Body-Mind/Fact-Value: How Do the Two Problems

Interrelate?

E-INTENTIONALITYTHURSDAY 15 MARCH 2007

Steve Torrance and Erik Myin

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Experience and value

• In some people’s minds, the two domains are closely associated, in some deep way…

• See Sue Blackmore, Conversations on

Consciousness OUP, 2005

5 examples…

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1. I don’t squish bugs anymore

Conversation with Christof Koch (p 134)• SB: How has studying all this changed you as a

person?• CK: Well, I can tell you in a very practical way, I

don’t squish bugs anymore….unless they attack me. Why? Because I’m a biologist. Most pet owners would agree that cats and dogs are conscious, and the monkey is conscious…. Now, you can ask, how low does it go in the evolutionary ladder?

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2. self-transformation;…becoming fully what we might be

Conversation with Stephen LaBerge (p 146)• SB: Do you think that a science of consciousness must

necessarily entail …questions of self-transformation?• SL: Yes. ….Eastern traditions have been working at this

inner knowledge for thousands of years. And I think that we in the West have the unique opportunity of benefiting from an interaction with that Eastern tradition, bringing in the Western scientific perspective. I think the collaboration of these two perspectives is what will give us the potential to understand consciousness in a new way and then make use of the value that it has, in becoming fully what we might be.

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3. without consciousness morals evaporate

Conversation with Roger Penrose (p 184)• SB: Does [a] moral element come in for you when

you’re thinking about the nature of consciousness?• RP: I think it has everything to do with it, because

without consciousness somehow morals evaporate. I remember having an argument with a computationalist – I’ve forgotten who it was now – where the question of morality came up, and this person just didn’t understand what consciousness had to do with morality, and I thought, ‘What?!’ I mean, if you bought a computer which is conscious you’d have a responsibility; it’s a moral issue.

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4. … the basis of our joys, pleasures, pains, tragedies

Conversation with Petra Stoerig (p 213)• SB: I want you to tell me …why consciousness is so

interesting and difficult.• PS: Why is it interesting? That is an easy question: of

course it’s interesting because it’s the basis of all our joys and pleasures and pains and tragedies and so on.…From my point of view, consciousness is the prerequisite of experience, and experience is what makes us happy or sad or enjoy the sunset or a glass of wine, or a wonderful Belgian meal…

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5. The most cherished quality of what it is to be alive

Conversation with Francisco Varela (pp 225-6)• FV: …So the question is, why is it that consciousness

feels so personal, so intimate, so central to who we are, and of course, that’s why it’s so interesting. The study of consciousness is a kind of singularity in science, because you’re studying precisely the most cherished quality of what it is to be alive.

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What’s the connection?

– it’s seen in rather vague terms;– different people see the connection differently;

• Possible themes:(a) C as basis of quality of life

(b) To see a being as C is to assume a responsibility

(c) Understanding C fully leads to the possibility of self-transformation

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A Tale of Two Gaps

• (a) A gap between properties of brains/bodies and consciousness – (Mind-Body gap)

(primarily consciousness)

• (b) A gap between facts-in-the-world and ethical commitments – (Fact-Value gap)

(primarily ethical value)

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Questions

(a) examine the common structures of these two debates– how far would participants in each debate benefit from

comparing their ‘moves’ with corresponding ‘moves’ in the other debate?

(b) can an ‘enactively’ inspired approach provide a standpoint from which progress can be made on both issues – in parallel?– in collaboration?

• How useful is it to see an interaction or ‘entanglement’ between the two domains?

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Objective/subjective• Both issues can be put in terms of a question about

the relation between objectivity and subjectivity:

MIND-BODY: • Can ‘subjective’ (1st-person) properties of

mind be explained in terms of ‘objective’ (3rd-person) features (e.g. of our physical make-up)?

FACT-VALUE: • Can the ‘subjective’ features of ethical

judgments be grounded in ‘objective’ features of the world?

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Special features of each domain

• Traditionally, theorists have identified a key property for each domain that makes it special and problematic…

• CONSCIOUSNESS– the qualitative, felt nature of conscious awareness

(subjectivity, phenomenality)

• ETHICS– the conceptual connection between ethical beliefs and

preferences, commitments, springs to action (prescriptivity, practicality)

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Key dilemmas

• CONSCIOUSNESS: – how to get a theory of consciousness which

grounds it in ‘objective’ features of the world without obscuring the special feature(s) of consciousness (subjectivity, phenomenality)

• ETHICS: – how to get a theory of ethics which grounds it

in ‘objective’ features of the world without obscuring the special features of ethics (prescriptivity, practicality)

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Commonalities between the domains

• Different kinds of responses to each problem match up with each other

• Examples….

