What Is It Like to Have Qualia?

Domenic Siravo

March 02 2011 Philosophy of Mind

As conscious human beings we have an astonishing amount of experiences every day and we tend to describe these experiences by how it feels to have them. Yet what does it mean to feel or know what it is like to have an experience, and how do these feelings relate to human perception and consciousness? These questions are addressed by Thomas Nagel in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? in which he promotes the existence of a subjective character of experience, an idea that is represented by most philosophers by the concept of qualia. I argue, along with Bennett and Hacker, that Nagels argument for qualia is inventive yet ultimately unconvincing and that the existence of qualia has yet to be established. First I give a cursory review of Nagels essay and his central argument. Then I discuss Bennett and Hackers response to the essay and the conception of qualia. Finally, after evaluating both respective works, I examine whether qualia exists or not. 1. Knowing What It Is Like Nagels influential and frequently cited thought experiment asks the reader to try and imagine what it would be like to be a bat. But why is Nagel asking this of us, and what are the implications of this question? It should be noted that the decision to use a bat for this exercise was not arbitrarily chosen. The bat is an animal that is differentiated enough from a human by its foreign ability of perceiving via echolocation and other alien forms of behavior and is also familiar enough as a mammal that it could enable one to assume that a bat is capable of having experiences. The latter part of this reasoning is especially important for Nagel because he is ultimately investigating how phenomenal experience can fit into a physicalist account of consciousness. The phenomenological features of experience can be understood by turning to the wording used in Nagels original question of what is it like to be a bat? To say that a creature has a conscious experience is to say that there is something it is like to be that organism

(Nagel 2). Thus if a bat does have experiences then there is something it is like to be a bat, or the subjective character of experience (Nagel 2). Embedded within Nagels explanations are premises that his argument will be constructed upon. First is that (1) an experience is a conscious experience only if there is something it is like for the subject to have this experience. Secondly, (2) a creature can have conscious experiences only if there something which it is like to be that creature. Returning to Nagels question with these premises in mind will be useful in unearthing his central argument concerning consciousness. When attempting to explain what it is like to be a bat, we would first turn to our imagination and picture what it would be like to be able to fly or have sonar and so on. However this would just be someone imagining what it would be like for them to be a bat, not what it is like for a bat to be a bat. We thus cannot extrapolate the desired knowledge of a bats experience through these means. Nevertheless we can try to observe the physical structure of the animal and its behavior, allowing us to express what we believe it is like to be a bat, for instance one has reason to believe that bats sometimes experience fear and hunger under certain conditions and the appropriate stimuli. Yet this method also falls short since all the experiences we would believe that bats have are based on observations that are met with an epistemological barrier that prevents a complete picture from being portrayed. Nagel explains that the experiences of bats also have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive (Nagel 3). Consequently, the inability to know the subjective character of a bats experience illuminates that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language (Nagel 4). This holds true for anyone of a different type than the subject of the experience, since it would be impossible for me to know the experiences of a blind and deaf person and vice versa. The facts of experience are only accessible subjectively;

each experience has a qualitative feel to it. Recalling premises (1) and (2), and recognizing that physicalism requires that all mental events have physical descriptions, then the existence of this indescribable qualitative feel of experience, commonly referred to as qualia, has given consciousness a subjective character immune from physical description (Nagel 7). If a creature with consciousness must have conscious experiences, and these experiences necessarily require that there is something which it is like for the subject to have them, then consciousness is thus characterized by the mark of qualia. 2. The Problem of Knowing What It Is Like So far consciousness has been defined by the way it feels to have an experience, or the qualitative character of each experience. However there is reason to believe that this explanation of consciousness and the notion that one can know what it is like to be another creature are put forward with unstable logical footing. Bennett and Hacker argue that not every experience has a certain feel to it, and that the notion of qualia is confusingly stretching the scope of consciousness. Experiences, and by extension qualia, are understood to include not only perception, sensation, and affection, but also desire, thought and belief (Bennett and Hacker 273). These experiences are individuated by their objects and may or may not be subject of an attitudinal predicate. Listening to Bach and listening to Rachmaninoff are different experiences, yet when asked how each experience felt they could both be answered with the same description of inspiring. Additionally when I am walking down the street and see various objects like trees and mailboxes, it is not necessarily true that seeing each different tree or mailbox will have a distinct qualitative feel to it, since there may not be a feeling at all. Qualia are merely describing the object of experience, not the experience itself. It is a logical muddle to say that each and every experience has a special feel to it.

