2) saying that your subjective experience is real (that is, it exists in some form and is not just a delusion)
What does it entail when you say that your subjective experience “is real”? It’s important to note that the anti-realist doesn’t try to take away the way something feels to you. Instead, the anti-realist disagrees with the further associations you might have for “consciousness is real.” If consciousness is real, it seems like there’d be a fact of the matter whether bees are conscious, that there’s an unambiguous way to answer the question “Are bees conscious?” without the need to further explain what exactly the question is going for. As I tried to explain endnote 18, that’s a very different claim from “it feels like something to be me, right now” (or “it feels like something to be in pain” – to use the example in your comment above).
For consciousness, this sentiment is really hard to explain. I think endnote 18 is the best explanation I’ve managed to give thus far. I’d say the sentiment behind anti-realism is much easier to understand with other bedrock concepts (Tier 2, 3, or 4).
For instance, you can go through a similar dialogue structure for morality. The moral realist says “But surely moral facts exist, because it seems that, all else equal, a world where everyone gets tortured is worse than a world full of flourishing.” In reply, the moral anti-realist might say something like “Sure, we can agree about that. But it seems to me that you think you are also saying that for every moral question, there’s a single correct answer. That, for instance, whether or not people have obligations to avoid purchasing factory farmed meat has an unambiguous answer. I don’t see how you think you can establish this merely by pointing at self-evident examples such as ‘surely a world where everyone gets tortured is worse than a world full of flourishing.’ It seems to me that you have not yet argued that what’s moral versus what’s not moral always has a solution.”
Analogously, the same dialogue works for aesthetics realism. The Mona Lisa might be (mostly) uncontroversially beautiful, but it would be weird to infer from this that “Are Mark Rhotko’s paintings beautiful ?” is a well-specified question with a single true answer.
The moral realist says “But surely moral facts exist, because it seems that, all else equal, a world where everyone gets tortured is worse than a world full of flourishing.” In reply, the moral anti-realist might say something like “Sure, we can agree about that. But it seems to me that you think you are also saying that for every moral question, there’s a single correct answer. …
I find myself quite confused now. This passage sounds to me like it’s implying that the anti-realist position is: “Some moral claims may be objectively true, but many are neither objectively true nor objectively false.” In this case, it sounds like the anti-realist is saying that there is a speaker-independent fact of the matter about whether everyone getting tortured is morally worse than a world full of flourishing, and just denying that that means there will always be independent facts of the matter about moral claims.
But I didn’t think this was what moral anti-realism was about. I think I’d want to classify such a view as moral realist in an important sense, as it seems to involve realism about at least some moral claims.
Have I misunderstood what you were trying to convey with that passage?
This passage sounds to me like it’s implying that the anti-realist position is: “Some moral claims may be objectively true, but many are neither objectively true nor objectively false.” In this case, it sounds like the anti-realist is saying that there is a speaker-independent fact of the matter about whether everyone getting tortured is morally worse than a world full of flourishing, and just denying that that means there will always be independent facts of the matter about moral claims.
I should have chosen a more nuanced framing in my comment. Instead of saying, “Sure, we can agree about that,” the anti-realist should have said “Sure, that seems like a reasonable way to use words. I’m happy to go along with using moral terms like ‘worse’ or ‘better’ in ways where this is universally considered self-evident. But it seems to me that you think you are also saying that for every moral question, there’s a single correct answer [...]”
So the anti-realist isn’t necessarily conceding that “surely a world where everyone gets tortured is worse than a world where everyone flourishes” is a successful argument in favor of moral realism. At least, it’s not yet an argument for ambitious versions of moral realism (ones “worthy of the name” according to my semantic intuitions).
I think I’d want to classify such a view as moral realist in an important sense, as it seems to involve realism about at least some moral claims.
It’s possible that you just have different semantic intuitions from me. It might be helpful to take a step back and ignore whether or not to classify a view as “moral realism,” and think about what it means for notions like moral uncertainty, the value of information for doing more work in philosophy, the prospect of convergence among people’s normative-ethical views if they did more reflecting, etc. Because the view we are discussing here has relatively weak implications for all these things, I personally didn’t feel like calling it “moral realism.”
