| [ KAIST ] in KIDS 글 쓴 이(By): imnot (반이정) 날 짜 (Date): 2002년 11월 10일 일요일 오전 01시 02분 00초 제 목(Title): Re: 인지과학자 Daniel Dennett 강연 저는 전문가 포럼 한번, 공개 강좌 한번을 갔습니다. 아마도 윗분과 '민족사관고 단체관람'시 같은 장소에 있었겠군요. 저는 맨앞 '바닥'에 앉아서 들었는데요. 강연을 듣는데, 회사에서 하도 전화질을 해대서, 질문시간에는 그만 나가고 말았습니다. 게다가 아시다시피, 첫 질문이 너무나 황당한 거여서 김새기도하고(보통사람이라고 자신을 소개한 어느 여자분이, 의식이란 동양의 음양이 물리학과 만나서 이뤄진...어쩌구 가 아니겠냐?고 질문했음.) * 민사고 학생들이 어떤 질문을 했는지 저도 궁금하군요. 좀 올려주시죠? * 데닛이 국내 출판한 책은 현재 딱 2권 있습니다. ==> 호프스테터라는 사람과의 공저인 [Mind's I]란 책의 번역본(한역 제목이 생각이 안나네...), 그리고 Kinds of Mind의 번역본인 [마음의 진화]입니다. 하지만, 후자는 절판되서 국내에서 구하기 힘듭니다. * 민사고 학생들이 왔던 공개강좌의 원고 전문을 아래에 올립니다. 이번 행사의 관계자가 제게 보내줬습니다. 그럼 관심있는 분 참고하세요. -------------------------------------------------------- DAEWOO Lecture 1 draft A third-person approach to consciousness Daniel C. Dennett July 5, 2002 Suppose scientifically and technologically advanced “Martians” came to earth to study the fauna and flora here. Let’s assume them to have some kind of sense organs, which might be as different from human senses as you can imagine, so long as these permit them to acquire information about physical regularities in the world about as readily as we can. Being technologically advanced, they can thus do what we have done with microscopes, telescopes, infra-red and ultra-violet detectors, chemical “sniffers” and the like: they can arrange to “see” what we can see, “hear” what we can hear, and so forth, thanks to prosthetic extensions of whatever senses they have, suitably equipped with Martian user-interfaces. Then whatever is observable to us is observable to them, albeit indirectly on some occasions (the way the shapes of bacteria, the shadows cast by infra-red sources of electro-magnetic radiation, and the vibrations emitted by distant earthquakes are observable by us thanks to our devices). Among the phenomena that would be readily observable by these Martians would be all our public representations of consciousness: cartoon “thought balloons”, soliloquies in plays, voice-overs in films, use of the omniscient author point-of-view in novels, and so forth. We tend to overlook the fact that much of what “we”-you and I and our friends and neighbors-believe about consciousness comes from our huge supply of shared, public, objective representations of the streams of consciousness of other folks, real or fictional. They would also have available to them the less entertaining representations of consciousness found in all the books by philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, phenomenologists, and other sober investigators of the phenomena. From all of this the anthropologists among them (the exomartian faunologists) would be able to arrive at an elaborate account of that part of the behavior of H. sapiens (as we communicating earthlings call ourselves) that concerns the folk theory of consciousness as well as our early stabs at a scientific theory of consciousness. Digression: I am supposing that these Martians already have the knack of adopting the intentional stance towards the fauna they observe, so that they can learn our languages and interpret our public communication, but I am not presupposing that these Martians are themselves conscious in any of the tendentious ways much discussed of late by philosophers. The Martians might, for all I have presupposed, be “zombies” whose data-gathering and scientific theorizing is all accomplished without a trace of “phenomenality” or “qualia” or whatever you take to be the hallmark of real consciousness, supposing that their manifest scientific expertise would not be conclusive evidence that they are conscious. They might, moreover, be quite unmoved by our music, our art, our theater, while unproblematically able to detect how much it matters to us. (“What do they see in these Picassos?” they ask incredulously, while noting not only the high prices we are willing to pay for them, but the large neuromodulator, endocrine, and visceral effects produced by encounters with them.) My introduction of these imaginary Martian scientists permits me to expose and render vivid a familiar subliminal theme in the current debates about a scientific theory of consciousness. One of the tenets of the folk theory that the Martians would soon discover is that a scientific theory of consciousness is widely held by earthlings to be impossible. Part of the lore that they would pick up-just as we pick it up, in the course of our enculturation-is that consciousness is utterly private, inaccessible to outsiders, somehow at least partly incommunicable and uninvestigatable by science-that is, by the very methods the Martians are using to explore our planet. Would they credit this? Would they understand it? Could they explain it? And, more pointedly, what would they make of the hypothesis that there was something that they, the Martians, couldn’t know about human consciousness that we, the earthlings, can know? They read Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” and thereby confront