By the third afternoon, Mr Blottisham had acquired the expression of a man who had discovered that his opponents had been arguing on his side without realising it.
Professor Quillibrace noticed.
“You look pleased.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I have finally found the flaw in your position.”
Miss Stray looked up from her tea.
“Already?”
“Indeed.”
Quillibrace sighed.
“Proceed.”
Blottisham placed both hands on the table.
“You have spent two days telling me that a quale need not be a separate thing. Very well. I shall concede the point.”
Quillibrace raised an eyebrow.
“How generous.”
“But the hard problem remains.”
Stray smiled.
“I wondered when you would say that.”
“Of course it remains! Suppose we give a complete account of the physical processes involved in seeing red. We describe the light, the retina, the neural pathways, the discriminations, the behavioural responses, the reports. Everything.”
“An ambitious experiment,” said Quillibrace.
“Nevertheless. We could know all of it. And still ask: why does seeing red feel like something?”
Stray nodded.
“That is the question.”
“And there is no answer in the physical description.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Ah!”
Blottisham pointed at her.
“You see?”
“I see the question.”
“And?”
“I am not yet convinced that the question establishes the ontology you want.”
Blottisham sat down.
“Let me be absolutely clear. I am no longer saying that there is a little object called a quale inside the brain.”
“Good.”
“I am saying that there is experience.”
“Good.”
“And that experience has a first-person character.”
“Good.”
“And that a complete third-person description seems unable to capture what that character is.”
“Also good,” said Quillibrace.
Blottisham looked triumphant.
“Then what is the problem?”
Quillibrace answered.
“You have moved from an ontological problem to an explanatory one.”
“And?”
“And explanatory gaps are not automatically ontological gaps.”
Blottisham frowned.
“Explain.”
“A description of a thing is not the thing itself. Nor is a description of a process an additional process.”
“Obviously.”
“Then why should a description of an organism from the outside be expected to contain, in the same form, what that organism undergoes from the inside?”
“Because consciousness is the very thing we are trying to explain.”
“Certainly.”
“Then surely the explanation must account for the first-person character.”
“Certainly.”
“Then we agree.”
“Perhaps.”
Blottisham groaned.
“Your favourite word.”
Stray intervened.
“I think there is a useful distinction here. We should not pretend that describing the neural activity is the same as describing what the organism undergoes. But neither should we infer that because the descriptions differ, there must be two things.”
Blottisham looked thoughtful.
“Two descriptions of one event.”
“Possibly.”
“But surely the difference is more profound than that.”
“Why?”
“Because one is objective and the other subjective.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“Yes. And that is interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“Very.”
“Not merely inconvenient?”
“Not at all.”
Quillibrace folded his hands.
“Suppose the organism is not merely an object among objects. Suppose it is an organised centre of activity with its own history, needs, sensitivities and possibilities. Then perhaps the first-person perspective is not something added to the physical organisation.”
“But a consequence of it?”
“Perhaps.”
“An emergent property?”
Stray shook her head.
“Careful.”
“Why?”
“Because emergent property can simply become another name for the thing we have not explained.”
Quillibrace smiled.
“Miss Stray has become suspicious of nouns.”
“She has been spending too much time with you.”
Stray ignored them.
“If we say that consciousness emerges from neural activity, we may have answered one question—when it occurs—without answering another: what sort of organisation makes first-person experience possible?”
Blottisham leaned forward.
“So you admit that there is still a problem.”
“Certainly.”
“What problem?”
“That is precisely what we are trying to find out.”
There was a pause.
Blottisham stood and walked to the window.
“Let me try once more. I see a red object. Something happens in my nervous system. But I don't merely process wavelengths. I see red.”
“Yes.”
“And seeing red is not the same as knowing that certain wavelengths have been detected.”
“No.”
“Then what explains the difference?”
Quillibrace replied quietly:
“Perhaps the question is not why neural processing produces an additional experience.”
Blottisham turned.
“What, then?”
“Perhaps the question is why this particular kind of organised physical system encounters the world in this particular way.”
Blottisham frowned.
“That sounds like wordplay.”
“It is not.”
Stray put down her cup.
“Consider the difference between a camera and an organism.”
“A camera detects light.”
