Nagel's nonsensical Moral Luck

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy introduces its article on 'Moral Luck' as follows- 

Moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control.

If there is a set of protocols by which an agent assesses another agent as having or lacking some property, the question arises as to whether that quality could also be predicated of the assessing agent. For example we might say 'only cool dudes can correctly say so and so is cool' or 'only a toff can recognize another toff'.  The advantage here is that there can be a chain of certification and, given a meta-protocol of an arbitrary type, a class can be defined. Indeed it may be a partially ordered set. 

One thing one might say is- 'it is only correct to assess another as having moral luck if you have moral luck'. But this is a bit like 'only the judgmental can say who is truly judgmental' or 'only moral philosophers can correctly identify other moral philosophers' or 'only blathershites can correctly identify other blathershites so blathershiterry can flourish.' 

Does it matter whether the property- e.g. that of having moral luck or being a blathershite- is or is not under the agent's control? Not really. After all, the fact of being or ceasing to be an agent is not- generally speaking- under any agent's control which is why many people who don't want to die nevertheless do so whereas my daughter, the secret-agent super-model, doesn't exist. 

Put this way, we see that though 'moral luck' is not necessarily meaningless, nevertheless it isn't particularly informative. It's just one of those things people sometimes say is all.

Bernard Williams writes, “when I first introduced the expression moral luck, I expected to suggest an oxymoron” 

Though anything at all could be said to be moral or be lucky or correspond to moral luck. But this is equally true of words like 'cool' and 'blathershite' and 'cool blathershite'.  

Indeed, immunity from luck has been thought by many to be part of the very essence of morality.

the irrelevance of luck, rather than immunity from it, is all that would be required.  One could say 'a person whose every act has been moral but who has never really been 'tested'- i.e put in a situation where he would have a strong reason to do something immoral- may not actually be moral. He has just been lucky and thus must abide our question. But, equally, we could give him the benefit of the doubt. 

And yet, as Williams (1976) and Thomas Nagel (1979) showed in their now classic pair of articles, it appears that our everyday judgments and practices commit us to the existence of moral luck.

Nonsense! Everyday stuff doesn't commit us to shit. Why not suggest that taking a dump commits us to evacuating blathershites if they become a pain in our arse?  

The problem of moral luck arises because we seem to be committed to the general principle that we are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control (call this the “Control Principle”).

This is an arbitrary assertion. There is no general principle here. There may be a specific qualification or exemption of an ideographic or pragmatic sort. Thus, as a general principle, I may agree that we should not employ very very thin models as part of our advertising campaign. However, we might make an exception for a model who comes from a part of the world where people tend to be exceptionally slender and gracile. The same is true of 'black-face' except when Rishi Sunak does it.  

At the same time, when it comes to countless particular cases, we morally assess agents for things that depend on factors that are not in their control.

Perhaps because we can't do otherwise. Not everything is under our control. However, we can tell moral philosophers to fuck off.

And making the situation still more problematic is the fact that a very natural line of reasoning suggests that it is impossible to morally assess anyone for anything if we adhere to the Control Principle

No. A thing may be possible though shitty. We can morally assess rocks or trees or anything else. It's just we might be shit-faced when doing so. Fuck you rock- you lazy sod! Get a fucking job

The idea that morality is immune from luck finds inspiration in Kant:

No. A thing may be independent of another thing but not always wholly immune to it. Kant was actually quite careful not to deviate too far from 'common sense'- which was a Scottish school of philosophy back then.

'A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition, that is, it is good in itself…

That follows from the concept or definition of 'will' as relating to things within an agent's power 

Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a step motherly nature, this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose—if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left (not, of course, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all means insofar as they are in our control)—then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add anything to this worth nor take anything away from it (Kant 1784 [1998], 4:394).

What's wrong with that? One can define height as being independent of width even if nothing with height lacks width.  

Thomas Nagel approvingly cites this passage in the opening of his 1979 article, “Moral Luck.” Nagel’s article began as a reply to Williams’ paper of the same name, and the two articles together articulated in a new and powerful way

if by 'new and powerful' you mean 'obviously foolish' then, sure.  

a challenge for anyone wishing to defend the Kantian idea that an important aspect of morality is immune from luck, or independent of what is outside of our control.

The way you defend an idea is by pointing to concrete examples of it or showing how it inspired useful actions or scientific breakthroughs.  

To see exactly how the challenge arises, let us begin with the Control Principle:
(CP) We are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control.

This begs the question. Are we morally assessable? Speaking generally, no. You wouldn't let a moral assessor into your house or place of business. If I start morally assessing you, you tend to punch me in the face or tell me to fuck the fuck off. 

True, if there is a morals clause in our contract or something of that sort, we may be subject to some protocol bound assessment. But that is juristic in nature or an ideographic matter. 

It is intuitively compelling, as is the following corollary of it:
(CP-Corollary) Two people ought not to be morally assessed differently if the only other differences between them are due to factors beyond their control

Thus, if it is beyond your control that you are in a coma you should be judged as morally responsible  as the guy who is going around stabbing people. 

Not only are the Control Principle and its corollary plausible in themselves, they also seem to find support in our reactions to particular cases. For example, if we find out that a woman who has just stepped on your toes was simply pushed, then our temptation to blame her is likely to evaporate.

We won't blame her even if she wasn't pushed. She is unlikely to have done the thing deliberately. 

It seems that the reason for this is our unwillingness to hold someone responsible for what is not in her control. Similarly, if two drivers have taken all precautions, and are abiding by all the rules of the road, and in one case, a dog runs in front of the car and is killed, and not in the other, then, given that the dog’s running out was not something over which either driver had control, it seems that we are reluctant to blame one driver more than the other. Although we might expect different reactions from the two drivers, it does not seem that one is deserving of a worse moral assessment than the other.

What the other driver did is irrelevant. Either dog killer couldn't help it or he could have avoided running over the bow wow.

At the same time, it seems that there are countless cases in which the objects of our moral assessments do depend on factors beyond agents’ control. Even though “moral luck” seems to be an oxymoron, everyday judgments suggest that there is a phenomenon of moral luck after all.

Everyday judgments don't suggest shit.  

As Nagel defines it, “Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control,

he does not exist. Stuff you do is defined as stuff you have control over. If you are doing stuff you have no control over you might be a character in a Stephen King novel. But you don't actually exist.  

yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck” (Nagel 1979, 59).

It doesn't greatly matter what you call incompossible objects. They don't fucking exist.

To bring out the conflict with the Control Principle even more starkly, we will understand moral luck as follows:
(ML) moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment, despite the fact that a significant aspect of what he is assessed for depends on factors beyond his control.

So moral luck only arises in the case of imaginary beings. But such characters may also have shadows made of light and combovers fashioned from frozen tendrils of Time.  

We certainly seem to be committed to the existence of moral luck. For example, we seem to blame those who have murdered more than we blame those who have merely attempted murder,

Fuck off! We blame those who attempt to murder us much more than those who sliced and diced a bunch of serial killers.  

even if the reason for the lack of success in the second case is that the intended victim unexpectedly tripped and fell to the floor just as the bullet arrived at head-height.

Fuck off! A guy who shoots at me is a guy I want to see beaten to death or fed to the wolves. On the other hand, if serving on a jury, I might feel that the 'retribution' portion of the punishment should be less in a case where the victim only suffered a little bruising.  

Since whether the intended victim tripped or not is not something in control of either would-be murderer, we appear to violate the Control Principle and its corollary.

No we don't. On the other hand we may sometimes appear to violate the Don't Masturbate Principle. This is merely a delusive appearance. 

It might be tempting to respond at this point that what people are really responsible for are their intentions or their “willings,” and that we are thus wrong to offer different moral assessments in this pair of cases. Adam Smith (1790/1976), for example, advocates this position, writing that
'To the intention or affection of the heart, therefore, to the propriety and impropriety, to the beneficence or hurtfulness of the design, all praise or blame, all approbation or disapprobation, of any kind, which can justly be bestowed upon any action, must ultimately belong. (II.iii.intro.3.)'