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Examples of analogies between the two problem areas

1. SPECIAL ENTITIES OR PROPERTIES: Consciousness as a special property: non-physical but scientifically well-founded (Chalmers). Goodness, rightness, etc. as special properties - non-natural, but objectively knowable (Moore)

2. REDUCTIONISM / NATURALISM. Consciousness-facts equated with (e.g.) brain-facts or computational facts.Ethical facts equated with (e.g.) facts about maximizing satisfaction or facts about social choices.

3. ELIMINATIVE VIEWS – concepts of consciousness or of ethics seen as based on confusions about mythical facts/properties (as in postulated by theories of type 1.)

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The legacy of Logical Positivism: ethics

• Hilary Putnam, in a recent lecture (The Fact-Value Dichotomy and its Critics, Dublin, March 2007):

• Putnam: – Logical Positivism claimed that ethical statements

(and value statements generally) were cognitively meaningless, and not amenable to rational discussion

– Yet “ethical questions are the ones that most of us think of as the most important in life, and as being the most important to discuss rationally.”

– But for much of the 20th century ethical issues were marginalized in philosophy and in science because of the legacy of Logical Positivism

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The legacy of Logical Positivism: consciousness

• Reference to consciousness (and other ‘mental’ entities) was banished from scientific discourse by Logical Positivism – once again because such terms were seen as

cognitively meaningless.• Behaviourism (although it predated the Vienna Circle),

was perhaps given greater pre-eminence because of the philosophical influence of logical positivism.– Even with the rise of ‘cognitivism’ in the 50s and 60s,

consciousness continued to be marginalized

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Enactivism

Certain strands within Enactivism (and Phenomenology) suggest a distinctive approach to

BOTH the brain-consciousness gap

AND– the fact-value gap.

(Cf Varela, Thompson, Noe, O’Regan, Myin – plus key ideas from Merleau-Ponty, etc.)

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• Some relevant ideas of enactivism– Mind as ‘lived embodiment’– Importance of sensorimotor interaction with

environment in characterizing cognition, experience

– Intersubjectivity as pivotal– Problematization of traditional ideas of

objectivity and subjectivity– ‘Laying down a path in walking’; mind as

‘bringing forth’ a world

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• What follows will also provide an approach to was called (in the Life and Mind talk yesterday) a ‘thick’ conception of phenomenality….

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Conscious experiences as special kinds of entities in the world

The ‘consciousness-brain’ gap:

We propose to target an ontological assumption behind the gap – – that conscious states are special kinds of

entities (facts, properties, etc.) in the world• and that these entities / facts / properties need to

be tied in with the other kinds of entities / facts / properties through logical links of explanation.

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Difference of Perspectives

The Enactive approach suggests a way of rethinking the relation between the phenomenal or subjective and the physical or objective aspects of our nature. – The difference between the phenomenal and

the objective should be understood in terms of a difference in perspectives • rather than a difference between kinds of

entities, facts, properties, etc.

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Mind-body gap as incompatibility of perspectives

WE PROPOSE:

• The ‘gap’ between consciousness and physicality arises from an incompatibility between two perspectives,

• rather than as a result of an ontological incompatibility of different kinds of fact – (i.e.) of two subcategories of one generic

ontological category of ‘fact’.

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• A similar view can be held about the fact-value gap (to be discussed later)– People often think of ethical judgments as

referring to special kinds of facts (or, by contrast, as expressing ‘imperatives’, or ‘prescriptions’)

– But we claim: it would be far more fruitful to think of ethics in terms of two perspectives

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Dreaming of Objectivity

• Both gaps arise from a common framework concerning objectivity

– This familiar, but misguided, framework is based on equating the universe with a totality of facts (Wittgenstein, Tractatus)

• Where these facts are thought as being ideally knowable by an ideally placed observer

• And where the goal of science is to try to describe and explain more and more comprehensively .