the question: “What is it like to be a human being?” They read David Chalmers’ The Problem of Consciousness and wonder if they have even identified “the Hard Problem” of consciousness. What, if anything, about “our” consciousness is off-limits to these alien investigators? And if there is such a thing, how do “we” know that it is real? One of the texts that the Martians would surely study is Descartes’ Meditations, and they would find it speaking quite forthrightly to them. The preface is directed to those who are willing “to meditate seriously with me and to lead the mind simultaneously away from the senses and away from all prejudices.” (nisi tantum iis qui serio mecum meditari, mentemque a sensibus, simulque ab omnibus praejudiciis, abducere poterunt ac volent.”). Descartes would expect his Martian readers to perform for themselves the thought experiments and inferences, and to discount any peculiarities of their sensory apparatus (“away from the senses . . . . away from all prejudices”) Good scientist that Descartes is, he appreciates the value of intersubjectivity, and the ways science has of canceling out the idiosyncrasies of individual investigators so that all can participate together in a shared inquiry. Martians are certainly not disqualified from joining in Descartes’s meditations, and I propose that we follow Descartes’s lead and strive for a maximally intersubjective science of consciousness. Let us see what happens when we cantilever the “third-person” methodology of science as far into the private interiors of minds as it will go. Will we leave important recesses untouched? There is a considerable chorus of opinion these days that insists that our efforts must fail, that a purely third-person science of consciousness is methodologically impoverished, cut off from important sources of evidence, or data, or enlightenment, . . . or something. We need, it is said, a “first-person science of consciousness” or even a “second-person science of consciousness” (which stresses empathy, and might be more properly be called the second-person familiar methodology-du not Sie, tu not vous). The idea, variously expressed or just tacitly presupposed, is that the Martians can’t play these games that we can play. They can’t engage in a first-person science of consciousness because they aren’t themselves the right kind of first-persons-they can study Martian consciousness from the first-person point of view, but not our consciousness. And they can’t engage in a second-person science of consciousness because, being an alien life form, they can’t form the I-thou bond of empathy such a method presupposes. My question is this: Is there any good reason to believe any of this? And my answer will be No. The third-person methods of the natural sciences suffice to investigate consciousness as completely as any phenomenon in nature can be investigated, without significant residue. What is the import of “significant” here? Simply this: If scientists were to study a single grain of sand, there would always be more that could be discovered about it, no matter how long they worked. The sums of the attractive and repulsive forces between all the sub-atomic particles composing the atoms composing the grain will always have some residual uncertainty in the last significant digit we have calculated to date, and backtracking the location in space-time of the grain of sand over the eons will lead to a spreading cone of indiscernibility. But our ignorance will not be significant. The principle of diminishing returns applies. My claim is that if we use the third-person methods of science to study human consciousness, whatever residual ignorance we must acknowledge “at the end of the day” will be no more unsettling, no more frustrating or mystifying, than the ignorance that is ineliminable when we study photosynthesis, earthquakes or grains of sand. In short, no good reasons have been advanced for the popular hypothesis that consciousness is, from the point of view of third-person science, a mystery in a way that other natural phenomena are not. We can begin to approach this issue by asking some boundary-setting questions. If Martians trying to study human consciousness must perforce leave something out, how do we know this? And who is this “we”? Is there something Francophones know about their consciousness that others cannot know? Is there something women know about women’s consciousness that men can never know? Do right-handers know things about right-hander consciousness that left-handers can never know? Is there something you know about your own consciousness that we others can never know? Nagel’s classic 1974 paper, “What is it like to be a bat?” gently resists-without supporting argument-this retreat into solipsism, suggesting that “we” could know what it is like for “us” to experience things the human way, while insisting-without supporting argument-that we could not know what it is like to be something as