As we’ve seen, Block, Shoemaker and others talk about the “qualitative character” or “phenomenal character” of this or that sensory state—equivalently for now, “qualia” or “feels.”  These come under the heading of “consciousness,” but are not explained by the “inner sense” theory.  (According to that theory, inner sense makes you awareof a state that was already there, complete with its qualitative character, so it presupposes qualitative character.)  Think of the specific feel of a particular pain you have, or the subjective quality of your visual sensation as you look at a colored object—what it’s like to experience those sensations.

Shoemaker vs. inverted spectrum

    Block (and Fodor, as cited by Shoemaker) had argued that an inverted spectrum argument like the one that figured in our Objection 3 to Behaviorism  also refutes Functionalism (of any sort):  Just as Behaviorism entails that creatures which are behaviorally alike must be mentally alike, so does Functionalism entail that creatures which are functionally alike must be mentally alike.  Yet, just as we can imagine spectrum inversion with respect to all actual and hypothetical behavior, we can imagine spectrum inversion w.r.t. actual and hypothetical behavior plus internal functional organization; so Functionalism is false, since the qualitative character of visual states can come apart from functional states.

    I said “just as,” but that’s not quite right.  In the case of Behaviorism, the imagining is backed up by a reason:  We think that subjective colors (visual qualia) can invert w.r.t. behavior because we know that internal wiring could be inverted without a change in behavioral dispositions, the dispositions being due to uniform training from birth in the use of color words etc.  That reason does not apply in the case of Functionalism; an inversion of internal wiring would be a functional difference.  Notice also that Block’s inversion hypothesis is more ambitious than the antiBehaviorist inversion hypothesis, since the qualia have to invert, not just w.r.t. behavior, but w.r.t. behavior plus all functional states.

    Block argues:

  1. Visual qualia can invert w.r.t. functional states.

  2.  If Functionalism is true, visual qualia cannot invert w.r.t. functional states (since Functionalism says that qualitative and other mental state just are functional states).

\ 3.  Functionalism is not true.
 

    So, Block’s premise 1 is ambiguous.  (i) Does it mean just that we can imagine visual qualia inverted w.r.t. functional states?  Then, as Luca pointed out, Block has given no argument to get us from that imaginability to real possibility.  We can imagine water not being H2O, lightning not being electrical discharge, etc., but that does nothing to show that water isn’t H2O or that lightning isn’t electrical discharge.  But (ii) if premise 1 means that visual qualia really can invert w.r.t. functional states, it begs the question, or at least fails to advance the discussion; obviously the Functionalist is not going to grant the premise on that interpretation.  (Of course Block may be right and the premise may be true, but he can’t just assert it; “I’m right and you’re wrong” isn’t an argument.)

    Notice again the difference between Functionalism and Behaviorism here.  The inverted-spectrum argument against Behaviorism worked because there is at least a little argument, the crossed-wiring argument, to get us over the gap between imaginability and real possibility.  That’s what’s missing in regard to Functionalism.

    Shoemaker goes on to give what he thinks is a better response to Block’s inverted-spectrum objection.  (We didn’t discuss it in class, since I gave that time slot to the Armstrong visit instead.)  He concedes, at least for the sake of argument, that inverted spectrum w.r.t. functional states is possible, but he argues, by way of the intrapersonal case (p. 401), that it would be behaviorally detectable.  He then assumes (p. 402) that when qualitative similarity or qualitative difference holds between “co-conscious” experiences, that will give rise to corresponding beliefs about similarities or differences in the world.  That allows him to say that qualitative similarity and qualitative difference are functionally definable, precisely in terms of producing those beliefs.  He concludes that classes of qualitative states can be functionally defined.  But he is forced to concede that particular qualitative states cannot be functionally defined—because such particular states can (he continues to assume) invert within the functionally defined classes.  So he ends up with a compromise position:  It is functionally determined that a particular state is a qualitative state, and that it is a member of a certain similarity class, but what particular quale the state has is not determined.
    (Elsewhere Shoemaker suggests that type-identity holds of particular qualia.  He calls this view “selective parochialism”:  Multiple realizability fails for particular qualia, even though it holds for all other mental properties.)

Shoemaker on absent qualia

    Of course Block claims that inverted qualia are not the worst of it.  Not only can we imagine creatures which are functionally alike but have their qualia inverted as between each other, but we can imagine a third creature that is functionally identical to the first two but which has no qualia at all.  (It is cold and dead inside; the lights are off; there’s nobody home.  It is a zombie.)  That was the point of Block’s homunculi-head, Chinese giant etc. examples.

