The idea of uploading is fairly familiar by now; indeed, for better or worse it resembles ideas of transmigration, possession, and transformation which have been current in human culture for thousands of years at least. Hauskeller situates it as the logical next step in man’s progressive remodelling of the environment, while also nodding to those who see it as  the next step in the evolution of humankind itself. The idea that we could transfer or copy ourselves into a computer, Hauskeller points out, rests on the idea that if we recreate the right functional relationships, the phenomenological effects of consciousness will follow; that, as Minsky put it, ‘Minds are what Brains do’. This remains for Hauskeller a speculation, an empirical question we are not yet in a position to test, since we have not as yet built a whole brain simulation (not sure how we would test phenomenology even after that, but perhaps only philosophers would be seriously worried about it…). In fact there are some difficulties, since it has been shown that identical syntax does not guarantee identical semantics (So two identical brains could contain identical thoughts but mean different things by them – or something strange like that. While I think the basic point is technically true with reference to derived intentionality, for example in the case of books – the same sentence written by different people can have different meanings – it’s not clear to me that it’s true for brains, the source of original intentionality.).

However, as Hauskeller says, uploading also requires that identity is similarly transferable, that our computer-based copy would be not just a mind, but a particular mind – our own. This is a much more demanding requirement. Hauskeller suggests the analogy of books might be brought forward; the novel Ulysses can be multiply realised in many different media, but remains the same book. Why shouldn’t we be like that? Well, he thinks readers are different. Two people might both be reading Ulysses at the same moment, meaning the contents of their minds were identical; but we wouldn’t say they had become the same person. Conceivably at least, the same mind could be ‘read’ by different selves in the same way a single book can be read by different readers.

Hauskeller’s premise there is questionable – two people reading the same book don’t have identical mental content (a point he has just touched on, oddly enough, since it would follow from the fact that syntax doesn’t guarantee semantics, even if it didn’t follow simply from the complexity of our multi-layered mental lives). I’d say the very idea of identical mental content is hard to imagine, and that by using it in thought-experiments we risk, as Dennett has warned, mistaking our own imaginative difficulties for real-world constraints. But Hauskeller’s general point, that identity need not follow from content alone, is surely sound enough.

What about Ray Kurzweil’s argument from gradualism? This points out that we might replace someone with cyborg parts bit by bit. We wouldn’t have any doubt about the continuing identity of someone with a cyborg eye; nor someone with an electronic hippocampus. If each neuron were replaced by a functional equivalent one by one, we’d be forced to accept either that the final robot, with no biological parts at all, was indeed the same continuing person, or, that at some stage a single neuron made a stark binary difference between being the same person and not being the same person. If the final machine can be the same person, then uploading by less arduous methods is also surely possible since it’s equivalent to making the final machine by another route?

Hauskeller basically bites Kurzweil’s bullet. Yes, it’s conceivable that at some stage there will come neurons whose replacement quite suddenly switches off the person being operated on. I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that some particular set of neurons might prove crucial to identity, but I don’t think we need to accept the conceivability of sudden change in order to reject Kurzweil’s argument. We can simply suppose that the subject becomes a chimera; a compound of two identically-functioning people. The new person keeps up appearances alright, but the borders of the old personality gradually shrink to destruction, though it may be very unclear when exactly that should be said to have happened.

Suppose (my example) an image of me is gradually overlaid with an image of my identical evil twin Retep, line of pixels by line. No one can even tell the process is happening, yet at some stage it ceases to be a picture of me and becomes one of Retep. The fact that we cannot tell when does not prove that I am identical with Retep, nor that both pictures are of me.

Hauskeller goes on to attack ‘information idealism’. The idea of uploading often rests on the view that in the final analysis we consist of information, but

Having a mind generally means being to some extent aware of the world and oneself, and this awareness is not itself information. Rather, it is a particular way in which information is processed…

Hauskeller, provocatively but perhaps not unjustly, accuses those who espouse information idealism of Cartesian substance dualism; they assume the mind can be separated from the body.

But no, it can’t: in fact Hauskeller goes on to suggest that in fact the whole body is important to our mental life: we are not just our brains. He quotes Alva Noë and goes further, saying:

That we can manipulate the mind by manipulating the brain, and that damages to our brains tend to inhibit the normal functioning of our minds, does not show that the mind is a product of what the brain does.

The brain might instead, he says, be like a window; if the window is obscured, we can’t see beyond it, but that does not mean the window causes what lies beyond it.

Who’s sounding dualist now? I don’t think that works. Suppose I am knocked unconscious by the brute physical intervention of a cosh; if the brain were merely transmitting my mind, my mental processes would continue offstage and then when normal service was resumed I should be aware that thoughts and phenomenology had been proceeding while my mere brain was disabled. But it’s not like that; knocking out the brain stops mental processes in a way that blocking a window does not stop the events taking place outside.

Although I take issue with some of his reasoning, I think Hauskeller’s objections have some force, and the limited conclusion he draws – that the possibility of uploading a mind, let alone an identity, is far from established, is true as far as it goes.

How much do we care about identity as opposed to continuity of consciousness? Suppose we had to chose between on the one hand retaining our bare identity while losing all our characteristics, our memories, our opinions and emotions, our intelligence, abilities and tastes, and getting instead some random stranger’s equivalents; or on the other losing our identity but leaving behind a new person whose behaviour, memories, and patterns of thought were exactly like ours? I suspect some people might choose the latter.

