Abstract
Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness.
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Notes
Throughout we will use the term “valence” as follows: mental states have a valence if and only if they have a hedonic value for the subject. That is, mental states have a valence if and only if they are pleasurable (they then have a positive valence) or disagreeable (they then have a negative valence). Not all mental states have a valence, and valenced states are more or less pleasurable or disagreeable. Typically, but perhaps not necessarily, disagreeable mental states motivate people to act as to discontinue these, while pleasurable mental states motivate people to act so as to perpetuate them.
While we follow convention in referring to mental states like seeing red and smelling banana as perceptual experiences, it is worth noting that some hold that mental states here classified as bodily sensations, felt emotions, or felt moods are also perceptual (e.g., Prinz 2006). We wish to thank an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for pointing this out.
Heather Gray explicitly equated her Experience dimension with phenomenal consciousness at the 2007 Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference.
See Appendix for demographical information and data analysis for each experiment.
“Philosophers” were defined as participants who indicated at least some graduate training in philosophy or either had already completed or were in the process of completing an undergraduate degree with a major in philosophy. Note that the results do not change when we count as philosophers only the participants who have some graduate training in philosophy.
We emphasize that the robot and the undergraduate behave in the same way. Thus, if participants were to ascribe differently pain and seeing red to the robot and the undergraduate, this difference could not plausibly be explained by reference to the functional and behavioral properties of the two agents; rather, it would result from participants focusing on the phenomenal properties of these states. This stands in contrast with Knobe and Prinz’s (2008) comparison of an individual agent and of a corporation.
The complete set of probes is available at: http://www.JustinSytsma.com/MSIS/probes.html. The same image was used with each robot scenario in Studies 1, 2, and 3; an image of a typical undergraduate was used in each of the human scenarios.
We briefly mention a third possible reply (T. Jack, personal communication). A critic could argue that our hypothesis predicts that if we ask ordinary people whether Jimmy experience red, they would answer affirmatively. If they would answer negatively (as our critic suggests they would), then we would have to conclude that the folk conceive of subjective experience as philosophers do. In reply, we note that “experience” is a technical term and does not have the same meaning in ordinary English and in philosophy. In ordinary English, an experience typically is a significant interaction with an object (e.g., one might say “My encounter with the bear in the woods was a frightening experience”). For this reason, it is dubious that asking ordinary English speakers about a robot’s experience would be of much relevance to study how they understand subjective experience.
See, e.g., Huebner (forthcoming) for a related objection.
We replicated the experiment with the question “Was Timmy/Jimmy angry…” instead of the question “Did Timmy/Jimmy feel anger…” Since this variation had no effect on participants’ answers, we present only their answers to the question formulated with “feel anger” to match the formulation used in Study 1 for “feel pain.” For discussion of the construction “feeling + psychological predicate” see Sytsma and Machery (2009).
Particularly, one might argue that the fact that ordinary people have no difficulty understanding the classical thought experiments about consciousness, such as the inverted spectrum thought experiment, shows that the folk conception of subjective experience coincides with the concept of phenomenal consciousness. We are currently examining whether people really grasp these thought experiments.
While most philosophers seem to find phenomenal consciousness obvious, we suspect that this has not been the case for scientists. In fact, philosophers have often criticized psychologists and neuropsychologists for failing to see that their account of consciousness failed to solve the hard problem (see Chalmers 1995, Sect. IV, for example). We suspect that many psychologists and neuropsychologists have not failed in this respect by accident. Rather, it might be that like the folk, they do not conceive of subjective experience as being phenomenal, in spite of having plausibly carefully considered “what it is like” for them to see red, feel pain, and so on. For this reason, they might not recognize that there is a further aspect of these mental states that needs explaining.
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Acknowledgments
The first author did most of the work on this article. We would like to thank Dave Chalmers, David Danks, Tony Jack, Joshua Knobe, Jonathan Livengood, Shaun Nichols, Peter Pagin, and Philip Robbins for their comments on previous versions of this article. We also would like to thank Eric Schwitzgebel for his reply to a talk based on this article at annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 2008. Thanks also to the audiences in Santa Cruz, Stockholm, Lund, and Gothenburg.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Study 1: seeing red and feeling pain
A total of 671 participants completed surveys through the Mental State Intuitions Study website. Sixty-eight participants were excluded because their biographical information was incomplete or because their comments indicated they misunderstood the probe. Biographical information was considered “incomplete” if we could not sort the participant into either the philosopher or the non-philosopher groups (see footnote 8). Participants were judged to misunderstand the probe mostly for the following reasons: they stated that the electric shock was not painful, they understood “see red” as meaning “is angry,” or they stated that the robot was under remote control. Of the remainder, 61% were male; the mean age was around 33 (range: 18–68). There were 372 philosophers (71% male; mean age around 33) and 231 non-philosophers (46% male; mean age around 31).