    The standard Functionalist reply works against this “absent qualia” objection too.  But Shoemaker now gives a further positive argument that such absent qualia are not possible.  He supposes toward reductio that they are, and deduces an absurdity:

   1.  Organism O1 is in functional state S1 and S1 is accompanied by qualitative property Q, while organism O2 is also in S1 (and is otherwise functionally equivalent to O1) but does not experience Q.   [A schematic “absent qualia” scenario.]

   2.  If O1 is in S1-with-Q, O1 can and normally does know that s/he is in S1-with-Q (and indeed is aware of being so).

   3.  If X knows and is aware of the fact that P, then the fact that P was a cause of X’s belief and awareness.   [The example of the sheep in the field.]

\  4.  If O1 is in S1-with-Q, then that fact normally causes O1 to believe and to be aware of it.   [2,3]

\  5.  O1’s being in S1-with-Q normally causes O1 to believe that s/he is in S1-with-Q (indeed, to be aware of being so).   [1,4]

   6.  For mental state M1 to be a normal cause of mental state M2 is a functional relation.

\  7.  O2’s being in S1 causes O2 to believe that s/he is in S1-with-Q (indeed, to be aware of being so).   [1,5,6]

\  8.  O2 does not experience Q, but believes s/he is in S1-with-Q (indeed, is aware of being so).

    Objections.  Luca:  Premise 2 can be denied; then the causal requirement on knowing will not come into play.  Lesley:  The outcome 8 is not as bad as Shoemaker supposes.

    Shoemaker also raises a skeptical question:  The argument shows that even if some creature Z were a zombie, if Z were functionally equivalent to you  Z would believe that Z experienced qualia.  So what reason have you for thinking that you experience qualia?  But this too is absurd.  (This assumes that we’re talking about a zombie in the weak sense, one which has propositional attitudes but no sensory experience or qualia.  A “strong” zombie has no mentality at all.  Oddly, it is easier to imagine a strong zombie than a weak zombie.)

Nagel, Jackson, and “what it’s like”

    Farrell’s/Nagel’s bat example is supposed to show that phenomenal character is intrinsically subjective, in a way that makes it in principle inaccessible to science.  The whole business of science is to remove all subjectivity, to display facts as they are in themselves regardless of anyone’s particular perspective on them; but to do that to phenomenal character would be to miss the entire point of phenomenal character, to change the subject.
    Nagel’s claims are that (a) there is something to know about the bat, that can be known only by taking the bat’s internal perspective, and that (b) that something seems to be a fact of a special kind.

    Jackson’s version of the argument:

   1.  Before her cure, Mary knows all the scientific and other “objective” facts there are to know about color and color vision and color experience, and every other relevant fact.   [Stipulation.]
 
   2.  Upon being cured, Mary learns something, viz., she learns what it’s like (w.i.l.) to experience visual redness.   [Seems obvious.]

\  3.  There is a fact, the fact of w.i.l. to experience visual redness, that Mary knows after her cure but did not know prior to it.   [1,2]

   4.  For any facts: if F1 = F2, then anyone who knows F1 knows F2.   [Suppressed; assumes simple factive grammar of “know.”]

\  5.  There is a fact, that of w.i.l., that is distinct from every relevant scientific/”objective” fact.   [1,3,4]

   6.  If materialism is true, then every fact about color experience is identical with some physiological, functional, or otherwise scientific/”objective” fact.
_________________________________________________

\  7.  Materialism is not true.   [5,6]

Materialist responses

    There are three main materialist responses to the Knowledge Argument.  One is brutally to deny 2.  2 can be denied in either of two ways.  First, Dennett in some moods simply rejects the idea of “w.i.l.” to have a sensation over and above the sensation itself; the notion is empty.  Second, even if we grant that there is such a thing, Dennett and Kathleen Akins insist that if Mary really did know all the scientific/”objective” facts, she could work out w.i.l. to see red, and so would know it after all.  At least, Jackson has given us no argument for thinking she could not.  (Dennett reminds us that fantastical science-fiction examples of this kind are dangerous because we are taken in by the immediate image and fail to work out the real implications of the fantastical hypothesis.)
    Jacksonian rejoinder:  Yeah, OK, maybe.  But it sure does seem that Mary would not know what it’s like to see colors without having experienced color in some way.

