Mind and Behavior

 

Philosophical behaviorism has a curious reputation: on the one hand, it can seem eminently reasonable, on the other, completely wrong. Thus it is natural to be uncomfortably ambivalent about it, veering from acceptance to rejection as the mood strikes. On the side of rejection we have the inverted spectrum, behaving zombies, paralyzed conscious subjects, and basic repugnance at the idea that phenomenology could be reducible to bodily movement. On the side of acceptance we have clear connections between mind and behavior, the problem of other minds, the functional necessity for bodily deeds, and the evident plausibility of functional definitions. Behaviorism doesn’t strike us as just completely wrongheaded: mind and behavior are intimately related. Watson, Carnap, Ryle and Wittgenstein don’t seem to be barking preposterously up the wrong tree. Isn’t it simply true that pain is a state that mediates between harmful stimuli and adaptive responses? Isn’t belief precisely a state that is typically caused by perceptual stimuli and leads to utterance and other action? Isn’t desire what inclines organisms to behave in certain ways, as when an organism drinks when thirsty? Isn’t bravery a trait that leads to courageous action? Maybe it is true that we can envisage color inversion combined with behavioral equivalence, but surely it is not true that mental states can be freely combined with just any behavioral profile—you can’t have pains that are functionally equivalent to beliefs, or beliefs that function just like desires. It seems to be part of the essence of a given mental state that it operates in a certain way; the connection is not just contingent and adventitious. Mental states can’t just swap functional roles ad libitum. Mind and body are not stuck arbitrarily together; they are made for each other. Isn’t behavior the point of having a mind? Isn’t behavior how we know what someone else thinks and feels?

            So we have conflicting intuitions: viewed from the inside, it can seem that behavior is just a dispensable extra; viewed from the outside, behavior looks like the whole story. We seem to be forced either into accepting that phenomenology and behavior are completely separable or that the former reduces to the latter. Neither alternative is attractive. Both sides in the debate seem to have a point, but pain (say) can’t be both behavioral and non-behavioral—behaviorism can’t be both true and false! Or can it? Aren’t we making an assumption here, namely that the ontology of the mental is essentially simple? That is, we are assuming that pain is a simple property, a one-dimensional state, a unitary phenomenon. But what about the idea that pain is actually a composite state, a combination of two (or more) components? What if mental states have a dual nature? They are combinations of a felt quality (a phenomenology) and a behavioral disposition (a bodily expression). When we respond to the first component we see the point of asserting the non-behavioral character of the mind; when we focus on the second component we respect the evident link to bodily behavior. Pain really is behavioral—partially; and it is also non-behavioral—partially. Pain isn’t a simple one-dimensional affair; it is a kind of compound or assembly. Compare meaning: we have grown accustomed to thinking of meaning multi-dimensionally (sense, reference, force, tone); and now we are pondering whether the same might be true of the mind generally. Is the ontology of the mind inherently plural, composite, and componential? Every mental state is really a complex of constitutive elements—a construction from distinct components.  [1] To put it simply, pain is made of a phenomenological component and a behavioral component. Thus we are given space to accept that mental states are partially behavioral: behaviorism is partially true. It is completely true of part of the mind. But the part it is true of doesn’t exhaust the whole nature of the mind; there is a part of the mind that is not behaviorally definable. So philosophical behaviorism is both true and false—but not of the same simple unanalyzable property. It is true of one component of the mind, but false of another component. The components can be pulled apart, at least to some extent–as with the inverted spectrum, zombies, and paralysis–but that only shows how compound mental states are: it doesn’t show that the mind is wholly non-behavioral. This is why these kinds of thought experiment affect us strangely: we are invited to detach a component from our ordinary concept while leaving the other component intact, but we find ourselves unsure whether we have enough left to ground that concept–hence the ambivalence. It’s like detaching reference and leaving sense, or detaching sense and leaving reference: sure, something semantic is left, but it seems to fall short of the genuine article—as if meaning has been dismantled and dismembered. The solution to these quandaries is to recognize that mental states are a congeries, a juxtaposition of elements, a duality. Accordingly, it is possible to be a behaviorist about one aspect of the mind—that is, to accept that an aspect of the mind is essentially and intrinsically bound up with behavior. Pain really is (in part) a disposition or tendency to respond in a certain way (viz. avoidance) to harmful stimuli, as belief really is a state that prompts certain kinds of behavior. Or perhaps we do better to say that functionalism is partly true—allowing that functionalism improves on classical behaviorism in familiar ways. Mental states essentially interact with other mental states in concert with external inputs to generate behavioral outputs. But they also have qualities that transcend such functional features, being hybrid entities. There is nothing materialist about this conception of the mind; there is no such metaphysical agenda. We are simply seeking descriptive adequacy. We are trying to do justice to the range of intuitions that cluster around this topic. We are explaining how it is possible to be a card-carrying behaviorist (functionalist) without eliminating the essential nature of the mind. The mind is a phenomenological-behavioral compound. The mistake was to presuppose an ontology of simple properties capable of only a single analysis—the analogue of pre-Fregean views of meaning. We need to acknowledge a more fine-grained and variegated ontological structure to the mind.  [2]

