Is it really all about the unconscious? An interesting discussion, much of it around the value of the Freudian view: powerful insight into unfathomable complexity or literary stuff of no therapeutic value?

Shahidha Bari makes an impassioned case for the depth of Freud’s essential insights; Barry C Smith says Freud actually presents the motives and workings of the unconscious as too much like those of the conscious mind. Richard Bentall says it’s the conscious mind that is the real mystery; unconsciousness is the norm for non-human beings. Along the way we hear about some interesting examples of how the conscious mind seems to be just a rationalising module for decisions made elsewhere. Quote back to people opinions they never actually voiced, and they will devise justifications for them.

I think the separation between conscious and unconscious often gets muddled with the difference between explicit and inexplicit thinking. It’s surely possible to think consciously without thinking in words, but the borderline between wordless conscious thought and unconscious processes is perhaps hard to pin down.

Do apes really have “a theory of mind”? This research, reported in the Guardian, suggests that they do. We don’t mean, of course, that chimps are actually drafting papers or holding seminars, merely that they understand that others can have beliefs which may differ from their own and which may be true or false. In the experiment the chimps see a man in a gorilla suit switch hiding places; but when his pursuer appears, they look at the original hiding place. This is, hypothetically, because they know that the pursuer didn’t see the switch, so presumably he still believes his target is in the original hiding place, and that’s where we should expect him to go.

I must admit I thought similar tell-tale behaviour had already been observed in wild chimps, but a quick search doesn’t turn anything up, and it’s claimed that the research establishes new conclusions. Unfortunately I think there are several other quite plausible ways to interpret the chimps’ behaviour that don’t require a theory of mind.

  1. The chimps momentarily forgot about the switch, or needed to ‘check’ (older readers, like me, may find this easy to identify with).
  2. The chimps were mentally reviewing ‘the story so far’, and so looked at the old hiding place.
  3. Minute clues in the experimenters’ behaviour told the chimps what to expect. The famous story of Clever Hans shows that animals can pick up very subtle signals humans are not even aware of giving.

This illustrates the perennial difficulty of investigating the mental states of creatures that cannot report them in language. Another common test of animal awareness involves putting a spot on the subject’s forehead and then showing them a mirror; if they touch the spot it is supposed to demonstrate that they recognise the reflection as themselves and therefore that they have a sense of their own selfhood. But it doesn’t really prove that they know the reflection is their own, only that the sight of someone with a spot causes them to check their own forehead. A control where they are shown another real subject with a spot might point to other interpretations, but I’ve never heard of it being done. It is also rather difficult to say exactly what belief is being attributed to the subjects. They surely don’t simply believe that the reflection is them: they’re still themselves. Are we saying they understand the concepts of images and reflections? It’s hard to say.

The suggestion of adding a control to this experiment raises the wider question of whether this sort of experiment can be generally tightened up by more ingenious set-ups? Who knows what ingenuity might accomplish, but it does seem to me that there is an insoluble methodological issue. How can we ever prove that particular patterns of behaviour relate to beliefs about the state of mind of others and not to similar beliefs in the subject’s own minds?

It could be that the problem really lies further back: that the questions themselves make no sense. Is it perhaps already fatally anthropomorphic to ask whether other animals have “a theory of mind” or “a conception of their own personhood”; perhaps these are already incorrigibly linguistic ideas that just don’t apply to creatures with no language. If so, we may need to unpick our thinking a bit and identify more purely behavioural ways of thinking, ones that are more informative and appropriate?

The robots are (still) coming. Thanks to Jesus Olmo for this TED video of Sam Harris presenting what we could loosely say is a more sensible version of some Singularity arguments. He doesn’t require Moore’s Law to go on working, and he doesn’t need us to accept the idea of an exponential acceleration in AI self-development. He just thinks AI is bound to go on getting better; if it goes on getting better, at some stage it overtakes us; and eventually perhaps it gets to the point where we figure in its mighty projects about the way ants on some real estate feature in ours.

Getting better, overtaking us; better at what? One weakness of Harris’ case is that he talks just about intelligence, as though that single quality were an unproblematic universal yardstick for both AI and human achievement. Really though, I think we’re talking about three quite radically different things.

