be argued that genuine understanding requires the possibility of misunderstanding, which requires that words are supposed to be understood in a certain way. This is a normative requirement, and, it may be thought, that can be provided only by an evolutionary history in which certain structures were developed because they enhanced fitness.11 In response, we may note that our words have to answer to present constraints – namely, the tacit expectations that their use raises in the surrounding community of speakers. Swampman has all your dispositions, so it has all the dispositions to avoid misuse of its words that you have, and all the possibilities of intentional or inadvertent misuse that you have. It has all of your knowledge about the possible damaging consequences of uses of words, and all of your knowledge about possible censure for what it says. This connection between Swampman’s speech and real consequences that it may suffer, and that it knows it may suffer, seems to me to provide a robust ground for saying that Swampman is supposed to use its words in a certain way (and knows that it is supposed to use them in a certain way).

11 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.

Robots  131 The view put forward in these last three sections is, of course, fully compatible with the view that contribution to fitness must play an important role in the causal account of the development of our ability to use language. 25. Sellars’ Tess analogy (see Ch. 1, §19) can be used to illustrate the nature of my view here. What follows in this section is not an argument for the view, just a way of understanding it. I suppose that chess has a history. Perhaps there was an old version without a castling rule, but experienced players thought games were too short and would be made more interesting if defenses could be made stronger by allowing castling. Perhaps there was an old version with a different rule about capture (or not) regarding passing pawns. We can imagine a kind of selection story here. Perhaps there used to be several versions of chess played during the same period, and gradually today’s version won out because it was generally regarded as more interesting than other versions. The point that Sellars made with his Tess analogy can be put succinctly as follows. The rookishness of a certain piece of wood does not derive from anything intrinsic to the piece. Its having a crenelated top is neither necessary nor sufficient for its being a rook. What makes it a rook is that players cause it to obey certain rules or, to put the same thing in other terms, they cause it to occupy a certain place in a network of relations (to other pieces and to the squares of the chess board). The application of the analogy I want to make is that, while chess has a history, and while that history is a large part of the explanation of why the network of relations today is what it is, the history is not what makes a piece of wood a rook. There could have been different histories that ended up with the same set of rules that are standard today. What makes the rook a rook is its having a certain place in a certain network of present relations (including relations to dispositions of chess players to continue playing by today’s rules, at least for the duration of a game). Analogously, language has a history, and this history, if we knew it, would explain a lot about why languages are the way they are. But the meanings of words, and the conditions that make a word understood by this language user but not by that one, are present relations (including relations to dispositions of language users to continue to keep those relations in force or, better, to change them only gradually). There could have been different histories of the development of language, that is, alternate histories that arrived at the same network of relations that surrounds presently used words. Once again: this analogy is introduced to illustrate my view of understanding. I am not offering it as an argument for that view. The argument is that it seems to me utterly implausible that Swampman’s words are not about anything, given that it has all of your dispositions and is

132 Robots caught up in the causal network of the world in almost exactly the way that you are. Behind this ‘almost’ is the point that, of course, Swampman’s apparent memories are all false. It seems to remember your parents (as its own), schools you attended, and so forth, but although those items exist, none of them are the actual causes of Swampman’s memories; none of them stand in the same causal relation to Swampman’s memories as they did to your memories at the moment before your annihilation and replacement. This fact about memories does not seem to me to undercut the view that Swampman’s words mean the same as what yours meant, and that its thoughts are about what yours would have been about if you had not been replaced. So, for example, upon having a desire to go see a parent, or attend a school reunion, Swampman will end up in the same location that you would have ended up in. Its present and continuing place in the network of causes is the same as yours would have been, its apparent memories have the same relations among themselves as yours do, and the apparently remembered objects exist and have the same relations to objects presently encountered by Swampman as your remembered objects would have to objects presently encountered by you if you had not been replaced. 26. It might seem that my stance leads to an absurd consequence. Here is a possible critic. What you mean – the way you understand your own and others’ verbal productions – depends on relations, and among the relata are your dispositions. But you cannot be in a position to know all your dispositions – that is, all the inferences you might draw under all the possible sequences of events that might occur between now and your death. So, you cannot be in a position to know what you mean. But if you never know what you mean, you don’t understand what you are saying. And that is absurd. What is right about this set of remarks is that one cannot anticipate all the consequences of what one says (whether to oneself or to others). But one can, without absurdity, deny the implicit premise that the critic relies on; namely, that you cannot understand what you are saying unless you can anticipate all future reactions under all possible future conditions. I remind readers of the point that learning a language includes acquiring tacit knowledge of effects one’s words will have on others. Such knowledge can be acquired only if there are regularities in responses. These are enough to give words such meaning as they have, and tacit

Robots  133 knowledge of them is enough for understanding them. Having a network of relations sufficient to establish meaning and understanding does not require having a network of relations that gives even tacit knowledge of all one’s dispositions under every possible circumstance that might arise. 27. Starting with section 15, I have been addressing an objection to robots’ understanding the words they may be imagined to use. In brief, the objection was that robots cannot have genuine intentionality, intentionality is essential to real understanding, and therefore robots cannot have real understanding (but at best only a simulacrum of it). My conclusion is that intentionality accrues from occupying a position in a certain kind of network of relations, possible robots could occupy the relevant kind of position in the right kind of network of relations, and so possible robots can have both genuine intentionality and real understanding. I do not claim to have established that in this book. I have described a framework, and related it to certain questions with which I am particularly concerned. But for the full argument, readers will have to study the tradition of ‘naturalizing intentionality’. The discussion of intentionality did not mention sensations. In the following sections, I will say something about how sensations do or do not fit into the account developed so far.

Relation to Robotic Consciousness 28. Starting in §4, I distinguished the project of building an intelligent robot from the project of building a conscious robot. In my recent argumentation for the possibility of robot understanding, I did not assume consciousness for robots, so the conclusion is that robots lacking consciousness could have genuine intentionality and understanding. 29. Such robots, however, would be limited in understanding statements that contain words that refer to qualia. They would have only a partial understanding of, say, “Clear skies in daytime are blue, but on an overcast day the sky is gray”. They would understand ‘skies’, ‘daytime’, and ‘overcast’, and they would understand that blue and gray are colors. They might (depending on how far our education of them has gone) understand that blue and gray are qualities that people experience when they look at clear or overcast skies, respectively, and they could understand “Blue and gray are qualities of events that occur in normally sighted people when their visual detection mechanisms are stimulated in such a way as to make them normally report seeing blue or gray things”.

134 Robots But since the robots we are now considering have no sensations, they do not have full understanding of ‘blue’ and ‘gray’. In this respect, they are like congenitally blind people, who understand many statements in which color words occur, but for whom there is a sense in which they do not fully understand what colors are. Of course, if we now imagine that we have built a robot that has not only intelligence and understanding, but also our visual sensations, this limitation on full understanding would be removed. 30. Let us return to those robots that do not have sensations. There is a special case of absence of sensations that may seem to conflict with attribution of genuine understanding – namely, absence of pain. What I shall mean by ‘pain’ in this section includes bodily pains (the sort of pain produced by cuts, burns, etc.) and emotional pain (e.g., grief, feeling rejected). A robot may very well have withdrawal reactions from objects or circumstances that damage it, or would damage it if prolonged. But if it has no sensations, it doesn’t feel a thing when, e.g., it is cudgeled, heated, subjected to contact with acids, and so on. There is another absence that is consequent on lack of sensations, namely, absence of pleasure taken in sensations. We can imagine a robot that is designed to replenish its power supply. When it has recently been plugged in, its behavior gives no indication of any special attention to electrical outlets. After, say, eight hours of operation, it finds an outlet and plugs itself in. If obstacles appear, they are handled with increasing speed as the eighth-hour approaches, and routine tasks are deferred in a way they would not have been at the fifth hour. In short, the robot behaves as if it were hungry (for electricity). But if it has not been built to have sensations, it feels no pangs of low power, and since it has no sensations of replenishment, it cannot take pleasure in the feeling of recharging of its batteries. The robot we have described has mechanisms that are valuable to its owner, but there is a sense in which nothing really matters for it. Being incapable of feelings, it will not experience sadness when it learns that it’s an old model that will soon be dismembered for the few reusable parts it contains. If it has been well designed, it will try to avoid damage to itself, and take itself to the repair shop when its stratagems for damage avoidance fail. But if I have adequately described a sensationless robot, there will be an obvious sense in which nothing really matters for the robot itself. No matter how good a performance it gives of caring what happens to it, its ‘caring’ about itself will seem hollow, a mere ‘as if’ caring, not the real thing. 31. An argument may then be made to the effect that without real caring, a robot could not really have goals – it might have ‘as if’ goals, but no real goals. If it has no real goals, then nothing is really appropriate

Robots  135 behavior for it. Since appropriateness is involved in the definition of intelligence, a sensationless robot could not have real intelligence. If a robot has no real intelligence, its alleged understanding is no understanding by it – its noteworthy performance is only a testament to the ability of its designer to make its verbal performances useful to its human owners. 32. My reply to this argument is that shgoals are enough to support robotic intelligence and understanding. X’s having a shgoal of G is X’s being organized in such a way that its behavior tends toward producing G. The robot we imagined in §30 behaves in ways that tend to get it to an electrical outlet when its batteries are low. Many novel circumstances could arise that would block, or potentially block, its progress toward an outlet. There is thus a field for various behaviors that may or may not tend to get the robot to the outlet. If the robot behaves in such a way that a wide variety of obstacles are removed, overcome, or avoided, that is a very interesting property of the robot, whatever we may decide to call it. But given the background of the use of ‘intelligence’, that is the obvious term to use for it. 33. Likewise, it is a very interesting property of Shoppie that it can use its words in ways that systematically relate to things in the world. Where there are no motives to lie, and no special circumstances that are deceptive, it says “The bus broke down” only when the bus broke down, it gives extra travel time as a reason for not buying ice cream only when it was forced to use a route that took extra time, and so on. When generalized over a wide range of words and circumstances, this is a very remarkable fact. Given Searle’s background, in which it is the connection (or lack thereof) between words and world that is featured, ‘understanding’ (of an entity’s words by that entity) is a natural and useful term to use for this property. 34. I have no standing to legislate others’ use of words. I believe, however, that to reject the possibility of intelligence or understanding by sensationless robots, on the ground that nothing really matters for them, would be to introduce confusion, where clarity is easily obtainable. There is a very interesting property of responding appropriately to a wide range of novel circumstances. There is a different property of using words with systematic and wide-ranging appropriateness to the actual presence or actual efficacies of things in the world. And there is a third property that requires the ability to have sensations. These properties should have different names, and the background we have seen strongly suggests ‘intelligence’ for the first and ‘understanding’ for the second. I am aware of no established name for the third. With some trepidation, I will venture ‘pointfulness’ – the property of an action’s really having a

136 Robots point for an entity, because if the action fails, or were not done, it would be likely that some form of pain, or some lack of otherwise obtainable pleasure, would ensue.12

Searle’s Argument from Extrinsic Assignability 35. There is one further argument that we must consider before leaving this chapter. This one is also famous, and also due to Searle (see his 1992). According to this argument, any sufficiently large entity can be regarded as computing anything. If that is right, the fact that some entity (e.g., a brain, human or robotic) computes function F unavoidably depends on some agent (e.g., one of us) assigning which function we are to regard that entity as computing. That something is doing a certain computation is thus never an intrinsic fact about it. Attributions of computation are always observer-relative, i.e., extrinsically assigned by someone outside the system. It is not quite so clear just what consequence we are to draw from this conclusion, but the following is a plausible development that fits what Searle’s text suggests. It seems that what our thoughts are about is intrinsic to them – at least no one outside us needs to, or even could, choose an assignment of what our thoughts are about. But if intentionality is intrinsic and what a brain is computing is not intrinsic, then it cannot be that all there is to our having a certain thought is that we are in a certain computationally defined state (according to one among many possible assignments of computational states to our brains). If this reasoning is accepted, there is a plausible further consequence. To wit: No matter what computational states might be assigned to a robot, it might still lack whatever the further thing is that is needed for intrinsic intentionality. So, the reasoning earlier in this chapter cannot support the possibility of genuine understanding in robots. At best, they might have a simulacrum of understanding (which, of course, might still be quite useful to their owners). 36. It is indeed a mathematical fact that sufficiently large objects can be divided into parts with relations, in such a way that they can be regarded as computing any function.13 However, to apply this mathematical fact, one needs complete freedom to select how one will divide the object into parts, and which relations among those parts one will take to be relevant. 12 It seems evident to me that a robot that could experience pain would have a moral claim not to be mistreated, and that robots that do not have sensations would have no more moral standing than, say, a hammer. However, stating and defending an ethical theory that would support such views plainly lies far beyond the scope of this book. 13 For discussion of the mathematical argument, see Chalmers (1996) and Blackmon (2013).

Robots  137 When we come to explaining robots or ourselves, we do not have such complete freedom. The reason is that there are more constraints than are allowed in the mathematical argument for Searle’s key claim. Namely, we want it to turn out that assignments to what our brains are regarded as computing would also dovetail with an explanation of our actions. To do that, we are going to have to parse our eyes as light-sensitive input organs, our ears as vibration detectors, and so on. And we are going to have to interpret some of our (behavioral) outputs as reaching for a piece of fruit (or, at least for something edible), inviting to mate, running away from a danger, and so forth. These interpretational constraints will sharply reduce the range of functions that we might suppose we are computing. The case is similar for robots. They are not just sitting there in the lab. The ones we have been imagining are out there in the world, successfully negotiating buses and grocery stores, with all the unexpected things that might happen in such a course of real-world involvement. If a group of engineers who had not been involved in designing such a robot stole one and tried to reverse engineer it, their efforts would proceed under not just mathematical constraints. Their hypotheses would be constrained by the demand that their account of what the robot’s ‘brain’ is doing operates on inputs from cameras and microphones and gives outputs such as getting on a bus, finding another bus route, deciding whether to go ahead and buy ice cream, and so forth. Their hypotheses would be constrained by the fact that its brain operations resulted in word production that is intelligible in light of its other words and its real-world surroundings.14 37. Searle comes close to responding to this line of criticism of his argument. He recognizes that abstract assignments of states need not be all there is to ‘computing’. He allows that it can also be required that counterfactual-supporting causal relations hold among computational states, and that providing these would constrain assignments of states. “But”, he says, these further restrictions on the definition of computation are no help in the present discussion because the really deep problem is that syntax is essentially an observer-relative notion. (Searle, 1992, p. 209; italics in original) 14 It has been suggested to me that Newman’s (1928) critique of Russell might be adapted to cause trouble for my discussion in this section. However, Newman’s trivialization argument depends on taking Russell at his word when the latter claims we know nothing about the external world other than its structure. No analogous claim applies in our case: for inputs and outputs, we know some of the relations among and some of the monadic properties of the relata.

138 Robots In succeeding pages, this claim is repeated in several ways. What Searle fails to recognize, however, is that the observer-relativity of assignment of what is being computed does not show that the “further restrictions”, which he has allowed, are of no help in narrowing the possible assignments. The task of explaining relations among brain states and verbal productions, and behavior, and inputs from sensors provides ample constraints on our theory of what kind of processing an organism’s brain or a robot’s computer ‘brain’ can be doing. Searle’s discussion of the quoted claim offers no argument to show that such constraints cannot be sufficient to determine an assignment of what is being computed. That possibility is not actually addressed in Searle’s discussion. The freedom on which he insists – the freedom of making assignments that is available to observers who are not described as having taken on the explanatory task – is irrelevant to the question of what constraints apply to assignments by those who do take on that task. 38. There is a common thread to Searle’s extrinsic assignment argument, and the reasoning in his (1980) paper that proposed the Chinese Room Argument. To wit: he pays insufficient attention to the difference between computers and robots. That leads him to extend conclusions that do apply to computers to devices that include computers as parts, but are immersed in interactions with the world (detections and actions) in a way that computers that are not driving robots are not. These extensions are illegitimate. The same may be said of extensions of claims about computers to claims about us. From the fact that computers, taken in isolation, do not understand their words, it does not follow that we do not understand our words if all there is to our intelligence is computation. That is because we are more than our brains – we have sensory input devices and motor output devices. 39. Does this critique of Searle’s argument commit me to the claim that the mind is computational? That depends on what one means by ‘computational’. (A) Events in the brain have causes. Now, perhaps some of these causes are themselves causeless events, e.g., events involving ions such that the position of an ion that will determine whether an interaction of a certain kind takes place has a quantum mechanical indeterminacy that can be modeled only with probability at best. If by ‘computational’ one means ‘can be modeled by deterministic laws that could (in principle) be programmed as rules, so that (in principle) one might make a Laplacean prediction of what a person will do’, then my answer is, “Maybe we are not computational”. That is, if indeterminate events in a brain can be ‘amplified’ (as they are in a Geiger counter) so as to make a difference to meaningful behavior, then Laplacean predictability would be impossible, even in principle.