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More on ‘objectivity’ as commonly understood

• ‘Objective knowledge’ thus consists in trying to get as close as possible to that ideal-observer state– This may be done via systematization of

observation and theory, as in science, by ‘pure thought’, etc.

• This leads naturally to puzzles like trying to fit CONSCIOUSNESS or ETHICS into this framework

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Inflationary or deflationary approaches to objectivity

The puzzles prompt alternative philosophical solutions – of either an inflationary or a deflationary kind– Inflationary solutions propose special kinds

of properties • (e.g. special ‘Cartesian’ or Chalmers-style

phenomenal entities or properties; or special Moore-style ethical properties)

– Deflationary solutions offer various styles of rejection of such special entities or properties• (reductionism; eliminativism)

(Cf. Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology. )

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• All such solutions (both inflationary AND deflationary) are unsatisfactory for all the reasons familiar to students of both debates– E.g. the classical puzzles about colour-blind

superscientists; zombies, etc.– Or puzzles about “open questions” in ethics

• The way out is to challenge the picture of objectivity which generates the various familiar kinds of solution in both domains…

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Two perspectives, not two kinds of entities

• Instead of seeing the world as populated with (possibly) two different kinds of entities– ‘Objective’ ones (nice, well-behaved);– ‘Subjective’ ones (dodgy)…

• …rather see the world, life, experience, as capable of being conceptualized from two perspectives – – ‘subjective’ (or ‘lived’, ‘engaged’, ‘enacted’)

• ‘My’ world

– ‘objective’ (‘disengaged’, ‘in-itself’, ‘ontic’)• ‘The’ world

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Two perspectives: experience

• This can be applied to the ‘consciousness/body’ gap by saying…– ‘experiences’ are not special kinds of events which

have subjective, private, ‘ineffable’ properties • (in this sense of ‘qualia’, eliminativists are right to say that

qualia don’t exist)

– rather, our experiential awareness provides the way we live our body and the way we engage with the world

• See, for example, Evan Thompson Phenomenology of the Cognitive Sciences, 2004.

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Two perspectives: ethics

• In the case of ethics – instead of saying that ethics deals with a domain of special moral facts or features (e.g. goodness as a G.E.Moore-style ‘non-natural property’)– We treat the ethical view of the world as part

of how we engage with others in the lived world

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Two perspectives on the same world

• So the special ‘phenomenality’ of consciousness arises from the ‘livedness’ of the ‘lived’ perspective– The ‘objective’ world (conceived as in-itself, as

phenomenally inert) IS the world which we live, but conceived outside that living….

• And so too, the special ‘practicality’ or ‘prescriptivity’ of our ethical thought also arises from our ‘living’ our world– Whereas the world conceived objectively is

evaluatively inert….

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The ‘lived’ world as idiosyncratic, open

• The ‘lived’ perspective (the perspective of ‘my world’) is essentially idiosyncratic - – there is an essential openness about how I relate myself to the world.

• Each of us has to choose their own foundational framework, their own way of placing myself in ‘the’ world.

• So there is an essential openness both about how I relate my experience to my embodiment and other physical features of the world, and about my values in action in the world.– [In fact, for many of us, there is a constant vacillation between various

different frameworks.]• In order to resolve this choice we can do one of two things: either

(1) converse with others to compare and share frameworks (2) try to live with no framework

• (Buddhist ‘enlightenment’?)

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Twin headaches

• This obviously creates a big headache for both the fields of consciousness and of ethics !! – In fact these are the twin headaches of the mind-body

and fact-value gaps:• If the ‘lived’ perspective is open in this way, then there

seems to be no watertight way of explaining 1. how our experiential properties emerge from certain kinds of

neural or bodily processes (rather than others)2. how our fundamental ethical convictions (e.g. that slavery or

genocide are morally heinous) are more than just idiosyncratic preferences

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The mind-body headache

• the unsettling idea that, without some kind of lawlike explanatory framework, there is no way of demarcating the ‘phenomenological constituency’– What creatures are conscious and what aren’t?– Why should anyone or anything have a

phenomenology? • you, others, slugs, bunches of keys, robots, etc.

– Why should you deem me to have a phenomenology? Why I, you?

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The fact-value headache

• the equally unsettling idea that, without some kind of lawlike link between factual statements and moral norms, there is no way of demarcating situations in the world that have a positive or negative moral significance:– there is no way of showing (for example) why it’s

morally bad to seek to increase someone’s pain or to diminish their pleasure,

– or why it is morally admirable to strive to reduce suffering, etc.