    A second rebuttal of Jackson is to grant 2 but balk at 3, holding that Mary’s acquisition is, not a fact, but a mere ability, a knowing-how (Lewis and Nemirow) or a mere acquaintance (Conee).  The Ability theory has it that although Mary would acquire some knowledge, it would be only a skill or ability, not knowledge that anything, not knowledge of a fact.  Jackson has done nothing to show that she has learned more than an ability to imagine colors, an ability to sort objects by color without using her spectrometer, etc.
    Jacksonian rejoinder:  Imagining is correct or incorrect.  (If I am imagining my boyhood home as viewed from the street, I may get it right or I may be in error.)  If Mary can imagine seeing a red object, this must mean imagining it correctly, not getting it wrong by imagining seeing what is in fact a different color.  And presumably her ability is to be reliably correct, not just accidentally so.  The best explanation of that reliability is that she knows that that is how red objects look.
    A second argument is linguistic:  “Knowing wh-” locutions are true in virtue of the truth of “knowing that” locutions with referring terms in them.  E.g., to know who robbed the diaper service is to know that N robbed the diaper service, for some suitable name N; to know when the bar closes is to know that the bar closes at t, where t refers to a time.  So too, presumably, to know what it’s like to see red is to know that it is like X to see red, for some suitable term X.  Of course, it’s hard, maybe impossible, to describe what it’s like in English (except comparatively), but a demonstrative is natural here:  If you’re like me, you’ll want to say, “It’s like... THIS.  I know what it’s like; I just can’t put it into words.”

    The third response is now fairly standard: the one hit upon by Mark. Let’s call it the  “perspectivalist” response.  It begins by rejecting premise 4, the suppressed principle according to which (to put it another way) if someone knows that P but does not know that Q, then the fact that P and the fact that Q are different facts.
    That principle may at first seem obvious.  It seems to be licensed by Leibniz’ Law.  You’d think that if fact F1 is known to Smith, and F1 = F2, then surely F2 is known to Smith.  But there are clear counterexamples to it:  The fact of water splashing just is the moving of lots of H2O molecules, but someone can know that water is splashing without knowing anything about H2O; the fact of my being overpaid just is the fact of WGL’s being overpaid, but someone (who does not know that I am WGL) can know that WGL is overpaid while having no idea whether I am overpaid.
    What has gone wrong?  As always and notoriously, Leibniz’ Law fails for representation-dependent properties.  (For more on this, see the freebie handout “Descartes’ Argument and Leibniz’ Law.”)  That Oedipus wanted to marry Jocasta but did not want to marry his mother does not show that Jocasta was not his mother; the poor woman was his marriage-object under one description or mode of presentation but not under the other.  And being known to Smith is a representation-dependent property: Whether Smith knows a given fact depends on how Smith represents that fact.  She may know it under one representation but not know it under a different one.  That is just what is going on in the “water” and “overpaid” examples.  One may see water splashing but lack the chemical perspective entirely; less commonly, a mad chemist might record a motion of H2O molecules but be mentally so far removed from the perspective of everyday things and substances that she has no thought of water.
    The “overpaid” example is perspectival too, but a different kind of perspective is at work.  Someone can know that WGL is overpaid without knowing that I am overpaid, if that person has only a public, (non auto )biographical perspective on me and is not in a position to refer to me more directly.  Even if the person were to come into the room, point straight at me and exclaim “You are overpaid,” I might insist that the knowledge she thereby expresses is still not quite the same knowledge I have when I know that I myself am overpaid.  (Especially if I believe that she is mistaken as to who I am.)  As Hector Castañeda emphasized in the 1960s, if I am amnesic I may know many facts about WGL, including that he is overpaid, without knowing that I myself am overpaid; so it seems that what I know when I do know that I myself am overpaid is a different fact from any of those I could know while amnesic, and an intrinsically perspectival fact.  In order to designate the person it is supposed to designate, a mental pronoun can be tokened only from a certain point of view; only I, WGL, can think “I” and thereby designate WGL.
    Clearly, being known to Mary is a representation-dependent property; whether Mary knows a given fact depends on how she represents that fact.  Facts can be differently represented from differing perspectives, and that is why 4 is false.  Without 4, seemingly, the Knowledge Argument collapses.
    Jacksonian rejoinder:  All right, so 5 doesn’t strictly follow from 3.  But isn’t 5 obviously true anyway?  When I know w.i.l. to experience visual redness, it seems I’m knowing an entirely different fact, indeed a different kind of fact, from any fact about neurological activity or even functions being performed.

