The+Subjectivity+of+Consciousness

=**Subjectivity: Thomas Nagel**=

One of the persisting qualities of consciousness is its subjective nature--the sense that consciousness is decidedly dependent on a subject and a context. Thomas Nagel has been a consistent defender of this quality in both his works on the nature of scientific knowledge, such as //[|The View From Nowhere]// and in philosophy of mind, such as his famous paper //[|What is it Like to be a Bat?]//

Nagel's most famous argument is against physicalism, but is based on the inherent subjectivity of consciousness. One way to construe this argument is as follows:
 * 1) Physicalism claims that facts about mental states are reducible to facts about brains and behavior.
 * 2) If physicalism is true, then if we know all the facts about the brain and behavior of an organism, then we also know all the facts about its mental states.
 * 3) We could know all the facts about the brain and behavior of a bat.
 * 4) **But we can never know** //**what it is like**// **to be a bat.**
 * So, there is a fact about the bat's mental states that we cannot know.
 * 1) Thus, physicalism is false.

Premise 4 is the key claim about the subjectivity of consciousness. Because we are not ourselves bats, we can never know the nature of bat consciousness. This is because one must be a bat to have the subjective conscious experience of a bat. He relates that the closest we may come to understanding another perspective is by attempting to imagine the world, "in terms of certain general features of subjective experience- subjective universals" (43). We can imagine what bats experience, like what it's like to fly or to eat bugs, but recognizing even these general objective traits of subjectivity cannot touch on a true and complete experience.

 ** Objection to Premise 3 ** The jump from Premise 2 to Premise 3 is unprecedented. To state that if we knew all of the workings of an organism's brain and its behavior then we would know its mental states does not result in the possibility of knowing the total workings of that organism’s brain, in which this case is a bat. That is an assumed possibility and denies the validity of Premise 3.

Nagel is suggesting that "minds" are a feature of reality that themselves are not available for "objective" consideration--for consideration from a view from nowhere. He does not deny that an essential "view from nowhere" could exist, but asserts that such a view is out of our perspective driven nature. He chooses to recognize objectivity and subjectivity as interrelated and that a comprehensive view of the world requires this acknowledgment. Nagel also asserts that although humans cannot attain to physical objectivity (the removal of all perspectives until quantitative facts are reached that are true from all points of view), they can develop a certain amount of mental objectivity (the human perspective that attempts to imagine other points of view apart from his own). This qualification of the problem of conscious subjectivity recognizes the complexity of the world around us and indicates that the oversimplifications of physicalism and phenomenologicalism aren't adequate.

In the first chapter of his book, //The Incompleteness of Objective Reality//, Nagel suggests that the very concept of objective reality is a construct that we develop over time through experience. He outlines this process in three steps:
 * 1) We realize that what we see is caused by our environment.
 * 2) We come to recognize that the our environment impacts objects even outside our direct experience.
 * 3) We then build an idea that our environment exists outside of our understanding, and in fact, outside our observation.
 * 4) We end up with a notion that there is an objective reality outside our individual experiences. (AM, 37)

Nagel argues that for the most part, the world must be viewed subjectively. He poses the question, "Am I, or are you, really the sort of thing that could be one of the particular creatures in the world?". The mind is a very interesting and complex thing. However, what the mind experiences is due to the orchestrated input of all its senses. To sense yourself as part of the world is as common as breathing. In an objective and scientific reality, it is easy to place yourself in this world, such as through scientific evolution and the processes of life reproducing itself. In a subjective reality, to question your placement in the world would argue a question of how something such as a human being can be created out of nothing. Within the subjective reality a biblical faith of creation can exist. Since subjective reality does not deal with the factual evidence of things, belief in a biblical creation can be considered a faith issue and not a factual issue.

**A] The ‘No Contrast’ argument.** [Nagel, p. 15]
==== There are cases in which, if there are cases in which p is true, then there must also be cases in which p is **not** true. [premise] ====

 Examples

 * 1) ==== If there is counterfeit money, then there must be (or have been) genuine money too. ====
 * 2) ==== If there are fake flowers, there must be (or have been) real flowers. ====
 * 3) ==== If promises are sometimes broken, promises must also sometimes be (or have been) kept. ====
 * 4) ==== If people dream, then it must also sometimes be the case that someone is awake (and not dreaming). ====
 * 5) ==== If people sometimes hallucinate, then veridical sense experience must sometimes occur. ====
 * 6) ==== Hence, it is not possible that all experience is a hallucination, or a dream. [Conclusion] ====

Subjective Experience: The connection of Nagel and Mary (Frank Jackson)

The premise of physicalism is that by knowing all the facts of the “mental state” of the brain and its behaviors one can know the mental state of any being in existence. Nagel’s argument against the objective reality is: with all objective knowledge one still cannot know what it truly means to be something else, because that other being is unique. Its uniqueness derives from the experience it gains subjectively. In turn each experience is especially unique in relation to the small period of time that it takes place within. Thus reality is made of two pieces the objective and the subjective. In response to Frank Jackson's Mary argument, Nagel might say that Mary is a fully operating objective creature (all objective knowledge), whose subjective reality has been confined in the limits of her black and white room. When Mary has contact with the color red, for the first time, she has a new piece of reality. This piece is part of her subjective reality, experience, and this experience could never be brought about by her objective knowledge. Nagel states that "The physical has been so irresistibly attractive, and has so dominated ideas of what there is, that attempts have been made to beat everything into its shape and deny the reality of anything that cannot be so reduced. As a result, the philosophy of the mind is populated with extremely implausible positions."

