Physicalism and the Privacy of Conscious Experience

Biosystems, 2020

The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative, phenomenal nature of conscious experiences also cannot be communicated to others in the form of a message composed of classical bits of information. Because in a classical world everything physical is observable and communicable, it is a daunting task to explain how an empirically unobservable, incommunicable consciousness could have any physical substrates such as neurons composed of biochemical molecules, water, and electrolytes. The challenges encountered by classical physics are exemplified by a number of thought experiments including the inverted qualia argument, the private language argument, the beetle in the box argument and the knowledge argument. These thought experiments, however, do not imply that our consciousness is nonphysical and our introspective conscious testimonies are untrustworthy. The principles of classical physics have been superseded by modern quantum physics, which contains two fundamentally different kinds of physical objects: unobservable quantum state vectors, which define what physically exists, and quantum operators (observables), which define what can physically be observed. Identifying consciousness with the unobservable quantum information contained by quantum physical brain states allows for application of quantum information theorems to resolve possible paradoxes created by the inner privacy of conscious experiences, and explains how the observable brain is constructed by accessible bits of classical information that are bound by Holevo's theorem and extracted from the physically existing quantum brain upon measurement with physical devices.

Ergo

A familiar sceptical worry about other minds is that if conscious experiences are private then I could never know whether another subject's experiences are like mine. A somewhat different sort of worry is that I could not even understand another subject's claims about the private features of her experience— and, conversely, that she could never understand my claims about my private features. Edward Craig (1982; 1986; 1997), taking Wittgenstein (1953) as his target, repeatedly argued that such incommunicability would not follow from the private nature of the features in question. The basic idea is that two subjects might each privately introduce predicates to describe their own private phenomenal features and these predicates might (albeit unknowably) have the same meaning, and that this could suffice for mutual understanding. After clarifying the notion of privacy at issue, I argue against this apparently plausible line of thought by showing how hard it is to make sense of the allegedly possible sameness of meaning.

2009

The phenomenal entities that we directly experience in perceptions, dreams and hallucinations tend to be viewed as essentially private and ephemeral (fleeting), i.e., necessarily incapable of being directly experienced by more than one subject and incapable of re-occurring more than once. Among phenomenal entities are the "object-shaped" gestalts studied in Gestalt psychology. The traditional ontological dichotomy of universals and particulars is appealed to, in order to make a distinction between (phenomenal) gestalt-types and gestalt-tokens. It is then proposed that the former are not essentially private and ephemeral. As regards the latter, it is argued that they are indeed essentially private, but ephemeral at most only in a contingent sense. The relevance of these claims for our perceptual judgments about external objects is briefly investigated at the end of the paper.

stc.arts.chula.ac.th

According to the laws of physics, the state of a physical system can only be measured by another system (usually a particular measuring device) via a physical interaction. However, when our brain is in a conscious mental state, it can in principle output its physical state based on the psycho-physical correspondance between the mental state and the physical state. It is arguable that this indicates that the conscious mind violates physical laws and it is not physical as physicalism claims.

In K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge, 2018, pp. 79-95

Wittgenstein’s philosophy involves a general anti-platonism about properties or standards of similarity. On his view, what it is for one thing to have the same property as another is not dictated by reality itself; it depends on our classificatory practices and the standards of similarity they embody. Wittgenstein’s anti-platonism plays an important role in the private language sections and in his discussion of the conceptual problem of other minds. In sharp contrast to Wittgenstein’s views stands the contemporary doctrine of natural properties, which holds that there is an objective hierarchy of naturalness amongst properties, a hierarchy that is completely independent of our concepts or practices. Some authors have appealed to the natural properties view to offer an explicitly anti-Wittgensteinian account of sensation concepts. The paper discusses these competing views of properties and sensation concepts. It is argued that, if our account of concepts of conscious states starts from a commitment to natural properties, we are bound to recognize that our actual classificatory practices also play a crucial role in determining which properties our concepts pick out. On the other hand, if we start from the anti-platonist position, we are bound to recognize that we also need a notion of sameness of property that extends beyond our limited capacity to recognize similarity or sameness of property. The correct view, it is concluded, must occupy a middle position between an extreme anti-realism about properties and an extreme version of the natural properties view. It is suggested that Wittgenstein’s own view does just that.

In this paper I challenge the physicalist claim, that everything that exists in the universe can be reduced to a physical explanation, and hence, consciousness is reducible to a physicalist explanation as well. I show some of the weaknesses of this argument, and introduce some classic objections to it, but also argue that such objections are not enough to overthrow physicalism and that something more is needed. In the second part of the paper I attempt to show what that something more could be, and show how we can study consciousness from a first-person perspective through methods such as introspection and phenomenology. In the third and last part, I take on naturalized phenomenology in the form of neurophenomenology, and argue that although we can, and should, study consciousness from a first-person perspective if we want a complete picture, or theory, of consciousness, we still can't bridge the explanatory gap, due to problems and differences in terminology between the third-personal (objective) sciences, and the first-personal (subjective) sciences.

Philosophia, 1994

In this paper I will present a new argument against the physicalist approach to the mind. The argument deals with what I will call the domain of the phenomenal, or what can be described metaphorically as the way things are for a cognizer from the inside, from a first-person point of view. Loosely, the phenomenal can be characterized in the traditional way, as what 'appears' to, or is present for a cognizer at a given moment, bracketed from any assumption about its existence. The phenomenal domain includes, for example, sensations of pain, smells, sounds presented auditorily and objects appearing visually, whether veridical or not, But the precise borders of this domain are not crucial here. 1. Phenomenal knowledge as ability: Laurence Nemirow (1980) and David Lewis (1983) claim that knowing what a state is like is not a factual type of knowing, that is, a knowledge of some information, or in other words, an epistemic relation between a cognizer and a fact.

Privileged Access to Conscious Experience and the Transparency Thesis, 2017