The following afternoon, the three occupants of the Senior Common Room had returned to the question of qualia.
Mr Blottisham had brought notes.
Professor Quillibrace noticed this immediately.
“Oh dear.”
Miss Stray smiled.
“You look prepared, Mr Blottisham.”
“I am prepared.”
“For what?”
“For resistance.”
Quillibrace folded his newspaper.
“To what?”
“To the regrettable tendency of this room to dissolve perfectly good philosophical concepts merely by asking what they mean.”
“I assure you,” said Quillibrace, “we have no such tendency.”
“You called a quale a grammatical achievement yesterday.”
“A compliment, in context.”
Blottisham sat down.
“Very well. Let us return to the beginning.”
“Again?” said Quillibrace.
“Yes. Suppose I experience pain.”
“We have established that you do.”
“And suppose I ask: What is it like to feel pain?”
Stray nodded.
“A perfectly ordinary question.”
“Exactly. And the answer is not simply: ‘There is tissue damage.’ Nor is it: ‘Certain neurons are active.’ The pain has a particular character. It may be burning, throbbing, stabbing, dull, unbearable, irritating. Surely that character is part of the experience.”
“Certainly,” said Stray.
“Then we agree.”
“Not quite.”
Blottisham sighed.
“Of course.”
Quillibrace leaned back.
“Your difficulty is that you are still trying to turn the character of the experience into another experience.”
“I am not.”
“Then let us see.”
Blottisham considered.
“What is it like to feel pain?”
“Yes,” said Quillibrace.
“It feels painful.”
“And what is it like to feel that?”
Blottisham stopped.
Stray looked at him.
“You see the difficulty?”
“I see that you are attempting a trick.”
“No trick,” said Stray. “We are following your question.”
Blottisham frowned.
“What is it like to feel pain? There is an answer. The pain feels a certain way.”
“Agreed.”
“And that way is what we call its phenomenal character.”
“Agreed.”
“So what is the problem?”
Quillibrace answered.
“Suppose the phenomenal character is itself something experienced. Then you must ask what it is like to experience that.”
“But that is absurd.”
“Why?”
“Because there would be another experience.”
“Precisely.”
“And then another.”
“Precisely.”
“And another.”
“Precisely.”
Blottisham looked irritated.
“You are suggesting an infinite regress.”
“No,” said Quillibrace. “Not quite. I am suggesting that if you turn what it is like into another phenomenal object, you create the possibility of a regress.”
Stray nodded.
“But the regress is not the important point.”
“What is?”
“That perhaps we have misunderstood the phrase in the first place.”
Blottisham looked sceptical.
Stray continued.
“When you say that pain has a particular character, you need not be saying that there is another thing—the feeling of the pain—behind the pain. You may simply be describing how the experience occurs.”
“How it occurs?”
“For the organism.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“The distinction is rather like saying that something is painful, rather than saying that it contains a little object called painfulness.”
Blottisham frowned.
“That sounds like yesterday's argument.”
“It is,” said Quillibrace. “But today you have moved the noun.”
Blottisham looked down at his notes.
“Let us try something else. I burn my finger. I immediately withdraw my hand. I say, ‘That hurts.’ Now surely there is something it is like for me to undergo that event.”
“Yes,” said Stray.
“And that is what makes the event conscious.”
“Perhaps.”
Blottisham looked suspicious.
“You keep saying ‘perhaps’.”
“Because we should distinguish what we know from what we infer.”
Quillibrace added:
“We know that the organism is affected. We know that it discriminates the event. We know that it responds to it. We know that the event can be reported as painful. The further claim is that all of this involves an additional phenomenal entity.”
“Which I experience.”
“Do you experience an entity?”
“I experience pain.”
“Exactly.”
Blottisham opened his mouth, then closed it.
Stray smiled.
“The first-person perspective is not in doubt. What is in doubt is what we think that perspective commits us to.”
Blottisham leaned forward.
“But surely first-person experience is fundamentally different from third-person description.”
“Of course,” said Stray.
“Then isn't something missing from the third-person account?”
“Something may be missing from the description,” she said. “That does not mean that something is missing from the world.”
