Topics Consciousness

Question I'm currently preparing for my A-level philosophy exam and am stuck on how a logical behaviourist would respond to the problem of qualia? The problem being that the 'what-is-likeness' of experience fails to be accounted for as there is no behaviour which reflects this sensation. So how would the behaviourist respond? or would they even deem qualia as a problem for their thesis? Thanks.

Accepted:
April 5, 2012

Comments

This is a tough matter. The classic paper on this you might cite is Thomas Nagel's "What is it Like to Be a Bat" PHilosophical Review 1974, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge 1979, 165-180. Nagel argued that a behavioral (and anatomical, third-person) analysis of bats would not disclose / capture / reveal the conscious state of what it is like to be a bat (the qualia involved). T.L.S. Sprigge came up with a similar line of reasoning at roughly the same time. I believe you may find his work in the OUP volume The Importance of Subjectivity. I actually think that behaviorists and their descendents (functionalists) do fail on this count to get at the intrinsic nature of subjective experience. Most of us (or so I believe) who take up this position hold that subjective states of consciousness are immediately apparent and (in a sense) require no argument on their behalf. Perhaps the best reply is the claim that those of us who appeal to qualia leave us with something entirely mysterious from a scientific point of view. Perhaps Nagel and other are simply begging the question by assuming there is a "what it is like" that has any more relevance than thinking there is a "what it is like" to be a stone. Do a google for "Daniel Dennett on Animal Minds" and note how he replies to Nagel.

You refer to "there is no behaviour which reflects this sensation"...That might give you another line of reasoning to develop. If there is no behaviour (including speech) that reflects a sensation, how might one meaningfully talk about the sensation? Here you might do some research (perhaps starting with the free and online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) on the Private Language Argument. The argument has many forms, and I personally think that the originator of the argument, Wittgenstein (d1951) recognized the reality of what might be called qualia (in his Philosophical Investigations, he writes --mysteriously?--that pain is not something, but it is not nothing), but it may be of use.

Good luck on the A-level exam! Dennett is probably your best bet, though I do sympathize with a line that Dennett cites as an objection to his view. He reports that Wilfred Sellars (a famous American philosopher who died in 1989) once told Dennett over a bottle of Chambertin: "But Dan, qualia are what make like worth living!" (See page 383 of Consciousness Explained).