In the previous post, we began with a seemingly innocuous question:
What is it like to feel pain?
The question seems to point towards something beyond the pain itself: its subjective character, its phenomenal quality, perhaps its quale.
But there is a curious feature of the question that is easy to overlook.
If there is something it is like to feel pain, what is it like to feel that?
Perhaps the answer is obvious. Nothing further is required. The phrase what it is like does not describe another experience. It simply describes the character of the original experience.
If so, we have arrived at an important possibility.
Perhaps there is no feeling of the feeling.
And if there is not, then we should ask why we were tempted to posit one.
The experience behind the experience
Suppose I burn my finger.
I feel pain.
Now imagine that someone asks:
But what is it like to feel that pain?
I can answer:
It hurts.
Perhaps I could elaborate: it is sharp, hot, unpleasant, localised, distracting.
But notice what I have not done. I have not reported a second experience standing behind the first.
I have simply described the character of the experience.
The pain is not one thing, followed by an experience of the pain as another thing. The hurting is part of what we mean by the pain being experienced.
Yet philosophical discussion can make the structure appear more complicated:
physical event → neural processing → pain → phenomenal experience of pain.
The last two terms can begin to look like separate stages.
But perhaps they are not.
Perhaps experiencing pain and the pain as experienced are not two events. They are two ways of describing one event.
That distinction may seem pedantic.
It is not.
What would a second feeling be?
Imagine that the feeling of pain really were a separate phenomenal item.
I experience pain.
Alongside it, I experience a second thing: the feeling of the pain.
But then I could ask:
What is it like to experience the feeling of pain?
If the answer is that there is another phenomenal character associated with this second-order experience, we have simply moved the problem upwards.
There is now:
pain;
the experience of pain;
the experience of the experience of pain.
And if the third is itself something experienced, we can ask about the experience of that.
The familiar philosophical regress appears.
It is tempting to conclude that the regress proves that qualia cannot exist.
That would be too quick.
A perfectly good response is that the regress arises only because we have misunderstood the expression what it is like. The phrase need not refer to another experience at all.
When I say that a wine is dry, I do not imply that there is another wine called the dryness of the wine. When I say that a melody is melancholy, I do not imply that melancholy is an additional object hidden inside the melody.
Likewise, saying that pain has a particular phenomenal character need not imply that there is another experience hidden inside the pain.
The regress therefore does not refute qualia.
But it does reveal something important:
The phrase “what it is like” cannot by itself establish that there is another thing there.
Description is not addition
This distinction is easy to lose because language encourages us to turn descriptions into nouns.
We say:
The apple is red.
Then:
The apple has redness.
And eventually:
There is a property of redness.
Sometimes that is perfectly legitimate. Properties are not simply grammatical inventions.
But the movement from adjective to noun does not itself establish an independent entity.
The same applies to experience.
We say:
Pain feels unpleasant.
Then:
Pain has an unpleasant phenomenal character.
And finally:
Pain instantiates the quale of unpleasantness.
The increasingly technical vocabulary can give the impression that we have learned something new about the ontology of pain.
Perhaps we have.
But perhaps we have merely repackaged the original observation in increasingly substantial grammatical forms.
The danger is particularly great with consciousness because the thing being described is already private and difficult to compare directly between observers. The terminology can therefore acquire explanatory authority before its referent has been made clear.
But surely the feeling is real?
At this point an obvious objection arises.
If someone is in severe pain, surely the feeling is real.
Of course.
But this does not settle the ontological question.
Consider the difference between saying:
The pain is real.
and:
The feeling of pain is a distinct phenomenal entity.
The first statement is entirely compatible with a naturalistic account of organisms, nervous systems, behaviour and experience.
The second requires considerably more explanation.
The question is not whether the person is genuinely suffering. The question is whether suffering requires the existence of a further ingredient called a quale.
Those are different questions.
Indeed, treating them as the same risks making a genuine phenomenon mysterious simply because we have chosen a particular vocabulary for describing it.
The first-person perspective
There is, however, something genuinely distinctive about experience.
When I feel pain, I do not merely observe a neurological event happening somewhere in my nervous system.
The pain is happening to me.
This first-person character is important.
But even here, we should be cautious about what follows from it.
The fact that an organism occupies a particular perspective does not necessarily imply that there is an additional object constituting that perspective.
A bird does not need to contain a little bird-shaped observer in order to see the world from the bird's perspective.
A nervous system does not need to contain an inner spectator in order for the organism to be affected by what happens to it.
And a person does not need to contain a private phenomenal object called pain in order for pain to be experienced.
Perhaps the first-person character belongs to the organisation of the organism's relation with its world.