    A fourth response (Carl and Mark):  6, though supposedly definitional, is unfair.  Even if there are in some sense intrinsically perspectival facts or properties inaccessible to science, that doesn’t show that there are ghosts or spooky immaterial properties.  There is room for an intermediate position, consistent with a broader materialism.  (After class, Carl cited the observer-relative properties posited in quantum machanics.  Though some interpretations of quantum mechanics are accordingly antimaterialistic, most are not.)

Qualia strictly so called

    Qualitative features of mental states are often called “qualia” (singular, “quale”). In recent philosophy of mind that term has been used in a number of confusingly different ways, but I shall now start using it in the specific, strict sense due to C.I. Lewis: A quale in this sense is an introspectible qualitative or phenomenal property inhering in a mental state, such as a colored region of ones visual field, or a heard sound or an experienced smell.  It is the characteristic property of what Bertrand Russell would have said was a “sense-datum.”
    A paradigm of a quale is the color of an after-image. For example, Bertie is experiencing a green after-image as a result of seeing a red flash bulb go off; the greenness of the after-image is the quale.  The after-image’s shape is also a quale, though less vivid an example of one than is the greenness.
    Qualia in this sense pose a problem for materialist theories of the mind. For where, ontologically speaking, are they located?  It is not plausible to suggest that the greenness is exemplified by anything physical in the brain (if there is some green physical thing in your brain, you are probably in big trouble).
    Here is an argument against materialism:  Suppose you are experiencing a green after-image.  Now:

    1.  There is a green thing contained in the experience.

    2.  There is no physical green thing outside your head.  [Supposition]

But

   3.  There is no physical green thing inside your head either.

Yet

    4.  If it is physical, the green thing is either outside your head or inside it.

 \  5.  The green thing is not physical.  [1,2,3,4]

 \  6.  Your experience contains a nonphysical thing.  [1,5]
 

 \  7.  Your experience is not, or not entirely, physical.  [6]

    Reply 1:  Adverbialism (Chisholm).  Stop right after premise 1’s first four words.  There is no green thing.  There are no Russellian sense-data.  It’s not that your visual experience relates you to a green object or individual.  Rather, you sense or are appeared to greenly; it is visually greenish as regards you.  “Green” is really an adverb expressing a way or mode or style or type of sensing, not an adjective describing an individual thing to which the experience relates you.
    Rejoinder (Jackson):  The “many property” problem.   Suppose that in your visual field there is a round yellowy-orange spot and to its right a triangular red blotch.  The adverbialist will translate that as “I am appeared to roundly and yellowy-orangely and triangularly and redly.”  But that translation loses the fact that the roundness and yellowy-orangeness go together and the triangularness and the redness go together.  It also loses the part about the triangularness+redness being to the right of the roundness+yellowy-orangeness.
    The adverbialist can fix those problems by making his hyphenating move:  “I am appeared to roundly-yellowy-orangely and also triangularly-redly and the-second-of-those-being rightly-with-respect-to-the-first,” or some such.  Jackson makes a somewhat technical semantical objection to that move, that I won’t pursue.  I’ll just note, in Jacksonian spirit, that the hyphenated version seems false to the way we think of and would talk about the contents of our visual field.  The v.f. is subjectively a mosaic of colored patches.  We would say things like, “There is a round yellowy-orange spot and to its right a triangular red blotch; above them are exactly six blue dots, and down to the left are a green spiky thing and a pink teardrop-shape.”  The adverbialist may be able to adverbialize all that, but the result would be forced and unnatural; indeed, it would sound like Pig Latin, a mere grammatical trick.

    Reply 2 (Mark):  After-imaging is the result of a well-understood physical process.  Vision scientists know exactly, and in physical terms, how the after-image is produced.  So the after-image is physical after all.
    Rejoinder:  Sure, the after-image has a well-understood physical cause.  But being produced by something physical doesn’t entail being physical.  The problem is the green object itself, and its greenness.  The green thing is still not a physical green thing.

