Bafflement

Picture:  Avshalom C. Elitzur. Over at Robots.net, they’ve noticed a bit of a resurgence of dualism recently, and it seems that Avshalom C. Elitzur is in the vanguard, with this paper presenting an argument from bafflement.

The first part of the paper provides a nice, gentle introduction to the issue of qualia in dialogue form. Elitzur explains the bind that we’re in in this respect: we seem to have an undeniable first-hand experience of qualia, yet they don’t fit into the normal physical account of the world. We seem to be faced with a dilemma: either reject qualia – perhaps we just misperceive our percepts as qualia – or accept some violation of normal physics. The position is baffling: but Elitzur wants to suggest that that very bafflement provides a clue.  His strategy is to try to drag the issue into the realm of science, and the argument goes like this:

1. By physicalism, consciousness and brain processes are identical.
2. Whence, then, the dualistic bafflement about their apparent nonidentity?
3. By physicalism, this nonidentity, and hence the resultant bafflement, must be due to error.
4. But then, again by physicalism, an error must have a causal explanation.
5. Logic, cognitive science and AI are advanced enough nowadays to provide such an explanation for the alleged error underlying dualism, and future neurophysiology must be able to point out its neural correlate.

That last point seems optimistic. Cognitive science may be advanced enough to provide explanations for a number of cognitive deficits and illusions, but sometimes only partial ones; and not all errors are the result of a structural problem. It’s particularly optimistic to think that all errors must have an identifiable neural correlate. But this seems to be what Elitzur believes. He actually says

“When future neurophysiology becomes advanced enough to point out the neural correlates of false beliefs, a specific correlate of this kind would be found to underlie the bafflement about qualia.”

The neural correlates of false beliefs? Crikey! It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that all false beliefs have neural correlates – because one assumes that all beliefs do – but the idea that false ones can be distinguished by their neural properties is surely evidently wrong. An argument hardly seems required, but it’s easy, for example, to picture a man who believes a coin has come down heads. If it has, his belief is true, but if it’s actually tails, exactly the same belief, with identical neural patterns would be false. I think Elitzur must mean something less startling than what he seems to be saying; he must, I think, take it as read that if qualia are a delusion, they would be a product of some twist or quirk in our mental set-up. That’s not an unreasonable position, one that would be shared by Metzinger, for example (discussion coming soon).

As it happens, Elitzur doesn’t think qualia are delusions; instead he has an argument which he thinks shows that interactionist dualism – a position he doesn’t otherwise find very attractive – must be true. The argument is to do with  zombies.  Zombies in this context, as regular readers will know, are people who have all the qualities normal people posess, except qualia. Because qualia have no physical causal effects,  the behaviour of zombies, caused by normal physical factors, is exactly like that of normal people. Elitzur quotes Chalmers explaining that zombie-Chalmers even talks about qualia and writes philosophical papers about them, though in fact he has none. The core of Elitzur’s position is his incredulity over this conclusion. How could zombies who don’t have qualia come to be worried about them?

It is an uncomfortable position, but if we accept that zombies are possible and qualia exist, Chalmers’ logic seems irrefutable.  Ex hypothesi, zombies follow the same physical laws as us:  it’s ultimately physics that causes the movements of our hands and mouths involved in writing or speaking about qualia: so our zombie counterparts must go through the same motions, writing the same books and emitting the same sounds. Since this seems totally illogical to Elitzur, he offers the rationalisation that when zombies talk about qualia, they must in fact merely be talking about their percepts. But this asymmetry provides a chink which can be used to prose zombies and qualiate people apart. If we ask Chalmers whether his zombie equivalent is possible, he replies that it is; but, suggests Elitzur, if we ask zombie Chalmers (whom he call ‘Charmless’) the same question, he replies in the negative.  Chalmers can imagine himself functioning without qualia, because qualia have no functional role: but Charmless cannot imagine himself functioning without percepts, because percepts are part of the essence of his sensory system. (It is possible to take the analogous view about qualia of course – namely that zombies are impossible, because a physically identical person just would necessarily have the same qualia). So zombies differ from us, oddly enough, in not being able to conceive of their own zombies.