If your appetite for discussion of Hauskeller’s paper is unsatisfied, you might like to check out John Danaher’s two-parter on it.

Dennett has a cunning trick to sort this out. He invites the professors to explain their ideas to a selected group of favoured undergraduates (‘Ew; he sounds like Horace Slughorn’ said my daughter); talking to undergraduates they are careful to keep it clear and simple and include an exposition of any basic concepts they use. Listening in, the other professors understand what their colleagues really mean, perhaps for the first time, and light dawns at last.

It seems a good trick to me (and for the undergraduates, yes, by ‘good’ I mean both clever and beneficial); in his new book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking Dennett seems covertly to be playing another. The book offers itself as a manual or mental tool-kit offering tricks and techniques for thinking about problems, giving examples of how to use them. In the examples, Dennett runs through a wide selection of his own ideas, and the cunning old fox clearly hopes that in buying his tools, the reader will also take up his theories. (Perhaps this accessible popular presentation will even work for some of those recalcitrant profs, with whom Dennett has evidently grown rather tired of arguing…. heh, heh!)

So there’s a hidden agenda, but in addition the ‘intuition pumps’ are not always as advertised. Many of them actually deserve a more flattering description because they address the reason, not the intuition. Dennett is clear enough that some of the techniques he presents are rather more than persuasive rhetoric, but at least one reviewer was confused enough to think that Reduction ad Absurdum was being presented as an intuition pump – which is rather a slight on a rigorous logical argument: a bit like saying Genghis Khan was among the more influential figures in Mongol society.

It seems to me, moreover, that most of the tricks on offer are not really techniques for thinking, but methods of presentation or argumentation. I find it hard to imagine someone trying to solve a problem by diligently devising thought-experiments and working through the permutations; that’s a method you use when you think you know the answer and want to find ways to convince others.

What we get in practice is a pretty comprehensive collection of snippets; a sort of Dennettian Greatest Hits. Some of the big arguments in philosophy of mind are dropped as being too convoluted and fruitless to waste more time on, but we get the memorable bits of many of Dennett’s best thought-experiments and rebuttals.  Not all of these arguments benefit from being taken out of the context of a more systematic case, and here and there – it’s inevitable I suppose – we find the remix or late cover version is less successful than the original. I thought this was especially so in the case of the Giant Robot; to preserve yourself in a future emergency you build a wandering robot to carry you around in suspended animation for a few centuries. The robot needs to survive in an unpredictable world, so you end up having to endow it with all the characteristics of a successful animal; and you are in a sense playing the part of the Selfish Gene. Such a machine would be able to deal with meanings and intentionality just the way you do, wouldn’t it? Well, in this brief version I don’t really see why or, perhaps more important, how.

Dennett does a bit better with arguments against intrinsic intentionality, though I don’t think his arguments succeed in establishing that there is no difference between original and derived intentionality. If Dennett is right, meaning would be built up in our brains through the interaction of gradually more meaningful layers of homunculi; OK (maybe), but that’s still quite different to what happens with derived intentionality, where things get to mean something because of an agreed convention or an existing full-fledged intention.

Dennett, as he acknowledges, is not always good at following the maxims he sets out. An early chapter is given over to the rules set out by Anatol Rapoport, most notably:

You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

As someone on Metafilter said, when Dan Dennett does that for Christianity, I’ll enjoy reading it; but there was one place in the current book where I thought Dennett fell short on understanding the opposition. He suggests that Kasparov’s way of thinking about chess is probably the same as Deep Blue’s in the end. What on earth could provoke one to say that they were obviously different, he protests. Wishful thinking? Fear? Well, no need to suppose so: we know that the hardware (brain versus computer) is completely different and runs a different kind of process; we know the capacities of computer and brain are different and, in spite of an argument from Dennett to the contrary, we know the heuristics are significantly different. We know that decisions in Kasparov’s case involve consciousness, while Deep Blue lacks it entirely. So, maybe the processes are the same in the end, but there are some pretty good prima facie reasons to say they look very different.

One section of the book naturally talks about evolution, and there’s good stuff, but it’s still a twentieth century, Dawkinsian vision Dennett is trading in. Can it be that Dennett of all people is not keeping up with the science? There’s no sign here of the epigenetic revolution; we’re still in a world where it’s all about discrete stretches of DNA. That DNA, moreover, got to be the way it is through random mutation; no news has come in of the great struggle with the viruses which we now know has left its wreckage all across the human genome, and more amazing,  has contributed some vital functional stretches without which we wouldn’t be what we are. It’s a pity because that seems like a story that should appeal to Dennett, with his pandemonic leanings.

Still, there’s a lot to like; I found myself enjoying the book more and more as it went on and the pretence of being a thinking manual dropped away a bit.  Naturally some of Dennett’s old attacks on qualia are here, and for me they still get the feet tapping. I liked Mr Clapgras, either a new argument or more likely one I missed first time round; he suffers a terrible event in which all his emotional and empathic responses to colour are inverted without his actual perception of colour changing at all. Have his qualia been inverted – or are they yet another layer of experience? There’s really no way of telling and for Dennett the question is hardly worth asking. When we got to Dennett’s reasonable defence of compatibilism over free will, I was on my feet and cheering.

I don’t think this book supersedes Consciousness Explained if you want to understand Dennett’s views on consciousness. You may come away from reading it with your thinking powers enhanced, but it will be because your mental muscles have been stretched and used, not really because you’ve got a handy new set of tools. But if you’re a Dennett fan or just like a thoughtful and provoking read, it’s worth a look.