Ok, I think from this reply, your other reply to me, and the four posts you’ve made thus far, I’m realising that (1) there are three views which I would’ve felt were separate, and only the first of which I’d typically be inclined to call “definitely moral anti-realism”. These views are something like the following:
A position in which there may not even be a single correct moral theory
A position in which no strong claims are (yet?) made about what the single correct moral theory would be
A position in which most moral questions—out of all those that could possibly be asked—may lack definitively or singularly correct answers (even if some other moral questions have such answers)
But (2) it seems like you see these views as “in effect” very similar, and perhaps interchangeable. And it seems like you’d consider them all “anti-realist” in the sort of sense you care about, whether or not we use that label for them.
Does (2) sound like a roughly accurate depiction of your views?
(I tentatively suspect there are substantial differences in the implications of these views, which map onto what I’d typically think of as differences between the implications of moral realism and moral anti-realism. But my thoughts on that still seem hazy at the moment.)
Does (2) sound like a roughly accurate depiction of your views?
Yes, but with an important caveat. The way you described the three views, it doesn’t make it clear that 2. and 3. have the same practical implications as 1. Whereas I intended to describe them in a way that leaves no possible doubt about that.
Here’s how I would change your descriptions to make them compatible with my views:
A position in which there may not even be a single correct moral theory ((no change))
A position in which no strong claims can ever be made about what the single correct moral theory would be.
A position in which the only moral questions that have a correct (and/or knowable) answer are questions on which virtually everyone already agrees.
As you can see, my 2. and 3. are quite different from what you wrote.
What does it entail when you say that your subjective experience “is real”?
Hmm, that my introspective observation of at time 14:04:38 EST corresponds to something that exists? (I notice feeling like talking in circles, sorry) Say I tell you that I just added two numbers in my head. I believe this is a useful description of some aspect of my cognitive processes, and it is possible to find shared patterns in other cognitive systems when they do addition.
I feel like Alice is uncharitable in this conversation. Lack of sharp boundaries is in my mind no strong argument for denying the existence of a claimed aspect of reality. Okay, this also feels uncharitable, but it felt like Alice was arguing that the moon doesn’t exist because there are edge cases, like the big rock that orbits Pluto. I wished she would make the argument why, in this particular case, the observation of Bob does not correspond to anything that exists. Bob would say
I think I notice something that is real but hard to grasp, has a character of ‘wanting to be ended’, and which sounds a lot like what other people talk about when they are hurt. I’ve observed this “experience” many times now.
Then Alice would maybe say
I can relate to the feeling like there is something to be explained. Like the thing that you call “your experience” has certain features that correspond to something. For example like the different color labels for apples and bananas correspond to something real: a different mix of photons being emitted. I claim that what you call a qualitative experience does not correspond to anything real, there is no pattern of reality where it’s useful to call it being conscious. Now let’s go meditate for a year and you will realize that you were totally confused about this part of your observations.
I feel like you’re too focused on this notion of whether something “exists” or not. One of the main points I was trying to convey in the article is that I don’t consider this to be an ideal way of framing the disagreement. See for instance these quotes:
Going by connotations alone, we might at first think that realism means that a domain in question is real, whereas anti-realism implies that it’s something other than real (e.g., that it’s merely imagined). Although accurate in a very loose sense, this interpretation is misleading.
[...]
Typically, when someone stops believing in God, they also stop talking as though God exists. As far as private purposes are concerned, atheists don’t generally refine their concept of God; they abandon it.[3]
Going from realism to anti-realism works differently.
[...]
Rejecting realism for a domain neither entails erasing the substance of that domain, nor (necessarily) its relevance. Anti-realists will generally agree that the domain has some relevance, some “structure.”
__
Now quoting something from your comment:
Lack of sharp boundaries is in my mind no strong argument for denying the existence of a claimed aspect of reality. Okay, this also feels uncharitable, but it felt like Alice was arguing that the moon doesn’t exist because there are edge cases, like the big rock that orbits Pluto.
Hm, I think it goes beyond just saying that a concept has fuzzy boundaries. Some people might say that “markets” don’t exist because it’s a fuzzy, abstract concept and people may not agree in practice what aspects of physical reality are part of a market. This would be a pedantic way of objecting to the claim “markets are real.” That’s not what I think anti-realism is about. :)
With the example of consciousness, my point would go something like this: “There might be a totally sensible interpretation of consciousness according to which bees are conscious, and a totally sensible interpretation according to which they aren’t. Bees aren’t ‘edge cases’ like the rocks that surround Pluto. They either fall square into a concept of consciousness, or completely outside of it. Based on what we can tell from introspection and from our folk concept of consciousness, it’s under-determined what we’re supposed to do with bees.”
If put this way, perhaps you’d agree that this in conflict with the realist intuition that consciousness is this crisp thing that systems either have or lack.