For Elitzur, the conclusion is inescapable; qualia do have an effect on our brains. He chooses therefore to bite the bullet of accepting that the laws of physics must be messed up in some way – that where qualia intervene, conservation laws are breached, unpalatable as this conclusion is. One consoling feature is that if qualia do have physical effects, they can be included in the evolutionary story; perhaps they serve to hasten or intensify our responses: but overall it’s regrettable that dualism turns out to be the answer.

I don’t think this is a convincing conclusion; it seems as if Elitzur’s incredulity has led him into not taking the premises of the zombie question seriously enough. It just is the case ex hypothesi that all of our zombies’ behaviour is caused by the same physical factors as our own behaviour; it follows that if their talk about qualia is not caused by qualia, neither is ours (note that this doesn’t have to mean that either we or the zombies fail to talk about qualia). There are other ways out of this uncomfortable position, discussed by Chalmers (perhaps, for example, our words about qualia are over-determined, caused both by physical factors and by our actual experiences). My own preferred view is that whatever qualia might be, they certainly go along with certain physical brain functions, and that therefore any physical duplicate of ourselves would have the same qualia; that zombies, in other words, are not possible. It’s just a coincidence, I’m sure, that in Elitzur’s theory this is the kind of thing a zombie would say…

21 thoughts on “Bafflement

  1. It seems to me that if you’re going to throw up your hands and decide that zombies must behave differently than non-zombies, you ought to decide that they would diverge at the point of even talking about qualia(and never use this word in the way that we non-zombies do), rather than at the point where they have started talking about qualia but then say that they cannot imagine people who don’t have what they call qualia.

    I’m also wary of the utility of asking whether or not we can imagine this or that. It seems that if qualia can eventually be fit into any coherent model of reality along side all the other phenomena that science can expain, once we know enough about the processes that go into it we will not be able imagine those processes without qualia. Our ability to imagine zombies that are physically identical to ourselves but who don’t have qualia is almost certainly a product of our ignorance of the qualia-generating/qualia-laden processes.

    Finally, if zombies can exist as they were originally imagined: behaving exactly the same as non-zombies because behavior is a product of the physics going on in and around a person and qualia is not, then zombies and non-zombies would have exactly the same discussions about qualia. However, in this thought experiment the zombies must not mean the same thing by that word as the non-zombies, or at least the root of their concept of qualia must be different(because they don’t have qualia in our non-zombie sense of the word), so to at least some degree they must not mean the same thing; their sense of the word must be different. So within this thought experiment the productive line of inquiry – as far as discovering the nature of qualia goes – ought to be in learning about how our word “qualia” gets its meaning/usage and how the zombie’s word “qualia” gets its meaning/usage.

  2. Fair points. Whether zombies must not mean the same thing when they speak of qualia is more tricky though. Can I only mean X if it was X that ultimately caused my utterance? Clever people have thought so, but I think not. I can, for example, speak about imaginary, non-existent, and hypothetical things, which don’t seem to have any causal powers. Equally, I can pick out some arbitrary entity like the oldest person in Austria. That person certainly exists, and it’s them I meant in the last sentence, but it hardly seems that that actual person (of whom I know nothing beyond their being the oldest person in Austria) can really be said to have caused my utterance. This is of course another big and difficult aspect of consciousness.

  3. Loved the article.
    It seems fair to me that “qualia” is described by the author as those aspects of our experience that cannot be communicated yet we know is there.
    And then the question if would be possible to have zombies baffled over qualia is like putting gasoline in a fire for a heated debate. In other words:
    “Could zombies ever become good enough actors so they would deceive a non-zombie human into believing they are also non-zombie humans?”
    And my 2 cents goes on this:
    I can sufficiently describe qualia as being the mind-body connection. Therefore, zombies do not have a mind-body connection. I would venture a little further and say that “non-zombie” humans cannot not communicate their qualia or mind/body connection. This communication is called body language. You know what I mean, the one communication that cannot lie! And is universal and considered 80% of human and non-human communication. Have you ever noticed in the zombie movies that what really makes a zombie is not that they have a knife stubbed into their head, but their body language tells it all. Actors in zombie movies make close to nothing bacause is so easy to play a zombie, just move like one.