But 'justly' does not mean the same thing as 'correctly' and that to which things 'ultimately' belong may be very different to what they belong to at other points in time. Thus an accountant who prepares the books correctly may not being doing justice to the company because 'book values' understate asset worth. Ultimately everything should be 'marked to market'. But no impropriety has occurred. Evidence which is true is not necessarily admissible for the purpose of justice and what ultimately matters is very different from what must continue to matter on a quotidian basis.

There is a certain discretionary 'economia' in these matters which can't be reduced to algorithmic, bright-line, 'akreibia' of a type which aims at greater precision than the subject matter permits. 

This is a tempting response, and others have followed Smith in defending something like it (e.g., Khoury 2019). But it faces difficulties of its own. First, as we will see, the would-be murderers offer only one of many cases in which our intuitive moral judgment appears to depend on “results” beyond one’s intentions, as Smith himself noted (II.iii.intro.5).

This poses no great scandal. At any given moment, our judgments or assessments may be 'factorizable' into different components- e.g. a retributive component which is 'consequentialist', a moral component which is 'deontological', a strategic component which has to do with Aumann public signals or something yet more arcane. 

And even more importantly, luck can affect even our “willings” and other internal states (Feinberg 1970, 34–38).

But 'willings' and 'other internal states' are not well defined. They can't be the subject of any functional relationship save by arbitrary stipulation. This statement has no 'informativity' though, no doubt, for any practical purpose some empirical investigation may throw light on why a particular person made that statement or why it does or doesn't matter very much. Here, 'luck'- e.g. why one person's arbitrary stipulation regarding a particular matter diverges from another's- features as part of the information theoretic 'background' of each. But it doesn't itself affect anything being spoken of. 

This is like the 'schmeidentity' argument of Kripke. Some may know Cicero is Tully. For others, it is a discovery. But nothing about identity is affected.  

As Nagel develops the point, there are other types of luck that affect not only our actions but also every intention we form and every exertion of our wills.

Only by arbitrary stipulation as to what 'affects' means and what 'luck' means and what 'intention' means and so forth. We don't know if there is an informational content to the claim. Indeed, we don't know if there is a claim or what it is. There is no well-defined set or functional relationship here. There may be, after some investigation, but only for some particular purpose.  

Further, once these kinds of luck are recognized, we will see that not one of the factors on which agents’ actions depend is immune to luck.

No. We will see that there is nothing here but a series of arbitrary and increasingly fatuous stipulations which supposedly represent 'what most people think'. 

Nagel identifies four kinds of luck in all: resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, and causal.

This is arbitrary. Anything at all can be predicated of luck. Instead of 'resultant', we might equally say 'residuary'. Instead of 'circumstantial' why not 'circumcised'. How do we know that some sorts of luck haven't had their foreskin snipped off? Also, it not the case that some types of constitutive luck are suffering from constipation which is why causal luck often complains of having to share an office with that flatulent cunt? 

Resultant Luck. Resultant luck is luck in the way things turn out.

The way things out depends on how different opposing types of luck cancel out leaving residuary luck. But this sort of statement adds nothing to our information set. It is mere arbitrary stipulation made, it maybe, in the hope of sounding smart.  

Examples include the pair of would-be murderers just mentioned as well as the pair of innocent drivers described above. In both cases, each member of the pair has exactly the same intentions, has made the same plans, and so on, but things turn out very differently and so both are subject to resultant luck.

This is an arbitrary assertion. It may be plausible enough in some particular context but it won't hold in general. The 'unlucky' driver who actually loves dogs and is feeling traumatized about ever getting behind the wheel is happy to learn that there is a specialist driving course he can take and a special type of car he can buy such that 'bad luck' will never cause him to drive over a bow wow again. 

What is 'luck' at one level of granularity is an engineering or other such problem at another.  

If in either case, we can correctly offer different moral assessments for each member of the pair, then we have a case of resultant moral luck.

No we don't. All we can say is if 'correctly' means 'in accordance with relevant protocols and if different assessments obtain then there is a stochastic aspect to the relevant process- at least from some possible perspective. That may be a 'feature' not a 'bug'. Equally, it may represent a trade-off or Nash mixed strategy. Something like Kuhn's 'no neutral algorithm' argument applies- improving mechanism design has one type of result. Improving the information set has another. There is no 'natural' or 'canonical' path forward which all stakeholders would agree on. 

Williams offers a case of “decision under uncertainty”: a somewhat fictionalized Gauguin, who chooses a life of painting in Tahiti over a life with his family, not knowing whether he will be a great painter. In one scenario, he goes on to become a great painter, and in another, he fails. According to Williams, we will judge Gauguin differently depending on the outcome.

No. We judge Gaugin the same way we'd judge a guy who quit being an actuary in Paris to go be a ship's chandler in Polynesia. We might say 'he was a bad man to abandon his family' or 'he was a cool dude he followed his bliss'. Also, the vast majority of proles like me think 'modern art' is shite invented by clever art-dealers who get the nouveau riche to hang childish daubs on their walls.  When I win the lottery, I'm gonna have a toilet made of solid gold in every room same as wot Trump & the Queen Gor' bless 'er have.

Cases of negligence provide another important kind of resultant luck. Imagine that two otherwise conscientious people have forgotten to have their brakes checked recently and experience brake failure, but only one of whom finds a child in the path of his car. If in any of these cases we correctly offer differential moral assessments, then again we have cases of resultant moral luck.

So, 'resultant moral luck' only arises out of 'differential moral assessment'- i.e. it has no functional relationship with the underlying act or event. The thing is an artefact. It is arbitrary. We don't say 'OJ Simpson was innocent. He bears no moral guilt'. We merely say 'OJ was correctly found 'not guilty' coz of some legal technicality. Morally, he was as guilty as fuck.' We also nod our head when some other barfly says 'Had OJ been tried in Louisiana, he'd have been found guilty. That's coz Louisiana inherits features of the French legal code. California, by contrast, has a legal code based on surfer dudes getting high and hanging ten.'  

Circumstantial luck.

A circumstance either arises from a stochastic process- in which case we can speak of luck- or there is a deterministic process. Nagel, with great stupidity, speaks of the latter as involving luck. The man was a cretin.  

Circumstantial luck is luck in the circumstances in which one finds oneself.

Why find oneself in shit? Why not take the path of Good Soldier Svejk? Even the Gods battle in vain against stupidity.  

For example, consider Nazi collaborators in 1930s Germany who are condemned for committing morally atrocious acts, even though their very presence in Nazi Germany was due to factors beyond their control (Nagel 1979).

Being German is a good enough reason to present as being as stupid as shit. Nobody wants an utter cretin as a collaborator- except in the Philosophy faculty.  

Had those very people been transferred by the companies for which they worked to Argentina in 1929, perhaps they would have led exemplary lives.

The same is true if they had turned into pussy cats or potted plants.  

If we correctly morally assess the Nazi collaborators differently from their imaginary counterparts in Argentina, then we have a case of circumstantial moral luck.

No we don't. We just have a protocol bound system of moral assessment which nobody connected to Argentina, but not Nazi Germany, need bother with. The fact is the latter country was defeated and occupied. The former country wasn't. But luck had nothing to do with either outcome.  

Constitutive luck. Constitutive luck is luck in who one is, or in the traits and dispositions that one has.

This is largely deterministic. It is not a matter of luck that my biological dad is my legal dad. Mum wasn't a slut.  

Since our genes, care-givers, peers, and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are (and since we have no control over these) it seems that who we are is at least largely a matter of luck.

