The mind/body problem is the feeling/function problem (Harnad 2001). The only way to "solve" it is to provide a causal/functional explanation of how and why we feel...
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Monday, September 2, 2019
10b. Harnad, S. (unpublished) On Dennett on Consciousness: The Mind/Body Problem is the Feeling/Function Problem
Harnad, S. (unpublished) On Dennett on Consciousness: The Mind/Body Problem is the Feeling/Function Problem.
The mind/body problem is the feeling/function problem (Harnad 2001). The only way to "solve" it is to provide a causal/functional explanation of how and why we feel...
The mind/body problem is the feeling/function problem (Harnad 2001). The only way to "solve" it is to provide a causal/functional explanation of how and why we feel...
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Harnad, S. (2003) The Symbol Grounding Problem . Encylopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. or: Harnad, S...
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Bekoff, M., & Harnad, S. (2015). Doing the Right Thing: An Interview With Stevan Harnad . Psychology Today . Twelve years after steppi...
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Extra optional readings: Harnad, S. (2011) Minds, Brains and Turing . Consciousness Online 3. Harnad, S. (2014) Animal pain and hu...
It seems that people like Dennett are settling on reframing the question rather than actually answering it. He settles on a kind of reasoning that deep down he must know to be false in order to explain what cannot be explained. I don’t think he would accept a similar kind of explanation for other physical events, such as gravity. This probably comes from humans’ dislike of not being able to explain or understand everything. I believe that the “right” way to answer the hard problem of consciousness is to swallow your pride and just accept that, with our current knowledge, we cannot answer the hard problem. I’m not saying that we should give up on trying to answer it and call it a day, but we shouldn’t rely on the sort of philosophical speculation that Dennett does. I think it’s similar to how early philosophers were trying to “prove” God’s existence through philosophy and rational inquiry. That was the hard problem of their time, because explaining God would consequently explain how and why we feel. It seems to me that the hard problem of consciousness and trying to answer it is the modern equivalent of trying to prove the existence of God.
ReplyDeleteI do however agree with Dennett’s point about the Zombie Hunch. I don’t see how a zombie version of myself could even answer “yes” to the question “do you feel?”. To answer that question, I introspect, notice the experience of feeling within myself, and proceed to answer. A zombie would not notice the experience and therefore should not answer yes. Also, just as Harnad said, it doesn’t make sense for a zombie version of myself to be a 100% replica, to be composed of the exact same molecules as myself, and not be able to feel just as I do. Unless you believe that the ability to feel/consciousness comes from an immaterial “soul” or something along those lines, the zombie hunch would make no sense.
I agree with your statement that Dennett is simply restating the question rather than answering it. However, I don't agree with your agreement of the Zombie hunch. If we look at an indistinguishable T3 robot that has sensorimotor sensors, this robot would be able to say 'yes' to do you feel because of its indistinguishable nature from a person. If the robot stubs its toe, if someone were to ask the robot, did that hurt, the robot would say 'yes.' So just because the robot doesn't feel, which we don't know if it does or not, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't answer yes to the question.
DeleteJohnny, I sort of agree that trying to prove there is no hard problem is similar to trying to prove that there is a god or there is an immortal, immaterial soul. (There is a soul: it is our capacity to feel; but it is not immortal -- and it seems immaterial only because we cannot see it in others, nor can we explain how and why the brain generates it. But there's no doubt that the brain generates it; and the brain is certainly material...)
DeleteDan Dennett really does believe that there is no hard problem, and that "consciousness" ("mind") is somehow an illusion or a "category error," as argued famously by his thesis supervisor, Gilbert Ryle. Harder to do that without the weasel-word: Is it an illusion or a category error that I feel?
Marine, you are right about T3. Johnny, when you think of what a Zombie would say, think of Gabe, not the "night of the Living Dead"!
“The (hypothetical) Zombie does not "fervently" anything, because he does not feel! He only behaves in a way that is interpretable (by us) as if he felt.”
