Illusionism about consciousness proposes that what we intuitively think consciousness is (intrinsic, irreducible qualia) is actually an illusion, and that consciousness can be explained through unconscious intentional states (representational states with content) that are not themselves conscious. This approach uses examples like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon and adjective order rules to demonstrate that we can explain what it's like to have certain experiences by appealing to unconscious mental states that have intentional content, thereby bridging the gap between non-mental explanations and phenomenal experience.
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13. Discussing Keith's interview with Alex O'Connor
Added:Hang on. Camera.
Ah, we are live. Hello. Welcome everybody.
We're the Persuaders and welcome back.
Long time. Hello. Welcome everybody.
>> What? What was that?
>> It's an echo from YouTube.
>> Are you on a You're on a delay.
YouTube is to >> to edit out like if I say something.
>> It's cancel. It's It's muted now.
>> Oh, okay. I thought maybe you were like editing out swear words or devastating objections.
[laughter] Anyways, I was gonna welcome back our longtime listeners who I think are are all named Mark or Allen. There's some really good ones, but neither name. Um, welcome back. Uh, and I I'm sure that by now they know that the persuaders never persuade anybody of anything, but they keep coming back.
Um, and people that have read the title of today's show might have guessed that we're planning on talking about a recent appearance of Keith Frankish.
Keith, hello. See, that is Keith Frankish. Um, do you know how to how to verify that you're not an an AI these days?
>> Uh, >> like if you're if you're if you're like having a video call and you suspect that you're you're actually interacting with a deep fake, do you know what some of the >> Oh, yeah. Look at that. That's That's real Keith.
>> Cuz I was talking to to this other Keith for like a half hour before uh I asked for the finger verification. Um, you got to get that early on. Uh, anyway, what we were hoping to talk about today was this recent appearance of Keith Frankish on the Alex O' Conor um, I forgot if he's still the mystic mystical skeptical skeptic. The mystic skepticism cosmic skeptic. I think >> he's cosmic skeptic.
>> Uh, which I suppose means universal skeptic. He's so skeptical that he's tempted to believe that consciousness is fundamental, the pansychism is true.
That I mean that real skeptical. Um, right. Anyway, I told Keith that I wanted to speak first so that I could state clearly and non-sarcastically, which something I've probably already blown. I totally blew it, but I'm going to say it anyway. I love this episode. I generally love uh Alex even though I disagree with him a lot. I think he's really very bright and kind, asks really really good questions I in very tough conversations and um even when he's saying he himself is saying things I don't agree with. I think he does a really fair job of of presenting you know his his position. he doesn't overstate it and he does I think a fair job of presenting what he understands about the opposing views. And another thing I would add is um one of the things I really appreciate about him is I don't think he's an insider in the sense of like you know Keith and I are both like insiders.
We we we we're both academics and and we both have axes to grind and we get paid to grind our axes. So, we're very much insiders who who talk a lot of inside baseball. And I think it's really important for the intellectual culture to talk to people that aren't insiders.
It's it's important for the insiders to to get the hell [laughter] outside, talk to someone else. Um, and not just from the point of view of let's find out what the little people think, but because like we're all people.
We're all people. No one's the little people. Um, and it's really valuable to to hear from example um from members of my family that that think philosophy is stupid to hear what they think about like consciousness and the brain and oh yeah that's I get a lot of insights from that. Insights about how like I might have gotten lost in my own rhetoric or my own like inside baseball. So I think Alex maybe I'm falling for a trick.
Maybe he's got a PhD in philosophy and he's, you know, a full professor somewhere and he's just been using a lot of re rejuvenating skin moisturizers, but but uh but I get the impression he is an outsider and so that's super extra valuable. So, I just wanted to like get that gushing praise out there. I I really like Alex Okconor's >> YouTube videos. Um, of course, I I love Keith to death. Uh, and I and I thought both of them did a really great job. And I wanted to say that in part because when I pitched this idea to Keith, the way I described it was why don't we have an episode where I talk about some of the many moments where I wished I could swoop in during that video and and either like whisper in your ear like an angel or devil on your shoulder or just push you out of your chair and say, "Yeah, but enough what Keith thinks.
Here's the here's a better answer. Um, so I kind of pitched it like that to Keith. Um, and I was worried at the last minute today like, well, I don't want this episode to be a pile up on Keith. I don't think of what I would have said as uh criticisms of the way Keith did it. I think that that episode is great. Even if you hate illusionism, like you just think any flavor of physicalism is completely a category mistake, it's still a great episode. Um, and I think Keith and and Alex both did really good jobs. I do think however it's interesting from the point of view of say a qualitist um or just a slightly different kind of illusionist to think about like well what were some what are some different kind of angles um to have taken on some of those um questions uh because I think that might be illuminating. One way to think about this is like what if there was a sequel um and the sequel was once again Keith and Alex, but they now they can get maybe take it to the the next level. Uh or you know what if what if we had a Freaky Friday situation, Pete and Keith trade bodies or trade brains, however you want to think of that. Um you know what would I what would I have said if I was the pilot in the giant Mecca robot that is the body of of Keith? Well, yeah, that's interesting because I mean we're on the broadly on the same wavelength and so I'll be interested to see where you would have diverged and to see to what extent your your option would have been one that I could have been happy to take or one that I would want to resist. So yeah, let's >> I think that could be instructive and >> and I could I just also say that I I I agree with what you said about about Alex. I've done a lot of interviews trying to explain this stuff or trying to explain my views on this stuff and it was by far the most um rewarding one I did and uh which isn't to criticize any of the other interviewers of course but Alex clearly knew what he was what he wanted from me and had thought about how he was trying going to get what he wanted and what he wanted was I think generally a understanding of what I thought.
>> Yeah. And um so he gave he structured it in a nice way. I thought he he anticipated that I would be I don't want to push back on a lot of mis um caricatures of the view and he'll he got that in at the start and his own contributions were thoughtful and they they usually um prompted me to to what I hope was a a constructive response and continuation of the debate. and he he's done a lot of this so I guess he you know he's it's his job and um yeah no I I enjoyed doing it. Um so yes I think we both we both agreed on that he's doing a good thing.
>> One more thing to add um I'm sure there'll be more compliments directed Alex's way but one more thing right now is he came across as a genuine listener and sometimes you talk to people and I'm sure people would say this about me. You could just tell Pete's waiting for his turn to say what he's been thinking for the past 45 minutes. All right. Um, a really good listener is someone who is not thinking about the next thing they want to say. They're thinking about what the other person's saying.
>> Um, and then reacting to that, not just following the script that they've written for themselves. And there's one moment early in the video where I I think that I'm able to tell just by looking at Alex's face while you're talking that he he smiles a little bit.
Like it's this subtle change in his face where he just got a little jolt of pleasure from learning something that he hadn't thought of before that you were saying. It wasn't necessarily agreement, but it was just like like kind of like, oh, that's that's pretty cool. That's pretty interesting and I can see it on his face and that really I took it as a sign of like yeah this guy is listening and a lot of [clears throat] >> his like little aides and stuff like that were very much someone who not only is engaged with the conversation that's going on but is also able to do the multitasking that you need to do >> to think on the fly.
>> Um and you know it's hard it's hard it's hard to have a conversation with another human being.
>> It is and it's Especially when you're broadcasting live and impromptu as we are.