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No ultimate validations?

(a) If my consciousness is essentially linked with – or expressed in – the orienting framework(s) that I adopt, then– there seems to be no way to describe the ‘true nature’

of my consciousness;– and no way to give a ‘true’ story of the relationship

between my consciousness and what lies ‘outside’ my consciousness [me and not-me]

(b) And similarly for ethics: if my living expresses or embodies my ethical outlook, then – but there seems to be no way to provide an ‘external’

validation for my moral values

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A possible solution: Sharedness

• BUT what each of us can do is reflect on the the sharedness of our condition …

• From this reflection we can perhaps extract or reconstruct – A conception of science as universal explanatory laws– A conception of universalistic ethics . but neither can be given a rationally watertight justification; – everyone is free to adopt any other framework – at

cost… – (the cost is: increasing idiosyncracy)

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Relief from headaches

• The solution is to realize that the predicament of idiosyncracy is not just MY predicament, but EVERYONE’S:– It’s a universal predicament– Pessimists might see this as fostering a nightmarish

plurality or nihilism– But equally it could engender a move towards

unification

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Convergence in ethics

• IN ETHICS: – it can allow for the possibility of a normative

convergence between different points of view in ethics.

• The ‘lived’ ethical perspective isn’t something that is done by a single person, solipsistically:– In recognizing other beings, I recognize other

beings who are each themselves engaging in their lived perspective.

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Recognizing the lived perspectives of others

• So: With recognizing the existence of others’ lived perspectives, come certain coherency constraints on what moral orientations make sense for each of us.

• Each actor, on reflection, will come to recognize the lived reality of every other actor, – and by that token certain life-styles or life-definitions become

harder to embrace consistently or coherently:

• for example: crudely self-serving or tyrannical ethical viewpoints will make little sense on examination.

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• Any such self-serving viewpoint will presuppose an acquiescence by others to one’s self-seeking or power-broking – Such acquiescence will, of course, in all probability

not be forthcoming, – or if obtained, it’s likely to be obtained only as a result

of some kind of physical or psychological duress.

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Summarizing how sharedness achieves ethical convergence

So (1) the idea of a ‘lived’ or ‘engaged’ ethical perspective

does not contain any explicit restrictions on the content of ethical orientations that may be chosen

(2) But the world we live in is one in which each person potentially affected by any individual’s actions is also enacting their own ethical orientation.

(3) This reduces the coherence of certain ethical orientations (e.g. purely egoistic or self-serving ones)

(4) and tends to encourage a convergence on universalistic moral positions.

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• Thus: – everyone is in the same lived situation with regard to moral

choice – so there must be a kind of intervalidity constraint on the moral

choices one enacts

• Our moral choices are not just arbitrary choices in a social vacuum, – rather they have the effect of proposals for commonly shared

ways of living together.

• Recognition of this makes it more likely that idiosyncratic or self-serving moral choices make little sense– because such choices have no appeal to those who are not the

selves served by such choices.

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Relief from the mind-body headache

• There is an analogy here with how our perceptual consciousness relates to the ‘objective’ world.

• Within the lived perceptual perspective on the world we encounter many objects in the world as independent from the flow of our experience. – Our sensorimotor encounter with these objects provides us with

a set of possible ways in which our own individual experience can vary as what we do varies (sensorimotor contingencies).

– But at the same time we experience such objects in terms of possible experiences for many other lived perspectives at the same time.

• The world of public objects is thus a world which is not just a source of experiential flow for our own individual history, but a source of experience for an indefinite number of other conscious agents.

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• From Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception– Here M-P. is discussing how we construct ‘objectivity’

in our perceptions – E.g. how we conceive of a house itself over and

above the individual experience of the house.• ...la maison elle-même n’est pas la maison vue de

nulle part, mais la maison vue de toutes parts. L’object achevé est translucide, il est pénétré de tous côtés par une infinité actuelle de regards qui se recoupent dans sa profondeur et n’y laissent rien de caché

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• …the house itself isn’t a house viewed from nowhere, but from everywhere. The object thus achieved (enacted??) is ‘translucid’, penetrated from all sides by an actual infinity of looks which deeply intersect with one another, and leave nothing hidden.

