Vim: How Much Is That in "Real Money"?

57. VIM: HOW MUCH IS THAT IN “REAL MONEY”?

It is a common opinion that although you could construct a robotic model of color vision, say, that exhibited all the familiar phenomena we humans experience, such as complementary afterimages and color contrast illusions, and although the robot would have similar internal processes that accounted for its afterimages and so forth, since “it’s just a robot” it couldn’t have red and blue qualia. The functional states that signaled or represented colored things in front of the robot’s television camera eyes would not have that extra something that we have. Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) provides us with a standard way of alluding to the conscious states, if any, of an entity. It wouldn’t be like anything to be a robot having an afterimage. Why do so many people think this is obvious? It might be because they are imagining a relatively simple robot and failing to note that you can’t draw conclusions about all robots from facts about all simple robots. Of course if you define qualia as intrinsic properties of experiences considered in isolation from all their causes and effects, and logically independent of all dispositional properties, then qualia are logically guaranteed to elude all functional analysis. No amount of clever engineering could endow a robot with qualia—but this is an empty victory, since there is no reason to believe such intrinsic properties exist.

To see this, compare the qualia of experience to the value of money. Some naïve Americans seem to think that dollars, unlike euros and yen, have intrinsic value. The tourist in the cartoon asks, “How much is that in real money?” meaning how much is that in dollars. Let’s push this idea a little farther: These naïve Americans are willing to exchange dollars for euros; they are happy to “reduce” the value of other currencies to their exchange rate with dollars (or goods and services), but when they do this, they have a sense that dollars are different. Every dollar, they declare, has something logically independent of the functional exchange powers it shares with all other currencies in circulation. A dollar has a certain je ne sais quoi. When you contemplate it, you can detect that it has an aura of value—less than in the olden days, perhaps, but still discernible: let’s call it the dollar’s vim (from the Latin, vis, meaning power). Officially, then, vim is the non-relational, non-dispositional, intrinsic economic value of a dollar. Pounds sterling and euros and the like have no intrinsic value—they are just symbolic stand-ins; they are redeemable for dollars, and hence have derived economic value, but they don’t have vim! How sad for those Europeans! Their currencies lack intrinsic economic value! How do they bear it? How do they motivate themselves to earn their pay, these poor vimbies! Those of us fortunate enough to get paid in dollars acquire items with a good helping of vim attached. No wonder the U.S. dollar has been adopted as the currency of choice in so many nations! Even foreigners can sense the vim of a dollar.

So say our imaginary American tourists. So defined, the vim of each dollar is guaranteed to elude the theories of economists forever, since no economic theory could ever account for intrinsic economic value. So much the worse for economics? The existence of vim would render economics a seriously incomplete science, but fortunately, we have no good reason to believe that there is such a thing as intrinsic economic value. Vim is quite obviously a figment of the imagination, an artifact of the heartfelt hunches of those naïve Americans, and we can explain the artifact without honoring it.

Some participants in the consciousness debates are rather like the imaginary tourists. They simply insist, flat out, that their intuitions about intrinsic phenomenal properties are a nonnegotiable starting point for any science of consciousness. Such a conviction should be considered an interesting symptom deserving a diagnosis, a datum that any science of consciousness must account for, in the same spirit that economists and psychologists might set out to explain why so many people succumb to the potent illusion that money has intrinsic value. (When Europe switched to the euro, people who were used to conceiving of prices in terms of francs and marks and lire and the like went through an awkward period when they could no longer rely on “translations” into their home-grown versions of “real money.” See Dehaene and Marques, 2002, for a pioneering exploration of this phenomenon.)

There are many properties of conscious states that can and should be subjected to further scientific investigation right now, and once we get accounts of them in place, we may well find that they satisfy us as an explanation of what consciousness is. After all, this is what happened in the case of the erstwhile “mystery” of what life is. Vitalism—the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all living things, dubbed élan vital—turns out to have been a failure of imagination. Vitalism today is all but extinct, though there are still a few cranks around who haven’t given up. Inspired by that happy success story, we can proceed with our scientific exploration of consciousness. If the day arrives when all the demonstrable features of consciousness are explained, all the acknowledged intellectual debts are paid, and we plainly see that something big is missing (it should stick out like a sore thumb at some point, if it is really important), those with the unshakable hunch will get to say they told us so. In the meantime, they can worry about how to fend off the diagnosis that they, like the vitalists before them, have been misled by an illusion. Here is the challenge, then, to those who believe in qualia as intrinsic properties of experiences: How do they distinguish their conviction from the mistake of the naïve Americans? (Or are the Americans right? Dollars do have vim, as anybody can just intuit!)