different as a bat. The reason, I submit, that Nagel could help himself to this denial of solipsism is simply that nobody wants to challenge it; it appeals to people-to “us”. We-nudge, nudge-know about our consciousness because we communicate about it all the time. We presuppose a vast sharing of understanding in all our public representations of consciousness, and as we contribute to that common stockpile, our presupposition is apparently vindicated. The folk theory of human consciousness is a hugely successful mutual enterprise, but it does have its well-known puzzle-points. Can a person born blind share “our” understanding of color? What about a color-blind person? What about “spectrum inversion,” a thought-experiment at least three hundred years old? What is it like to be an infant-is it a ‘buzzing blooming confusion” or something very different from that? Do men and women actually experience the world in ways that are fundamentally incomparable? There are lots of competing answers to these puzzle questions, and others, but rather than trying to adjudicate them from the outset, we should take a deep breath and recognize that all the answers, good and bad, are themselves parts of folk theories of consciousness, not data that we can share with the Martians. So they are not a good starting point for a scientific theory of consciousness. I propose that we follow Descartes’s lead, and start with the data that we know we share with the Martians, and see where it leads us. This doesn’t presuppose that we won’t discover, in the process of developing our scientific theory, that some folk theory is right about the inaccessibility of human consciousness to Martians; it just requires that the case for such a discovery be itself intersubjectively accessible. (And that must be presupposed by those who argue for such claims-else why are they wasting their breath and our time?) The third-person method, the method both we and Martians can adopt and know we have adopted in common, is captured in the strictures of what I have dubbed heterophenomenology (Dennett, 1982, 1991): the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science. (Consciousness Explained, 1991, p72.) There is nothing revolutionary or novel about heterophenomenology; it has been practiced, with varying degrees of punctiliousness about its presuppositions and prohibitions, for a hundred years or so, in the various branches of experimental psychology, psychophysics, neurophysiology, and today’s cognitive neuroscience. I just gave it a name and got particularly self-conscious about identifying and motivating its enabling assumptions. We start with recorded raw data on all the physical goings-on inside and outside our subjects, a pool restricted to communicating human beings (with or without identifiable pathologies and quirks, of both sexes, of all ages, cultures, varying socio-economic status, etc., etc.). We gather data on all the chemical, electrical, hormonal, acoustical . . . . and other physical events occurring in the subjects, and we pay particular attention to the timing of all these events, but we also single out one data stream from the others for special treatment. We take some of the noises and marks made by subjects as consisting of communication-oral and otherwise-and compose transcripts, which then are further interpreted to yield an inventory of speech acts, which are further interpreted as (apparent) expressions of belief. This transformation of the raw data of acoustic pressure waves, lip-movements, button-pressings and such into expressions of belief requires adopting the intentional stance. It requires us to treat the subjects as if they were believers and desirers capable of framing and executing speech acts with intended meanings-but it leaves wide open the vexatious question, from folk theory of consciousness, of whether or not some subjects might be zombies. (It also leaves untouched such subordinate puzzles of folk theory of whether zombies should be properly said to perform real speech acts or merely apparent speech acts, and whether zombies thereby express their beliefs or merely seem to express their apparent beliefs, and so forth. For people who believe that zombie hypotheses are serious problems, these are serious questions, but they don’t have to be settled ab initio. We can conveniently postpone them, noting that it is agreed on all sides that the intentional stance, being “behavioristic” in one sense, works exactly the same for zombie behavior as for the behavior of genuinely conscious beings, supposing these to be distinguishable. The intentional stance is not behavioristic in another sense, of course, since it precisely consists in “mentalistic” or “intentionalistic” interpretations of raw behaviors as actions, expressive of propositional attitudes, and so forth.) Is this neutrality of the intentional stance on the zombie problem a bug or a feature? From the vantage point of our attempt to found a natural