Psychophysical Harmony

I wanted to write about the argument from psychophysical harmony against naturalism, even though it has no force for those like me who think that talk of qualia and phenomenality in general is confused. For the argument to make any sense at all, we will first have to assume that such considerations as the Knowledge Argument (i.e. the Mary's Room thought experiment from Frank Jackson) have persuaded us that physicalism is inadequate for the task of accounting for phenomenal experience. The argument from psychophysical harmony then goes farther, suggesting that there cannot be any sort of neutral natural explanation at all for the mysterious appropriateness of our experience in representing the physical world. Instead we might need to invoke God, or if not God then perhaps some other benevolent purposeful force or principle such as John Leslie's axiarchism.

First let's look at what the argument actually is. There's a good presentation of the argument in this paper by Brian Cutter and Dustin Crummet, or you could watch from the linked part of this video where Philip Goff gives his take on it and where it leads him. Of course I'll try to summarise some of the arguments here also.

From here on out, I'm going to be adopting a false persona. I'm going to pretend, for the sake of argument, that I believe in qualia (that I am a qualiaphile). I'm probably going to portray a somewhat unsophisticated caricature of a qualiaphile, both because I cannot easily inhabit this mode of thought and because a simple qualiaphile's world view will hopefully serve to get the point across simply, even if a real qualiaphile could make it more plausible. So I'll be helping myself to an ersatz belief in some ideas that Daniel Dennett proposes (in Consciousness Explained and elsewhere) to ridicule the views of qualiaphiles: namely a "Cartesian theatre" where qualia are presented for the viewing pleasure of some sort of homunculus that lives in the mind, and "figment", the hypothetical mental substance with which the qualia of colours are painted. But I'm going to limit this qualiaphilia more or less to sensory qualia. I'm going to maintain the view that beliefs and desires and other intentional states are essentially functional -- that is I will not adopt a belief in cognitive phenomenology. I will also assume that standard naturalism in the sense of physical causal closure obtains -- i.e. I will reject libertarian free will and any role for phenomenal consciousness in explaining behaviour. OK, here goes!

The basic idea is that we are presented with an astonishing coincidence when we consider how well our phenomenal experiences correspond to states of affairs in the physical world, and how misaligned these could have been. Cutter and Drummet present a number of different sorts of examples. Perhaps the simplest is the harmony between the affect associated with certain phenomena and the functional behaviours we have evolved to exhibit with respect to them: in general, we seek out pleasant experiences and we avoid unpleasant experiences. Our behaviour is attributable entirely to physical cause-and-effect, so there is no need for evolution or the natural world to ensure that our qualia are appropriate and give us reason to seek or avoid them.

Take pain for example. In the real world, pain is extremely unpleasant, but consider the idea of a hypothetical subject who is functionally just the same as a normal human but who has a strange inversion of phenomenal experience. Unlike the more well-known thought experiment of the subject with inverted qualia, in this case we have a subject with inverted affects (that is, the emotional responses she has to stimuli are inverted). Being functionally normal, when she hits her thumb with a hammer, she yelps and jumps and winces, then nurses it and so on, but what she experiences is extremely pleasant. When she has her morning cup of coffee, she appears to savour the taste, smiles, exclaims that she loves her first sip of the day, etc., but the taste as experienced is in fact revolting to her. Her reports and facial expressions are just her way of communicating her disgust. Her avoidance of pleasant experiences and seeking of unpleasant experiences is because her experiencing self is essentially deranged and irrational, being someone who lacks psychophysical harmony. She smiles when she's miserable, she cries bitterly when she's ecstatic, she will do anything to avoid pleasure and so on. On the assumptions that underlie the argument from psychophysical harmony, this seems a possible state of affairs. More likely would be that phenomenal affect would be essentially random, neither wholly appropriate nor wholly inappropriate but more chaotic. It seems to be extraordinarily lucky that this is not how we are. Therefore, God (or whatever)!

