Ossorio: I don't know if we can get anymore mileage out of this one. How would you describe this experience of satori or pure awareness? How can we talk about it?

Well, one way we can talk about it is to call it pure experience. But if you give up the notion that you are ever describing experience, then that means that you've got to work to make this an honest question. So we need some help on the question.

Member of Audience: If it's impossible to describe an experience, at least trying to describe an experience, talk about it or think about it and simply have the experience. Is that not satori or whatever?

Ossorio: I don't know. How would you know?

Member of Audience: We all did agree that we cannot talk about it or...

Ossorio: No we can talk about it but we can't describe it.

Member of Audience: You can't describe experience. We have to all agree that we have experience.

Ossorio: Yeah. But that's why I say if you followed all of that about other experience, is there anything that remains to be answered about this experience? Walter, you are looking troubled.

Member of Audience: Well, you correctly detect my experience. [laughter] If you can't describe experience, does it make sense to say that we can observe each other's experience?

Ossorio: You could make some kind of sense out of it but it wouldn't help. If you explain that by saying "Well we can often tell what sort of experience somebody is having", I'd say "Yeah, but it doesn't help much."

Member of Audience: Why not?

Ossorio: Because nobody doubts that. So that isn't going to satisfy people who have questions about experience.

Member of Audience: Well, what does it mean when you say "Oh yeah, now I know what you mean."

Ossorio: That's not problematic. That's not puzzling.

Member of Audience: But somehow we have recreated our experience enough so that the other person recognizes it.

Ossorio: Yeah and that's commonplace. That's why I say it. If that's all you mean, I don't know anybody that would disagree or be much interested. I mean somebody who talks about indescribable experiences is not going to be satisfied with that.

Member of Audience: I thought you used to avoid the word "experience."

Ossorio: Yeah, there is nothing in the formulation that says "experience". It's all carried by this notion of making distinctions. And making distinctions, if you want to get technical, can be paraphrased into information processing, which I don't do. On the other hand, there is nothing in the formulation that denies that there is any experience.

Member of Audience: Can you be a person and not have experience?

Ossorio: Well, that's an interesting question and you can go either way. Some people prefer one way. I prefer to be conservative and say "Yes." You might say "It's a burden of proof thing." I am willing to say "No," but the burden of proof is on somebody who wants to say that. Without any such thing I would say "Yes."

Member of Audience: For example, a computer would qualify as a person...

Ossorio: Not a computer, but a creature.

Member of Audience: Say what?

Ossorio: A creature.

Member of Audience: A creature in a mechanical sense.

Ossorio: No, not a mechanical creature. No, a non-biological creature. See, if you say machine or mechanical you are biasing the answer because by definition those aren't persons. So you have to get something neutral like creature in order to be able to say something with it.

Member of Audience: We can assume burden of proof wise that experience is possible and yet not be a human, not be a person. I'm sorry. But can you not have experience and yet be a person?

Ossorio: Yeah, that's what I thought you were saying.

Member of Audience: Is Hal a candidate for that. In 2001, Hal the creature...

Ossorio: By implication, yeah. If you didn't know how Hal worked, if you didn't know that it was just a computer system, you might take it as a person.

Member of Audience: You can't know if somebody is not having an experience either, you know. Because they can't communicate it to you, doesn't mean that they are not having some kind of experience.

Ossorio: No, but remember that communication -- language -- is the best way that we know about other people's experience. There isn't a better way. That's the prime way.

Member of Audience: Yes, but that doesn't mean that if you are in a coma or sleeping you could still be experiencing and not be able to tell about it.

Ossorio: You might. You could be dreaming.

Member of Audience: Regarding the description of the experience again, are the person characteristics the parameters that distinguish between two different cases of experience?

Ossorio: No.

Member of Audience: Does the person characteristic...

Ossorio: No. Person characteristic merely helps to explain why you have the experience that you do. It's not a way distinguishing one experience from another.

Member of Audience: But then if two behaviors differ because they involve different experiences when all other parameters are the same, wouldn't they differ only in the person characteristics?

