These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
Feelings Are Not in the Head The US philosopher Michael
Tye believes that our feelings are not in the head at all. Neurologists can never explain what it is like
to smell or taste. The starting point is a
thought experiment by the Australian
philosopher Frank Jackson ("Epiphenomenal Qualia", 1982). Imagine a scientist who
knows everything about a subject, but has not experienced that subject. She has
lived her entire life in a black and white environment but studied all there is
to know about colors. She has seen colored objects only on a black and white
television set. She just has not seen them in color. But she knows what color
is and what properties it obeys and so forth. Then one day she steps outside
her black and white environment and experiences the colors of those
objects. No matter how much she knew
about colors, when she actually sees a red object, she will experience something
that she had not experienced before, she will "learn" something that
she did not know: the "what it is like" of seeing a color (what Tye
calls the "phenomenal character" of seeing a color).
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell had already argued that light is precisely what a blind man cannot see. We can explain the theory of electromagnetic waves to a blind man, but light is precisely the thing that a blind man can never understand.
There is a difference between objective
knowledge of something and subjective experience of something. The latter
constitutes the “phenomenal consciousness” of something. Tye believes that phenomenal
states cannot be possibly realized only by neural states (as opposed to what
physicalism claims). Tye believes that
mental states are symbolic representations, but he differs from Fodor in that he does not believe
that the representation for a sensation involves a sentence in the language of
thought. The belief of something is represented by a symbolic structure which
is a sentence. The sensation of something, instead, is represented by a
symbolic structure which is not a sentence. The format (the symbolic structure)
of a sensory representation is instead map-like: a pattern of activation
occurring in a three-dimensional array of cells each containing a symbol and to
which descriptive labels are attached. The patterns are analyzed by
computational routines that are capable of extracting information and then
attaching the appropriate descriptive labels. A sentence would not be
enough to represent a sensation, as a sensation includes some kind of
"mapping" of the domain it refers to. For example, pain is about the
body, and needs a way to represent the body parts that are affected by pain.
Sentences lack this map-like representational power. Tye's patterns of activation in those map-like structures are
therefore representations of bodily changes that trigger some computational
processing. And this is what an emotion
is, according to Tye. Tye's hypothesis is that
phenomenal consciousness is not in the neurons: phenomenal consciousness is in
the "representations". Tye believes that the body
is equipped (as a product of evolution) with a set of specialized sensory
modules for bodily sensations (for pain, hunger, and so forth) just like the
specialized sensory modules for the five senses (physically different neural
regions). Each module is capable of
some computation on some symbolic structure. Additionally, Tye notes that
the object of a feeling is non-conceptual. We have different feelings for
different shades of red even if we don't have different concepts for those
shades of red. Thus we are capable of many more feelings than concepts. Tye concludes that
"phenomenal states lie at the interface of the non-conceptual and
conceptual domains", at the border between the sensory modules and the
cognitive system. Tye analyzes the “phenomenal
character” ("what it is like") of an experience and its “phenomenal
content” ("what is being experienced"). Tye shows that the phenomenal character of an experience is
identical to its phenomenal content: the feeling of pain in a foot cannot be
abstracted and remains the fact that it is pain in that foot. Tye, therefore,
concludes that phenomenal aspects are a subset of the representational aspects,
and not distinct from them. Because phenomenal character
(the "what it is like" feeling) is phenomenal content, experiencing
"what it is like" depends on having the appropriate system of
concepts: one must have the appropriate system of concepts in order to
understand what it is like to experience something. I cannot know what it feels
like to be a bat because I don't have the appropriate concepts to feel what a
bat feels. Appropriate concepts are
"predicative" and "indexical", which can be acquired only
from direct experience (past or present, respectively). Tye does not truly solve the
"explanatory gap" between phenomenal states and physical states (how
subjective feelings arises from neural states that are not subjective). His theory
offers an explanation for why we cannot know "what it feels like" to
be a bat, but does not explain why the bat feels whatever it feels, i.e. how
feelings are created from brain states. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Consciousness: the Factory of Illusions" | Back to the index of all chapters |