Robots  139 (B) By ‘the mind is computational’, one might mean that there is a level at which events in the brain can be usefully analogized to the working of a digital computer. My critique of Searle does not imply that the mind is computational in this sense. The proper conclusion from my critique is that Searle’s arguments do not show that the mind is not computational in this sense. But there are other reasons to doubt that the mind is computational in this sense. These reasons have been given earlier (see Ch. 5, §§12–13), so here I will be very brief. The elements of our brains are not digital. It’s true that neural firings are binary – at any given moment there is an action potential or there is not, and a neuron’s potentials are all of the same amount. But rates of action potential production, lengths of interval between action potentials, distances of synapses from spike triggering zones, and variations in electrical fields within neural cells are all continuous variables. These facts are compatible with there being a higher level at which the brain is effectively a digital computer; but it is not clear how that would be possible, and the relative slowness of neural processes (compared to computer processes) places severe constraints on the number of processing steps available. Synapses change strength as a result of experience. In effect, the machine that we are constantly changes. Digital computers do not work like that.15 Finally, computer models work with calls for stored data, but stored sentences require readers, which introduces a cognitive process that either does not work like a digital computer, or begins a regress of readers of stored data.16 (C) By ‘the mind is computational’, one might mean that there is some way of dividing up brain events such that (i) there is a theory about those events that explains how the mind works – how it is able to do what it in fact does – and (ii) would be such that its laws could (in principle) be programmed as rules in a digital computer, so as to yield predictions that are correct up to possible effects of quantum mechanical indeterminacy. It is compatible with this meaning that quantum mechanical indeterminacies ‘wash out’, i.e., could be ignored in much the way that they can be ignored in most of our practical activities and in large tracts of science. But it is also compatible with there being an irreducibly probabilistic character to the best theory of how the mind works. In this sense, I firmly believe that the mind is computational. My reason for accepting computationalism in this sense is that the alternative would be a succession of daily miracles. 15 Digital computers can, of course, be used to calculate what will happen in a neural net that does change its connection strengths as a result of error correction. When digital computers do that, they are not working like a neural net; just as, they are not working like a storm when they calculate a model’s prediction about its trajectory. 16 For the full technical development of this point, see Robinson (1995a).

8 Unconscious Processing

1. The importance of unconscious processing has already been evident from the numerous appeals that have been made to tacit knowledge. Although we can sometimes articulate something about the expectations our words are likely to cause in others, it could not be the case that these expectations are articulated by us to ourselves before we speak. For if such articulation were required, we would never say a word – we would always have to articulate something else to ourselves before we could begin. But a background of tacit knowledge of effects our words are likely to have is required for our possession of language, and therefore such a background is involved in our production of speech (whether overt or inner). So, the efficacy of processes of which we are ordinarily not aware has been implicit in much that we have already seen. 2. This chapter offers further reasons to recognize the importance of unconscious processing. It begins with an argument concerning the view that we control our thoughts, and then examines the apparent truism that our words express our thoughts. At the end of the chapter, I will draw some corollaries of the results of these discussions.

‘Controlling One’s Thoughts’ 3. To examine the view that we control our thoughts, I do not need, and shall not argue for, a complete analysis of the concept of control. What I do need, and what I shall explain, are two necessary conditions for being in control. I believe it will be easy to secure agreement that if either of these conditions is unsatisfied with respect to an outcome, one is not in control of that outcome. 4. The first condition is that if S controls outcome O, S has thought of O before it happens. This condition is related to the fact that if people are in control of outcomes, they are trying to produce O (rather than some alternative), and if they are trying to bring about O, they must have O in mind as what they are trying to bring about.

Unconscious Processing  141 5. The second condition is that there are alternatives, such that if one were instead trying to bring about some incompatible outcome, O´, it would normally be O´ and not O that ensued. This condition is related to this fact: If one is trying to bring about O´ but the incompatible O happens anyway, one was not in control of what happened. 6. These points can be illustrated with a homely example. If you are in control of your car, you want it to go along a certain route, at certain speeds, in accord with traffic signals (or, perhaps, not in accord with them, if you’re in a hurry, and think you won’t be observed by the police). If you want to make a right turn, that’s where the car goes. If you had aimed to turn left but the car went right, you would not be in control. If it goes left or right, depending on what you set out to make it do, then, normally, you are in control. If you lose control of your car, it doesn’t go where you want it to go and are trying to make it go. As you slide toward the snow bank, you want it to stay on the road but it doesn’t. If you are a novice driver and your attempt at a right turn results in an oversteering that runs you into the curb, you have not yet learned to control your car. 7. These remarks, which I believe are truistic, will have some philosophers licking their chops. What about deviant causal chain cases? What about the case of the neurosurgeon who implants a device in my brain that can stop me from executing any aim I may have, but who is religiously bound to refrain from using it? Which one of us is really in control here? But I am not interested in the likely hopeless task of providing a ­bullet-proof analysis of all possible cases of control. It is enough for my purposes that the following hold. (i) In everyday, normal contexts, people are often in control of a certain range of outcomes. They are not normally out of control, or unable to control what they do, when they do their grocery shopping, drive to the golf course, write an e-mail, mow the lawn, and so on and on. (ii) In these everyday contexts, people who are in control of a certain range of outcomes know what outcome they are aiming at. (iii) In such contexts, the outcomes in the range they have control over covary systematically (i.e., in a counterfactual-­ supporting way) with what they are aiming to bring about. Finally, (iv) If the conditions identified in §§4 and 5 are not met, people normally have justification for excusing themselves from bad outcomes by saying they were not in control. 8. On this understanding, it is easy to see that people cannot control what ideas occur to them. To do that, they would have to try to make it occur to them to think whether p. But if they are trying to bring it about

142  Unconscious Processing that they consider whether p, they have thereby already had p occur to them. What comes to mind – what occurs to you – is not under your control. But quite often, what occurs to you is relevant to what you have just been saying to yourself, and to your ongoing projects. This maintenance of relevance, which is imperfect but strong enough to be useful, is something that your brain provides to you without your being conscious of how it does so. It is one among many things that a good theory of how the mind works, when we have one, will explain. 9. Hume (1739) had a theory of relevance. Entertaining one proposition might call up another because it is about something that resembles the subject of the first, or was observed spatially or temporally near it, or is causally related to it. I want to make two comments on this view. First, I do not doubt that these relations obtain among many, many items in our trains of thought. But they cannot be the whole story. For one thing, there are an indefinitely large number of aspects in which things or events resemble other things or events. So, Hume’s relations do not account for which among the vast number of resembling items would come into our minds, given some item that we are already thinking about. For another thing, this list of relations evidently does not include any explanation of which relation on the list will be operative in any particular case. Second, these principles of Hume’s do not go very deep. They do not tell us how a brain manages to find a resembling item. We should expect that what comes to mind will depend not only on what we have just been thinking of, but also on our projects. But to have Hume’s principles by themselves does not tell us how the brain manages to bring what we are explicitly thinking of together with current projects, and produce in our inner speech a sentence that helps some project we have. Whenever we first realize some connection that we might communicate by saying “Aha! I can use X to achieve Y!” we are receiving a gift from our brains that we had no conscious hand in bringing about, and for which we do not now have an explanation. We are, of course, not limited to Hume’s resources, and understanding the brain as a neural network is surely an advance in understanding how relevant information is brought to mind – although similar questions about just how a particular similarity, coincidence, or causal connection becomes the one that is brought to mind persist. The point, however, is not that such questions have no answers; indeed, since we do regularly have relevant considerations occur to us, they must have answers. The point is that the coming to mind of relevant material (and the not coming to mind of numerous items that are related but not relevant to present concerns) is not something we consciously manage. Our maintenance of

Unconscious Processing  143 relevance (to the imperfect but useful extent that we have it) is something our brains do for us without our knowing how they do it, and therefore without our control. 10. There are some indirect ways in which we can have some control over what occurs to us. So, for example, we know from experience that we are more likely to think about a certain topic if we read something that discusses that topic. We can aim to pick up a book on, say, cognitive phenomenology, and we know that if we start reading it, we will likely think about that topic. There is no guarantee, of course. As we often put it, there are times when we ‘cannot concentrate’, and no matter how fearful we may be of failing tomorrow’s exam, we may find ourselves unable to dispel distracting images and reflections connected with our long-planned post-exam vacation. But we have some measure of control over what we think about, because we can know what topic we aim to think about, and to a fair extent, what we think about will be what a book on that topic is about. Of course, what will occur to us as we start reading about topic X is not something that is under our control.

‘Expressing One’s Thoughts’ 11. There is a network of ways of speaking that may cause resistance to accepting the picture I have been drawing, and that I want to describe and disentangle. A leading villain in this resistance is a term that I have mostly avoided so far in this book, namely, ‘thoughts’. This term often goes with the term ‘express’, in an apparent truism: Our words express our thoughts. There is an argument that goes with this view. Words, we should all agree, are arbitrary noises (with the possible exception of a few onomatopoetic words). By themselves, they wouldn’t mean a thing. They can mean only because we use them to express our thoughts. So, it must be that thoughts have a meaning that is logically prior to their being expressed (or ‘clothed’) in words. The words in our inner speech are images of arbitrary noises. The German’s inner speaking of ‘Tisch’ is as good as my inner speaking of ‘table’. But inner speech expresses our thoughts, and speakers of different languages can have the same thought, although they express it differently. So, our thoughts must have a meaning that is independent of their linguistic clothing. If that is so, then our thoughts have intentionality, and they have an intentionality that is logically prior to the intentionality (or meaningfulness) of the words that express them. But most instances of consciousness that I have recognized in this book so far are either instantiations of qualia in sensations, or instantiations

144  Unconscious Processing of qualia in images.1 Neither of these can plausibly be identified with thoughts that are supposed to have original (i.e., not derivative, not merely the clothes of) intentionality. So, it would seem that, according to the view developed in this book, our thoughts that have original intentionality must be unconscious thoughts. This reflection leads to what may seem a puzzling question, namely, how can unconscious events in the brain have intentionality? Searle (1992) advocated the view that an unconscious mental state must be one that is capable of becoming conscious. If this view is taken to imply that unconscious mental states are not the most basic instances of intentionality, then it will seem that the view I have been developing has no place at all for original intentionality, i.e., no place for the intentionality that is required in order for our words to be meaningful in the way that they plainly are. 12. It should come as no surprise that I think the view of thoughts in the preceding section is nonsensical. The next few sections explain why, and respond to the argument, such as it is, that original intentionality of thoughts is required to explain intentionality of language. Much of the groundwork has already been laid in discussing the understanding of robots and the dependence of language on tacit expectations of how others will react to what we say. But more needs to be said in direct response to the way of thinking described in §11. 13. We may begin with the premise that our words express our thoughts (motivated, in turn, by the agreed view that our words, being arbitrary, couldn’t have their meanings if they did not express our thoughts). I accept this premise – provided that it is rightly understood. We must, however, clearly distinguish two understandings of this premise. (‘WXT’ abbreviates ‘Words express thoughts’.) (WXT1)  A thought has a meaning, and words (and, of course, sentences composed of words) have a meaning that matches the meaning of our thoughts. A little more intuitively, the point of WXT1 is that the intentionality of thoughts is prior to the intentionality of words. The history of the development of language is conceived, on this view, as the history of

1 Some exceptions occur in Chapter 6, §28 – a phenomenology of saying (not just hearing); feelings of familiarity; valence. I also recognized emotional feelings in Chapter 1. It should be evident that these exceptions make no difference to the dialectic in this chapter.

Unconscious Processing  145 development of the ability to express thoughts that already have their intentionality. Words or sentences express thoughts when they occur in a (WXT2)  very large network of relations of appropriate kinds, where the last six words mean that the words are words of a language that the speaker is using, and that will be understood by the speaker’s linguistic community (or, in the case of technical terms, by the relevant set of experts in that linguistic community). WXT2 says nothing about matching. All that is required for people’s words to express their thoughts is that there is a surrounding linguistic community in which their words have tacitly anticipatable effects. WXT2 is compatible with possessing the ability to lie. One can say something insincerely. One can then be said to express a thought that one does not endorse, but it might be clearer to say that one has taken a deceptive action. Just for purposes of understanding, it will be helpful to recall the nonconscious robot of Chapter 7. The argument was that Shoppie understood ‘bus’, for example, if its production of this word was caused by a certain range of circumstances, and its behavior had an appropriate relation to buses, and what it said about buses generally made sense in the surrounding linguistic community. On the view of WXT2, we can say not only that Shoppie understands words, but also that when it says “The number 1 bus was unable to run its route because of flooding”, it expresses its thought that the number 1 bus was unable to run its route because of flooding. Shoppie has no consciousness, and there was nothing in the theory of Shoppie that implied that it had internal states with a special property of original intentionality. Our assumptions about Shoppie do not give us anything that its words could match. Yet, there is a clear difference between a device that produces ‘bus’ with no relation to other things, and Shoppie, whose production of ‘bus’ occurs only when certain relations (largely causal) to buses and many other things obtain. 14. So far, I have only explained two ways of looking at how to understand ‘our words express our thoughts’. If I’ve been successful, WXT2 will be allowed the status of a coherent candidate view. But, of course, those who are attracted to WXT1 will think it is a poor candidate and reject the view that Shoppie’s words express its thoughts on the ground that it hasn’t got any thoughts to be expressed. Its designers have merely constructed a very clever device that imitates the expressing of thoughts.

146  Unconscious Processing In response to this charge, what we need is an argument against WXT1. 15. In preparation for that argument, let us explicitly identify a view that we can set aside relatively easily. This is the view that our overt speech, if it makes sense (or, if it expresses our thoughts), must be an audible repetition of what we have recently said to ourselves in inner speech. This proposal can be rejected on both phenomenological and observational grounds. In ordinary conversation, most of the time, one simply responds. Readers will be able to remember some recent conversations well enough to know that they did not pause to state what they were about to say in inner speech, and then repeat it out loud. They will also be able to recall occasions when they observed two other people conversing, and they will recall that there was not generally time enough for either of them to have inwardly said what they are about to say, before giving an audible response. Of course, sometimes we rehearse what we are going to say – or at least the first part of it. If some question raises a particularly sensitive issue, we may ‘choose our words carefully’, which often means trying out some formulations in our inner speech, and then repeating one that seems to avoid raising likely objections. But this is something we do only occasionally, and it is like something we also do overtly. Namely, we utter a sentence, and then immediately utter another that corrects it. Or we utter the first part of a sentence, break off, and start a new sentence. When we do this overtly, we are not first uttering a partial sentence in inner speech, repeating that out loud, then correcting ourselves inwardly, and repeating the correction out loud. 16. The view rejected in §15 is also suspect because it leads to a dilemma. Suppose one thought that overt speech had to be a repetition of a bit of inner speech in order for it to be meaningful, or even for it to be thoughtful speech as distinguished from mere rambling. Then one would be exposed to this question: What makes inner speech meaningful, or not just rambling? There seem to be just two available answers. (A) Inner speech is meaningful because it repeats some other kind of speech (perhaps, unconscious inner speech?). But this answer leads to a regress. If inner speech can’t be meaningful without repeating earlier speech (of some sort), how could that earlier speech be meaningful without repeating some yet earlier kind of speech? And so on. (B) Inner speech does not require any earlier speech in order for it to be meaningful. But now there is no reason why overt speech should be required to repeat inner speech. If the brain can produce meaningful, conscious inner speech without copying some earlier ‘speech’, why can’t it manage to produce meaningful overt speech without copying?