>> Yeah, it's not always easy to you have to be thinking about what you're going to say and which point you want to make next and how you going to frame that and so on. But at the same time, you need to be following along where the other guy's going and uh and listening to you, I'm thinking, okay, so where's Pete going? He's going this I want to come back on that. you you you you constantly sort of secondguessing um yourself, you think, wait a minute, no, he's not going there, he's going here. So, as somebody who can do that fluently and um you know, in a relaxed way, as Alex, it's yeah, it's a skill. Um so, I suppose that's what makes a good interview and being a good interviewer is quite a special talent, I think. Uh sometimes the really great interviews like I I would say Dick Cavat I think seem to do very little um I don't know whether you agree that Dick Cavitt was a great interview but I I always enjoy his um his >> I enjoy his his banter. I It's funny you bring him up because I was watching a Dick Cavitt video very early this morning and and I was like, huh, kind of not liking Dick Cavitt right now and I used to >> Exactly.
>> used to like him more. Anyway, >> anyway, let's get into >> So, one thing that occurs to me about the format of this is that I think uh it would be a bad idea to try to start at the beginning and then work our way through.
>> Oh, yeah. because my past experience of doing that sort of thing is you never get past the first minute of the thing.
So it might be better to just if I were to try to guess what I thought was some highlevel >> bird's eye view that was important. Um, >> so one of the things that occurred to me that I perhaps really marks a difference in approach um to to one that I find myself being attracted to and what I perceive you as doing um with respect to like and let's just call it illusionism like for today I'm a fellow illusionist because in in some ways one thing that re we really agree on is that Like there's this thing that we're probably close to being able to explain, which is why do all these people think there's a hard problem?
>> Think that they know with a high degree of certainty what consciousness is. Like there's this there's all these people that are saying all this stuff that we think is mistaken in some way or other.
And we're optimistic that we could explain where these mistakes came from.
>> Yep.
>> And you know, I'm I'm happy to say I'm an illusionist in that sense. Um >> I I won't um I won't record it.
>> Whatever. I'm just an illusionist. You can't hurt me, fellow illusionist. Um but but one of the things I uh found myself thinking a lot throughout the video is that what would really have been nice is to get more of um two things >> at once. And the two things are a kind of like positive explanation.
Um like for example an explanation of you know what is it like to see red?
>> Um or maybe something slightly less ambitious. Um like you know an explanation of the tip of the tongue phenomenon. Um and and further uh make a big deal about how the explanation is a a representational explanation that you could for most sakes and purposes couch in terms of ordinary folk mental states like belief but also help yourself to the idea that they are unconscious beliefs. beliefs of which the subject is not conscious. I think that those two things glued together and delivered simultaneously are can like I I think that that really can go a long way to dispelling a lot of the feeling of like oh this is the way conscious is consciousness works and I know it works this way because I introspect it. I'm directly immediately acquainted with this thing that you couldn't possibly define. You couldn't possibly explain it. It couldn't possibly just be my wife's parts moving around or like I think it it does a lot to >> reference to a phrase that Philip G sometimes uses for those who wondered where the example came from.
>> Oh yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, I wasn't trying to talk smack about uh anybody's wife, but I believe this is something he said in public.
>> He sometimes he sometimes I I hope I'm not mischaracterizing here, but he sometimes says that when I say that my wife is in pain, I don't just mean that the parts of her body are or parts of her brain are moving in certain ways, are doing certain things. I hope that's not too unfair to him.
>> Me neither. But he does like to say things about behavior and how like >> there's more more to consciousness than how things behave. Yes.
>> Um but there but there's no more to physics than describing how things behave.
>> I think he thinks that there is something more to physics than that and that's that's that's the whole that uh that uh >> but like like physics as we understand it now like as physicists understand physics.
>> I I think he thinks that that again I don't hope I don't misrepresent it but I think he thinks that there's a gap in that story. It doesn't tell us. Physics doesn't tell us what uh the things it talks about really are, what mass really is, what um uh quarks really are, what their intrinsic nature is. It just tells us, it just defines them in in dispositional terms in terms of what their dispos is physics.
>> He thinks that's a limitation on physics and supplied by metaphysics, >> right? But physics itself just has a story to say uh about the behavior of things and what things do.
>> That's I think I think >> um but if there is a further question about what things are >> you're not going to get it from physics.
You need >> you need something else and that something else is Jesus Christ.
>> Right. [laughter] I'm kidding.
>> It's not Jesus Christ. It's of course >> consciousness. any of us will do.
>> It's consciousness >> simply by introspecting our own consciousness.
>> The consciousness is coming from inside of the house.
>> Um so anyway, should I say some more?
>> Say look say some more about this. You you said it would be nice to have had a more positive >> you were paying attention. You're a terrible listener. [snorts] [screaming] >> You you were saying >> I was wishing a more positive proposal.
So and you said that could be sketched in terms of um two components. One of them belief and the other uh unc non-concious belief and the other what was the other?
>> Uh well there two two parts. Uh one of them you could say was the belief part.
>> Oh yeah.
>> As opposed to just citing um effects or or reactions which is often the lingo that you you go to.
>> Well I do because I a belief that um doesn't do anything. just lie just an just lies there in an inert representational state that just lies there not doing anything. It's uh it's not talking about any changes.
It's not >> Yeah. And I don't intend this as a criticism.
>> This was a thing that that that Dan Dan had always used to press on. He was saying look you talk about representations here but who's consuming these representations and what what is the consumer doing with them? if the consumer if there isn't a consumer um uh uh then the representation which isn't even a representation without a consumer I suppose I made a point um and you know that's where the the sort of the the heft of the story lies with what's what does the representation do >> right >> so that's I guess that's why there's this emphasis there >> yeah well to reiterate I'm not being um I'm not trying to subtract I'm merely trying to add do you know the golden rule rule of improv.
>> Uh, don't fall over.
>> That's the silver rule. The golden rule of improv is yes and.
>> Okay. So, let's hand this let's hand this sketchless positive story for us.
>> So, the the positive story, one way to think of it as a yes and so yes to what Keith is saying and also Dan Dennett about there's got to be like the effects.
>> There's got to be an answer to the question and then what happens? You can't just you don't just want qualia that just sit there. You need you need some story about how there's something else. Um there's m there's an apple out there. Light comes in.
Then what happens? Well then blah blah blah makes there be a conscious state.
And then what happens? You can't just say well the buck has to stop somewhere and it stops with what consciousness is. And what consciousness is is what it's like to feel see red or what it's like to feel pain. And what that is is like you just feel it, man.
>> I think there's a there's a temptation among some philosophers who are trying to naturalize consciousness to replace that what it's like with well um there's a certain sort of representation like a first order representation that has certain characteristics that it's non-conceptual that it's um uh abstract um that it's whatever.
>> Yeah. I'm thinking of ties theory here >> and that's poised to do certain work and yeah just that's it and that seems to me just like another version of the presentation. I mean, okay, it's not inquiry. It's not mysterious. It's something that could be physically realized and no problem about that. We can have stories about how it gets its content, but still it's just sitting there.
>> Um, that's not a story yet about about consciousness, >> right? And so, >> consciousness is more dynamic than that.
>> I totally agree. And so I'm um I I completely agree that ultimately this has to bottom out >> with effects, reactions, things that are wholly non-concious and non-mental and not representations. Like there's the bottom has to be describable that way. But I I what I want to add is that I think for the purposes of education, >> of enlightening, >> of of elevating the people to the full understanding of what's going on here, it's it's really helpful to have an intermediary story. Um, and so my what I am am adding is this two-piece uh thing um which is um to to give the representational story and to to spell out how it works >> without itself being conscious. And what I mean by how it works is how it explains phenomenal consciousness. how it explains it seeming to you like there's something going on or it's seeming to you that that something uh there's something red or that there's something intrinsic. Um and I I I further think that there are some examples that can be more effective >> for those like educational or communicational purposes than others.
Um, >> yeah, let's let's have them.
>> So, so one of them that I like is to um mention tip of the tongue phenomenon.