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• So – although our lived world is idiosyncratic – (I could, in principle, think I see a weasel when you see a cloud)

• There are normative constraints upon our how we interpret our experience, – Based not just upon our sensorimotor interactions with the

environment– But also upon our interaction with other experiencing agents

• This also helps us to resolve questions of what particular features in the world seem to be most closely associated with phenomenality - brains versus rocks…– (the ‘phenomenological constituency’ question)

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Cross-fertilization: moral concepts as intertwined with phenomenal concepts

(1) Moral concepts are deeply intertwined with phenomenological concepts

• e.g. Welfare – – a key component of the notion of welfare is to do with states of

conscious feeling that have positive or negative polarity• Key terms in moral discourse such as benevolence,

sympathy, interests, care, happiness, suffering, etc – all such concepts imply a focus on people’s states of consciousness

• There’s an important role for asking ‘what it’s like’ in ethics as well as in the study of consciousness – it plays a key role in ethically evaluating and advocating actions…

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Evaluative significance of phenomenal attributions

(2) Phenomenological attributions and evaluative significance.

• It’s an important feature of many phenomenological states that they have either a positive or a negative tone or polarity.

• Thus the feel of a piece of velvet isn’t just a phenomenal quality that feels thus-and-so, in an evaluatively neutral way. – an essential part of its characterization is that it feels nice (to

most of us at least). • Similarly the experience of a mild electric shock (or a

piercing shriek) isn’t just an experience that has a neutral quality – – it’s an experience that feels unpleasant, nasty, unbearable.

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Constituency

(3) Questions of constituency• Discussions about the constituency of

phenomenality (conscious beings) are closely linked with questions about the contours of the moral constituency. – There is a deep assumption that moral consumers or

potential beneficiaries of morality have to be capable of phenomenal states.

– This is particularly relevant to philosophical discussion concerning ETs, zombies, robots, virtual agents, brain-to-silicon uploads, etc.

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Practice

(4) Centrality of practice.• It’s long been a commonplace in moral

philosophy to see ethics as centrally bound up with practice or action– The enactive approach also stresses how

consciousness is essentially constituted by potentialities for action and interaction (SMC theory, etc.)

– So this is another way in which the enactive approach provides a natural framework for unifying or cross-fertilizing discussion concerning ethics and consciousness.

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To summarize…

• I’ve suggested that we can distinguish an engaged, ‘subjective’ perspective, from the disengaged, ‘objective’ perspective

• This provides a more acceptable way to view the subjective-objective relation

• The world, life, etc. can be viewed from either perspective….

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Summary (2)

• The mind-body puzzle is resolved by showing that experientiality is not a special kind of entity or process, separate from a physical world (conceived as experientially inert)– But rather experience is the way we live our

embodied existence in the physical world• The fact-value puzzle is resolved by showing

that ethics doesn’t relate to some special realm outside the natural world (where the latter is conceived as evaluatively inert)– But rather arises from our engaged life within the

world.

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Summary (3)

• In both cases a problem arises, to do with the fact that the ‘lived’ perspective seems to threaten a kind of nightmare pluralism of idiosyncracies – any explanatory or normative framework seems to be as valid as any other

• But this is answered by reflection on the ‘sharedness’ of our lived predicament– This reflection helps us at least to remove certain self-

serving kinds of ethical viewpoints;– It also helps us to construct a non-arbitrary

conception of a world apart from us, and a world where the ‘phenomenological constituency’ isn’t constructed in a haphazard way.

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Summary (4)

• In this way it can be seen – That the ‘fact-value’ and ‘mind-body’

dichotomies • have important parallels as problems;• and there are parallels in a method for their

solution

• We’ve also sketched ways of showing also that – There is a deep (and multifaceted) cross-

fertilization between the two domains.

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Another quote from Putnam

… I believe that the unfortunate division of contemporary philosophy into separate “fields” (ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind…) often conceals the way in which the very same arguments and issues arise in field after field. For example, arguments for “antirealism” in ethics are virtually identical with arguments for antirealism in the philosophy of mathematics; yet philosophers who resist those arguments in the latter often capitulate to them in the former. We can only regain the integrated vision which philosophy has always aspired to if at least some of the time we allow ourselves to ignore the idea that a philosophical position or argument must deal with one and only one of these specific “fields”. [Emphasis added.]

Ethics Without Ontology (2004, Harvard U.P.), Introduction.