(2115) What is it Like to be a Bat? - the hard problem of consciousness - YouTube

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• objective fact and science could tell us all about that but the pain itself that just is how things seem and so it can't be that pain seems a certain way to me but really is a different way right i'm talking about the pain not about the damage the burning damage to my hand the burning damage to my hand it could seem like my hand is burning when it's really not right because maybe there's something wrong with the connection between my hand and my and my brain or whatever but the pain itself that sensation 22:11 that conscious experience the qualia of pain that can't seem one way and really be another way if i feel like i'm in pain then i really am in pain because all there is to pain and all there is to any conscious experience is just how that thing seems to you at that time and if you tried to give an objective physicalist scientific characterization of pain one that got away from how things seem from a particular point of view well then you would just no longer be talking about pain you you get away from the phenomenon 22:49 that you're trying to talk about if you're trying to talk about consciousness and you try to do it in a physicalist scientific way nagel's point is that all of the versions of physicalism that we've talked about in this course behaviorism identity theory functionalism they all try to give an objective characterization of mental phenomenon but when it comes to conscious mental phenomenon at least they're completely off track there can be according to nagel no science of consciousness it's not because science is lacking or 23:25 defective or anything like that science is great it's just that science is the kind of thing that gets away from particular points of view and when we're talking about consciousness what we're talking about are particular points of view okay now i want to prove to you that everything i just said all of that stuff about consciousness being a phenomenon that is distinctively from a particular subjective point of view and how physics or science in general gets away from particular subjective points of view and that 23:57 therefore there can be no scientific understanding of consciousness all of that i want to prove to you that all of that is what nagel says in this super famous paper from 1974 so i'm just going to read some passages from that paper to you right now every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view that was on page 220 and then just a couple of pages later on page 222 nagel says for if the facts of 24:34 experience facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism are accessible only from one point of view then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism the latter and by latter he means the physical operation of that organism is a domain of objective facts par excellence the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems the point that he's getting at there is 25:10 that the physical description of the world is the quintessential way of describing the world that can be understood to different creatures with any kind of perceptual system so if you had a bat that could echolocate but also had as much cognitive skill as human beings that is you know it had language and it could have complex thoughts in the way that we do we could give a bat the same science that we have and it could teach us all the science that it's discovered all the physical objective descriptions of the world 25:40 because science can be shared by different organisms with totally different types of conscious experience but what the bat couldn't give us was some sense of what it's like to be a bat echolocating to fly around and the reason that physical language can't capture that conscious experience is because it's reductive it reduces some some phenomenon to an objective set of facts that well could be understood from any perspective from any point of view nagel makes this point just three paragraphs later still on page 222. in 26:19 other areas he means areas of inquiry other than the study of consciousness right so the study of other physical phenomena or whatever okay in other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things this is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species specific points of view toward the object of investigation the less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint the more objective is our description but then he says 26:58 experience itself however does not seem to fit the pattern the idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here right that was the point that i made just a couple minutes ago when it comes to conscious experience you can't distinguish between how things appear or how they seem and how they really truly are because consciousness this thing that we're talking about right now at least that just is the appearance that just is the seeming what is the analog in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding 27:33 of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing and the presumed unspoken answer to that question that nagel is suggesting is that there is no analog when it comes to consciousness you can't get away from the particular subjective initial point of view to get at a better objective understanding of the thing certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of 28:12 our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us if the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view then any shift to greater objectivity that is less attachment to a specific viewpoint does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon it takes us farther away from it so that's nagel's argument to the conclusion that physicalism is false there's this thing in the world 28:48 consciousness and it can never be explained in physical terms but i just want to end on the thought that dualism might not do any better right dualism is just different from physicalism in that it says that there's some other stuff some other type of stuff in the world like sometimes for example duelists say that there is ectoplasm ectoplasm is just some non-physical stuff in the universe it's the mental or whatever it's not in space it's not extended in space it's not physical it's the mental stuff 29:27 that minds are made out of whatever ectoplasm is or whatever the mental stuff is you might think that's just more objective stuff right it just objectively exists and objectively has certain characteristics not physical characteristics of course but it just has some spiritual or mental characteristics or whatever if that's right if the dualist is just supposing or claiming that there's some more stuff in the universe well that's just more objective stuff and so it's not going to do any better 30:04 when it comes to explaining consciousness if that's what dualism is and that's how we understand it when it comes to consciousness it seems like there's something in the universe a very very real thing not some spooky you know occult nonsense but a very real thing that everyone acknowledges is real all scientists or almost all scientists agree that consciousness is a real thing right it's in the universe well when it comes to consciousness it seems like there's some real stuff in the universe 30:37 that just can never be explained objectively and to posit some more mental non-physical objective stuff that doesn't seem to help at all okay that's it we're done