>> Um because as a bit of an aside, I really worry as praise be to Alex, he worried early on in like within the first few minutes, he worried about like, oh, it's always red, isn't it?
>> It's never brown. Um or right or purple.
Well, I think that's actually very insightful of him and and that's something that I've been trying to make noise about for years that we we zero in on this particular example that is number one visual.
>> Uh and number two, it's of a of a color that many of us have learned at a very early age as a primary color.
>> Mhm.
>> We we never we never do like uh light blue.
Um, and if you know a little bit of your history of this stuff, you know that famously like Hume stumbled over shades of blue and there's the famous missing shade of blue. Um, it's really really hard to pump Maryesque intuitions about uh a light shade of blue. Um, like imagine Mary instead of being in a black and white room, she was in a light blue and dark blue room. And the thing that she hadn't ever seen before was this one particular shade of blue.
>> Would she learn what it's like to see blue necessarily only upon leaving the room? Right?
That's the Mary question. Turn in that other dial. And you could go read Hume who didn't put it explicitly in terms of someone named Mary, but he kind of poses the same problem to himself. And he comes to this conclusion I think many people would would come to. And that is no, you could figure out in advance of experiencing the missing shade what it would be like to see the missing shade.
>> And further Hume has a story to tell about why that's the case.
A story that we should be super suspicious of. And the story is that our knowledge of what it was like it would be like to see this shade that we haven't actually seen before is grounded in or constituted by these simple ideas that we combine in our mind. the way you might combine colors on a paint palette and mix them.
>> And so you take your your idea of blue and your idea of lightness and you mix those ideas quite literally in your mind, whatever that's supposed to mean literally in your mind. What? Um but I but I think that it it's really interesting to change examples and see what happens which again that's like a Dennut thing right to say let's turn the knobs on the thought experiment and see what >> which way the intuitions flow through the intuition pipes. Um so one of the things about tip of the tongue phenomenon it's not about an apple that's that we all like start off by agreeing like oh yeah the apple is out there. Um and it's not about puzzling about vision. Mhm.
>> It's this phenomenon that many of us, if not all of us, have experienced. What's Allan talking about? John Cles. Um, all right. Allan is always just saving saving the day. My my go-to is always George Clooney, but John Cles will will do the trick, too. So, many people have this experience.
You're trying to answer a question. The answer to the question is the name of somebody.
often it's a celebrity >> and you know that you know >> but we want to say it's it's as if on the tip of my tongue like it's right there and I don't know exactly what the etmology of this is supposed to be but one way to think about it is like okay it's on the tip of my tongue without a mirror I can't see the tip of my tongue but I know Or or maybe it's like you've got something stuck in your teeth. You you don't know if it's a little skin from a popcorn kernel or or maybe it's a a a thumbnail that's been in there for a few years. You don't know, but it's on the tip of your tongue, so you know it's there. Not sure what it is. And so the interesting thing is it's not an apple and it's not John Cles like whatever you have or is in there isn't an apple because an apple is a fruit and you you don't have a fruit in there. Um John Cles is a grown man. You don't have John Cles inside of you. You have a name. You have a name inside of you. Whatever that means. you you have knowledge of a name and you could call that a belief. You could say it's the belief that that man or the belief of the that that the tallest cast member of Monty Python's Flying Circus or um >> right the guy that starred in the funny walk sketch was that Cleles.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Ministry of silly walks. John Cle, right? There's al you might be able to think about that guy under all sorts of descriptions, including as the person named John Cleas, but that bit right there, >> your belief that the name of that person is John Cle, it's in there, but not fully. So you know that you have it but you don't and it's it's it's kind of difficult to really characterize the phenomenology of tip of the tongue phenomenon but here's here's all I need to make my point.
There's a there is a representation.
Now what's a representation? Excellent question to be answered some other day.
But Keith is right that ultimately the answer is going to be about like what things do, reactions, effects. That's what's going to be at at bottom. We are going to explain what this representation is ultimately in terms that aren't themselves representational terms. But right now, this is really useful for lots of things relative to these conscious consciousness wars. Um, >> hang on a minute. Let let me just You said it has to be a belief, but there's another there's another it depends what >> Sorry. It has to be what?
>> You said it has to be a belief that I mean well what if it's I mean the way it seems to me and the way I think of the tip of the tongue thing is it's more procedural.
It's like there's a certain sort of way I can put my vocal um apparatus and my tongue that well and then I you know I breathe out through my lungs or whatever and and this sound comes out and it's the one that's appropriate. this sequence of sounds comes out sequence of phone names I guess which is appropriate to the person I'm wanting to talk about that tall dangly guy who you know um and what I'm trying to it's more procedure it's like I can't quite remember how to how to play this shot in a in a cricket or tennis or whatever I just can't quite remember how to get my tongue into the right place to do it and suddenly it comes to me and it's quite like remembering uh so much as just oh yes that's him and just John please and one way to prompt yourself to do this is to just through the alphabet and say [laughter] until you get to John please and so it's I mean now of course that could be described in belief terms um uh pretty much you know any competence can uh if you take a suitably um minimalist view of what belief if but there's a danger that when you talk about belief you talk it sounds as if you're talking about sort of bit of discreetly coded information you know little proposition stored in your belief sentence stored in your belief box and I don't think we need to go there. So what's what's the advantage here of of casting this in belief talk? I think you you raised a lot of really good points that I think are true and part of the full story and also you raised some really good concerns that um ultimately I can answer. You you need not always be concerned about them. Um, so the the true thing is that one of the things going on here is there's something that you're usually able to do and there is a way to do it and you're usually able to do that thing and and the thing that you're able to do is say the right name in the appropriate context >> and and you don't need an actual John Cle in the room with you or causally interacting with you in order for you to do the thing. and the thing that you're doing. We could call that a procedure.
>> We could even say it's a procedure that you've learned. But during tip of the tongue, there's some kind of temporary >> interruption of the procedure. Okay, >> that's all happening.
>> But there's more. One of the things is you know that you know the name, >> right? Okay.
>> What? But right and I don't know off the top of my head what exact experiments have done if any to verify this but I bet you could conduct a bunch of experiments to prove that people's judgments in those conditions that they actually do like their judgment that yeah I know the name is reliable.
I I I'm sure people have tip of the tongue phenomenon >> at least sometimes and you could demonstrate that like nah they didn't they didn't actually know the name [clears throat] >> but I bet you could you could demonstrate that people are actually pretty good at knowing that they know even though they can't get it all the way out. I think tip of the tongue phenomenon is in this sense real it's a real thing that happens. People actually do know in this cognitive science sense of no which is like reliably get the right answer. I'm not talking about defeating, >> but I'm making an empirical bet. I bet this is pretty benign that there's lots of stuff people do know >> and one of the things that they know is that they know the name that they just can't they can't fully get it out.
>> I give me that investigate. Well, certainly when if it's we choose someone like John Le and who do you think for Montipython Montipython fans? So yeah, we're sure we know it because we've been so much exposed to that. But if you're trying if I'm trying to remember the name of somebody I met last week and I could remember that they told me it and I made an effort to [snorts] remember it and was it John or Jim or and there I'm much less confident that I know it. Uh I might I might I I mean I was trying to remember the name of some comedian the other day and and I actually remembered it. I I after struggling a bit I came out with the the answer and it was actually correct but I wasn't sure that it was correct and I had to go and look it up and see if I had got it right.
>> Yeah, there's there's all sorts of different ways you could rank people with respect to a domain of knowledge.
There's all sorts of fine grain distinctions you could make like um how much do they know uh and how and how fast are they at like getting that knowledge out, right? You might have two people that pretty much know all the same biology trivia, but one of them is just faster at at accessing it and so they're better on your trivia team, right? But in terms of like actual things known, there's no significant difference.
