Review of: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on consciousness. Understanding different concepts of consciousness, and the three problems: what, why, and how.

Observations

What is the difference between qualitative states of consciousness (qualia) and phenomenal states? Are phenomenal states the whole, comprised out of multiple independent qualia?

According to the article, a ‘phenomenal state’ describes the broader structure of experience that is conscious in the ‘what is it like to be that structure’ sense. The term ‘phenomenal state’ is “applied to the overall structure of experience and involves far more than sensory qualia”. More specifically it includes how different qualia relate to each other, for instance spatially (such as within the visual field), temporally (such as sounds in a song), or conceptually. So in this sense a phenomenal state is at least partially composed of both basic (sensory) qualia and these ‘organizational’ aspects between the qualia. The naming seems a bit tricky here: Are these ‘organizational’ components of phenomenal states also qualia (but of a different kind than sensory ones), or should we consider them as something else entirely that might not actually be conscious in the same sense? It seems to me that the former view aligns more with the thick view of phenomenal states while the latter corresponds to the thin view if we assume that the (non-sensory qualia) ‘organizational’ components of phenomenal states are not conscious.

Is consciousness a fundamental property of the world, or not?

  • Life, for example, is not a fundamental concept. Things can be alive or living, but life itself doesn’t exist as a concept beyond this.
  • In contrast, electromagnetic fields are fundamental physical phenomena.
  • What about consciousness?
    • Does this boil down to the debate over dualism?
    • Our consensus view at the moment (except crazy Francesco who thinks property dualism could also be true) - consciousness isn’t a fundamental concept, it arises from matter or computation somehow.

Where do we stand on thin vs thick phenomenal states?

  • thin - Phenomenal properties are limited to basic sensory qualia. Conscious ‘what is it likeness’ experience is nothing more than the sum of multiple ‘raw feels’.
  • thick - Phenomenal states also incorporate associations and memories related to what is perceived. In this sense, the whole organizational structure of a conscious experience, not just its basic constituents, has a phenomenal character.
  • Our consensus is that the thin view is too limiting, so we align more with thick.

In the above distinction we consider phenomenal states to consist of the whole set of properties make up the ‘what is it likeness’ of a conscious experience.

We also talked about the possibility of a ‘thick minus thin’ view where a phenomenal state is fully described by its organization, i.e. there are no fundamental building blocks like ‘redness’ or ‘pain’. The idea here is that redness has no fundamentally distinct property compared to other qualia, but it is defined by its associations to other concepts.

Conclusions

Couldn’t analyse everything in detail - there was too much to cover. But this will serve as a good framework to refer back to for our future readings and help us to have consistent definitions of various terms. There are a multitude of references leading us in different interesting directions.

Random Musings

Is there a fundamental “experience” associated with viewing colours?

  • Does it feel like something to perceive a colour, before associations with that colour are triggered?
  • Is there some “base quale” that is always triggered when viewing the same colour? Do the experiences of the sea, the sky, and a blue car have something in common?
  • Would two babies viewing colours for the first time have different experiences, if one were viewing blue and the other red, since those colours don’t yet mean anything?
  • Colour is an interesting case, in which we can easily define all possible colours, but this doesn’t really help us define the experiences associated with them?