  4. “Chalmers can imagine himself functioning without qualia, because qualia have no functional role: but Charmless cannot imagine himself functioning without percepts, because percepts are part of the essence of his sensory system.”

    When “Charmless” talks of qualia, he wouldn’t talk of percepts, the same way Chalmers wouldn’t. Both realise that it is not about percepts, but the difference would be that Chalmers will talk about something he experiences beyond percepts while Charmless will talk about something beyond percepts, although he will not experience it. But if we assume that Charmless and Chalmers are identical in behavior from a 3rd person standpoint, Charmless will not even realise that he doesn’t experience qualia, since that can lead to an internal contradiction (which will not happen in the case of Chalmers) which in turn can lead to verbalization of the same that will represent a divergence in behavior as observed by a third person.

  5. “1. By physicalism, consciousness and brain processes are identical.”

    This seems like a specious premise given there are many compelling accounts of consciousness that don’t involve reducing it to a strict identification of brain processes. One could just as easily say that consciousness only emerges when a particular kind of brain interacts with a particular kind of environment, and that furthermore, consciousness is not a “thing” which has an occurrent, physical presence in the same way a chair does. It is only a result of mix-matched metaphors that we come to see consciousness as a “thing” at all which can be identical to other things or what have you. Maybe consciousness is a metaphorical operator that structures our experience not by giving us “qualia”, but by allowing us to understand the world in terms of embodied metaphors of self, time, and space, which in turn open up the possibility of internal narratives, episodic memory, and private reflection and monologue. This operation only emerges when we grow up in a linguistic culture so strictly speaking, consciousness is not *just* brain activity, but rather, brain activity that has interacted with a special kind of structured environment. Reductionist accounts altogether fail to grasp the importance the linguistic-cultural environment plays in the development of conscious thought.

  6. Don’t you think that qualia do indeed perform a huge functional role for us humans. Without “experiencing” via “qualia”, zombies could have no reference for such fundamental concepts as pleasure,pain,personal identity(thus identification with others), free will,beauty,good,evil,justice etc.If free will is indeed an illusion,it is an illusion the consequences of which are real and huge and are witnessed everywhere in human culture.Isn’t meaning itself a product of qualia?

  7. That’s it! This paper did it!

    But of course, I don’t believe any physical law will be broken. However, this is a testable proposition. Why not test it rigorously?

    Once we have this question settled, we can come back to the alternative option: The impossibility of zombies. I held the belief that zombies were possible up until Peter’s last post. But now I am quite convinced that they can’t exist. It is an extraordinary shift. I can quite understand why Elitzur avoided this conclusion and leans towards the possibility of breaking physical law instead. The claim that zombies cannot exist is quite an extraordinary claim and it requires extraordinary evidence. I will also argue, the result is the breaking of physicalism as well. If you are going to break physicalism, you might just as well break it explicitly and early on. However, I myself prefer minimal breaking, which will be in the “impossibility of zombies” option.

    Why the “impossibility of zombies” option breaks physicalism can be argued as follows: Based on physicalism, the behavior and properties of a physical system (in this case, a living human being) is uniquely determined by its structure and its interaction with its environment alone, all based on physical laws (which are not necessarily completely known to humans, but it suffices that the laws exist). No non-physical extra quantity is needed. The claim that all humans, in particular, my zombie counter part, if exists, necessarily have these unphysical things called qualia, which is something that no one else can verify without being that person himself/herself, and yet now provable even from a third person standpoint through the bafflement argument, therefore points to self-contradiction within physicalism itself.

    However, this self-contradiction is conceptual “only”. The integrity of physical laws can still be preserved through epiphenomenalism. That is, we know and can prove that qualia exist for all conscious entities, but qualia do not result in anything verifiable by any third party. I call this minimal breaking of physicalism, as oppose to the explicit violation of some physical law, as Elitzur proposed. Either way, physicalism needs extension, it seems.

    Elitzur leans towards interactive dualism. If we find violations in physical laws, then he is right. If not, the interactive epiphenomenal dualism I proposed in Comments #33 and #34 of Peter’s last post may be a good alternative. The Universal Mind concept is a good possibility because, if true, it is presumably the driving force behind all the conscious beings in the universe, like a CPU is driving all the programs in a computer, thus providing the qualia that each conscious being can verify for himself/herself, and be baffled about.