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the idea of language and communication. We assign language to communicative signs of other species as we have the capacity to do so. Such as with monkeys that have been taught sign language, we see it in terms of language (subject, predicate, and truth value) when there is no language from the side of the monkey communicating through the learned signs. Similarly, we assign feelings to the Zombie as the behavior expressed by the Zombie can be interpreted by beings that feel as feelings.
For the rest of the article, I agree with Harnad that Dennett does not address the ability to answer the Hard Problem as I mentioned in my previous skywriting and that by refuting Chalmers, he is simply circumventing the issue of the Hard Problem rather than leaping over it.
circumnavigating...
DeleteIn my skyriting on Dennett's piece, I said I was torn because I was agreeing with a computationalist, though I don't agree with computationalism. I felt something was wrong and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. In reading this, I'm hoping my brain was just tired because it's obvious that heterophenomenology doesn't address the how or why we feel things. In addition, I like how Harnad effectively sidestepped the Zombie issue by asking for an explanation for how and why any human isn't a zombie i.e. how and why we feel. And, at the same time, said Dennett and Turing weren't leaping over the hard problem, merely side-stepping. Dennett got so wrapped up in the weasel words and the smaller details that he forgot the bigger picture that we are trying to, and may never be able to, solve: how and why we feel what we feel, the hard problem.
ReplyDeleteBut Dan does give it a good run for its money -- and has been inspiring a lot of people to go into cognitive science...
DeleteThe hard problem comes to ask us how and why we feel. If we don’t know why and how we feel, we could not know why zombies cannot exist. Why does a zombie have to do things with feeling? Can a zombie truly do everything we can do without being able to feel? What is the purpose of feeling in the first place? With this question, this is where Dennett’s idea of heterophenomenology falls. Heterophenomenology, could be a good method to let you know if your feeling was correct or false, however, it doesn’t prove that there was no feeling in the first place. And without eliminating feeling, the hard problem still stands strong. We currently don’t have any way of answer this question and being a little pessimistic, I don’t think we ever will. Finding a causal mechanism to feeling almost always leaves us with the how and why part of the question still unanswered. We go above and beyond to find a causal mechanism such as making a robot with complete identical networks that we do in the brain, and that may actually lead to feeling, but it doesn’t help us answer the question as to why we feel and why is it that this mechanism will lead to feeling. We don’t know many things to this question but we do know some facts around this question. We do know that one can feel and that it feels like something to think and do. We also know that, if you leave the alternative argument of the soul wherever that is, that feeling should be in the brain. It is the conscious experience and therefore, it should be in the brain. The hard problem is not answered, but with these facts you can make some hard judgements as to why a zombie may not be possible. Our brains are made up of neurons and glial cells that individually don’t give us consciousness, but when working together, does. I agree with you in that if we were to truly create a T3 machine that could complete the robotic turing test, that feeling may be also coming along for the ride. However, even with all this said, and even if all this was done, the hard problem still remains
ReplyDeleteThe "zombie hunch" (if it were possible) would not just apply to T3 and T4, but to T5 -- the real neurons and glia, all working together...
DeleteBut, as a hunch, it is one of an infinite number of hunches -- like gods in the sky, immortal souls, or peekaboo unicorns, for which there is no positive evidence; just speculations about invisible things. Not the poverty of the stimulus (lack of negative evidence) but the over-fecundity of the imagination.
This response is thorough in its steady return to the hard problem: “neither the hetero methodology nor the Zombie hunch is relevant to the actual point at issue, which is the hard problem of the causal/functional explanation of feeling.” It shows that the opposing argument has been read in full and considered, and drives this point home through the use of repetition as a literary device. However, the fundamental class between thinkers is whether or not an explanation of feeling-states is necessary for cognitive science.
Delete“We've learned to dismiss other such intuitions in the past: the obstacles that so long prevented us from seeing the Earth as revolving around the sun, or seeing that living things were composed of non-living matter. It still seems that the sun goes round the earth, and it still seems that a living thing has some extra spark, some extra ingredient that sets it apart from all non-living stuff, but we've learned not to credit those intuitions.”