            Having distinguished the two components of mental states we can ask which component preponderates in a given case. It seems intuitively correct to report that sensations have a larger phenomenological component than beliefs (and certainly traits of character): thus we can envisage inverted spectrum cases with relative ease, but we can’t easily envisage exchanging beliefs and preserving functional role. So we should leave open the possibility that some types of mental state are more behavioral than others: some are more a matter of qualia (e.g. color sensations) and some more a matter of abilities to act, dispositions to behave, and competences to perform (e.g. belief, linguistic understanding, and character traits). You can in principle be very behaviorist about some things and only slightly behaviorist about others, according to the magnitude of the behavioral component. Why there should be such variations of magnitude is no doubt an interesting question, and one that could profitably engage the attentions of a researcher who has seen the merits of the dual component conception. I rather think it has to do with the fact that experience is low on the behavioral component but knowledge is high on it: in knowing the deed dominates, but in experiencing the feeling does. In the beginning was the deed, as some like to say, but the deed is only part of the story; the feeling is also a leading character, sometimes eclipsing the deed. At any rate, the mind is a feeling-deed combo.  [3]

 

  [1] I leave aside the question of whether there is a third component corresponding to the neural correlates of the mental state, but this possibility is certainly worth exploring: see my “A Triple Aspect Theory”.

  [2] Motto: things are often more complicated than we initially suppose (duh).

  [3] As to the problem of other minds, we can venture the following: given that mental states are partly constituted by behavioral facts, we are in a good position to know that other people (and animals) have part of a mental state—for example, we can know that an organism has one component of pain (the part that consists in behavioral facts). Thus we have partial knowledge of other minds even if we don’t have full knowledge. This might explain our sense that the mind is not quite as elusive as some philosophers suppose—those that identify the mind exclusively with the inner phenomenological component. There is something to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the mind is visible in behavior, even though it is not plausible to think that all of mind is so visible. The mind is not entirely private, but it is not entirely public either: it has a foot in both camps. The concept of mind is the concept of a pairing of elements, neither exclusively inner nor exclusively outer. By rough analogy, it is like the concept of knowledge—a pairing of both belief and truth; or wide content and narrow content, or character and content, or connotation and denotation—all cases of duality within apparent unity. 

 

Objects

 

The word “object” occupies a prominent place in philosophy, but it is seldom scrutinized in any depth. What is an object exactly? On the face of it the word has two uses or meanings: it may be used as a descriptor of a certain type of entity in contrast to other types, as with the distinction between objects and properties; or it may be used to indicate a relation between a thinker and what she or he is thinking about, as in the phrase “object of thought”. In this latter sense we speak of someone as the “object of attention”, or of “objects of experience”, or of “my object in doing such and such” (goal, aim), or of the “direct object” of a verb, or of “nonexistent objects of hallucination”.  [1]Objects in this sense need not exist: a mental state can have an object—it can be about something—even if that object doesn’t exist. Fictional objects are objects of thought that don’t exist. It is not always clear what sense is intended, or whether the duality of uses is even recognized. The OED gives this for “object”: “a material thing that can be seen and touched”, and “a thing external to the thinking mind or subject”. The confusion is evident here. Must an object be a material thing? Why make reference to what can be sensed? Why just sight and touch? Why must an object be external to the mind—aren’t there mental objects, and isn’t the self an object too? The philosopher seems to want to designate a very broad ontological category that exists independently of perceiving minds and makes no reference to mental acts (as with Frege’s and early Wittgenstein’s use of “object”), but also to speak of mental acts in which things are “posited” or “apprehended”. The word “object” shuttles between these uses rather indiscriminately, now meaning one, now the other. Linguistically, it’s a mess.