>> It's a high order thing though. the confidence in one's own judgments. Yes.
>> Yes.
>> YouTube is saying that in these tip of the tongue cases we normally do know and we're confident that um we know we know that we know. I'm just not sure about that. How I mean sometimes obviously we are but other times I think >> I think that I think >> I'm not confident for I'm often not at all confident in my own recommendations.
>> That's fine. He's I'm not saying that we uh always are right when it seems like we're right. I wouldn't say that about anything, >> right?
>> But I'm saying that here's the thing that upon a little bit of just, you know, think about >> what you recall of your past experiences with what you would call tip of the tongue phenomenon. Mhm.
>> Doesn't it make sense to say that there's of course this procedure that you normally are able to, you know, get out of the gate, >> but in this moment you can't, but that's not all that's happening.
>> There's also this like conscious awareness, belief, hunch. I kind of don't care what you call it, but it is representational in the sense of representational that I would say beliefs are representational.
>> We could talk about what it's about.
It's about >> George Clooney. You just can't say that it's George Clooney, >> but you know that you know.
>> And so there's also not just this feeling of knowing or this hunch. There's what you know.
>> Okay. So, let's concentrate on one of those good cases. What's what's the model we we draw from that?
>> Well, we now have at least a partial explanation of what it's like to have a certain kind of experience. And what is helping us see that we have an explanation is that in the explanons, the part of the story that is doing the explaining, we are citing representational states.
And it's important that the representational states are unconscious representational states. If all of that was happening in consciousness, it wouldn't make any sense at all. Like you're conscious that his name is George Cles John Clooney and that and you just can't make those words come out of your mouth. That's doesn't seem like what's going on at all. That's not the explanation of what's going on. that there's these representational states all in consciousness >> in this very straightforward sense of in consciousness which is something like you're conscious of it >> like we suppose we're we're conscious of what it's like to see blue while we're looking at my nice blue t-shirt in in that sense you're conscious of having the knowledge of the right answer and also you can't fully bring it out and so there's still you still have uh very good questions. I can tell by the look on your face there's still questions to ask. There's there's still things that haven't been explained. Um but I do think this goes a long way to showing the power of the intermediate step before we get all the way out of the folk psychological explanations. The power of adverting to what is in the mind but not consciously in the mind.
>> Yeah. And it's in the mind in the sense of it's it's got intentional content.
>> Mhm.
>> And but it's not in consciousness in the sense of you're conscious of it.
>> So look, let's just make sure I've got that. So the idea is that there's this this state we're in which we recognize we're in which has what we call the sort of phenomenology. just using that term in a a neutral way and to get a grip on the state. It helps to think and from as you say from a folk psychological perspective it helps to conceptualize that state as involving non-concious attitudes of some kind.
That's a natural way to get a grip on what that state is like. Is that is that roughly >> right? Um because and I I sorry um let me just about and so the idea is that that's a helpful lever helpful wedge to to to start moving people away from the idea of intrinsic and reducible qualia that you can get from the folks staying still staying firmly within folk psychology and with everyday examples that >> yeah I I think uh one way I would try to state what you just said not that there's anything wrong with it would be to say that um I think that people that have really strong anti-illusionist Mhm.
>> Intuitions, people that really genuinely >> struggle to understand illusionism and not because they're unintelligent, although of course there's a lot of unintelligent people out there, but there's really intelligent people.
They're just like, I don't get it at all. And I think that they don't get it at all. I think that part of their problem is that they're coming to the problem just focusing on what they can consciously imagine and what they can consciously perceive. And when you invite them to imagine believing that you have a conscious state but not having a conscious state, that just seems like an outright contradiction. And of course, it seems like a a contradiction. You can't consciously imagine being in a state that is not conscious. In order to make sense of what the illusionist is saying, you have to be able to get your head around in some sense that isn't imagine it consciously. You have to be able to understand in a in a non-contradictory way how it could explain what it's like to be in a conscious state by adverting to unconscious things.
And it is really helpful when the unconscious things also have intentional content >> that you can also >> be in conscious states that have similar if not the same intentional contents. I think that's a beautiful middle step to the ultimate gold at the end of the rainbow.
I suppose someone might say in response to that playing devil's advocate that well yes okay you can see how having this intentional structure kind of helps to get you get a grip on what's happening here this that this condition can be described in intentional terms without the intentional states involved being part of the conscious experience itself I could see how that helps but they might say yeah but still that's just showing that there must be this intentional structure to the state as well >> no it's explaining something that you you previously didn't have any explanation for and now it's it's helping explain it.
>> Well, that's what they would say. I guess that it it doesn't because how does the how does the for for one thing they might say the intentional states themselves have to have some phenomenology. But let's set that aside.
They will say understanding the representational content that's contents involved doesn't get you to because representations >> okay part of the story naturalistically can be defined in terms of causes and effects and essentially behavior and parts moving in the right way and that doesn't get you to the feel of the whole of the >> Oh yes it does. Well, >> what it what it's like what it's like is to know what the name is >> while simultaneously not being able to say what the name is nor to call to mind what the name is.
That's what it's like the like. So, I have just exhaustively characterized the phenomenology in just intentional content.
So if someone were to say, "No, no, no, Mandic, you haven't explained what it's like." They would have to also say that they define phenomenology as as not in any way involving intentional content, which some people do. I know some people do that, but not everyone does that.
Some people just say, "Look, look, look, we don't have a theory. We don't have like a heavy metaphysics in mind. We just mean what it's like." And now I'm telling you in a very straightforward natural normal person kind of way what it's like. What it's like to have tip of the tongue phenomena is like when you know that you know what the name of that person is. You just cannot bring the name to mind. You cannot become conscious of the name >> as such. But none but but you still what you know >> is is is something that you cannot characterize as some like direct relation to George Clooney or or some kind of causal relation to to John Cle.
What you know has got to be something that we would further characterize in terms of a a complex causal story about the receipt of information about learning storage. All of this things that have intentional content and you can later reduce the intentional content but they have intentional content one and the same intentional contents that figure in the the the exhaustive characterization of what it's like.
>> I suspect >> I can do more examples by the way.
>> Okay the whole thing home.
>> Let's let's we'll come to this. I suspect that the people with bugs disagreeing with would say something like well okay so there's a phenomenon here. It's a psychological phenomenon.
It's one you can recognize that you're in. It's one that's characterized in the way that that you did that you just did.
And it's a real thing. And you're telling me about that would would help me to recognize when I'm in it. Um, and yeah, great. But it's not really a a phenomenal state of the sort that we're really interested in because there isn't really any deep sort of any really rich phenomenology to the tip of the tongue thing. It's just this being in this >> rich well not being able to behave. you recognize that you can't do the bit of behavior that you're wanting to do and you can explain why you can't do that bit of behavior in >> Is that supposed to be something rich or not rich?
>> That's supposed to be something that's devil's advocate that that is quite different from being in pain which is not a case of not being able to do something that you you want to do. It's a case of just something being imposed upon you. this this awfulness being manifested to you. It's not >> Yeah. So, I'm I'm I'm saying they might they could accept perhaps the your analysis of that case, but say that's not a good example of the kind of thing that poses a hard problem.
>> But I'm not explaining I'm not explaining anything solely in terms of oh, there's this thing that you aren't able you're temporarily not able to do. That's not the full explanation of anything >> that I'm talking about. It's part of an explanation >> of of what you know and what you know is one and the same as you know that you know the name and you know that you can't >> call the name. And if we want to focus on what it's like, what it's like is the intentional content that you you are consciously accessing. What you're consciously accessing is that you're not able to fully access the name of this person. Even though you are able to access that you have it.
>> You have the name in the sense of have.