To me, even qualiaphile me, this argument is not very compelling for a couple of reasons. First, it's not obvious to me why affect should be intrinsic to qualia. It's plausible that affect could be entirely functional, and that the very same quale could be experienced by some subjects as pleasant and by others as unpleasant. Indeed, this seems certain when we consider acquired tastes. The qualia I experience when I taste wine now seem to be the same as when I first tasted it as a child and thought it was disgusting. But the associated affect has changed, as now I quite enjoy it. If this can be so for wine, then why assume that the affect of pain is intrinsic? The idea then is that the qualia we feel in response to various sensory inputs really are basically arbitrary, and have no intrinsic affect. We find pain to be unpleasant not because it is intrinsically unpleasant but because it plays the functional role of a noxious stimulus that is to be avoided -- this is just what it is to find something unpleasant. If this is so, then it is not conceivable that I could find pain to be pleasant while it plays the functional role it does.

Another worry is whether someone with inverted affect is perhaps incoherent just because it's impossible to map all these upside-down affects consistently without either ending right back where we started or arriving at a contradiction.

For instance, in the behaviour of avoiding pain, does our inverted affect subject want pain and fail to get it by systematically making choices that defeat her goals, or does she actively seek to avoid something that she would find pleasant and succeed? If we're turning everything upside-down, then she must want pain because a normal person would not. But, on the other hand, if a normal person wants to experience pleasure, and she finds pain to be pleasurable, then she must not want it, because she avoids pleasure. Contradiction!

While experiencing pain, is our subject is actually experiencing something pleasant, while believing herself to be experiencing something unpleasant? If she believes herself to be experiencing something unpleasant, she should want the experience to continue, because of flipped affect. But if she is actually experiencing someting pleasant, then she should want the experience to end, because of flipped affect. Contradiction!

(I always found the psychology of the classic Addams family to be implausibly incoherent for the same kinds of reasons -- haven't seen the new Netflix series though so maybe that makes more sense)

Or maybe what we've done in constructing such a subject is just changed the language we use to describe her phenomenal states upside down without changing anything else. We're just relabelling everything unpleasant as pleasant and vice versa.

Perhaps with some care we can construct a coherent subject like this by flipping some things and not others, but it seems clear to me that we can't just carelessly flip everything. On the other hand, it's not clear at all to me that any such psychophysically disharmonious but functionally normal subject is a coherent possibility.

This is more a skeptical worry rather than a particularly strong counter-argument. Let's return to the first suggestion, that affect might be functional. In the Cutter and Crummett paper, this response is called the "contingent normative roles explanation" (specifically, it's the second version of this discussed in the paper) because the normative roles of qualia are contingent on the functional roles they play. To take up the thread here, I think it might be fun to switch to a dialog, because there will be some back and forth. My interlocutor is "Dusty", who is intended to represent the views of Dustin Crummett as I understand them from reading the paper and from a Twitter conversation. But that understanding may be limited, and I will be paraphrasing, extrapolating and synopsising, and probably doing an inadequate job all round of representing him fairly. Take this representation with a grain of salt.

Dusty: So I see you're a fan of the contingent normative roles explanation. This is addressed in the paper.

Me: Great! How does the paper treat it?

Dusty: Well, first, are we OK to imagine some sort of disembodied mind? Like a ghost, or maybe a brain in a vat or a Boltzmann brain?

Me: Hmm, I guess. Let's say so for now...

Dusty: Well, imagine such a mind is experiencing the most unimaginable torturous pain. This is clearly a bad state of affairs, right?

Me: Agreed.

Dusty: You say affect is functional, but there's nothing functional happening in this picture, so that can't be right.

Me: Hold on, why is nothing functional happening?

Dusty: Well, let me quote the paper... here it is... it says that a functional role is "a role defined in non-phenomenal terms, ultimately in terms of causal relations (however indirect) to outward behavior and physical stimuli." But there is no outward behaviour or physical stimuli in the case of a disembodied mind.

Me: I see. Well, I'm not sure I agree with that account of functionalism.

Dusty: Why not?