            What should we say about these two ways of using “object”? One view would be that we have a straight ambiguity analogous to “bank”—the same sound or mark just happens to have two quite distinct meanings. But this is hardly plausible: surely the two meanings are connected in some way. It is natural to suppose that one use is primary and the other derived: “object” as a type of entity or “object” as a way of talking about mental acts. Suppose we take the first use as primary: then “object of thought” comes to mean something like, “object (first sense) that happens to be thought about”. This has the problem that not all objects of thought exist, but all objects in the first sense do: so “object of thought” can’t mean “existent thing that someone happens to be thinking about”. The whole point of the phrase “object of thought” is to make room for mental acts about nonexistent things. Also, objects of mental acts need not be objects in the first sense, since mental acts can be about properties, facts, moral values, etc.—these are their “objects”. More promising is the idea that the mental act sense is primary: an object is what is or can be an object of thought (experience, emotion, intention, etc.). This is supported by the etymology of the word: it derives from a Medieval Latin word objectum meaning “thing presented to the mind”. Thus whenever “object” appears in philosophical discourse it means, “object of thought”. There are two problems with this. The first is that not all objects are objects of thought, since some are not thought about—e.g. remote galaxies and their constituent parts. The second is that it is clear that not all uses of “object” by philosophers can be so paraphrased: for example, Wittgenstein’s use of “object” in the Tractatus. At 2.01 he says: “A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things)”; at 2.014 we have “Objects contain the possibility of all situations”; and at 2.02 we read “Objects are simple”. He clearly doesn’t mean the word “object” in the mental act sense, and indeed he slides between “object” and “thing” without giving any notice of a shift of sense. Similarly, when Frege announces that truth-values are objects he doesn’t mean that they are things that we think about; he means to be making an ontological remark. He is distinguishing between objects and concepts (functions, in his system)–as Wittgenstein is distinguishing between objects and facts. So it is wrong to suppose that this use of “object” can be paraphrased by invoking the other use. What is to be done?

            One thing we can do is firmly mark the distinction and pay due attention to it. We could in principle simply ban one use so as to clean up the language and not be bamboozled by it: we could, say, reserve “thing” for objects in the first sense and continue to use “object” only in the second sense (thus respecting etymology). I am not against this idea, though it would be pretty impractical given the entrenchment of the first sense (but in an ideal language…). It has the advantage of preventing a certain kind of misguided objection to Meinong, namely the sneering riposte, “But nonexistent objects of thought are not objects”—as if Meinong is contradicting himself. Sure they aren’t, but the whole point of Meinong’s philosophy is to distinguish between what we think about and what really exists (the former having a special type of “being”). Let’s agree that objects of thought (“intentional objects”) are not objects in the sense in which Frege and Wittgenstein speak of objects—whoever said they were? We can continue to investigate the nature of objects of mental acts, observing (say) that such objects need have no mind-independent existence, or that they lack ontological depth, or that they violate the law of excluded middle. This verbal recommendation would certainly put paid to a lot pointless squabbling. I suspect myself that “object” in the ontological sense is an example of creeping semantic shift, whereby the original word (objectum) was extended to anything that exists whether thought about or not. This can lead to an unspoken idealism according to which everything that exists is really intrinsically a mental object—for everything is like an object of thought. We conceive of everything as if it were something thought about—an object of apprehension. But we need to make a firm distinction between an object of thought and a real existing object—though we do sometimes think about the latter. Clarity would be served by calling objects in the first sense “things” and reserving “object” for objects of thought. Thus we might ask how many things (of a certain kind) exist in a given room, and we might ask how many objects came before my mind in that room during a certain time interval: these are quite different kinds of question. I might have three cat-things in my room but have hallucinated a dozen cat-objects. It only invites confusion to report that there were three objects of a certain type at a given time in a particular place but a dozen objects of the same type at the same time (three actual cat objects but a dozen object-of-thought cats). In any case, we do well to be clear about the distinction and be constantly on guard against confusing the different uses of “object” that now infect our language.

            It may be wondered whether we really have a notion of object in the ontological sense. Objects of thought are conceptualized things, unitary and well defined, but are things considered independently of the mind similarly unified and well defined? We might toy with the idea of a “natural object”—one that is unified by nature, as it were. Maybe there is such a thing—organisms provide plausible examples—but the principle of unification is not like that imposed by the mind. Nature is not as Gestalt as the mind is, and it obeys different rules of unification. I conceive of you as a unitary person, but nature might regard you as just an assemblage of parts. Is Mount Everest really the natural unity that it is represented as being in human thought? One can at least sympathize with those philosophers who have found in nature only undifferentiated stuff not individuated objects; they have an exaggerated response to the insight that the world is not as cleanly segregated objectively as human thought represents it as being. But objects of thought enjoy a kind of ideal unity, since they have no being beyond what the mind invests in them. They are the real objects not the amorphous and pointless stuff that populates the mind-independent universe. In other words, natural objects are not as clearly defined as intentional objects, which enjoy a kind of conferred unity. The latter are human objects, fitting human purposes; the former are just products of natural forces that lack conceptualized unity. If we project the unity of intentional objects onto nature, we endow nature with a mind-centeredness it doesn’t strictly deserve. We engage in a kind of unintended idealism. This is why I am not averse to restricting the word “object” to objects of mental acts and referring to everything else with the word “thing”, from which any suggestion of presentation to the mind is expunged. Thus the objective world is not strictly speaking composed of objects, though it is composed of things that bear a certain complex relation to objects of thought.  [2]

            I am struck by the fact that “object” in the mental act sense has so few synonyms or even metaphorical expressions (perhaps this is why Husserl had to introduce neologisms like “noema”). The closest word I can think of is “target”—what the mental act “aims” at. The mind targets its objects of thought. But even that is jejune and unhelpful: what kind of targeting is this, and with what weapon? We are stuck with the locution “object of” expressing a relation whose nature remains obscure. The word “object” here just seems to mean, “what is apprehended”—what is on the receiving end of thought, so to speak. Maybe the mind “grasps” this thing when it becomes an object of apprehension, but again this word lacks the limpidity one could wish for. At any rate, “object” in the intended sense should not be confused with designations of existing objects in space; it has a quite different grammar, as Wittgenstein would say.  [3]

 

  [1] In this use the word “object” functions like the word “referent”: both are descriptions that allude to a representational medium—mental acts or linguistic expressions. A referent is that which is referred to; an object (of thought) is that which is thought about. It is the same with “denotation” or “designatum” or “subject” (in the sense of “subject matter”). 

  [2] An enormous amount of philosophy (and science) is comprised in understanding the nature of this complex relation (Kant had a strong interest in it).

  [3] This would be a good example of the way ordinary language can mislead us: we toggle lazily and confusedly between two uses of “object”.

 

 

Qualia

 

When philosophers talk about qualia they are typically discussing the mind-body problem and the prospects for materialism. They are not interested in the general theory of qualia. They may cite some examples of qualia, but they don’t enquire into the general structure and function of qualia—as a linguist might study the structure and function of language. There is no “qualistics” analogous to linguistics. And indeed the subject is difficult and obscure, even more so than the nature of language. Here I will merely tickle the subject of qualia in the hope of eliciting a gurgle that might reveal the general nature of the beast. The analogy with linguistics provides a useful starting-point, because quite a bit about language has been discovered, particularly in the post-Chomsky period. The most basic fact about language is that it consists of a finite lexicon that is capable of infinite expansion by means of the rules of grammar. Language has an elements-and-rules structure with infinite potential. Grammars generate an infinite array of expressions by operating on a fixed and finite set of linguistic units. Is something similar true of qualia?

            The plural form of the noun “qualia” suggests a stock of distinguishable discrete elements, and indeed introspection confirms that our sensory consciousness is constituted by a totality of just such elements—sensations of color, feelings of pain, tastes, smells, etc. These come in enormous profusion: it would be hard to put an upper limit on the number of qualia accessible to a typical human perceiver (or other animal). Just consider the number of distinct qualia you experience with a closed eyelid! I would suspect that qualia vastly outnumber words. So we may state the first law of qualia science: there exist a colossal number of qualia in the universe. The number is presumably finite, and is probably less than the number of stars, but it is truly massive. Moreover, qualia, unlike words, vary continuously, being more analogue than digital (just consider all the shades of blue): so the infinity of the continuum applies to them. The cardinality of the qualia lexicon is astronomically large. In addition to this the “grammar” of qualia is immensely productive: qualia can be combined ad libitum, both in space and time. Complex totalities can be formed that are completely novel and will never be repeated—as when you visually take in a new scene of any complexity. At any given moment the five senses are saturated with seething populations of qualia, which together yield an enormous array of variegated qualia ensembles. The brain in all its complexity must be responsible for this vast qualia universe, by virtue of mechanisms little understood. Consciousness is constitutionally capable of housing these gargantuan combinations of individual qualia. The brain is clearly an incredibly complex and intricate qualia-generating machine.

            The second law of qualia science states that qualia are extremely various. Each sense has its own proprietary range of qualia, and within each sense there is also considerable variety. There are a great many qualia universals. Qualia types are evidently more various than physical particle types (which are relatively few in number). Words differ in their types too, but qualia fall into far more categories. It would take a determined theorist to be a qualia monist (or an especially blind one). The qualia of different senses don’t mix, despite their freedom of combination within a given sense: you can’t see red and taste pineapple within the same sensory field. Qualia shun each other when they are too different, though they congregate happily when they share a basic phenomenology. Perhaps there could be olfactory eyes that respond to light and chemical impingement at the same time, thus producing a combined olfactory-visual field; but that is not the set-up on planet earth (so far as we know). So there is a definite limit to the combinability of qualia into unitary percepts, even though within a sense modality there is great plasticity (not to say promiscuity). Qualia are like members of a tribe that will hang out with any member of their own tribe but will not mix with members of other tribes.

            But there are some strange borderline cases and apparent exceptions, which bring us to the heart of qualia darkness. For one thing, qualia enthusiasts never cite impressions of geometrical forms as instances of qualia: it’s always sensing colors not sensing shapes. Do we not have shape qualia? But surely we do perceive shapes, so there ought to be corresponding qualia. The reason for this omission, I suspect, is that we experience shape with more than one sense—with both touch and sight. So there is nothing qualitatively distinctive about sensing shape. Yet it does seem as if a single experiential type is involved in sensations of circularity (say). This is why it is tempting to give an affirmative answer to Molyneux’s question: yes, a blind man made to see would recognize circles based on his previous tactile experience with them. So here the quale seems to hover between sensory specificity and abstract generality. We don’t really know what to say about geometrical qualia—that is, qualia corresponding to the traditional category of primary qualities. This is why all the examples cited involve secondary qualities. But the question cannot be avoided: do we, or do we not, have qualia of what are called “common sensibles”? If we do, qualia can hop between the senses; but if we don’t, we are qualia blind to certain qualities of things.  [1] The question remains infuriatingly obscure.