That must mean you have learned it. You just can't recall it. So you you you have like a partial access to something that has a fuller existence >> and in its fullness at least some of it is in the unconscious but it still has intentional content.
>> So there's so I'm giving a characterization of what it's like and an explanation of what it's like. As I say, the push back I think would be that that's what the way that you're using what it's like there is different from or >> well that's great but now we're having a different debate and then now that's a debate about like what what it's like >> how how could that sort of explanatory um framework can how would that apply to knowing what light blue is like or what can can you do the same story some that's a good that's a good analogy I think there's um you would you would have to get into how it's deceptively simple >> um right that we um have deceived ourselves into thinking that part of the story is a like a mixing there's a mixing that happens in the mind >> um and um >> but yeah you could you could do that also part of the re the Why we have more certainty about the red case is that we have beguiled ourselves into thinking that red is is simple that it doesn't have any of the descriptive or structural complexity that the representation of of light blue has.
Light blue kind of wears on the sleeve the same sort of structure that the English word light and blue has. Um it it's not monoexmic >> to to use the the the lingo about color languages. We've got um >> I agree about that. But how could we get the how do we get the explanation of phenomenology of seeing blue in intentional terms in the same way that we did with the tip of the tongue >> the the in a way that is maybe hard to follow unless you were first warmed up by the examples I did want to talk about. So >> okay. So one of one way of describing what needs to be closed in closing the gap is that on the on the one side we have completely non-mental non-intentional nonfenomenal explanons which you know we probably don't have to go all the way down to quirks for it's enough to talk about like neural circuits or or or modules of of memory and and attention something relatively high level compared to cellular or uh you know subatomic levels. Uh but but the that's one end of the rainbow um that we have to get all the way to that's where the gold is and where we start is something like well what would we say about what it's like if we were to attempt to describe the phenomenology in as un theoretic of a way as possible.
We would say things like ah yeah I know what it's what it's like to see blue. I I know what it's like to to taste a lemon. I don't think I know what it's like to taste Vegemite. Um, >> right. So, I mean, that's that's stuff that people feel like they understand and can follow. Um, and and many people will say like they just don't see how you could possibly close that gap at all.
>> And and I think that you could find all sorts of intermediate cases that help start filling in pieces of the gap. And once you see how these different dots occupy intermediate positions between the one end and the other, you start to see how like oh how you could fill in even more intermediate positions between the intermediate positions. So >> looking for intentional structure looking for oops looking for >> looking for intentional structure and and further in intentional structure where we can kind of we can kind of intellectually see we can grasp that it m it makes sense that it must sometimes be unconscious and even while unconscious it is explaining >> it [clears throat] is part of the explanatory story how we're in this complex state >> a state that doesn't even seem seems simple or intrinsic. It's a it's a complex state like I know the name of this celebrity. That's complex. There's no plausible account that says that's some like intrinsic property that's part of the f foundation of reality that what it's like to to partially but not fully remember John Cles's name. There's no way that's a simple fundamental property. You got to be kidding. Right.
I guess this is this is the insight behind higher order theories of consciousness that you need that non-concious intentional machinery um is uh can can can help us do a lot of the >> yeah I you know right now today agnostic about whether this is just full-blown higher thought theory or not but it's certainly very similar in lots of ways and I certainly have learned a lot of these tricks by hanging out in higher order thought theory club.
>> Yeah. One of the worries about that I suppose is that it's I mean it's a standard worry about higher order of thought theory is that it's uh it's it seems to run the risk of requiring a good deal of conceptual sophistication for possession of consciousness that I mean to take the tip of the tongue phenomenon maybe that an animal might find that it's a non-human animal might find that it couldn't we call the right motor sequence to do something but it won't know that it actually has that motor sequence encoded. We'll just >> I'm not I don't have any pretense to explaining all of consciousness in one fell swoop.
>> But but I think it's it's hard to deny that there are human beings who among their what it's likenesses is what it's like to have John's name on the tip of the tongue.
>> Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. that like you would have to do we would have to get in real deep into theory land for you to tell a story about phenomenality whereby that's just completely irrelevant >> to what it's like >> can I move to my other examples so I think light blue and also red are excellent examples and I I could explain those but I don't think that those are great places to start at this stage in the like this early stage in the in the journey. Um, I would like to do uh I've got two more examples. One of them is a second linguistic example, and it's important I'm doing them in this order.
And the the the the one after that that I have is visual, and that will help us get a little bit closer to blue and red because they're visual, too. So, the the um the the second linguistic one that I I I really personally like thinking about, I haven't tried on a lot of people, has to do with adjective order.
Um, and and some people already know about adjective order, Keith, off top of your head, do you know the the English adjective order rule?
Have you Let me ask you this. Have you heard of it? Don't Don't Are you typing?
Don't Google it.
Do you know it?
Uh oh.
I don't hear Keith speaking.
I barely see him moving. Is he frozen?
>> I muted my mic for a second. Okay. Okay.
I Yes, I just said some really clever things there. Pif. [laughter] What is Do I know the English adjective order rule? Yes and no. I in the sense procedurally that if you give me a bunch of adjectives, I can put them in that order. If you ask me to articulate the order and say which type of adjective goes in which order, I I would have to do a few examples myself and try and work it out from that. Um, so I yes and no. Excellent. That is a great that's a great answer in part because of its resemblance to the George Clooney and John Cles sorts of examples, but also it just kind of uh more importantly illustrates where I want to go with all this. Um, and I agree with everything Allan says uh in case he thought maybe he had an objection. Um, so many people haven't heard of the adjective rule order. Some people have heard of the adjective rule order, but like me, they couldn't tell you off top of their head what the adjective rule order is, even though I have seen it many times before.
I have seen what the adjective order rule is.
>> Um, and further, I would have a really hard time reconstructing what the rule is.
Mhm.
>> But nonetheless, here's a a fun little set of linguistic stimuli for all of us to expose ourselves to, regardless of how confident you are that that you're familiar with the adjective order rule.
So, here's one uh stimulus. This is something that you probably would would think sounds like a fairly normalish thing for a person to say in English.
Hey Keith, I just purchased a big new black metal cooking iron.
>> Congratulations.
>> Yeah. Okay.
>> Yep. That's >> How about this? Hey Keith, I just purchased a cooking metal black big new iron.
>> Yes.
>> Sound weird?
>> It does.
>> Sounds a little weird. Um and no, uh one of the Marks guessed I'm going to talk about the the Japanese flag. Oh. Um, uh, that was 2025.
2025, I had a series of blog posts and they were like called Japanese flag number one, Japanese flag 17 of 34. Uh, I've taken some time off from the Japanese flag. Um, >> more bets for the next example. Um, >> you guys, no one's going to guess it.
>> Um, if anyone guesses it, I'm going to be uh blown away, but not that blown away because there was a clue in a recent blog post on my blog. Anyway, um here's another uh stimulus. Get ready to be stimulated.
>> Hey Keith, have you seen the sleeping fluffy old gray Chinese cat?
>> Yes.
>> It seems normal, right?
>> That seemed fine.
>> Hey, Keith, have you seen the fluffy old gray Chinese sleeping cat?
sound too bad actually, but maybe that's me.
>> It seems weird. Okay. So, regardless regardless >> whether Allan is right and it's really a rule as opposed to like kind of a guideline thing that there actually are acceptable exceptions for like for example if some of the adjectives I'm sorry if some of the >> the vowel sounds >> violate a vow this other rule which is a vowel order rule then it's okay to say things like the big bad wolf, even though the big bad wolf technically doesn't conform to what usually gets called the the adjective order rule or the royal rule of adjectives. So, you know, it's not a law of nature, but it's the sort of thing whereby I could predict about a whole bunch of people I never met before >> and knew only that they are adults who identify as monolingual English speakers. I could predict which >> strings of English words they would label as like yeah that's fine and which ones they would say no that's not fine I could predict that >> now how am I able to predict that I'm able to predict that because in in in some sense which I'm going to put in a very handwavy way but nonetheless it it's got to be true there's some sense in which they learn something.