Recently we seem to have had a new genre of invented brain science. We could include Ian McEwan’s fake paper on De Clerambault syndrome, appended to Enduring Love; recently Sebastian Faulks gave us Glockner’s Isthmus; now, in his new novel A Box of Birds Charles Fernyhough gives us the Lorenzo Circuit.

The Lorenzo Circuit is a supposed structure which pulls together items from various parts of the brain and uses them to constitute memories. It’s sort of assumed that the same function thereby provides consciousness and the sense of self. Since it seems unlikely that a distinct brain structure could have escaped notice this long, we must take it that the Lorenzo is a relatively subtle feature of the connectome, only identifiable through advanced scanning techniques. The Lycée, which despite its name seems to be an English university, has succeeded in mapping the circuit in detail, while Sansom, one of those large malevolent corporate entities that crop up in thrillers, has developed new electrode technology which allows safe and detailed long-term interference with neurons. It’s obvious to everyone that if brought together these two discoveries would provide a potent new technology; a cure for Alzheimer’s is what seems to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds, though I would have thought there were far wilder and more exciting possibilities. The story revolves around the narrator, Dr Yvonne Churcher, an academic at the Lycée, and two of her undergraduate students, Gareth and James.

Unfortunately I didn’t rate the book all that highly as a novel. The plot is put together out of slightly corny thrillerish elements and seems a bit loosely managed. I didn’t like the characters much either. Yvonne seems to be putty in the hands of her students, letting Gareth steal the Lycée’s crucial research without seeming to hold the betrayal of her trust against him at all, and being readily seduced by the negligent James, a nonsense-talking cult member who calls her ‘babe’ (ack!). I’ve seen Gareth described as a “brilliant” character in reviews elsewhere, but sadly not much brilliance seems to be on offer. In fact to be brutal he seemed to me quite a convincing depiction of the kind of student who sits at the back of lectures chuckling to himself for no obvious reason and ultimately requires pastoral intervention. Apart from nicking other people’s theories and data, his ideas seem to consist of a metaphor from Plato, which he interprets with dismal literalism.

This metaphor is the birds thing that provides the title and up to a point, the theme of the book. In the Theaetetus, Plato makes a point about how we can possess knowledge without having it actually in our consciousness by comparing it to owning an aviary of birds without having them actually in your hand. In Plato’s version there’s no doubt that there’s a man in the aviary who chooses the birds to catch; here I think the idea is more that he flocking and movement of the birds itself produces higher-level organisation analogous to conscious memory.

Yvonne is a pretty resolute sceptic about her own selfhood; she can’t see that she is anything beyond the chance neurochemical events which sweep through her brain. This might indeed explain her apparent passivity and the way she seems to drift through even the most alarming and hare-brained adventures, though if so it’s a salutary warning about the damaging potential of overdosing on materialism. Overall the book alludes to more issues than it really discusses, and gives us little side treats like a person whose existence turns out to be no more than a kind of narrative convention; perhaps it’s best approached as a potential thought provoker rather than the adumbration of a single settled theory; not necessarily a bad thing for a book to be.

Yvonne’s scepticism did cause me to realise that I was actually rather hazy on the subject; what is it that people who deny the self are actually denying, and are they all denying the same thing? There are actually quite a few options.

• I think all self-sceptics want to deny the existence of the traditional immaterial soul, and for some that may really be about all. (To digress a bit, there are actually caverns below us at this point which have not been explored for thousands of years, if ever: if we were ancient Egyptians, with their complex ontology of multiple souls, we should have a large range of sceptical permutations available; denying the ba while affirming the khaibit, say. Our simpler culture, perhaps mercifully, does not offer us such a range of refinedly esoteric entities in which to disbelieve, but those of a philosophical temperament may be inclined to cast a regretful glance towards those profoundly obscure imaginary galleries.)

• Some may want to deny any sense, or feeling, of self; like Hume they see only a bundle of sensations when they look inside themselves. I think there is arguably a quale of the self; but these people would not accept it.
• Others, by contrast, would affirm that the sense of self is vivid, just not veridical. We think there’s a self, but there’s nothing actually there. There’s scope for an interesting discussion about what would have to be there in order to prove them wrong – or whether having the sense of self itself constitutes the self.
• Some would say that there is indeed ‘something’ there; it just isn’t what we think it is. For example, there might indeed be a centre of experience, but an epiphenomenal one; a self who has no influence on events but is in reality just along for the ride.
• Logically I suppose we could invert that to have a self that really did make the decisions, but was deluded about having any experiences. I don’t think that would be a popular option, though.
• Some would make the self a purely social construct, a matter of legal and moral rights and privileges, a conception simply grafted on to an animal which in itself, or by itself, would lack it.
• Some would deny only that the self provides a break in the natural chain of cause and effect. We are not really the origin of anything, they would say, and our impression of being a freely willing being is mistaken.
• Some radical sceptics would deny that even the body has any particular selfhood; over time every part of it changes and to assert that I am the same self as the person of twenty years ago makes no sense.

As someone who, on the whole, prefers to look for a tenable account of the reality of the self, the richness of the sceptical repertoire makes me feel rather unimaginative.