  8. This paper is definitely a step forward in the understanding of qualia. It underpins the idea that that the relations between brain and qualia is bidirectional, and qualia have causal effects. It is even difficult to accept that zombies could talk about “percepts”. In terms of what? physical parameters related to the percepts, like “oh, yesterday a sound wave with this particular frequency pitch interacted with me hearing sense…” makes no sense. The paper strikes really hard in the concept of zombies, as possible real beings.

    Still I don’t see the need for dualism. Brain creates the mind and the other way round. Extending the scope to assume one single nature in which mind and brain(matter…) are two faces of one single entity.

    Congratulations to Elitzur

  9. “It is an uncomfortable position, but if we accept that zombies are possible and qualia exist, Chalmers’ logic seems irrefutable. ”

    If we admit that qualia can have effects on behaviour then we are left with the issue of whether this behaviour could be simulated by a device that has no qualia. Can a device that has a wholly different physical form from another device simulate its processing? The answer to this question is well known, for instance, it is known that a one dimensional Turing Machine can simulate a two dimensional Turing Machine so things that have widely different physical forms can indeed provide the same processing.

    But what of Turing Machines simulating our minds? The main difference between ourselves and Turing Machine simulations of ourselves is that a Turing Machine simulates dimensional time as a succession of marks on a one, two or three dimensional tape plus a few empirical processing instructions. This simulation of dimensional time is the same technique as simulating a plane by storing numerous segments of data in a one dimensional array. Unlike a Turing machine we do not not simulate dimensional time, we are a 4D structure (see Time and conscious experience).

    There is actually no mystery in the zombie debate, it is just a discussion in which all the participants agree to resolutely ignore dimensional time. If the debate were between those who held that all processing was due to one dimensional arrays within any processing device and those who held that arrays could be two dimensional then those participants who maintained that the behaviour of both devices was identical so the devices were no different would be considered unreasonable. The argument is equally unreasonable when philosophers hold that behaviour proves that 4D people are no more than 3D zombies.

    I was actually a bit shocked at the way Elitzur identified physicalism with Dennett: “Physicalism invented a variety of exercises in order to prove that qualia do not really exist, being merely some aspects of the percepts (Dennett, 1991, 2003).”. Dennett’s arguments are paper thin and materialist rather than physicalist (see Materialists should read this first).

  10. I just re-read the concluding part of Elitzur’s paper. Its scope is actually narrower than what I perceived during the first pass. It concludes that if there is a conscious being who has qualia, then its externally indistinguishable zombie version cannot exist, by the bafflement argument. However, it says nothing about the possibility of any zombie who has no non-zombie counterpart. So, zombies, in general, can still exist, as long as it is not a counterpart to some real conscious being. In the lack of a non-zombie version, no one can conclusively tell if an individual is a zombie or just a non-zombie who is just deeply uninterested in the qualia topic (I am sure we all can find examples among our family and friends.)

    So, this paper has not resolved the “problem of other minds”. I was celebrating too early. But still, it is a step forward.

  11. By definition zombies always have a counterpart, since they are the qualialess version of a conscious being, and they should be undistinguishable from the counterpart, in order to prove that qualia have no effect on behaviour.

    Elitzur bafflement argument shows that they are probably distinguishable, the moment you ask a zombie to consider qualia, which it cannot.

    Even more, try to understand human evolution in terms of zombies, eg: the effect on language evolution. In the beginning, how could beings with very low conceptual knowledge, and not directly confronted to outter world through qualia experience, ellaborate and exchange the necessary intellectual models of reality for social evolution. Is it reasonable consider that art would have emerge in a world of zombies?

    The question is if zombies can consider the concept of qualia, rather than how much interest can show in them. If were to talk about percepts as the counterpart of qualia for zombies, we would need a definition and description of what does a zombie “understand” for a percept.

