D. Papineau Thinking about Consciousness

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octopuses.2
This dissociation between phenomenal and psychological research is of course a
corollary of the overall argument of this book. I have stressed throughout that
phenomenal concepts must be distinguished from psychological and other material
concepts, and that there are no a priori connections across this divide, Given this, it is no
surprise that empirical research into psychological concepts should prove impotent to
decide phenomenal questions.
Discoveries about psychological pain carry no immediate implications concerning the
presence of phenomenal pain.
Recall the knowledge argument discussed in Chapter 2. As we saw, this failed to disprove
ontological materialism, but it did establish conceptual dualism. In so doing, it provided a
graphic demonstration of the impotence of psychological research to decide phenomenal
questions. You can know as much as you like about canonical octopus responses to
stimuli, and about physiological processes inside octopuses, and you still won't know
whether the octopus feels like this. That is, no information about the material realizations
of psychological concepts will tell us when phenomenal concepts are satisfied. If we want
to find out about the referents of phenomenal concepts, we will need to do something
different from simply figuring out how given causal roles are satisfied in different
creatures.
I take it that much current consciousness research is designed to do precisely this. In any
case, this is the kind of research that I shall be concerned with in the rest of this chapter.
This is not of course because there is anything wrong with research into psychological
concepts, but simply because it is phenomenal research that poses the more fundamental
philosophical puzzles.3
7.4 Subjects' First-Person Reports
There is a distinguishing mark of research that is designed to identify the referents of
phenomenal concepts. This is the crucial role that it accords to subjects' first-person
reports on their phenomenal states.
Thus consider the standard strategy adopted in paradigms of recent research into
consciousness. Experimental subjects are presented with certain stimuli, or asked to
perform certain tasks. At
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the same time, researchers seek to figure out what is going on inside their skulls, using
traditional techniques like electroencephalography (EEG), or more recent functional
imaging techniques such as Positron Emission Topography (PET) and Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI),4 or indeed simply by noting that subjects have suffered
various kinds of brain damage. And then the experimenters will ask the subjects what
they experienced during the trial. For example, they might ask the subjects whether they
were consciously aware of some stimulus, and how it consciously seemed to them; again,
they might ask the subjects whether they were consciously aware of making some
decision.
To see how these subjective reports are crucial to this kind of research, compare an
analogous investigation conducted with nonverbal but otherwise intelligent mammals,
like vervet monkeys, say. You prompt the monkeys in various ways, you get them to
perform various tasks, and you check what is going on in their brains at the same time.
This research might reveal all kinds of interesting things about monkey cognition, and in
particular about the way in which certain causal roles are realized in monkeys. However,
it won't tell us anything at all about the monkeys' phenomenal consciousness. Without
any first-person reports to go on, it is perfectly consistent with such investigations that
monkeys have no phenomenal consciousness at all, or a full phenomenal life just like
ours, or anything in between. If we want to find out about the referents of phenomenal
concepts, as opposed to merely psychological ones, it seems that we need the subjects to
tell us what they are feeling.
We might usefully compare the role of subjects' first-person reports in consciousness
research with that of observation reports in normal scientific research. When scientists
seek to uncover the nature of some natural kind, like water or temperature, say, they will
typically begin with some direct observational judgements that certain things are water,
certain things are hotter than others, and so on. And then
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they will seek to construct a theory which will identify further scientifically interesting
properties which are common to these observationally identified samples. Similarly with
research into phenomenal consciousness. We start with subjects' first-person reports of
when they are in pain, seeing an elephant, and so on. And on this basis we aim to develop
a theory which will tell us about the material constitution of these states.
Having offered this analogy, let me immediately qualify it. Subjects' phenomenal reports
may share the non-inferential directness of ordinary sensory observation, but there are
also important differences. For a start, it seems wrong to posit some inner phenomenal
sense-organ to stand alongside sight, hearing, and so on. The workings of first-person
phenomenal judgements was sketched only briefly in Chapter 4, but none of the cases
discussed there seems to call for a cerebral mechanism which is causally sensitive to
conscious experiences. A better model is that first-person phenomenal judgements
incorporate the experiences they refer to, or re-creations thereof. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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