Today

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Todays Lecture

• A comment about your final Paper
• Third in-class quiz and grade spreadsheet
• Kathleen Atkins

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A comment about your final Paper

• I am giving you a bonus day of grace to get your
  final Paper in to me.
• Three things to note about this extra day of
  grace
• (1) It means that IF you get your paper to me, or
  the assignment drop box, by 400 p.m. on August
  11th, THEN you will not receive any late
  penalties for your paper.
• (2) This extra day of grace only applies to your
  Paper.
• (3) Technically, this does not change the due
  date for the paper (which remains August 8th).
• (4) If you have any extra day s of grace
  remaining you can add them to this bonus day.

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Third in-class quiz and grade spreadsheet

• Do remember that due to my oversight in not
  giving a third in-class quiz, each of you have
  received an automatic 2 out of 2 for the quiz
  that wasnt.
• Today I am placing a randomized grade spreadsheet
  on the course website (look for your grades under
  the columns associated with your student ID
  number). Please check to ensure that the data
  matches what you have. If there are any
  discrepancies, come and see me.

4
Preliminary comments Animal minds

• Several books come to mind if you want to explore
  the issue of animal minds
• Bekoff, Marc. 2002. Minding Animals Awareness,
  Emotions, and Heart. New York Oxford University
  Press.
• Griffin, Donald. R. 1992. Animal Minds. Chicago
  The University of Chicago Press.
• Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, Stuart G. Shanker and
  Talbot Taylor. 1998. Apes, Language, and the
  Human Mind. New York Oxford University Press.
• Wrangham, Richard W., W.C. McGrew, Frans de Waal,
  and Paul G. Heltne, eds. 1994/96. Chimpanzee
  Cultures. Cambridge (MA) Harvard University
  Press.

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Preliminary comments Qualia and intentionality

• In the course of her discussion, Kathleen Atkins
  makes mention of qualitative states and
  intentional states.
• We have already encountered the notion of
  intentional states. For a state to be intentional
  it must be about something.
• Bailey puts it this way
• Sometimes philosophers use intentional in the
  everyday sense, to mean something which is done
  on purpose, but frequently they use it to mean
  instead something which is about (directed at,
  represents, of) something else. Thus, for
  example, a sentence, a thought, an action, a
  sculpture, or a map can be intentional (or have
  intentionality) while a person, a star, or a
  house usually are not (FP, p.435).

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Preliminary comments Qualia and intentionality

• Mental states that are intentional states possess
  representational content.
• Bailey, among many other philosophers of mind,
  holds that not all mental states are intentional
  (i.e. not all mental states possess
  representational content).

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Preliminary comments Qualia and intentionality

• Qualitative states are mental states that possess
  a certain or particular feel to them. The
  particular feel of a mental state is often
  referred to as a quale (singular), and the feel
  of various mental states as qualia (plural).
• Bailey, again, puts it this way
• The sensations of being tickled and the smell
  of cooking onions both have a distinctive feel to
  them there is something it is like for you to
  be tickled (FP, p.390).

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Preliminary comments Qualia and intentionality

• William Lycan puts it this way
• The quale of a mental state or event
  (particularly a sensation) is that state or
  events feel, its introspectible phenomenal
  character, its nature as it presents itself to
  consciousness (Lycan, William. 2003. Philosophy
  of Mind. In The Blackwell Companion to
  Philosophy. Second Edition. Edited by Nicholas
  Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James. Malden (MA)
  Blackwell Publishers Ltd., p.185).

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Preliminary comments Qualia and intentionality

• When thinking back to Nagels paper, his worries
  about what it is like to be a bat can be
  understood as worries about the qualia a bat
  experiences.
• His general thesis can be understood as
  contending that current physicalist theories of
  mind cannot accommodate qualia (either
  experienced by human or nonhuman animals) (CP,
  p.54).
• Kathleen Atkins paper is partially directed
  towards Nagels paper.

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Kathleen Atkins

• Kathleen Atkins is a contemporary philosopher at
  Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
• She primarily works in philosophy of mind and
  neurophilosophy.
• Like Nagel, she is a metaphysical physicalist.

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A Bat without Qualities? Preliminary remarks

• Atkins opens up with a discussion of birds of
  prey and certain properties of their eyes.
• Eagles, notes Atkins, have more than one fovea (a
  small portion of the retina densely packed with
  receptor cells CP, p.53) in each eye with
  which to scan their immediate environment.
• Humans have only one fovea.
• The fovea of an eye enables the organism that
  possesses it to bring certain features of its
  immediate environment into focus. Peripheral
  vision is that which is visually perceived
  outside of the foveated area of the eye (CP,
  p.53).