First, there’s computation; the capacity, roughly speaking, to move numbers around according to rules. There can be no doubt that computers keep getting faster at doing this; the question is whether it matters. One of Harris’ arguments is that computers go millions of times faster than the brain so that a thinking AI will have the equivalent of thousands of years of thinking time while the humans are still getting comfy in their chairs. No-one who has used a word processor and a spreadsheet for the last twenty years will find this at all plausible: the machines we’re using now are so much more powerful than the ones we started with that the comparison defeats metaphor, but we still sit around waiting for them to finish. OK, it’s true that for many tasks that are computationally straightforward – balancing an inherently unstable plane with minute control adjustments, perhaps – computers are so fast they can do things far beyond our range. But to assume that thinking about problems in a human sort of way is a task that scales with speed of computation just begs the question. How fast are neurons? We don’t really understand them well enough to say. It’s quite possible they are in some sense fast enough to get close to a natural optimum. Maybe we should make a robot that runs a million times faster than a cheetah first and then come back to the brain.

The second quality we’re dealing with is inventiveness; whatever capacity it is that allows us to keep on designing better machines. I doubt this is really a single capacity; in some ways I’m not sure it’s a capacity at all. For one thing, to devise the next great idea you have to be on the right page. Darwin and Wallace both came up with the survival of the fittest because both had been exposed to theories of evolution, both had studied the profusion of species in tropical environments, and both had read Malthus. You cannot devise a brilliant new chip design if you have no idea how the old chips worked. Second, the technology has to be available. Hero of Alexandria could design a steam engine, but without the metallurgy to make strong boilers, he couldn’t have gone anywhere with the idea. The basic concept of television was around since films and telegraph came together in someone’s mind, but it took a series of distinct advances in technology to make it feasible. In short, there is a certain order in these things; you do need a certain quality of originality, but again it’s plausible that humans already have enough for something like maximum progress, given the right conditions. Of course so far as AI is concerned, there are few signs of any genuinely original thought being achieved to date, and every possibility that mere computation is not enough.

Third is the quality of agency. If AIs are going to take over, they need desires, plans, and intentions. My perception is that we’re still at zero on this; we have no idea how it works and existing AIs do nothing better than an imitation of agency (often still a poor one). Even supposing eventual success, this is not a field in which AI can overtake us; you either are or are not an agent; there’s no such thing as hyper-agency or being a million times more responsible for your actions.

So the progress of AI with computationally tractable tasks gives no particular reason to think humans are being overtaken generally, or are ever likely to be in certain important respects. But that’s only part of the argument. A point that may be more important is simply that the the three capacities are detachable. So there is no reason to think that an AI with agency automatically has blistering computational speed, or original imagination beyond human capacity. If those things can be achieved by slave machines that lack agency, then they are just as readily available to human beings as to the malevolent AIs, so the rebel bots have no natural advantage over any of us.

I might be biased over this because I’ve been impatient with the corny ‘robots take over’ plot line since I was an Asimov-loving teenager. I think in some minds (not Harris’s) these concerns are literal proxies for a deeper and more metaphorical worry that admiring machines might lead us to think of ourselves as mechanical in ways that affect our treatment of human beings. So the robots might sort of take over our thinking even if they don’t literally march around zapping us with ray guns.

Concerns like this are not altogether unjustified, but they rest on the idea that our personhood and agency will eventually be reduced to computation. Perhaps when we eventually come to understand them better, that understanding will actually tell us something quite different?

dog-beliefThe unconscious is not just un. It works quite differently. So says Tim Crane in a persuasive draft paper which is to mark his inauguration as President of the Aristotelian Society (in spite of the name, the proceedings of that worthy organisation are not specifically concerned with the works or thought of Aristotle). He is particularly interested in the intentionality of the unconscious mind; how does the unconscious believe things, in particular?