Me: I think functions can be more abstract and "internal" than you allow. Just to illustrate, can we assume for the sake of argument that any mind can be simulated or modelled with the right sort of algorithm, (perhaps with something like a neural network).

Dusty: OK.

Me: Presumably, we could in principle identify parts of this algorithm that play certain functional roles. For instance, one particular cluster of neurons might seem to have something to do with avoidance behaviour, at least when the mind we're talking about is embodied. I think this is still the case when the mind is not embodied. Those neurons are part of an algorithm, and within the algorithm they play a functional role, even if the algorithm is not physically instantiated. Similarly, I think that parts of a disembodied mind must be playing functional roles, albeit internally and without any causal relations with the physical world.

Dusty: Unless the "internal functioning" is something phenomenological, we can still ask about a conceptually possible case where we change the internal functioning and hold fixed the phenomenology--and there we say torture victim phenomenology is bad

Me: I think that if you hold fixed the phenomenology but change the functional aspects then it's no longer necessarily true that the torture phenomenology is bad. I think the badness is entirely in the functional reactions.

Dusty: I really don't think this issue is what's relevant. Our claim is that having the complete phenomenology of a torture victim is necessarily prima facie bad, and bad just in virtue of the phenomenology; you have to deny that, so that's where we part.

Me: Well, yes. I deny that, not because I think it's OK to have the complete phenomenology of a torture victim, but because I think that you can't have the complete phenomenology of a torture victim (at least if this includes affect), without also having all the functional state of a torture victim, and it's the functional state that makes it bad. If this is true, then psychophysical harmony of affect is guaranteed.

And that's the end of that thread so far.

However, there remains a suite of other such examples exploring different aspects of psychophysical harmony. I think where most of these go wrong is that these examples only work if experiences are atomic, primitive, simple, whereas I would emphasise that most experiences are composite, made up of a great number of primitive qualia. The brain composes these qualia in such a way as to reflect what's going on in the physical world as a side-effect of its' functional job of integrating and synthesising information.

Again, let's start from the simplest example. Consider the quale representing the colour orange. It seems more similar to that for red than to that for green, which is an example of psychophysical harmony because monochromatic orange light is closer in wavelength to red light than to green, while polychromatic orange light would tend to have more red-adjacent wavelengths making it up than green-adjacent. But from the phenomenal side, we could imagine orange seeming more similar to green than to red if the associated qualia were chosen arbitrarily, and we're in some sense lucky that this is not the case and our qualia are instead physically appropriate.

Here, I think the problem is that even "orange" is a composite. I'll give a cartoonish illustration of how this could work, without claiming that this is how it actually works. Suppose that the visual system detects the incoming light as a mixture of reddish and yellowish, these both being primary colours of this particular visual system, at least once some visual processing is done. By the action of psychophysical laws mapping the visual system's representation of reddishness and yellowishness to particular qualia, we how have both qualia being presented simultaneously. We can think of this scenario as having a mixture of red "figment" and yellow "figment" presented on the Cartesian theatre for the enjoyment of the homunculus. The resulting experience is labelled "orange". As such, the similarlity of "orange" to "red" is not an accident, it is a consequence of the functional behaviour of the visual system as treating orange as a combination of reddishness and yellowishness.

In contrast, it seems to me that the qualia for primary figments are essentially arbitrary. I would judge that red is not obviously more similar to yellow than to blue for example, even though physically it is. So in the case of primary figments, there is no psychophysical harmony. Unlike light and dark, we do not experience differences in wavelength as a smooth continuum of some quantity, even though physically it is. This psychophysical disharmony is a consequence of how the visual system functions, and so pyschophysical harmony or disharmony is best understood as a purely functional issue.

Dusty: I agree that the relation between particular color qualia and physical reality is essentially arbitrary. There is no sense in which our particular color spectrum is more fitting than an inverted spectrum of qualia, for example. But when I look at orange light, I don't perceive red or yellow qualia, so there can't be any literal sense in which orange is a compound of them.

Me: Yes, just as you don't see red paint or yellow paint when you look at an orange mixture of red and yellow paint. I'm not claiming that we are always aware of the structure of our experiences, but I do claim that our experiences are composed of more primitive qualia.

