(Reply to Judith Economos)
“That I know what I am thinking is setting me apart from a computer or a zombie that does not know what it is thinking and therefore is only “thinking”. You see, I do understand that much. It just seems to me important not to confuse this with feeling, but all the words I might use, like “aware” and “conscious”, are [you say] bad words, dishonest and weaselly. It is true that those words are vague, but so is Feeling, as you use it, and the problem is that what goes on in our minds is private to us and not really shareable. We have to communicate it to each other with words whose meanings to the other can at best be guessed at by analogy with states we think are comparable, working from the most obvious behavioristic criteria to the more delicate shades of inward state, events, processes, efforts, and, er, well, awarenesses. Since we cannot directly compare your mental target with mine, we just can’t know if we are really on about exactly the same thing, or even if there is such a thing in my mind as there is in yours. That is why I am comfortable in my intransigence about what I feel or don’t feel, and why I think argument is futile. Each of us is (as it were) sitting in a closed room considering objects for which we have never had a common name, nor common adjectives, and trying to see if the other has similar objects in his room.”
I think the debate about whether there are unfelt thoughts may be a throwback to the introspectionists’ debates about whether there is “imageless thought.”
The big difference is that the introspectionists thought that an empirical methodology was at stake, one that would allow them to explain the mind. We now know that there was no such empirical methodology, and no explanation of the mind was forthcoming, not just because introspection is not objective, hence not testable and verifiable, but because it does not reveal how the mind works.
(This conclusion was partly reached because it was not possible to resolve, objectively, the rival claims of introspective “experimentalists” as to whether imageless thought did or did not exist. The outcome was an abandonment of introspectionism in favor of behaviorism, until it turned out that that could not explain how the mind works either, which led to neuroscience and cognitive science.)
The difference here, is that we are debating about whether or not there are unfelt thoughts while at the same time agreeing that introspection is neither objective nor explanatory.
The disagreement is, specifically, about what it means to say that we are conscious of something, when that being-conscious-of something does not feel like anything.
The reason I keep calling “consciousness” and “being conscious of” something weasel-words is that if things are going on in my mind that somehow are different yet do not feel different then it is not at all clear how I am telling them apart, or even how or what I am privy to when I say I am “conscious of” them despite the fact that I don’t feel them in any way.
It seems to me that the notion of “unconscious thought” and “unconscious mind” is as arbitrary and uninformative as “unfelt thought” — or, put in a less weaselly way that bares the incoherence: unfelt feelings.
Among other things, this makes it more obvious that “thought” and “thinking” are themselves weasel-words (or, at best, phenomenological place-holders). For apart from the fact that they are going on in my head, it is not really clear what “thoughts” are: we are waiting for cognitive science to tell us! (We keep forgetting that “cognition” just means thinking, knowing, mentation — weasel words, all, or at least vague if not vacuous until we have a functional — i.e., causal — explanation of what generates and constitutes both them and, more importantly, what we can do with them, apart from thinking itself.)
Now explaining how we can do what we can do is these days called the “easy” problem. What, then, is the “hard problem,” and what is it that makes it hard?
My own modest contribution is just to suggest that (1) the hard problem is to explain how and why thought (or anything at all) is felt, and that (2) it is hard because there is no causal room for feeling in a complete explanation of doing.
So where is the disagreement here? Let us assume we can agree that explaining unconscious thought — i.e., those things going on inside the brain that play a causal role in generating our capacity to do what we can do, but that we are not conscious of — are not hard problems but easy problems. They may as well be going on inside a toaster. The rest is just about how they generate the toaster’s capacity to do whatever it can do. And of course we are not privileged authorities on whatever unconscious “thoughts” may be going on in our heads, because we are not conscious of them.
So all I ask is: What on earth do we really mean when we speak of having a thought that we are conscious of having, but that it does not feel like anything to have!
You (rightly) invoke “incorrigibility” if I venture to doubt your introspections, but, to me, that justified insistence that only you are in a position to judge what’s going on in your mind [as opposed to your head] derives from the fact that only the feeler can feel (hence know) what he is feeling: what the feeling feels like. But apart from that, it seems to me, there are no further 1st-person privileges. One can’t say: I don’t feel a thing, yet I know it. On what is that privileged testimony based, if it is not the usual eye-witness report? “I didn’t see the crime, but I know it was committed?” How do you “know”? In the case of thought, what does that “knowing” consist, if not in the fact that you feel it (and it feels true)?
There is no point referring to objective evidence here. I can “know” it’s raining in the sense that I say it’s raining and it really is raining. I have then made a true statement, just as a robot or a meteorological instrument could do, but that has nothing to do with the mind or the hard problem (and, as the Gettierists will point out, it’s not really “knowing” either!). It’s just back to the easy problem of doing. What makes it hard is not just that that “thought” is going on inside your head, but that it is going on in your mind, which is what makes it mental (another weasel-word).
Hence (by my lights) the only thing left to invoke to justify calling such a thing mental, and hence privileged, is that it feels like something to think it, and you are feeling that thing, and you’re the only one in the position to attest to that fact.
Yet the fact you are attesting to here (as an eye-witness) is the fact that it doesn’t feel like anything at all to think something! And that’s why I think I am entitled to ask: Well then what is a thought, and how do you know you are thinking it? In what does your “consciousness of” it consist, if not that it feels like something to think it? (How can you be an eye-witness if your testimony is that you didn’t see a thing?)
Galen Strawson has invoked the less weaselly (but nonetheless vague and hence still somewhat weaselly) notion of “experiencing” something, as opposed to “feeling it.” But that just raises the same question: What is an unfelt “experience” (an experience it doesn’t feel like anything to have)? Galen invokes “experiential character” or “phenomenal quality” etc. But (to my ears) that’s either more weasel-words or just euphemisms because — for some reason I really can’t fathom — one can’t quite bring oneself to call a spade a spade.
To be conscious of something, to experience something, to sense something, to think something, to “access” something — all of those are simply easy, toaster-like “information”-processing functions (“information” can be yet another weasel-word, if used for anything other than data, bits) — except if they are felt, in which case all functional, causal bets are off, and we are smack in the middle of the hard problem: why and how do feel? (Ned Block‘s unfortunate distinction between “phenomenal consciousness” and “access consciousness” is incoherent precisely because unfelt “access” is precisely what toasters have — hence “access” too is of the family Mustelidae, and the PC/AC distinction is bared as the attempt to distinguish felt feelings vs. unfelt “feelings”…)
Amen — but with no illusions of having over-ridden anyone’s (felt) privilege to insist that they do have unfelt [imageless?] thoughts — thoughts of which they are in some (unspecified) sense “conscious” even though it does not feel like anything at all to be conscious of them…