We certainly each have some privileged access, but we should not overrate its significance. I suspect that our access to our own thoughts provides more quantity but does not seem to bring much more quality: our self-reflections reveal very little about the nature or causes of what we can see of our own mental activities. Indeed, our self-assessments are sometimes so inept that our friends may have better ideas about how we think. That’s one reason why I suggested that we mainly represent ourselves in the same ways that we use to describe our friends.
Joan: Still, one thing is sure: none of my friends can feel my pain. I surely have privileged access to that.
It is true that the nerves from your knee to your brain convey signals that none of your friends can receive. But it’s almost the same when you talk to a friend through a telephone. ‘Privileged access’ does not imply magic; it’s merely a matter of privacy. No matter how private those lines may be, there still must be some processes that try to assign some significance to the signals that get to your brain from your knee. That’s why Joan might find herself wondering, “Is this the same pain that I felt last winter, when my ski boot did not release quickly enough?”
Joan: I’m not even sure that it was the same knee. But isn’t something missing here? If sensations are nothing but signals on nerves, then why are there such distinctive differences between the tastes of sour and sweet, or between the colors of red and blue?
Feelings are hard to describe because they are complex!
Our folk-psychology still maintains that our sensations have certain ‘basic’ or ‘irreducible’ qualities that, somehow, stand all by themselves and cannot be reduced to anything else. For example, each color like Green and each flavor like Sweet has its own ‘ineffable’ character, which is, therefore, unexplainable. For if such qualities do not have any smaller parts or properties, then there’s no possible way to describe them.
Philosophers call this the problem of ‘Qualia,” and some them argue that to understand the nature of those qualities is a fundamental problem of philosophy, because they have no physical properties. To be sure, it is not hard to see (or measure) how much more Red is one spot than another or, at least to some degree, how much sweeter is one peach than another; however (those philosophers claim) such comparisons tell you nothing whatever about the nature of the experience of seeing redness or tasting sweetness.
I want to discuss this briefly here, because some readers might object that if we cannot explain such ‘subjective’ things, that would undermine the whole idea that we can explain the human mind entirely in terms of physical things (such as our brain’s machinery). In other words, if the sensation of sweetness can never be measured or weighed, or detected in any physical way, then it must exist in a separate mental world, where it cannot possibly interact with any physical instruments.
Well, let’s first observe that this claim must be wrong, because it is self-contradictory. For, if you can tell me that you have experienced sweetness then, somehow, that sensation has caused your mouth to move! So clearly, there must be some ‘physical instrument’ in your brain that recognized the mental activity that embodies your experience. In other words, we are simply facing, again, the same kind of problem that we solved in the previous section: we simply need another one of those internal “condition-detecting” diagrams!
Of course, there is something missing here, because we do not yet quite know how to connect those condition detectors. However, so far as I can see, this is merely another instance of what I called the “Easy is Hard Paradox.” Indeed, it should be no more than a very few years before we can ask a brave philosopher to enter a suitable scanning device so that we can discover which brain-cells best distinguish the conditions that we wish to detect.
In other words, to understand how feelings work in more detail, we’ll have to stop looking for simple answers, and start to explore more complex processes. When a ray of light strikes your retina, signals flow from that spot to your brain, where they affect other resources, which then transmit other kinds of reports that then influence yet other parts of your brain.[210]
At the same time signals from the sensors in your ears, nose, and skin will travel along quite different paths, and all these streams of information may come to affect, in various ways, the descriptions the rest of your mind is using. So, because those pathways are so complex and indirect, when you try to tell someone about what sensation you feel, or what you are experiencing, you’ll be telling a story based on sixth-hand reports that use information that has gone through many kinds of transformations. So despite what some philosophers claim, we have no basis to insist that what we call our ‘sense of ‘experience’ is uniquely direct.
The old idea that sensations are ‘basic’ may have been useful in its day, the way the four kinds of ‘atoms’ of antiquity were supposed to be elementary. But now we need to recognize that our perceptions are far less ‘direct,’ because they are affected by what our other resources may want or expect. This might relate to the fact that we sometimes clearly ‘see’ objects, which do not ‘really’ exist.
We like to attribute ‘qualities’ to stimuli—instead of to the more complex activities that they influence in the rest of our brains. Consider the two different feelings that you get when I first touch your right hand and then touch your left. How would you describe the difference between those two kinds of sensations? In some ways, they seem different, yet in other ways they seem similar. To compare them you would need to use descriptions that your resources have made, and that comparison will depend on the details of how those resources were built (or have learned) to process those two kinds of evidence. Such a process must involve quite a few different levels and stages, perhaps extending to some self-reflection. This suggests that what we call ‘qualities’ might mainly reflect the ways we assess the relations between events in our brains.[211]
What would it mean to express what you’re feeling?” Perhaps it is no accident that, literally, ‘expression’ means squeezing. But when you try to “express yourself”, there is no single thing to squeeze; a typical human mental state is too complex to project through our tiny channels or language and gesture. However, your brain is equipped has many resources, each of which can make a description of some aspect of certain parts of your state of mind. Then, although some of these may disagree, you—that is, some of your language resources—can formulate some statement of “How I feel” by selecting from among those other descriptions—perhaps by simply choosing the one whose signals are the most intense.
But, of course you cannot describe your entire state, because this is something that’s constantly changing. At one moment you’re thinking about your foot; then your attention is drawn to the sky; next you notice a change in some sound, or turn to look at something that moves—and then you notice that you are noticing these. There’s no way for you to be ‘simply aware of yourself’ because ‘you’ are a river of rivaling interests, always enmeshed in cascades of attempts to describe its rapidly changing currents.
210
In fact, a single spot of red may not be sensed as being red; in general the colors we see depend, to a large extent, on which other colors are in its neighborhood. Also, some readers might be surpised to hear that the visual system in a human brain includes dozens of different processing centers.
211
Those touches seem different in ones low-level descriptions, because each relates to a different