The standard view, as Crane says, might probably be that the unconscious and conscious believe things in much the same way, and that it is basically a propositional one. (There is, by the way, scope to argue about whether there really is an unconscious mind – myself I lean towards the view that it’s better to talk of us doing or thinking things unconsciously, avoiding the implied claim that the unconscious is a distinct separate entity – but we can put that aside for present purposes.) The content of our beliefs, on this ‘standard’ view can be identified with a set of propositions – in principle we could just write down a list of our beliefs. Some of our beliefs certainly seem to be like that; indeed some important beliefs are often put into fixed words that we can remember and recite. Thou shalt not bear false witness, we hold these truths to be self-evident; the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

But if that were the case and we could make that list then we could say how many beliefs we have, and that seems absurd. The question of how many things we believe is often dismissed as silly, says Crane – how could you count them? – but it seems a good one to him. One big problem is that it’s quite easy to show that we have all sorts of beliefs we never consider explicitly. Do I believe that some houses are bigger than others? Yes, of course, though perhaps I never considered the question in that form before.

One common response (one which has been embodied in AI projects in the past) is that we have a set of core beliefs, which do sit in our brains in an explicit form; but we also have a handy means of quickly inferring other beliefs from them. So perhaps we know the typical range of sizes for houses and we can instantly work out from that that some are indeed bigger than others. But no-one has shown how we can distinguish what the supposed core beliefs are, nor how these explicit beliefs would be held in the brain (the idea of a ‘language of thought’ being at least empirically unsatisfactory in Crane’s view). Moreover there are problems with small children and animals who seem to hold definite beliefs that they could never put into words. A dog’s behaviour seems to show clearly enough that it believes there is a cat in this tree, but it could never formulate the belief in any explicit way. The whole idea that our beliefs are propositional in nature seems suspect.

Perhaps it is better, then,  to see beliefs as essentially dispositions to do or say things. The dog’s belief in the cat is shown by his disposition to certain kinds of behaviour around the tree – barking, half-hearted attempts at climbing. My belief that you are across the room is shown by my disposition to smile and walk over there. Crane suggests that in fact rather than sets of discrete beliefs what we really have is a worldview; a kind of holistic network in which individual nodes do not have individual readings. Ascriptions of belief, like attributing to someone a belief in a particular proposition, are really models that bring out particular aspects of their overall worldview. This has the advantage of explaining several things. One is that we can attribute the same belief – “Parliament is on the bank of the Thames” – to different people even though the content of their beliefs actually varies (because, for example, they have slightly different understandings about what ‘Parliament’ is).

It also allows scope for the vagueness of our beliefs, the ease with which we hold contradictory ones, and the interesting point that sometimes we’re not actually sure what we believe and may have to mull things over before reaching only tentative conclusions about it. Perhaps we too are just modelling as best we can the blobby ambiguity of our worldview.

Crane, in fact, wants to make all belief unconscious. Thinking is not believing, he says, although what I think and what I believe are virtually synonyms in normal parlance. One of the claimed merits of his approach is that if beliefs are essentially dispositions, it explains how they can be held continuously and not disappear when we are asleep or unconscious. Belief, on this view, is a continuous state; thinking is a temporary act, one which may well model your beliefs and turn them into explicit form. Without signing up to psychoanalytical doctrines wholesale, Crane is content that his thinking chimes with both Freudian and older ideas of the unconscious, putting the conscious interpretation of unconscious belief at the centre.

This all seems pretty sensible, though it does seem Crane is getting an awful lot of very difficult work done by the idea of a ‘worldview’, sketched here in only vague terms. It used to be easy to get away with this kind of vagueness in philosophy of mind, but these days I think there is always a ghostly AI researcher standing at the philosopher’s shoulder and asking how we set about doing the engineering, often a bracing challenge. How do we build a worldview into a robot if it’s not propositional? Some of Crane’s phraseology suggests he might be hoping that the concept of the worldview, with its network nodes with no explicit meaning might translate into modern neural network-based practice. Maybe it could; but even if it does, that surely won’t do for philosophers. The AI tribe will be happy if the robot works; but the philosophers will still want to know exactly how this worldview gizmo does its thing. We don’t know, but we know the worldview is already somehow a representation of the world. You could argue that while Crane set out to account for the intentionality of our beliefs, that is in the event the exact thing that he ends up not explaining at all.