You’re right in pointing our that Denett has lumped the intuition of feeling in with disproven theories in the absence of the conditions that allowed us to move on from them – there is no explanation.
“When it comes to first-person formalisms, there may be even greater obstacles: can the content of experience be wholly captured in language, or in any other formalism, at all?
Equivocal. Is it describable in words? Church/Turing would argue yes. Analog/digital gap -- a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words -- proponents would argue no.”
I don’t fully understand the reference to an analog/digital gap.
A picture is always worth more than 1000++ words. Words are approximations. You can never describe an object exhaustively. Something is always left out of the description (e.g., that it is "not bigger than a bread-box"). You can add that to the description, but there's always more.
DeleteThat's the analog/digital (and analog/symbolic) gap.
"So we have this hetero-soup, with the psychophysicist measuring all manner of behavioral and neural and functional correlate (including predictive functional/computational modeling) of feeling, and then we have the feelers who are actually doing the correlated feeling. Then what? What do we do with this heteromix (or is it miscegenation)?"
ReplyDeleteThis thought came to my mind while reading Dennett’s paper. I agree with this completely. Sure, we can measure all these “behavioural reactions, visceral reactions, hormonal reactions, and other changes in physically detectable state” in correlation with feeling, but like the problem with the brain: where and when doesn’t tell us why and how. Sure, I’ll sweat when I am nervous and you can measure my galvanic skin response to “confirm” that I am sweating; but why am I nervous and how did I feel nervous? Additionally, the ability to sweat can be reverse-engineered on T3, but does T3 feel nervous when it sweats or at all?
How and why do you feel anything at all, rather than doing what needs to be done (including sweating)?
DeleteAfter reading this piece, I came exactly to this conclusion as well -- all of these measurements are correlational, but do not tell us anything about the "how" of feeling. Another question to ask relates to Prof. Harnad's reply above: what is the role of categorization in *feeling*. Since feeling is, of course, a part of cognition (despite the reverse-engineering of feeling being impossible), then would our capacity to feel (and react according to those feelings) be a process of categorization? Are these physical indicators of emotional response (although reductive and hard to predict for certain) examples of us doing the right thing with the right kind of thing? Further, what is the right thing with the right kind of thing when we talk about feeling? Feeling is a form of doing, because it is something we do. The hard problem and easy problem are incredibly valid frameworks for expressing what we can and cannot do in regards to studying cognition, but I also find that the dualism between the two problems can cause us to lose our intuition: feeling is still a part of cognition, which means it is also categorical. These categories are erratic and unpredictable (and is there a right thing to do with them?) and we will never know how they work. I agree with Turing's sweeping feeling to the side, but it is important to return to the fact that, although it cannot be studied, it is an equally real and powerful force as doing. We don't evaluate eachother, our world, and other living beings according to what they do (or at least, we shouldn't) but how we treat one another does have everything to do with how we feel. Science cannot explain that, but that doesn't mean we should forget about it.
Delete“*TURING: "I don't think we can make any functional inroads on feelings, so let's forget about them and focus on performance capacity, trusting that, if they do have any functional role, feelings will kick in at some point in the performance capacity hierarchy, and if they don't they won't, but we can't hope to be any the wiser either way" then he would have been at least a realist, and squarely facing the hard question.
ReplyDeleteBut that is called side-stepping, not "leaping over"... “
I am wondering if the “how” question of consciousness and the “why” question of consciousness must be asked separately or together. It seems that this passage of Turing appeals to the “why” question, but I am not sure how you can verify the “functional” role of feelings even negatively (i.e. proving that a T3-T4-T5 without feeling is not possible). Indeed, even if you create a perfect T3-T4-T5, the other-minds problem still prevents you to assess the existence of feeling in the machine created.
The “how” question is even harder in my opinion, because a) the other-minds problem forbids you for evaluating the feelings of another organism (even if Dennett pretends that you can with heterophenomenology) and b) introspection have showed not helpful to provide causal mechanisms of your cognition (and cognition in general).
So, you cannot check in others, you cannot check in yourself, and you cannot demonstrate the causal mechanism of consciousness negatively (because you cannot demonstrate beyond doubt that feeling are necessary for cognition).
