Why I Do Not Believe In Intrinsic Subjectivity

Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot, and also a picture of steam comes out of a picture of the pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot?

Imagine someone saying, "But I know how tall I am!" and laying his hand on top of his head to indicate it!

-- Wittgenstein

Let's say that Mundanius buys some new coffee and takes a taste.

Wow this coffee ☕ tastes incredible!

His friend Bloviatius, an avid coffee drinker himself, is curious and asks for some. To Bloviatius's great disappointment, Mundanius has purchased the cheap instant coffee, not the fancy gourmet coffee he was expecting.

Mundanius insists that the coffee is delicious while Bloviatius says that it --

Tastes like rancid motor oil!

If you could taste MY taste you would see how disgusting it is!

But that is impossible! Surely you could not have MY conscious experience!

Neither of you could ever *really* taste the other's taste! The matter is unresolvable. We are trapped within the confines of our heads. To escape is impossible!

Before Skepticus goes on about the Inverted Spectrum Hypothesis or something, I want to ask: How impossible is it really?

Many cognitive scientists and philosophers alike want to claim that there are intrinsically subjective properties that are in principle: ineffable, unsharable, and immediately apprehended by their "havers". So, they would say, 'tasting my taste' really is in principle impossible. I disagree.

I will argue that there simply are no intrinsically subjective experiences or properties as just described. I want to be clear that I am not arguing against the existence of subjective properties generally, just the so called in intrinsically subjective ones.

What is "Intrinsic Subjectivity"?

An intrinsically subjective property or experience is one which is in principle impossible for anyone but X to have. Mundanius could never, on this view, ever apprehend the subjective properties of experience that Skepticus has when he takes a sip of sub-par coffee. (For the sake of this argument I will treat intrinsically subjective properties, intrinsically subjective experiences and intrinsically subjective properties of experiences as all the same conceptually. I do not think this changes the nature or force of the argument at all.)

I think it can be agreed that intrinsically subjective properties are:

• $(A)$ Only in principle apprehendable by the subject
• $(B)$ Inherently ineffable

While subjective properties, generally, are:

• $(C)$ Only apprehended by the subject but may, in principle, be apprehended by others
• $(D)$ Difficult, perhaps practically impossible, to express or put into words (practically ineffable)

(by ineffable in this discussion, I will mean "not describable in any objective way") Note that defenders of the idea usually add that these properties are immediately apprehended by their "havers" without error. I will get to that later.

Clarifications

First, it will help to clear up a few confusions. When we wonder if we can have the "same experience" as others in everyday life we wonder things like "Will I get sunburned if you did?" or "Will I be as bored during this movie as my friend was?". That is not what we mean when we are discussing intrinsic subjectivity.

It would be silly to deny that "the taste" is not a sharable experience if "the taste" just meant that we were both tasting the same physical cup of coffee or the same brand. What is meant in reference to intrinsic subjectivity is some completely internal property of experience (not of coffee) that supposedly only the "haver of it" can have.

The Problem with "Only in principle apprehendable by the subject":

• $(A)$ Only in principle apprehendable by the subject

What's wrong with that? When Mundanius loves his instant coffee wouldn't Skepticus have to literally be (somehow) in Mundanius's consciousness in order to apprehend the experience that Mundanius has? This question is, I believe, misguided.

Let's examine further what can be meant by $(A)$. There are two senses in which we could mean $(A)$, logically and in the sense of metaphysical-possibility.

First, let's consider $(A)$ restated logically:

• $(E)$ M has an experience, X, which only counts as experience X by virtue of being M's experience

This sense is trivially true and uninteresting. Let's turn the to metaphysical-possibility sense:

• $(F)$ M has an experience, X. While X is an experience of some thing, Y, which is accessible to others, X itself cannot be had by other experiencers although other experiencers can have their own experiences of Y.

This we can sink our teeth into a bit and I think a thought experiment can help to show why it is wrong.

