There's a profile of Paul and Patricia Churchland, husband and wife philosophers, in this week's New Yorker. They are interested in neuroscience and questions about mind/body dualities. At one point, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is described. Nagel asks the reader to try to imagine what it is like to be a bat.
"Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far)," he wrote, "it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." The purpose of this exercise, Nagel explained, was to demonstrate that, however impossible it might be for humans to imagine, it was very likely that there was something it was like to be a bat, and that thing, that set of facts-the bat's intimate experience, its point of view, its consciousness-could not be translated into the sort of objective language that another creature could understand...But if the bat's consciousciousness-the what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat-is not graspable by human concepts, while the bat's physical makeup is, then it is very difficult to imagine how humans could come to understand the relationship between them.
The impossiblity of imaging the interior life of a bat, while at the same time being able to understand the biology of the bat is used as an argument for a special status for consciousness, and against the ability of neuroscience to completely understand it. For some, this is an argument for a fundamental mind/brain duality. The Churchlands strenously disagree, and I'm inclined to second them. The fact that we can't fully imagine what it's like to be a bat is not that informative. If we weren't faced with the fact of bats themselves would we be able to imagine them?
[Looks like there's no online version of the New Yorker article. Sorry.]
2 comments:
Cool post.
Sounds like an interesting article. I'll have to read it sometime. I read that essay by Nagel awhile ago. I remember it did have an effect on me. But I guess the same argument could be applied to other people. We can imagine what it would be like for us to be in their situation, but how do we know what its like for them? More a note of caution about assuming too much about the mind body connection than a knock-down argument. One book I appreciated that I've wanted to get back to is Susan Blackmore's
Consciousness: An Introduction
Patricia Churchland is profiled and it says that "She thinks the hard problem [of consciousness] is a "hornswaggle problem" that will go the way of phlogistin or caloric fluid...".
Boaz, I will give you the article. I guess the question is whether we could know what it's like for other people or animals if we had enough information. If we knew how they grew up, what their frontal lobes look like, what they ate for breakfast, etc., and knew enough about thinking in general, would we know what it's like to be someone else? Would we know what they are going to do in any given situation? Maybe.
Whether the problem of consciousness will "go the way of phlogiston" depends, I think, on what question we're asking about consciousness.
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