There are some problems about resting on dispositions, too. Barking at a tree because I believe there’s a cat up there is one thing; my beliefs about metaphysics, by contrast, seem very remote from any simple behavioural dispositions of that kind. I suppose they would have to be conditional dispositions to utter or write certain kinds of words in the context of certain discussions. It’s a little hard to think that when I’m doing philosophy what  I’m really doing is modelling some of my own particularly esoteric pre-existing authorial dispositions. And what dispositions would they be? I think they would have to be something like dispositions to write down propositions like ‘nominalism is false’ – but didn’t we start off down this path because we were uncomfortable with the idea that the content of beliefs is propositional?

Moreover, Crane wants to say that our beliefs are preserved while we are asleep because we still have the relevant dispositions. Aren’t our beliefs similarly preserved when we’re dead? It would seem odd to say that Abraham Lincoln did not believe slavery should be abolished while he was asleep, certainly, but it would seem equally odd to say he stopped believing it when he died. But does he still have dispositions to speak in certain ways? If we insist on this line it seems the only way to make it intelligible is to fall back on counterfactuals (if he were still alive Lincoln would still be disposed to say that it was right to abolish slavery…) but counterfactuals notoriously bring a whole library of problems with them.

I’d also sort of like to avoid paring down the role of the conscious. I don’t think I’m quite ready to pack all belief away into the attic of the unconscious. Still, though Crane’s account may have its less appealing spots I do rather like the idea of a holistic worldview as the central bearer of belief.

heterogeneous-ontologyIs downward causation the answer? Does it explain how consciousness can be a real and important part of the world without being reducible to physics? Sean Carroll had a sensible discussion of the subject recently.

What does ‘down’ even mean here? The idea rests on the observation that the world operates on many distinct levels of description. Fluidity is not a property of individual molecules but something that ’emerges’ when certain groups of them get together. Cells together make up organisms that in turn produce ecosystems. Often enough these levels of description deal with progressively larger or smaller entities, and we typically refer to the levels that deal with larger entities as higher, though we should be careful about assuming there is one coherent set of levels of description that fit into one another like Russian dolls.

Usually we think that reality lives on the lowest level, in physics. Somewhere down there is where the real motors of the universe are driving things. Let’s say this is the level of particles, though probably it is actually about some set of entities in quantum mechanics, string theory, or whatever set of ideas eventually proves to be correct. There’s something in this view because it’s down here at the bottom that the sums really work and give precise answers, while at higher levels of description the definitions are more approximate and things tend to be more messy and statistical.

Now consciousness is quite a high-level business. Particles make proteins that make cells that make brains that generate thoughts. So one reductionist point of view would be that really the truth is the story about particles: that’s where the course of events is really decided, and the mental experiences and decisions we think are going on in consciousness are delusions, or at best a kind of poetic approximation.

It’s not really true, however, that the entities dealt with at higher levels of description are not real. Fluidity is a perfectly real phenomenon, after all. For that matter the Olympics were real, and cannot be discussed in terms of elementary particles. What if our thoughts were real and also causally effective at lower levels of description? We find it easy to think that the motion of molecules ’caused’ the motion of the football they compose, but what if it also worked the other way? Then consciousness could be real and effectual within the framework of a sufficiently flexible version of physics.

Carroll doesn’t think that really washes, and I think he’s right. It’s a mistake to think that relations between different levels of description are causal. It isn’t that my putting the beef and potatoes on the table caused lunch to be served; they’re the same thing described differently. Now perhaps we might allow ourselves a sense in which things cause themselves, but that would be a strange and unusual sense, quite different from the normal sense in which cause and effect by definition operate over time.

So real downward causality, no: if by talk of downward causality people only mean that real effectual mental events can co-exist with the particle story but on a different level of description, that point is sound but misleadingly described.

The thing that continues to worry me slightly is the question of why the world is so messily heterogeneous in its ontology – why it needs such a profusion of levels of description in order to discuss all the entities of interest. I suppose one possibility is that we’re just not looking at things correctly. When we look for grand unifying theories we tend to look to ever lower levels of description and to the conjectured origins of the world. Perhaps that’s the wrong approach and we should instead be looking for the unimaginable mental perspective that reconciles all levels of description.

