(Reply to David Rosenthal)
DR: “There are two aspects to… feelings. One is what they all have in common; (1) they’re all conscious. The other is (2) their specific qualitative character.”
I would say the same thing thus:
There are two aspects to feelings. One is that (1) they’re all felt. The other is (2) what each feeling feels like.
DR: “The apparent… hard problem [is] a difficulty in explaining how conscious qualitative states can be subserved by or perhaps even identical with neural states”
For me, the hard problem is not this metaphysical one, but the epistemic problem of explaining how and why some neural states are felt states.
DR: “the apparent intuition that [(1) and (2)] are inseparable is… generated by the idea that we know about feelings… solely by the way they present themselves to consciousness.”
We know that we feel (1), and what each feeling feels like (2), because we feel it.
DR: “There seems to be an other-minds problem if.. we know about qualitative states… only by how they present themselves to consciousness; how… can we be sure anybody else is in such states?”
We each know for sure that we feel because we each feel. How can we each know for sure that anyone else feels? (There are plenty of reliable ways to infer it: that’s not what’s at issue.)
DR: “these views are not… commonsense, pretheoretic intuitions… but… [the] theory… that we know about conscious qualitative states solely by the way they present themselves to consciousness.”
We know for sure that we feel (1), and what each feeling feels like (2), because we feel it. (That does not sound very theoretical to me!)
We each know for sure that we feel because we each feel. We can reliably infer that (and what) others feel (we just can’t know for sure). (Only the inferring sounds theoretical here.)
DR: “there is a theoretical alternative: that we know about conscious qualitative states, our own as well as others’, by way of the role they play in perceiving.”
I know (a) that I feel, and (b) what I feel, and (c) that others feel, and (d) what others feel because of the role (a) – (d) play in “perceiving”?
But is perceiving something I feel or something I do? If it’s something I feel, this seems circular. If it’s something I do — or something I’m able to do — then we’re back to doing, and the easy problem; how/why any of it is felt remains unexplained. (And “role” doesn’t help, because it is precisely explaining causality that is at issue here!)
DR: “Even bodily sensations such as pains are perceptual…; they enable us to perceive….damage to our bodies. And we individuate types of qualitative character, in our own cases and in those of others, by appeal to the kind of stimulus that typically occasions the qualitative state in question… we individuate types of pains by location and by typical feels of stabbing, burning, throbbing, and so forth.”
All true: Bodily stimulation and damage are felt. And, in addition, our brains know what to do about them. But how and why are they felt, rather than just detected, and dealt with (all of which is mere doing)?
(Perception is a weasel-word. It means both detecting and feeling. Why and how is detection felt, rather than just done?)
DR: “Professor Harnad… dismisses this view, by relegating perceiving to mere doing, instead of feeling. But… the individuation of states according to perceptual role… will include states with… color, sound, shape, pain of various types, and all the other mental qualities.”
Doing is doing. If it is felt doing then it is “perception”: But how and why are (some) doings felt?
Yes, different feelings feel different. But the hard problem is explaining how and why any of them are felt at all.
DR: “But what about consciousness? We know that perceptual states can occur with qualitative character but without being conscious. Nonconscious perceptions occur in subliminal perceptions, e.g., in masked priming, and in blindsight, and we distinguish among such nonconscious perceptions in respect of qualities such as color, pitch, shape, and so forth. So qualitative character can can occur without being conscious. What is it, then, in virtue of which qualitative states are sometimes conscious?”
Unfelt properties are not “qualitative states.” Qualitative states are felt states. The roundness of an apple is not a qualitative state, neither for the apple, nor for the robot that detects the roundness, nor for my brain if it detects the roundedness but I don’t feel anything. The hard problem is explaining how and why I do feel something, when I do, not how my brain does things unfeelingly. (Why doesn’t it do all of it unfeelingly?)
DR: “If, as in masked priming or other forced-choice experiments… somebody is in a qualitative state that the person is wholly unaware of being in, we regard that state as not being conscious. So a conscious state is one that an individual is aware of being in.”
A felt state is a state that it feels like something to be in. “Unfelt feelings” do not make sense (to me).
The only thing the unconscious processing (sic) and blindsight data reveal is how big a puzzle it is that not all of our internal states — and the doings they subserve — are unfelt, rather than just these special cases.
DR: “I have argued elsewhere that such higher-order awareness is conferred by having a thought to the effect that one is in that state; but the particular way that higher-order awareness is implemented isn’t important for present purposes.”
We cannot go on to the (easy) problem of “higher-order awareness” until we have first solved the (hard) problem of awareness (feeling) itself.
DR: “We have then, the makings of an explanation of how neural processing subserves–and is perhaps identical with–conscious qualitative states.”
I am afraid I have not yet discerned the slightest hint of an explanation of how or why some neural states are felt states.
DR: “But conscious qualitative states–what Professor Harnad calls feelings–are not, as is typically thought today, indissoluble, atoms; rather they consist of states with qualitative character, which in itself occurs independently of consciousness, together with the higher-order awareness that results in those qualitative states’ being conscious.”
I don’t see how one can separate a feeling from the fact that it is felt. I don’t believe in (or understand) “unfelt feelings.” Unfelt states are both unfelt, and unproblematic (insofar as the “hard” problem is concerned).
And “higher-order awareness” — awareness of being aware, etc. — seems to me to be among the perks of being an organism than can do what we can do, as well as of the (unexplained) ability to feel what it feels like to do and be able to do some of those things.
Yes, not only does it feel like something to be in pain, or to see red, but it also feels like something to contemplate that “I feel, therefore I’m sure there’s feeling, but I can’t be sure whether others feel (or even exist), but I can be pretty sure because they look and act more or less the same way I do, and they are probably thinking and feeling the same about me… etc.” And that’s quite a cognitive accomplishment to be able to think and feel that.
But unless someone first explains how and why anything can feel anything at all, all that higher-order virtuosity pales in comparison with that one unsolved (hard) problem.