Unconscious Processing  147 17. Finally, it is extremely implausible that ability for inner speech precedes ability for overt speech. Children learn language in overt interactions. Our ability to carry on our internal monologues is most easily explained as an ability built over the foundation of an already acquired ability to act overtly by speaking. 18. Similar considerations undercut the matching theory, WXT1. It faces this question: If the brain can produce meaningful (intelligent, non-rambling) speech (overt or inner) only by matching that speech to an earlier state that has the same meaning, how does it produce that earlier state with its meaning? This question seems to have just two possible answers. (A) It produces an inner state that has a meaning by its having established (learned) a systematic way of mapping still earlier meaningful states onto the state in question. But, as in §16, this answer leads to a regress. (B) The brain creates – we know not how, but somehow it must create – events that are meaningful, but are not matches to, or dependent on, previous states that already have that meaning. But in this case, there is no evident principle why either inner or overt speech cannot be the very first kind of events that the brain produces that have the meaning that speech (inner or overt) has. If that is what happens then, of course, there is no matching to an earlier meaning, and WXT1 is false. 19. There is a way in which it may seem that WXT1 might still be held. This is to say that intelligent, non-rambling speech (inner or overt) must match a prior state with the same meaning, but that prior state has no linguistic structure. What the brain is able to learn to do (by learning language) is to convert nonlinguistically structured events into linguistically structured inner or overt sentences. A problem for this rescue attempt is that it must now be explained how a linguistically structured sentence can ‘match’ the meaning of something that is not linguistically structured. Here is a way of answering this question. The brain evidently produces meaningful sentences. So, before one speaks (inwardly or overtly), there is a state of organization of the brain, plus some occurring events, that will shortly cause the meaningful speech. One can then say that there is a meaningful state of the brain that the speech ‘matches’ – namely the one that is just about to produce the meaningful speech. This answer, however, trivializes the issue between WXT1 and WXT2. There is plainly no conflict for proponents of WXT2 in accepting the obvious truth that the brain is organized and that it regularly produces utterances that are appropriate to circumstances, and that are reacted to by other speakers in ways that make sense to those who speak the relevant language and are apprised of relevant circumstances. There is no conflict between WXT2 and our being at least superficially

148  Unconscious Processing consistent over extended periods, or between WXT2 and our usually having the ability to give some reason when we change our minds about some issue. There is no conflict between WXT2 and the view that immediately before production of a sentence (overt or inner), the brain is in a state that is just about to produce that sentence. No one should approve of a way of speaking that reduces ‘matches’ to a mere alternative way of expressing a causal relation. If we adopt that practice, we would, for example, be permitted to say that the explosion of a firecracker ‘matches’ the gunpowder and lighted fuse that shortly preceded it. I suppose that we could speak this way, but we should not, as it adds no explanation and is just confusing, given the way we actually do speak. The challenge for proponents of WXT1 is thus to explain ‘matching’ of linguistically structured sentences to events that have no linguistic structure, without trivializing the notion of ‘matching’. I do not have an argument that demonstrates that all attempts of this nature must result in inconsistency. But I do not believe that anyone has any idea how to meet this challenge. WXT2 does not face an analogous problem, and that is a reason for preferring it. 2 20. There is an intuition that seems to support WXT1. It is such a powerful intuition that if we are to convincingly reject WXT1 we must face it squarely. This intuition concerns cases in which we take some small time to ‘search for the right way to put’ something and then come out with a satisfying utterance. The intuition that goes with such cases is that our final, satisfying sentence is what we really were thinking all along; i.e., the thought was there all the time, and we just had a little difficulty figuring out how to ‘express’ what was there. There are, indeed, cases that do fit this last description. These are cases in which we know perfectly well what we think – we may have declared it to ourselves in inner speech – but we fear that if we speak forthrightly, we would be impolite, or undiplomatic or likely to be misunderstood. Perhaps my opinion about Jones is that he’s an idiot; but his relatives are present, so I pause to think before coming out with “Jones and I disagree 2 This section and the ones following focus on language, because we are discussing ‘words express our thoughts’. Neither that view nor my discussion of it implies that there is no thinking without language. Any processing that takes place between the sensory and motor arrays (see Chapter 7, §9) and is not rigidly triggered can be regarded as ‘thinking’. Unconscious processes that produce a sentence that is not a ‘match’ to a previous sentence or thought can be assumed to involve flexible, complex processes (thus, thinking) that are not themselves linguistic. Further, Bekoff et  al. (2002) provide several examples of behavior in nonlinguistic animals that is not rigidly stimulus-bound. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting clarification on this point.)

Unconscious Processing  149 on many issues”. Diplomats must ‘choose their words’ carefully, and this is plausibly regarded as involving trying out several reformulations of an unvarnished assertion that they have already articulated to themselves, or privately to colleagues. To get at the intuition I mean to identify we must set such ‘diplomacy cases’ aside. The cases of interest (‘non-diplomacy cases’) are instead cases in which we have not already formulated a view, or a response to a question. In these cases, we may, inwardly or overtly, start to say something, and then stop, and start with another sentence. We may get through a whole sentence and then immediately add a disclaimer to the effect that what we just said is not what we meant. After several stabs, we produce a sentence that seems satisfying. An intuitive description of this kind of case is that we have, at last, found a sentence that expresses what we meant all along. One can embed this intuition in an argument. At the end of the indicated process we are satisfied. We are satisfied because we have finally articulated what we meant. (That’s the intuition.) But if there had not been something we meant to begin with, we could not have succeeded in saying what we meant. So, there had to be a thought – a ‘something we meant’ – that preceded our finding of the right words to ‘express’ it. 3 21. The plain facts in non-diplomacy cases are that we did not know what to say to begin with and we did know what to say at the end. In our early tries, we realize problems with what we are saying only as we are saying it, or immediately thereafter. Before we produce a sentence that satisfies us, we are frustrated. When we do produce a sentence that is not immediately followed by a recognition of a problem, this frustration is relieved. That is a sufficient ground for satisfaction: a match to a previous meaning is not required to make a sense of satisfaction both likely to occur and well grounded. The sense of relief from frustration can be taken as a feeling that is misconstrued by the theory that says we are entitled to our satisfaction because of having matched an already-present thought. The view that locates the source of our satisfaction in the relief from frustration is simpler than the view that requires a matching to a previously formulated thought. This simplicity, along with the fact that WXT2 avoids WXT1’s threat of regress, gives us a reason to prefer WXT2. On that view, when we witness (overt) non-diplomacy cases, we are witnessing people who are in the process of arriving at what they think.

3 Is this argument so weak as to be a straw man? No; it was advocated in a paper in the main program of one of the meetings of the American Philosophical Association in 2016.

150  Unconscious Processing There are, however, two kinds of non-diplomacy cases, and it may seem that one of them requires a prior thought after all.4 (a) Sometimes, a formulation that proves satisfying can strike us as a discovery. But (b) in other cases, the arrival of a satisfying formulation can seem more like a realization of something that we have always known. Perhaps, at least in these latter cases, it would be plausible to suppose that there must have been a matching thought present all along. I am not sure that this suggestion actually is plausible. The fact is that, even in the (b) cases, it took some time, and some failed attempts, to arrive at a formulation that proved not to be followed by objections. There was, of course, something that was already there – namely, a brain that was in a certain state of organization, and that was harboring a process that was soon to issue in an acceptable statement. To add that this process involved the presence of a fully formed thought for which only the proper clothing needed to be worked out is to offer a risky hypothesis for which there does not seem to be any compelling need. Additionally, the (b) cases allow for accompaniments that lie in the present and immediate future, and that would explain their distinctive character. I have in mind connections to other things we know that immediately occur to us with no sense of effort. These other things may be supporting reasons for what we have just said, or they may be memories concerning circumstances that we (only now) recognize as being similar to the present matter in some important respect. In contrast, when there is no such flood of connected material (i.e., in the (a) cases), it would seem natural to regard what has just arrived as something that must have been developed relatively recently. The relation between the (b) cases and the accompaniments I have just described is in principle empirically testable, but (as far as I know) has not been tested. The proper conclusion of the last two paragraphs is thus a modest one, to the following effect. The distinctive character of the (b) cases does not, as far as we know, require the hypothesis of a matching thought for its explanation. So, it does not provide a good reason to affirm WXT1 rather than WXT2. In virtue of the former’s threat of regress, we should prefer WXT2. 22. There is another line of thought that is similar to the one described in §11. This one starts with the claim that we represent the things we can recall, even when we are not actually recalling them. So, for example, suppose you can remember the last time you talked with a friend whom you do not see very often and do not see on a regular periodic basis. If

4 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for distinguishing these cases and pressing the objection.

Unconscious Processing  151 the last time was two or three months ago, you surely have not been constantly rehearsing this encounter. But since (by assumption for this case) you reliably report when you saw your friend and some of what you talked about, there must have been something about you that was changed by your meeting, and that has remained changed in you, and that explains how it is that you are able to reliably report about your encounter. Or, in brief, you must internally represent your encounter (even when you are thinking about unrelated matters, or are sleeping) – for otherwise it would be a miracle that you could give an accurate report of it without consulting notes. The next move in this line of thinking is to say that whatever it is about you that enables you to give a reliable report of your meeting is an internal representation. Hard on the heels of this nominalization comes the idea of retrieving the representation. That notion seems to be the obvious way to describe the difference between those stretches where you were thinking of other things, or asleep, and the moments when you are remembering your conversation. At the latter times, you are retrieving (or, ‘activating’) your representations of what went on when you saw your friend; in the former stretches, it is natural to think of your retrieving various other representations, or none (e.g., when you’re asleep, or swept up in some musical passage). Representation is a very close relative of intentionality. Representations are representations of something, and it is natural to read this ‘of’ as indicating standing for, or being about something. Representation exhibits a familiar, key characteristic of intentionality; to wit, one can represent what does not (or did not) exist, and one can represent what existed as having (or lacking) features that it lacked (or had). So, it is natural to take a further step and think of sentences (inner or overt) as corresponding to collections of appropriately related representations that one has retrieved. If we take this step, we may seem to have a candidate for a thought: A thought is the coming into an appropriate relation of representations that we have retrieved. 23. The flaw in this reasoning comes early, in the move from representing to representation. The line of thought in §22 begins by making a disposition sufficient for representing. That is, if you can reliably report about the meeting with your friend, you thereby are representing the meeting (or, if you wish, facts about that meeting). That is to say that representing denotes an ability – namely, an ability to report accurately. To attribute an ability is not to say anything about how that ability is made possible. When, however, representing, in the sense of an ability, is nominalized into ‘having a representation’, a theory is thereby introduced – namely, the theory that representing is enabled by storing and retrieving representations. And if one gets that far, it will be very difficult to avoid

152  Unconscious Processing further holding that representations are also manipulated, or ordered, i.e., brought into certain relations and not others. This move amounts to supporting a theory by grammatical sleight of hand. I recognize the near-inevitability of the intuition that if we represent, we store representations, but I am trying to call attention to the fact that the move from representing to representations is a significant theoretical claim, and that it cannot receive any genuine support from the grammatical relation between ‘representing’, and ‘having (storing) a representation’. 24. One might be in narrow agreement with this conclusion, yet think that the stored representation theory is, after all, a good theory in its own right. But in fact, the theory is riddled with difficulties that I believe would have made it unattractive, were it not for the apparent, but not real, support it seems to get from the obvious fact of representing. If a representation is retrieved, it has to be read as representing what it does. Reading is a cognitive operation, so anything that is thought to be explained by retrieving of representations will involve us in a further cognitive operation. If that further cognitive operation proceeds by retrieving representations, a regress threatens. If it does not, then we have reason to assert that a significant cognitive operation can occur without retrieving representations.5 Perhaps one will object that it is contentious to suppose that representations have to be ‘read’. But if we do not regard them as ‘read’, it is hard to see how their character as representations can enter into any explanation of how our brains can connect sensory inputs to appropriate (fitness enhancing, or even non-fitness-degrading) actions. If the stored representation theory is ‘rescued’ by an account that implies that we do not need to talk of representation in order to explain intelligent action, then the rescue is no rescue at all. Plausible theories that seek to naturalize intentionality explain intentionality as accruing to whatever it is properly attributed to in virtue of that item’s standing in a certain position in a network of relations. Now, it is not incoherent to propose that a brain event may stand in a network of relations that in fact bestows intentionality (or, representationality, or representational status) upon it. But the fact that it stands in a certain place in such a network of relations is not something that could be ‘seen’ by a set of further brain events that it might cause. So, even if we allowed that some brain events are representations, that fact about them does not seem available to the processing system, i.e., to subsequent brain events that a ‘retrieved representation’ might cause. Moreover, the representational character of a supposedly retrieved representation might very well depend on relations to its effects as well 5 For more technical presentations of these views, see Robinson (1995a, 1995b, 1999b). See also Fodor (1980), Gallistel (1990).

Unconscious Processing  153 as to its causes.6 In that case, it is evident that the representational character of an alleged stored representation could not contribute to the nature of its brain event effects. 25. It would be wonderful to now exhibit a theory of how our brains enable us to act intelligently that avoids the pitfalls of appeals to stored representations. Alas, I do not have such an account. I am aware that theories in science are infrequently abandoned just because they face difficulties, so I do not have much hope that my criticism of stored representation theory will change many minds. But I think it is part of the philosopher’s job to point out the difficulties in unworkable proposals.

Some Corollaries 26. There are three claims that are corollaries of the considerations reviewed so far. The first of these concerns the idea of a “Global Workspace” (GW) and a view of consciousness as availability to all specialized processors of “information” that is “broadcast” in the global workspace. This idea is explicitly introduced as a “theoretical metaphor” by Baars (1988, p. 89). My criticism is directed at this metaphor; it does nothing to impugn the soundness or importance of various facts that Baars adduces in the course of his very rich book. For example, on p. 102, Baars discusses an experiment by E. R. John (e.g., Thatcher and John, 1977) in which a number of electrodes were inserted at various places in the brain of a cat, and recordings were made while the cat was awake and a series of light flashes were presented. Initially, in this set up, effects of the flashes are observed throughout the brain, but as they continue (as habituation takes place), the “electrical activity never disappears completely … but it becomes more and more localized – until finally it is limited only to the classical visual pathways”. I agree that this is a very interesting study, and I agree that it tells us something about consciousness. But these agreements are compatible with rejecting the GW metaphor. John’s result can be summarized by saying that consciousness of the flashes (what presumably disappears after habituation) requires global activation. In no way does it follow that such global activation involves anything analogous to a “broadcast” of information. Expectation of John’s result would also be natural, for example, if one held simply that novel sensory inputs have extensive ripple effects throughout the brain, and that these are gradually inhibited with repetition. The main reason for avoiding the GW/broadcast metaphor is that what is broadcast must be ‘heard and understood’ by whatever has 6 Sellars (1954), for example, writes of language entry transitions, within language transitions, and language exit transitions (i.e., actions), in giving background for his account of meaning.

154  Unconscious Processing access to the broadcast. But understanding a broadcast message is itself a significant cognitive process. So, if we think in terms of a broadcast, we will always be burdened by a significant cognitive process that we have not explained. If we try to reiterate the broadcast idea, we will be off on a regress. This criticism is not a rejection of modularism per se. It is only a rejection of the idea that whatever modules there may be get (the same) ‘information’ from receiving what is broadcast to all modules. We can all understand a (nonmetaphorical) radio broadcast, because we all understand the language used in it. If we try to use the broadcast metaphor in explaining conscious processing, we must imagine that the modules all ‘understand’ the broadcast signal that they receive in the same way. But it would be a heavy theoretical load to cash that out in neural terms. A small network can ‘hear’ a broadcast by receiving a series of pulses from wherever the information originates. A different small network may be connected to the same originating neurons. But the connecting neurons will be different and may ‘deliver’ a different set of inputs to the second network. We are thus faced with the task of explaining how the effective information in a second network can be the same as the information effectively ‘received by’ the first network. – Of course, this task might be accomplished if there were a common neural code. But again, it is a heavy theoretical load to explain how that might be possible.7 A real broadcast is available to many of our cognitive processes, in this sense: If we had had different interests, actions that may be caused by our hearing the broadcast might have been different, and different in ways that systematically vary with our interests. If we have a recording, or a written transcript, we can access it on various occasions, and find different pieces of information that we can use. But to take this aspect of the metaphor’s basis over into the brain’s workings would be to commit an egregious homuncular fallacy. There is no evidence that on any particular occasion, an event in the brain is ‘accessible by’ any brain part (or, module) that did not actually participate in producing whatever action was produced. Once again, I am impugning the metaphor and not the many important and well-grounded observations Baars makes in his book. The reason for being so negative is that the GW/broadcast idea is so attractive a

7 Baars has a section on p. 106, titled “What is the global code?” that recognizes this problem. The only suggestion he makes toward a solution is that “input into the GW may be perceptual or quasi-perceptual … and that processors in the “audience” respond only to the most general aspects of these global messages, namely their ­spatio-temporal properties”. This suggestion seems inadequate to provide for the many finer distinctions of ‘information’ to which our cognitive processes must be sensitive.

Unconscious Processing  155 metaphor that it is likely to cloud one’s vision and inhibit the search for a better theory.8 27. In §11 I mentioned Searle’s view that unconscious thoughts must be able to become conscious. My view of this claim should now come as no surprise. There are legions of unconscious processes, but there is no reason to think that any unconscious brain event is a thought. When we report a conscious thought, we are either overtly simply saying what we think, or we are recalling something we said to ourselves in inner speech. There are undoubtedly systematic processes that produce the speech of either kind, but it is the beginning of a regress to suppose that there are unconscious events that have a structure and meaning that ‘match’ the structure and meaning of what is (inwardly or overtly) said. The same point may be easier to see if we consider nonlinguistic actions. Knapping a stone tool, hunting prey, frying an egg are examples of processes that take attention and intelligence. The brain produces success in such endeavors by processes that are largely unconscious. It would be idle and regress-inviting to suppose that we cannot do those things without first having modeled what we are about to do in an unconscious theater. Our highly sequenced movements and responsiveness to sensory inputs are what the brain produces. Producing them once is quite enough. 28. The final corollary concerns cognitive phenomenology. In two papers on this topic (Robinson, 2005, 2011), I have cast doubt on claims that there is a distinctive and proprietary phenomenology of thoughts. Arguments in those papers were almost entirely independent of the general dissent from ‘thoughts’ that I have been putting forward in this chapter.9 But now that I have argued against unconscious thoughts, I have a further reason: there are no ‘thoughts’ that could have a conscious phenomenology. What there are, phenomenologically, are episodes of inner speech, and a rich collection of images, emotions, feelings such as the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, the feeling of relief from frustration, and valence. 8 Dehaene and King (2016) make significant use of “global neuronal workspace” theory. But they appear to conflate two ideas under this metaphor. (a) Broadcast of “information” (which implies that the same information is located in at least two places); and (b) “Metastable states”, which involve a pattern of activation over multiple brain regions that lasts for some hundreds of milliseconds. Metastable states do not imply that there is any information that is multiply located. 9 The exception is that I have previously raised the problem that the phenomenology of thought is not supposed to consist in linguistically structured material, yet is supposed to “match” the sense of the words that report the thought. (I have called this the “structure problem” for cognitive phenomenology.) See Chapter 9, §12 for further explanation of the structure problem.