  12. I read the paper and it is fascinating.

    The analogy of plant life as simple conasciousness fascinates me since they are essentially living beings which respond to their environment. Although as animals we experience qualia, we also have the unique ability to quantify our qualia and pass it amongst each other on a very advanced level which makes us the unique animal species. Namely the study of language as qualia descriptive and qualia inducive behavior is still not fully advanced. Reading my words here in English if you only understood Japanese would make no sense, but if translated and reading them in Japanese would then have the same meaning. As human beings, all of our different cultures and languages still run on the same human autonomic platform, which means all languages still operate on a fixed system.

  13. Hi Vicente,
    A robot is a real life zombie without non-zombie counterpart. I am entertaining the idea of a “biological robot”…..

  14. Hi Kar Lee,

    In that case, could such a sofisticated robot have a “conversation” about qualia with a person, or among them, without being baffled or blocked? Would a society of those robots produce art? these are classical questions of strong AI, that remain unanswered.

    I believe it would be dead easy to differentiate a society of zombies, from ordinary human society. No need for Turing tests or similar tools.

    Still I understand a zombie as a conscious being whose qualia have been removed, with no effect on its behaviour, and therefore impossible to be identified as a zombie by an external observer. But the moment you somehow expose the zombie to the concept of qualia, you should find a complete different response from the one produce by his conscious counterpart, thus qualia weights on behaviour.

  15. I think Elitzur, like physicalists as well as many dualists has fallen into the trap of assuming that the physical universe is somehow absolute and sacrosanct. Thus qualia are regarded as an embarrassing side effect of physical processes and the attempts made even by interventionist dualists are always trying to explain qualia in terms of the aforementioned physical stuff, never the other way around.

    It seems that pure phenomenalism is getting sidelined in this “Hard Problem” debate.

    When you think about it, all our experiences are only in the form of qualia, never physical parameters. This holds true even for scientists working in a lab, who, at the end of the day depend on their own qualia to reach whatever conclusions they do regarding the ‘physical’ universe.

    So instead of holding physicalism as absolute, why don’t we turn the table on this debate? Why do qualia associated with events, like the collision of billiard balls, seem consistent and predictable?

  16. Imagine that in your dream you are a researcher and there is such a thing as the ’64th Law of Thermodynamics’. It is supposed to be inviolable, even more sacred than the 2nd Law. Textbooks have been written about it and scientific teams have conducted numerous experiments to find a violation, but never been successful. It has come to be accepted as THE fundamental law.

    Now some philosopher in the dream concludes that zombies are not possible since that would violate the 64th Law. This stes off an intense debate in philosophical circles.

    Now, you are no way sure if others around you are not zombies to begin with. So you wish to find neural correlates of your own sensory experiences. You remove a portion of your skull and with a micro probe, stimulate areas in your visual cortex. You find pixels of red, green, etc that appear in front of your eyes. You do conclude that physical processes lead to consciousness, but that doesn’t mean you have solved the ‘Hard Problem’.

    By now, the alarm rings and you wake up.

    You realize the absurdity of the whole debate which happened in your dream and your attempts to solve the Hard Problem.

    Dreams, in my opinion, offer a fantastic reminder of the limitations/pitfalls of assuming anything that deviates from phenomenalism. It is the absolute reality check for me, that happens on a daily basis.

  17. Unfortunately, I am just an engineer and not a trained logician like the philosophers who opine ad nauseam on this subject but it seems to me that any time you invoke a zombie thought experiment you must also stipulate that the zombie is using the same cognitive architecture that brains employ. If you do not do this then any conclusion you draw is simply nonsense. On the other hand, if you do make this stipulaton then you have simply circled right back to square one, namely, another round of ontological speculation.

    Michael Baggot

  18. I like the dream scenario above.
    Now we have one more tool, other than a dream, to think about this problem: The Matrix. You could be doing the same thing to your virtual body inside The Matrix and wonder where your mind is. You can keep taking the third body view and do experiment on another “physical” individual (maybe an agent?) and investigate the clockwork inside this individual’s “brain”, and you discover some springs and gears. When you tighten the spring, this individual’s facial expression turns smiley and you infer that it must be the pleasure center. You infer that your brain has similar structure, and that you will similarly behave if the spring in your “brain” gets tighten too.

    Then someone unplug you from The Matrix… and you wake up to another reality… So, what does the laws of physics you discovered inside The Matrix tell you?