If I get the picture right, it is very probable that the hard problem is the insolvable problem.
Hi Antoine –
DeleteI’m interested in the difference between the how and why question and I’m honestly not sure that I really understand the distinction.
I think I agree with you that the “how” question is even harder to answer.
I think the “why” question could be satisfactorily answered if we could figure out in what way feeling allows us to do something of the things we can do. In other words, if we take away the feeling capacity, are our mental capabilities inhibited? It seems like if we can identify a causal mechanism from feeling to other capacities, or an evolutionary advantage, this question is answered. Perhaps a satisfactory evolutionary advantage theory could even be posited from introspection. (Or maybe not).
The “how” question seems even harder, because as far as we know, feeling is immaterial and cannot be measured. Even if it’s self-reported, a zombie would have the ability to self-report feeling as well. I agree that the other minds problem forbids one from evaluating or confirming feelings of another organism, and if feeling cannot be measured, we cannot really identify the causal mechanism leading to the capacity for feeling.
Although if we cannot measure feeling, we also cannot identify a causal mechanism from feeling to other capacities.
Again, I’m not sure if I’m totally misunderstanding the distinction between these questions. But I agree with you that until feeling continues to be “immaterial”, it seems that the hard problem is unsolveable.
Hi Antoine and Erin!
DeleteI agree with the idea that how and why questions of the hard problem should be asked separately. Definitely, “how” question is the harder one between the two. I think Dennett doesn’t even try to solve the hard problem, I think he merely ignores the hard problem when he suggests heterophenomenology as a way to study the brain, that doesn’t beg for any answers as to why it feels like to do anything. It is true that OMP still applies even if you create a T3; you cannot infer upon the feeling of that T3, that is if while creating it you still did not know the causal mechanisms. If you knew the causal mechanisms of how the feelings arise then when you create the T3 with feelings, even if you cannot infer if it has feelings (due to OMP), you know that it has feelings because you added the causal mechanisms to it while creating.
For the why question though, I agree with Erin that it might have been an evolutionary advantage (ie. there might be a distal reason) for why we feel. However, I don’t think that “why” question would be necessarily answered by an evolutionary advantage, it might have been just a side effect of other advantages that were selected for, or even it might have been a mutation (ie. not even selected for) that lead to a strong shift overtime which somehow lead to us having consciousness. By the way, I think all these ideas all have the presumption that there was a time that animals did not have consciousness. Otherwise, we would be on the same track with Dennett, in the sense that we wouldn’t even consider the how and why we feel what we feel.
It seems that this quote --Harnad’s reimagining of what Turing could have said-- demonstrates that the framework Turing proposed side-steps feeling/the hard question on the grounds that it’s basically impenetrable (but Turing didn’t say this so directly). To my mind, this is just a breaking down of the question of ‘how?’ into what he thinks can be cast as an engineering question and what might not be able to be cast that way (because of the impenetrability of feeling, trusting that if feelings are a necessary precursor to performance capacity, they will "kick in") and the question of ‘why?’ more or less takes a back seat here.
DeleteAntoine, "How" and "why" are pretty closely related in the case of the easy problem: "How can the brain learn categories?" is a reverse-engineering question and "Why can the brain learn categories?" is an evolutionary (survival/reproduction) question, distal and proximal (like why do children have a "sweet tooth").
DeleteBut in the case of the hard problem it's more complicated: even explaining causally how the brain generates feeling would not explain why. Because of the OMP, evolution is as "blind" to whether or not an organism feels as we are. Evolution is sensitive only to the easy problem: "What does an organism have to be able to do in order to survive and reproduce?" (This includes what size and shape and other observable structural properties it needs to have. The "doing" there is development, growth and morphology.) But how can explaining how and why organisms can do what they can do explain how or why they feel? Even if feeling is tightly correlated with some brain states, that still does not explain the causal role of feeling itself. (It's not for naught that the hard problem is called hard!)
One of the ways of asking why we have X is to ask what difference would it make if we did not have X?