    Reply 3 (the “Representationalist” reply):  In some sense “there is” a green thing involved in your experience of after-imaging.  But we often use “there is” without asserting real, actual existence (“There is something I’m thinking of that doesn’t really exist: the Easter Bunny”).  In order to refute materialism, the argument needs to show that there is a real, actual nonphysical thing, and it hasn’t done that.  Compare:  You are hallucinating pink rats.  An argument exactly parallel to the After-Image objection would prove that the rats are nonphysical; but rats are physical things.  Now, yes, there is a sense in which hallucinated rats are not physical, but it’s only that they’re not real; if they were real they’d be as physical as bricks.  The rat argument fails to prove that there are real pink rats.  So too, the After-Image argument fails to prove that the green blob is real.  And after all, after-images are illusions; your visual system tells you there’s a green thing before you, when there isn’t really one.  The alleged green thing is as unreal as the rats.
    Rejoinder (Russell):  The blob is not real??  But you’re looking right at it.  You’re directly acquainted with it.  Try again to tell yourself it isn’t real!   Reply to rejoinder:  Remember the rats.  You’re looking right at them too.

More on the Representational theory of qualia

    On the representationalist analysis, for Bertie to experience the green after-image is for Bertie to be visually-representing a green blob located at such-and-such a spot in the room. Since in reality there is no green blob in the room with Bertie, his visual experience is unveridical; after-images are illusions. The quale, the greenness of the blob, is (like the blob itself) an intentional inexistent.
    So the Representational theory of qualia in our strict sense is this:  Qualia are the characteristically represented properties of real or apparent physical objects in the environment.  Bertie’s greenness is that of an unreal, illusory object in front of him; the pinkness of the rats is that of nonactual, hallucinated rats; the redness of the irregular patch in my visual field when looking at Johnathon is the actual redness of his sweatshirt.
    And that, again, is how the Representationalist rebuts the After-Image argument.  There is a green thing that Bertie is experiencing, but it is not an actual thing. That “there is” is the same weak, lenient non-actualist “there is” that occurs in “There is something that Bertie believes in but that doesn’t exist” and in “There is a mythical god that the Greeks worshipped but no one worships any more.”  (In defending his sense-data, Russell mistook a nonactual material thing for an actual immaterial thing.)

Objections

    Objection 1.  So there are green blobs that do not exist?  That sounds nearly contradictory—too close to “There exist green things that do not exist,” or “There are green things that aren’t.”  At the very least it’s weird metaphysics, a desperate lunge to save materialism.  Reply:  No; we are all stuck with things that do not exist, strange as that can be made to sound.  We can list some of them: the Easter Bunny, the free lunch, hallucinatory rats, the planet Vulcan.  It’s a fact that there are things that don’t exist, whatever metaphysical account may then be given of them.

    Objection 2 (Mark):  The mere representation of greenness does not suffice for phenomenal green, for something’s looking green to a subject.  One could say the word “green” aloud, or semaphore it from a cliff, or send it in Morse code, or write the French word “vert” on a blackboard, or point to a color chip.  Where’s the qualitativeness in any of those things?  Reply:  Remember, the representation must be specifically a visual representation.  And it must be produced by either a normal human visual system or by something functionally like one.  (Thus, the representational theory of qualia cannot be purely representational, but must appeal to some further factor, such as (here) appealing to an underlying functionalism.)  Mark’s rejoinder:  A digital camera represents colors as a result of fairly complicated processing of visual-type input.  So doesn’t it follow that the camera would be having visual experiences containing qualia, even if their qualia aren’t the same as ours because the processing is different?  If the camera had some internal monitoring in addition, Armstrong would have to say that the camera was aware of its color experiences.  Reply to rejoinder:  What the camera is doing is not the right kind of processing.  Also, the camera is doing its representing, not for it in the teleological sense, but for its user.  Rebuttal:  Oh, yeah?  On what grounds do you say those things?

    Objection 3:  The Representational theory seems to require color realism. In this discussion, “green” has meant the objective, public property that inheres in some physical objects.  But many people reject color realism.  And not just any realist theory of color would serve, either:  One could not, without circularity, explicate phenomenal greenness in terms of represented real-world color and then turn around and construe real physical greenness as a disposition to produce sensations of phenomenal greenness.)  What sort of real-world property is an “objective,” physical color?  There is a variety of realist answers, though none of them is uncontroversial or even very plausible.

    A fourth type of objection I should mention:  Some criticisms of the Representational theory take the form of counterexamples: cases in which either two experiences share their intentional content and differ in their qualia or they differ entirely in their intentional content but share qualia. Christopher Peacocke gave three examples of the former kind, Ned Block one of the latter.  Block’s is a famous example involving “Inverted Earth,” a planet exactly like Earth except that its real physical colors are (somehow) inverted with respect to ours.  References upon request.