Quillibrace raised a finger.
“An important distinction.”
Blottisham looked between them.
“You are separating the limits of a description from the limits of reality.”
“Yes,” said Stray.
“And you think philosophers have confused the two?”
“Sometimes.”
Quillibrace smiled.
“Frequently enough to keep us employed.”
There was a pause.
Blottisham returned to his notes.
“Very well. Let me put the problem another way. I am conscious. Surely there is something it is like to be conscious.”
Stray looked thoughtful.
“What is it like?”
“To be conscious.”
“Yes. Of what?”
Blottisham hesitated.
“Of anything.”
“Then you are conscious of something.”
“Yes.”
“So what is it like to be conscious?”
“To see red.”
“Then you have described what it is like to see red.”
“Yes.”
“Not what it is like to be conscious.”
Blottisham frowned.
“I don't see the distinction.”
Quillibrace supplied it.
“Consciousness may not be another object of consciousness.”
“Why not?”
“Because then we would need another consciousness in which to experience the first.”
Blottisham looked alarmed.
“Don't start again.”
“I wasn't going to.”
Stray laughed.
“The point is simpler. When you ask what it is like to see red, you have given consciousness some content. When you remove the content and ask what consciousness itself feels like, it becomes much less clear what you are asking.”
“But perhaps consciousness can exist without content.”
“Perhaps,” said Stray. “That is an interesting question.”
“And if it can?”
“Then we can investigate it.”
“But it would still have a phenomenal character.”
“Would it?”
Blottisham stared at her.
“What else could it have?”
“That is precisely what we should not assume.”
Quillibrace nodded approvingly.
“An experience does not necessarily require an additional experience in order to be experienced.”
Blottisham looked perplexed.
“That sentence seems designed to make my head hurt.”
“Which would be an experience,” said Quillibrace.
Stray laughed.
Blottisham ignored him.
“I still cannot escape the feeling that you are removing something.”
“We are removing an assumption,” said Stray.
“What assumption?”
“That there must be an inner observer who receives the experience.”
Blottisham sat back.
“But surely I receive my experience.”
“You do.”
“So there is an observer.”
“You are the organism.”
“And?”
“And there need not be another observer inside you.”
Quillibrace picked up his cup.
“The organism is the perspective.”
Blottisham stared at him.
“That sounds suspiciously like a slogan.”
“It is a sentence.”
“A sentence with ambitions.”
“Perhaps.”
Stray looked again towards the window.
“Consider the burning finger. The organism is damaged. It discriminates the damage. It withdraws. It attends to the injury. It remembers it. It may avoid the source of the injury in future. The event matters to the organism.”
“And that is consciousness?”
“No. But it shows us something important.”
“What?”
“That we need not put a little spectator inside the organism to explain why the event matters to it.”
Blottisham was silent.
Quillibrace broke the silence.
“Perhaps the mistake is not that we take experience seriously.”
“That would be a rather serious mistake,” said Stray.
“Indeed. The mistake may be that we take the first-person description of experience and turn it into a first-person object.”
Blottisham looked down at his notes again.
“So when I say, ‘I feel pain’…”
“You are describing an actual occurrence,” said Stray.
“And when I say, ‘The pain has a particular phenomenal character’…”
“You are describing the manner in which that occurrence is experienced.”
“And when I say, ‘There is a quale’…”
Quillibrace smiled.
“You may be giving the description a new noun.”
Blottisham sighed.
“You two are remarkably persistent.”
“We have had practice,” said Quillibrace.
Blottisham stood.
“I remain unconvinced.”
“Excellent,” said Stray.
“Excellent?”
“It means there is something left to discuss.”
Blottisham gathered his papers.
“Then tomorrow I shall ask the obvious question.”
Quillibrace looked wary.
“Which is?”
“If we remove the quale, what happens to the hard problem?”
Stray smiled.
“That,” she said, “is a much better question.”
And Blottisham left the room.
Quillibrace watched the door close.
“Do you suppose he will return?”
Stray looked at the abandoned notes.
“Almost certainly.”
“Then perhaps we should hide the nouns.”
“Too late.”
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