science of human consciousness, it is most definitely a feature; it is what permits us to postpone the perplexities of folk theory while getting on with the business of extracting, organizing, and interpreting the data we and the Martians share. In this chapter we have developed a neutral method for investigating and describing phenomenology. It involves extracting and purifying texts from (apparently) speaking subjects, and using those texts to generate a theorist’s fiction, the subject’s heterophenomenological world. This fictional world is populated with all the images, events, sounds, smells, hunches, presentiments, and feelings that the subject (apparently) sincerely believes to exist in his or her (or its) stream of consciousness. Maximally extended, it is a neutral portrayal of exactly what it is like to be that subject-in the subject’s own terms, given the best interpretation we can muster. People undoubtedly do believe that they have mental images, pains, perceptual experiences, and all the rest, and these facts-the facts about what people believe, and report when they express their beliefs-are phenomena any scientific theory of the mind must account for. (Consciousness Explained, p98) Working side by side, we and the Martians move from raw data to interpreted data: convictions, beliefs, attitudes, emotional reactions, . . . but all these are bracketed for neutrality. Why bracket? Because of two possible failures of overlap, familiar from the judicial injunction to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”: subjects often fail to tell the whole truth because some of the psychological things that happen in them are unsuspected by them, and hence go unreported, and subjects often fail to tell nothing but the truth because they are tempted into theorizing that goes beyond what we can demonstrate to be the limit of their experience. Bracketing has the effect of holding them to an account of how it seems to them without prejudging, for or against, the questions of whether how it seems to them is just how it is. Consider, for instance, the well-studied phenomenon of masked priming. It has been demonstrated in hundreds of different experiments that if you present subjects with a “priming” stimulus, such as a word or picture flashed briefly on a screen in front of the subject, followed very swiftly by a “mask”-a blank or sometimes randomly patterned rectangle-before presenting the subjects with a “target” stimulus to identify or otherwise respond to, there are conditions under which subjects will manifest behavior that shows they have disciminated the priming stimulus, while they candidly and sincerely report that they were entirely unaware of any such stimulus. For instance, asked to complete the word stem fri___, subjects who have been shown the priming stimulus cold are more likely to comply with frigid and subjects who have been shown the priming stimulus scared are more likely to comply with fright or frightened, even though both groups of subjects claim not to have seen anything but first a blank rectangle followed by the target to be completed. Now are subjects to be trusted when they say that they were not conscious of the priming stimulus? There are apparently two ways theory can go here: A. Subjects are conscious of the priming stimulus and then the mask makes them immediately forget this conscious experience, but it nevertheless influences their later performance on the target. B. Subjects unconsciously extract information from the priming stimulus, which is prevented from “reaching consciousness” by the mask. It is open for scientific investigation to develop reasons for preferring one of these theoretical paths to the other, but at the outset, heterophenomenology is neutral, leaving the subject’s heterophenomenological worlds bereft of any priming stimuli-that is how it seems to the subjects, after all-while postponing an answer to the question of how or why it seems thus to the subjects. Heterophenomenology is the beginning of a science of consciousness, not the end. It is the organization of the data, a catalogue of what must be explained, not itself an explanation. And in maintaining this neutrality, it is actually doing justice to the first-person perspective, because you yourself, as a subject in a masked priming experiment, cannot discover anything in your experience that favors A or B. (If you think you can discover something-if you notice some glimmer of a hint in the experience, speak up! You’re the subject, and you’re supposed to tell it like it is! Don’t mislead the experimenters by concealing something you discover in your experience. Maybe they’ve set the timing wrong for you. Let them know. But if they’ve done the experiment right, and you really find, so far as you can tell from your own first-person perspective, that you were not conscious of any priming stimulus, then say so, and note that both A and B are still options between which you are powerless to