No. It is largely deterministic. Why not say 'it is largely a matter of luck that urine comes out of my penis. It could quite easily be Champagne. Anyway, losing my job as sommelier was undoubtedly bad luck though, no doubt, I ought not to have refilled the Duchess's champagne flute with my pee pee.' 

Since how we act is partly a function of who we are,

Nope. Who we are is not 'well defined'. There is no function here because there is no unique representation as a graph.  

the existence of constitutive luck entails that what actions we perform depends on luck, too.

No. Nothing 'depends' on what is merely a term for a naive set of stochastic outcomes. To say 'everything depends on luck' is uninformative. One might just as easily say 'everything is predetermined by an inscrutable and malicious demiurge'. 

For example, if we correctly blame someone for being cowardly or self-righteous or selfish, when his being so depends on factors beyond his control, then we have a case of constitutive moral luck.

No we don't. We have an arbitrary claim no more meaningful than the assertion that the Great God Fuck You has been at work again.  

Further, if a person acts on one of these very character traits over which he lacks control by, say, running away instead of helping to save his child, and we correctly blame him for so acting, then we also have a case of constitutive moral luck.

No. We have a case of a trait being proclaimed blameworthy. One may say this was also a case of bad luck or a case of the manifest malice of the Great God Fuck you- but these are not assessments. Even if part of a judgment, they are not 'ratio'. They are 'obiter dicta'. 

Thus, since both actions and agents are objects of moral assessment, constitutive moral luck undermines the Control Principle when it comes to the assessment of both actions and agents.

There is no such Principle to be undermined. Also, everybody knows 'assessments' are shit. Bureaucrats invent the things so as to prevent anything get done.  

Causal luck. Finally, there is causal luck, or luck in “how one is determined by antecedent circumstances” (Nagel 1979, 60).

if luck is determined by something it isn't luck. Why not speak of heat as being determined by antecedent coldness?

Nagel points out that the appearance of causal moral luck is essentially the classic problem of free will.

We might call this 'old wine in new bottles' if we hadn't seen, with our own mind's eye, Nagel whipping out his dick to refill the Dean's champagne flute with his own frothing piss.  Meanwhile Williams was contributing to the feast of reason and flow of soul by providing everybody with the chocolate pudding which he had made in his pants.

The problem of free will to which Nagel refers arises because it seems that our actions—and even the “stripped-down acts of the will”—are consequences of what is not in our control.

So this problem only arises because of an arbitrary stipulation. Similarly if I stipulate that every time you take a piss, you are refilling Putin's champagne flute than the question arises as to whether you are 'sanctions busting' or 'providing material comfort to the enemy' who, by another arbitrary stipulation, is the neighbor's cat whose Nicraraguan horcrux stripped down acts of will and then made fun of its puny genitals. 

Anybody can talk nonsense. You don't have to be a Philosophy Professor.  

If this is so, then neither our actions nor our willing are free.

save in so far as actions are neither willings nor billings and no freedom is save that of self-sodomy on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Margate.  

And since freedom is often thought to be necessary for moral responsibility,

Nonsense! A slave or a prisoner is still morally responsible though not legally so. 

we cannot be morally responsible even for our willings.

If something is 'often thought' no ethical proposition is entailed. Cats are often thought to say 'miaow' but they don't really. They make various noises which different languages name differently. 

It is a different matter to say that a responsibility exists though no means to discharge it obtain. This mayy arise by an arbitrary 'uncorrelated asymmetry'. Thus if it is the case that I am the father of a child in a distant country, I feel morally responsible for him even if I have no means of ascertaining his identity or location. The law may acknowledge this. Thus this son of mine may have a claim against me, or assets held in trust for me, or my estate even if I am not capable of discharging any sort of duty. 

Sometimes the problem is thought to arise only if determinism is true, but this is not the case.

The problem only arises if we believe that things which are 'often thought' entail any proposition whatsoever. But we'd have bigger problems with avoiding stepping under ladders and being careful not to break mirrors and refraining from touching our no-no place lest we go blind.  

Even if it turns out that determinism is false, but events are still caused by prior events according to probabilistic laws,

that is determinism.

the way that one is caused to act by antecedent circumstances would seem to be equally outside of one’s control (e.g., Pereboom 2002, 41–54, Watson 1982, 9).

if Darwin was right, then our continued survival is about expanding the sphere of what is in our control. Assessing stuff may play some small part in this but, precisely because the thing is utile, or has survival value, it isn't philosophical. 

Interestingly, assuming a moral responsibility for another even in an area where one has no control over oneself can have a beneficial outcome. In A.A there are 'ascending chains' involving sponsors, perhaps even sponsors of sponsors, but, I imagine people who take responsibility for each other on the basis of mutuality can regain autonomy or free themselves of addictions or conditioned patterns of behavior. 

In this context, Tyche (Luck) and Kairos (Timeliness) may indeed play a part. But they are aspects of the comedy of mutuality. This has nothing to do with any Physicalist configuration space. Indeed, there could be backward causation and a totally weird metric. Still, for any particular juristic process, a partition can be imposed such that agency is well defined- even it is notional in some respects. But this is arbitrary save from some utilitarian perspective.

 As Nagel puts it, “[t]he area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point” (1979, 66.) He goes on,

Here 'genuineness' means 'naturality' or non-arbitrariness.  

'I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things.'

but many things in that do have that compatibility. It's just that there is never anything in any concept which is compatible with its every possible use. 

But as the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things.

Nope. It will turn out that the configuration space is radically non physicalistic and features backward causation and a totes weird metric 

Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised (1979, 68).

This is like saying 'if you get a lump of marble and start chipping away at it, you will eventually be left with nothing even if you are Michelangelo and what you end up with is the La Pieta.' True, if Mikey had been terrified he'd be blamed for stopping short of perfection he might indeed have stubbled away that marble to nothing. But then he wouldn't be remembered as a great sculptor. Indeed, he would have been known as a guy you need to keep well away from any nice piece of marble. Still, there may be a useless or foolish type of art criticism- perhaps one connected to Grievance Studies- which shits on great artists for their moral luck in being born with penises at particular times in history and which has nothing to say about the aesthetic choices underlying the creation of their masterpieces. 

Nagel's bat-shit bat essay revisited.

 What's it like to be a bat? The answer, obviously, is that its like being a particular type of chiroptera but there would be wide differences based on the fitness landscape. Similarly, the answer to the question 'what's it like to be a macaroon?' is 'being a macaroon is pretty much like being any type of fancy, almond based, confectionary' . 

When I hear people use a word I'm unfamiliar with- e.g 'chutiya'- I tend to ask 'what's it like being a chutiya?' so as not confess my ignorance of the term. If I get a helpful answer I show appreciation by tooting politely. If I don't, my farts are ferocious. 

I suppose, if the question were posed 'what is it like to be 'inside' the mind, or sensorium, of the bat' the answer would have to do with the 'Markov blankets' separating 'inside' from 'outside'. Furthermore, what sort of 'theory of mind' a species has would be a function of evolutionary game theory concerning coordination and discoordination problems. Ceteris paribus, the bat sensorium would be a set of co-evolved nested Markov blankets which it might be worth our investigating so as to alter their behavior. Thus, if bats are the vector of a dangerous type of viral disease, then knowing what 'it is like to be a bat' or understanding its 'sensorium' might enable us to make an intervention which preserves the species and the ecological benefits it brings without putting our own lives, and our complicated global economy, at risk. 

Fifty years ago, Thomas Nagel took a different approach. It proved utterly worthless. To be fair, it was not then known that the guy had shit for brains or, indeed, that Philosophy was invented for shitheads. Consider his very first sentence- 

CONSCIOUSNESS is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Consciousness is a feature of minds. Problems only exist for Minds. Macaroons don't have minds and thus don't have the sort of problems that people do.

