Bees and Perspectives

BDK: Afterthought: it would be great for antinaturalists to answer Bennett's question. In general, your answer to this question starkly reveals your philosophical stripes. This is all about propositional thought and the like, truth, reference and all that.

As for what you'd have to add to make bees conscious, or whether bees are already conscious, I have no strong opinion. I think Dretske believes they are conscious. I am agnostic. Do qualia precede propositional contents in evolution? I tend to think so, but am not sure: even leeches might feel little flashes of pains and excitements.

VR: I think what is needed is the perspective of an agent who sees certain things as the case, and who is introspectively aware of what it means when it says something.

Example: I enter a conversation and misuse a word consistently. The community of language speakers makes a word mean one thing, but I meant something else, and in spite of the sniggers that I got from everyone, I think to myself "But I was using it to mean that." I can recognize two words that sound the same but mean different things, and I can identify two words that mean that same but sound different.

Add to this the perception of necessary relationships that obtain amongst proposition. We have to be people who exist at particular places and times who know that some things exist regardless of place or time. And I see difficulty with that so long as what gives us pieces of information are temporally locatable physical brains and causal connection from those brains to particular states of affairs in the world.

Now, could we solve these problems naturalistically if we could just solve the hard problem of consciousness naturalistically? My answer is that raw feels by themselves aren't going to solve it; we're going to need a connection between consciousness and the mental states involved in rationality.

Birds, Bees, and Going Declarative

BDK wrote: Bees represent where nectar is in the world, communicate this to other bees, which respond appropriately. I frankly don't understand the reaction to imagining that this simple capacity were scaled up in ways I said. Especially if we were to add syntactic operations to the scaled up number of elemental contents. We'd have the roots of more interesting thoughts.

I have been trying to work out what disagreements I have with you. The problem I have here is that to my mind there is a difference between causing action appropriate to someting being the case (causing the bees to go where the nectar is), and declaring it to be the case that the nectar is in such--and-such a place. Science is inherently declarative, and requires understanding. It is in my view tempting, but erroneous, to attribute a declarative character to bee dances and birdsongs.

It seems possible to understand some proposition without having any other propositional attitude. But this seems not possible for the birds and the bees.

A simple suggestion about propositional attitudes

As I see it, the most fundamental propositional attitude is understanding the proposition. Belief, desire, and the rest are just understanding with affirmation, understanding with the hope that it is true, etc.

Reforumulating the argument from reason

A version of the argument from reason.

1. If naturalism is true, then propositional attitudes are eliminable, reducible, or epiphenomenal.
2. Propositional attitudes are not eliminable.
3. Propositional attitudes are not reducible.
4. Propositional attitudeesa re not epiphenomenal.
5. Therefore, naturalism is false.

The Hard Problem of Rational Inference: A Reply to Blue Devil Knight

Blue Devil Knight expressed some frustration with the fact that I don’t adequately distinguish between different types of problems that naturalism faces in giving an account of the mind. There is a widespread conventional wisdom in the philosophy of mind that there is a proposition/intentionality side and an experiential side of the philosophy of mind; that there are puzzles perhaps on the proposition side, but there are deeper problems are problems related to consciousness. My response is that while these problems should be distinguished, I think I have good reason to suppose that they can’t very well be divorced, and the divorcing them in the way that many philosophers of mind want to makes things perhaps easier for the naturalist or materialist than it really is. Here’s why.

Let’s take the traditional syllogism:

1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Is this a valid argument? We all think that it is valid. However, that depends upon whether the argument has three terms, four, five or six. In other words, the meanings of the terms we use have to be constant throughout the syllogism. Do we mean by men males adults, or humans? Do we mean by mortal subject to physical death, or subject to complete extinction? Christians would say we are mortal in the first sense but not in the second, atheists normally think that we are mortal in both senses. Am I talking about Socrates the ancient Greek philosopher, or the dog my philosopher friend named after him?

In order to argue validly, I have to know what I mean by these terms. My knowledge of what I mean by something is something that seems to me to be open to introspection. Now admittedly the extensions of the terms are fixed in part by my causal relation to the world, but if I don’t have access to the “in the head” part of the meaning of these terms, I can’t reason. If I can’t truly say “I know what I meant by that,” I’m in trouble.

There are, to be sure, some information-theoretic analyses of, say, birdsong or bee dances, which show how information can be transferred from one critter to another. However, I take it that you can’t go to the birds and ask them what they meant by their song and get an answer. If you have a good consciousness-independent conception of informational content, then it seems to me that you are going to have the problem of how this content can be present to consciousness, because the kind of reasoning that I am engaging in while writing this response is, and must be present to my consciousness.

That’s why I don’t think a naturalist can refute the argument from reason without coming up with a decent-looking solution to the hard problem of consciousness. And then there are other problems on top of that.

It seems to me that there are a some distinctions I ought to make, between the issue of intentionality simpliciter, the issue of how intentional content becomes propositional content, and then the issue of how intentional content comes to be present to consciousness. I think the last two may be a good deal harder for the naturalist than the first one.