9 Valence

1. My chapter title is intended as a convenient shorthand for ‘pleasure and displeasure’. Mostly, I will be talking about pleasure. I do not say that pleasure and displeasure are mirror images of each other in every respect, but for the most part parallel accounts apply to both, with, of course, appropriate reversals of sign. That relation should be assumed as a default. Valence is an important topic in its own right. Since it presents several difficulties, it will take the majority of this chapter to explain a view about it and defend that view against some objections. Besides the intrinsic interest of valence, however, a correct understanding of it is needed in order to respond to William James’s (1890) argument against epiphenomenalism. At the end of the chapter I will be able to redeem my promise in Chapter 3 to complete this necessary task.

What Is It Like to Like? 2. I will begin by summarizing the conception of pleasure for which I argued in detail in “What Is It Like to Like?” (Robinson 2006a; hereafter, WIILTL). The first point is that pleasure is not a sensation. One reason for asserting this view is phenomenological. Take, for example, two foods you like – perhaps chocolate for one and ripe peaches for another. Both are pleasant (for you, we are assuming). But can you identify a sensation that accompanies both? When I try this, it seems plain that the answer is “No”. I have put this question to others on various occasions, and they have, without exception, reported that they cannot find a sensation that is a characteristic and distinctive accompaniment of what they find pleasant.1 3. A more formal reason was given by Ryle (1954). Pleasure is taken in things; pleasantness is pleasantness of something. Furthermore, we are never in doubt about what it is we are finding pleasant. Of course, we 1 For clear exposition of, and references for, several views on this question see Aydede (2014). My own view is not quite the same as any he identifies, but it is closest to what he calls an “hedonic tone” view.

Valence  157 can be in doubt or error about what is causing a pleasant taste. Maybe, for example, it is some preparation from the carob bean that’s in my mouth, no real chocolate at all. But this is not an error about which taste it is that I am finding pleasant. One argument based on these observations is this. If pleasure were a sensation, it ought to seem that its relation to other sensations was purely contingent. To see what I mean by this, consider that we can have soup that is bland, or soup that has much of the same tastes in it, but is salty. If we have the salty version, we can imagine the other tastes without the saltiness. But we are at least under the illusion that the pleasantness of a taste is provided by the taste itself – that the pleasantness of a taste is extremely closely bound to the nature of that taste. We might think that it could not be that taste and yet not be pleasant. I believe that this appearance of closeness is an illusion. The reason is a pair of personal anecdotes, but I believe that many others will be able to recall similar experiences in their own history. On two memorable occasions (both before I was twelve) I gorged myself on a food to the point where I became ill. Of course, I did that because eating those foods was extremely pleasant. But immediately after having paid the price of my overindulgence, I could not abide the taste, or even the smell (in both cases quite strong and distinctive) of those foods. These experiences convince me that there is really nothing necessary about the connection between a sensation and its valence, but the appearance of necessity remains strong. I am aware that one can take the position (see discussion in Dennett, 1991) that the effect of overindulgence was an early rewiring that resulted in a different sensation attending the consumption of these foods. On that view, one could consistently hold that each taste has a valence that is necessarily connected with it, and that my change of desire for those foods was due to their having come to cause different taste sensations. One thing I want to say in response is that this hypothesis has no phenomenological attraction whatsoever. That is, I had no sense that those foods smelled different; I just didn’t like those smells any more. Another response is that in any case the possibility of same taste with change of valence is not ruled out by there being an alternative scenario that is also, as far as we know, possible. As long as we cannot rule out either possibility, we cannot claim to know that there is a necessary connection between a sensation quality and its valence. 4. A further argument following Ryle is this. If pleasantness were a sensation among sensations, then, if we had two other sensations at the same time, it should be possible for us to wonder which of these other two is the pleasant one. But it is difficult even to imagine being puzzled about which one we are enjoying, and which one is either unpleasant or neutral.

158 Valence 5. A conclusion I drew from all this, and affirm here, is that valence has a kind of intentionality. The pleasantness of the taste of chocolate really is the pleasantness of that taste: the pleasantness is about or directed upon that taste. The intentionality of pleasure also comes out in the fact that it is aspectual. To bring this out, consider the sound of a drum. Such sounds have a pitch and a resonant timbre. But, at least in my case, it is not the pitch that pleases; it’s the resonant quality of the sound. 6. I hasten to add, however, that pleasantness does not have full blown intentionality. By that I mean that pleasures are not true or false, in the same sense that what we believe is true or false. There can, of course, be ‘false pleasures’. But these are not pleasures that are not true. They are cases of genuine pleasure. They are false only in the sense that what causes them is something that is not good for us, or in the sense that repetition of attempts to get pleasure from the same source are likely to fail (i.e., we are likely to become jaded, and derive no pleasure from repetition). If pleasure were a representation of what is pleasant as having some property, then there would be the possibility of misrepresentation – of representing some sensation as pleasant when it really was not. But phenomenologically, there is no such possibility. One may fail to get pleasure from a later encounter with the same source, but that does not make the pleasure one is now getting from that source a misrepresentation. One could be pleased by an emotion that was caused by ‘learning some good news’ when in fact the report was false, and the actual circumstances contained nothing that would give anybody any joy. But again, the error in this case would be an error in the report that caused the good feeling. It would not be an error in the relation between the feeling one was having and the pleasantness of that feeling. 7. In view of the fact that ‘intentionality’ usually suggests the full-blown version, I think it is best to say that valence has ‘quasi-­intentionality’. In using this term, it is to be understood that quasi-intentionality falls short of intentionality only because it does not involve representation, misrepresentation, or truth-evaluability. The being directed upon, and the aspectuality (directedness upon some particular aspect of what is present in consciousness) are not ‘almost’ anything; they are full blown directedness and aspectuality. 8. In WIILTL, I argued for another thesis, which I will put here by saying that valence has a phenomenology. In view of my rejection of the sensation theory, this acceptance may seem odd (or worse). But I believe we must embrace this thesis.

Valence  159 9. The reason is that ‘Because I like it/it pleases me/it gives me pleasure’ is a good reason to do something, combined with the fact that valence is not something we infer. In saying this, I am, of course, not saying that the valence of a sensation is what causes our behavior. Behavior is caused by activations of motor neurons, which are caused by activations of neurons that synapse onto them, which are caused by activations of neurons that, in turn, synapse onto them, and so on up to activations of sensory neurons (which may be thought of as inputs to a brain that is already highly organized). The phenomenology of valence is phenomenology that is caused by some part of this process. (Starting in §17 I will explain what kind of part I have in mind.) We are, however, not conscious of brain activations as such, and therefore these causes never appear as they are as reasons why we do what we do. On the other hand, the pleasantness of a taste is immediately accessible in consciousness and is something that we can give as a reason for having selected a certain kind of food. Having pleasantness as a reason for one’s selection is no mere trivial corollary of having made a particular selection, for there are other reasons that might have rationalized that selection, e.g., religious reasons, or medical reasons. 2 10. It is possible to come to believe that some activity we have never engaged in, or some new food, would please us. Such a belief is arrived at by inference – for example, we might reason that the new activity or food is similar to something that we already know pleases us, and so we’ll probably like it. But we do not infer whether we like something we actually taste or do. We sample the soup; and say “Hmm, good!” – or not. We listen to an unfamiliar piece by Schoenberg; and say “Please, no more of that!” – or not. 11. If it appears to us without inference that something is our reason for eating more of a food, requesting another piece by the same composer, and so forth, that reason must concern something that is in our consciousness. Being pleasant is a noninferential reason for us to be doing something. I infer that the pleasantness of a stimulus or an activity is

2 The disengaging of reasons from causes should not be surprising. Reasons are often regarded as combinations of beliefs and desires. Chapter 5 concluded that complete causal explanations of behavior can (in principle) be given by reference to interactions of brain parts, none of which are beliefs, desires, or their realizers or storers. It follows that complete explanations of behavior can (in principle) be given by reference to interactions of brain parts, none of which are reasons. The stating of our reasons is, of course, an action that causes changes in the world, and our ability to state our reasons is a consequence of the same brain organization that enables nonlinguistic actions that our statements of reasons make intelligible.

160 Valence something that is in our consciousness, i.e., that there is a phenomenology of pleasure (and, more generally, of valence). 12. I want to pause here to address a possible puzzlement. Readers may recall that I have argued against cognitive phenomenology. 3 So, it may seem odd for me to now argue in support of a non-sensory phenomenology. However, in Robinson (2011), I argued for a “frugal” view, which I contrasted with a “stingy” view that would allow only sensory phenomenology. If I had tried to include a discussion of pleasure in that paper, I would have either had to overburden the paper with the material I have just treated above, or said something so brief as to be worthless and misleading. I did, however, explicitly recognize feelings of familiarity and feelings of confidence. That is, I have already recognized that there is non-sensory phenomenology. Here, I am adding pleasure and displeasure as further items of that kind.4 My papers on cognitive phenomenology have some appeals to phenomenology, but they also have an important argument that is not phenomenological. Briefly stated, the problem for cognitive phenomenology is that it is supposed to be the phenomenology of thoughts that can be expressed in language. The thought that John loves Mary is held to be different from the thought that Mary loves John. So, if there were a phenomenology of thought, there would have to be a different phenomenology for thoughts that had different structures. I called this ‘the structure problem’. Why is this a problem? It is because proponents of cognitive phenomenology are not saying (as I do) that the phenomenology of thinking is mostly the auditorily imagistic phenomenology of inner speech, plus a variety of kinds of nonverbal imagery. They are holding out that there is a phenomenology that can be sudden and brief, yet correspond to thoughts that must have structural complexity parallel to the structural complexity of sentences that would appropriately express those thoughts. But once inner speech has been rejected as the ‘medium’ in which such elements can be structured, there seems to be no other medium that could have such a structure. Moreover, the suddenness and brevity of alleged cognitive phenomenology does not allow for structure to be a temporal structure. It might be a spatial structure, but that does not seem phenomenologically right either, and no such spatiality is put forward by proponents of cognitive phenomenology. But 3 For earlier remarks on several kinds of phenomenologies see Chapter 4, §15, Chapter 6, §§ 23–28, Chapter 8, § 28. 4 My thinking on non-sensory phenomenology owes much to a paper by the psychologist Bruce Mangan (2001). Although I do not agree with his criticism of epiphenomenalism, I highly recommend this paper.

Valence  161 if the structure is neither temporally extended nor some sort of spatial layout, there seems to be no ‘medium’, or ‘field’, in which there could be structure that would systematically correspond to the structure of sentences that are held by all to ‘express one’s thoughts’. (For the need for care regarding ‘expressing one’s thoughts’, see Chapter 8.) Now, the point of rehearsing this material here is to absolve myself of the charge of inconsistency in allowing non-sensory phenomenology, while rejecting cognitive phenomenology. The key consideration is that pleasantness, unpleasantness, familiarity, confidence, and other non-­sensory phenomenologies do not have the kind of structural complexity that would be reflected in a sentence. So, the central non-­ phenomenological argument that applies against cognitive phenomenology does not apply to them.

A Dispositional Account 13. To resume the thread from §11, we need to introduce a contrasting view that I shall call a ‘purely dispositional account’. This account says that ‘X is pleasant for S’ = ‘S is disposed to approach X without ulterior motives’. Here and in what follows, I shall use ‘approach X’ in a very generic way. It is stipulated to cover getting more of X, e.g., continuing to eat a certain food; extending the time of some condition, e.g., remaining indoors on a cold night; and seeking repetition, e.g., ordering the same dish that one enjoyed on a previous occasion. It also applies to activities, such as skiing or playing a musical instrument; and again, ‘approach’ to these activities might be continuing to do them or it might be doing them again after some interval. The inclusion of ‘without ulterior motives’ recognizes that we may approach all sorts of unpleasant things in hope of future benefits. We may ingest disgusting medicine to promote our health, endure discomfort to support a charity or to do penance, or forgo some activity we enjoy in order to save money for future pleasant things. The idea of the purely dispositional account is that liking X is nothing but being disposed to approach X, even when there are no other reasons for approaching X. And it allows that we can be disposed to approach X even when we do not approach X when we could, because there may be other present or future things we prefer, approach to which would be incompatible with present approach to X. In what follows, I will often write simply ‘approach X’, but this is to be understood to mean ‘approach X without ulterior motives’. ‘Avoid X’ will be used for the opposite sense, with the same understanding. 14. A purely dispositional account resembles what are often called ‘attitudinal’ views of pleasure. Such views define pleasure in terms of propositional attitudes, so that, for example, for Q to be pleasant to s

162 Valence would be for s to have a desire to approach Q without ulterior motives. If ‘desire to approach Q without ulterior motives’ is defined as ‘has a disposition to approach Q without ulterior motives’, then this version of an attitudinal view reduces to a purely dispositional account. But one might not define ‘desire’ in that way. Some alternative accounts of desire would fall afoul of criticisms of the pool table picture contained in earlier chapters. I am not aware of a way of defining ‘desire’ that would yield an attitudinal view that avoids both those criticisms and the one to follow. 15. On a purely dispositional account, “I am approaching X because I like it (or, because it gives me pleasure)” would come to this: “I am approaching X because I am disposed to approach X”. But this is nonsense – that is, being disposed to approach X doesn’t make sense as a reason for approaching X. But “Because I like it” is a reason for approaching X. So, I reject the purely dispositional account.

A More Positive Account 16. Although the purely dispositional account won’t do, there is surely some intimate relation between finding something pleasant and being disposed to approach it. The next sections are an attempt to clarify what this relation is. They begin with an explanation that was promised in §9 – namely, an explanation of what kind of part of our processing gives rise to the phenomenology of valence. This explanation requires some background about how I conceive one aspect of our brain’s organization. This background is evidently speculative, but I do not see how the main lines that matter to what I have to say could be otherwise. It may appear that there is a rival account in recent work led by K. Friston. (See, e.g., Friston (2009, 2013); Clark (2013).) This work attempts a unified theory of mind, and part of this unification represents action as one way of reducing error in the predictions of the internal model of the world that our brains embody. On this account, valence virtually disappears in favor of beliefs (or sub-personal ‘beliefs’) about what I am about to do, and action reduces the discrepancy between those beliefs and reality by changing the world to conform to our expectations. This account, however, leads directly to the question of why we believe we will do an action (or that reality will soon be in a state that will result from an action). To explain that, we must appeal to preferences, or what we want, or what we have found pleasant, or productive of what we have found pleasant. Friston’s account, therefore, is not a rival to the view set out in the next sections. It is an addition to it: it mediates the connection between valence and action through belief (or ‘belief’), but it does not bypass the need for efficacy of a system that gives rise to a phenomenology of valence.

Valence  163 To illustrate the point just made, we may use an example from Friston (2013). In the course of responding to an objection, he writes (see p. 213): For example, when we enter a dark room, the first thing we do is switch on a light. This is because we expect the room to be brightly lit (or more exactly, we expect our bodily movements to bring this about). In other words, the state of a room being dark is surprising because we do not expect to occupy dark rooms. This surprise depends upon (prior) expectations, but where do these prior beliefs come from? They come from evolution and experience, in the sense that if we did not have these prior beliefs, we would be drawn to dark rooms and die there. In short, a dynamic world can only support a generative model of that world (prior beliefs) that predicts the dynamics it encounters – predictions that action fulfils. Suppose, however, that we are searching for something we think we have left in a room that is now only very dimly lit. We would turn on a light, but our friend has fallen asleep on the couch and we do not want to wake her. So, we don’t turn it on. Or perhaps we have heard a noise in the street, and want to see what is going on. Again, we would not turn on a light. It seems to me that we cannot explain cases of this kind (which are ubiquitous) without invoking what we want. It may, indeed, be that we do not turn on the light because we do not believe we are going to do so. But the reason we do not believe we will turn on the light is that we are aware that doing so might lead to a state of affairs we do not want. So, even if reduction of predictive error does come into the account of action, we will still need to refer to our wants. 17. The first piece of the background we need for understanding the relation between pleasure and approach is this: In order for learning to take place, there must be some aspect of our brains’ functioning that can be regarded as a reinforcement system, RS. I shall understand an RS to be a system that tends to make approach to some items more likely and avoidance of other items more likely. The ‘items’ here may sometimes be most conveniently conceived of as objects (e.g., a toy, a burr) but in other cases may be conveniently described as events (e.g., getting thumb in mouth, moving in a way that removes coverage of a blanket) or states of affairs (e.g., nursing, being in cold drafts). It is implicit in this description that some part of an RS functions as an ‘evaluation’ system, ES. The scare quotes indicate that an ES is a neural system. It is a part of an RS that determines whether the rest of the RS will tend to lead to approach or to avoidance (or neither) of recent items that have caused an event in the ES. We may think of events in the ES as events that classify incoming stimuli as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (or, neither).

164 Valence If we use this heuristic, however, we must not forget that events in an ES are not instances of propositional attitudes. They are simply neural events that have certain effects on the remainder of an RS. Saying that an event in an ES has classified an input as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (or neither) is nothing but a shorthand way of saying that it causes the remainder of the organism’s RS to tend to lead to approach or avoidance (or neither) of the items that caused that input. Evaluation – without scare quotes – is, in its fully developed adult form, often an outcome of reflection. We are typically able to say what our evaluation of things is. For simple cases, such as tastes or being cold, there may be no reasons, but in cases of more complex items, such as houses or political candidates, we may have many reasons for our evaluations. ‘Evaluations’ – in scare quotes – are neural outcomes of unconscious processes. They are neural events that initiate events in the rest of the RS that enhance either approach or avoidance (or have neither effect, i.e., classify items as ‘neutral’). I do not see how complex, reasoned evaluation could begin unless some ‘evaluations’ were innate. So, for example, I suppose that a nipple in the mouth of a hungry infant is innately ‘evaluated’ positively, and that empty stomach and cold skin surface are innately ‘evaluated’ negatively. Let us have one more example. Infants soon begin to reach for nearby objects that are bright, or moving (maybe their toes). I do not know why they want to do that, but they do. Early efforts often fail, occasional successes happen, and gradually the infant acquires the ability to grab its toes, or its toys, in a reliable way. I do not see how this could happen unless (a) the occasional successes were innately distinguished from the failures, and unless (b) this distinction produced some consequences that led to raising the probability of activity in whatever sensory-to-motor pathways had been involved in the success. I am conceiving of the brain event bases of (a) and (b) together as the RS, and I am regarding the initiator of the consequences in (b) – whatever brain events distinguish a condition as one for which the pathways from its cause to behavior will be strengthened – as the ES. Analogous remarks are to be assumed for negative ‘evaluations’ and weakening of pathways whose recent activation occurred shortly before conditions that are negatively ‘evaluated’. 18. Here and in what follows, my talk of ‘strengthening’ and ‘weakening’ are to be understood as abbreviations for strengthening/weakening of synaptic excitatory connections, or weakening/strengthening of inhibitory connections. There may be many iterations – e.g., strengthening a pathway may consist in strengthening inhibitory connections to inhibitory neurons.

Valence  165 19. The RS must be able to distinguish good or bad conditions that come soon after we move our bodies, from good or bad conditions that arrive independently of our having moved in some way. This point is compatible with allowing that there can be cases of confusion. The RS will do its job so long as it is mostly right about whether a change in our condition depended on some movement we made. 20. Events in the ES are neural events. Pleasure and displeasure are the phenomenologies that are caused by events in the ES. It is the ES that is the ‘part of our processing’ (§9) that causes the phenomenology of valence. 21. Pure functionalist views (of pleasure and displeasure) hold that pleasure is whatever event type plays a certain role in causing approach to causes of events of that type. 5 The view I have been describing has similarities to pure functionalism, but it is not the same. According to the view taken here, pleasure is the phenomenology that is caused by events in the ES, i.e., by events that (also) initiate certain kinds of events in the RS. If there were some organism or robot in which some events played this role but had no phenomenological effects, then nothing would be pleasant or unpleasant for that organism or robot.6 22. To further develop the view I am advocating, and to bring out the difference between it and pure functionalism, let us consider octopi, which have neural systems quite different from ours. Of course, they approach food and potential mates, and avoid circumstances that might be damaging, and they can learn. So, it is highly plausible that they have a system that performs the functions of an RS; and therefore, on the view I am advocating, they have an ES. I do not know whether octopi’s ESs cause phenomenology for them, but let us suppose that they do. Since their neural systems are different from ours, it seems unlikely that their phenomenology would be just the same as ours. We can thus ask the question: Do octopi (on the stated supposition) experience pleasure? 23. I think the best answer is that they experience pleasureO (whereas, we experience pleasureH). The difference between the ‘O’ and the ‘H’ carries the difference in our phenomenologies, the common stem ‘pleasure’ carries the fact that both phenomenologies are caused by events in

5 Plurality of functionalisms corresponds to plurality of ways of specifying the details of the causal role. 6 In the terminology of Chapter 1, §15, this is a ‘mixed’ version of functionalism.

166 Valence an ES that causes the rest of the RS to change synaptic strengths in ways that tend to enhance approach to causes of that kind of event in the ES. 24. Here is another way to state this view. Suppose we are dealing with entities that have a phenomenology. We ask “Which of their phenomenologies, if any, is pleasure for them?”. The answer I am recommending is that we locate their RS, and within that, their ES. The phenomenology of theirs that we should count as their pleasure = the phenomenology that is caused in them by states of their ES that lead the RS to cause changes that lead to approach to the causes of those ES states. (And, as always, analogously, but in reverse sense, for their displeasure, including their pains.) Here is a third way of stating the view. The function that an ES performs does not give us a definition of ‘pleasure’, but it does give us a way of fixing the reference of the term. The meaning of ‘pleasure’ is a certain phenomenology (of a kind that has quasi-intentionality). But the recipe for fixing the reference of ‘pleasure’ for any species, or in any possible world – the recipe for identifying which among its phenomenologies is pleasure – is this: Find an organism’s RS, and within that, its ES. Then, pleasure for it is the phenomenology that is caused by those events in its ES that initiate RS processes that normally lead to approach to causes of those ES events, independently of any ulterior motives. 25. Pure functionalism bypasses the phenomenology of pleasure. In the terminology of the present discussion, it gets along only with states of the ES. To repeat a point made earlier: If pleasure were nothing but having a state of the ES that stimulates the RS in a certain way, then an item’s being pleasant could not be a reason for approaching it. (“X causes an event that tends to lead to my approaching X” is not a reason for approaching X.) Only if we recognize a phenomenology correlated with certain kinds of ES events can we regard producing that phenomenology as so much as appearing to us as a reason for approaching what we think will cause it. This account does have a somewhat peculiar consequence, which may appear to be an objection to it. To wit: It does not make sense, on the view I am advocating, to say that pleasantness (or the nature of pleasure, or some intrinsic property of pleasure) is a reason for us to pursue pleasure. It makes no sense, that is, to say that we are motivated to pursue pleasure because pleasure is pleasant (or because pleasure has property P, and P is a species of goodness). The nature of pleasure is not a reason for seeking pleasure. Instead, pleasure is a reason to approach items that we believe (correctly or not) will be pleasant. I do not regard this consequence as an objection, because I do not think it is independently plausible that anything should count a reason to seek pleasure. I think “Why do you want pleasure?” and “Why do you seek out things that are pleasant?” are nonsensical questions. The questions that make sense are those that ask why we are seeking X, where X

Valence  167 is not pleasure itself. When “Because it is pleasant” is a meaningful answer, it is an answer to a question of the form “Why are you approaching X?”, where X is not pleasure itself, but is a thing or an activity that is pleasant (or at least is one that we believe will be pleasant).

Objections and Replies 26. This stance puts me in conflict with the position of I. Goldstein (1980). He set the issue out this way. Why do we prefer pleasure to pain? There are three answers to be considered. (1) We have a reason for wanting pleasure and for shunning pain. Our normal attitudes are guided by some rational insight about the nature of pleasurable and painful experiences. (2) Pleasure and pain do not in themselves provide any reason for wanting the one and shunning the other. It is just a brute contingent fact about our constitution that we are disposed to want and seek pleasure and dislike and avoid pain. (3) That pleasure is wanted and pain unwanted is a simple tautology. The attitudes toward the experience enter into the definition of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’. (Goldstein, 1980, p. 349. Emphases in original.) My own view is that none of these positions is quite right, and that the one I have been advocating is better. Differences of the latter position from Goldstein’s three alternatives are as follows. From (1): We do not have a reason for wanting pleasure and shunning pain. We have reasons for wanting certain items, namely that they are pleasant, and we have reasons for shunning certain other items, namely that they are unpleasant (including painful). Analogously, we want many things because we think they are good, but we do not want goodness because it is good. Pleasure and goodness are reasons to approach what is pleasant and good, not reasons to approach themselves. From (2): But it is not a brute contingent fact that we are disposed to want and seek what is pleasant, and dislike and avoid pain. ‘Pleasant’ is what we call the phenomenology caused by events in our ‘evaluation’ systems that initiate processes in the RS that tend to lead to approach to what we take to be the causes of those events. Mostly, what we take to be the causes of such events actually are their causes. From (3): It is not a simple tautology that pleasure is wanted and pain is unwanted. It is, indeed, a consequence of the account I have been advocating that pleasant things are wanted and unpleasant things are unwanted. But that consequence does not arrive through a definition of

168 Valence ‘pleasant item’ as ‘item that is wanted’. Pleasant items, according to my account are items that cause events in the ES that cause both a certain phenomenology and states in the rest of the RS that tend to lead to approach to the perceived causes of those ES events. It is not a tautology that there is such a phenomenology or that there is that kind of structure in our reinforcement systems. 27. It should come as no surprise that I also think my account is preferable to two more recent views that are generally known as Evaluativism and Imperativism. The reason for lack of surprise is that these views are applications of representationalism, and that view has been previously criticized in Chapter 1. It may be recalled that one way of stating a key point involves ‘mental paint’. Representationalism without ‘mental paint’ is implausible, yet mental paint cannot be added to representationalism without abandoning its central aim. Similarly, attempts to reduce pain’s unpleasantness to its representing something as bad merely substitutes items that are associated with pains for the real thing. However, in view of the popularity of representationalism, I want to give here some remarks about evaluativism that are independent of appeal to this general doubt. I will forgo a critique of imperativism, because I have little to add to Bain’s (2013) critique of this view. However, in that same paper, Bain argues for evaluativism, and it is his formulation on which I will focus. 28. Here is Bain’s account of evaluativism: A subject’s being in unpleasant pain consists in his (i) undergoing an experience (the pain) that represents a disturbance of a certain sort, and (ii) that same experience additionally representing the disturbance as bad for him in the bodily sense. (p. S82; emphasis in original.) Both clauses are required because we have to allow for those with pain asymbolia, who have pains but do not find them unpleasant. The explanation of the last four words comes in a passage immediately following: [W]hen you step into the scalding bathwater, you’re in pain by dint of perceptually representing your foot as undergoing a disturbance of a certain sort. But I insist that the pain is unpleasant and motivating only because it further represents that bodily disturbance as bad for you. (p. S82; emphases in original.)7 7 Motivating reasons are reasons recognized as such by a subject, whether or not they truly justify an action (e.g., they may be based on falsehoods); justifying reasons are

Valence  169 In a later passage, Bain asks, “What is badness in the bodily sense?” In response, he says: One answer is that a disturbance’s being bad in that sense is simply its being apt to harm the subject’s body, in the sense of being apt to impede its proper functioning. Another says that a disturbance’s being bad additionally requires that the subject care about its proper functioning. (p. S82; emphases in original.) This account seems inadequate to me in the same way that ‘a day in winter’ is an inadequate description of Christmas day. A robot with no phenomenology at all might have sensors in its foot that cause certain events in its computer ‘brain’ to represent a disturbance in its foot, and such events might be connected to its effector system in such a way as to initiate verbal and nonverbal behavior typical of circumstances that are bad for its continued functioning. Identifying these associates of pains in us simply leaves out the salient fact about pains: they hurt. The addition of caring is promising, because (see Chapter 7, §30) genuine caring may require the ability to have pleasant or unpleasant sensations. But if we add caring in this way, we will no longer have an account that explains the unpleasantness of pains (or, that reduces it to representational contents). 29. Bain is mainly concerned with Imperativism and desire theories, so it is not surprising that he does not respond directly to the objection I have just raised. However, in the last two sections of the paper (§§8.2 and 8.3), he does consider what is at least a very similar worry. Section 8.2 begins by considering an opponent who says: (a) No Bodily Ends The end at which unpleasant pain, as a motivational state, is aimed is always the cessation of unpleasant pain itself and never the cessation of bad bodily states. Naturally, I find the idea that pains are aimed at something bizarre, but for the sake of the argument, I will pretend to follow along with such talk. I will begin by observing that (a) is put forward very strongly. It would be enough to form an objection to Bain’s thesis if one said only that some pains are aimed at cessation of unpleasant pain itself, even if additionally they were aimed at cessation of bad bodily states. This reasons that make an action reasonable, whether or not they are known to a subject (and thus, whether or not they are also motivating reasons for that subject).

170 Valence position would conflict with Bain’s view because (see clause (ii) of Evaluativism) the unpleasantness of unpleasant pain is supposed to consist in the representation of badness of a bodily state rather than the badness of the pain experience itself or a representation of the badness of the pain experience. Let us call this weaker form of the objection ‘(aº) Some Non-bodily Ends’. Bain agrees that accepting (a) would undermine his version of evaluativism, and I believe accepting (aº) would also have this consequence. But he offers a defense. Appealing to Wittgenstein, Bain (2013, p. S85) distinguishes between what would terminate a motivational state, and what it is aimed at. A punch in the stomach might end your desire for an apple, but your desire is aimed at an apple, not a punch. Similarly, a painkiller might terminate your pain, but that doesn’t show that ending your unpleasant pain is your experience’s aim. This response is puzzlingly inadequate. It is correct that “A painkiller would terminate my pain, therefore my pain aims at its termination” is a bad argument. But the fact that there is a bad argument for a claim does not count against that claim; and it seems obvious (to me, at least) that we do sometimes have as our primary aim the removal of unpleasant pains. For example, some years ago I broke two ribs, and was prescribed hydrocodone for pain. To the best of my belief (then and now), hydrocodone does nothing to promote healing of bones, but I took it anyway, despite finding some of its side effects unpleasant. The only reason I can give for doing so is that I wanted to avoid pain. I believe many readers will be able to provide similar cases from their own experience. 30. It would be unfair to leave matters here, because Bain (2013, pp. S85–S86) goes on to endorse the following. (b) Hedonic Ends Unpleasant pain is a justifying (i.e., good) reason to act so as to end the unpleasant pain. However, as Bain (2013, p. S86) himself acknowledges, we now need to ask how can we make sense of his endorsing (b). How can evaluativism accommodate the view that unpleasant pain is intrinsically bad? The key part of Bain’s strongest suggestion (Bain, 2013, pp. S86–S88) is that “it can be intrinsically bad for you (in one sense) to be in a state in which something seems bad for you (in another sense)”. This idea is explained by reference to grief and to fear. The latter is taken to involve “its striking you that your situation is dangerous, and in that sense bad for you”. Fear is not merely a consequence of your situation’s striking you as dangerous; “rather fear is a state in which things so strike you. And that, I am claiming, is why fear is in itself bad for you, indeed a kind of suffering” (p. S87; emphasis in original).

Valence  171 I do not believe that these remarks succeed in explaining how evaluativism can accommodate (b). Unpleasantness, we may recall, was supposed to derive from an experience’s having a content to the effect that something about us is bad. In the pain case, unpleasantness comes from the content: the disturbance (in a certain body part) is bad. That motivates doing something about that disturbance. We need a second badness (or, a badness in a second sense) to account for a motivation to do something about the pain per se. The best sense I can make of Bain’s suggestion is that this second badness is supposed to be a badness (or, perhaps, a represented badness) of having an experience with the content: the disturbance (in a certain body part) is bad. But now we face the question, Why is it bad to have an experience that has the content: the disturbance (in a certain body part) is bad? Only two kinds of answer seem to be available. (A) It is bad because we also have an experience that has a content: an experience of a disturbance in a body part being bad is a bad thing to have. This is not a plausible answer, because it would saddle us with experiences whose content is generally false. Of course, it is bad to have experiences with the content, the disturbance (in a certain body part) is bad, if in fact there is no disturbance in that part that is bad. But generally, we hurt where there is a bad (or incipiently bad) bodily condition, and the difficult lives of so-called ‘pain insensitives’ show us that it is a good thing that we have pains. (B) An experience with the content, the disturbance (in a certain body part) is bad, is bad because besides having that content, it is also unpleasant. This answer is much more plausible, but it is unavailable to evaluativists. For this unpleasantness of the experience is an addition to the content about badness, and so this unpleasantness does not simply consist in the experience’s having that content. This critique is not a demonstration, because it is always open in principle for one to suggest a third account of the second kind of badness. But I see no plausible suggestion along this line, nor does Bain offer one. The analogy with fear is not helpful. Fear is not bad, in the sense of being bad for us to have it. On the contrary, when we are afraid we focus our attention on aspects of our situation that are potentially dangerous, and that makes it less likely that we will actually be injured. The only sense in which fear is bad is that it is unpleasant – as Bain puts it, fear is “a kind of suffering” (p. S87). But evaluativism cannot simply appeal to unpleasantness here: it would have to explain that unpleasantness as a representation of something as bad. Bain however, does not supply a second representation of badness. The only badness represented in his account is the badness of being exposed to danger, and the representation of that badness is what makes one’s state a state of fear, and not what makes fear unpleasant.