This time he boldly sets out to tackle the intractable enigma of meaning. Well, actually, he says his aims are more modest; he believes there is a separate binding problem which affects meaning and he wants to show how the CEMI field offers the best way of resolving it. I think the problem of meaning is one of those issues it’s difficult to sidle up to; once you’ve gone into the dragon’s lair you tend to have to fight the beast even if all you set out to do was trim its claws; and I think McFadden is perhaps drawn into offering a bit more than he promises; nothing wrong with that, of course.

Why then, does McFadden suppose there is a binding problem for meaning? The original binding problem is to do with perception. All sorts of impulses come into our heads through different senses and get processed in different ways in different places and different speeds. Yet somehow out of these chaotic inputs the mind binds together a beautifully coherent sense of what is going on, everything matching and running smoothly with no lags or failures of lip-synch. This smoothly co-ordinated experience is robust, too; it’s not easy to trip it up in the way optical illusions so readily derail up our visual processes. How is this feat pulled off? There are a range of answers on offer, including global workspaces and suggestions that the whole thing is a misconceived pseudo-problem; but I’ve never previously come across the suggestion that meaning suffers a similar issue.

McFadden says he wants to talk about the phenomenology of meaning. After sitting quietly and thinking about it for some time, I’m not at all sure, on the basis of introspection, that meaning has any phenomenology of its own, though no doubt when we mean things there is usually some accompanying phenomenology going on. Is there something it is like to mean something? What these perplexing words seem to portend is that McFadden, in making his case for the binding problem of meaning, is actually going to stick quite closely with perception. There is clearly a risk that he will end up talking about perception; and perception and meaning are not at all the same. For one thing the ‘direction of fit’ is surely different; to put it crudely, perception is primarily about the world impinging on me, whereas meaning is about me pointing at the world.

McFadden gives five points about meaning. The first is unity; when we mean a chair, we mean the whole thing, not its parts. That’s true, but why is it problematic? McFadden talks about how the brain deals with impossible triangles and sees words rather than collections of letters, but that’s all about perception; I’m left not seeing the problem so far as meaning goes. The second point is context-dependence. McFadden quite rightly points out that meaning is highly context sensitive and that the same sequence of letters can mean different things on different occasions. That is indeed an interesting property of meaning; but he goes on to talk about how meanings are perceived, and how, for example, the meaning of “ball” influences the way we perceive the characters 3ALL. Again we’ve slid into talking about perception.

With the third point, I think we fare a bit better; this is compression, the way complex meanings can be grasped in a flash. If we think of a symphony, we think, in a sense, of thousands of notes that occur over a lengthy period, but it takes us no time at all. This is true, and it does point to some issue around parts and wholes, but I don’t think it quite establishes McFadden’s point. For there to be a binding problem, we’d need to be in a position where we had to start with meaning all the notes separately and then triumphantly bind them together in order to mean the symphony as a whole – or something of that kind, at any rate. It doesn’t work like that; I can easily mean Mahler’s eighth symphony (see, I just did it), of whose notes I know nothing, or his twelfth, which doesn’t even exist.

Fourth is emergence: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The properties of a triangle are not just the properties of the lines that make it up. Again, it’s true, but the influence of perception is creeping in; when we see a triangle we know our brain identifies the lines, but we don’t know that in the case of meaning a triangle we need at any stage to mean the separate lines – and in fact that doesn’t seem highly plausible. The fifth and last point is interdependence: changing part of an object may change the percept of the whole, or I suppose we should be saying, the meaning. It’s quite true that changing a few letters in a text can drastically change its meaning, for example. But again I don’t see how that involves us in a binding problem. I think McFadden is typically thinking of a situation where we ask ourselves ‘what’s the meaning of this diagram?’ – but that kind of example invites us to think about perception more than meaning.

In short, I’m not convinced that there is a separate binding problem affecting meaning, though McFadden’s observations shed some interesting lights on the old original issue. He does go on to offer us a coherent view of meaning in general. He picks up a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic information. Extrinsic information is encoded or symbolised according to arbitrary conventions – it sort of corresponds with derived intentionality – so a word, for example, is extrinsic information about the thing it names. Intrinsic information is the real root of the matter and it embodies some features of the thing represented. McFadden gives the following definition.

Intrinsic information exists whenever aspects of the physical relationships that exist between the parts of an object are preserved – either in the original object or its representation.

So the word “car” is extrinsic and tells you nothing unless you can read English. A model of a car, or a drawing, has intrinsic information because it reproduces some of the relations between parts that apply in the real thing, and even aliens would be able to tell something about a car from it (or so McFadden claims). It follows that for meaning to exist in the brain there must be ‘models’ of this kind somewhere. (McFadden allows a little bit of wiggle room; we can express dimensions as weights, say, so long as the relationships are preserved, but in essence the whole thing is grounded in what some others might call ‘iconic’ representation. ) Where could that be? The obvious place to look is in the neurons. but although McFadden allows that firing rates in a pattern of neurons could carry the information, he doesn’t see how they can be brought together: step forward the CEMI field (though as I said previously I don’t really understand why the field doesn’t just smoosh everything together in an unhelpful way).

The overall framework here is sensible and it clearly fits with the rest of the theory; but there are two fatal problems for me. The first is that, as discussed above, I don’t think McFadden succeeds in making the case for a separate binding problem of meaning, getting dragged back by the gravitational pull of perception. We have the original binding problem because we know perception starts with a jigsaw kit of different elements and produces a slick unity, whereas all the worries about parts seem unmotivated when it comes to meaning. If there’s no new binding problem of meaning, then the appeal of CEMI as a means of solving it is obviously limited.