Ossorio: No. They would differ here [pointing to K]. If at all. You see the question is "What do you mean by experience?" "What is this extra something?" You don't just want to stipulate that there is an extra something because that's what the argument is about. But if it's an extra something it's going to be this kind of something.

Member of Audience: But that doesn't require...

Ossorio: This doesn't require it. I am saying that if there is an extra something like that, it will be this kind. It will involve distinctions because experiences are of one kind or another. And you can tell if you are having this experience or that one.

Member of Audience: Is that the same thing as saying whatever distinction you are making when you engage in that behavior?

Ossorio: Say that again.

Member of Audience: Would that be the same as saying it's whatever distinctions you are making when you are engaging in that behavior?

Ossorio: Yeah.

Member of Audience: That's the equivalent of saying that's what your experience is?

Ossorio: No. I am saying if there is something called experience that enters into behavior, it will enter here.

Member of Audience: That would be a special case.

Ossorio: It would be a special case. A special kind of value of K. See, you might pursue it by saying "Well after all, on this burden of proof thing, shouldn't it be the other way because all of the people we know have experience?" So, then I direct your attention to your knowledge of yourself and your knowledge of your behavior, and your knowledge of your behavior is not via experience. And that's because it's an author's knowledge that you have before the behavior even exists because you have to have it before the behavior exists in order to create the behavior. You can only experience what's already there. You can't experience something before it exists. So you see your knowledge of your behavior is not because you have an experience of it.

Member of Audience: Then wouldn't it show up under PC instead of under K?

Ossorio: Nope. It's a distinction but it's not experience. It's not experiential. That's the point of bringing it up now. You can distinguish what behavior you are going to engage in. That's what you've got here. And that's what you need in order to go ahead and engage in it. But, it appears here [points], not as an experience, because it doesn't exist. It appears there [points] as a distinction.

Member of Audience: In the same way that you have a connection between what you want and the distinctions you make, couldn't there be that kind of connection between personal characteristic...

Ossorio: Of what?

Member of Audience: Of that distinction you make...

Ossorio: You got me confused here.

Member of Audience: I guess I am trying to see if there is a connection between that individual's experience of that distinction. Is that where it could fall?

Ossorio: Is what where it could fall?

Member of Audience: Do you want to say encounter with instead of experience? Would that make any difference?

Member of Audience: I'm raising the issue of making a distinction and what we call the experience of that, and to the extent that people detect the differences in the making of that distinction. I am wondering if that falls into the styles, or something under...

Ossorio: No. Let me tell you what has happened in history. Following that approach there is a PC, a type of PC, that you could use. That's the notion of a state. People talk about states of mind. You can talk about an experience as a state of mind. And you could hypothesize that whenever you make a given distinction, you are in a corresponding state of mind. You can also hypothesize that when you have a particular experience, you are in a corresponding state of mind. But then what? Then you get all of the same questions about states of mind. But that's how people have done it. They talk about states of mind. And state of mind will not help you distinguish between experience and simply making a distinction.

Member of Audience: Except I think it allows for differences, a certain qualitative difference from the distinction.

Ossorio: No, that's simply a different distinction.

Member of Audience: What do philosophers mean when they talk about qualia?

Ossorio: ... the irreducibly experiential aspect of your consciousness.

Member of Audience: Raw feels.

Ossorio: Yeah, raw feel is the other term they use. The analogue is seeing nothing but blue. You know when you look up at the sky and you don't see your surrounds. You've got a visual field and what is it? It's just blue. You just have a simple, single quality. And that's the kind of thing that quale is. And, indeed, if anything is irreducible, I would bet that that is. That's why they use it and that's how they use it. They say you can account for everything else but you cannot account for this. You can't reduce this to something non-experiential. And as far as I know they are right. There are arguments about it, but... One way of putting the argument that consciousness is not essential to being a person is to say that "Experience is simply our way of making distinctions." And one can make distinctions in other ways, and it's the distinctions that matter as far as being a person, not doing it the way that we do it. That goes with being homo sapiens, not with being a person.