If so, the first-person perspective is real without being a separate substance.
This would be a significant shift.
Instead of asking where the phenomenal object is located, we would ask how an organism comes to have a perspective at all.
The strange case of consciousness itself
This becomes particularly interesting when we move from particular experiences to consciousness as such.
Suppose I see a red apple.
There is something it is like to see the apple.
Suppose I feel pain.
There is something it is like to feel the pain.
But now ask:
What is it like to be conscious?
This question sounds profound.
But what exactly are we being asked to imagine?
Conscious of what?
If I am conscious of the apple, there is an experience of the apple.
If I am conscious of the pain, there is an experience of the pain.
If I am conscious of a thought, there is an experience involving the thought.
But if we remove everything of which I am conscious and leave only consciousness itself, what is left to experience?
Perhaps there is an answer.
Perhaps there is a distinctive phenomenal quality belonging to consciousness as such.
But if there is, we need to say what that quality consists in.
And if the answer is simply:
It is what it is like to be conscious,
we have not explained anything.
We have returned to the same phrase.
The question has folded back upon itself.
Consciousness without an object?
This raises a deeper issue.
Perhaps consciousness can exist without being consciousness of anything. Some philosophical traditions have proposed precisely this: a bare or contentless consciousness, an experience without an experienced object.
Whether such states exist is an empirical and philosophical question, and reports of unusual states of consciousness are notoriously difficult to interpret.
But even if such experiences occur, they would not automatically establish the existence of a quale of consciousness.
There would still be a question about what the phrase means.
If consciousness is an activity, process, capacity or mode of organisation, its occurrence need not involve a further phenomenal object corresponding to the word consciousness.
We might be trying to make consciousness into something it does not need to be: an object that could itself become an object of experience.
The spectator hidden in the vocabulary
Perhaps this is why discussions of qualia can sometimes seem to produce a peculiar picture of the mind.
There is the physical organism.
There are its neural processes.
There are its experiences.
And somewhere behind the experiences seems to stand a silent observer, receiving the qualia.
But who is that observer?
If the observer is itself conscious, then it too has experiences.
And if those experiences require an observer, we have begun another regress.
If the observer is not conscious, it cannot obviously be the one to whom the experience is presented.
The apparent solution is to say that there is no inner observer.
The organism itself is the subject of the experience.
That is not a problem. It is simply a different conception of what a subject is.
The subject need not be a thing hidden inside the organism.
It may be the organism considered as a centre of activity, responsiveness, memory, anticipation and self-maintenance.
On this view, the first-person perspective is not produced by an inner spectator.
The organism is the perspective.
What, then, is a quale?
We are now in a position to ask the question more carefully.
A quale might be understood in at least two ways.
In the first, it is simply a name for the distinctive character of an experience: the painfulness of pain, the appearance of red, the sound of a particular note.
There is nothing objectionable about this usage.
In the second, the quale is treated as an ontologically distinctive ingredient of experience—something whose existence is not captured by describing what the organism is doing, undergoing or experiencing.
That is a much stronger claim.
And it is the stronger claim that requires justification.
The important point is that the first does not automatically lead to the second.
We can accept the reality of experience while remaining agnostic about the ontology of qualia.
Indeed, perhaps this is the position from which we should have begun.
A different question
There is therefore a subtle change in the question we should ask.
Instead of:
How does the brain produce the feeling of pain?
we might ask:
How does an organism come to experience events in ways that matter to its activity and persistence?
Instead of:
How does neural activity generate the quale of red?
we might ask:
How does an organism come to discriminate and experience its environment as coloured?
And instead of:
What is the phenomenal character of consciousness itself?
we might ask:
What kind of organisation makes a first-person perspective possible?
These questions are not easy.
But they do not presuppose that experience contains an additional ingredient whose existence has yet to be established.
Perhaps that is the real lesson of the apparent regress.
It does not show that experience is unreal.
It shows that we should be careful not to mistake the description of an experience for another experience, and not to mistake either for an ontological addition to the world.
The feeling does not necessarily contain a feeling of itself.
Pain does not need a second pain in order to hurt.
And consciousness may not need to feel consciousness in order to be conscious.
Perhaps the strange thing about experience is not that there is something behind it called a quale.
Perhaps the strange thing is simply that an organised living system can have a world that matters to it at all.
That question takes us somewhere rather different.
And perhaps, when we finally ask it, we will find that the mystery of consciousness lies not in a private phenomenal substance hidden inside experience, but in the emergence of a relation between an organism and its world.
That would leave us with plenty of mystery.
But perhaps rather less metaphysics.
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