The second problem is that his account of meaning doesn’t really cut the mustard. This is unfair, because he never said he was going to solve the whole problem of meaning, but if this part of the theory is weak it inevitably damages the rest.  The problem is that representations that work because they have some of the properties of the real thing, don’t really work.  For one thing a glance at the definition above shows it is inherently limited to things with parts that have a physical relationship. We can’t deal with abstractions at all. If I tell you I know why I’m writing this, and you ask me what I mean, I can’t tell you I mean my desire for understanding, because my desire for understanding does not have parts with a physical relationship, and there cannot therefore be intrinsic information about it.

But it doesn’t even work for physical objects. McFadden’s version of intrinsic information would require that when I think ‘car’ it’s represented as a specific shape and size. In discussing optical illusions he concedes at a late stage that it would be an ‘idealised’ car (that idealisation sounds problematic in itself); but I can mean ‘car’ without meaning anything ideal or particular at all. By ‘car’ I can in fact mean a flying vehicle with no wheels made of butter and one centimetre long  (that tiny midge is going to regret settling in my butter dish as he takes his car ride into the bin of oblivion courtesy of a flick from my butter knife), something that does not in any way share parts with physical relationships which are the same as any of those applying to the big metal thing in the garage.

Attacking that flank, as I say, probably is a little unfair. I don’t think the CEMI theory is going to get new oomph from the problems of meaning, but anyone who puts forward a new line of attack on any aspect of that intractable issue deserves our gratitude.

Kouider has a bit of form on consciousness: last year Trends in Cognitive Sciences carried a dialogue between him and Ned Block. This arose out of a claim by Block that classic experiments by Sperling support the richness of phenomenal consciousness as compared with access consciousness. Block is probably best known for introducing the distinction between phenomenal, or p-consciousness, and access, or a-consciousness, into philosophy of mind. Roughly speaking, we can say that p-consciousness is Hard Problem consciousness, to do with our subjective experience, and a-consciousness is Easy Problem consciousness, the kind that plays a functional role in decision-making and so on.

Sperling, some fifty years ago, showed that subjects shown an array of letters could report only 3 or 4 of them; but when cued to think of a particular line, they were able to report 3 or 4 from that line. They must therefore have had some image of more of the array – probably the whole array – than 3 or 4 items, but could only ever report that many.

Block’s analysis is that the whole array was in phenomenal consciousness, but access consciousness could only ever get 3 to 4 items from it. This is apparently supported by what test subjects tended to say: they often claimed to be conscious of the whole array at the time but not able to recall more than a few of the items (although the Sperling experiments show they could report the quota of items afterwards from any row, indicating that the problem was not really with recall but with access).

Kouider, among others, rejected this view, suggesting instead that the full array is retained, not in phenomenal consciousness, but in unconscious storage. In his view it’s not necessary to invoke phenomenal consciousness, which is an unverifiable addition which we’re better off without. The subjects’ feeling that they had been aware of the whole array can be attributed to a sort of illusion; you don’t notice the absence of things you’re not aware of, any more than you can see whether the refrigerator light goes off when the door is closed.

It’s tempting to think that the dispute is at least aggravated by terminology; everyone agrees that information about the array is retained mentally in a place other than the active forefront of the mind; isn’t the argument merely about whether we call that place phenomenal or un- conscious? That doesn’t seem altogether satisfactory, though, if we take phenomenal consciousness seriously – we are talking about whether the subjects are right or wrong about the contents of their own consciousness, which seems to be a matter of substance. I wonder though, whether there is some unhelpful reification going on – are phenomenal consciousness and the unconscious really two ‘places’? Is it really more a matter of retaining information phenomenally or unconsciously? That might be a slightly more promising perspective, although I also think that mental states are generally a trackless swamp and a dispute with only two alternatives may actually be underselling the problem (could it be kept both unconsciously and phenomenally? Could it be not unconsciously but subconsciously? Could the route from unconscious storage to access consciousness lead via phenomenal consciousness?)

So what about the babies? Is it possible that we are again in an area where what we mean by ‘conscious’ and the way we carve things conceptually is half the problem? It does look a bit like it.

After all (and my apologies to any readers who may have been grinding their teeth in frustration) babies are obviously conscious, aren’t they? The difference between a sleeping baby and one that is awake (which for some common sense values, equals ‘conscious’) is far too salient for any parent to overlook. On the other hand, do babies soliloquise internally? Equally obviously, no, because they don’t have the words to do it with.

But Kouider et al do make it fairly clear that they are specifically concerned with perception, and they make only sensible claims, noting that their results might be relevant, for example, to questions of infant anaesthesia (although it may be difficult to keep the can of phenomenal worms fully sealed on that issue). It is interesting to note the gradual development in speed and intensity which they have uncovered, but by and large I think common sense has been vindicated.

On consciousness the basic argument is simply that our inner experience is just inaccessible to science. We still can’t get inside the heads of those bats, and we can’t really get inside anyone’s except the one we have direct experience of – our own. Nagel briefly considers the history of the problem and the theory of psychophysical identity put forward by Place and Smart, but nothing in that line satisfies him, and I think it’s clear that nothing of the kind could, because nothing can take away the option of saying “yes, that’s all very well, but it doesn’t cover this here, this current experience of mine”. Interestingly, Nagel says he actually suspects the connection between mental and physical is not in fact contingent, but the result of a deep connection which unfortunately is obscured by our current conceptual framework; so given a revolution in that framework he seems to allow that psychophysical identity could after all be seen to be true. I’m surprised by that because it seems to me that Nagel is in a place beyond the reach of any conceptual rearrangement (that cuts both ways – Nagel can’t be drawn out by argument, but equally if someone were simply to deny there is “something it is like” to see red, I don’t think Nagel would have anything further to say to them either); but perhaps we should feel very faintly encouraged.