Suppose that I, in a parallel universe, live a life exactly identical to M's with regard to all physical aspects of it that would lead to M's having experience X, except for the fact that I am still me. The relevant facts obtain that would keep me the same person. When you ask me questions about myself, I respond as I would and my other preferences are those that I typically have. In this hypothetical life, I experience all of the coffee-relevant experiences that M does up until that moment. Every burning of the taste buds, and every neural-wiring is the same such that it is the very same measurable information signaling within my body as occurs in M's when he takes a sip. Of course, and defenders of intrinsic subjectivity would agree, my physical and functional reaction will be the same as M's.

It may be objected that the example is impossible. The objection might go that since I am still me then I could not also have the required physical traits to match M's. This objection either collapses into $(E)$ or is implausible. To deny the possibility of the thought experiment, avoiding the objection collapsing into $(E)$, one would have to deny that there is at least one possible world in which any two individuals could still meaningfully be 'distinct selves' yet have identical perceptual pathways for receiving a given stimulus. That seems highly unlikely. We can even simply imagine another scenario where M and I are identical to our normal-world selves up until the very second before we take a sip of coffee. At that second, all of my perceptual pathways, memories, and coffee relevant dispositions are made identical to M's. We take the "same sip", phenomenologically speaking, unless this change in pathways changes my identity somehow or is somehow different epiphenomenally. Either explanation seems less plausible than the theory which merely calls it the "same sip".

Returning to the comparison of my and M's experiences, where is the difference? If the same information signal went through the same physical channels, and I have the same reaction as M to the coffee, what grounds do we have for the claim that these are not the same experience? I think none.

The defender of intrinsically subjective properties might then claim that the property was never physical in the first place and so the thought experiment misses the point. This claim requires a defense of its own. I believe the defenses of this claim fail. I will come to that in a moment.

The Problem with "Inherently ineffable":

• $(B)$ Inherently ineffable

It is worth noting that $(B)$ could be true while $(A)$ was false. We could have inherently ineffable experiences that someone else could in principle have, but there would then be no way of ever knowing what the same was.

It is also worth noting that $(A)$ $\rightarrow$ $(B)$ because if some property X were effable, then I could somehow presumably find a way (however practically impossible) to have that experience (via the 'effability' of that information). If some property were only apprehendable by me, then it would not be effable because it if were another might apprehend it.

Nevertheless, I think $(B)$ is not a property experiences have. Consider:

$(G)$ If a property is fully expressible in information to a perceptual system it is, in principle, effable.

$(H)$ The brain creates our inner world solely by information-processing.

Unpacking $(G)$ a bit, it means that if something like the taste of coffee is fully expressible in information somehow, which $(H)$ gives us good reasons to believe is the case, then any experience we have is, in principle, effable.

$(H)$ is likely to be the most controversial among defenders of intrinsically subjective properties. Note that this is a different issue from the subject of Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument because to undermine $(B)$ we only need $(G)$. If there is some information, however complex, propositional, ability-based, etc. that could give us that experience, then $(B)$ is false of that experience.

$(H)$ might be rejected for two reasons. One, the defender of intrinsically subjective properties might object that $(H)$ is true, but that that information may not be computable by another information processing system by virtue of its nature. e.g. certain things are computable, but not by quantum computers. This is certainly not true of brain-to-brain interactions and is on shakey ground even in the quantum-computer-to-turing-machine case.

A second reason to reject $(H)$ might be believing that the brain creates our inner world by information-processing and some strongly-emergent property, that property being the intrinsically subjective one. There is, I think, little reason to believe in strong emergence.

Non-Physical Properties?

As I mentioned in the issues with $(A)$, the defender of intrinsically subjective properties might make the claim that the experiential property was never physical in the first place and so the thought experiment about M and my tastes misses the point.