By the way, there is a set of definitions that might help here. First, a definition of a person, an individual whose history is paradigmatically a history of deliberate action. Then a human being. A human being is an individual who is a person and a specimen of homo sapiens. An alien is an individual who is a person and has a non-homo sapiens embodiment. And an authentic robot is an individual who is a person and has a nonbiological embodiment. Now the formulation of the person concept is directed at persons, not homo sapiens, not human beings. Human beings are simply naturally occuring examples that we can observe. But since we would admit as persons little green men from Mars, etc. if they showed us the right stuff, it follows that our present concept of a person is not limited to homo sapiens. And by extension the same thing applies to an authentic robot. If there were a creature who showed us the right stuff and wasn't a biological thing, we would still say it's a person. You know, just think of all of the science fiction where there are such things and they are accepted as persons.

Member of Audience: What an experience that would be!

Ossorio: Yeah, mind boggling.

Member of Audience: I am still remembering the...

Ossorio: So the fact that we have only one kind, namely, homo sapiens, that we observe doesn't mean that we don't already leave room for these others.

Member of Audience: I think in the last couple of years I...what an authentic robot is as opposed to an inauthentic robot.

Ossorio: No, that's not the right contrast. The difference between an authentic robot and an inauthentic one is like the difference between an authentic person and an inauthentic person. The right contrast is the difference between an authentic robot and a piece of automatic machinery. See, these days, any piece of automatic machinery gets called a robot. A movable arm on the factory floor gets called a robot. So the definition I have of a robot is in a sense a polemic one. Why? Because I don't think it's worth calling something a robot if it isn't a person. You know, if you call it automatic machinery that's fine. It describes what it is. Why call it a robot?

Member of Audience: Could you tell us what an authentic robot is?

Ossorio: It's an individual who is a person and has a nonbiological embodiment.

Member of Audience: Are there any yet?

Ossorio: I said the only persons that we know of are homo sapiens. But we already leave room for the others. Take that from a different angle. There is almost nothing that we define in terms of what it is made of. You don't define a cup in terms of what it is made of. You define it in terms of what it is for. You don't define a lecturn in terms of what it's made of. It can be made of lots of different things. You don't define an automobile in terms of what it's made of. You define it in terms of how it works. In fact, the only thing that I can think of off hand where we have gone the other way is in this very question of what is a person. Somehow there we insist that it's got to be made of flesh and bones or it's not a person. Well, it's just as bad policy as describing an ashtray as something that's made out of glass. You can do that but then you have to account for the fact that there are other things that are exactly like ashtrays except they are not made out of glass. So all you've done is lose the use of one word and you have to introduce another to do the same job.

Member of Audience: What if they discovered one day that what it takes to be a person includes consciousness?

Ossorio: You don't discover that...

Member of Audience: ...empirical discovery and that furthermore it requires a certain kind of material structure.

Ossorio: There's no such possible discovery. You have to decide that. No matter what the evidence is you can decide one way or the other. It's a matter of decision, not of discovery. And it depends on how you conceptualize a person.

Member of Audience: It would be persuasive though in terms of a connection between our brain processing...

Ossorio: Not at all. We already know there is a connection. We already know there is a connection and it doesn't do a damn thing in that direction. All it does is create a mind/body problem.

Member of Audience: What we said was consciousness is so far...

Ossorio: One of the problems of consciousness is that you can't say what it is.

Member of Audience: I was kind of hoping that you would say that but... (Change tape)

Ossorio: People are conscious of things. That's the fundamental statement involving consciousness. People are conscious of certain things. I am conscious of your voice as you talk. I am conscious of the sight of the group here. But in that sense it's synonymous with experience. I experience the sound of your voice. I experience the sight of the door. That's how we encounter it in real life. Other than in academic contexts, people generally don't talk about consciousness or experience. They say I see, I taste, I smell, I know.

Member of Audience: Wow, what an experience.

Ossorio: Yeah. And notice it has nothing to do with this kind of thing, this notion of experience. There you are talking about the impact that it had on you. Okay, are you ready to move on? Going once...Well, let's see.