(Introspection did not help for the easy problem either! So that's not the reason the hard problem is hard.)
Erin, the main reason the hard problem is hard is that answering the easy problem (by reverse-engineering a T3 or T4) has answered all the answerable how/why questions for doing-capacity. It leaves feeling-capacity as seemingly superfluous causally. You can't say "without feeling we could not do this or this" because Gabe can already do this and this! So there is no causal wiggle room left. If Gabe had to feel to do be able to do everything we can do, then Gabe feels. But we don't know whether Gabe had to feel to do be able to do everything we can do (because of OMP), and even if, despite OMP, we somehow "knew" that Gabe feels, we still have no idea how or why.
Onur, "why?" is the harder (but still causal) question for the hard problem: What is feeling for, if our doing capacity can be fully explained without feeling? It seems causally superfluous. If it's an adaptive advantage, what is that advantage? That's a causal question -- and the solution to the easy problem (Gabe) would already have answered all causal the questions, which are all about doing, not feeling.
Kevin, not just the observational "impenetrability" of feeling (OMP) but the (seeming) causal superfluousness of feeling. We haven't a clue as to why everything cannot be doable and done without it.
Reading this made me feel a little silly for the comment I made on the original paper. It seems pretty clear in hindsight but the concept of a feeling needs to be separated from it's reality and the action or the doing as pointed out by Harnad. On the last reading, I commented that my brain has fooled me into believing that I was moving my left arm when I was in fact moving my right. I posited that this made my beliefs untrue and my reality untrue but looking back on this, my doing of my beliefs may be untrue in reality, but my belief is of course true to me as that's my feeling. While my belief may be updated with greater information and new sensations or changed later, that does not make the initial belief untrue as it was true in the moment.
ReplyDeleteIf you feel a toothache you may be mistaken that something is wrong with your tooth (or even that you have a tooth) but not that it feels like a toothache.
DeleteI think this secondary realization that you've had is one that Dennett seems to be ignoring because it involves the idea of feeling. This is a good example of why taking feeling, or the zombic hunch, into consideration is necessary. Feeling, tells us something more about what's going on. I find it interesting that Dennett ignores this, considering heterophenomenology is about taking into account someone's direct experience. The feeling aspect cannot be separated from what Dennett is trying to uncover, which is also why the hard problem is necessary.
DeleteHi Kyle!
DeleteI think these realizations that you have made are important ones! I also needed to take the time to realize that it is important to separate what we are feeling with what is actually going on. The thing that really helped me see the important of differentiating the feeling from what is actually going on is when Professor Harnad explained Sentio ergo sentitur. When Professor Harnad mentioned that Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) should have been Sentio ergo sentitur (“I’m feeling therefore a feeling is being felt”), this really helped me understand that what I an feeling, despite if what I am feeling is corresponding to the source of the feeling, is still being felt. Professor Harnad’s toothache example perfectly does this.
I agree with the point that Naz has made. If heterophenomenology is about taking into account someone's direct experience, feeling should not be ignored. It might be due to the difficulties of the hard problem that Dennett has chosen not to take into account feeling. Feeling is extremely subjective, so even if Dennett did take this into account, would it really be possible for a third person to accurately observe how, why and what another person might be really feeling? This would also be difficult due to the other mind’s problem. It might not be possible to make third-person scientific observations of what another person is feeling… let alone know if you are able to observe what they are or are not truly feeling.
(I am not sure if I understand the whole debate around so-called “unconscious feeling” correctly, and it was one of the questions that I had back in Week 3, so this comment is more for checking my understanding for the issue.) I agree that heterophenomenology does not help answering the hard question, and no matter how good the correlation is, it still does not tell us how and why there is feeling. What is meant by “feeling” is really the feeling of feeling things – and if one did not feel the feelings, one did not feel – even if there is brain activity going on, since one did not “feel” it, it is not “feeling”. The question we are asking is “how and why we feel”, which is equivalent to “how and why we do not not feel”. Then based on that logic, it seems that answering the question of “how and why would one not feel something (that could have been felt)” could give us insight into “how and why one feels anything at all”. Yet, the “top-down control” sort of explanation can explain why it may have felt like this but not that, but it still does not explain why anything feels like anything.