Dusty: None of this affects the argument. The explanation is not that the psychophysical laws are such that the result of the evolutionary process is beings whose experience reflects physical reality. Instead, this is what we are seeking to explain.

Me: This problem goes away once you let go of the assumption that intentional states and other non-phenomenal aspects of cognition are not functional. The psychophysical laws only relate primitive brain representations to arbitrary qualia. Everything else could be functional. If the brain represents orange as being both reddish and yellowish at the same time (understood as a functional relation between functional representations), the resulting experience is perceived as being both reddish and yellowish in virtue of the psychophysical laws linking the functional representations to their respective qualia, and we call this experience "orange". Evolution has selected for a being that can functionally recognise that orange is similar to red. The psychophysical harmony is explained by functionalism about similarity judgements while requiring psychophysical laws only to provide arbitrary mappings between primitive qualia and primitive functional representations.

Dusty (entirely imagined response): But aren't you helping yourself to unstated additional psychophysical laws all the same? If we experience red and yellow qualia at the same time, then why should they appear as one unified color? Why is it not more like seeing red in one eye and yellow in the other -- a distinct feeling of two separate qualia being overlaid rather than blended? Must there not be a psychophysical law to determine which way this is experienced?

Me: Again, let us be functional about intentional states. The visual system seems to function in such a way that we believe we are seeing a unified colour, as can be confirmed by introspection or attending to reports about experience. If beliefs are functional, then it must be that we believe that the final experience is of a unified colour, and this constrains how the qualia can be combined. It must be by a sort of blending or interpolation, it cannot be any other sort of combination or our reports and beliefs would be different. My view is that the quale we call "orange" is the only one that satisfies these constraints. It's what you get when you combine qualia for red and yellow along with a belief that we're seeing a unified colour.

In being functionalist about intentional states, the argument I've been making here seems to depend on rejecting cognitive phenomenalism, that there is a distinct phenomenal what-it-is-likeness to have a certain cognitive or intentional state. In fact, I think we can accommodate a kind of cognitive phenomenalism here if we again regard cognitive experiences as compound. There could be a primitive quale for what it is like to believe something, and then the experience of believing something would be a compound of this quale and some compound phenomenal representation of the thing that is believed. Breaking down experiences into primitive states means that they are guaranteed to mirror their functional analogs. All we require is psychophysical laws allowing arbitrary mappings between primitives in both realms.

Considerations such as the Knowledge Argument, Philosophical Zombies, Leibniz's Mill and so on might convince us of the existence of qualia and perhaps even cognitive phenomenalism, but they don't rule out this picture and I'm not aware of anything that does. Many panpsychists, for example, think that all the qualia we experience are somehow built out of the primitive qualia experienced by particles. It is unlikely that there are particles experiencing the qualia of ennui, or confusion, or itchiness, or the taste of coffee. For panpsychists at least, it must therefore be possible to build new qualia out of simpler ones. I subscribe (or at least this persona subscribes) to a similar view. The way this happens is not arbitrary, but a result of how the brain represents experiences as composed of a number of primitives, each associated with a primitive quale by psychophysical laws. The correspondence between the final experience and the functional state of the brain is therefore far from an accident.

There are other cases Crummett would like me to answer about semantics and epistemology, but I feel that this is enough for now. My strategy in answering those cases would be basically the same. Break functional states into primitives. Assume psychological laws providing mappings from functional primitives to arbitrary primitive qualia. Reconstruct the phenomenal states by combining the mapped qualia according to the relations between the functional primitives and our intentional states about how they relate. The resulting psychophysical harmony is logically necessary on this picture.

For Crummett and Goff, the argument from psychophysical harmony licenses us to believe in God, or that every particle is an agent responding rationally to its desires, or in other such supernatural explanations. From my point of view, the idea of radical psychophysical disharmony is so absurd that I think instead it should cause us to question the assumptions that lead to it and to bolster our credence in accounts of phenomenality that do not run into such problems in the first place.