At any rate, Nagel argues (and few will resist) that if consciousness is indeed physically inexplicable in this way the problem cannot be sealed off in the mind; it must creep out and infect our ideas about everything, because we have to give accounts of how consciousness evolved, and how it fits into our notions of physical reality. The answer to that in short is of course that as far as Nagel is concerned it can’t be done, but getting there through his review of the possibilities is quite a ride.

Cognition is the second problem, and somewhat unexpected: that’s supposed to be the Easy Problem, isn’t it? Nagel draws a distinction between the simple kind of reactions which relate directly to survival and the more foresighted and detached general cognition which he sees as more or less limited to human beings. He doubts that the latter is a natural product of simple evolution, which sort of echoes the doubts of Wallace, the co-discoverer of Darwin’s theory; in later life he took the view that evolution could not explain the human mind because cavemen simply didn’t need to be that bright and would not have been under evolutionary pressure to spend energy on such massive intellectual capacity.

Nagel sees a distinction between faculties like sight, and that of reason. Our eyes present us with information about the world; we know it may be wrong now and then, but we’re rationally able to trust our vision because we know how it works and we know that evolution has equipped us with visual systems that pick up things relevant to our survival.

Our reasoning powers are different. We need them in order to justify anything to ourselves; but we can’t use them to validate themselves without circularity. It’s no good saying our reason must be serviceable because otherwise evolution wouldn’t have produced it, because we need to use our reason to get to belief in evolution. In short, our faith in our own cognitive powers must and does rely on something else, something of which a separate, non-evolutionary account must be given.
There’s something odd about this line of argument. Do we really look to evolution to validate our abilities? I have a liver thanks to evolution, but its splendid functional abilities are explained in another realm, that of biochemistry. I don’t think we trust our eyes because of evolution (people found reasons to believe their eyes before Darwin came along). So yes, our cognitive abilities do, on one level, need to be understood in terms of an explanatory realm separate from evolutionary theory – one that has to do with logic, induction, and other less formal processes. It’s also true that we haven’t yet got a full and agreed account of how all that works – although, you know, we have a few ideas.

But surely not even the most radical evolutionary theorists claim that the theory validates our powers of reasoning – it simply explains how we got them. If Nagel merely wants to remind us that the ‘easy’ problem still exists, well and good – but that’s not much of a hit against materialism, still less evolution.
The third big problem is ‘value’” a term which here confusingly covers three distinct things: first, the target for Nagel’s teleological theory – the thing the cosmos hypothetically seeks to maximise; second, the general quality of the desiderata we all seek (food, shelter, sex, etc); third, the general object of ethics, somewhat in the sense that people talk about “our values”. These three things may well be linked, but they are not, prima facie, identical. However Nagel wants to sweep them all up in a general concept of something loosely motivating which is absent from the standard materialist accountHe quotes with approval an argument by Sharon Street about moral realism, with the small proviso that he wants to reverse it.

Street’s argument is complex, but the twice-summarised gist appears to be that ‘value’ as something with a real existence in a realm of its own is incompatible with evolution because evolution happens in the real material world and could not be affected by it. Street draws the conclusion that since evolution is true, moral realism in this sense is false, whereas Nagel concludes that since moral realism is just evidently true, evolution can’t be quite right.
Myself I see no need to bring evolution into it. If moral value exists in a realm separate from material events, it can’t affect our material behaviour, so we have an immediate radical problem already, long before we need to start worrying about such matters as the longer-term history of life on earth.
I said that I think ‘value’ is actually three things, and I think we need three different answers. First, yes, we need an account of our drives and motivations. But I feel pretty confident that that can be delivered in a standard materialist framework; if we lay aside the special problems around conscious motivation I would even venture to say that I don’t see a huge problem; we can already account pretty well for a lot of ‘value’ driven behaviour, from tropisms in plants up through reflexes and instincts, to at least an outline idea of quirte complex behaviours. Second, yes, we also need an account of moral agency; and I think Nagel is right to make a linkage with philosophy of mind and consciousness. This is a large subject in itself; it could be that morality turns out in the end to need a special realm of its own which gives rise to problems for materialism, but Nagel says nothing that persuades me that is so, and things look far more promising and less problematic in the opposite direction. Finally, we have the fuel for Nagel’s teleology; not wanted at all, in my view: an unnecessary ontological commitment which buys us nothing we want in the way of insight or explanation.
To sum up; this has been a pretty negative account. I think Nagel consistently overstates the claims of evolution and so ends up fighting some straw men. He doesn’t have a developed positive case to offer; what he does suggest is unattractive, and I must admit that I think in the end his negative arguments are mainly mistaken. He does articulate some of the remaining problems for materialism, and he does put some fresh points, which is a worthy achievement. I sympathise with his view that evolutionary arguments have at times been misapplied, and I admire his boldness in swimming against the tide. I do think the book is likely to become a landmark, a defining statement of the anti-materialist case. However, that case doesn’t, in my opinion, come out of it looking very good, and by associating it so strongly with misplaced anti-evolutionary sentiment, Nagel may possibly have done it more harm than good.