Then Alice would maybe say
Haha. Or if you wanted to make the joke about Dennett’s eliminativism, you could describe Alice’s reply like this:
“Look, here’s an optical illusion. And here’s another one. Therefore, consciousness doesn’t exist.”
But I think that’s uncharitable to Dennett. If you read Consciousness Explained in search of arguments why consciousness doesn’t exist, you’ll be disappointed. However, if you read it in search of arguments why there’s no clearcut way to extrapolate from obvious examples like “I’m conscious right now” to less obvious ones like “are bees conscious?” then the book will be really interesting. All these illusions and discussions about fancy neuroscience (e.g., cutaneous rabbit or the discussion about Stalinesque versus Orwellian revisions) support the point that many processes we believe to have a good introspective grasp on are actually much more under-determined than we would intuitively guess. This supports the view that consciousness is very unlike what we think it is. Some people therefore say things like “consciousness ((as we think of it)) doesn’t exist.” I think that’s misleading and will confuse everyone. I think it would be easier to understand anti-realists if they explained their views by saying that things are different from how they appear, and more ambiguous in quite fundamental ways, etc.
What does it entail when you say that your subjective experience “is real”? It’s important to note that the anti-realist doesn’t try to take away the way something feels to you. Instead, the anti-realist disagrees with the further associations you might have for “consciousness is real.” If consciousness is real, it seems like there’d be a fact of the matter whether bees are conscious, that there’s an unambiguous way to answer the question “Are bees conscious?” without the need to further explain what exactly the question is going for. As I tried to explain endnote 18, that’s a very different claim from “it feels like something to be me, right now” (or “it feels like something to be in pain” – to use the example in your comment above).
For consciousness, this sentiment is really hard to explain. I think endnote 18 is the best explanation I’ve managed to give thus far. I’d say the sentiment behind anti-realism is much easier to understand with other bedrock concepts (Tier 2, 3, or 4).
For instance, you can go through a similar dialogue structure for morality. The moral realist says “But surely moral facts exist, because it seems that, all else equal, a world where everyone gets tortured is worse than a world full of flourishing.” In reply, the moral anti-realist might say something like “Sure, we can agree about that. But it seems to me that you think you are also saying that for every moral question, there’s a single correct answer. That, for instance, whether or not people have obligations to avoid purchasing factory farmed meat has an unambiguous answer. I don’t see how you think you can establish this merely by pointing at self-evident examples such as ‘surely a world where everyone gets tortured is worse than a world full of flourishing.’ It seems to me that you have not yet argued that what’s moral versus what’s not moral always has a solution.”
Analogously, the same dialogue works for aesthetics realism. The Mona Lisa might be (mostly) uncontroversially beautiful, but it would be weird to infer from this that “Are Mark Rhotko’s paintings beautiful ?” is a well-specified question with a single true answer.
Thanks for this post!
I find myself quite confused now. This passage sounds to me like it’s implying that the anti-realist position is: “Some moral claims may be objectively true, but many are neither objectively true nor objectively false.” In this case, it sounds like the anti-realist is saying that there is a speaker-independent fact of the matter about whether everyone getting tortured is morally worse than a world full of flourishing, and just denying that that means there will always be independent facts of the matter about moral claims.
But I didn’t think this was what moral anti-realism was about. I think I’d want to classify such a view as moral realist in an important sense, as it seems to involve realism about at least some moral claims.
Have I misunderstood what you were trying to convey with that passage?
I should have chosen a more nuanced framing in my comment. Instead of saying, “Sure, we can agree about that,” the anti-realist should have said “Sure, that seems like a reasonable way to use words. I’m happy to go along with using moral terms like ‘worse’ or ‘better’ in ways where this is universally considered self-evident. But it seems to me that you think you are also saying that for every moral question, there’s a single correct answer [...]”
So the anti-realist isn’t necessarily conceding that “surely a world where everyone gets tortured is worse than a world where everyone flourishes” is a successful argument in favor of moral realism. At least, it’s not yet an argument for ambitious versions of moral realism (ones “worthy of the name” according to my semantic intuitions).
It’s possible that you just have different semantic intuitions from me. It might be helpful to take a step back and ignore whether or not to classify a view as “moral realism,” and think about what it means for notions like moral uncertainty, the value of information for doing more work in philosophy, the prospect of convergence among people’s normative-ethical views if they did more reflecting, etc. Because the view we are discussing here has relatively weak implications for all these things, I personally didn’t feel like calling it “moral realism.”