ReplyDelete"Unconscious feeling," once de-weaseled, becomes "unfelt feeling" which is self-contradictory -- except in the trivial sense of "I did not feel pain when the surgeon cut me because I was anesthetized."That is not an "unfelt pain" it is an unfelt injury. There are no "unfelt pains" (no matter what psychoanalysts tell you), just forgotten pain, or PTSD). Anesthesia can explain the neural correlates of feeling pain. And the feeling of pain is no doubt caused by the brain, perhaps by those very neural correlates, somehow. The trouble is that we cannot explain how, or why. We can only explain how and why they cause you to do (and say) what you do and say, which is the easy problem. (Nor is the problem that the OMP prevents us from even being sure that you are in pain when you say you are.)
ReplyDeleteRegarding the anesthesia example, I think this is what certain people in the pain field would refer to as the presence of nociception without pain. If a surgeon has to cut someone, likely the neural afferents encoding nociception will be activated. But pain is felt through the central nervous system (mainly the brain and to some extend the spinal cord).
DeleteThis minding is what has caused some neuroscientists to believe that fish do not feel pain. They don’t doubt that the neural afferents encoding nociception are activated when you harm a fish, they only doubt that fish’s brains receive and process that neural encoding as pain. They base their argument on the distinction between peripheral and central processing, and seem to doubt that fish’s central nervous system has the property to feel pain as we do. This rationale does not make sense to me and I do not agree with it.
I understand that functioning and feeling should be well separated when it comes to the problem of locating the causal explanations for our cognitive capacities. Figuring out how and why of our behaviors does not necessarily give us a hint of how and why of our feelings. But I'm a little unsure of this claim.
ReplyDelete"You will still not be able to give even a hint of a hint as to how it is that that mechanism feels at all (you'll just have the molecular or computational mechanism that correlates with the feelings), nor of why (in, say a Darwinian, or some other functional sense) it feels."
I thought for some feelings we've already found some scientific explanations. For example, happiness: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins are studied and proved to be responsible for our happiness. The releases and increased level of these neurotransmitters in our body leads to the feeling of happiness and suppress some negative emotions. Why is this not a "mechanism explaining how and why we feel at all"? Is it because that with these findings, the problem hence becomes how and why we release these chemicals and how and why they can activate different emotions?
RE: Junlin
DeleteIf I’m understanding correctly, it’s that the hints we have for “feelings” (kind of similarly to Dennett, actually) tell us about the different “flavors” of feeling without actually giving us a distinct mechanism for the more important problem: when is there feeling, and when is there not?
An easy way to make sense of this, I think, is looking at explicit processes (like telling me there was a clown at your 10th birthday party) VS implicit processes (breathing regulation) that the brain engages in. I’m excluding here the instances where we try to control our breathing (ex. exercise, yoga, whatever). We have found that functional traces of both of those things in the brain: if you put people in a scanner, you can see both areas when they are active. Knowing which part of the brain does what doesn’t tell you anything about what it means to feel. Both areas (breathing VS explicit/declarative memory) are active in the same way. Yet there is something fundamentally different about both of them: one of them we are aware of/conscious of, the other we are not.
The bottom line is that all of these different emotions you describe are actually, for the purposes of the hard problem of cognitive science, feeling. They’re all just feeling. We don’t care which one it is: we just care about why and how it happens.
Junlin - in other psychology or neuroscience classes that I've taken, the increase of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, oxytocin etc has also been used as an explanation for how and why we feel happiness. As Fodor suggests however, knowing where and when things happen in the brain (T4) does not answer why and how we feel. Even if it was shown that every person in the world released the exact same proportion of these neurotransmitters and subjectively judged how they feel as being equally as 'positive', the question of why and how we even know that we are feeling something is still unanswered. If you took questionnaires or self-reports at face value to show the existence of feelings (e.g., with heterophenomenology), the other minds problem arises - we cannot definitively prove that the person reporting their 'positive' feelings are feeling at all. As Veronique has already suggested, the hard problem is why we feel at all, not why we feel certain emotions (feeling is more broad than just this). This can only be correlational, not causational. As Harnard suggested in his response to Dennett's Zombie Hunch, "Whereas I just call a methodological spade the spade it is: There is no accounting for feelings functionally. Period".