>> Mhm.
>> In some sense, there's something inside of them that is causing them >> to behave in this way that I'm able to predict.
>> But here's another thing I I'm I'm able to predict.
And um and that is that one of these will seem wrong to them.
>> What it's like to hear one of these, what it's like to read one of these.
It's like reading something that's wrong >> or or it seems off. It feels off. That's what it's like. And the other one, it seems fine. It seems normal. There's all sorts of different ways you could put it. But all of them capture what it's like. They say what it's like. I'm able to predict what it's like for that person to read this sentence that perhaps no human has ever read before.
One of the great things about natural languages is they have so many pieces.
There's way more combinations of pieces than we have time in the whole age of the universe to ever write down or say, but nonetheless, you could take some never before seen configuration and and someone could say like, "Oh, that's [ __ ] up th [laughter] those those adjectives.
That's not that's not how you do it."
Um, so somehow in some sense of learn the rule, they've learned the rule. Now, did they have a belief that which which has the intentional content that you would write out if you wrote out the rule? That's that's a bit hard to believe. It's a bit hard to [clears throat] believe, but it's really hard to tell a story that doesn't in some sense adverts.
Yes, ultimately there is a non-representational level where it's just like nerve cells or it's just atoms. It's just some bottom level stuff that's that's individually not mental.
Individually doesn't have intentional content. But there there also it seems really difficult to deny that there's this intermediate intentional story that when I say well I predict those people are going to say that sentence is okay and those people are going to say that sentence is not okay.
Those people what it's like to read that sentence or to say that sentence out loud is going to it's going to feel wrong. It's going to feel off that characterization of what it's like for them to have a conscious experience. My ability to do that is tracking something that has intentional content >> that that that I'm I have access to and they have access to and and and some of that is stuff that while having intentional content, some of it is unconscious >> but intentional. How much work though is it is is that is introducing intentional states here doing in the um account because it seems that before you introduced the notion of of belief about the rule you'd already explained what it was like to uh to to to um uh read one of these sentences. You know, you know that >> I stated what it's like. I stated what it's like and and in doing that I articulated a >> explan.
>> Yeah. So somebody who's you know been never heard one of these sentences just as Mary has never seen right they would be able to predict what it would be like to hear one of these to hear a hypothetical sentence of this.
>> Wait I didn't did you say they wouldn't >> they would they would >> they would yeah so so what this is this is how this is dwell on this this is a super important point.
>> Mhm. Yeah.
>> But >> what it's like is not synonymous with um Mary ignorant.
>> Mhm.
>> Right. There's only uh special cases that phenomenal phenomenal realists allege are phenomenal but are incommunicable.
>> But [clears throat] they don't they don't claim that all phenomenality is incommunicable.
>> Right. They would grant that. Yeah, Mary could know in advance of seeing Hume's missing shade of blue what what it's like to see the missing shade of blue, right?
>> So, what it's likeness >> and ineffibility are not they're not the same thing. They're not even close to the same thing. Another way of putting it is ineffibility is not essential to there being something it's like.
>> Yeah. And I suppose there were distinguish uses, but I'm not sure. But but the point I was just was making there was in in describing this phenomenon of how we have this in that we have this intuitive grasp of the rule and that when the rules violated, we [laughter] don't like it. Um there you've got a you're able to predict what what hearing particular sentences would be like without um having heard them.
And as you said, but then intro so introducing the the um brief into the story about the rule.
That's just an explan that's just um an explanatory hypothesis. It's not part of the analysis. It's not what's actually doing the work of getting us to find what it's like talk more um um less to find structure in what it's like talk and to resist the merry intuitions and these sort of things. It's just, you know, we can do that without introducing the hypothesis that there unconscious beliefs involved.
>> I'm I'm not sure.
>> No, I didn't articulate it very well.
>> You describe the phenomenon in terms that we have um we have this intuitive mask with the rule and when uh the rule's violated, we have a sense of of in congruity. something's something's not right. And we we we protest and we say that's something that's not right. And that allows us to predict what it will be like to hear various sentences that we've not heard.
Which gives us an a a um I'm sorry it's getting rather late here.
which gives us an ability to know what things are like that we that we haven't experienced for ourselves which is I took to be the point that's working against the the the Mary intuition.
You can say all that without saying anything about what explains our ability to uh our intuition that certain sentences are >> okay >> okay ones aren't that could be explained in terms of representation so it could be explained in terms of >> so I heard you correctly it turns out I heard you correctly the first time >> all right >> but now I really am sure that I heard you correctly >> and I I feel confident that you're wrong and >> okay gentlemen >> my confidence comes from this often times we could describe one in the same moment in in science >> in terms of prediction or in terms of explanation.
>> Mhm.
>> Often times what predicts and what explains is the same thing. It's a theory and what is predicted and what is explained is the same thing and it's the data >> and the relationship between the theory and the data. It's the same relationship. There's just like really kind of irrelevant differences that dictate whether you want to talk about this in terms of prediction versus in terms of explanation. So um oftentime we call explanation. We might as well call it prediction.
>> Um I have one in the same theory from which I can derive or infer.
Maybe it's deductively maybe it's something looser than that. But I'm deriving from the theory that this >> Mhm.
>> this particular actual event Yeah. that that makes sense. That's the theory said it would have happened or this theory says why it happens, right? There's all sorts of ways of of describing the relationship between the theory and the data. One way of of describing is in terms of explanation. One way is describing it in terms of prediction.
and and it people that are have been in the weeds in the philosophy of science know that you could kind of pull these apart in some instances. There's like the famous flag pole counter example to the deductive nomological theory of explanation. Um, and you know, I don't need to get all the way into those weeds to make the point that I want to make right now, which is >> we can we can all convince ourselves >> together, >> me and Pete on the screen and Keith on the screen, those three guys, we can all three of us can convince each other that in this case we have an explanation. And and part of the evidence that we have in explanation is is how how great it would be at generating predictions, >> real predictions in the sense of I could say about a people I've never met before and a bunch of sentences neither I nor they have seen before >> that that they're going to classify these like that that's evidence to you that I know what I'm talking about when I now shift to tell you what the explanation is. The explanation is that there are these structures inside of those people that have intentional contents and the same intentional contents will figure into an exhaustive characterization of what it's like to be them.
>> I I take your point about explanation, prediction, and all that. And I don't this isn't a deep um at least not in the present context disagreement. It's just that I I I I think there are other explanations of the phenomenon, other ways of accounting for our predictability that don't depend on uh a representational story. I mean, maybe a dynamical system story could do it. I don't know. But I'm saying they they for for the didactic purpose of of trying to um undermine the Mary intuition. Just saying that we could predict that whether that you wouldn't like that sentence that you wouldn't what it would be like to hear that sentence which you haven't yet heard. That's already got you everything you need. Now the theoretical explanation of that ability is another question. And yes, maybe the intentional explanation is the right one. And it's an interesting one and some, but I don't think you actually need it for the simple dactive purpose of saying I can give you a I can give you insight into what it would be like to be in this state even though you've never been in it. And I can do that because you have this um now you have the ability is another question.
>> It's probably worth bringing it more in to explicitness something that is implicitly driving the way I think about this stuff. I presume that when people come to me and say, "Mandic, you can't explain what it's like, I presume they're talking about what it's like in the sense in which they presume that they know what it's like. They know what it's like to see red. They maybe don't know what it's like to be a bat, >> but they don't presume it's nonsense to ask the question of what it is like to be a bat." And so, um, they the the people who are I'm letting set the terms of what are the >> the data that need to be explained.