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A Bat without Qualities? Preliminary remarks

• Imagine the foveated regions of the eagles eye
  as resembling a barbell. You have two fovea in
  each eye connected together by a horizontal band
  of densely packed receptor cells (CP, p.53).
  These fovea point outwards to the left and right
  of the eagle, taking in different areas of the
  immediate environment (CP, p.53).
• There is also an extra pair of (temporal) fovea
  pointing forward, converging on a shared field
  (CP, p.53), much like our own foveated are of our
  eyes, except with three times the density of
  receptor cells (CP, 53).
• Now imagine what it is like to be an eagle. This
  is an analogous problem to the one suggested by
  Nagel (CP, pp.53-54).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Problem

• I dont think we need to go into a lot of detail
  here rehashing Nagels discussion as described by
  Atkins (Ill leave that part of the reading to
  you).
• Some things bear mentioning
• (1) Nagels problem is a clash between the
  purportedly essential subjective component of
  conscious experience and the need for a
  non-subjective point of view (i.e. an objective
  point of view) in the natural sciences (CP,
  p.54).
• (2) The only way to understand the conscious
  experience of another is through extrapolation
  from our own (i.e. the human communitys)
  experiences of consciousness (CP, p.54).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Problem

• Atkins uses the example of migraines, or
  radically alien sapient species, to bring out the
  intuitive grounds for the kind of problem Nagel,
  and others, are attempting to highlight.
• The basic thought here is that the intensity of
  pain associated with migraines is something that
  cannot be fully communicated to those lacking
  experience with this form of headache.
  Alternatively, the qualia of an extraterrestrial
  organism significantly different in its
  neurophysiology than anything on earth seems
  unimaginable (CP, p.54).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Problem

• Atkins now directs our focus to how this problem
  might be manifest in science, rather than in the
  imaginations of the unschooled. As she notes,
  this is the primary focus of Nagels discussion
  after all (CP, p.54).
• She uses, here, the example of the various pain
  states associated with the breaking of a toe. If
  we can imagine that science, at some point in the
  future, yields a complete picture of the
  neurophysiological porcesses or mechanisms
  responsible for pain production, we will still,
  it is thought, be unable to understand pain
  states we have not ourselves experienced directly
  (CP, p55).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Problem

• She also (rightly) notes that this is not a
  (subtle) way for certain philosophers to reject
  metaphysical materialism. It is simply an
  expression of a skepticism that our knowledge in
  these areas of the study of mind can be completed
  without having the requisite experiences
  ourselves (CP, p.55).

17
A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• Atkins now introduces the idea of a film, made by
  future scientists, and visually representing (in
  3-D) the information being received by a bat as
  it omits sounds at frequencies ranging from 60 to
  20 khz while on the hunt for food (in this case
  mealworms being thrown into the air by an
  experimenter) (CP, p.55). Remember this is a
  fiction.
• What we will see on the film, where the sound has
  been translated into colors, is a mass of
  changing color schemes, coalescing and then
  dispersing, as the bat pursues its prey. This
  will not look like anything we would see were we
  the ones on the hunt. This is, rather, what it is
  like to hunt when one is a bat (CP, p.56).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• Prima facie problems with this suggestion
• (1) In watching the film we still lack the
  sympathetic sensations (CP, p.56) associated
  with travelling through the air, or actually
  perceiving and then chasing the thrown mealworm.
• (2) We lack the requisite knowledge of what is
  what as we watch the changing shapes and colors
  to be able to understand the events transpiring
  as experienced by the bat.
• (3) We cannot translate what we are seeing into
  what the bat would be seeing in its environment
  (CP, p.56).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• What do you think of Atkins claim that we could
  learn a lot about the experience of hand-gliding
  from watching a 3-D film of a sky-diver, from the
  moment she leaves the aircraft to her soft
  landing (CP, p.56)?
• Is this not dependent on having analogous
  experiences (or experience sets), or being at a
  certain level of cognitive maturity? Does this
  make a difference to her argument here?

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• At first glance the problem seems to be that we
  use our visual system in importantly different
  ways than how a bat uses its auditory system.
• However, we might think that we can compensate
  for this by becoming aware of how the colors
  represent what the bat is perceiving.
• First, the hue of the sensations (red, green,
  blue, etc.) encoded the frequency of the sound
  waves second, the brightness of the colors gave
  the volume or intensity of the sound and, third,
  the configuration of the patches showed,
  straightforwardly, the spatial properties of the
  sound waves (CP, pp.56-57).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• Now, though this will not yield an analysis, or
  understanding, of what it is the bat does to
  process auditory information when in pursuit of a
  tossed mealworm, it seems to promise to give us
  the feeling of what that pursuit is like (CP,
  p.57).
• That is to say, this film may, at least for some
  philosophers and under its present description,
  give us the feel of what it is like to pursue a
  mealworm using sonar, though it will not give
  us the bats point of view (what it is like for
  the bat per se). We still lack the
  representational, or intentional, content that
  makes this experience meaningful to the bat (CP,
  p.57).