Now he has inspired new controversy with his book ‘Mind and Cosmos: Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.’ Probably the part of the book which has elicited the most negative reaction is the doubts Nagel expresses about evolution itself, or rather about the currently accepted view of it. It’s not that Nagel disbelieves in evolution per se, but he thinks there are important gaps in its account; in particular he doesn’t think it accounts satisfactorily for the origin of life, or for the availability of the large range of living forms on which natural selection has worked. He is not endorsing Intelligent Design but he thinks some of its proponents have arguments which deserve a wider and more sympathetic readership.

That does seem a bit alarming. It’s true, I think, that we don’t yet have a full and convincing story of how life came out of inert chemistry. I’d also agree that some of the theories put forward in the past – like the naked replicators championed by Richard Dawkins in the Selfish Gene – look a bit sketchy and optimistic. But none of that would stop me putting my money on the true story being a fully materialist one in which Darwinian evolution plays an early and crucial role. Nagel’s second problem, with the way nature seems to have provided a remarkable fund of variation in organisms, of a kind which lent itself to the emergence of sophisticated organisms, just seems misconceived. He offers no statistical analysis or other reasoning as to why the standard account is unlikely, just mere incredulity. It seems amazing that that could have happened; well yes, it does, but then it also seems amazing that we’re sitting on a huge oblate spheroid which is rotating and orbiting round an even vaster sphere of terrifying thermonuclear activity; but there it is.

The real problem is that Nagel wants these doubts (together with some more specific objections to standard materialism) to justify a large metaphysical change in our conception of the whole cosmos. His book professes only to offer tentative and inadequately imaginative speculations, and the discussion is largely at a meta-theoretical level – he isn’t telling us what he thinks is the case, he’s discussing the kinds of theory that could in principle be advocated – but it’s clear enough what kind of theory he would prefer to reductive materialism. What he leans towards is a teleological theory; one in which some underlying principle drives the world towards a particular goal. He does not want this to be an intentional goal; he does not want God in the picture or any other Designer; rather he wants there to be a natural push towards value; value being conceived as a sort of goodness or moral utility, although this part of the speculative potential theory clearly needs development.

Nagel’s critique of evolution may seem alarmingly misplaced, but the idea of introducing teleology to fill the gaps seems really astonishing. What, we’re going to abandon the idea that DNA came together through natural selection and say instead that it came together because it sort of wanted to or was sort of meant to? The history of science has been a history of driving out teleological explanations – and the reason that represents progress is that teleological explanations are just not very good; they are usually vacuous and provide no real insight or predictive power.

In some ways what Nagel is after seems like an inverted law of entropy. Instead of things running down and tending to disorder, he wants there to be something built into the cosmos that shoves things towards elaboration, complexity, and indeed self-awareness (he positions the evolution of human consciousness as a peak of the process, and likens it to the Universe waking up). In itself that vision is quite appealling, but Nagel wants it to be driven by the worst kind of teleology.

I’m not sure what the official ontological status of the law of entropy is – it could be a meta-law which says the laws of nature must be such that entropy always increases, or it could be something that emerges from those laws (perhaps from any viable set of laws) – but it is definitely fully compatible with the rest of physics. If Nagel’s new teleology worked like this, it might be viable, but he actually supposes it is going to have to discreetly intervene at some point and turn events in a direction other than the one mere physics would have dictated. This seems a disastrous requirement. If there’s one thing the whole weight of science goes to prove, it’s that the laws of physics are not intermittent or interruptable; every experiment ever conducted has contributed evidence that they are consistent and complete. Yes, there are some places in quantum physics or wherever where some might hope to smuggle in a bit of jiggery-pokery, but I think on examination even these recondite areas offer no real hope of a loophole.

This is a general issue with Nagel’s case. We can sympathise with the view that evolution is not a Theory of Everything, but the other theories we need should be compatible with the broadly materialist world view which, despite some problems, is really the only fully-worked out one we’ve got: but Nagel hankers after something stranger and thinner.

What about those other theories? Nagel isn’t basing his argument simply on his doubts about evolution; he has three places in which he thinks the standard materialist view is just not adequate. Consciousness, unsurprisingly, is one; cognitive thought, more unexpectedly, is another; and the third is his concept of value. In the next post let’s consider what he has to say about each.

Also worth a look is this essay considering the history of ideas about animal consciousness, leading up to a favourable mention for Thomas Nagel and his seminal paper on What Is It Like To Be A Bat – more on Nagel and his recent book very soon.

If you missed it I also recommend a look at Scott Bakker’s post on Reengineering Dennett: Intentionality and the Curse of Dimensionality.

JohnJoe McFadden claims his conscious electromagnetic field information (CEMI) theory – which says that consciousness lies in the brain’s electromagnetic field – has now been borne out by a number of recent research findings. His paper is in the JCS, but a pdf can be accessed at Machines Like Us. We first discussed the CEMI theory eight years ago (can it really be that long?).

The case for CEMI is based in turn on the idea that synchronous neural firing can be shown to correlate with conscious awareness. Others have thought that lots of neurons firing in harmony at the right frequencies might be important of course; but the CEMI theory explains why it should be important by suggesting that synchronous firing produces effects in the endogenous magnetic field, which unsynchronised activity does not. If registering in that field is taken to be the same as presentation to consciousness we have a neat account of the phenomenon.