172 Valence 31. My conclusion from the last few sections is that evaluativism (at least in one leading exposition of the view) is flawed beyond repair. It seems to me that the account I offered earlier in this chapter is preferable. 32. I take it as evident that the foregoing account is compatible with epiphenomenalism. (All the causal arrows, one might say, run either from neural events to neural events, or from neural events to phenomenology, never in the reverse direction to the latter.) Epiphenomenalism allows the providing of pleasure to enter our thinking as a reason for acting; pure functionalism does not. Epiphenomenalism allows unpleasantness of pains to be our reason for taking steps to avoid them per se; evaluativism, at least in Bain’s form, does not. In these respects, epiphenomenalism is more intuitive than these alternatives. 33. In order for pleasantness or unpleasantness to be a reason for approach or avoidance, we not only have to have a phenomenology of valence, we must also know (or at least believe) that we have it. Further, to know (or even believe) that we have such a phenomenology, we have to be able to refer to it. These commitments may appear to afford an opening for criticism of an epiphenomenalist view. How is it that we know (or even have beliefs about) the pleasantness or unpleasantness of our sensations? How do we even refer to their valence? However, the answers to these questions are the same as the answers to the self-stultification problem and the meaning objection, which I have explained in detail in Robinson (2006a and 2013, 2012, respectively).

James’s Evolutionary Argument 34. William James (1890, pp. 143–144) gave an evolutionary argument against epiphenomenalism (under the name, “automaton-theory”). In my view, his argument has not been better stated since, so I will quote it here.8 It is a well-known fact that pleasures are generally associated with beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences. All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law. Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink and sleep, work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, the effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr. Spencer

8 Corabi (2014) has offered a criticism of James’s argument. Although, as we shall soon see, I have my own disagreement with James’s argument, I explained in a response to Corabi why I think James’s argument is well stated, and stronger than Corabi believes. See Robinson (2014d).

Valence  173 and others have suggested that these coincidences are due, not to any pre-established harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection which would certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of creatures to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed enjoyable. An animal that should take pleasure in a feeling of suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious enough to make him immerse his head in water, enjoy a longevity of four or five minutes. But if pleasures and pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some such à priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the ‘scientific’ champions of the automaton-theory) why the most noxious acts, such as burning, might not give thrills of delight, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing, cause agony. The exceptions to the law are, it is true, numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vital or not universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which though noxious, is to many persons delightful, is a very exceptional experience. 35. In Robinson (2007a), I gave a summary of this argument that I shall repeat here (in a slightly revised version).9 I introduced a phrase – ‘hedonic/utility match’ – for the match (or, association) between the beneficial and the pleasant, and the detrimental and the unpleasant.10 Here is my summary. (J1) The hedonic/utility match stands in need of explanation. (J2) The hedonic/utility match has to be accounted for either by a scientific explanation or by appeal to an a priori parallelism. (J3) A priori parallelism is no real explanation. (J4) The only scientific explanation for the hedonic/utility match is evolution. (J5) To apply evolutionary considerations to explaining the hedonic/utility match, one must suppose that pleasures and displeasures are efficacious (and efficacious in virtue of their being pleasant or unpleasant). So, (J6) Pleasures and displeasures are efficacious (in virtue of their being pleasant or unpleasant). 9 The revision consists in replacing ‘pain’ with ‘displeasure’ or ‘what is unpleasant’. The reason for this revision is that although James uses ‘pains’ in the first sentence of the quotation, he includes privation of food, drink and sleep as illustrations; and the experiences that go with these conditions, while decidedly unpleasant, are not normally counted as pains. 10 For the sake of continuity, I will retain the term ‘hedonic/utility match’. However, John Wright (2015) has introduced a better term for it: the ‘felicitous alignment’. He distinguishes this from the ‘fortunate correlation’, also needed in James’s argument, which refers to the association between hedonic states and behavior –i.e., our tendency to approach what we find pleasant and avoid what we find unpleasant.

174 Valence 36. In the 2007 paper I did not go into the background concerning RSs, as I have done earlier in this chapter. Its central argument was that all of the current serious rivals to epiphenomenalism leave something unexplained, and that these explanatory lacunae are as serious for their respective views as James’s argument is for epiphenomenalism. I stand by that argument, but applying the background provided earlier in this chapter will enable a more insightful critique of James’s argument.11 37. Members of a species that survives must have an RS that contains an ES that positively ‘evaluates’ circumstances that tend to enhance the fitness of those members. If events in the ES that are positive ‘evaluations’ cause a phenomenology, that phenomenology is pleasureS (i.e., pleasure for the species in question). PleasureS may not be pleasureH, but it will be pleasure for members of S. If they can give reasons for their actions, expectation of pleasureS will be a reason for members of S to approach what they believe to be its cause. 38. Allowing that pleasureS might not be the same phenomenology as pleasureH may seem to leave room for what I will call the ‘Jamesian specter’. This is a condition in which an organism approaches what is beneficial to it, but its ‘pleasureS’ is what we would call ‘displeasure’ or even ‘pain’. Thus, necessary processes such as breathing might be well performed, and thus contribute to survival, but all the while the organism is suffering unspeakable agony. 39. The possibility of the Jamesian specter is, however, not a consequence of the view I have been advocating. For consider that agony is, in us, inextricably tied with avoidance. If you imagine a scenario in which you are having X, and you have no imagined tendency to try to get rid of it, you are not imaging X as unpleasant. Of course, you can always use the word ‘agony’ in describing what you claim to imagine, but there will be nothing in your scenario that is actually imagined as unpleasant. To imagine the Jamesian specter is to imagine an organism in a state of struggle against its own nature. It tries as hard as it can to avoid taking that next breath, but its body is organized so that eventually such efforts are overruled and another wave of suffering arrives along with the life-sustaining oxygen. 11 J. Corabi (2008) has criticized my treatment of James. His key claims are that interactionism and physicalism make the hedonic/utility match more likely a priori than does epiphenomenalism (see pp. 84–85). These claims are, however, unsupported, and simply assume the falsity of claims for which I argued in my paper, and that Corabi explained clearly earlier in his paper (see pp. 80–81 and 82–83, and note 6 on p. 81.) B. Gertler (forthcoming) is correct in thinking (see her note 7) that Robinson (2007a) does not explain the hedonic/utility match. However, it did not claim to do so. The present effort aims to go beyond the 2007 paper in this respect.

Valence  175 But pleasureS, even if it is not pleasureH, has no such role. On the picture I have been presenting, pleasureS is the phenomenology of events in an organism’s ES, and those events are to be identified by discovering events that cause the rest of the RS to strengthen connections that lead to approach. If those events also caused the rest of the RS to strengthen connections that lead to avoidance of the same items, its owner would harbor a contradictory RS. Perhaps there could be a transitory condition of this sort, but unless it were soon resolved, it would detract from an organism’s fitness. If an RS were subject to rampant internal contradictions, its owner would be unfit. 40. The Jamesian specter may seem plausible if we think of pleasure and displeasure as sensations – for, in general, sensations are independently generable occurrences. They can be mixed and matched promiscuously, so there seems no obstacle to matching the smell of rotting flesh with pleasure, and the feeling of orgasm with displeasure – if we think of pleasure and displeasure as accompanying sensations. But we have seen that they are not sensations. 41. I do not like to rest my view heavily on cases of reactive dissociation or pain asymbolia, because I have not had such experiences myself, and I find them puzzling. The cases I have in mind are those in which subjects report that they have pains but do not mind them. Their reports include identifications of felt locations that correspond to locations of actual or incipient injuries, and intensities of their sensations that parallel seriousness of bodily damage. Reported intensity is thus not an index of how much they mind having a pain – they say they do not mind having it.12 42. However, if we accept reports in these cases at face value, it seems we must distinguish between a neural mechanism that causes pain sensations, and an affective system that corresponds to minding having sensations of that kind. The explanation of (at least some of) these cases would then be that the system that causes pain sensations is intact, but the affective system has been somehow put out of play. If we combine this distinction with the foregoing account, we get the following view. Pains (and displeasures more generally, and sensory pleasures) depend on two systems, a producer of sensations and an affective system. The latter system has two effects, (a) a tendency to cause the rest of the RS to strengthen/weaken connections that tend to lead to approach/avoidance regarding its causes (depending on the sign of the valence) and (b) a tendency to cause something phenomenological, i.e., pleasure or displeasure (in cases where the affective system tends to 12 The clearest cases – maybe the only true cases – are pain asymbolics (Grahek, 2007). These are included among the subjects who say they have pains but do not mind them.

176 Valence move the RS toward approach or toward avoidance, respectively). But if this is how these systems are, there will be one phenomenology of pleasure that will mostly correspond to what is beneficial (drunkenness being an exception), and one phenomenology of displeasure that will mostly correspond to what is detrimental. ‘Affective system’ is a term I borrowed from discussions of reactive dissociations. But I am not introducing a third system; it is, of course, the ES of the foregoing exposition. 43. In the foregoing, I have written of events in the ES causing events in the RS that tend to strengthen connections between causes of events in the ES and approach to those causes. In some cases, readers may think it would be more appropriate to think of the RS as tending to strengthen connections to behavior from what is believed to be the causes of pleasures. I agree. However, I think that in simple cases the distinction hardly matters. We are very good at holding causal beliefs that are true in simple cases such as what is making us cold or what will relieve our hunger. Of course, in cases where causes are connected to pleasant or unpleasant effects through long chains of causation, we will sometimes have false beliefs, and the RS can strengthen/weaken connections in ways that make our lives more difficult. 44. I will close this chapter by returning to the Jamesian argument stated in §35. I have not said explicitly why it fails, but I hope it will not be surprising to learn that I reject premise J5. That premise is prima facie extremely plausible, and an alternative to it is neither obvious nor easy to summarize. But the view I have advocated, starting with the discussion of reinforcement systems in §17, and including the account of how reference of valence terms is fixed, is an account that makes essential use of natural selection (see §39), yet does not attribute efficacy to pleasantness or unpleasantness.

Epilogue

1. We have now completed the description of the three areas of the epiphenomenalist outlook identified in my subtitle. A certain aspect of this outlook will be found objectionable by some, and the first task of this epilogue is to address this objection. The second task is to draw some consequences of the epiphenomenalist outlook that concern our responsibility and our attitudes to other people and to ourselves. These consequences are mostly familiar views for which others have argued in many ways that have little to do with epiphenomenalism. It is not my aim here to review the extensive literature concerning these views. My focus will be limited to exhibiting some connections between them and an epiphenomenalist outlook.

Dividing Mentality 2. The main theme of the epiphenomenalist outlook is that the proper understanding of our mentality requires a set of views about causation that can be roughly summarized by saying that our mentality is a gift from our brains. That is, our mentality is an effect of events in our brains, which latter are caused by earlier brain events and external events, none of which are themselves mental events. This rough summary applies to sensations, propositional attitudes, and valence. However, when we look at the arguments in these three areas, it is easy to see that they are quite different. Sensations are events, and thus of the right category to be causes; but causation in virtue of their qualitative properties is unneeded and implausible, since (a) neural explanations that do not appeal to qualia suffice (in principle) for explaining behavior, and (b) we have no theory that gives instances of qualia per se a causal role in the production of a neural (or any other physical) event. Propositional attitudes, by contrast, are, according to the account of this book, not events, and not the right kind of thing to be causes. Pleasure and displeasure are neither sensations nor propositional attitudes. We have just seen, however, that their position in the causal scheme of things is analogous to that of sensations: they are

178  Epilogue effects, but not causes, of certain brain events, which latter also causally contribute to our behavior. 3. This difference of treatment of the three divisions of our mentality will be seen by some as an objection to the account offered in this book. They may wonder whether there is anything in this account that could explain why all these divisions are in some sense ‘mental’. They may suggest that the hallmark of mentality is a combination of representational content and phenomenology, and that the unity of mind implied by a view that finds both of these in all instances of mentality is in itself a reason for preferring that kind of view. 4. I have no new argument to offer in resistance to these suggestions. I can only ask readers to review the arguments offered in this book, while bearing in mind the question whether they apply to all aspects of mentality. Consider, for example, that the treatment of sensations crucially involves the status of qualities. It is appropriate to ask whether qualities such as colors, scents, flavors, etc. are actually instantiated in our world, and, if so, what their instances consist in. But while ‘Jones believes p’ implies that there is an instance of believing that p, believing that p is not plausibly regarded as an instantiation of a quality in the same sense that instances of blue, or the taste of an orange are. Conversely, the treatment of believing the truth of some claim requires a background of dispositions that seems to have no analogue in what is required for a color or flavor experience to occur.1 To the extent that the arguments offered along the way in this book seem cogent, the fact that in general they apply to some aspects of our mentality but not to others should be regarded as supporting a view of mentality that recognizes significant differences in its various aspects. 5. One can accept what I have just said and still worry that there ought to be some explanation of how disparate items can all seem naturally regarded as being of the same kind. I do not claim to be an historian of words in general or of ‘mental’ in particular. There is, however, an obvious explanation for why sensations, propositional attitudes, and valence should be grouped together that is compatible with the existence of significant differences among them. This explanation is that our three divisions all have a pair of salient relations to knowledge. First, in all three cases, we do not find out what is rightly attributed to us in the same way that we find out how things are in the world around us. We do not observe our bodies or what is outside them in order to know what sensations we are having, what we believe or want, or what pleases or displeases us.

1 This point of difference holds even if one thinks there is also a phenomenology of believing.

Epilogue  179 Secondly, and of course relatedly, our knowledge of our own sensations, propositional attitudes, likes, and dislikes is more secure than our knowledge of those matters in other people. 2 One might object that this explanation merely relocates the problem. One can now ask why we should be tempted speak of ‘knowledge’ in all these cases. There seems, however, to be an easy answer to this question. In all these cases, we make indicative reports, and we can sensibly ask whether those reports are true, and how likely we are to be right when we inwardly or overtly affirm them. If we believe we are highly likely to be right, we thereby have good reason to use ‘knowledge’ in describing our relation to such reports. There is no general presumption that sentences that are known to be true must be about topics that share a nature. There is thus no reason to suppose that items that share two relations to knowledge should also share any properties other than those that follow strictly from their being possible objects of knowledge. One may concede this point, but ask why it should seem to us that we know what sensations we have. I am willing to summarize my answer to this question: The background required for the ability to report (to oneself or to others) one’s own sensations guarantees that in normal conditions, those reports are true. This answer should not be surprising, in light of remarks in Chapter 1, §2, and the discussion of Chapter 4. Our learning of words for phenomenal qualities is dependent on our learning of words for properties of perceived things, and the relations that maintain the correct use of those words in the latter case also contribute to maintaining their correct use in the former case. There is, however, much more support for this answer, and it requires carefully formulated arguments that I do not know how to summarize without severely reducing their plausibility. They can be found in Robinson (2004, 2006a, 2012, 2013). These arguments focus on sensations and do not mention valence, but I believe they can be easily extended to apply to our knowledge of what we find pleasant or unpleasant. 6. An anonymous reviewer has noted that “most of the time I form beliefs which have the same content as my perceptual experience”, and has suggested that my division of the mental makes it difficult for me to make sense of this fact (and perhaps even to state it). I take ‘perceptual experience’ to be a hybrid term. For us to have a perceptual experience, we must have a sensation. (Typically these are complex.) We must also make a judgment (typically effortless and unavoidable) that a certain kind of object or situation is present. According to my account, these are cases in which, normally, (a) an impingement on 2 This claim does not imply incorrigibility in our own case. In the second chapter of Robinson (1988) I have described several ways of not being incorrigible – and only one, highly restricted sense in which our mental self-reports can be said to be incorrigible.