Minds exist so as to solve problems well enough to permit survival on an uncertain fitness landscape. No problem is intractable- unless it leads to an extinction event- save for some particular approach to it. In maths, a problem may be intractable for a class of algorithmic methods or a particular degree of precision or 'akreibia'. But it may be trivial from some other perspective. For reasons of 'economia' or utility, we may settle for a quick and dirty heuristic for practical purposes while the Terence Taos of the world get on with open problems. Consider the three body problem. Is it intractable?- there is no general closed-form solution- or is it no biggie coz there were good enough approximations to the analytic solution centuries ago?

Nagel's opening statement is of the form 'The X-Y problem is wicked hard coz X is wicked complicated.' It is ignorant. It is not philosophical. 

Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong.

No. If stupid people discuss stuff they say stupid shit. That's all that's happened in this field for fifty years.  

The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.' But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H20 problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.

But what makes a problem unique is itself unique as is what makes it making it unique and so forth. There is nothing informative about the above paragraph. The plain fact is that all the other problems only arise if there is a mind-body problem. If it is a pseudo-problem so are the others. If working on it for 50 years leaves you stupider than when you started off maybe it isn't a philosophical problem at all. It is the sort of problem which arises when you pay stupid people to be stupider than Nature intended.  

Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain.

Only because it is likely that the relation could only be analogical but almost every analogy would have some degree of illuminative power in some context or other. This is because minds are analogical. Indeed, they only exist by an analogy with bodies which physically exist and souls which don't. It would be nice, if the mind was in between- with, mebbe, the heart being detachable and wearable on one's sleeve. Also, one could have a shadow which gets up to all sorts of adventures at night.  

But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different.

Incomprehensible, like intractable, is not informative. It's like saying 'this is wicked hard' or claiming not to be able to understand why any sensible person would watch porn.

This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction.

Stuff like 'my heart is heavy' or 'my mind is made up' is informative and imperative. It solves a coordination problem. Obviously, if you try to make an academic career trying to pretend there's some physics behind such hearts and minds then you are going to have shitty metaphysics. Why bother with reductionism- which would only get us back to physics anyway- when you could just say 'metaphysics is stooooopid, useless, shite?'  

I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be.

Nonsense! Even 50 years ago, you could waffle on about 'emergent properties' on higher dimensions or 'quantum consciousness' or holograms. or whatever. The problem is that the genuine mathematicians and physicists and computer scientists made useful discoveries. Nagel & Co just went batty. 

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting.

This is like saying, if no life forms existed, biology would be less interesting. On the other hand, you probably don't have to be fully conscious when doing Nagel type philosophy. I like to think of him as typing up this stuff in his sleep after taking too much cough syrup.  

With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood.

Or it is as thoroughly understood as it needs to be. Aristotle warned of the fault of akribeia- seeking for more precision than the subject matter permits- and recommended 'economia'- i.e. a pragmatic approach which looks at the 'cash value'- or utility- of a discourse. Nagel & Co did nothing useful. But, at the time, peeps thought they might be smart and know from Science.  

Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it.

Because reductionism focuses on one structural causal factor which renders any further explanation otiose. Thus, I don't have to explain why I gave away the baby I gave birth to in 1981 who is now known as Beyonce. I just have to take out my dick and jizz all over the place. Dudes with dicks don't got wombs or vaginas. I couldn't be Beyonce's birth mother and thus am not required to explain that I gave her away at birth coz I was married to Prince Charles at the time and you know how dem Royals feel about the complexion of their babies. 

Reductionism is about reducing stupid shit to stuff like dicks or veejays which are the reason any of us is around.  

And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it.

Nagel was wrong. Semantics could be reduced to coordination and discoordination problems. What Nagel was doing was 'product differentiation'- which is a discoordination game. Some people got tenure on that basis. Big whoop. 

Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.

David Lewis had already written 'Conventions' drawing on Schelling's work.  Clearly it is useful to have conventions re. 'minds', 'hearts', 'souls', 'egos' and so forth. 

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon.

No. 'Conscious experience' is a description of something which is a phenomenon. Does the description fit? That is the question. I might say 'I've cooked curry all my life. But it wasn't till I took up Mindfulness training, that I had the conscious experience of cooking curry. Guess what? My curries now taste like those Mother made.'  

It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.

Nonsense. There is no single thing which is like being me because being me feels different to me when I'm doing different sorts of things. Furthermore, if evolution is a true theory, then 'being like' an organism is multiply realizable and could be subject to mimicry. If the thing has survival value some unlike organism may have more of that quality. The plain fact is that I'm neither a member of the Royal Family not Queen Bey's biological mother. But I feel like I'm both more intensely than any actual person with both predicates could do. Also, I'm a natural blonde.  

There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism something it is like for the organism.

Bullshit! I'm an organism. I have conscious mental states but they are not related in any way to what it is like to be me. That's why I'm still me when I have no conscious mental states. Some cretin might say 'there must be a qualia associated with an identity which has consciousness' but we could equally say 'there must be some particular type of dog turd that cretins eagerly devour in order to say stupid shit'. The thing is a purely arbitrary stipulation.  

We may call this the subjective character of experience.

But all experience is that of a subject.  Why not call this the experiential character of experience? Or would that be too obvious a tautology?  

It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental,

but no type of analysis 'captures' anything. A reductive analysis involves a structural causal model whose explanans are cognitively simple. 'He was hungry. So he bought a burger. It wasn't a high quality burger. But because he was hungry he relished it'. That's pretty reductive.  Suppose the guy in question was a fan of Sartrean bullshit. He might have preferred to speak of his experience in more high falutin' terms. He had eaten the burger in an ironic manner for some esoteric reason involving existential angst. We don't believe him- more particularly when he claims to be a vegan practitioner of Yoga and Tai Chi. 

for all of them are logically compatible with its absence.

Nonsense! The guy has to have enough basic consciousness to buy a burger, rather than a brick, to eat after he felt hunger pangs. What is not 'compatible' with a reductionist approach is evidence of a more cognitively complex intentionality and behavior. That's when you bring in psychology or game theory or both.  

It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.

But we don't actually analyze robots or automata as though they had experiences and intentional states. It is a different matter that I might cry in exasperation- 'this photocopier has a mind of its own!'- but I don't expect the technician who analyzes the fault to speak in such terms. I expect him to say something like 'the sensor is defective. That's why it is showing the toner as empty though you refilled it. I will replace the sensor and it will work properly.' 

Nagel first very stupidly suggested that analysis 'captures' things when it has no such property. Then he pretended that we don't know the difference between machines and living beings. Thus he invented a fertile field for his own stupidity to shit all over.  

It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior for similar reasons.

But those reasons are nonsense! We do analyze the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior because doing so is essential for our collective survival at the top of the food chain. Thus when hunting, or hunted, we need to interpret the behavior of others on our team in terms of what they are experiencing. That guy has raised his hand. Why? It is to signal that he has seen the prey or the predator. This may not have been a pre-arranged signal. But we understand it well enough.  

I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior,

They may do. They may not.  

nor that they may be given functional. characterizations.

or dysfunctional ones. 

I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis.

Analysis can be useless and absurd but why the fuck would we want to exhaust ourselves doing it?  If evolution is a true theory, there's only so much stupid, useless, shit you can do without reducing your inclusive fitness. 

Any reductionist program has to to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced.

Why? Coz this cretin sez so? Any useful program has to be based on doing useful stuff. A reductionist program which is useful may not know know what is being reduced. I have recently learned that switching off my appliances  at the socket cuts my energy bill. Apparently, these are 'vampire' devices and use electricity even when they aren't being used. It seems that using less electricity reduces the money I have to pay. This would be true even if I didn't have a conception of electricity. A Physicist might be able to analyze electricity usage in a more useful way such that I could save even more money off my energy bills. But he too will be using reductionist heuristics of various types. Philosophers, on the other hand, are wholly useless. It doesn't matter what they analyze, they will simply be pulling shite out of their anuses.

