#conscioiusness — Public Fediverse posts

Is studying conscious experience different from studying behavior?

In a number of recent conversations I’ve had, the distinction between experience and behavior has come up. There’s a strong sentiment that we can study behavior scientifically, including all the intermediate mental states that enable it. But experience is seen as something distinct from that, something that is much more difficult to study.

This behavior / experience divide matches the distinction David Chalmers makes between the “easy” problems and the “hard” problem. The easy problems aren’t really easy, but they are scientifically tractable, mainly because they’re all about functionality, the functionality that enables behaviors such as self report, navigation, object recognition, etc. But the hard problem is the one of experience, which is hard mainly because it’s not supposed to be about functionality and behavior.

Of course, a lot here depends on what we mean by “experience”. There’s a grounded sense of the term, which is what we mean when someone has been through an activity or series of activities that allowed them to learn things. It’s what job recruiters mean when they advertise that a particular position needs X years of “experience”. In that sense, experience is about learning through behavior that enables and explains future behavior.

This doesn’t have to be something that’s stretched across years. If I walk to the mailbox, I have the sensorimotor experience of doing that, which will result in at least temporary memories of how sunny or cloudy a day it is, the temperature outside, whether it’s raining, whether the mail is running late today, etc, along with reviewing my preferences about these conditions. If I have the experience of a headache, or a tasty meal, we can talk about it in the same sense.

So this grounded sense of “experience”, which is structural, relational, and functional, seems to cover a lot of territory. The question is whether it covers all the territory, or if there’s a remaining aspect we’re leaving out.

Often philosophers will talk about “what it’s like”, the “raw feels”, the subjective character, the phenomenal properties, the qualities (qualia) of the experience. Of course, as with “experience”, there are grounded versions of what these phrases could be referring to. But that’s generally not what’s meant. Instead the sentiment is that this is something primal, indescribable, unanalyzable, and scientifically inaccessible, a brute fact of existence. It can’t be described, only referenced, with each of us accessing only our own private versions.

The view is that all the behaviors described above could, in principle, happen without this additional form of experience. The putative mystery is why we have these types of experiences at all. Thomas Nagel, a pioneer in discussing this sense of experience, beginning with asking what it’s like to be a bat, agrees with many of the critics that evolution can only work with behavior and what enables it, not this private ineffable essence. His conclusion then is that evolution can’t explain experience in this sense. It’s a line of reasoning that makes the idea of latent experience existing everywhere appealing.

But there is a logical consequence of this view. It means experience is completely acausal, epiphenomenal, something that makes no difference in the world. Note that this would include the behavior of talking about it. Some advocates of the view, such as early Frank Jackson, embrace this implication. There is sometimes talk in this camp of concepts like psychophysical harmony, the idea that the experiential and physical exist in separate but parallel causal frameworks. But outside of a theistic type framework, it doesn’t seem like a parsimonious view. Which is probably why most seem to resist this implication, although the arguments for avoiding it aren’t clear to me.

The question then is whether this type of experience exists at all. It seems like once we’ve reasoned ourselves into seeing something making no difference in the world, we’ve essentially concluded it doesn’t exist, but aren’t quite willing to let it go.

The illusionists, as we discussed in the last post, say it doesn’t exist, but concede that it’s natural, even unavoidable, for us to think it does. In this view, we go wrong by trusting too much in our introspective judgments. The right move is to doubt those judgments. I’m sympathetic to this stance, but increasingly reluctant to concede that we all have an innate disposition to believe in this kind of experience.

For me, it seems more about optional assumptions we make, rather than any unavoidable species wide instinct. For sure, we’re all born intuitive dualists, but this is usually of the old fashioned Cartesian sort, the type that relegates memory, imagination, and all thought to the non-physical, not the more limited property dualism under discussion. It seems more likely it results from remnants of those Cartesian intuitions. But maybe I’m just splitting hairs here.

I should note that denying this type of experience is not old school behaviorism. There’s no reason to deny internal mental states as the logical behaviorists did. Maybe in principle we could talk about everything in terms of behavioral dispositions, but it requires a lot of convoluted language. It’s much easier to just admit those internal states exist, as long as they’re causal ones. Which I think is the main reason analytic and empirical functionalism emerged as successors to behaviorism.

Someone could continue to believe in non-behavioral experience and just take the stance that the science is valid for the behavioral portions, but not addressing the aspects they’re interested in. This is the sense I get from someone like David Chalmers. Chalmers basically seems like a functionalist, but with an extra metaphysical assumption of something else that “coheres” with the functionality. It allows him to accept the possibility of conscious AI and simulated realities without going full physicalist. I see similar stances from some panpsychists.

Of course, that’s not universal. And holding on to the non-behavioral version seems to affect the types of scientific theories someone finds plausible. It’s why theories like integrated information theory are more popular among panpsychists than straight functional ones like global workspace, higher order thought, etc.

Overall, studying behavior, along with everything that enables it, seems like a productive enterprise. If there is an aspect of experience unrelated to behavior, then it seems like an unsolvable metaphysical problem, something we’ll only ever be able to speculate about. To me, it seems exceedingly vulnerable to Occam’s razor.

But maybe I’m missing something. Are there necessities to accepting non-behavioral experience I’m overlooking? Are there solid arguments that allow experience to be scientifically inaccessible yet not epiphenomenal? If it is epiphenomenal, is there any way for science to ever get at it? Or even philosophy in any conclusive manner?

Featured image credit

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/09/15/experience-and-behavior/

#conscioiusness #phenomenalConsciousness #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind