Abstract
Philosophical attitudes towards qualia divide into three main types. First, there are qualia enthusiasts who claim that qualia exist and do not reduce to anything else. These philosophers also typically consider that the existence of qualia is sufficient to doom physicalist or functionalist approaches to the mind. Supporters of qualia elimination are to be found at the opposite end of the spectrum. They deny that mental states and events actually possess the qualitative properties attributed to them by qualia friends and, as a consequence, they advocate quining qualia. In between these two extreme positions stand the advocates of demystification. They admit the existence of qualia but they try to dissipate the air of mystery that surrounds them by showing that they can be accounted for in functional or representational terms.
My thanks to Roberto Casati, François Clémentz, Denis Fisette, Pierre Jacob, Pierre Livet, Claude Panaccio, and Joëlle Proust for their comments and suggestions.
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Notes
In particular, this link plays an essential role in Dretske’s account of the causal efficacy of mental content. However, I will not discuss here the issue of the causal efficacy of mental contents, since it seems that, for Dretske, only acquired representations can properly be said to have a causal efficacy in virtue of their contents and since the sensory representations I am concerned with are, according to him, systemic and not acquired.
‘Acquisition’ should be taken here in a broad sense covering both acquisition by an individual in the course of learning and acquisition by a species in the course of evolution.
According to Dennett (1988), qualia are traditionally taken to have the following four fundamental properties: they are supposed to be ineffable, intrinsic, private, and directly or immediately apprehensible to consciousness.
In particular, this is the case with the intermediary representations computed by the linguistic or sensory modules, such as, for instance, the primal sketches in Marr’s theory of vision or the deep syntactic representations of sentences in a Chomskian conception of a linguistic module.
The argument offered by Shoemaker constitutes a ‘social’ version of a Darwinian justification of the existence of phenomenal experience. But it is also possible to give the Darwinian justification a more ‘individualistic’ flavor, by claiming for instance that conscious control of one’s actions as opposed to their automatic control brings with it the benefit of flexibility. This is, in particular, the line of reasoning taken by Weizkrantz (1988).
Here the term ‘beliefs’ serves to designate the representations formed on the basis of visual information and used for the guidance of certain actions. That such representations are indeed formed seems to be demonstrated by the fact that blindsighters are capable (when forced) to take appropriate action towards objects visually presented to them and that the success of their performance can only be explained if we accept that they have formed those representations. See the next footnote for examples of such actions. A number of philosophers will claim that other conditions must be satisfied as well for a representation to be a belief in the full sense of the term. They are certainly right and this is why I use quotes. Let us note however that those ‘beliefs’ share a number of properties with fully fledged beliefs: their are representations of states of the world, they involve if not conceptualization in a strong sense at least a certain categorization or digitalization of sensory information and, most importantly, they guide action.
For instance, blindsighters asked to reach out for an object presented in their blind visual field — and that they deny seeing — are nevertheless able to reach for it accurately and to adopt a hand shape appropriate to the object presented. Or, placed in forced-choice situations, they are able to ‘guess’ quite accurately for the presence or the absence of an object, to guess whether the object presented is a horizontal or a vertical bar, whether it is moving or not, whether they are presented with an X or an O, and so on. For more details, see Weizkrantz (1986, 1988), Marcel (1988), Young & de Haan (1993).
I speak of Tactic’s M* and N* states rather than simply inverting M and N states in order to avoid a possible causal objection. According to the objection, it would be a violation of the principle of the nomological character of causation to assume that, whereas Tictac and Tactic have both M states and N states, the Fs cause in one M states and in the other N states. Let us note, however, that the force of the objection depends, on the one hand, on what conception one holds of physical causality and, on the other hand, on the further stipulation that that there are no other aspects of the cognitive organization of Tictac or Tactic that might account for such a difference in the effects produced by the same cause. Besides, in order to forestall another objection, let us note that the situation described, where different states types — M and N for Tictac and M* and N* for Tactic — correspond to the values of the quality space, is perfectly compatible with Dretske’s representational theory, since the theory holds that the indicator function of a type state and hence its qualitative aspects depend on relational properties of tokens of the type and not on their intrinsic properties. Thus, the issue is not whether states belonging to the same physical (or neurological) type can have different qualitative properties, but whether states belonging to the same representational type can have different qualitative properties.
I use this term to refer to memories that involve imagistic representations as opposed to memories involving propositional content. This corresponds roughly to the distinction between memories linked to episodic memory and memories linked to generic memory.
By perceptual-motor activity, I mean motor activity the purpose of which is to obtain perceptual information from the world. The effects ofthis activity on perception can have a greater or lesser strength. For instance, moving one’s head usually has a marked effect on the flux of visual information, which is not the case with straightening one’s back or flexing one’s toes. Besides, a change in the informational flux can be a side effect of some motor activity aiming at a different goal, or it can be the intended effect of motor activity. In the latter case, we have an instance of perceptual-motor exploration activity.
Neuropsychologists working on blindsight insist on the existence of different types of representations corresponding to different levels or modes of processing of sensory information, for instance “where” representations (localization) versus “what” representations (object identification). They also emphasize the existence of different levels of integration between representations and actions or behaviors. For instance, certain dissociations seem to point to the existence of a system of “how” representations, responsible for a pragmatic processing of sensory information which directly links this information to certain motor behavior, without the mediation of “where” or “what” representations (Rossetti, Rode, & Boisson, 1995). By contrast, other types of behaviors or actions operate in relation with more symbolic or more detached levels of representations (Jeannerod, 1994; McCarthy & Warrington, 1990, Paillard, 1991; Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982). Furthermore, one may think that conscious perceptual experience is linked to detached or demodularized forms of representations (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). In Darwinian terms, one may think it would be useless to be conscious of representations the consequences of which we could not influence because they automatically unfold anyway.
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Pacherie, E. (1999). Qualia and Representations. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_6
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