            Obscurity mounts when we consider synesthesia. It is said that red resembles the sound of a trumpet, and some people experience letters of the alphabet as having certain hues. Is there, then, a type of experience that straddles the two—a type of quale that unites these disparate qualities? Are redness and trumpet sounds instances of a common qualia type for people who sense the resemblance? Are there such higher-order qualia? The idea seems not without merit. This suggests a hypothesis: that there are qualia that transcend specific concrete qualia but coexist with them. These unifying qualia hover in the background somehow, permeating our more immediately discernible qualia.  [2] Maybe we have no words for them, but they are real nonetheless. Concrete instances may be variations on a phenomenological theme. Could it be that there is a single basic type of quale that gets specialized in the different senses, producing variety from uniformity? Can we imagine a sentient being whose entire qualia space arises from a subset of uniform qualia originating in a particular sense? Suppose that in this being vision evolves first and then the other senses piggyback on it by modifying the qualia associated with vision, thus producing qualia called by other names. The sensation of red is coopted by hearing to produce the sound of a trumpet, say.  [3] Thus there are qualia universals that span the different senses—rather as there are linguistic universals that span different human languages. The variety we observe arises by a process of transformation amounting to metamorphosis. This seems like a strange idea, to be sure, given the qualitative differences between qualia across the senses, but can it be ruled out a priori? Might the variety of qualia be less than appears to casual inspection? Certainly we have repeatedly discovered deeper uniformities in nature than strike us at first sight. Concepts are not sense-specific—they don’t have a sense-modality written into them—so perhaps qualia are also more modality-neutral than we suppose. Could there be unconscious qualia that underlie the conscious kind available to introspection? Could the apparent heterogeneity disguise a more basic homogeneity? Might qualia admit of a distinction between surface structure and deep structure? We don’t know, but the question seems real enough. We are certainly familiar with the idea that the introspectively available part of the mind is only one part of it. Qualia might enjoy a substantial unconscious life in some form or other.

            It may be said that the analogy with language is imperfect because the principles of qualia combination are nothing like grammar in the literal sense. I would agree with that—indeed, insist upon it—but this is a dispensable feature of the analogy. A better analogy would be bird song, which has the advantage of locating qualia at a lower evolutionary level: bird song is also built around a set of primitive elements and rules of combination, species-specific and quite intricate. Also, the notes of bird song vary continuously like qualia, thus producing enormous variety. Architecturally, then, individual qualia resemble the elements of bird song; we can readily imagine a mapping from one to the other. The basic brain mechanisms that allow one might allow the other (not that we know what these mechanisms are). From a computational point of view, both are functions from primitive elements to combinations of elements, possibly exhibiting hierarchical structure. Qualia do seem to cluster and embed, forming gestalts, dividing up the world into useful units for effective behavior (just consider your visual field right now). We have no idea how qualia evolved, singly or as combinable elements, but presumably mutations produced machinery capable of generating their distinctive form—a kind of program for qualia manipulation. And presumably this elaborate mental capacity has survival value: qualia help keep the organism around. The genes wouldn’t go to all that trouble for no reason. Qualia are psychologically real, cerebrally embodied, and functionally adaptive—they have to be. They must be as natural as bird song, and analogous to it (up to a point).

            It should be noted that qualia are not confined to the senses. They also appear in the imagination: our mental imagery is qualia-laden. Here they combine in new and surprising ways, following the elastic rules of image formation. They take on fresh combinatorial possibilities, not being stimulus-bound. Thus we have the qualia-borne imagery found in dreams: boundless, bizarre, creative, and anarchic. Dreams are qualia heaven—the place where qualia go to do whatever they feel like doing. And they are so nimble, so mischievous, and so free. But even in daydreams qualia flex their creative power, fluidly combining and recombining, always resourceful, preternaturally agile. They form the inner speech of the senses. They also feed into the thought process, though they seem shy about actually entering that domain (we don’t “think in qualia”): what we think and believe is shaped by the qualia populating our sensory consciousness—colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feels. So qualia fit into the overall economy of the mind in characteristic ways; they aren’t just marginal. Again, they are like words in this respect—here, there, and everywhere.

            I have tried to avoid the vexed question of the ontology of qualia. What are they exactly? Are they representations of external properties or are they qualities of consciousness itself? Are they non-physical? I will simply say that they are subjective-objective hybrids: episodes of seeming to apprehend qualities of things. The quale associated with seeing something red is a seeming to have a red thing before you: it is thus a synthesis of a subjective state and an objective quality (in one sense of “objective”). Not that any of this is easy to understand, but it is the right way to describe what is at issue. Accordingly, qualia are instances of such episodes of seeming—that is, states of consciousness in which a quality is apprehended. These are the things that exist in such profusion and that get combined so freely. If it is any consolation, it is also not at all clear what a word (lexical item) is: is it a sound wave, an act of speech, a mental entity, an abstract pattern, or a brain configuration? The ontology of words is also obscure (ontology often is: numbers, meanings, beliefs, even physical objects). But this obscurity shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing important truths about the subject matter in question, particularly its structural and functional features. As with so much about the mind, we are only at the beginning of understanding it, and may never achieve the understanding we seek.  [4]

 

  [1] People sometimes say we perceive visual shape and tactile shape, but never just shape: but this is an obvious cop-out—surely there is something in common between the two, something with phenomenological reality.