A three-way ANOVA with type of agent, type of mental state, and philosophical training as between-participant factors yielded a main effect of the type of agent (Timmy > Jimmy), a main effect of the type of mental state (seeing red > pain), a main effect of philosophical training (non-philosophers > philosophers) and three-two-way interaction (type of mental state by type of agent; type of mental state by philosophical training; type of agent by philosophical training). Planned analyses showed that philosophers’ mean answers for both feeling pain and seeing red were significantly above 4 for Timmy (red: N = 92, M = 5.90, SD = 1.46, p < .005; pain: N = 84, M = 6.44, SD = .87, p < .005) and significantly below 4 for Jimmy (red: N = 96, M = 3.48, SD = 1.94, p < .01; pain: N = 100, M = 2.02, SD = 1.53, p < .005); non-philosophers treated the states dissimilarly, the mean answers for Timmy being significantly above 4 (red: N = 55, M = 5.98, SD = 1.25, p < .005; pain: N = 62, M = 6.15, SD = 1.01, p < .005), as was the mean answer for Jimmy seeing red (N = 52, M = 5.15, SD = 1.85, p < .005), while the mean answer for Jimmy feeling pain was significantly below 4 (N = 59, M = 2.54, SD = 1.99, p < .005). The difference between the average folk ascription of seeing red and of feeling pain is statistically significant [t(109) = 7.12, p < .001] and the effect size (d = 0.87) is large (Cohen 1992).
1.2 Study 2: smelling banana and feeling anger
253 participants completed surveys through the Mental State Intuitions Study website. Thirty-one participants were excluded because their biographical information was incomplete, because they had indicated they had already participated to the Mental State Intuitions Study, or because they were not 18 year old. Since this study was aimed at exploring the pattern of folk responses seen in our first experiment, an additional 63 participants were excluded based on their responses to biographical questions concerning their philosophical training (see footnote 8). Of the remainder, 38% were male; the mean age was around 30 (range: 18–75).
A two-way ANOVA with type of agent and type of mental state as between-participant factors yielded a main effect of the type of agent [Timmy > Jimmy; F(1, 102) = 36.84, p < .001] and no other main effect or interaction. Planned analyses showed that the mean answers for both smelling banana and feeling anger were significantly higher than 4 for Timmy (banana: N = 18, M = 5.83, SD = 1.46, p < .005; anger: N = 25, M = 5.84, SD = 0.99, p < .005); the mean answer was significantly below 4 for Jimmy feeling anger (N = 35, M = 3.06, SD = 2.22, p < .05) and neutral for Jimmy smelling banana (N = 28, M = 3.89, SD = 2.42).
1.3 Study 3: the valence of smell
A total of 211 participants completed our survey in a classroom setting. Thirty-four participants were excluded because their biographical information was incomplete, because they were philosophers (see footnote 8), because they had already completed one of our surveys, or because they were not 18 years old. Of the remainder, 33.5% were male; the mean age was around 20 (range: 18–30).
A two-way ANOVA with type of agent and type of olfactory cue as between-participant factors yielded a main effect of the type of agent [Timmy > Jimmy; F(1, 171) = 13.17, p < .001] and no other main effect or interaction. Planned analyses showed that participants’ mean answers for each of the three target smells for Timmy were significantly above 4 (isoamyl acetate: N = 25, M = 5.68, SD = 1.38, p < .005; banana: N = 26, M = 5.62, SD = 1.56, p < .005; vomit: N = 25, M = 5.48, SD = 1.76, p < .005); the mean for the unfamiliar smell (isoamyl acetate) for Jimmy was also significantly above 4 (N = 32, M = 5.31, SD = 2.13, p < .005), but the scores were neutral for the two familiar smells for Jimmy (banana: N = 35, M = 4.11, SD = 1.98; vomit: N = 34, M = 4.148, SD = 2.30). Participants mean answer to the unfamiliar smell was significantly higher than either familiar smell [banana: t(65) = −2.28, p = .02; vomit: t(65) = −2.08, p = .04], while for the unfamiliar smells the mean answers were not different between each other [t(67) = −.12, p = .9].
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Sytsma, J., Machery, E. Two conceptions of subjective experience. Philos Stud 151, 299–327 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9439-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9439-x