Thanks for posting the above Pharoah. Here are some responses I've jotted down to the referees' remarks:
REFEREE 7
"p. 2, parag. 2, line 6: “What should we call this correspondence with fact? Undoubtedly … and this truth is justified by virtue of its qualitative relevancy; it is qualitative and relevant to the species as a whole…” I do not want to dispute that the sun’s location is “represented in the plant’s physiological mechanism” (ibid., line 2 from bottom) – namely that the physiological mechanism carries information about the sun’s location – nor that such an informed construct is relevant to the species, nor that it is “devoid of conceptual representations”. Why, however, should we think that it is qualitative? or qualitatively relevant? The answer to this question depends, of course, on what the A means by “qualitatively relevant”. Does the A assume that being qualitatively relevant entails being consciously experienced by the plant? If so, then this claim is highly controversial and it would need to be supported by some argument.
Does the A assume that being qualitatively relevant does not entail being consciously experienced by the plant? If so, then the A should say so. In that case, however, what does it mean to say that it is qualitatively relevant? One could simply say that it is “Non-conceptually represented”. Otherwise, the A should make clear in what sense such an unconscious non-conceptual representations is qualitatively relevant. This question is crucial since a large part of the article rests on the notion of qualitative relevance and on various uses of “qualitative” which remain unclear in that respect. The A should make clear whether these uses of “qualitative” do entail consciousness or not.
Response: I think the confusion for the referee arises from his hanging on to the analytical language of ‘representation’ which constrains nonphenomenological thinking about consciousness. He/she does seem able to recognize that experience {felt qualities} can be both conscious and unconscious/subconscious. But he seems to demand that for subconscious or nonconscious experience to be significant for consciousness {to provide orientation or ‘knowledge’ of some sort} that knowledge must be ‘represented’. We have no idea how the subconscious mind ‘represents’ that which it absorbs and remembers, but we do know that the subconscious ‘knows’ many things about our situation in the world
prereflectively. That means
noncognitively – a noncognitive kind of ‘knowing’ that is built up and maintained through/during prereflective experience and continues to be significant for reflective consciousness and mind. This SEP article on “Mental Representative” is a good place to begin thinking critically about ‘representation’:
Mental Representation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“Section 6: This section suggests that perhaps the answer to my first question (whether the plant’s qualitatively relevant physiology entails that the plant is conscious of qualitative differences) is that the plant is not conscious, since those physiological processes are only at the level of assimilation. (The same remark would also apply to Berrybug’s qualitatively delineated mechanisms.) On this interpretation, consciousness (phenomenal experience) arises only at the level of evaluation. If so, then the A should make it clear.
Response: ‘assimilation’ is another term that is tossed about (by analytical philosophers and some scientists) without clear definition. These people need to read phenomenology, neurophenomenological research, and affective neuroscience if they are to grasp the way in which experience and learning first take place preconsciously or unconsciously in all organisms.
REFEREE 4
“(2) The author discusses phototropism in plants. He or she says it involves representation but of a nonconceptual kind that does not involve belief. In the next section, when discussing a thought experiment in which scientists discover an alien organism that they judge to be a phototropic plant, the author says plants have ‘knowledge’ and are ‘informed’ of various things, using scare quotes without explanation.”
Response: This reader seems in this comment to suffer from essentially the same problem – same undefended presupposition – as the first reader: i.e., that knowledge can only be conscious.” Pharoah’s use of the word ‘information’ as an alternative for ‘knowledge’ is in fact confusing, as it is in Soupie’s reliance on ‘information’ to account for consciousness and mind , though Soupie and probably Pharoah as well recognize that ‘information’, if it accounts for anything, should function at the subconscious as well as the conscious level [though not necessarily in the same ways]. We still have no well-explicated ‘grip’ on what constitutes ‘information’. Until we do, relying on this undefined concept in papers on consciousness and mind begs too many questions (in my opinion).
This reader goes on to say: “No distinction between types of knowledge or senses of “knowledge” is drawn here,
nor does the author reference the extensive discussion of the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representation in the philosophical and psychological literature. Nor is any argument for the author’s view given. The author should try to articulate his or her view more clearly, compare it with other views defended in the literature, and then offer some argument or other for the superiority of his or her view.”
Response: The underscored needs attention for the next version of the paper (and also I think among us here in this thread). Have we yet read the discussions the reader is referring to that distinguish conceptual from non-conceptual representation? I think we’ve read some POM papers that do this, but maybe not the most critical ones? The reader goes on in the next paragraph to refer to Searle's and Block’s physicalist approaches:
“Block and Searle both have biological accounts of consciousness, but Block differs from Searle in allowing non-biological representation without “qualia” by drawing a distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness.”
Response: What does Block mean by ‘non-biological representation’? And how solid is the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness? Has analytical philosophy considered how prereflective experience in the world
accesses the subconscious and thence influences reflective consciousness and mind?
“(6) The author goes on to endorse the reasonable [re]view that higher-order representations and evaluations of those states represented play a role in the construction of subjective perspectives, which are lacking in animals that don’t represent and evaluate their first-order representations. But, again, the view is not articulated clearly,
nor is it supported against criticisms or compared with alternative accounts of the evolution of subjectivity.”
Response: I think Panksepp is the major resource to be brought in, and early, in the paper. {Note the vagueness of the above assertion: “higher-order representations and evaluations of those states represented
play a role in the construction of subjective perspectives.” What’s needed is a deeper and broader understanding of what else plays a role in the construction of subjective perspectives
from the bottom up.}
“(7) The author says, “To possess phenomenal experience is to assimilate and to evaluate, and thereby to understand the relevancy of qualitative environmental experience.”
What difference does the author impute between “phenomenal” and “qualitative” that would render this thought coherent? The author seems to be sketching a view on which there are both non-conceptual and conceptual forms of higher-order representation where the non-conceptual ones are common to both humans and other animals but the conceptual ones are unique to humans (and perhaps other primates?).
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but, again, one would like it clearly articulated and supported with some sort of argument.”
Response: I think the advice in the last sentence is good. I understood Pharoah’s quoted sentence on first reading because we have discussed the issues involved at length here. The reader might have understood the sentence more easily if he understood the ramifications of
qualia, but understanding qualia requires going beyond what Chalmers has given POMs to work with. Maybe clarifying this is one of the ways in which Pharoah can educate his next readers.
“(8) The definition of “knowledge” that does not entail belief, which is given on p. 17, needs to be unpacked and explicated with examples.
The author seems to suggest that if I infer the relative location of the sun from the direction in which a flower is pointing that I have knowledge without belief. But this doesn’t seem at all correct to this reader.”
Response: Reader seems to have lost the plot here (unless you really did suggest what he thinks you suggest). The reader’s problem is his restrictive application of the term ‘knowledge’, inherited from the positivism embedded in the analytical school. Here is a paper I’ve recently read that might useful at this point:
Bill Brewer, “Perception and Reason”
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/faculty/brewer/ppr.pdf
What we have there is a précis of Brewer’s book by the same title followed by his responses to several comments by respondents at a symposium conducted on the book. The paper is challenging but worth it since it engages some of the issues raised by Pharoah’s readers.