offer any further evidence.) In other phenomena, what needs to be bracketed is subjects’ manifestly false beliefs about what is present in their own experience. For instance, most people-- “naive subjects” in the standard jargon-suppose that their color vision extends all the way to the periphery of their visual fields, and they also suppose that their visual fields are approximately as detailed or fine-grained all the way out. They are astonished when it is demonstrated to them that they cannot identify a playing card-cannot even say if it is red or black-even though they can see it being wiggled at the edge of their visual fields. What needs to be explained by a science of consciousness in this case is the etiology of a false belief. The question to ask, and answer, is Why do people think that their visual fields are detailed all the way out? not: Why, since people’s visual fields are detailed all the way out, can’t they identify things in the parafoveal parts of their visual fields? Since there is an amiable but misleading tendency of people to exaggerate the wonders of their own conscious experience, rather like audiences at stage magic shows, who tend to leave the theater claiming to have witnessed more marvels than were actually presented for their enjoyment, the astringent neutrality of heterophenomenology often has the deflationary effect of cutting the task of explaining consciousness down to size; consciousness is not quite as supercallifragilisticexpialidocious as many people like to believe. But the goal of heterophenomenology is getting at the data, whatever they are, not deflation I have just noted that the neutrality of heterophenomenology actually does justice to first-person experience, a point often overlooked by its critics. This is partly the result of misdirection not unlike the confusion sown by the difference senses of the term “behaviorist”. Consider the following passage from a recent paper by Parvizi and Damasio, commenting on a shift in perspective in the maturing of cognitive neuroscience. They disparage . . . a time in which the phenomena of consciousness were conceptualized in exclusively behavioral, third-person terms. Little consideration was given to the cognitive, first-person description of the phenomena, that is, to the experience of the subject who is conscious. (Parvizi and Damasio, 2001, p136) Notice that the new, improved perspective gives consideration to “the cognitive, first-person description of the phenomena . . . .”-in short, the new improved perspective is heterophenomenology. What it is being contrasted with is an old-fashioned behavioristic (in the anti-intentionalist sense) abstemiousness that refused to consider subject’s descriptions as anything other than noise-producing behavior. In fact, all the research presented or discussed in the special issue of Cognition (2001) devoted to the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness in which Parvizi and Damasio’s paper appears is conducted according to the constraints of heterophenomenology. As they insist, this does not prevent the research from taking the first-person point of view seriously. A philosopher who has criticized heterophenomenology’s neutrality is Joseph Levine (1994), who has claimed that “conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer.” Levine’s claim can be most clearly understood in terms of a nesting of proximal sources that are presupposed as we work our way from raw data to heterophenomenological worlds: (a) “conscious experiences themselves” (b) beliefs about these experiences (c) “verbal judgments” expressing those beliefs (d) utterances of one sort or another What are the “primary data”? For heterophenomenologists, the primary data are the utterances, the raw uninterpreted data. But before we get to theory, we can interpret these data, carrying us via (c) speech acts to (b) beliefs about experiences. These are the primary interpreted data, the pretheoretical data, the quod erat explicatum (as organized into heterophenomenological worlds), for a science of consciousness. In his quest for primary data, Levine wants to go all the way to (a) conscious experiences themselves, instead of stopping with (b) subjects’ beliefs about their experiences, but this is not a good idea. If (a) outruns (b)--if you have conscious experiences you don’t believe you have--those extra conscious experiences are just as inaccessible to you as to the external observers. So a first-person approach garners you no more usable data than heterophenomenology does. Moreover, if (b) outruns (a)--if you believe you have conscious experiences that you don’t in fact have--then it is your beliefs that we need to explain, not the non-existent experiences! Sticking to the heterophenomenological standard, and treating (b) as the maximal set of primary data, is a good way of avoiding a commitment to spurious data. But what if some of your beliefs are inexpressible in verbal judgments? If you