Or, and I think this might be closer to it, the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy is actually connected with the obscure reason for there being anything. As the world gets larger it gets, ipso facto, more complex and reduction and backward extrapolation get ever more hopeless. Perhaps that is in some sense just as well.

(The picture is actually a children’s puzzle from 1921 – any solutions? You need to know it is called ‘Illustrated Central Acrostic’)  

 

age-smHow far back in time do you recognise yourself? There may be long self-life and short self-life people; speculatively, the difference may even be genetic.

Some interesting videos here on the question of selves and persons (two words often used by different people to indicate different distinctions, so you can have a long talk at cross-purposes all too easily).

Too much content for me to summarise quickly, but I was particularly struck by Galen Strawson’s view of self-life (as it were). Human beings may live three score and ten years, but the unchanged self really only lasts a short while. Rigorously speaking he thinks it might only last a fraction of a second, but he believes that there are, as it were, different personality types here; people who have either a long or a short sense of identity over time. He is apparently near one end of the spectrum, not really identifying with the Galen Strawson who was here only half an hour ago. Myself, I think I’m towards the other end. When I look at photographs of my five-year-old self, I feel it’s me. There are many differences, of course, but I remember with special empathy what it was like to look out through those eyes.

Strawson thinks this is a genuine difference, not yet sufficiently studied by psychology; perhaps it even has a genetic basis. But he thinks short self-life and long self-life people can get along perfectly well; in fact the combination may make a strong partnership.

One other interesting point, Raymond Tallis thinks personhood is strongly social. On a desert island your personhood would gradually attenuate until you became more or less ‘Humean’ and absorbed in your environment and daily island tasks. It doesn’t sound altogether bad…

sleepOUP Blog has a sort of preview by Bruntrup and Jaskolla of their forthcoming collection on panpsychism, due out in December, with a video of David Chalmers at the end: they sort of credit him with bringing panpsychist thought into the mainstream. I’m using ‘panpsychism’ here as a general term, by the way, covering any view that says consciousness is present in everything, though most advocates really mean that consciousness or experience is everywhere, not souls as the word originally implied.

I found the piece interesting because they put forward two basic arguments for panpsychism, both a little different from the desire for simplification which I’ve always thought was behind it – although it may come down to the same basic ideas in the end.

The first argument they suggest is that ‘nothing comes of nothing’; that consciousness could not have sprung out of nowhere, but must have been there all along in some form. In this bald form, it seems to me that the argument is virtually untenable. The original Scholastic argument that nothing comes of nothing was, I think, a cosmological argument. In that form it works. If there really were nothing, how could the Universe get started? Nothing happens without a cause, and if there were nothing, there could be no causes.  But within an existing Universe, there’s no particular reason why new composite or transformed entities cannot come into existence.  The thing that causes a new entity need not be of the same kind as that entity; and in fact we know plenty of new things that once did not exist but do now; life, football, blogs.

So to make this argument work there would have to be some reason to think that consciousness was special in some way, a way that meant it could not arise out of unconsciousness. But that defies common sense, because consciousness coming out of unconsciousness is something we all experience every day when we wake up; and if it couldn’t happen, none of us would be here as conscious beings at all because we couldn’t have been born., or at least, could never have become aware.

Bruntrup and Jaskolla mention arguments from Nagel and William James;  Nagel’s, I think rests on an implausible denial of emergentism; that is, he denies that a composite entity can have any interesting properties that were not present in the parts. The argument in William James is that evolution could not have conferred some radically new property and that therefore some ‘mind dust’ must have been present all the way back to the elementary particles that made the world.

I don’t find either contention at all appealing, so I may not be presenting them in their best light; the basic idea, I think is that consciousness is just a different realm or domain which could not arise from the physical. Although individual consciousnesses may come and go, consciousness itself is constant and must be universal. Even if we go some way with this argument I’d still rather say that the concept of position does not apply to consciousness than say it must be everywhere.