How might the defender of intrinsically subjective properties have come to know that? It is typically claimed as obvious and the source is introspection or something like the aforementioned Knowledge Argument. Typically the primacy of the experience and the inability to be wrong about it is invoked in defense of this notion. I will argue here that the notion of immediate and error-proof apprehension of the "properties of ones experience" does not make sense and that the Knowledge Argument is misguided.

Let's look at introspection first:

$(I)$ From introspection, M knows that the property his experience has which is his "taste of coffee" is not a physical one. He can immediately apprehend it.

No one will argue that we do not have our sensations and that they are not experienced by us, but it does not follow we have privileged access to their metaphysical nature. To illustrate this point look at the following image:

What did you see?

How about this one:

Do you see one neon blue ring that overlaps the inner parts of the four outer rings?

You had a perception. Its full nature was not revealed to you. Additionally, your observation was theory-laden. Presumably, you saw one or the other first because of some predilection for one over the other. What reason do we have to suppose that when you introspect you are incorrigibly correct about the metaphysical nature of your experiences? I think none and so I reject $(I)$.

The second way that the defender of intrinsically subjective properties might argue that experiential properties are non-physical is via the Knowledge Argument for epiphenomenal qualia. This argument is misleading, to say the least, and I believe it fails to secure the conclusion that there are any non-physical properties of experience.

The argument goes like this, straight from Frank Jackson's 1982 Paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia":

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.… What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

We can summarize fairly:

1. Mary is a color scientist who is locked in a black and white room her whole life. Never seeing color.
2. While in the room, Mary learns "all the physical information there is to obtain" about red.
3. Mary is released from the room and sees red for the first time.
4. Mary gains knowledge upon seeing red.
5. Therefore, not all information about our experiences is physical.

Most objections to this argument focus on (4). I think, as Daniel Dennett points out, the problem is with (2). Can we really imagine what we would know if we had "all the physical information there is to obtain"? I think not. In an important sense, to have all the information is not the same as to know, propositionally, all the information. Consider that many trained musicians can recognize middle C but could not tell you that "middle C is $256Hz$". So if Mary has the information in this sense, certainly she gains nothing new, and if she does not, Jackson's argument fails because he has excluded one important sense of knowing or having information and expected us, ludicrously, to imagine having it.

Dennett gives the counter-example of two spies who use a torn piece of a Jello box as a "whose who" key. If the two spies meet and the torn box halves match, they know the other is not an imposter. The torn edge of the box contains a vast amount of information that would be extremely difficult to fake; NOT impossible to fake and completely comprised of physical information. This is the kind of information Mary would have if we took (2) seriously.

Without a reasonable defense for non-physical properties and without another convincing argument why something like $(H)$ is false, I do not see a way to defend intrinsically subjective properties. Additionally, the high likelihood of our being mistaken about the nature of our experiences in conjunction with taking seriously a physical and information-based model of our consciousness leaves us with no reason to take the notion of intrinsically subjective properties seriously.

Conclusion

In conclusion subjective properties in the sense of:

• $(C)$ Only apprehended by the subject but may, in principle, be apprehended by others
• $(D)$ Difficult, perhaps practically impossible, to express or put into words (practically ineffable)

make perfect sense.

However, no experiences or properties have been shown to be:

• $(A)$ Only in principle apprehendable by the subject
• $(B)$ Inherently ineffable

Nor do I believe that any sense can be made of these supposedly "intrinsically subjective" properties or experiences by some other argument.

I believe $(A)$ is either trivially true (in the logical identity sense) or it is simply false.

I believe something could only be $(B)$ if it belonged to an information processing system that could encrypt its own data in a way that could, in principle, never be decrypted by another. Indeed, some possible encryption is so strong that it would take until the heat-death of the universe to decrypt, but even that is in principle decryptable.

And, as to the status of immediate knowledge of non-physical properties via introspection or arguments for such non-physical properties, we should remain unconvinced.

I hope to have dispelled in the reader the initially plausible view that there are experiences which can be "intrinsically subjective" in any important sense.