believe that, you can tell us, and we can add that belief to the list of beliefs in our primary data: S claims that he has ineffable beliefs about X. If this belief is true, then we encounter the obligation to explain what these beliefs are and why they are ineffable. If this belief is false, we still have to explain why S believes (falsely) that there are these particular ineffable beliefs. As I put it in Consciousness Explained, You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you, and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it seems to you, about what it is like to be you. And if you complain that some parts of how it seems to you are ineffable, we heterophenomenologists will grant that too. What better grounds could we have for believing that you are unable to describe something than that (1) you don’t describe it, and (2) confess that you cannot? Of course you might be lying, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.(CE, p96-7) Moving from the third-person to the first-person point of view is just asking for trouble; you get no data not already available from the third-person point of view, and you risk sending yourself off on wild goose chases trying to pin down conscious experiences that you only think you are having! What about the second-person point of view? What people seem to have in mind by this suggestion is some sort of empathy, or trust, that is distinct from the admittedly weird, unnaturally noncommittal attitude adopted by heterophenomenology. This neutrality or agnosticism has been criticized by Alvin Goldman. . In "Science, Publicity and Consciousness" (1997), he says that heterophenomenology is not, as I claim, the standard method of consciousness research, since researchers "rely substantially on subjects' introspective beliefs about their conscious experience (or lack thereof)" (p532). In private correspondence (Feb 21, 2001, available as part of my debate with Chalmers, on my website, at he puts the point this way: The objection lodged in my paper [Goldman, 1997] to heterophenomenology is that what cognitive scientists actually do in this territory is not to practice agnosticism. Instead, they rely substantially on subjects' introspective beliefs (or reports). So my claim is that the heterophenomenological method is not an accurate description of what cognitive scientists (of consciousness) standardly do. Of course, you can say (and perhaps intended to say, but if so it wasn't entirely clear) that this is what scientists should do, not what they do do. (Alvin Goldman) I certainly would play the role of reformer if it were necessary, but Goldman is simply mistaken; the adoption of agnosticism is so firmly built into practice these days that it goes without saying, which is perhaps why he missed it. Consider, for instance, the decades-long controversy about mental imagery, starring Roger Shepard, Steven Kosslyn, and Zenon Pylyshyn among many others. It was initiated by the brilliant experiments by Shepard and his students in which subjects were shown pairs of line drawings like the pair in figure 1, and asked to press one button if the figures were different views of the same object (rotated in space) and another button if they were of different objects. Most subjects claim to solve the problem by rotating one of the two figures in their “mind’s eye” or imagination, to see if it could be superimposed on the other. Were subjects really doing this “mental rotation”? By varying the angular distance actually required to rotate the two figures into congruence, and timing the responses, Shepard was able to establish a remarkably regular linear relation between latency of response and angular displacement. Practiced subjects, he reported, are able to rotate such mental images at an angular velocity of roughly 60E per second (Shepard and Metzler, 1971). This didn’t settle the issue, since Pylyshyn and others were quick to compose alternative hyptheses that could account for this striking temporal relationship. Further studies were called for and executed, and the controversy continues to generate new experiments and analysis today (see Pylyshyn, forthcoming, for an excellent survey of the history of this debate, and also my commentary, forthcoming, both in Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Subjects always say that they are rotating their mental images, so if agnosticism were not the tacit order of the day, Shepard and Kosslyn would have never needed to do their experiments to support subjects’ claims that what they were doing (at least if described metaphorically) really was a process of image manipulation. Agnosticism is built into all good psychological research with human subjects. In psychophysics, for instance, the use of signal detection theory has been part of the canon since the 1960s, and it specifically commands researchers to control for the fact that the response criterion is under the subject’s control although the subject