If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

So what? I posed the problem to myself of how to save up enough money to fly to Hollywood and get cast in the role of 'She-Hulk Attorney at Law'. This was probably a foolish or false way to pose the problem I faced- viz. being as poor as shit. The fact is Hollywood is racist towards elderly South Indian gentlemen and refuses to give them roles as hot female attorneys with Super Powers. This is because the fucking Iyengars are running things there. Still, cutting down my energy bills by using less electricity turned out to be a good move. That which is useful is valued whether or not some question or other was posed falsely or foolishly or flippantly.  

It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any

philosophical argument. Farting in the face of those who deny material reality is the way to go.  

analysis of mental phenomena that. fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character.

Why? The fact is, if I know you lost your sense of smell after sticking a crayon up your nose in primary school, then I won't fart in your face. I will punch you to convince you that materialism aint going to go away just coz you can get a sheepskin for arguing otherwise.  

For there is no reason to suppose

anything unless it is useful to do so or that's what you get paid to do

that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness.

Why not? We know that respiration can't be 'conscious' because we speak a lot. We also know that it is extremely unlikely that we will suffocate if we consciously will ourselves not to breathe. There probably is a 'reductionist' analysis of respiration which notes that though the thing could be speeded up or slowed down by conscious effort, mostly the thing is independent of consciousness. It is enough that what consciousness adds is 'noise' (i.e. tends to cancel out) for a reductionist theory to be the most useful and appropriate when it comes to 'signal'. Thus, your Doctor telling you to stop smoking because that is affecting your respiratory health. You may not agree. There are times when you breathe perfectly well. Indeed, it is as though smoking a cigarette helps. However, if you monitor these things yourself, you will soon see that there is a 'signal' which is correlated with smoking and reduced respiratory function. The same is true of other 'reductionist' analysis to do with diet and blood sugar etc. We can omit from our model that which merely contributes noise even though it is obvious that, short term, it can have some effect. So long as it can also have the opposite effect, it is 'noise'. One may speak of the 'free energy principle' in this context but Occam's razor or cognitive economy works just as well. 

Without some idea, therefore of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot; know what is required of a physicalist theory.

But we always already have our own subjective idea of the subjective character of our own experience. This is like saying 'Hello! Are you me, by any chance? No. In that case, maybe I'm me. If so, I want to say I am pleased to meet you unless it turns out you are actually me and I am you in which case maybe I'm not pleased to meet you at all.'  

While an account of the physical basis of mind must explain many things, this appears to be the most difficult.

Unless you understand the role that 'uncorrelated asymmetries' play in evolutionary game theory. An example of an uncorrelated asymmetry is that, absent some significant mental abnormally, I always know who I am but may not know who you are. This is why conversations about which of us is me and which is you don't tend to occur. There is a 'bourgeois' strategy here and the bourgeoisie, famously, are discreet in ontological matters. 

It is impossible to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from a reduction in the same way that one excludes the phenomenal features of an ordinary substance from a physical or chemical reduction of it-namely, by explaining them as effects on the minds of human observers.

But nothing of the sort occurs when dealing with ordinary substances in ordinary contexts. Physics and Chemistry may help make the thing more useful- i.e. produce a better effect on the mind of some concerned human- but that is equally true when dealing with experiences. Suppose I want the experience of fly diving. This may involve some technical calculations re. altitude and so forth but what is even more important to me is that I'm well treated and feel safe and that I jump out over some lovely sunlit landscape rather than a stinking fog. 

If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account.

That does not follow. It is quite possible that 'phenomenological features' are inaccessible for one reason or another. If evolution is a true theory, this is more likely than not.  

But when we examine their subjective character it: seems that such a result is impossible.

Fuck is so difficult with 'giving an account'? Why pretend everything is impossible or intractable or incomprehensible?  

The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view,

why? Is there some law saying peeps can't have multiple points of view? Also, why privilege sight? Minds exist in time. They may not exist in space.  

and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.

Nothing wrong in that. A theory should be general and nomothetic even if it relates to what is particular and ideographic. On the other hand, the theory may be of little use. 

Let me first try to state the issue somewhat more fully than by referring to the relation between the subjective and the objective, or between the pour-soi and the en-soi.

the 'for-itself' and the 'in-itself'. There is no, non arbitrary, relation between them. One is as welcome to say that pour-soi is to the en-soi is as Becoming to Being or as Philately to Fellatio. Humans are certainly not 'for themselves' nor is their Consciousness. We have to survive as a species and so stupidity has to be weeded out. As for things, they won't endure for all time. They don't really exist in themselves at all.  

This is far from easy.

It is trivial.  

Facts about what it is like to be an X are very peculiar, so peculiar that some may be inclined to doubt their reality, or the significance of claims about them.

Virtually everybody thinks this shite is worthless, meaningless, shite.  These fuckers aren't addressing any genuine question and always end up concluding that some useless shite should be done before it can even be posed or groped or molested in some other way. 

To illustrate the connection between subjectivity and a point of view,

it is sufficient that the subject have a point of view for such a connection to be known to exist.  

and to make evident the importance of subjective features, it will help to explore the matter in relation to an example that brings out clearly the divergence between the two types of conception, subjective and objective. I assume we all believe that bats have experience.

Why? The truth is a person who announces that she thinks bats have experiences will be considered a bit batty by most people. We may be interested of the experience of people we wish to emulate or who have been through some arduous challenge or who have had something interesting just happen to them. We have no similar curiosity about bats. We make assumptions that are useful to us. Nagel is dragging in this bat business for some purpose of his own. But that purpose, 50 years later we can all agree, was paltry and wholly unconnected with anything useful or enlightening.  

After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience.

That depends. If you like eating whale meat and exterminating mice and pigeons, you might spend a bit of money getting some sciencey guy to prove that these animals have no fucking experiences at all. After all, that was Descartes's position. Furthermore, what counts as experience is a movable feast even for humans. Back in the early Seventies, when old guys said 'I have 30 years experience in this field. Listen to what I am telling you.' young peeps would reply 'You don't have 30 years experience. You have one year's experience repeated 30 times.'  

I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all.

Philosophy went down the toilet when it started making assumptions about what people believed or had faith in or what seemed right to them. The trouble was that people didn't really make those assumptions at all. They were only interested in stuff that was useful or informative or entertaining to them.  

Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species,

Nagel is assuming that close relatives are more similar than the unrelated. Yet, in his own profession, he must have noticed that his colleagues were more similar to him in respects of importance to him than they were similar to their own siblings.  

nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

Not if you grow up in a place- like rural Kerala- where there are plenty of bats. 

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.

And yet, thanks to the Daredevil comics, this is precisely what many of my cohort grew up imagining.  

This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.

No. It is like being Daredevil. Alternatively, we can imagine wearing a Virtual Reality headset which promises to simulate whatever it is that goes on within a bat's brain.  

We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion. 

If the thing can make money, I suppose somebody is doing it. I suppose the military has researched this for its own purposes. Perhaps there are applications to help those with vision lost. Scientific investigation of this filed is certainly useful. But Philosophy can add nothing sensible here. 

 

By "our own case" I do not mean just "my own case," but rather the mentalistic ideas that we apply unproblematically to ourselves and other human beings.

If it is useful to do so- sure. But we may also pretend that someone who poses a threat or a nuisance to us is 'incomprehensible'  

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.

This is a foolish assumption. Some people may have a very different type of imagination from that of a stupid academic teaching worthless shite.  