DeleteAfter reading this paper, many of my issues with Dennett's original paper were confirmed or further explained. I can feel the frustration within this paper because Dennett is asking all the wrong questions and trying to evaluate the wrong things. He is concerned with being able to detect feelings from one's behaviour and about 'unfelt feelings'. Harnad states "I don't care! I don't care if every nook and cranny, every last JND of my feeling life is correlated with and hence detectable and predictable from something you can pick up on your polygraph screen or can infer from my behavior. That's not the question! The question is: How/why does anyone/anything feel at all?" (Harnad 2001). This quote I think sums up the entire frustration with Dennett's piece as a whole very well. It is true that being bale to detect or infer something from someone else's behaviour is not what we should be interested in - if we are to attempt to solve the hard problem. Dennett's approach quite obviously misses the point of the hard problem and side steps around it, analyzing different aspects of feeling, but no aspects that are relevant to the important question. That being, how and why we feel.
ReplyDelete"Only felt feelings count. If I didn't feel it at the time, I didn't feel it" (Harnad 2001). This quote summarizes what I touched upon in my last post on Dennett's original paper. I talked about how 'unconscious mental states' (as Dennett puts it) may be interesting and lead to interesting discoveries about the mind - however it doesn't seem that these really apply in the situation of the hard problem. As Harnad puts it, only felt feelings count and if it was not felt than it doesn't give us any interesting information. Nor does studying them lead us to any conclusions regarding the hard problem - how/why we feel. As Harnad states "All this stuff about the "penetrability" and describability (and plasticity and ambiguity) of feelings is interesting, but irrelevant..." (Harnad 2001).
"Nothing to prove. No metaphysics whatsoever at issue. A simple methodological (hence also epistemic) point about the constraints on causal/functional explanation: It works for everything else, but it doesn't work for feelings..."
ReplyDeleteFrom what I understand via class, the hard problem is virtually unsolvable because by the time we have reached T5 and solved the easy problem, we would have no more resources and forces of nature to apply and explain anything more. It is clear that solving just the easy problem does not explain all of cognition - this is made very apparent through identifying the pitfalls of Dennett's assertions that entirely ignore and circumvent feeling through with heterophenomenology. As Harnard's suggests in the above quote, no methodology we can attempt apply to measure or explain consciousness can provide a causal mechanism for why and how we feel. While I can understand why the hard problem cannot be solved through the material in this class, it is still a hard pill to swallow and accept. For me, it is an interesting to fathom that science (contradicting to what I have been made to believe in the past) cannot provide a definitive answer for everything - particularly that we may not be ever able to unravel the core of the very subjects I have spent learning about in university.
Exactly! I find it interesting that the conclusion of this course is that the hard problem is not soluble at least with the scientific method. I remember at the beginning of the course, criticizing Turing for not taking into account that a machine will never be like us because it will never feel, and Harnard answering that the *feeling* objection was a Granny objection and not getting why. Now I totally get it ! If Turing had been more clear on the fact that " I don't think we can make any functional inroads on feelings, so let's forget about them and focus on performance capacity, trusting that, if they do have any functional role, feelings will kick in at some point in the performance capacity hierarchy, and if they don't they won't, but we can't hope to be any the wiser either way", we would have left him alone with the hard problem. However, even if he had said that instead, I still don't think that feeling will kick in by focusing on performance capacity because there isn't still and in my opinion will never be any causal explanation between our functional capabilities and the how and why we feel, the gap is too big and I don't see the answer being found in the physical realm.
DeleteRe: Andrea Karam “there isn't still and in my opinion will never be any causal explanation between our functional capabilities and the how and why we feel, the gap is too big andI don't see the answer being found in the physical realm.”