If X is the subject of an experience and V is a verb specifying experience, then stating that There is something it is like for X to V does nothing in expressing the qualitative character of the experience. For unless this statement is making a comparison to another experience, which for proponents of qualia like Nagel it is not, then it is incoherently trying to say that For X to V is like A when A is the affective attitude of the subject. This is like saying For me to listen to Bach is like inspiring, an unintelligible sentence born from the misguided effort of characterizing conscious experience in terms of qualia (Bennett and Hacker 277). Moreover Nagels original question is met with similar logical impediment that discredits much of thought experiment. To ask What it is like to be a bat? is essentially asking what it is like for a bat to be a bat, or What it is like for an X to be an X?. The reiteration of the subject makes this question considerably less meaningful than it would be if it asked What is it like for a Y to be an X?, as the subject in the former statement does not differ from its object and does not allow for the contrasts that can be made in the latter. The question What it is like for a professor to be a professor? is much different, and much less revealing than, What is it like for a professor to be a soldier? Furthermore if X is a creature, like a bat or a human being, then this question makes even less sense. Assuming that stories like Kafkas The Metamorphosis are indeed fiction, human beings cannot change into other creatures, and nothing other than a human being can be a human being. Since there is no alternative possibility of what else a sentient creature could be, the question of What is it like for an X to be an X? should be understood as What is it like to be an X? However as the above arguments have shown, this question would avoid the most logical complications if it is interpreted as an inquiry into the attitudinal features of the life of X, a request that can be feasibly answered by one who is familiar enough with X (Bennett and

Hacker 280). There is no unique way that it feels for a person to have an experience, and it is mistaken to claim that every conscious experience has qualia. 3. Do Qualia Exist? Determining the existence of qualia is contingent upon what is meant by the term. If qualia are to be understood in the terms that Nagel portrayed them, then it seems unlikely that qualia exist. Bennett and Hacker have exposed Nagels claim that one cannot know what it is like to be a bat, or even a dissimilar human being, to be a point that sheds no real light on the nature of consciousness. In fact, there is little reason to believe that this statement is actually true in the first place. Why shouldnt one be able to accurately describe the life of a bat without having to transform his mind to that of a bat? It appears reasonable to suggest that imagining what it is like to be a bat can be successfully done by third person observation of the behavior of the animal in conjunction with an understanding of the bats perceptual and behavioral structure. Through enough research and experimentation a vivid depiction of a bats life can be constructed; a picture that eventually can be considered complete unless qualia is proven to exist. Fortunately the presumption that there is something it is like to have a conscious experience has been undercut by the logical problems that come with expressing attitudinal predicates when using this phrasing, along with the realization that qualia must be describing the objects of experience, not the experience itself. Nonetheless, at this point it is possible that a defender of qualia would object that I am misconstruing what is really meant by qualia, that each experience has a unique qualitative character that makes it distinct from any other experience and this is what cannot be observed.

I am not denying that listening to Bach is a different experience than listening to Rachmaninoff, or that tasting a strawberry is a different experience from seeing the color red. However I am putting forward that when one is asked what the distinct qualitative character is of a certain experience, like seeing red, they will fail to give a meaningful answer. They can say In my mind I see red like this, but this is without meaning unless said while pointing to what Wittgenstein called a picture of what is experienced (Bennett and Hacker 282). When a girl wants her hair dyed in a particular color, she does not just show up with the color in mind and says dye my hair this color, but she brings a picture or sample of that specific color and then can say this color. She is not pointing to any quale or any other subjective character to define the concept of red, since seeing that picture is the experience of seeing red, an experience that can be shared by others with normal color vision. The defender of qualia may say that this inability to express ones own mental image is indicative of the subjective and private nature of qualia. But it has already been shown that qualia are concerned with the properties of objects of experiences, and the experiences themselves are not objects that can be privately owned. Two people can enjoy or disdain the same experience despite the alleged unique and distinct nature of qualia. While the constraints of this paper have made it impossible to fully evaluate all the arguments for and against the existence of qualia, progress has been made in establishing what qualia are not. First qualia, and the idea that experiences have a certain feeling, are not what define consciousness. Secondly, qualia are not characterized by knowing something it is like to have an experience. Finally, qualia are not unique and distinct qualitative characters of experience. While an intriguing thought experiment, the existence of qualia is not established by the ideas presented in Nagels argument.

Works Cited Bennett, M.R., and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003. Print. Nagel, Thomas. What Is It like to Be a Bat. The Philosophical Review (1974). Print.