The first of the new studies quoted by McFadden, by Fujisawa et al, showed that fields of the kind generated by gamma oscillations in a slice of rat hippocampus affected the neuronal firing pattern. This demonstrates that neurons can influence each other significantly by electromagnetic means quite separate from ‘normal’ synaptic activity. The second, by Frohlich and McCormick, showed broadly similar influences of electromagnetic fields in the visual cortex of ferrets, supporting the claim that the endogenous fields provide a positive feedback loop that helps set up oscillatory networks. The third is research by Anastassiou et al which showed that neurons could influence each other through electric field effects: we discussed this ‘ephaptic coupling’ and pointed out its relevance to McFadden a couple of years ago (you read it here first, folks!).

So there’s the evidence; what does it actually mean? I think McFadden is right to claim that the evidence for electromagnetic field effects on neuron firing is now too strong to ignore. At a minimum, it’s something brain simulations will need to take into account. It’s likely, moreover, that rather than simply being a nuisance factor, it actually plays some functional role in how networks of neurons are recruited and operate together. Anything more?  McFadden suggests it may solve the binding problem; I’m not so sure. The binding problem is essentially the question of how information flows from different senses, processed at different speeds, with lags and gaps, somehow manage to end up in a smoothly coherent perception of reality with no jumps or lip-synch problems. Solving that problem may well involve bringing the activity of different neural assemblies together, but to me it’s not clear how field effects could do anything other than smoosh all the inputs together, which is almost the opposite of what we want.

Speculatively McFadden suggests the EM field might be doing field computing, whatever that may be. He quotes a bizarre finding from the School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences (COGS) group at the University of Sussex. They used an evolutionary approach to develop a network which could perform  a certain task, and then deleted the nodes which weren’t playing any part in the the final network.  Weirdly, they found that one of the essential nodes was not actually connected to anything; yet removing it made the network stop working; put it back and the network worked again. They concluded that electromagnetic coupling must be playing a part. Of course electromagnetic effects in a field-programmable gate array (the equipment used by COGS) are not particularly likely to be anything like electromagnetic effects in the radically different physical substrate of neuronal tissue, but it does illustrate the general principle.

I still don’t see that there are particularly good reasons to say that the EM field is the home of consciousness. For one thing consciousness is full of very complex content: while I can easily see how that complexity could be encoded in the fantastically complex patterns of neuron firing which go on in the cortex, it’s harder to think that the EM field has a sufficiently elaborate structure. My consciousness is (in places) quite sharply defined and multi-layered, whereas a EM field seems more likely to provide a misty general glow. Perhaps the neurons provide the content and the EM field the subjectivity?

But one thing McFadden’s theory cannot be is a solution to the ‘Hard Problem’ of subjective experience; his electromagnetic consciousness is playing a vital functional role in the operation of the brain, whereas qualia, strictly defined, have no causal effects. So much the worse for the theory of qualia, you might think; that just helps show that Dennett was right and the whole business of qualia is nonsensical. However, Sue Pockett, whose electromagnetic theory of consciousness is a kind of cousin of McFadden’s, has jumped the other way on this, accepting that her own electromagnetic consciousness is epiphenomenal: it is produced by the brain but doesn’t in turn produce any effects of its own; consciousness is a mere observer. This enables her to stay in the game so far as the Hard Problem is concerned, but of course it lands her with a different set of problems.

Perhaps in another eight years things will look very different – I rather hope so.

Emergence of consciousness and the Soul.             

My Hypothesis.                                           

Trees and flowers do not need to evolve a brain, everything they require is taken care of by their environment. The sea squirt digests its brain when no longer required, which shows the economics of nature. Bodies evolve without brains, not vice-versa.

Often when the mind is discussed, the body is taken as such a banal subject that it does not get considered much, if at all. For me this is completely wrong, as I hope to explain with my hypothesis. Looking at the brain without considering the body is like trying to understand an electronic control unit without knowing what it is connected to.

Some creatures do not need much of a brain to survive in their environment, as they are moved around by the tide, wind, light or dark. The environment aids their survival. Their brain being operated by their body senses send the required action.

Some creatures needed to evolve a more complex brain for the 3 F’s, but this came at a cost. A large brain needs more fuel to run and maintain. A way to conserve energy was evolved, so part of the brain and body could be used when necessary, and relaxed when not. This proved to be more advantageous for their environmental survival. More beneficial than a less capable brain running 24/7. This improvement was achieved by a natural division of the nervous system in the body and brain. These are the autonomic and somatic nervous systems. It is the interaction between these two nervous systems which form the basis of my hypothesis, which combined with our dexterity has allowed us to evolve as we are.

Obviously I did not discover these two nervous systems, but I hope to show how their two feedback loops cause physical duality interaction of the body and brain, essentially the mind.

The autonomic nervous system is unconscious, to and from both the body and brain, which functions 24/7 and is the main control of our internal existence, a large part of our body and brain keeping us alive, as it has done since before we were born.

The somatic nervous system is the conscious to and from both the body and brain, and is the means of controlling and managing actions in the outside world to keep us alive.

The unconscious autonomic nervous system is indirectly connected, interacts, affects and effects the conscious somatic nervous system and vice-versa. Our conscious manages the somatic action in the environment and decides to act or not, assisted by, and sometimes urged by, the unconscious autonomic nervous system.  It is this dual interaction of essentially different parts of the nervous spectrum that complement each other making a formidable partnership that is the basis of my hypothesis and is how we are.

Our soul is simply our conscious inability to understand our unconscious activity.