180  Epilogue our sense organs initiates a causal process, some part of which causes a sensation. (b) That same process also results in new events in our already organized neural systems, such that we are able to respond appropriately to the perceived object or situation (including, but not limited to, reporting on it). (c) It is not usual for us to attend to our experience as such, but if occasion demands it, we are normally able to do so, and to report what experience we have. (d) When we do report on our experience as such, the qualities mentioned normally correspond in a regular way to properties that we attribute to objects in our perceptual judgments. (For example, if we take lighting conditions to be normal, the colors in our experiences will be correctly indicated by the same words that we would use in describing the colors of the objects we take ourselves to be seeing – which, if conditions are in fact normal, will be the correct color words for those objects.) (e) One aspect of our brains’ organization is that, after some experience in the world, impingements on sense organs that cause sensations with a relatively narrow set of qualities also cause perceptual judgments that attribute a richer set of properties. (For example, the qualities in my visual experience are colors and spatial properties and relations, but my perceptual judgments attribute properties such as being a bird, a tree, a house, and so on.)3 (f) Perceptual judgments on matters of sufficient importance may be remembered. They may make a lasting difference to our brains’ organization, and if so, we have beliefs about what we have perceived (in the indefinite past, or at some particular time in the past). This account attributes to us brain operations of which we have little present understanding, but I do not see any incoherence, or philosophical problem in it. It provides an illustration of a more general point, namely, that a properly integrated account does not require that the items in that account be all of the same type. It is quite enough if disparate items have intelligible relations to each other, and especially if their causal and epistemological relations share common themes. I believe the account given in this book satisfies that description.

Control Redux 7. It will be useful to begin our discussion of responsibility with a few salient points that are either evident or have been supported earlier in this book. Our behavior (nonlinguistic and linguistic) is caused by our sensory inputs and the organization of our brains. Sensations are caused by brain events that also causally contribute to further events in our brains. Beliefs and desires are global states of our brains. Brain processes 3 There is a large literature on the question of just which concepts can enter into judgments that are properly considered to be perceptual. This controversy is not a problem here because many answers to that question are compatible with a narrow view of which qualities are instantiated in sensations.

Epilogue  181 that lead to our behavior are not available to conscious inspection. What we believe and desire at a given time are facts about our brain organization at that time. Our actions are symptoms of our brains’ organization. 8. With the possible exception of some quantum mechanically indeterminate micro-events, our brains are caused to be in the state they are in. Some of that causation is genetic, some epigenetic, some nutritional. Some is due to experience. Some is due to experience that is partially caused by our actions. That is, when we alter the world, we will generally experience that alteration (we can usually see, hear, etc. what we do); and we will experience some of its physical (direct or indirect) consequences, which may or may not have been anticipated; and we may experience criticism, praise, or questioning from others. Receptions of stimuli that have been caused (however indirectly) by our actions cause alterations in our brains. Of course, changes in the world that happened independently of our actions also cause impingements on our sense organs that also cause changes in the organization of our brains. The nature of those changes depends not only on the inputs, but on the state of organization of our brains when those inputs are received. 9. In Chapter 8 we saw some limitations on the extent of our control. We need not deny that we control many of our actions, for we often satisfy the two necessary conditions for being in control that I identified: We know what we are going to do, and what happens would have been different if we had believed or desired differently in relevant respects. But we do not control the organization of our brains, and we do not control inputs (except in the very limited sense that doing something will ordinarily result in perceptions of changes in nearby objects that we anticipate, and that would have been different if we had wanted or believed differently, and thus had acted differently). 10. The possible quantum mechanical exception makes no difference to these points about control. We do not know beforehand how a quantum mechanically indeterminate situation will resolve itself, and its resolution would not reliably have been different if we have believed or wanted differently. (Even on views according to which consciousness causes collapse of the wave function, our consciousness does not determine which state will be collapsed to.) 11. Putting §§9 and 10 together leads to the conclusion that while we control many of our actions, we are not in control of who we are when we do them. That is, our actions are products of current inputs and our organized brain, but (except in the very limited sense explained in §9) we do not control our inputs, and we do not control the organization of our brains.

182  Epilogue There is one very special exception to this generally correct picture. It is possible to voluntarily place oneself under the control of others for the purpose of changing one’s character. For example, one might despise one’s lack of organization and reason that joining the army would likely result in one’s becoming a more focused and capable person. Signing the papers in such a case would be an action that would normally be under one’s control, and would have as its aim a significant change in who one would eventually be. If the desired improvement actually arrives, we could say that one’s action changed one’s self. Such cases are few; and even in these cases, it is not under one’s control that one believed that military service would result in a positive change in one’s character. Nor is it under one’s control that one was sufficiently motivated to sign up despite the risks.

Self-Causation? 12. It may be tempting at this point to invoke the idea of self-causation. Now, there is one sense of this term that is unobjectionable. The special case just described is one example that might be described as causing one’s (later) self. More generally, if I act at t1, that will have consequences, and some of these will result in new inputs that can change the state of my brain at t2. Some of these consequences may be trivial (e.g., I will be caused to remember what I have done). Others may be highly significant if, for example, they result in punishment that eventually leads to a genuine change of heart. All of these cases illustrate how I can be a causal factor in the production of myself at t2 – i.e., the organization of my brain at t1, plus inputs to which I causally contributed, causally contribute to the state of organization of my brain at t2. In this sense, however, I am not in control of who I am when I act, because I was not in control of who I was at t1, and thus not in control of what changes would occur in me that are due to inputs falling upon a brain that is organized in that way. I am also not, in general, able to anticipate the consequences of my actions in such detail that I can aim to cause particular kinds of changes in my future self and have a reasonable expectation of success. So, in general, I am not in control of who I will be at t2. 13. If the idea of self-causation is to make any real difference to our understanding of our relation to ourselves, it must be interpreted in some stronger way. It is doubtful, however, that there is any coherent alternative way of thinking of self-causation of either one’s actions or of oneself. Significant actions are done in a context that calls them forth. An act of kindness depends on the perception of someone’s need, an act of revenge springs from perception of a wrong, an act of giving into temptation depends on realizing that a desired but forbidden item is available. Reasoned decisions to do a particular action can be made only in light of knowledge of relevant circumstances. So, reasoned decisions have to

Epilogue  183 come after the time at which relevant circumstances become known. Evidently, they must come before the actions that we decide to do. Thus, reasoned decisions to act in a particular way occur at some time between the realization of relevant circumstances and the action. This definite location in time qualifies them as events. To propose self-causation of actions that we decide to do for reasons is thus to propose causation of events by one’s self. Now, either (a) the self has existed for some time before it causes an event, or (b) the coming into the existence of the causing self is an immediate temporal predecessor of what it causes. (a) In this case, self-causation cannot be simply and solely causation by the existence of a self. The reason is that in this case, the self has existed for some time without a decision or an action having resulted. It must be that the coming to know facts on which the reason for an action depends ‘triggers’ one’s self to cause one’s decision to act in a particular way. This triggering can be conceived in either of two ways. (a1) Recognition of relevant circumstances initiates a series of events in the self that eventuates in the decision. Now, the events in this series are either caused or not caused. If they are not caused, they are not under the control of the self (barring clairvoyance, the self cannot know in advance what they will be), and so this version of self-causation will undercut control of our decisions by our selves. If these events are caused, however, then the appeal to self-causation has not made any dialectical advance. The view will be equivalent to one that says our self is an organized brain, and actions are produced by certain inputs (namely, those that result in recognition of relevant facts) falling upon a brain that is in a particular state of organization. The same result appears if we conceive triggering as (a2) the triggering without intervening events of a disposition of the self to cause a particular decision or action upon receiving a certain body of relevant information about its circumstances. Structurally, this is the same view that we get if we say that an organized brain is in a state of readiness to cause a particular action, A, upon receiving certain information, without having to go through intermediate processing steps. What about alternative (b)? If the self arises only just before a decision, the self did not control its being in existence; nor did it control the dispositional state that that self would be in. Adding such a self gives no dialectical advantage; it is a complication that makes no dialectical difference and that should fall to Occam’s razor. 14. The conclusion I draw from §13 is that self-causation cannot add anything by way of control regarding our decisions. Our actions often satisfy necessary conditions for control: we know in advance what we are aiming at, and (in normal cases) what we do would have been different if we had aimed differently. But we do not know in advance what our decisions will be. We aim to make a decision, but we do not aim to make a particular decision. We do not control our decisions. And, with

184  Epilogue the innocuous exceptions noted earlier, we do not control who we are when we make our decisions. 15. The last conclusion of the preceding section can be arrived at more simply. It is evident to everyone that we do not control what genes we have, nor do we control what kind of parenting we received, nor what nutrition was provided to us in our early years. Control over our actions is gradually acquired. By the time we have control of some of our actions, we already have a brain that is organized in some way, and that, together with current inputs, produces those actions. The consequences we receive – from the inanimate world and from parents, teachers, other children, and so on – are mostly not under our control. To a very large extent, we do not know what effects our actions will have on our future selves; so, we are not in control of the next states of our brains’ ­organization – that is, the organization that will, in conjunction with inputs we receive, that are also largely not under our control, produce our next actions, and so on.

Responsibility 16. If we are not in control of something, we are not responsible for it. With the few exceptions noted earlier, we are not in control of who we are. So, apart from a few exceptional cases, we are not responsible for who we are at any given time. 17. The first premise of the argument in §16 may be challenged by noting that there is no abuse of language involved in advising someone that they ought to change themselves. “You should try to be more diligent.” “You should learn to control your impulses.” These and other injunctions are not nonsense; indeed, they may be pieces of good advice. But those who receive such advice are in a certain state when it is received. Whether such advice will take root depends on that current state, which is not under their control, and on other circumstances, which are also not under their control. Further, in order to act on such advice, one must particularize it, so that one does a particular action at a particular time. We saw, in Chapter 8, that we are not in control of what occurs to us. Thus, whether or not it will occur to a person that a particular occasion offers a particular opportunity for doing something that will strengthen a disposition toward diligence, or reduce impulsivity, depends on the state of their current brain organization; and for that, they are not responsible. 18. Many of our actions meet the two necessary conditions for control. So, unless some further necessary conditions are not met, many of our actions may be under our control. If there are obstacles to regarding ourselves as responsible for our actions, they are at least different from the obstacles to responsibility for who we are that I have been pointing out. Lack of responsibility for who we are does not imply lack of responsibility for our actions.

Epilogue  185 19. More positively, it seems to me that the background summarized earlier in this chapter is fully consistent with our accepting responsibility for our actions and holding others responsible for their actions. I take accepting responsibility and holding others responsible to imply the legitimacy of criticizing actions, praising and blaming agents for their actions, and rewarding and punishing them.4 These practices are not guaranteed to have their desired effects, but they have them often enough to maintain a social fabric that seems necessary for a good life. 20. It is important to keep clear about the distinction between (non) responsibility for who one is, and responsibility for what one does. The importance of this distinction becomes evident if we consider what happens if we are not clear. Blame and punishment are appropriate for the doer of actions that cause unpleasantness for others. If we focus on the action, we will think that an appropriate punishment should be proportional to the action, and serve the needs of deterrence, restitution, or protection from further injurious actions. If, however, we think that people are responsible for who they are, we may think of the punishment as directed at the person, not the action. This shift in focus may decrease attention to proportionality, and thus result in acceptance of unduly harsh punishments. Withholding of blame and punishment is appropriate regarding who a person is at the time of an action. If we are confused about the distinction between being who one is, and one’s actions, we may come to think that punishment is not an appropriate response to actions that cause unpleasantness for others. In that case, recommended punishments may be unfairly light.

Attitudes 21. The important distinction in §20 is difficult for us to keep clear. The explanation of this difficulty lies in some reflections on the emotions of resentment for wrongs done to oneself and indignation for wrongs done to others. 5 Like other emotions, these can be felt with inappropriate strength; but in their proper place they are useful in responding to unfair threats or instances of violence, and to unfair withholdings of benefits.6

4 One could use ‘praise’ and ‘blame’ in such a way as to imply that when actions are praiseworthy or blameworthy, the people who do them must be responsible for who they are. That usage would make nonsense of the view I am explaining, and is evidently not intended here. There is ample further content to these terms; e.g., implication of dispositions to benefit those who act well, or withhold benefit from those who do not. 5 Thanks to Margaret Holmgren for calling my attention to the importance of these emotions; and for an excellent, though somewhat different, treatment of them in Holmgren (2015). 6 The following account owes much to the view of anger given in Sell et al. (2009).

186  Epilogue In a community where individuals have many interactions over a long period of time, it is likely to be beneficial for individual fitness, and perhaps for fitness of the community, if there is a reasonable expectation that wrongs may be met with compensatory future consequences. It thus seems natural for people to remember past wrongs, and adjust their future behavior accordingly. For example, they may avoid bullies, or arrange circumstances in which ill-gotten benefits are subsequently offset, or react to unfair withholdings of benefits by comparable future withholdings of their own. Such responses to wrongs, however, have a cost. They may involve risk of further violence against oneself, and in any case they require planning and effort. If it is beneficial for such costs to be incurred, it would also be beneficial to have an emotion that would overcome tendencies to avoid those costs. It is thus understandable that humans should have developed the emotion of resentment, i.e., an emotion that stiffens their resolve to undertake actions to compensate for losses perceived by them to be unjust. If one observes another being mistreated, one may fear that one will be the next victim. If the mistreated other is one’s relative or friend, one may feel diminished even apart from fear for oneself. As with personal wrongs, redress has actual and potential costs. It is thus plausibly beneficial to individuals and groups to have an emotion that impels one to incur the planning costs, efforts, and risks involved in trying to ensure that ill-gotten gains are somehow offset. When the wrongs are to others, this emotion is indignation. 22. Those who are not fans of evolutionary psychology may be suspicious of the foregoing account. However, even if one rejects the implicit origin story, it should still seem plausible that resentment and indignation do mobilize resolve for efforts toward redress. And it should also seem plausible that such resolve is an appropriate response; i.e., a response that offers some resistance to domination by those who are physically strong, or devoid of conscience, or in an unusually favorable position to withhold benefits due to others. 23. We are now in a position to address the question implicit in §21: Why is it difficult for us to keep clear about the distinction between (non)responsibility for who one is, and responsibility for one’s actions? The answer is that resentment and indignation are by nature unspecific as to the actions that will express them. They are triggered by a perceived wrong; thus they cannot prevent the wrong that triggers them. They must be directed toward future actions. But which actions those will be depends on many particular circumstances. What unites these multifarious possibilities is that they are all ways of somehow getting back at the perpetrator of the perceived wrong.

Epilogue  187 It thus seems easy for resentment and indignation to come to be directed against the perpetrator. Especially in cases where there is more than one past action that is a cause for grievance, the aim will be to bring down a perpetrator in some way (whatever way may present itself). If that happens, attention will be diverted from proportionality, and perpetrators may come to be regarded as bad persons. When that attitude is reached the distinction between blame for who one is, and blame for one’s particular actions will be difficult to maintain. This difficulty is, of course, not a justification for failing to keep the distinction clear. It is an explanation of how resentment and indignation can easily lead us into inappropriate attitudes, despite their being useful and appropriate when properly targeted. 24. I shall end by briefly identifying some further attitudes toward ourselves and others that are appropriate, given the general epiphenomenalist outlook that this book has advocated.7 Since people are not responsible for who they are, they deserve compassion, if they are in an unfortunate state of organization. This compassion should extend even to the worst criminal, and should remain in place even as punishment for actions is administered. We have seen in §23 why this combination of attitudes is not easy to maintain, but that is no argument against the appropriateness of that combination. Those who are in a good state of organization are fortunate, and it is appropriate to recommend emulating them. It is no detraction from respect to say that they are not responsible for who they are, and that therefore they do not deserve praise for their fortunate state. The fortunate are entitled to take pleasure in their accomplishments, but if they feel proud about being who they are, they are not as fortunate as they believe themselves to be. If we think we are in a fortunate state, our proper attitude toward ourselves would be humility. There is no virtue in false modesty about the goodness of one’s state, but regarding who one is as deserving the kind of praise that would be appropriate for a good action would be a mistake. If we think we are in an unfortunate state, we should have compassion toward ourselves. I am unaware of a word for this attitude, but it surely excludes guilt for who we are. This attitude is compatible with feeling intense regret for some action we have done, with resolving to avoid doing a comparable action in the future, and with doing actions that we believe will lead to better future states of ourselves. 7 Much of what might be added to the following remarks has been said very well, and supported independently of epiphenomenalist assumptions, in the last chapter of Pereboom (2001).