The second major argument is one from intrinsic nature. We start by noticing that physics deals only with the properties of things, not with the ‘thing in itself’. If you accept that there is a ‘thing in itself’ apart from the collection of properties that give it its measurable characteristics, then you may be inclined to distinguish between its interior reality and its external properties. The claim then is that this interior reality is consciousness. The world is really made of little motes of awareness.

This claim is strangely unmotivated in my view. Why shouldn’t the interior reality just be the interior reality, with nothing more to be said about it? If it does have some other character it seems to me as likely to be cabbagey as conscious. Really it seems to me that only someone who was pretty desperately seeking consciousness would expect to find it naturally in the ding an sich.  The truth seems to be that since the interior reality of things is inaccessible to us, and has no impact on any of the things that are accessible, it’s a classic waste of time talking about it.

Aha, but there is one exception; our own interior reality is accessible to us, and that, it is claimed, is exactly the mysterious consciousness we seek. Now, moreover, you see why it makes sense to think that all examples of this interiority are conscious – ours is! The trouble is, our consciousness is clearly related to the functioning of our brain. If it were just the inherent inner property of that brain, or of our body, it would never go away, and unconsciousness would be impossible. How can panpsychists sleep at night? If panpsychism is true, even a dead brain has the kind of interior awareness that the theory ascribes to everything. In other words, my human consciousness is a quite different thing from the panpsychist consciousness everywhere; somehow in my brain the two sit alongside without troubling each other. My consciousness tells us nothing about the interiority of objects, nor vice versa: and my consciousness is as hard to explain as ever.

Maybe the new book will have surprising new arguments? I doubt it, but perhaps I’ll put it on my Christmas present list.

Some deep and heavy  philosophy in another IAI video: After the End of Truth. This one got a substantial and in places rather odd discussion on Reddit recently.

Watch more videos on iai.tv

Hilary Lawson starts with the premise that Wittgenstein and others have sufficiently demonstrated that there is no way of establishing objective truth; but we can’t, he says, rest there. He thinks that we can get a practical way forward if we note that the world is open but we can close it in various ways and some of them work better for us than others.

Perhaps an analogy might be (as it happens) the ideas of truth and falsity themselves in formal logic. Classical logic assigns only two values to propositions; true or not true. People often feel this is unintuitive. We can certainly devise formal logics with more than two values – we could add one for ‘undetermined’, say. This is not a matter of what’s right or wrong; we can carve up our system of logic any way we like. The thing is, two-valued logic just gives us a lot more results than its rivals. One important reason is that if we can exclude a premise, in a two-value system its negation must be true; that move doesn’t work if there are three or more values). So it’s not that two-valued logic is true and the others are false, it’s just that doing it the two-valued way gets us more. Perhaps something similar might be true of the different way we might carve up the world.

John Searle, by video (and briefly doing that thing old people seem mysteriously prone to; sinking to the bottom of the frame as though peering over a wall) goes for common sense, as ever, albeit cloaked in technical terms. He distinguishes between epistemic and ontological senses of objectivity. Our views are unavoidably ontologically subjective to some degree (ie, different people have different views:  ‘perspectivalism’ is true); but that does not at all entail that epistemic objectivity is unattainable; indeed, if we didn’t assume some objective truths we couldn’t get started on discussion. That’s a robust refutation of the view that perspectivalism implies no objective truth, though I’m not sure that’s quite the case Lawson was making.  Perhaps we could argue that after all, there are such things as working assumptions; to say ‘let’s treat this as true and see where we get’ does not necessarily require belief in objectively determinable truth.

Hannah Dawson seems to argue emphatically on both sides; no two members of a class gave the same account of an assembly (though I bet they could all agree that no pink elephant walked in half-way through). It seems the idea of objective truth sits uneasily in history;  but no-one can deny the objective factuality of the Holocaust; sometimes, after all, reality does push back. This may be an expression of the curious point that it often seems easier to say that nothing is objectively true than it is to say that nothing is objectively false, illogical as that is.