DeleteYou make an interesting point. This is an area that I struggle with. I don’t really believe in anything metaphysical, like a soul or spirit explaining why we are humans and therefore feel, but I would also tend to agree that you cannot account for feelings through physical processes either. Where does that leave us? Where do feelings come from? Why do we have them? Although admittedly, answers to these questions would only satisfy my personal curiosity, and the relevance/importance of finding this out is unclear.
Harnad’s main criticism is about the purpose of heterophenomenology: there is still no explanation of the how and why – the Hard Problem. Heterophenomenology is only ‘inferring and describing feelings’, but who cares (Harnad, S. On Dennett on Consciousness)? This brings me back to the article written by Fodor titled ‘Why, why, does everyone go on so about the brain?’. We must redirect our efforts of determining how and why the brain; Stop worrying about the where and what. You cannot reverse-engineering how and why from ‘[inferred] and [described] feelings’ collected by heterophenomenology.
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ReplyDeleteI like the point made about equating thoughts to feelings and this way seeing the Turing question cannot replace the Kant and Descartes questions, nor give a relevant answer. Turings question is in fact a completely different one. Turing really only really touches on the function aspect of the mind/body problem, rather than the feeling one and hence doesn’t get close to finding out how and why we feel.
I very much agree with the quote following “If Turing had instead said:” In this text. Had Turings goal been different and more carefully outlines, his question and methods would have perfectly fulfilled the goal. Without acknowledging that feeling is an integral part that simply cannot be understood through this approach for now, his questions and explanations come short.
In Harnad’s scorching rebuttal to Dennet’s essay “The Fantasy of First-Person Science”, he simply demands that Dennett repudiate his heterophenomenology methodology and ask “how/why do we feel?”. While admittedly, I must respectfully acknowledge that the terms (which I don’t have the best grasp on at the moment) of Dennett’s argument were shifted almost immediately in Harnad’s rebuttal, as he eviscerated the very purpose of the questions (Kant’s and Descartes’) that Dennett’s argument was predicated on. Moving on however, as a dutiful student of Harnad, I agree that his line of argumentation is nevertheless asking the important questions, and are digging in to the inconsistencies inherent in the heterophenomenological approach (see my 10a sky writing). However, those important questions are asked transparently for the purpose of reaffirming the insolubility, as well as the very existence of the hard problem – that is the problem of finding a causal mechanism which explains how and why we feel. Although I think someone who ventures to find an answer to the hard problem, either by dismissing it as an illusion of the material brain, as Dennett does, or otherwise answering it in their own way should necessarily be reminded of the inherent impossibility of the how/why question. Should we even move to rephrase the question? Is that appropriate if no answer is in sight, or just cheating?
ReplyDelete"The mind/body problem is the feeling/function problem (Harnad 2001). The only way to "solve" it is to provide a causal/functional explanation of how and why we feel…"
ReplyDeleteThis quote right at the beginning is a great summary of the main points of the critique to Dennett's argument, and honestly to the much of this class as a whole.
My first concern from my skywriting on the previous paper about Dennett misinterpreting Turing's question, was addressed right away: "Kant's was not the right question, but Turing's is an answer neither to Kant's question nor to the right one (about feelings)." Turing does not touch feelings at all.
Dennett's hetereophenomenology does not work to solve the hard problem, because he disregards the hard problem.
"There is no accounting for feelings functionally. Period. Back to Turing modeling and heterophenomenological weather-forecasting…"
I really liked this quote. The hard problem is insoluble. Using these methods will not explain how/why we feel. Even solving the easy problem is hard! And once we solve the easy problem, what degrees of freedom do we have left to solve the hard problem?
It goes without saying that after taking this class we all agree with Harnad’s criticism of heterophenomenology. The Hard Problem remains unsolved. As I mentioned before, I am really seeing this field under new lenses. Whenever we try to find explanations to why and how we feel things, no matter the papers and the theories it always seems like it’s going in circles. Will we ever be able to find an answer to that ultimate question? Do we need this answer? What are the things that require this answer except for our thirst of knowledge?
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