22
A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• This suggested interpretation, which now seems to
  hold out the hope of knowing the dual aspects
  (i.e. the qualitative and representational
  aspects ) of experience albeit separately, will
  only work if we can intelligibly separate qualia
  from the representational content of an
  experience (or set of experiences), and this, for
  Atkins, is unlikely (it would be like separating,
  in any substantial way, the experience of color
  and the experience of that which is colored when
  examining the perception of a colored thing) (CP,
  pp.57-58).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• Perceiving (or imagining) moving colored patches
  on a screen is an intentional - or, at least,
  quasi-intentional - event, an experience of
  colored patches as colored patches. So when we
  imagined the bat film, we did not thereby imagine
  pure sensory qualities, color qualia devoid of
  content (CP, p.58).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• Part of the problem that Atkins thinks is present
  both in the attempt to read the bat film as
  conveying feeling or qualia and with Nagels
  contention that functionalism leaves out
  consciousness, is the view that conscious
  experience consists in bundles of qualia (CP,
  p.58).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• This is misleading for the following reasons
• (1) Just because we converse with others about
  unique or shared experiences, does not mean that
  we are isolating the feel of experiences from
  their intentional content in our discussions. It
  is unlikely that our problems, in such
  discussions, with communicating unique
  experiences has to do with the lack of a
  reference to the pure qualitative aspects of the
  states to which we are referring. For Atkins, we
  do not, and cannot, refer to such purely
  qualitative aspects (or to qualia abstracted from
  intentional content) when describing our
  conscious experiences (CP, p.58).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• (2) Consequently, a point of view, say one like
  our own, is not merely a bundle of qualia. Our
  conscious experiences have both qualitative and
  intentional aspects that cannot be meaningfully
  separated. If this is our starting point for
  talking of (human or bat) points of view (which
  are then successfully carried out if we can
  successfully extrapolate from our own cases), we
  have no good reason for thinking that a bats
  point of view consists of bundles of qualia (CP,
  p.58).

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A Bat without Qualities? The Film

• According to Atkins, these two considerations
  allow us to reject the problem of What it is
  like to be a Bat as developed by Nagel (and
  others like him).
• Given that qualia and intentional content seem to
  be inextricably linked, AND that we seem to be
  making headway in understanding intentionality,
  there is no prima facie reason to be pessimistic
  that science will one day give us the picture of
  what it is like to be a bat (CP, p.58).

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A Bat without Qualities? Ourselves as subject

• This inquiry may yield interesting results in the
  study of our own phenomenology. (After all, it
  would seem that we misdescribe the problem
  attaching to communicating unique experiences to
  a fellow human).
• Consider the eagle example that began the paper.
• Atkins would rightly suggest that we cannot
  duplicate the point of view of the eagle by
  merely wearing the right set of focal lenses and
  then attending to the ways this allows us to
  focus in on various areas of our respective
  fields of vision. After all, there is no inner
  eye of the eagle, which is the eagle looking
  through various foveated regions of its eyes. It
  probably attends to its field of vision all at
  once, or at least can do so (CP, p.59).

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A Bat without Qualities? Ourselves as subject

• Atkins thinks that this point is obviously right.
  
• But it actually raises an important additional
  point about our own self-perceptions. It could be
  that our understanding of introspection, as some
  kind of inner eye that roams and illuminates
  various regions of our mind, is as equally
  wrong-headed, and even indicates how our own
  visual processes color our understanding of
  conscious attentive processes as a whole (CP,
  p.59).

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A Bat without Qualities? Ourselves as subject

• If this is a real possibility, it could be that,
  contra the traditional view on the matter, we do
  not have special infallible access to the
  content, character or nature of our own minds. At
  least, it could be possible that we frequently
  misdescribe what is going on in our minds (CP,
  p.59).
• Atkins asks us to imagine ourselves in the not
  uncommon experience of struggling through a door
  while over-laden with groceries. Though we can
  parse the various conscious mental events taking
  place, or that must have taken place, as we
  struggled through the door, this does not
  represent the actual state of affairs that took
  place in that circumstance. As Atkins suggests,
  everything happens at once (CP, p.59).

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A Bat without Qualities? Ourselves as subject

• Perhaps, then, the explanation does the other
  way about perhaps the searchlight metaphor,
  combined with our story-telling practices and our
  understanding of the relevant causal chain of
  events, confer order upon the conscious events
  only in retrospect. ... What the eye of the eagle
  should make us wonder is whether our conception
  of ourselves might not be tainted with the same
  foveal metaphors we naturally apply to other
  creatures (CP, p.59).

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A Bat without Qualities? Ourselves as subject

• Note Atkins is not suggesting that the spotlight
  theories of conscious attention (CP, p.59) are
  obviously wrong.
• What she is suggesting is that it is not
  obviously right that science will never have
  anything of substance to say about either the
  points of view of nonhumans or even the points of
  view of humans.