Fading knowledge of qualia

I am one of those people who do not have vivid memories of pains.

Suppose I stub my toe. While the toe is hurting, I know what the toe’s hurting feels like. After it stops hurting, for a while I still know what that felt like. But I know it less and less well as my memory fades, until eventually I know very little how it felt like. The whole process might take only a few minutes.

Thus, that mysterious “knowing what it’s like” involving qualia is something that comes with a parameter that varies as to how well you know it.

This should worry physicalists. Thin physicalists should worry because it doesn’t seem that the fading corresponds to any knowledge of the underlying physical reality. Thick physicalists who think that Mary just acquires a new recognitional concept when she sees red should worry, because it does not seem that there is any gradual loss of a concept. I continue to have the same “that experience” concept (the demonstrative “that” points to the same past experience, and does so in a first-personal way) and the recognitional abilities it enables (I can tell if another pain is like that one or not), even as my knowledge of what “that experience” is like fades.

It’s also not completely clear what a dualist should say about the fading of the knowledge. Normally, when knowledge fades, what happens is either that we lose details (as when I forget much of what I once learned in school about the Metis uprising), or we find the dispositional knowledge harder to make occurrent. But the fading is neither of these. Maybe what is happening is that our present knowledge becomes a less good representation of what it is the knowledge of.

An argument against naturalism from the concept of the numinous

1. If naturalism about our minds is true, then the correct account of intentionality is causal.

2. On a causal account of intentionality, our possession of an irreducible concept is caused by something which falls under that concept.

3. The concept of the numinous is irreducible.

4. Therefore, if naturalism about our minds is true, our possession of the concept of the numinous is caused by something numinous. (1–3)

5. If there is anything numinous, then naturalism in general is false.

6. If naturalism about our minds is not true, then naturalism in general is false.

7. So, naturalism in general is false. (4–6)

What do I mean by “the numinous”? Since I claim it to be irreducible, I had better not try to define it. But I can point to it by means of our experiences of the holy, the uncanny, etc.: see Rudolf Otto’s book on the holy.

I think the best objection to the argument is to say that numinous can be reduced to the negation of the natural. But that objection seems to me to be mistaken. Imagine some simple particle-like thing that doesn’t interact with anything else in a way that is governed by the laws of nature. That thing wouldn’t be numinous. Likewise, not all magic is numinous: quite a bit of the magic in the Harry Potter stories is not numinous at all (there is nothing numinous about the chocolate frogs).

Absolute relativistic simultaneity

If we accept relativity theory as providing a metaphysically correct theory of time, the folk concept of temporal simultaneity needs revision. The standard way to revise it has been to relativize it to a reference frame. Instead of simultaneity being a binary relation between events (A is simultaneous with B) it becomes a ternary relation between events and a frame (A is simultaneous with B in F).

But another revision of the folk concept is possible: We keep simultaneity a binary relation, and specify that two events are simultaneous if and only if they are colocated in spacetime (this is roughly the same as saying that they are simultaneous according to every frame). Spatially distant events, on this revision, are never simultaneous.

The downside of the absolute simultaneity revision is that a lot of first-order
simultaneity judgments become false. Leibniz and Newton were not developing calculus simultaneously. I am not typing this at the same time as my daughter is playing a game on another laptop. Etc.

The upside is that colocation is a much more fundamental concept given relativity theory than the concept of a reference frame.

So we have a choice: We can keep our ordinary first-order judgments as to what events are in fact simultaneous or we can preserve the arity of the simultaneity relation and the judgment about the fundamentality of simultaneity. I think cases of revision of ordinary concepts, preserving ordinary first-order judgments tends to trump other things. So I am inclined to think the standard revision is superior as a way of doing justice to the language.

But the absolute revision may be better as a philosophical heuristic. For we might think that fundamental philosophical concepts should be frame-invariant, like fundamental physical concepts are.

A schema for theistic arguments

1. We think thoughts that are about Fness.
2. There is no good naturalistic explanation of how our F-thoughts manage to make claims about reality.
3. The best explanation of how our thoughts succeed in being about Fness, of how our F-thoughts have intentionality, involves God.

As far as I know, the first to give an argument of this form was Descartes, and he contributed the first two of the examples below. Examples of Fs that might fit in this argument schema include:

• God
• infinity
• duty
• truth
• reference
• metaphysical possibility
• good
• proper function
• normative
• numinous
• objectively beautiful

The point in this line of argument isn't that these properties depend on God. Rather, our grasp of these properties either is given to us by God, directly or not.

A related argument schema is to ask for the explanation of how we know F-facts.

[I may end up enlarging this list from time to time by editing this post. At least one of the entries is due to a commenter--see comments below.]

An anti-sceptical argument schema

1. Concept C is not further analyzable.
2. If C is an actually-had (by a human being) concept that is not further analyzable, then C is possibly satisfied.
3. If C is an actually-had concept that is not further analyzable, then, probably, C is actually satisfied.
4. Someone actually has the concept C.
5. Therefore, both possibly and probably there is something that has C.

Plausible cases: causation, materiality, possibility, goodness, consciousness, numinousness, etc.

Is knowledge a natural concept?

Consider the following argument:

1. The best accounts of "x knows p" are conjunctive, i.e., of the form R₁(x,p) & R₂(x,p) & ... (with at least two conjuncts).
2. Therefore, probably, knowledge is a conjunctive concept. (See this post and this one)
3. No conjunctive concept is natural.
4. Therefore, knowledge is not a natural concept.

Alternately, one could claim that knowledge is a natural concept, and hence the best accounts of "x knows p" are false.