  [2] Sartre would say that every quale carries with it a sub-quale of nothingness, since nothingness is the essence of consciousness: in seeing something red, say, the subject apprehends the emptiness of consciousness itself. A referential theory of qualia would likewise imply that every quale embeds an awareness of an act of intentionality common to all qualia. In both cases we have cross-modal qualia of a rather abstract type.

  [3] We can formulate a synesthetic version of Molyneux’s problem: would a person born deaf recognize the sound of a trumpet as similar to red if suddenly given the ability to hear? That is, is this similarity inherent in the red quale and capable of extrapolation? I myself sense a strong similarity between whiteness and silence, and also between hot peppers and hot objects (the use of “hot” for both is surely not an accident). Thus there might be a universal phenomenology (across the senses) analogous to universal grammar (across languages). 

  [4] It is an interesting historical fact that the word “qualia” and the associated concept have been around for over a hundred years  (C.S. Peirce introduced “quale” in 1866 and C.I. Lewis introduced “qualia” in 1929), but the notion is still highly controversial even as a descriptive term. The subject is shrouded in obscurity, and hardly exists as part of scientific psychology. It awaits its Noam Chomsky to set it on a scientific footing. We barely have even a superficial taxonomy of qualia. Qualia theory is like the linguistics of the Stone Age.

 

 

A Day in the Life

 

I began the day by putting the finishing touches to my essay “A Triple Aspect Theory”, on a subject I have been thinking about for over fifty years and still find inexhaustibly interesting. This was the usual intense intellectual effort in which the mind seems both to be struggling with its own limitations and soaring serenely over the landscape. I then posted the essay on my blog and sent it to my usual correspondents (Tom Nagel, Noam Chomsky, Steve Pinker, Rebecca Goldstein, Marie McGinn, Teddy St Aubyn, and my brother Keith). It was a perfectly satisfactory philosophical morning, if nothing out of the ordinary.

            Then at noon I went to play tennis with my regular partner Eddie, having just played with him yesterday. It was the usual focused, intense, ballistic, brutal, and exhilarating hour and a half. I was using my new Wilson Clash racquet, which is both maneuverable and powerful, and I wanted to work on changing the direction of the ball. I have been practicing this against the wall for a while (over at the Biltmore club), particularly the down the line backhand drive. It’s not an easy shot to pull off but a very useful and satisfying one. I had the customary battle against Eddie, who is a fine player and never lets up (also a keen kite boarder). It was an all-out mental and physical effort.

            I had an hour’s break before going to my voice lesson at 4pm with Nicole. Nicole and I have formed a group called the Duetones (she has been teaching me to sing for a year). We began by singing a new song “When Will I be Loved?” by Linda Ronstadt (written by Phil Everly), sung over the original record. Then we turned to “You Really Got a Hold on Me” by the Beatles (originally by the Miracles and written by Smokey Robinson). But then we did something different: we sang both songs without musical accompaniment. Now Nicole is a marvelous singer (me not so much) and I was fascinated to hear what we would sound like together singing a cappella. The Duetones have a philosophy, a mission even: we seek to unite opposites. She young, me old; she female, me male; she classical, me more rock and blues. I was hoping for what I was pleased to call the “magic sound”—what happens when two voices blend together perfectly (think Lennon and McCartney). And I believe it happened, especially with “Love Me Tender”, “Love Hurts”, “Funky Town” and “Give It Up” (by K.C. and the Sunshine Band). Again, this was an hour of intense effort, but deeply satisfying. There is nothing quite like singing together with another person, especially when it works. I recorded the lesson. When I got home I listened to the whole thing and relived the experience (not without the odd wince at myself). The Duetones are here, I thought.

            That was a day worth living, it seemed to me. It makes you think what an amazing thing the human organism is, or can be. It also represented human cooperation at its finest. I felt it was worth memorializing here. I will refrain from analyzing it further, being content just to record the basic facts.