Dawson’s basic argument looks to me a bit like an example of ‘panic scepticism’; no perfect objective account of an historical event is possible, therefore nothing at all is objectively true. I think we get this kind of thing in philosophy of mind too; people seem to argue that our senses mislead us sometimes, therefore we have no knowledge of external reality (there are better arguments for similar conclusions, of course). Maybe after all we can find ways to make do with imperfect knowledge.

neural-netInteresting piece here reviewing the way some modern machine learning systems are unfathomable. This is because they learn how to do what they do, rather than being set up with a program, so there is no reassuring algorithm – no set of instructions that tells us how they work. In fact they way they make their decisions may be impossible to grasp properly even if we know all the details because it just exceeds in brute complexity what we can ever get our minds around.

This is not really new. Neural nets that learn for themselves have always been a bit inscrutable. One problem with this is brittleness: when the system fails it may not fail in ways that are safe and manageable, but disastrously. This old problem is becoming more important mainly because new approaches to deep machine learning are doing so well; all of a sudden we seem to be getting a rush of new systems that really work effectively at quite complex real world tasks. The problems are no longer academic.

Brittle behaviour may come about when the system learns its task from a limited data set. It does not understand the data and is simply good at picking out correlations, so sometimes it may pick out features of the original data set that work well within that set, and perhaps even work well on quite a lot of new real world data, but don’t really capture what’s important. The program is meant to check whether a station platform is dangerously full of people, for example; in the set of pictures provided it finds that all it needs to do is examine the white platform area and check how dark it is. The more people there are, the darker it looks. This turns out to work quite well in real life, too. Then summer comes and people start wearing light coloured clothes…

There are ways to cope with this. We could build in various safeguards. We could make sure we use big and realistic datasets for training or perhaps allow learning to continue in real world contexts. Or we could just decide never to use a system that doesn’t have an algorithm we can examine; but there would be a price to pay in terms of efficiency for that; it might even be that we would have to give up on certain things that can only be effectively automated with relatively sophisticated deep learning methods. We’re told that the EU contemplates a law embodying a right to explanations of how software works. To philosophers I think this must sound like a marvellous new gravy train, as there will obviously be a need to adjudicate what counts as an adequate explanation, a notoriously problematic issue. (I am available as a witness in any litigation for reasonable hourly fees.)

The article points out that the incomprehensibility of neural network-based systems is in some ways really quite like the incomprehensibility of the good old human brain. Why wouldn’t it be? After all, neural nets were based on the brain. Now it’s true that even in the beginning they were very rough approximations of real neurology and in practical modern systems the neural qualities of neural nets are little more than a polite fiction. Still, perhaps there are properties shared by all learning systems?

One reason deep learning may run into problems is the difficulty AI always has in dealing with relevance.  The ability to spot relevance no doubt helps the human brain check whether it is learning about the right kind of thing, but it has always been difficult to work out quite how our brains do it, and this might mean an essential element is missing from AI approaches.

It is tempting, though, to think that this is in part another manifestation of the fact that AI systems get trained on limited data sets. Maybe the radical answer is to stop feeding them tailored data sets and let  our robots live in the real world; in other words, if we want reliable deep learning perhaps our robots have to roam free and replicate the wider human experience of the world at large? To date the project of creating human-style cognition has been in some sense motivated by mere curiosity (and yes, by the feeling that it would be pretty cool to have a robot pal) ; are we seeing here the outline of an argument that human-style AGI might actually be the answer to genuine engineering problems?

What about those explanations? Instead of retaining philosophers and lawyers to argue the case, could we think about building in a new module to our systems, one that keeps overall track of the AI and can report the broad currents of activity within it? It wouldn’t be perfect but it might give us broad clues as to why the system was making the decisions it was, and even allow us to delicately feed in some guidance. Doesn’t such a module start to sound like, well, consciousness? Could it be that we are beginning to see the outline of the rationales behind some of God’s design choices?

twinsCan we solve the Hard Problem with scanners? This article by Brit Brogaard and Dimitria E. Gatzia argues that recent advances in neuroimaging techniques, combined with the architectonic approach advocated by Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, open the way to real advances.

But surely it’s impossible for physical techniques to shed any light on the Hard Problem? The whole point is that it is over and above any account which could be given by physics. In the Zombie Twin though experiment I have a physically identical twin who has no subjective experience. His brain handles information just the way mine does, but when he registers the colour red, it’s just data; he doesn’t experience real redness. If you think that is conceivable, then you believe in qualia, the subjective extra part of experience. But how could qualia be explained by neuroimaging; my zombie twin’s scans are exactly the same as mine, yet he has no qualia at all?

