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my conscious experience will actually fade, or, rather, in piecemeal fashion will fail to
manifest itself. But that doesn't mean there will be some overarching consciousness of
this fading or limiting. There is no reason to think I should consciously feel this loss.
Again, to lose a bit of consciousness is not the same thing as being conscious of losing
something.
Once we recognize this distinction, it isn't so clear that we are faced with an absurd
situation. As my internal parts, say the realizers of my visual experiences, are replaced by
their non-conscious functional duplicate parts, certain states that used to be conscious
experiences for me will cease to be conscious. So, say, when Qr is replaced by Zr, though
Qg is still in place, it might be that I cease to have reddish experiences even though I
continue to have greenish ones. What makes it seem absurd is the appearance of my
consciously observing the loss of my reddish experiences, and yet supposedly still being
cognitively unaware of it. But there's nothing in the story about
end p.155
losing Qr that entails consciousness of losing my reddish experience. It just goes, that's
all. When I see green things, I consciously experience them, and when I see red things, I
don't.
Of course such a situation does seem quite odd. If I could be consciously experiencing
some colors but not others my consciousness would be fragmented in a way that seems
quite hard to imagine. In particular, consider the case in which I'm looking at red and
green objects simultaneously. One is driven to ask, What on earth would that be like?
As long as we're careful about what that question means, it seems perfectly appropriate.
But it's awfully tempting to take it to mean that there must be a way it is like to
experience fragmentation of consciousness, and that sneaks in the assumption that there
would be consciousness of the hole in experience caused by the substitution of Zr for Qr.
Again, a hole in consciousness is not consciousness of a hole.
Though recognizing the distinction between a hole in conscious experience and
experience of a hole in consciousness goes some way to alleviate the sense of
incoherence in the replacement scenario, one might still legitimately wonder about
explicitly introspective states. As I mentioned above, both before and after the
replacement I might entertain the judgment that I am now experiencing reddishly. The
assumption of functional identity seems to guarantee that even after my reddish
experiences have disappeared I will still judge that I have them. This seems paradoxical.
But here again, we have to be careful about just what it is that seems paradoxical. It is
very easy, as the preceding discussion about the distinction between fading consciousness
and consciousness of fading showed, to sneak in some consciousness where it doesn't
belong and thereby induce a sense of absurdity into the scenario. When one imagines
apparent but supposedly illusory introspective awareness of having a reddish experience
it could certainly seem quite absurd. After all, if you are apparently having a reddish
experience, then you are having one, right? It's not like apparently seeing something
red having a reddish experience but not really seeing something red (as in an optical
illusion, or hallucination). With conscious experience the appearance is the reality. So if
turning into a zombie leaves one's apparent experiences the same, there doesn't seem to
be any difference between being conscious and being a zombie after all.
However, to characterize an introspective judgment to the effect that I am having a
reddish experience as apparently experiencing reddishly is to endow the judgment with
consciousness not only that, but with reddish qualitative character as well. But reddish
qualitative character is precisely what one would lose once Zr was substituted for Qr.
Perhaps a better way to think about what would be going on when I introspectively judge
that I'm having a reddish experience even though I've lost the capacity is to see it as
similar to cases of anosognosia. In such cases, subjects with various sorts of lesions lose
the ability to see over large portions of their visual field, or sometimes lose the ability to
notice what is happening to one entire side of their body (hemineglect), yet will sincerely
deny having any deficit at all.
end p.156
When confronted with what would appear to be incontrovertible evidence of their deficit,
such patients will confabulate wildly and maintain their denial. Similarly, after my Qr
parts are replaced by Zr parts, I would cease to have any reddish experiences, yet I would
sincerely deny having lost any part of my conscious experience. Of course the difference
between the two cases is that my loss in our replacement scenario would not be
accompanied by any functional loss, so there would be no way to provide me with
evidence of my loss, and thus no need to confabulate. But I don't see that this difference
matters for the issue at hand. We at least have some model for how one could sincerely
judge that something was going on in one's experience even though it wasn't. Admittedly
it's hard to quite imagine what that would be like, but that goes for the anosognosia cases
as well, and no one claims they are impossible, or incoherent. They can't be; they actually
happen.
The response, so far, to the replacement argument is this. What makes the idea of
gradual, or piecemeal loss of conscious experience, together with the preservation of
functional equivalence, seem so absurd, is that one is sneaking into the picture
consciousness that doesn't belong. When one imagines that one doesn't notice the missing
experience, one has in mind a kind of noticing that involves conscious awareness. So then
it seems as if there's conscious awareness both present and absent at the same time. But
that isn't what the replacement scenario involves. The sort of noticing with respect to
which one wouldn't notice the missing conscious experience is non-conscious itself. It
isn't that one consciously experiences having a reddish experience even though one isn't
having one. The consciousness of a reddish experience is just missing.
Though I think this response does move us in the right direction, it still leaves an
important issue unresolved. For what we are inclined to wonder about now is the
distinction between conscious and non-conscious belief (or judgment). It seems clear that
anyone who recognizes a distinction between conscious and non-conscious states has to
recognize such a distinction within the realm of cognitive states. Clearly there is a
difference between those beliefs (thoughts, judgments, etc.) I'm explicitly considering in
my conscious, waking moments, and those that are either latent because I'm not currently
considering them they're not occurrent states or are deeply unconscious in the way
that, say, my knowledge of grammar is supposed to be unconscious and inaccessible
according to the Chomskian linguist.
So, when my Qr parts are replaced by Zr parts, and I therefore no longer have reddish
experiences, what happens to my conscious beliefs to the effect that I'm having reddish
experiences? On the one hand, given the inability to experience reddishly anymore, it
would seem that I could no longer consciously believe that I'm experiencing reddishly.
On the other hand, given that the assumption of functional identity seems to entail the
preservation of my previous beliefs' propositional contents, it looks as if the contents of
my conscious beliefs must remain the same.4 Since it would violate functional identity for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
