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>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism."

>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism." IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.

trescenzi 1y ago
There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  >Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing. That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
  - trescenzi 1y ago
    So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Materialists don’t even know what materials are though.
    - bondarchuk 1y ago
      >The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience” I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent. >So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
  - goatlover 1y ago
    That's just idealism. Idealism doesn't have a hard problem. But it does have a problem with accounting for how the world appears to be physical independent of any mind experiencing it, such as before any life evolved or in many places were no life is around.
antonvs 1y ago
Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do? If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language. That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious. I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes. (Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
  - antonvs 1y ago
    > it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious. Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question. In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem. How would you describe the distinction? > fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.
    - axus 1y ago
      A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?
mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.
- mellosouls 1y ago
  All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness. The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms. To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarguable description of what consciousness actually is. Which of course, you cannot do, as there is no such agreed description.
  - cwmoore 1y ago
    “The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them. [0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/ https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
    - brudgers 1y ago
      As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not. Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
tech_ken 1y ago
The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed". "What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states "What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness" edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf) > It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the subject himself'.
- brudgers 1y ago
  "What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states How do you know that? Philosophically, of course. I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either. Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.
  - tech_ken 1y ago
    > How do you know that? Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like: (1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing) (2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1) (3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition) => Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3) > Just that all models, however useful are still models Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.
biophysboy 1y ago
I think that's why he states it as a biconditional, which makes the exclusive restriction you're arguing is necessary
Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
I believe you're falling into a purely linguistic trap. In other languages we wouldn't even use the word "like" in this kind of constructions, that's an English thing because other wordings sound awkward, but I don't think it entails comparison. In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?" In French, "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", literal word by word translation "What effect it makes to be a bat?" In Chinese, "成为一只蝙蝠可能是什么样子", i.e., "To become a bat could be what feeling/sensation?" None of these translations has a comparative word. And at least in Spanish (I won't speak about the other two because I'm not so proficient in them), using a comparative expression similar to "being like" in English ("¿A qué se parece ser un murciélago?") would sound awkward and not really convey the point. Which is why the translators didn't do so. Of course I know that the original article is in English, but I think the author basically meant "What is felt being a bat?" and just used the "like" construction because it's what you say in English for that to sound good and clear. Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree. I want to credit the GP one way, which is that the category they're identifying is real, namely of frivolous or circular comparisons. This just isn't one of those. It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand. The idea has been around but this expression of it has gained the most traction in English. As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.
brudgers 1y ago
The “something” here refers to inner experience (something similar to Kantian “aperception”. The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism. To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community… …sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant. Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" is about the sensory qualia of a bat, assuming it has consciousness and ability to experience quales, which he assumes it does. The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.
sethev 1y ago
That particular phrasing happened to catch on, but I don't think it's essential to any of the arguments. How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? Or are you saying that that distinction is just a verbal trick?
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  >How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?
  - sethev 1y ago
    That's just a label, though, it makes no attempt to describe the difference. You could say a conscious object has subjective experience, but that's open to the same observation that it implies there are two things (the subject and the experience).
    - bondarchuk 1y ago
      I can only use a label to vaguely point at the concept of consciousness, and thus the disctinction between conscious and non-conscious objects. This is not infinitely precise, because noone really understands what's going on. What you call "describing the difference" would in fact be making further claims about consciousness. If one is not in the position of making further claims, it is better to not make any claims and stick to vague but commonly understood labels, instead of making claims implicitly by using complicated labels without further examination.
KolibriFly 1y ago
It might be one of those cases where the philosophical hook works because of its rhetorical power

trescenzi 1y ago

There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.

bondarchuk 1y ago
>Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing. That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
- trescenzi 1y ago
  So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Materialists don’t even know what materials are though.
  - bondarchuk 1y ago
    >The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience” I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent. >So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
- goatlover 1y ago
  That's just idealism. Idealism doesn't have a hard problem. But it does have a problem with accounting for how the world appears to be physical independent of any mind experiencing it, such as before any life evolved or in many places were no life is around.

antonvs 1y ago

Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do? If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language. That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.

bondarchuk 1y ago
Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious. I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes. (Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
- antonvs 1y ago
  > it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious. Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question. In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem. How would you describe the distinction? > fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.
  - axus 1y ago
    A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?

mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago

This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.

mellosouls 1y ago
All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness. The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms. To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarguable description of what consciousness actually is. Which of course, you cannot do, as there is no such agreed description.
- cwmoore 1y ago
  “The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them. [0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/ https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
  - brudgers 1y ago
    As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not. Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.

tech_ken 1y ago

The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed". "What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states "What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness" edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf) > It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the subject himself'.

brudgers 1y ago
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states How do you know that? Philosophically, of course. I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either. Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.
- tech_ken 1y ago
  > How do you know that? Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like: (1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing) (2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1) (3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition) => Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3) > Just that all models, however useful are still models Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.

biophysboy 1y ago

I think that's why he states it as a biconditional, which makes the exclusive restriction you're arguing is necessary

Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago

I believe you're falling into a purely linguistic trap. In other languages we wouldn't even use the word "like" in this kind of constructions, that's an English thing because other wordings sound awkward, but I don't think it entails comparison. In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?" In French, "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", literal word by word translation "What effect it makes to be a bat?" In Chinese, "成为一只蝙蝠可能是什么样子", i.e., "To become a bat could be what feeling/sensation?" None of these translations has a comparative word. And at least in Spanish (I won't speak about the other two because I'm not so proficient in them), using a comparative expression similar to "being like" in English ("¿A qué se parece ser un murciélago?") would sound awkward and not really convey the point. Which is why the translators didn't do so. Of course I know that the original article is in English, but I think the author basically meant "What is felt being a bat?" and just used the "like" construction because it's what you say in English for that to sound good and clear. Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.

glenstein 1y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I want to credit the GP one way, which is that the category they're identifying is real, namely of frivolous or circular comparisons. This just isn't one of those. It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand. The idea has been around but this expression of it has gained the most traction in English. As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.

brudgers 1y ago

The “something” here refers to inner experience (something similar to Kantian “aperception”. The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism. To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community… …sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant. Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" is about the sensory qualia of a bat, assuming it has consciousness and ability to experience quales, which he assumes it does. The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.

sethev 1y ago

That particular phrasing happened to catch on, but I don't think it's essential to any of the arguments. How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? Or are you saying that that distinction is just a verbal trick?

bondarchuk 1y ago
>How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?
- sethev 1y ago
  That's just a label, though, it makes no attempt to describe the difference. You could say a conscious object has subjective experience, but that's open to the same observation that it implies there are two things (the subject and the experience).
  - bondarchuk 1y ago
    I can only use a label to vaguely point at the concept of consciousness, and thus the disctinction between conscious and non-conscious objects. This is not infinitely precise, because noone really understands what's going on. What you call "describing the difference" would in fact be making further claims about consciousness. If one is not in the position of making further claims, it is better to not make any claims and stick to vague but commonly understood labels, instead of making claims implicitly by using complicated labels without further examination.

KolibriFly 1y ago

It might be one of those cases where the philosophical hook works because of its rhetorical power