Ok, I think from this reply, your other reply to me, and the four posts you’ve made thus far, I’m realising that (1) there are three views which I would’ve felt were separate, and only the first of which I’d typically be inclined to call “definitely moral anti-realism”. These views are something like the following:
A position in which there may not even be a single correct moral theory
A position in which no strong claims are (yet?) made about what the single correct moral theory would be
A position in which most moral questions—out of all those that could possibly be asked—may lack definitively or singularly correct answers (even if some other moral questions have such answers)
But (2) it seems like you see these views as “in effect” very similar, and perhaps interchangeable. And it seems like you’d consider them all “anti-realist” in the sort of sense you care about, whether or not we use that label for them.
Does (2) sound like a roughly accurate depiction of your views?
(I tentatively suspect there are substantial differences in the implications of these views, which map onto what I’d typically think of as differences between the implications of moral realism and moral anti-realism. But my thoughts on that still seem hazy at the moment.)
Yes, but with an important caveat. The way you described the three views, it doesn’t make it clear that 2. and 3. have the same practical implications as 1. Whereas I intended to describe them in a way that leaves no possible doubt about that.
Here’s how I would change your descriptions to make them compatible with my views:
A position in which there may not even be a single correct moral theory ((no change))
A position in which no strong claims can ever be made about what the single correct moral theory would be.
A position in which the only moral questions that have a correct (and/or knowable) answer are questions on which virtually everyone already agrees.
As you can see, my 2. and 3. are quite different from what you wrote.
Thanks, this helps me understand your views a bit more.
Hmm, that my introspective observation of at time 14:04:38 EST corresponds to something that exists? (I notice feeling like talking in circles, sorry) Say I tell you that I just added two numbers in my head. I believe this is a useful description of some aspect of my cognitive processes, and it is possible to find shared patterns in other cognitive systems when they do addition.
I feel like Alice is uncharitable in this conversation. Lack of sharp boundaries is in my mind no strong argument for denying the existence of a claimed aspect of reality. Okay, this also feels uncharitable, but it felt like Alice was arguing that the moon doesn’t exist because there are edge cases, like the big rock that orbits Pluto. I wished she would make the argument why, in this particular case, the observation of Bob does not correspond to anything that exists. Bob would say
Then Alice would maybe say
I feel like you’re too focused on this notion of whether something “exists” or not. One of the main points I was trying to convey in the article is that I don’t consider this to be an ideal way of framing the disagreement. See for instance these quotes:
[...]
[...]
__
Now quoting something from your comment:
Hm, I think it goes beyond just saying that a concept has fuzzy boundaries. Some people might say that “markets” don’t exist because it’s a fuzzy, abstract concept and people may not agree in practice what aspects of physical reality are part of a market. This would be a pedantic way of objecting to the claim “markets are real.” That’s not what I think anti-realism is about. :)
With the example of consciousness, my point would go something like this: “There might be a totally sensible interpretation of consciousness according to which bees are conscious, and a totally sensible interpretation according to which they aren’t. Bees aren’t ‘edge cases’ like the rocks that surround Pluto. They either fall square into a concept of consciousness, or completely outside of it. Based on what we can tell from introspection and from our folk concept of consciousness, it’s under-determined what we’re supposed to do with bees.”
If put this way, perhaps you’d agree that this in conflict with the realist intuition that consciousness is this crisp thing that systems either have or lack.
Haha. Or if you wanted to make the joke about Dennett’s eliminativism, you could describe Alice’s reply like this:
“Look, here’s an optical illusion. And here’s another one. Therefore, consciousness doesn’t exist.”
But I think that’s uncharitable to Dennett. If you read Consciousness Explained in search of arguments why consciousness doesn’t exist, you’ll be disappointed. However, if you read it in search of arguments why there’s no clearcut way to extrapolate from obvious examples like “I’m conscious right now” to less obvious ones like “are bees conscious?” then the book will be really interesting. All these illusions and discussions about fancy neuroscience (e.g., cutaneous rabbit or the discussion about Stalinesque versus Orwellian revisions) support the point that many processes we believe to have a good introspective grasp on are actually much more under-determined than we would intuitively guess. This supports the view that consciousness is very unlike what we think it is. Some people therefore say things like “consciousness ((as we think of it)) doesn’t exist.” I think that’s misleading and will confuse everyone. I think it would be easier to understand anti-realists if they explained their views by saying that things are different from how they appear, and more ambiguous in quite fundamental ways, etc.