(1) Is feeling/nonfeeling an all-or-none distinction?
The answer is most definitely yes. (But the question is not about whether I’m feeling this or that, nor about whether I am feeling more or less. It is about whether I am feeling at all. I can feel a little tired, say, half-tired, but I can’t half-feel — any more than I can half-move [or one can be a little bit pregnant]).)
(2) Is believing a feeling (and if so, what’s my evidence that that’s true)?
The answer is most definitely yes, and the evidence is of precisely the same kind as the evidence that seeing — or hearing or smelling or hurting — is feeling. There’s something it feels like to smell roses, and when you’re smelling carnations — or onions — it feels different. In exactly the same way (but more subtly), there’s something it feels like to be believing that it’s Tuesday today, and something different it feels like to be believing it’s Wednesday (and not just the sound of the words it takes to say one or the other). Every JND of difference in mental space feels different. That’s what makes mental states mental, and how we tell different mental states apart: Otherwise I wouldn’t know whether or not I was believing it’s Tuesday any more than I would know whether or not I was in pain. (Knowing is feeling too!)
Aside: None of this has anything to do with Zombies (and I have next to nothing to do with or say about Zombies). But just for the sake of logical coherence: A zombie would be a lookalike that behaved and talked indistinguishably from us, but did not feel. It could not be believing it felt, because believing is feeling! It would merely be behaving (and speaking) exactly as if it were feeling (and believing, and believing it was feeling).
I consider such a possibility so far-fetched and arbitrary as to be absurd, so I never base any argument on the possibility that there could be such a thing.
However, I do point out that we can no more explain how and why there could not be Zombies than we can explain how or why we feel (the “hard problem“). Zombies are absurd because all the evidence is against them: All the entities that behave as if they feel are in fact, like us, biological organisms that feel. We don’t know how or why we all feel, but we do know that we invariably do. The speculation that this invariance could be broken — with entities acting exactly as if they felt, but not feeling a thing — is as far-fetched as imagining a universe in which apples fell up rather than down, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics was the reverse. Not only can nothing interesting, one way or the other, be derived from such idle suppositions, but — and this is most important — even the correct supposition that Zombies are impossible does not do anything whatsoever toward solving the hard problem (of explaining how and why they are impossible, which is equivalent to explaining how and why we feel, rather than just do).
The statement that “believing is seeing” is no less supported, I should think, than “hurting is feeling”: I can’t do much more than ostension and appealing to what I am pretty confident is our fundamentally similar mental lives in either case. (I did make a bit of a supporting argument about JNDs just now. The gist is that the only thing that distinguishes mental states is that they feel different: Otherwise what makes them not the same mental state? The fact that they may be followed by different behavioral dispositions won’t do the trick, because the states are now, not later, so later divergence in behavioral dispositions still doesn’t distinguish the mental states now, when I’m having them. (My knowledge that I believe it’s Tuesday today and that I don’t believe it’s Wednesday cannot come from what I am inclined to do later — unless, of course, it feels different to be inclined to do this rather than that — which would be fine with me; that still leaves the difference between beliefs as a difference in what they feel like…)
Excerpts from Doug Hofstadter’s “I Am a Strange Loop“:
Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z
There is one last matter I wish to deal with, and that has to do with Dave Chalmers’ famous zombie twin in Universe Z. Recall that this Dave sincerely believes what it is saying when it claims that it enjoys ice cream and purple flowers, but it is in fact telling falsities, since it enjoys nothing at all, since it feels nothing at all ‹ no more than the gears in a Ferris wheel feel something as they mesh and churn.
I completely agree that this is incoherent — simply because believing is feeling. What Chalmers should have said is that the Zombie behaves and talks exactly as if he was feeling (including believing, and believing that he was feeling) but in fact he was feeling (and hence believing) nothing.
Well, what bothers me here is the uncritical willingness to say that this utterly feelingless Dave believes certain things, and that it even believes them sincerely. Isn¹t sincere belief a variety of feeling? Do the gears in a Ferris wheel sincerely believe anything? I would hope you would say no. Does the float-ball in a flush toilet sincerely believe anything? Once again, I would hope you would say no.
I feel sincerely in agreement, and would add only that it is not only a sincere or passionate belief that is felt, but also a phlegmatic, quotidial belief, such as it’s Tuesday today.
And of course all those mechanical devices don’t feel.
And of course talk of Zombies that are like us on the outside and like the Ferris wheel on the inside is nonsense.
So suppose we backed off on the sincerity bit, and merely said that Universe Z¹s Dave believes the falsities that it is uttering about its enjoyment of this and that. Well, once again, could it not be argued that belief is a kind of feeling? I¹m not going to make the argument here, because that¹s not my point. My point is that, like so many distinctions in this complex world of ours, the apparent distinction between phenomena that do involve feelings and phenomena that do not is anything but black and white.
I would and do argue the point that believing is feeling.
But I completely deny the point that the difference between feeling and non-feeling is a matter of degree! It’s all or none.
The quality and intensity of the feeling may differ (the latter in degree), but whether there is feeling going on at all is not a matter of degree (though feeling be may be flickering, intermittently on/off). In particular, there is nothing (except degrees of doing-power) in between a Ferris wheel, that feels nothing, and, say, an amphioxus which, even if all it can feel is “ouch,” is fully one of us sentients.