This, I think, is where the architectonics come in. The foundational axiom of the approach, as I understand it, is that the functional structure of phenomenal experience corresponds to dynamic structure within brain activity; the operational architectonics provide the bridge . (I call it an axiom, but I think the Fingelkurts twins would say that empirical research already provides support for a nested hierarchical structure which bridges the explanatory gap. They seem to take the view that operational architectonics uses a structured electrical field, which on the one hand links their view with the theories of Johnjoe McFadden and Sue Pockett, while on the other making me wonder whether advances in neuroimaging are relevant if the exciting stuff is happening outside the neurons.) It follows that investigating dynamic activity structures in the brain can tell us about the structure of phenomenal, subjective experience. That seems reasonable. After all, we might argue, qualia may be mysterious, but we know they are related to physical events; the experience of redness goes with the existence of red things in the physical world (with due allowance for complications). Why can’t we assume that subjective experience also goes with certain structured kinds of brain activity?

Two points must be made immediately. The first is that the hunt for Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) is hardly new. The advocates of architectonics, however, say that approaches along these lines fail because correlation is simply too weak a connection. Noticing that experience x and activation in region y correlate doesn’t really take us anywhere. They aim for something much harder-edged and more specific, with structured features of brain activity matched directly back to structures in an analysis of phenomenal experience (some of the papers use the framework of Revonsuo, though architectonics in general is not committed to any specific approach).

The second point is that this is not a sceptical or reductive project. I think many sceptics about qualia would be more than happy with the idea of exploring subjective experience in relation to brain structure; but someone like Dan Dennett would look to the brain structures to fully explain all the features of experience; to explain them away, in fact, so that it was clear that brain activity was in the end all we were dealing with and we could stop talking about ‘nonsensical’ qualia altogether.

By contrast the architectonic approach allows philosophers to retain the ultimate mystery; it just seeks to push the boundaries of science a bit further out into the territory of subjective experience. Perhaps Paul Churchland’s interesting paper about chimerical colours which we discussed a while ago provides a comparable case if not strictly an example.

Churchland points out that we can find the colours we experience mapped out in the neuronal structures of the brain; but interestingly the colour space defined in the brain is slightly more comprehensive than the one we actually encounter in real life. Our brains have reserved spaces for colours that do not exist, as it were. However, using a technique he describes we can experience these ‘chimerical’ colours, such as ‘dark yellow’ in the form of an afterglow. So here you experience for the first time a dark yellow quale, as predicted and delivered by neurology. Churchland would argue this shows rather convincingly that position in your brain’s colour space is essentially all there is to the subjective experience of colour. I think a follower of architectonics would commend the research for elucidating structural features of experience but hold that there was still a residual mystery about what dark yellow qualia really are in themselves, one that can only be addressed by philosophy.

It all seems like a clever and promising take on the subject to me; I do have two reservations. The first is a pessimistic doubt about whether it will ever really be possible to deliver much. The sort of finding reported by Churchland is the exception more than the rule. Vision and hearing offer some unusual scope because they both depend on wave media which impose certain interesting structural qualities; the orderly spectrum and musical scale. Imaginatively I find it hard to think of other aspects of phenomenal experience that seem to be good candidates for structural analysis. I could be radically wrong about this and I hope I am.

The other thing is, I still find it a bit hard to get past my zombie twin; if phenomenal experience matches up with the structure of brain activity perfectly, how come he is without qualia? The sceptics and the qualophiles both have pretty clear answers; either there just are no qualia anyway or they are outside the scope of physics. Now if we take the architectonic view, we could argue that just as the presence of red objects is not sufficient for there to be red qualia, so perhaps the existence of the right brain patterns isn’t sufficient either; though the red objects and the relevant brain activity do a lot to explain the experience. But if the right brain activity isn’t sufficient, what’s the missing ingredient? It feels (I put it no higher) as if there ought to be an explanation; but perhaps that’s just where we leave the job for the philosophers?