is not himself or herself a reliable source on the topic. Or consider the voluminous research literature on illusions, both perceptual and cognitive, which standardly assumes that the data are what subjects judge to be the case, and never makes the mistake of “relying substantially on subjects’ introspective beliefs.” The diagnosis of Goldman’s error is particularly clear here: of course experimenters on illusions rely on subjects’ introspective beliefs (as expressed in their judgments) about how it seems to them, but that is the agnosticism of heterophenomenology; to go beyond it would be, for instance, to assume that in size illusions there really were visual images of different sizes somewhere in subjects’ brains (or minds), which of course no researcher would dream of doing. Finally, consider such phenomena as d?j? vu. Sober research on this topic has never made the mistake of abandoning agnosticism about subjects’ claims to be reliving previous experiences. See, e.g., Bower and Clapper, in Posner, ed., 1989, for instance, or any good textbook on methods in cognitive science for the details. (Goldman has responded to this paragraph in a series of emails to me, which I have included in an Appendix on the website mentioned above.) Is there, then, some other sort of attitude, importantly different from the strange restraint of the heterophenomenological method, that might bear fruit in our quest for a scientific understanding of consciousness? Varela and Shear, in “First-person methodologies: What, Why, How?” J.Consc. Studies, 1999, describe the empathy that they see as the distinguishing feature of a method they describe as first-person: In fact, that is how he sees his role: as an empathic resonator with experiences that are familiar to him and which find in himself a resonant chord. This empathic position is still partly heterophenomenological, since a modicum of critical distance and of critical evaluation is necessary, but the intention is entirely other: to meet on the same ground, as members of the same kind. . . . Such encounters would not be possible without the mediator being steeped in the domain of experiences under examination, as nothing can replace that first-hand knowledge. This, then, is a radically different style of validation from the others we have discussed so far. (p10) One can hardly quarrel with the recommendation that the experimenter be “steeped in the domain of experiences” under examination, but, in a word, can Martians marinate? If not, why not? Is there more to empathy than just good, knowledgeable interpretation from the intentional stance? If so, what is it? In a supporting paper, Evan Thompson speaks of “sensual empathy,” and opines: “Clearly, for this kind of sensual empathy to be possible, one’s own body and the Other’s body must be of a similar type.” (“Empathy and Consciousness” J.Consc. Studies, 2001, pp1-33) It may be clear to Thompson, and it may even, in the end, be true that “Martians” of some ilk would be incapable of sensual empathy with human beings, but this is hardly the sort of opinion on which a natural science of consciousness should be based. It should emerge, if it is true at all, from a discovered failure to connect, a striking disparity in the success of “Martian” and “earthling” experimenters/investigators, for instance, and it should itself be a fact that our theory can explain, not something it presupposes in the very course of gathering its data. Any such gradient or discontinuity worth taking seriously can itself be discovered by heterophenomenology. My conclusion is that the method of heterophenomenology captures all the data for a theory of human consciousness in a neutral fashion. A “first-person” science of consciousness will either collapse into heterophenomenology after all, or else manifest an unacceptable bias in its initial assumptions. Debates about zombies and their kin can and should be postponed indefinitely. References Chalmers, David, 1996, The Consciousness Mind, New York: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Alvin, 1997, "Science, Publicity and Consciousness" Philosophy of Science 64 (4), 525-545. Levine, Joseph, 1994, “Out of the Closet: A Qualophile Confronts Qualophobia,” Philosophical Topics, 22, pp107-26 Dennett, Daniel, 1982, "How to Study Consciousness Empirically: or Nothing Comes to Mind," Synthese, 53, 159-80. Dennett, Daniel, 1991, Consciousness Explained, Boston and New York: Little Brown. Nagel, Thomas, 1974, “What is it like to be a bat?” Phil. Review, 83, pp435-50. Parvizi, Josef, and Antonio Damasio, 2001, “Consciousness and the Brain Stem,” Cognition, 79, pp135-59. Shepard, Roger and J. Metzler, “Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects,” Science CLXXI (1971), 701-3. Thompson, Evan, 2001, “Empathy and Consciousness” J.Consc. Studies, 2001, pp1-33. Varela, Francisco and Jonathan Shear, 1999, “First-person methodologies: What, Why, How?” J.Consc. Studies, 6 (203): 1-14. |