(I also think that near-threshold phenomenology and psychophysics — did I feel something or didn’t I? — is irrelevant to all this, but if one insists on citing it: Feeling is instantaneous. In the instant, you feel what you feel (if you are awake and sentient at all). If the source is a stimulus, it is irrelevant that you are uncertain near-threshold: you are not uncertain about what you felt. You felt whatever you felt. You are uncertain whether what you felt was the stimulation you were supposed to be detecting — whether it was external, from a near-threshold “beep” or endogenous: did I just feel the aura of an impending migraine?).
If I asked you to write down a list of terms that slide gradually from fully emotional and sentient to fully emotionless and unsentient, I think you could probably quite easily do so.
Not me. I could rank intensity, maybe even quality, by degrees, but not whether a feeling is felt! That’s an all or none divide and on the other side of it is not an unfelt feeling, but nothing but unfelt doing (a Ferris Wheel). Again, near-threshold judgments about a particular external or internal stimulus by a feeling person are irrelevant here. They are feeling;and we are just fussing over what they are feeling, not over whether they are feeling at all: that’s an all-or-none matter.
In fact, let¹s give it a quick try right here. Here are a few verbs that come to my mind, listed roughly in descending order of emotionality and sentience: agonize, exult, suffer, enjoy, desire, listen, hear, taste, perceive, notice, consider, reason, argue, claim, believe, remember, forget, know, calculate, utter, register, react, bounce, turn, move, stop.
If I’m awake, doing every one of those things feels like something — agonizing as much as tasting or considering or knowing; only quality and intensity differs.
And of course that includes moving (if it is voluntary and I am not anesthetized).
I won’t claim that my extremely short list of verbs is impeccably ordered; I simply threw it together in an attempt to show that there is unquestionably a spectrum, a set of shades of gray, concerning words that do and that do not suggest the presence of feelings behind the scenes.
There are spectra of feeling quality and feeling quantity, but an all-or-none divide between feeling and nonfeeling. No continuum from me to the Ferris wheel (except doing). And that’s the [hard] problem: doings: easy; feelings: hard…
The tricky question then is: Which of these verbs (and comparable adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, etc.) would we be willing to apply to Dave¹s zombie twin in Universe Z? Is there some precise cutoff line beyond which certain words are disallowed? Who would determine that cutoff line?
No tricks at all. If there could be a Zombie, it would have to be feeling nothing at all, just doing, not feeling. But supposing that an unfeeling ramified Ferris Wheel could be doing what we are doing now — namely, discussing feeling, mutually intelligibly — is pure fantasy.
To put this in perspective, consider the criteria that we effortlessly apply (I first wrote “unconsciously”, but then I thought that that was a strange word choice, in these circumstances!) when we watch the antics of the humanoid robots R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. When one of them acts fearful and tries to flee in what strike us as appropriate circumstances, are we not justified in applying the adjective “frightened”?
I think most people’s intuitions about cinematic robots are incoherent. They do and don’t believe that they feel. Nothing hangs on such incoherent notions. Here’s the real test: If the robot were real, would they feel compunctions about kicking it? (I think they would, if the robot was sufficiently like us — just as they are with animals. Below, Doug seems to agree too.)
Here’s a piece — not much longer than this excerpt from Doug’s book — addressing this very issue. Punchline: you get out of a fictional robot whatever the author purports to put into it. If it is decreed, however incoherently, that the robot behaves just as if it feels, but it doesn’t. Then so be it. If it is decreed (as in the Spielberg movie) that it does feel, well then it does. Same for decrees that it flies, it can read minds, it can see into the future, it can change the past, it can redesign the universe, square circles, disprove Goedel’s theorem — in fiction, anything goes…
Harnad, S. (2001) Spielberg’s AI: Another Cuddly No-Brainer.
Or would we need to have obtained some kind of word-usage permit in advance, granted only when the universe that forms the backdrop to the actions in question is a universe imbued with élan mental? And how is this “scientific” fact about a universe to be determined?
No word-usage-permits for “feeling”: In fiction, go with the flow. In the real world, your mind-reading instincts (along with common sense and the invariant correlation of feeling with organism-like doings) will be your guide, whether you like it or not. (And, of course, you can’t be 100% sure in any case but your own.)
“Science” has nothing to do with it — except maybe if you’re wondering about someone in a coma…
And feeling itself is the élan mental — the trouble is, we don’t know how and why it happens (and, by my lights, we never will, because of limits on the power of causal explanation in any but a counterfactual psychokinetic universe, where feeling really is a causal “force” — but that’s not our universe).
If viewers of a space-adventure movie were “scientifically” informed at the movie’s start that the saga to follow takes place in a universe completely unlike ours ‹ namely, in a universe without a drop of élan mental ‹ would they then watch with utter indifference as some cute-looking robot, rather like R2-D2 or C-3PO (take your pick), got hacked into little tiny pieces by a larger robot?
Of course not: Fiction can dictate our premises, but not our conclusions…
Would parents tell their sobbing children, “Hush now, don’t you bawl! That silly robot wasn’t alive! The makers of the movie told us at the start that the universe where it lived doesn’t have creatures with feelings! Not one!” What’s the difference between being alive and living? And more importantly, what merits being sobbed over?
You’re asking moral questions, and you’re right to. It is only the existence of feeling that makes morality matter at all. And of course we alas have many psychopathic tendencies, not to mention sadistic ones. I don’t know if it’s parents or experiences or genes that cause some people to be indifferent to or even to enjoy pain in others, but it happens.
But none of this affective evocativeness changes the basic facts: Whether or not an entity feels is all-or-none,
And all mental states (including believing) are felt states: that’s what makes them “mental.” Otherwise they’d just be states, tout court, as in a ferris wheel or a float-ball in a flush toilet…