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Index

Aaronson, S. 41n aboutness 126; see also intentionality acquaintance 62n agony 173–174 Anastassiou, C. A. 7 animals 66–67, 83n, 103, 112–14, 123, 130, 148n, 173 Antony, L. 91n appearances 26, 71 arrangements 7, 55–57 artificial intelligence 90, 122, 123; regular/premium 122, 122n; strong/ weak 122n artificial neural network (ANN) 90, 90n, 139n aspectuality 69, 158–59 associationism 86 attention 64, 68–69 155, 171, 185, 187 attitudes (non-propositional) 67, 71–72, 75, 167, 177, 185, 187 attitudinal views 161–162 automaton theory 172–173 aware(ness) 8, 24, 30, 59, 69–71, 97, 98, 101, 107, 140, 163 Aydede, M. 156n Baars, B. J. 153, 154n Bain, D. 168–172 Balzac, H. de 112 Bekoff, M. 148n beliefs/believing 27, 45, 61, 71–2, 76–88, 91–116, 128–30, 158, 159n, 162–63, 172, 176, 178–82; ___ box 80–82; explicit 83n; occurrent 76–79, 93, 109 Bergmann, G. 162 Berkeley, G. 63 binding 69 Bird, A. 20n, 43

Blackmon, J. 136n blame 185, 187 Block, N. 15–16, 17n, 18, 22, 119–21 brain in a vat (BIV) hypothesis 70, 71 broadcast metaphor 153–54, 155n canning 120–22 caring 134, 169 categorical (bases, properties) 44, 77, 106–07 causal closure 47, 56, 92 Causal Intuition 54 causal powers 91 causal-relation space 20 causation 6, 10, 12, 34, 42, 46, 48–49, 53, 58–60, 83n, 87n, 126, 177, 181; self-___ 182–84; and time 31, 46, 59; see also mental causation cerebellum 33, 34, 117, 121 Chalmers, D. J. 3n, 32, 35n, 136n chaos 58 Chinese Room Argument 124–25, 138 Chirimuuta, M. 4n Chisholm, R. M. 14, 80n, 101n, 126 Clark, Andy 9, 86n, 162 Clark, Austen 38n cognitive phenomenology 29–30, 73–74, 74n, 78n, 111–16, 155, 160–161, 178n color space 19–21 compassion 187 complexity 10, 13, 25–26, 36n, 41, 48; of reasons, 80; and simplicity (CAS) 32–33, 33n, 34–35; SR 35–41, 43, 48n, 57–59, 117, 121–23; structural, 160–61 compression waves 22, 26, 95 computation 87, 136–39 computers 87–90, 119–21, 122n, 123–25, 138–39n

198 Index conation 111 ConCAS 32–33, 38–41, 44, 57–58, 117, 121 conceivability 1 concept 11–14, 106n, 109–10, 112–15 confidence 104–05, 115; feeling of 74n, 112, 155, 160–61 connectome 88 conscious(ness) 1, 8, 15–16, 24–25, 29, 30, 34n, 35n, 36, 41–42, 56, 59, 78–79, 121, 143, 146, 155, 158–60; episode of 2–5, 8, 24, 29, 67–68; and Global Workspace 153–154; Hard Problem of 29, 32; and quantum mechanics 49–52, 181; robotic 117–18, 133–136; see also unconscious constitution 10–11, 13, 17, 20, 24n, 36, 55–56, 65, 85, 106, 111, 114, 116 construction (from) 12, 23–24, 27, 43; see also reduction content 57, 74, 80, 110, 111–114, 169, 171, 178–79, 185n continuity: of change, 60; homogeneity 26; mathematical 89 control 140–143, 180–184 Corabi, J. 172n, 174n correlation 6, 15, 16, 32, 42, 49, 86n, 109–110, 126 Crick, F. 43n Dänzer, L. 82 Davidson, D. 128 Dehaene, S. 155n dendro-dendritic connections 6, 77, 86, 88 Dennett, D. C. 9, 63n, 72, 157 depth 63–65 Descartes, R. 73, 109n, 118n decisions 182–84 desires/desiring 27, 45, 61, 76–93, 94–116, 128, 130, 132, 157, 159n, 162, 169–70, 180–82; box 80, 82 diplomacy cases 149–50 dispositions 4n, 70–72, 77–79, 101, 105, 106, 129–33, 151, 178, 183, 184, 185n; of animals 67–68; essentialism 43–44; and valence 161–62 distancing 71–73, 75 dreams 30, 36, 73; lucid 73n Dretske, F. 14, 83n, 109–111

dualism 1, 4–6, 11–15, 18, 24, 26, 29–44, 60, 117; of events 8; of properties 5; of substances 5n, 7 ‘ectoplasm’ 5n, 8, 24n EEG 50 electron 7, 39, 54, 56–57 Eliza 119 emotions 1, 74, 111, 114–116, 134, 144n, 155, 158, 185–86 enteric nervous system 33 entire-mentality view 84–86, 90–91, 109 epiphenomenalism 45–61, 79, 92–93, 116, 156, 160n,172, 174, 177 equipotentiality thesis 86 error theory 3–4 essentialism 39, 43–44 ‘evaluation’ system (ES) 163–68, 174–76 evaluativism 168–72 events: brain (neural) 4–11, 16–20, 22, 24–26, 30–41, 43, 45–49, 52–53, 57–60, 64, 66, 78, 89, 116, 117, 121, 139, 152–53, 155, 164–65, 172, 177–78, 180; mental 45, 76, 110, 177; qualitative 4–6, 10, 23, 29n, 30–31, 33n, 40, 52, 62, 117 evolution 60, 128, 130, 163, 172–73, 186 expectations 70–1, 95–104, 107–09, 111, 116, 130, 140, 144, 162–63, 174, 186 experiences 2–4, 7–10, 15, 19–20, 26, 42–43, 50–51, 60, 62–75, 121, 134, 157, 167, 168, 170–73, 178–80 experiential realism 63n explanation: and generality 40; and identities 16, 42; illusion of 106n; inference to best 11–16, 40–41; and location 34; non-extensionality of 12; and simplicity 15, 48 expression (of thoughts) 94, 126, 143–50, 161 extensional relations 11–14, 27, 126 extrinsic assignability 136–38 familiarity (feeling of) 74n, 112, 116, 144n, 155, 160–61 fear 170–71, 186 Feldman, J. A. 89

Index  199 Fields, R. D. 7 Fodor, J. A. 12n, 14, 152n Friston, K. 86n, 162–63 functionalism 17–21, 165–66, 172 fundamental physical entities/ properties 11, 44, 54–55 Galilei, G. 2 Gallistel, C. R. 152n Gauker, C. 95n Geach, P. T. 80, 96, 101–02, 109 Gertler, B. 174n gifts (from brain) vii, 142, 177 glia 6, 47, 77, 79, 86, 88 global workspace (GW) metaphor 153–55 Gödel, K. 51n Goldman, A. I. 107 Goldstein, I. 167 Gordon, R. 107 Grahek, N. 175n grain argument 26n ground 56–57, 58, 81, 84, 86–87 Hameroff, S. 6, 49–52 Hard Problem 1, 29, 32, 38, 43–44, 52 hedonic tone 156n higher order thought (HOT) 24–25 Holmgren, M. ix, 185n homogeneity 26n Hume, D. 142 humility 187 Hunh? feeling 68–71 identities 15–16, 32, 42; a posteriori 15–16, 53; gappy 16n identity theory 9–16, 121 images 30, 70, 74, 78–79, 143–44, 155 imagining 30, 33, 56, 71, 74, 107, 111, 114, 115, 157, 174 imitation game 121 imperativism 168, 169 incorrigibility 179 indicators, 21, 83n indignation 185–87 inference to the best explanation 16, 41 inner speech 33, 70, 74, 78–79, 111, 113, 115–16, 129, 140, 142–43, 146–48, 155, 160 insula 87, 88

integrated information theory (IIT) 41–43 intelligence 117–24, 134–35, 138, 155; see also artificial intelligence intentionality 68, 126–28, 136; naturalizing 14, 27, 126–27, 133, 152; original 143–45; quasi-158, 166; representation as 27, 127, 151 intentions 83 interactionism 47–49, 52, 56, 92, 174n internal relations 19 introspection 109, 113 intuition(s) 38, 41n, 52, 152; Causal 54; of distinctness 16; re ‘matching’ 148–49; re mental causation, 84–85, 104–05 irony 99–100 Ishihara, S. 2n Itano, W. M. 51 James, W. 60–61, 156, 172–176 Jamesian specter 174–75 John, E. R. 153 Kim, J. 15, 29, 82n, 91n Kind, A. 66n King, J-R. 155n Koch, C. 34n, 59 Kovács, G. 36 Kriegel, U. 111–15 Lake, B. M. 86n, 90n language 3, 67, 71, 86n, 95–104, 106, 130–32, 140, 144–48, 153n, 160 Laplace, P-S. 58–59, 138 laws 31–32, 34–35, 38–40, 48–49, 55–59, 83n, 84, 87, 90, 118, 138–39, 172–73 learning 49, 86n, 95, 97, 102, 104, 130, 132, 147, 163, 179 Levine, J. 16n lies 96, 102–103, 110, 135, 145 Llinas, R. 90 location 7–8, 29, 34, 36, 64, 85, 175 Locke, J. 1–5, 18 Low, K. 36 magnetic field 7 Mangan, B. 160n match: hedonic/utility 173, 174n; of words and meaning 144–50, 155

200 Index McFadden, J. 6 meaning 74, 78n, 99, 113, 125, 126, 128, 130–133, 143–144, 146–47, 149, 153n, 155, 166, 172 measurement problem 49 Melnyk, A. 91n memory 47, 64, 69, 132, 150–51, 180 mental act 62n, 112–13, 126 mental causation 61, 76–93, 104–107, 177 mental paint 22–23, 65n, 72, 168 mental states 4, 76–77, 80–84, 122n, 144 metamers 4n microtubules 6, 50–51 Miller, J. O. 36 ‘mind stuff’ 8 Minimum Arbitrariness Principle (MAP) 38–41, 44, 58, 60, 117 Misra, B. 51n modalities (sensory) 1, 35–36 modes of access 13, 15 modules 86–88, 154 monadic property 13, 19–20, 137n moral judgments 108–09, 136n motor array 123, 148n Muilenberg, G. 27n muscle fibers 53 necessity 15, 58–59; a posteriori 40; appearance of 157; a priori 39 networks: artificial (ANNs) 90; causal 18, 132; neural 88, 142, 154; of relations 19, 111, 131, 133, 145, 152 neural code 154 neural correlates of consciousness 26, 34, 35n, 36, 38, 49 Newman, M. H. A. 137n Newton, I. 34 Nisbett, R. E. 85 Noether, E. 40n noncognitivism 108–09 non-reductive physicalism 92 non-sensory phenomenology 160–61 normativity 130 N-properties 10 Occam’s razor 15, 183 Oizumi, M. 41 Orch OR 49–51 pain 31, 56, 64, 97, 121, 130, 134, 136, 166–75 Papineau, D. 16

parsimony 48–49, 57 Penrose, R. 6, 49–52 perception 3, 19, 23, 25, 51, 62, 66, 77n, 129, 154n, 168, 180; erroneous, 73 perceptual experience 66, 179 perceptual judgments 19, 180 Pereboom, D. 187n Pettit, P. 9 phenomenal qualities, see qualia phenomenal realism 9, 194 ‘phenomenal red’ 3 phenomenalism 102n physicalism 12–13, 16, 23, 25–28, 34–36. 40, 47, 52–53, 92, 174n pin impression toy 37, 59n Pinker, S. 87 pleasure (and displeasure) 60, 69, 93, 116, 134, 136, 156–176; false 158 Pockett, S. 6 pointfulness 135–36 pool table picture 85, 92–93, 105–06, 162 praise 181, 185n, 187 pretending 71–72 Price, H. H. 64 proportionality 185, 187 propositional attitudes 45, 61, 74n, 111–14, 161, 164, 177–79 protophenomenal qualities 54–57 pseudo-relation 126 punishment 182, 185, 187 qualia (phenomenal qualities) 1, 4–11, 18–19, 22–24, 26, 29–32, 35, 38–39, 43–44, 46, 48–50, 52–57, 62, 66, 117, 133, 143–44, 157, 177–79, 180 qualitataive event realism (QER) 5–10, 21–23, 26, 28, 61–62 quality space 24, 38; color 19–21 quantum mechanics 34, 47–51, 53, 83n, 138–39, 181 quasi-quotational view 94–102, 106–07, 116 Rathkopf, C. A 88n reactive dissociation 175–76 realization: physical 15, 20, 77, 80, 82–84, 86n, 90–92, 105–106, 116, 159n; sudden 73 reasons (for actions) 77, 79–80, 85, 93, 96, 159, 161–62, 166–70, 172, 174, 182–83 receptivities 83n

Index  201 recurrent pathway 53 reduction 12, 24, 27, 101; of predictive error 163; see also construction (from); non reductive physicalism; Orch OR reference fixing 166, 176 reflectance (percentages, profiles) 3, 4n, 11, 22–23, 26 regress 43–44, 139, 146–47, 149–50, 152, 154, 155 reinforcement system (RS) 163–68, 174–176 relevance 125, 142–43 reports 151, 155, 156, 179–80; of beliefs 84–85, 99–101; of lucid dreams 73n; of sensations or qualities 17, 36, 46–49, 54, 175 ‘representational’ art 22, 63, 72 representationalism 21–24, 27, 65–66, 72, 168–71 representations 21–22, 34n, 43, 81, 86n, 151–53, 158, 178; and misrepresentation 65, 127, 151, 158 resemblance (see also similarity) 142 resentment 185–87 responsibility 180, 184–87 Richardson, R. C. 27n Robbie 30 Robinson, W. S. 5, 9, 10, 15, 16n, 24, 27n, 28, 29n, 32, 40, 45n, 49n, 51n, 54, 55, 62, 73, 74n, 78n, 82n, 85n, 89n, 95n, 124, 129n, 139n, 152n, 155, 156, 160, 172, 173, 174n, 179 robot 30, 117–139, 144, 145, 165, 169 Rosenthal, D. 20n, 24–25 rotten egg smell (RES) 11–15 Russell, B. 3n, 53, 62, 63, 72, 137n Russellian monism (RM) 53–57 Ryle, G. 80, 101–102, 156, 157 scanning 88 Schaffer, J. 7n Schriner ix Searle, J. 122n, 124–26, 135, 136–139, 144, 155 Seager, W. ix, 39n Segal, G. M. A. 86n selection (natural) 11–12, 173–176 SELL 11–15, 16, 20, 23n, 32 Sell, A. 185n Sellars, W. 14, 19, 26–27n, 44, 126, 131, 153n

sensations 1–28, 33–36, 45–49, 52–62, 79, 109n, 116, 121, 124, 133, 143, 177–80; as events 30–31; and Hard Problem 32, 38–41; and intelligence 122; and location 29, 64; and robots 117–18, 125, 134–36; and valence 116, 156–59, 169, 172, 175, 177 sense-contents 101n sense data 62–64 sensory array 123, 148n sequences (of brain events) 9, 10, 26, 58–60 Shai, A. S. 7 Shoemaker, S. 90–91 Shoppie 118–119, 125, 127, 135, 145 Siewert, C. 73–74 similarity 19, 35–36, 38–40, 60 142; essentialism 39; of themes 73 simplicity 15, 53, 60, 149; relative 25–26, 38, 48; see also complexity, parsimony simulation 107 Smart, J. J. C. 38 smells 26, 64, 157, 175 sounds 1, 21, 34–36, 42, 64, 88, 158 spatiality 29, 59, 64, 160–61 spatial relations 23, 29, 54, 142, 154n, 180 spike triggering zone 89, 139 Stalnaker, R. 15–17 states 41–43, 58–59, 89, 117, 145, 162–63, 169–71, 174, 187; brain (neural) 24, 52, 59–60, 79, 80–86, 90, 91, 94, 102, 147–48, 150, 166, 168, 180–84; computational 136–38; mental (or conscious) 4, 25, 68–69, 71, 76–77, 83–84, 91, 111, 122n, 144, 180; metastable 155n; quantum 49–52, 181 structure problem 155n, 160 subset view 90–91 substance 5, 7–8, 31n substantivalism 7n Sudarshan, E. C. G. 51 sudden realization cases 73–74 supervenience 84n Swampman 128–132 symptoms 85n, 94, 102, 105–06, 181 synapses 2, 47, 49, 52, 77, 79, 86, 88, 89, 139, 159, 164, 166 tacit (expectations, knowledge) 95–96, 99–104, 107–08, 110, 130, 132–33, 140, 144–45

202 Index taking seriously 67–68, 72–73, 75 tastes 1, 26, 35, 36, 64, 157–158, 159, 164 teleology 12 tess (Texas chess) 19–20, 44, 131 thalamus 59 Thatcher, R. W. 153 thick properties 60 thoughts 19, 24–25, 126, 132, 136, 151–53, 155, 160; controlling 140–143; expressing 143–50, 161 three-dimensionality 62–66, 71, 75 time intervals 5, 6, 10, 29, 31, 36, 37, 42, 58–59, 60, 91, 139 Tononi, G. 41–43 transparency (of experience) 22, 61, 62, 65–66, 72, 75 Turing, A. 118–121, 124 Tye, M. 15, 21 ultimately extensional relations 12–13, 27 uMAP 38–41, 44, 58, 117

unconscious: expectations 70–71, 95, 107; occurrent beliefs 79; organization 33, 116; processing 33, 34–35, 107, 140–155, 164; thoughts 144, 155 understanding 74, 78n, 117, 124–25, 127–36, 138, 144, 145, 154 V4 59, 87 valence 36n, 60, 112, 144n, 155, 156–176, 177–79 Van Orden, G. C. 88n Venus 14 water 10, 11, 16–17, 40 Watson 121–22 Wegner, D. M. 85 Weizenbaum, J. 119 Wilson, T. D. 85 Wittgenstein, L. 170 Wright, J. 173n Wundt, W. 48 Zeki, S. 59 Zeno effect 51