They're bringing in this story that's got intentional content riddled through and through. There's what, >> there's what, there's knowing what.
and we could fit that into all sorts of frames where it's quite clear that we're talking about intentional content.
>> So, um here's a real quick bonus example I wasn't planning on mentioning, but I I think it's a really nice example to talk about in these sorts of contexts. The feeling uh of being watched.
>> I feel like someone's watching me.
>> And and many of us have had that feeling even though we don't see Mhm.
>> Like maybe subliminally or something, but like we do not, as best we can tell, we don't see a face. We don't see anybody's eyes. We don't see any people.
We don't hear any.
>> But there there's this there's a feeling. There's an awareness.
There there's something going on. And what is it? How would you describe how would you describe it? Well, the first thing you would say is it it's like I'm being watched >> now. Okay.
Can people feel like they're being watched even when there is no other person causally influencing them in in any kind of way that would reliably trigger them to to say, "I feel like I'm being watched."
Yeah, probably. Probably feeling like you're being watched has absolutely nothing to do with a a a causal relation to another person.
So what is it? What is the feeling o of of being watched? Um it it it's in many ways um it's something that they know.
>> They know that not that they're being watched. They know that it feels like they're being watched. Well, what is it?
What does it feel like? Does it feel like you're smelling someone? Does it feel like maybe you that they're over here versus over there? One interesting thing about if you've ever had this feeling, I feel like I'm being watched, is you you don't feel like you have any opinion whatsoever of where the person is. Are they off to the left? Are they off to the right? Are they above you?
Below you, far away, near? No. No. It's it's this very in some sense sparse content. The way that like a lot of sentences and beliefs can be sparse.
Like I I believe Jupiter has more moons than Earth. How many moons do I believe Jupiter has? I don't know. more than two or three that like I it's just like it has some moons more than one, right?
It's very sparse as opposed to like a photograph that like captures all of the moons of Jupiter that would be replete that like it's a picture is worth a thousand words sort of thing. Um and so here is a case where I'm in a mental state that many other people have been in. the mental state. The best anyone can do to characterize it is to to state what could also be the content of a belief.
>> I'm not saying it's a belief. I'm saying the content of the state >> could be a belief. It's not crazy to to think that there could be a belief that has the same content or there could be a sentence that you write down on a piece of paper in English that has the same content. It doesn't leave anything out cuz the cuz the state is is that sparse that you could like capture it without residue without mentioning visual qualia without mentioning tactile qualia without mentioning perhaps any sensory modality except this like kind of vague thing that you want to call feeling. And by the way, we English speakers reach for the word feeling most often when we don't have >> a strong opinion of of a distal stimulus or uh when there's a particular uh distal stimulus. We'll say we we we smell it.
>> Mhm.
>> Like I smell the odor. Not like I feel the odor. I smell the odor. I see the blue. I don't feel the blue. I Right.
Um, I I can hear the birds chirping. And then there's this other word feeling, which is like this catchall for when it's something that is touching the surface of my body or is inside of my body or it's I have no [ __ ] idea where it is, but it's mine. So, I guess it's in here in some sense. Feel is that that catchall. And so, we have this kind of catch-all situation. I feel like I'm being watched. Well, >> what else can you tell me about it?
Well, nothing besides this thing that is captured without residue by this intentional content.
>> Okay. So, let um I want to wrap up a bit soon because um I'm getting a bit past my my um limit on um articuly. Um but is it so is this a fair summary? So I was s I was trying to um press you on whether we need it to take um something like representationalism in a reasonably strong sense as an explanatory hypothesis. And I think the way you responded was no what we need is an intentional vocabulary to characterize the the phenomenon. We can characterize it in intention terms without making any deep commitments about you know the the mechanisms involved you know in an intention stat sort of way. And that would this be a fair representation of your point that where people resort too easily to a phenomenal vocabulary at least in theoretical context when thinking about conscious they resort it's phenomenal then yeah whereas where where in many cases an intentional vocabulary would do not just as well but better for capturing the nuance of the situation and if they were to just use this so you could switch from that simplistic phenomenal vocabulary to a much richer intentional character ization of the situation and not only describe the thing better but also make it seem less mysterious because realizing intentional states however it's done whether it's done in a sort of you know language of thought way or in some much more distributed um uh way doesn't seem like a very very hard problem is that a fair characterization of what you're saying >> yeah that's very fair I would say that's 95% fair the little extra bit that I would add in there is that I think uh you said we don't need any any deep commitment about mechanisms or something like that. I would say yeah but there are some mechanisms that are in this story. There's superficial mechanisms and there's they're kind of folk psychological mechanisms like like inference like we kind of have the idea of like oh yeah there's some things that you you you see and there's some stuff you remember and then you draw inferences based on >> this other step which is the inferring step or the reasoning step or putting two and two together step. So there's a bit of a mechanistic story there.
There's also a very superficial kind of folk theoretic thing about learning and memory and storage and retrieving from memory. Um, and and it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to get people on board with this story that says like, yeah, a lot of that is happening unconsciously.
>> Yeah. No, no. Yeah. But I think you could go on full on Paul Churchland and not lose anything um from the the the dactic point about you know using an intentional vocabulary rather than a um >> well I'm not sure what you mean by fullon u Paul because you earlier mentioned dynamic systems theory in in a mode that I thought was supposed to be fully anti-representational.
>> Yes. Well, well, no by I just meant just envisaging the complete replacement of like psychological idioms with ones from cognitive neuroscience or something like that and you can still make the point because we can still use as as I mean I think continually pointed out we can still use the intentional vocabulary description.
>> There's a lot of >> there's a lot of Paul Churchland stuff that I still uh would find myself disagreeing with but but I think I Paul were here he would agree with this much.
He doesn't completely get rid of semantic notions. He's okay with like content and representations and concepts.
he starts to feel an allergic reaction when you when you start talking about [clears throat] folk psychological things like beliefs.
Um, right and trying to make fine grain uh propositional attitude distinctions like the difference between a desire and an attention and and um a belief versus uh a hunch, right? like he thinks that that's probably more of an artifact of a certain way of talking than what's really happening in the brain. But when you ask him like, "Yeah, Paul, like tell us what's really happening in the brain." He's happy to show you a diagram of a connectionist network and talk about how if you partition the weight space or activation space a certain way, you could talk about these attractors as being the concepts. This is the concept of a face and it subdivides into the concept of of a you know a a male presenting face versus a female presenting face and and a lot of that is tracking what we would recognize from the folk psychological point of view at least partially because there's semantic content um there's there's stuff like concepts there's there's a co cognitive scientist sense of knowledge there's memory there's learning there's retrieval so Um, I got I got as much Paul Churchill on my side as I need for for the story, >> but that's I mean, we're arguing over the 5% anyway. So, um, we need I I think we need to wrap up fairly soon. So, have is there are there was another example or there is another point you wanted to make? I mean, can you can you get it in quickly? Um >> uh well the real quick uh the um the example that I'm not going to have time uh to get into, but if people could go look it up if they want. I was going to talk about um what's what's known as tilt shift photography. So one way of understanding what what tilt shift photography is, it's a way to doctor a photograph to make it look like what you photographed is um a miniature model of something. So, I could stand on top of a of a house and take a bunch of photographs of people walking down the street, um, cars and stuff on the street, and then I could go and do some relatively simple processing to the photograph. And then when I show the photograph to anyone else, they'll say, "Oh, wow. That that looks like a bunch of toys. That looks like little miniature figures." Um, and I could also just take a camera and some miniature figures and set them up and take a photograph of that and do no doctoring.
