Hofstadter<\/a> is right: because these words refer to states we cannot point to or compare, words grounded (in your term) only in private experience, then we are simply clashing by night. We don’t really know what each other means by any of them. \u00a0I will swear that I can know I am thinking about next Tuesday, or the square root of twelve, and can tell the difference between these notions, but it is all done separate from sensation of any kind.<\/p>\n“I repeat, why CAN’T the brain deliver information to one’s awareness by at least one other avenue than feelings? \u00a0To insist that it cannot makes your denial cease to be an empirical statement and become a definition of “feeling”.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Very good challenge, and I’m happy to try to rise to the occasion!<\/p>\n
The brain not only can but does “deliver information” without its being felt. Not only delivers information, but gets things done.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It does nocturnal deliveries while we’re asleep, of course, but it also does a lot while we’re awake (keeps my heart beating, keeps me upright, and, most important, delivers answers to my (felt) questions served on a platter (“what was that person’s name?”, “where am I going?”, “what word should I say next?) without me feeling any of the work that went into it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
These are things we do, and feel we do (“find” the name, “recall” where I’m going, “decide” what to say next), but we are clueless about their provenance: We have no idea how we do them. Our brain does them, and then “delivers” the result.<\/p>\n
Some of this delivery is delivery of know-how (riding a bike, speaking) and some of it is of know-that (facts, or putative facts).\u00a0<\/p>\n
We are the “recipients” of the delivery, and the question is, how does our brain do it?<\/p>\n
But these are the “easy” questions: Cognitive neuroscience will eventually tell us how our brain does and “delivers” all these things for us.<\/p>\n
But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is explaining why and how it feels like something to be the “recipient” of these “deliveries.” If the result of the deliveries were merely doings and sayings, there would be no issue, because there would be nothing mental; it would all just be mechanical, neurosomatic dynamics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, you are sort of forcing me to do some phenomenology here — something I’m neither particularly good at, nor set great store by, but here goes:<\/p>\n
Am I just linguistically legislating that having received a “delivery,” [say, the “information,” X, that it’s Tuesday today] from their brain, what people mean by “I am aware of X” has to be “It feels as if X is the case”?<\/p>\n
Or, worse, am I presumptuously denying what is not only other people’s private privilege but (by my own lights) certain and incorrigible, when I say that people are wrong when they insist it doesn’t feel like anything to know it’s Tuesday? Wrong to just settle for saying they just know it, it’s one of those pieces of “information delivered” by their brain, and that’s all there is to it?<\/p>\n
That would be fine, it seems to me, if the “delivery” were taking place while you were asleep or anesthetized or comatose.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But it seems to me (and here I am doing some amateur phenomenology) that the difference between being (dreamlessly) asleep and being awake is that it feels like something to be awake and it does not feel like anything to be dreamlessly asleep.<\/p>\n
“Information” “delivered” and even “executed” by my brain while I am asleep is also being served on a platter, just as it’s served on a platter when I’m awake: I’m just not feeling anything the while.<\/p>\n
So far you will say you could have substituted “not aware of (a ‘delivery’)” for “not feeling (a ‘delivery’)” and covered the same territory without being committed to its having to feel like something to be aware of something.<\/p>\n
But I can only ask, what does it mean to be awake and aware of something if it does not feel like something to be awake and aware of something?<\/p>\n
If you reply “It feels like something to be aware of something, but only in the sense that it feels like something while<\/em> I’m being aware of something, because I happen to be awake, and being awake feels like something” — then I will have to reply that you are losing me, when you say that it feels like something while<\/em> you receive the “delivery” but that that something it feels like is not what it feels like to receive the delivery!<\/p>\nYes, our language about this is getting somewhat complicated, so let me remind you that, yes, our difference could be merely terminological here, for much the same reason that (if I remember correctly) you had objected, years ago, to my insistence that seeing, too, is feeling.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I think you said that feeling tired is feeling, or feeling anger is feeling, and even feeling a rough surface is feeling, but seeing red is not feeling, it’s seeing. And the way I tried to convey what I meant by “feel” was to point out that you too would agree (and you did) that it feels like something (rather than nothing) to see red. And it feels like something different to see green, or to hear middle C or to smell a rose.<\/p>\n
I think I even said that it was just our language — which says I am feeling a headache or I am feeling cold or I am feeling a rough surface, yet not “I am feeling red” but rather “I am seeing red,” and not “I am feeling the perfume” (if we don’t mean palpating it but sniffing it) but “I am smelling the perfume” — is fooling us a bit, when we conclude from our wording that seeing is not feeling.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I think I even mentioned French, in which both feeling and smelling are (literally): “je sens la douleur”, “je sens le parfum,” as is palpating (“je sens la surface”), whereas, as in English, seeing and hearing have verbs of their own.<\/p>\n
There is in the French the residue of the Latin “sentio” — to feel — that still exists in English, but as a sort of ambiguous false-friend, “I sense,” which means more “I intuit” or “I pick up on” than “I feel.” But I would say the same thing about sensing: If I sense something, be it sensory, affective, tactual, thermal, cognitive, or intuitive, then it feels like something to be sensing it, and would feel like something else to be sensing something else, as surely as it feels like something to be seeing red and would feel like something else to see something else.<\/p>\n
And not just because I happen to be awake while my brain “delivers” the “information”!<\/p>\n
So if I am sensing that it’s Wednesday today, then that feels like something, and feels like something different from sensing that it’s Tuesday today as surely (but perhaps not as intensely) as seeing red feels different from seeing blue. \u00a0<\/p>\n
To put it another way, the result of the “delivery” is not just my “speaking in tongues.” It feels like something not only to say (or think) the words “It’s Wednesday today” but to mean them. And it feels like something else not only to say (or think) but to mean (or understand) something else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Wouldn’t it short-circuit all these discussions if you just came out and said that this is how you use the word “Feeling”, that is, to mean any conscious notion or awareness whatever, even if it is not a sensation like taste or pain or fear? \u00a0You say “feeling” is a nice honest word, while words … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Making Sense of Sensing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":595,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions\/595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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