It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

If that were really true, Nagel would have been trying to live like a bat or would have been taking plenty of drugs in the hope of achieving bat consciousness. The truth is Nagel didn't want to know what it was like for a bat to be a bat. He wanted his readers to believe some insuperable difficulty arose in this connection. I don't suppose a happy and contented bat which is peacefully drowsing has very different qualia from myself when I'm similarly at peace. But, I know my qualia can change simply by pinching myself. Indeed, qualia may be strategic or, rather, must be so if evolution is a true theory. But to say something is game theoretic is not to deny reductionism. It just means outcomes are stochastic. Nagel didn't get this. His cohort was iggnirint. 

Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind,

why? You could ask Tim Leary to give you some nice LSD while making bat like noises. Alternatively, you could hire a hypnotist with a bat fetish. 

and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

So, Nagel had a shitty imagination or, to be more precise, said something foolish about it. The fact is that head trauma or hypnogogic drugs could have changed what his imagination could or couldn't do.  

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals.

But Nagel could look and behave like a Professor whose work was useful and his experiences would still be qualitatively different even if he maintained otherwise. We would say 'Nagel's eurekas were fake experiences of illumination'. The other guy who worked on Markov blankets had the genuine experience. We'd pay attention to what the latter said about what it felt like to make a useful discovery. We would avert our eyes and shuffle our feet if Nagel started babbling on about how he felt when he came up with this worthless tripe- which it must be said made him famous amongst the feeble minded products of Anglo American Philosophy departments. 

On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. 

Fuck off! We might well describe Nagel & Co as being batty bats- excluded from any sort of Light- who coordinate their activities through echolocation so as to spread a virus of stupidity.  

Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution

except your imagination- if you aint a fuckin' retard

 enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. 

Nonsense! From the time of Kafka we have all been able to imagine that final moment when Bat-Nagel foresees his fate as a wholly bat like entity with no memory of his sweetheart or his family. Indeed, since we know we will die, our imagination is always geared to imagining a state where the knowledge exists that imagination itself will be obliterated in the next time period. 

The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

No. The best evidence is evidence which is actually available. Thus testimony of experience, not the experience itself, is accepted by Courts as evidence. However, apart from verbal testimony, there are other types of scientific data- e.g brain scans showing highly stimulated pleasure centers- which may be deemed the best available. 

So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable.

It is completeable for any given purpose- but that is true of everything in the scientific world.  

We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like.

Screw 'schematic conceptions'. We are only interested in useful conceptions for some specific purpose. Nothing 'schematic' may be involved.  

For example, we may ascribe general types of experience on the basis of the animal's structure and behavior.

Why? What utility would doing so yield? 

Thus we describe bat sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward perception; we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger, and lust, and that they have other, more familiar types of perception besides sonar. But we believe that these experiences also have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive.

We don't know what is or isn't beyond any ability we have.  Temple Grandin- an autistic savant- has been described as a woman who can think like a cow. There may be 'bat whisperers' who can get bats to do amazing things. 

And if there is conscious life else where in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.

Nonsense! If we encounter such life-forms we are likely to spend a lot of time trying to describe it and, for any particular purpose, a good enough description will prevail.  

(The problem is not confined to exotic cases, however, for it exists between one person and another. The subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not accessible to me, for example,

unless, like Helen Keller, she can write about her 'life-world'. 

nor presumably is mine to him.

A wonderful excuse to keep disabled or cognitively diverse people out of service sector jobs! But why stop there? Why not say Jews can't understand Christians?  

This does not prevent us each from believing that the other's experience has such a subjective character.)

It also doesn't prevent us believing that everybody else is an evil robot. Why stick to Philosophy when Schizophrenia can take you so much further down the road to being a menace to the commonweal? 

If anyone is inclined to deny that we can believe in the existence of facts like this whose exact nature we cannot possibly conceive, he should reflect that in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us.

Nonsense! Intelligent bats or Martians could learn our language and spend time hanging out with us at the pub till they are satisfied that most of our experiences are pretty boring and not worth further investigation.  

The structure of their own minds might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is like to be us: that only certain general types of mental state could be ,ascribed to us (perhaps perception and appetite would be concepts common to us both; perhaps not). We know they would be wrong to draw such a skeptical conclusion because we know what it is like to be us.

No we don't. Being something doesn't mean knowing that thing. I can recall a time when being me sucked ass big time. Then I stopped being an Auditing. Being me suddenly became fun. I didn't know this would be the case. I just knew that I was very very bad at auditing. It never occurred to me that I might excel in some other field- being a drunken bum in my case. 

And we know that while it includes an enormous amount of variation and complexity, and while we do not possess the vocabulary to describe it adequately, its subjective charater is highly specific, and in some respects describable in terms that can be understood only by creatures like us.

To know what it is like to be me, I'd also need a structural causal model of myself such that I could tinker with it to ensure that my everyday experiences are more rewarding. But this may involve doing Yoga and developing a spirit of loving kindness. Fuck it. I'll stick with stuffing my face with Pizza and binge watching Netflix shows about super-heroes with tight bods who are also successful lawyers.                        

The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology

not to mention Iyengar phenomenology 

should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.

Coz that's what generally happens right? At the recent G7 meeting, Biden had to punch BoJo in the face coz the latter kept saying disparaging things about Martian phenomenology.  

It would be fine if someone were to develop concepts and a theory that enabled us to think about those things; but such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature.

Fuck does Nagel know about the limits of our nature? Could he say 'men will prove P does not equal NP for such and such reason?' If you know the limits of human nature you can also say which problems in Maths will always remain open for our species. Moreover, you could specify the exact age beyond which no mortal will ever be able to live and the exact speed beyond which no human will ever be able to run. 

In a footnote, Nagel says ' Therefore the analogical form of the English expression "what it is like" is misleading. It does not mean "what (in our experience) it resembles," but rather "how it is for the subject himself." Any intelligent extraterrestrial beings totally different from us.

So, if Nagel was asked 'what's it like teaching at Princeton?' he could not say 'It's great. You have super-smart colleagues and super-smart students. The money is good. Still, Stanford has better weather and that might be important for you. For myself, I find New England winters bracing.' 

And to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.

Nonsense! I deny the reality of dragons and demons. No 'cognitive dissonance' is involved. I can enjoy Netflix shows about dragons and demons because the fact that they are imaginary causes no great scandal.  

This brings us to the edge of a topic that requires much more discussion than I can give it here: namely, the relation between facts on the one hand and conceptual schemes or systems of representation on the other.

The relationship is one of multiple realizability. Any conceptual scheme can be modified to accommodate any set of facts.  

My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts.

No. It involves an arbitrary restriction on what is conceivable by humans. Back in the Nineteenth Century, Doestoevsky suggested that the fourth dimension was literally inconceivable for mortals. Within a few decades, every 19 year old Physics graduate was thoroughly at home with General Relativity. There was also the notion that Aryan Science could never be grasped by Jews. Thus Einstein must have been wrong. Also the earth is hollow. We are actually inside it. The stars we see are fixed to the underside of the Earth's crust.  

Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend.

Or the reverse.  

Indeed, it would be foolish to doubt this, given the finiteness of humanity's expectations.

Some humans expect to gain omniscience and to be as Gods.  

After all, there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them.

There would have been nothing called 'transfinite numbers' in Humanity's archives.  

But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted forever-simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type.

One can believe any old shite. It is not reasonable to have a belief about the limits of a Structural Causal Model without knowing what that Model might be.  

This impossibility might even be observed by other beings, but it is not clear that the existence of such beings, or the possibility of their existence, is a precondition of the significance of the hypothesis that there are humanly inaccessible facts.

The utility of that hypothesis is obvious. We can go ahead and make decisions in a protocol bound, timely, manner on the basis of available evidence.  

(After all, the nature of beings with access to humanly inaccessible facts is presumably itself a humanly inaccessible fact.)

No. If a giant dragon suddenly appeared in the Sky and said 'an asteroid is on a collision course with the earth. The Russians must supply such and such type rockets and the Americans must place such and such payload on them and the Chinese must calculate the optimal flight path using their new quantum computers. Get busy already. The rockets must launch by such and date.' The dragon then performs some miracles and disappears. We have high confidence in its assertions. This is a case where an 'oracle' has supplied cheap, common knowledge, 'verification' which would have been inaccessible to any deterministic algorithm.  

Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language.

No. There are facts which can be easily verified but which can't themselves be computed algorithmically. In Astronomy or Econ, we are observing complex systems which we can't fully simulate. But we can easily verify when our model is wrong because an observable fact shows that some unknown variable has affected the outcome. We can start finding proxies for it till we get a better idea of what it is.  

We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.

You can state and comprehend them well enough for any practical purpose.  

I shall not pursue this subject, however. Its bearing on the topic before us (namely, the mind-body problem) is that it enables us to make a general observation about the subjective character of experience.

Anybody can make any sort of general observation while off their head on drink.  

Whatever may be the status of facts about what it is like to be a human being, or a bat, or a Martian, these appear to be facts that embody a particular point of view.

Not if they genuinely are facts- i.e. canonical solutions which are context independent.  

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is.

We can also suggest that the other guy eagerly devours dog turds. Nagel is pretending people have to reason everything out before they say anything. Furthermore, when one person can know or say what the quality of the other's experience is, we don't get an objective fact. We get an inter-subjective proposition.  Nagel clearly does not reason things out before dashing off stupid shite. 

They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view-to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak.

This is nonsense. The people closest to me by blood and habitus may not be able to say anything at all about my inner state. A neurologist, on the other hand, who belongs to a wholly different race and background, may be able to pin-point the source of my malady and to cure me of it. After recovery, he might try to explain to me why I felt so horrible that I kept trying to bite my own face off. But I'm too stupid to understand sciencey stuff.  

The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.

Unless you have studied something worthwhile- like Medicine- not useless shite.  

In our own case we occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its point of view.

This depends on whether we are doing something useful or entertaining to us. The fact is we need help interpreting our experiences- e.g. why do I feel so lousy at work?- so we can qualitatively improve them. As for cats- another species whose basic drives we probably do understand quite well- it is nicer to think of them as enigmatic Egyptian deities who reward us with affection because we are genuinely worthy of it.  

This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts of experience- facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism- are accessible only from one point of view,

then they aren't facts at all. For a fact to exist there must be information which makes a proposition true. There is no such proposition in this case nor is there even any information from which some proposition could be adduced.  

then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism.

Why must experience have a 'true character'? How would its being revealed help or hinder any 'physical operation'? This is just mindless verbiage.  

The latter is a domain of objective facts par excellence-the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems.

Not if the organism is imaginary or inchoate.  

There are no comparable imaginative obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiology by human scientists, and intelligent bats or Martians might learn more about the human brain than we ever will.  It may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid of the imagination. For example, blind people are able to detect objects near them by a form of sonar, using vocal clicks or taps of a cane. Perhaps if one knew what that was like, one could by extension imagine roughly what it was like to possess the much more refined sonar of a bat. The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available.

So Nagel admits that Science can do useful stuff even when dealing with 'phenomenology'. Philosophy just shits the bed.  

The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat.

In which case if one person finds out what it is like to be a bat then he can teach a whole bunch of guys to arrive at the same knowledge. If this isn't the case, no knowledge obtains. There is merely some sort of mysterious transmutation of a mystical or occult kind.  

I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat (and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat) one must take up the bat's point of view.

Unless the thing has already been done, in which case you can simply sign for instruction in the subject.  

If one can take it up roughly, or partially, then one's conception will also be rough or partial.

Why? I may have a very good conception of English prosody but, you will agree, my grasp of it is rough and partial. 

Or so it seems in our present state of understanding. This is not by itself an argument against reduction. A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world.

A Martian poet, on the other hand, would make it his business to do so. In my own lifetime, I have seen how ideas about geomancy from the inscrutable East have become mainstream in the West. Feng Shui really does seem to work.  

The objective nature of the things picked out by these concepts

The concept of 'lightning' does not pick out only 'objective' things. It also picks out the notion of instantaneous enlightenment in Buddhism. Nagel forgets that a concept is not restricted in scope to what physically exists.  

could be apprehended by him because, although the concepts themselves are connected with a particular point of view and a particular visual phenomenology,

This is not the case. The concept of lightning that we have is wholly unconnected to any point of view or phenomenology save by express stipulation. 

the things apprehended from that point of view are not: they are observable from the point of view but external to it; hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by the same organisms or by others.

Nagel is assuming inerrant apprehension. But, if evolution is a true theory, no such thing could obtain. You'd only have a 'free energy' principle and 'Markov blankets'. Moreover, we'd all have some 'facts' about the internal states of others coz that has survival value. You hear the thug next door is angry coz his wife escaped. You keep well clear of him till he as stabbed her a sufficient number of times to restore his cheerfulness.  

Lightning has an objective character that is not exhausted by its visual appearance, and this can be investigated by a Martian without vision. To be precise, it has a more objective character than is revealed in its visual appearance.

This is true of every visible thing save those which are the product of mental illness or psychotomimetic drugs.  

In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an end point, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel.

Why not simply accept that the thing is a focal solution to a coordination game? After all, there is some utility in saying things like 'objectively, x is a good enough employer, but, subjectively, the fucker creeps me out.'  

And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.

We know of no Scientific work which hasn't emerged from strictly human viewpoints. MIT isn't actually staffed by monkeys. 

In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer.

Coz if your point of view is that you can't be beaten and raped, you can never actually have that experience- right?  

It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it.

Nonsense! Suppose the leader of your cult keeps beating and raping you. Because of brainwashing, you may have thought of the experience as a pleasant one. Later, after 'de-programming' you can give a more 'objective' account in Court.  

After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?

Nagel is precluding the possibility that bats might have no individual point of view. We may well say 'what would it be like to be a cloud' though we don't consider clouds to be sentient. Some advanced esoteric techniques do claim to achieve this type of state of Being.  

But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character,

it can have lots of different subjective characters simultaneously. Indeed, it may be wholly imaginary. I vividly recall my delight and exaltation at being declared Miss Teen Tamil Nadu despite no such happy event has occurred- -  

an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view?

This could  be supposed if you kept screaming 'stop fucking observing my mental processes. That shit hurts like a motherfucker. Kindly go back to anal probing me.' 

How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?

He could bring in an evolutionary game theorist who looks at the survival value of epi-phenomena. Qualia, like emotions, probably are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'.  

We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction.

Not if we are actually doing Science to some useful end. 

In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity,

not necessarily. Racism is a reductionism as is Nepotism. Hiring peeps on the basis of color or who their Mummy is is plenty reductionist. Sadly, it is the best strategy in some milieus.  

toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things

Fuck the real nature of things. Reductionism is cool if that's what helps us have a better life without too much cognitive effort.  

. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation.

Did Nagel think the guys curing polio or cancer or whatever bothered with any such shite?  

We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses.

Like what? Smells only dogs can pick up? Did Nagel never visit a lab? Did he really not know that human senses are required to make sense of stuff under a microscope?  

The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description.

No. I may 'that guy is hateful' which is subjective or I may say 'that guy is 1.83 cm tall', which is objective. But my dog can easily demonstrate that it finds the guy hateful because it jumps 1.83 cm inot the air to bite his fucking head off. Incidentally, it is only because having an accurate measurement of height is useful from the human viewpoint that we have centimeters.  

It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves toward which we have the phenomenal point of view.

Fuck does this mean? It is only from a particular human point of view that anything is objective.  

Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things. Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here.

Because the underlying notion is that behind the appearance of plurality, univocity obtains.  

What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing?

But only 'objective' from some human point of view. Around this time there were plenty of Maoist nutters who would say things like 'subjectively, Mother Theresa is a loving and caring person. Objectively, she is a fucking vampire draining the blood of poor brown peeps.'  

Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience

we are human. We have human experiences. You can't get closer than that. It is a different matter that we could always get a better Structural Causal Model of experience so as to improve the utility or felicity of our experiences. Thus, not having a knife stuck in your back tends to improve your experience of teaching High School Math in the inner city.  

by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us.

The same is true of describing things to clouds or rivers. On the other hand, I do find it comforting to confide my troubles to my teddy bear.  

In a footnote, Nagel observes-  The problem is not just that when I look at the "Mona Lisa," my visual experience has a certain quality, no trace of which is to be found by someone looking into my brain.

This is unlikely for sufficiently advanced equipment. 

 For even if he did observe there a tiny image of the "Mona Lisa," he would have no reason to identify it with the experience

Actually, we can imagine an autistic savant who always spots the genuine Mona Lisa from the most faithful reproductions. A study of his brain waves may indeed be very useful in refining some sort of device which turns brainwaves into images. Thus, if we can access 'brainwaves' then we have a way of seeing what others see. 

If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one  point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity -that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint-does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.

Nagel is assuming there is metric over the relevant configuration space. Does he have any reason to do so? It is likely that it will have 'topological holes'.  Otherwise all consciousness would be continually deformable into every other. There are sound evolutionary reasons to do with uncorrelated asymmetries why this is would not be 'regret minimizing'. 

In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced.

No. Sound is sound is sound. Seeing it is a wave is about reproducibility not reducibility. But experts in sound as something wholly human will still be employed to improve reproducibility and there will be product differentiation in the speaker market based on 'phenomenological' considerations like 'warmth'. 

Members of radically different species may both understand the same physical events in objective terms,

It is more likely that they will have different 'objective' definitions of what is or isn't a physical event.  

and this does not require that they understand the phenomenal forms in which those events appear to the senses of members of the other species.

It may do. How physical events are interpreted can determine if they continue to be experienced. Ultimately perception is about survival. If you keep looking at stupid shit, you go extinct.  

Thus it is a condition of their referring to a common reality that their more particular viewpoints are not part of the common reality that they both apprehend.

Why not? The dog has a viewpoint. I have a different viewpoint. Our common reality features me throwing sticks at the mutt and that brave and intelligent creature returning that stick to a fat fool who can't throw for shit.  

The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.

A reductionist view is that doggy and me like playing with each other coz of the way our species co-evolved. This doesn't omit 'dogginess' or our own instinctive reaction to dogs from the picture. Indeed, this reductionist view might help people and dogs to have superior quality time together. I discover it is a mistake to try to get doggy to do my taxes. Doggy comes to understand that I need to be taken for walkies to the pub by the park where there are plenty of other dogs with interesting butts to sniff.  

But while we are right to leave this point of view aside in seeking a fuller understanding of the external world, we cannot ignore it permanently, since it is the essence of the internal world, and not merely a point of view on it.

We don't what is or isn't 'the essence' of anything. If evolution is a ture theory, it is likely that all sorts of things we consider to be a priori synthetic truths are nothing of the sort.  

Most of the neobehaviorism of recent philosophical psychology results from the effort to substitute an objective concept of mind for the real thing, in order to have nothing left over which cannot be reduced.

This may be true. But Nagel is equally shite. So this is just philosophy complaining about how shitty it is.  

If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience,

why acknowledge anything so foolish? A physical theory of mind doesn't need to account for shit. If you bring up 'subjective character of experience', the physicalist can reply 'you only saw that coz u eat dog shit'. You deny you eat dog shit. The physicalist says- 'exactly what a dog shit devourer would say!'  

we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done.

Fuck these guys would know about 'presently available conceptions'? Their subject was adversely selective of cretinous bullshitters.  

In a footnote, Nagel says 'The relation would therefore not be a contingent one, like that of a cause and its distinct effect. It would be necessarily true that a certain physical state felt a certain way.

This is foolish. What is being asserted is that a Hilbert type calculus can be as informative as a Gentzen type set of propositions. This is not the case because uncorrelated asymmetries are captured by the latter not the former. What this means is that a 'necessarily true' relation is not in fact a relation between two things. They are one and the same. There is no 'relation'. Indeed, there may only be one 'slingshot' proposition- i.e. one very detailed fact about the world. 

 Saul Kripke argues that causal behaviorist and related analyses of the mental fail because they construe, e.g., "pain" as a merely contingent name of pains. 

Very naughty of them, I'm sure. The truth is they fail because they are a waste of fucking time. 

The subjective character of an experience ("its immediate phenomenological quality" Kripke calls it [p. 340]) is the essential property left out by such analyses, 

just as utility is the essential property left out of worthless psilosophical bullshit

and the one in virtue of which it is, necessarily, the experience it is. My view is closely related to his. Like Kripke, I find the hypothesis that a certain brain state should necessarily have

The problem is unique. If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically," to undergo certain physical processes.

Only if some survival value is added thereby- assuming evolution is true. But why would evolution fabricate an epiphenomena regardless of the fitness landscape? 

What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery.

In the sense that the smell of a unicorn's fart is a mystery.  

What moral should be drawn from these reflections, and what should be done next?

This type of mental masturbation is utterly worthless.  

It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.

This is stupid. We thing P is not equal to NP. That's something we grasp easily enough. I personally have no conception of how it may be true. But, equally, I have no conception of how my fingers on the keyboard are causing these words to appear on the screen in front of me. This does not mean I don't understand that I'm posting stuff to my blog.  

Perhaps it will be thought unreasonable to require such a conception as a condition of understanding.

It is crazy.  

After all, it might be said, the meaning of physicalism is clear enough: mental states are states of the body; mental events are physical events.

Which is why they stop after your head has been cut off.  

A theory that explained how the mind-brain relation was necessary would

be obviously wrong if evolution is true. Some change in the fitness landscape would eliminate that epiphenomena as involving more cost than benefit. There's lots of stuff we do 'mindlessly'. It may be that our distant descendants will appear quite mindless to us- though the reverse is more likely.  

still leave us with Kripke's problem of explaining why it nevertheless appears contingent.

Death. That's the answer. Life is fucking contingent. Minds might not get up to much in the grave.  

That difficulty seems to me surmountable, in the following way. We may imagine something by representing it to ourselves either perceptually, sympathetically, or symbolically.

Fuck off! We imagine things just by imagining them. There is no need for any representing in addition to that. By contrast, if I want to imagine Nagel writing something non nonsensical, I can't do so even if represent Nagel to myself sympathetically. On the other hand, I have frequently imagined Angela Merkel doing very naughty things to me. Believe me, no 'representing' was involved. I was hoping to imagine Arsulla Van der Laydown. You don't believe me? All right! It was Willy Brandt. Happy now?  

I shall not try to say how symbolic imagination works, but part of what happens in the other two cases is this. To imagine something perceptually, we put ourselves in a conscious state resembling the state we would be in if we perceived it.

No we don't. Angela invades my imagination at the most inappropriate times.  

To imagine something sympathetically, we put ourselves in a conscious state resembling the thing itself.

Fuck off! I can imagine Terence Tao. I'm too fucking stupid to ever be in any type of conscious state resembling Tao's. 

(This method can be used only to imagine mental events and states-our own or another's.) When we try to imagine a mental state occurring without its associated brain state, we first sympathetically imagine the occurrence of the mental state: that is, we put ourselves into a state that resembles it mentally.

Nagel thinks that I could be as smart as Einstein by commanding myself to use sympathetic magic to become Einstein. 

I think I now understand why Nagel's paper was so popular in my youth. The guy was peddling a puerile type of magic. Shame he didn't set up a sex-cult and get rich. Ultimately, the mind-body problem has to do with ugly dudes trying to get laid by using their mind. Maybe pretending to be a bat helps in this. Some folk are kinky that way.  Different strokes for different folks- right?