“Yes. But the light does not matter to the camera.”
“It matters in the functional sense.”
“Perhaps. But it does not matter to the camera in the way food matters to an animal, or injury matters to an animal.”
Blottisham considered this.
“You are moving from information to significance.”
“Exactly.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“And perhaps that distinction matters more than we have allowed.”
Blottisham returned to the table.
“So consciousness is significance?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Don't rush.”
Stray smiled.
“The point is that an organism does not merely register differences in its environment. Its organisation establishes differences that matter to its continued activity.”
“Food, danger, shelter.”
“Exactly.”
“And you think that is the beginning of consciousness?”
“I think it may be part of the story.”
Blottisham sat down.
“But that still doesn't explain what it feels like.”
“Perhaps,” said Stray, “because what it feels like is being treated as though it were the name of a further phenomenon.”
Blottisham looked annoyed.
“We have been through this.”
“Yes. But now the consequence matters.”
Quillibrace took up the argument.
“If there is no additional phenomenal object, then the hard problem cannot simply be: ‘Why does the physical brain produce the quale?’”
“Agreed.”
“It becomes: ‘How does an organised living system come to have a first-person mode of existence?’”
Blottisham was silent.
“And,” Stray added, “how does its world become a world for it?”
Blottisham looked at them.
“That sounds almost worse.”
“Possibly,” said Quillibrace.
“At least the quale was a thing.”
“Exactly.”
Blottisham laughed despite himself.
“You have removed the thing and replaced it with a question.”
“An improvement,” said Quillibrace.
“Debatable.”
They were quiet for a moment.
Then Blottisham said:
“Suppose I accept all of this. What happens to the famous thought experiment? The philosophical zombie?”
Quillibrace smiled.
“Ah.”
“What?”
“You have reached the zombies.”
“I thought they were unavoidable.”
“Unfortunately.”
Stray laughed.
“The zombie is supposed to be physically identical to a conscious human being but lacking experience.”
“Yes.”
“And therefore, the argument goes, consciousness cannot be identical with the physical facts.”
“Exactly.”
“But notice what the thought experiment assumes.”
Blottisham waited.
“That the physical description leaves out the very thing that consciousness is.”
“Yes.”
“So it has already built the conclusion into the setup.”
Blottisham frowned.
“Not necessarily.”
“No,” said Stray. “Not necessarily. It is an interesting test of our intuitions. But conceivability is not the same as discovery.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“We can imagine a great many things by separating descriptions that may not be separable in reality.”
Blottisham considered this.
“So the zombie argument loses some of its force if consciousness is a mode of organisation rather than an additional ingredient.”
“Precisely.”
“But it doesn't prove that consciousness is such a mode.”
“No.”
“Then we still don't have a solution.”
“No.”
Blottisham looked almost delighted.
“At last!”
Quillibrace looked puzzled.
“At last what?”
“You admit that the problem remains.”
Stray smiled.
“Of course it remains.”
“Then I was right.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were right that there is a problem. You were not necessarily right about what the problem was.”
Blottisham sat back.
“That is annoyingly precise.”
“Thank you,” said Quillibrace.
The afternoon light had begun to fade.
Blottisham looked towards the window.
“Then perhaps the hard problem was never quite as hard as we thought.”
“Or perhaps,” said Stray, “we made it hard in the wrong way.”
Quillibrace closed his journal.
“We began by asking how matter produces an extra phenomenal thing.”
“And now?”
“Now we might ask how a particular organisation of matter comes to be a living perspective.”
Blottisham nodded slowly.
“And that is a different question.”
“Yes.”
“Possibly a harder one.”
“Almost certainly more interesting,” said Stray.
Blottisham gathered his papers.
“I shall have to think about that.”
Quillibrace smiled.
“Excellent.”
“What?”
“You have finally stopped asking us to explain the quale.”
Blottisham paused at the door.
“I haven't stopped believing in it.”
“No,” said Stray.
“But?”
“We haven't stopped believing in the problem.”
Blottisham considered this.
Then he nodded.
“I suppose that will have to do.”
The door closed.
Quillibrace looked at Stray.
“Do you think he understands?”
She smiled.
“Not yet.”
“Good.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise tomorrow's discussion would be very short.”
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