    I keep wondering if some “physicists” inside The Matrix attempt to build a bigger and bigger hadron collider to probe the nature of quantum mechanics, what will they find eventually? Are they going into the area where the Matrix computer can no longer simulate and reveal the hoax?

  19. Despite the comments on this article I am still shocked that this paper is taken seriously. It’s not just the acceptance of Dennett’s arguments as if they were gospel, Elitzur’s key argument runs as follows:

    “1. People have qualia.
    2. People express bafflement about qualia.
    3. Physics allows the existence of zombies that lack qualia.
    4. Zombies must also express bafflement about qualia.
    5. Therefore people express bafflement about qualia for reasons
    other than their having qualia.”

    It is item 3 that is mistaken. It derives from Chalmer’s analysis of the zombie problem. Chalmers uses Pylyshyn’s “thought experiment” to suggest that if two processors share exactly the same functional architecture then if one is conscious so is the other. Chalmers says: “I claim that conscious experience arises from fine-grained functional organization. More specifically, I will argue for a principle of organizational invariance, holding that given any system that has conscious experiences, then any system that has the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences.” (The Conscious Mind). The inclusion of ‘fine-grained’ means that what Chalmers is really saying is that if two things are identical in form and function they are the same. This argument cannot be used to suggest that a robot that has the same behaviour as a person has the same ‘conscious experiences’ because the robot does not have the same ‘fine grained functional organisation’. If it had exactly the same ‘fine grained’ functional organisation it would consist of exactly the same macromolecules and materials as a person and would not be a ‘robot’. Unfortunately the argument is often referenced to support the possibility of conscious experience in machines that only replicate our overall behaviour. This mistaken interpretation of the argument is often seen in the discussions of “philosophical zombies”. (From Zombies and progressive replacement of the brain).

    Confuse form and function and you will be confused indeed. The “conscious experience” that Chalmers describes is events arranged in space and time, its a geometrical form, not a function so the whole argument is a non-sequitur (some of the other comments here have pointed out that it is a non-sequitur).

  20. The “bafflement” about qualia and brains is due to the assumption of physicalism as the premise. The common definItion of physicalism excludes qualia. That’s all. According to physicalism rules-=qualia are taboo, not to be admittred into the model. So, what to do?
    Assume a different premise: the physical world arises out of
    the mental, (a la Berkeley perhaps)is just a different form of the
    mental. After all, assuming the mental arises out of the physical is just as arbitrary a scheme. Once you divide the world into mental and physical then you must reconcile them since they are both equally the world. Science reconciles by making the mental a physical thing. But this makes only as much sense as making the physical world a mental thing.
    Both are meta-premises–starting points—and no evidence for the superiority of either. It may be argued that rendering unconscious with a hit on the head halts the mental and so it is the physical that
    produces the mental. The reply is that anything that shows up is all mental–including the scenario wherein the hit on the head stops the mental, that’s mental.
    sO, if you accept physicalism and hold that mentalism is
    exclusive of physicalism—then of course qualia, being mental, is
    going to conflict. Remember that joke about the guy at the doctor’s who says “doc it hurts when I do this”, the doc replies, “so don’t do that”. That’s what I say. Don’t do that–don’t do that split.
    Instead, say that mental and physical are two points of view out of the great many that make up the world–from one point of view the world is mental and from the other it is physical. If you define the two as mutually exclusive–what do you expect? If you put up a wall
    between two yards will you complain that you can’t understand why when you try to walk to the other yard you bump your head? Don’t put up the wall in the first place!
    Of course, once you split the world into mental and physical it will be paradoxical to say that the mental is just the physical or the physical is the mental–after all, you have defined them as mutually exclusive!
    The paradox is made by definition and the presumption that only one point of view must win out. The world, the whole, is a mental idea, but the world is a physical entity. That the physical world produces the mental then is itself a mental idea but the mental idea is produced by the physical world —and yet physical and mental are mutually exclusive! Nobody wins–it is set up that way! If there is a recipe for eternal conflict–that is it! It is conceptual schizophrenia! Self made bafflement indeed.
    How about this: the mental and the physical are of the same stuff but differ in quality–namely, one is tactile. What is that stuff?—
    why existence of course. Now peace! you warring tribes!

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