And I could do the kind of prediction and explanation thing that I talked about with the linguistic cases in which I could predict and also explain why these photographs seem like miniatures and these other ones don't seem like photographs of of miniatures. And it's not that only some of the photographs were caused by actual miniatures. It's it's not that at all. It has something to do with the way that the people are representing what's going on. And it's a way that is figuring into what it's like without it itself being conscious.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> And people that want to try to guess >> example I like I really like that example. That's that's one of the strongest example.
>> Well, I mean in part because so much of what we want to get is stuff about vision >> and this works in part because it's so obviously not simple.
>> It's so obviously complex. It's so obviously something that that um you know I haven't really stated why but it it would be easy to explain like this has to have a learning component to it.
>> It's hard to believe that um that someone who is is you know just been postnatal for a few hours is going to be seeing things as like oh that's a miniature. Like at best you're tracking uh nearby faces. That's it. It's going to be a while before you start having opinions about whether that's a miniature car, the photograph versus an actual car, uh, non-miniaturized. Um, >> so so it it it's a really nice case that's intermediate between the very sparse linguistic sorts of cases like the adjective order um or the the George Clooney name or even arguably like there's someone watching me is is well that's it's kind of hard to tell a purely non-llinguistic story about that one um because it on the face of it it seems if if it was just about sensations What sensations?
Like it's tempting to say there's no sensations at all that would plausibly figure into like a a superficial folk accessible description of the phenomenology. Um a sensational story or just kind of drops out of it. Um, and if you want to force a sensation vocabulary into it, it really exposes the phenomenal realist just meaning by sensations like well uh you know averted dormativa a thingy that would explain >> what needs explaining. Um but that would be embarrassing if they caught themselves doing that. Uh so that that's what's what's nice about those sorts of cases. But but the um but the other point I just wanted to uh to squeeze in before we're done is the ram home that I really do believe that I am um closing or pointing the way for closing the explanatory gap.
>> Mhm.
>> Uh there that there's a in fact there's a way of hearing this as not illusionism at all. It's it's a kind of re like mildly revisionary um phenomenal realism. I was just going to say that >> if you come at it >> I was going to ask you what explanatory gap >> if you come at it with this this supposedly neutral uh pre theoretic way of understanding what it's like where you don't build in um intrinsic properties or non-intentional content or nonfunctional you just say yeah it's what it's like you know when when you know what it's like bet that's what we're talking about that what needs explaining well guess what I can explain it and I can explain it in terms of things for which there is nothing it's like they're unconscious the explainers >> are not individually conscious but when you put them together you get what you wanted to get you get an explanation of it you explain what it's like you explain why there's something it's like because you like we didn't really get into that particular wrinkle like how do you get from like well why is it like anything at all?
>> I want to discourage you from get using this terminology because >> no we need to reclaim it. I remember reading someone who said that it really was could it could only be in a circular way and that it had no substantive content and that it was just a um a philosophers uh in that mandic's on the tip of my tongue meet um anyway um I I they'll say that's a bait and switch of course we can all talk about what it's like if we just mean you know whatever isn't going up Now >> that's right.
>> They want something that's irreducibly but they want something that's irreducibly sub they just start with that then >> well once they once they stop starting with that then they they've lost what you know the game's over because we just we just start doing standard cognitive science and you know and you know using the sort of examples you've been doing talking about potential explanations of this stuff.
Um, so you've got to stop them doing that in the first place. But I yeah, I take your point. Having some alternative in place is is is one way to try to stop them doing that.
But what what puzzles me and one reason I like to talk about illusion is it's very hard to get them to stop doing that, to stop building in this um uh this resistance to any of these alternative perspectives on what it's like. they just don't they're just not open to that. It's it's it's it's sealed in a way that resists any dismantling from from these ways. Uh and that interests me why they have that and this >> I mean >> you know one is to to say that uh they haven't tried >> but they didn't try hard. No, I mean, you know, uh, one thing I like to say that it seems to anger everybody is, um, when you tell me that you you can't imagine how we could ever explain consciousness. What I want to hear from you is that you're good at explaining anything because I don't care about your opinions of how hard it is to explain consciousness unless you can explain to me like how does parallax work or why are there seasons?
>> I'm not even asking about something hard like gyroscopes.
>> Magnets, how do they work? It's not even kind of It doesn't have to be hard like that.
>> Why when you look out a car at the passing corn >> rows in in the Midwest, that's all we have is corn?
>> Why do the Why do the corn rose that are the corn that's closer to you seem like it's going by you faster than the ones that are farther away?
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> It's not hard to explain that. Um, but uh if I'm going to trust your ability to judge and and rank potential explanations by how hard they are, I want I want to hear some uh some successes.
>> I want to hear that. Um and and I suspect a lot of the people that claim to have a grip on what can and can't be explained, they don't have any grip on any explanations.
And they especially haven't looked at explanations that people that work in color science.
And I don't just mean like people that know about the neurohysiology of vision, but people that are like graphic designers, >> painters, they know all sorts of stuff about color that, you know, I think would would [ __ ] up the merry room intuitions.
>> Well, I totally agree. Of course. And and that's one thing that depresses me so much about the uh the uh I call them phenomenal realist the phenomenal realist position.
Um the people who take this who take phenomenality to be irreducible is that they they they're giving themselves a an excuse or justification for not exploring that because they think they can tell in advance that that can't possibly be relevant. And so they're >> [clears throat] >> uh they're directing themselves and other people away from this because they're saying, "Well, it may be all very interesting in its own right, but it wouldn't cast any light on this really hard." And that's I think that's a really bad uh influence to have. Um of course, you know, they might say, well, you know, by all means, go and study it, but just understand that it won't ever answer this question. And uh if you're interested in the nature of consciousness, then you might be tempted to say, "Well, I I really want to answer the hard problem, so I'll ignore that other stuff because it would never get at it." And I think that that's bad. Um okay, uh we'll wrap up now. Here's a comment from uh not sure how to pronounce that.
There are too many consonants in it.
>> This whole thing was about the Alex Connor podcast and how I wish someone [laughter] >> said what I said. Another another comment from u I'm not sure if that's um ironic or not but I don't think it is not sure um >> I don't think the hoy ploy have mostly have heard about qualia >> oh can Allan says I of course ho is already the Greek uh definite article so it should be so yes it should be just the poy the poly the poy and topen how hill is that the hill that means means hill.
>> Is that like a redundant acronym?
>> Yes. Well, >> acronym.
>> Not an acronym. A redundant um name. Um proper name. Multiply multiply descriptive of the of the object.
>> Well, uh it's it's it's getting late here, so I think we wrap up. Thank you for um for that, Pete. I I think one thing we can both agree on is that there's a position here that that we need to um persuade people out of as persuaders and that the more tools we have at our disposal on that task, the better. And uh I'm totally with you that the ones you suggested are powerful ones and we should definitely have them in our armory. So yes, I'm I think I'm pretty much in agreement with everything.
>> I I was so worried you were going to say I think we could agree that wherever consciousness is we need one of those. We need we need a sign off line. Um can't think of one that's um [laughter] let's just say good night. It's good you good afternoon.
>> Say good night Gracie.
>> What's that from?
uh George Burns uh TV show um from >> last century uh might have just been called the George Burns show, American uh television show. And at the end he says, "Say good night, Gracie." And then >> Gracie says, "Good night, Gracie."
>> Oh, no. This is a good one. You have been persuaded. [laughter] >> Just been persuaded by Petic. Okay.
Bye everyone. Thanks for listening. Hope you found it interesting.
>> They didn't. They hated it.
>> Come back again for more persuasion. Bye everyone. Bye.
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