=Subjectivity of a Child=

Nagel writes: "Clearly, there must be some alternative to the assumption that anything said about other persons has to be given a reading which places it firmly in the familiar external world, comprehensible by means of the physical conception of objectivity. That leads straight to solipsism: the inability to make sense of the idea of real minds other than one's own." (pp. 42)

"The concept of mind, though tied to subjectivity, is not restricted to what can be understood in terms of our own subjectivity-what we can translate into the terms of our own experience. We include the subjectively unimaginable mental lives of other species, for example, in our conception of the real world without betraying their subjectivity by means of a behaviorist, functionalist, or physicalist reduction. We know there's something there, something perspective, even if we don't know what it is or even how to think about it. The question is whether this acknowledgment will allow us to develop a way to think about it.

"Of course one possibility is that this particular process can go no further. We can have a concept of mind general enough to allow us to escape solipsism and ethnocentrism, but perhaps we cannot transcend the general forms of human experience and the human viewpoint." (pp. 43)

A child’s imagination is one of the most powerful tools for understanding the mind. Though a child does not have the gained objective knowledge that adults use to relate to the world at large, it has a familiarity with the consciousness that supersedes that of any grown-up. One might say that the "sensory perception" of the consciousness is imagination, thus making imagination the most formidable way for a child to begin understanding objective reality. The greater the use of a child's imagination, the deeper its understanding of the consciousness.

It would be impossible for a child to believe in solipsism. Because of their "sensory perception" of consciousness, so exponentially more acute than ours, they so readily believe in anything and everything; more often than not, they need to be convinced that the opposite of solipsism is true: that there //aren't// an infinite amount of people in the universe.

=** Derren Brown- Illusionist **= Another interesting area of subjective reality poses a simple question: How is the person not conscious of everything that is going on around them? Does the mind simply grasp the //big picture,// so to say, of life, and leave out the small details? For example, Darren Brown is a famous British mentalist, illusionist, and skeptic, as a YouTube sensation he has used mind tricks to baffle random people, whether it is in a person swap or even in pickpocketing a person who is directly in front him. This amazes me and I simply question the concentration of the subjective mind and the present reality the mind's eye experiences every day. [|Derren Brown Person Swap] [|Derren Brown-Pickpocket]

It seems like this could potentially be called one of Nagel's "subjective universals." The brain in its processes has its strengths and weaknesses, and we can use insight into the processes behind why we make such errors to try to construct what is consistent about subjectivity.

=**Lazy Consciousness** = It is true what was said in the Darren Brown section, many times it seems true that our consciousness seems to become lazy. For instance, when you have glasses on top of your head and moments later you are looking to see where they are. Yet you had just put them on your head. Your senses become accustomed to the glasses being atop your head an your mind no longer actively processes this information. This begs the question: to what else can a person's consciousness become accustomed? Surely, it must be harder for your senses to fail you with regards to your own body. Take illusions, like the ones that Darren Brown does. In mere seconds the brain can not recall who it was just talking to. Just like the glasses, how can this be that we forget, and/or don't realize that a change has occurred? The subjective mind seems to have too many inconsistencies in it that may not enable us to unlock it.

= Attempting To Understand The Subjective Experience = Chalmers suggests that a complete theory of consciousness will have two components, physical laws and what he calls psychophysical laws. Chalmers goes on to explain that the greatest hindrance in the pursuit of these laws is a lack of data [20].

In attempting to derive some of these psychophysical laws, what kind of data could be gathered in attempting to understand the subjective experience? Let’s consider the thought experiment of Mary once more. Upon seeing red for the first time, Mary is introduced to a new bit of subjective consciousness. Obviously, the big question about consciousness is, “what gave rise to this subjective experience?”

Obviously, some part of Mary contributed to the experience; but, also, some part of “red” must have contributed to her experience as well. Is it possible to identify certain constant qualities of “red” that induce subjective episodes in anyone? Perhaps there are certain aspects to “red subjective consciousness” that are uniform in everyone. Expanding this thought, perhaps all colors share certain base qualities that produce similar results to its recipients.

Perhaps identifying certain foundational subjective qualities produced by external stimuli can provide some basis for deriving some of these psychophysical laws. Each piece of the puzzle is a bridge to more fully understanding the subjective experience. = Empathy? =

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Nagel, in his paper “What is it Like to be a Bat?” concludes that we can never know what it is like to be a bat. Following this reasoning, we likewise can never know what it is like to be a dog, a bird, a snake, etc. Extending this argument even further, we can actually never know what it is like to be another human being. ======

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For example, following this line of reasoning, we may know how we feel when we burn ourselves, but we cannot fully know exactly how someone else feels when they are burned. We think we know how someone else feels, but we don’t (and we can’t according to Nagel). When we think we know how someone feels, we label this quasi-knowledge as sympathy. But to advance to the intimate knowledge that we call empathy, seems to be impossible given the restrictions of the bat argument. ======

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Is Ismael making this same point when he writes about the pain he feels when a knife enters his flesh? He explains that the event is one to which __he__ bears a special relation. He goes on to say that each of us has consciousness of certain states that others do not have direct access to [51]. Can we infer from these opinions that only sympathy, and not empathy, can actually exist? ======

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So, does empathy really exist or does it not? And if it does exist, if we are following Nagel’s logic, then it would seem to exist only as the result of some type of universal consciousness that all living things, or at least all humans, share. ======

=﻿Criticism on Subjectivity of Consciousness=

We must all keep in mind the purpose of philosophy in order to maintain its usefullness, aside from mental excercise. Although there is no single and correct purpose of philosophy, I believe the purpose I will explain is most beneficial.

The purpose of philosophy is to ask and attempt to answer questions now that scientists will ask again and solve later.

Philosophers are meant to be the catalysts of scientific discovery and when the question of who is correct becomes more important than what is correct, philosophers are no longer philosophers.