Conscious Entities

Recent research at UCL provides corroboration for the claim that elite sports players often feel they have plenty of time to think about how they address a ball which is actually coming at them so fast that normal human beings probably shouldn’t even see it.

This effect, a perceived slowing down of time, is the kind of thing which I think would once have been shrugged off as unresearchable, outside the scope of proper science: how can we tell how things seem to people? These days we’re bolder, and the team in this case came up with an experiment in which some subjects were asked to tap a screen while others were merely asked to observe. Those who were asked to prepare action reported feeling the time they had available seemed longer.

The finding makes a certain obvious sense in that being granted extra mental time when a particularly crucial task is coming up is bound to be helpful. But it’s also a little puzzling: if the brain is capable of giving us more time, why doesn’t it do so routinely? It would never be a bad thing to have more time for reflection; if the facility only gets turned on in these special circumstances there must either be some downside or cost which makes the brain ration its use, or something else is wrong.

It’s not altogether implausible that revving up our mental processes might have an energy cost, or that our neurons might be able to speed up a bit only temporarily; but as always with consciousness there’s a deeper issue. Did mental processing actually speed up, or did it simply feel as if it did; or indeed, was the time merely remembered as passing more slowly? There’s an assumption here that when we are playing baseball or tennis control is fully conscious, but actually it’s far from clear that the deliberative  level of thought has much to do with it – it generally seems more a matter of gut reaction than strategic debate.

Another complicating factor is that we don’t actually perceive the passage of time directly, in the way we can observe spatial sizes. There is no speial organ devoted to measuring time, and it seems likely that if we do have to assess time (we’re pretty bad at it- try telling when two minutes have passed without looking at a clock) we pick up on several different indirect clues.

It may well be that one way the brain works out how much time has passed is by counting the number of ‘events’ it remembers and assuming that the gap between each of them is about the same. ‘Events’ would be mental ones, which explains why outwardly uneventful time may seem to pass very slowly – because we keep checking our watches or asking ourselves how much longer, so that there is a steady stream of mental acts, whereas when we’re caught up in something interesting there are none of these mental markers put down and time seems to fly.

It seems highly plausible to me that when we’re asked to prepare mentally for a given act (whether tapping the screen or hitting a perfect drive to the boundary) a sequence of this kind is set up, in which we keep asking ourselves ‘am I going to do it now?’ or ‘is it time yet?’. If that’s true the chances are the impression of having more time to react is actually an illusion, though it may reflect a genuinely improved state of readiness.

I couldn’t help reflecting that the conditions of these experiments rather resembled those in the famous series of experiments by Benjamin Libet which seemed to show that a decision to move one’s hand at a given moment had actually been taken significantly before that same decision entered consciousness. Libet’s subjects were asked to get ready to act in just the sort of way which might have led to the kind of time-dilation effect considered in the UCL research. Libet’s ingenious system for measuring the time of decision, with subjects reporting the position of a clock at the vital moment, should be fairly well proofed against subjective errors: but could it be that a sense of time slowing down caused Libet’s subjects to delay slightly in reporting their decision?

Just  a thought.

David Gunkel of NIU has produced a formidable new book (via) on the question of whether machines should now be admitted to the community of moral beings.

He lets us know what his underlying attitudes are when he mentions by way of introduction that he thought of calling the book A Vindication of the Rights of Machines, in imitation of Mary Wollstonecraft. Historically Gunkel sees the context as one in which a prolonged struggle has gradually extended the recognised moral domain from being the exclusive territory of rich white men to the poor, people of colour, women and now tentatively perhaps even certain charismatic animals (I think it overstates the case a bit to claim that ancient societies excluded women, for example, from the moral realm altogether: weren’t women like Eve and Pandora blamed for moral failings, while Lucretia and Griselda were held up as fine examples of moral behaviour – admittedly of a rather grimly self-subordinating kind? But perhaps I quibble.) Given this background the eventual admission of machines to the moral community seems all but inevitable; but in fact Gunkel steps back and lowers his trumpet. His more modest aim, he says, is like Socrates simply to help people ask better questions. No-one who has read any Plato believes that Socrates didn’t have his answers ready before the inquiry started, so perhaps this is a sly acknowledgement that Gunkel too, thinks he really knows where this is all going.

For once we’re not dealing here with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophy: Gunkel may be physically in Illinois, but intellectually he is in the European Continental tradition, and what he proposes is a Derrida-influenced deconstruction. Deconstruction, as he concisely explains, is not destruction or analysis or debunking, but the removal from an issue of the construction applied heretofore.  We can start by inverting the normal understanding, but then we look for the emergence of a new way of ‘thinking otherwise’ on the topic which escapes the traditional framing. Even the crustiest of Anglo-Saxons ought to be able to live with that as a modus operandi for an enquiry.

The book falls into three sections: in the first two Gunkel addresses moral agency, questions about the morality of what we do, and then moral patiency, about the morality of what is done to us. This is a sensible and useful division. Each section proceeds largely by reportage rather than argument, with Gunkel mainly telling us what others have said, followed by summaries which are not really summaries (it would actually be very difficult to summarise the multiple, complex points of view explored) but short discussions moving the argument on. The third and final section discusses a number of proposals for ‘thinking otherwise’.

On agency, Gunkel sets out a more or less traditional view as a starting point and notes that identifying agents is tricky because of the problem of ‘other minds’: we can never be sure whether some entity is acting with deliberate intention because we can never know  the contents of another mind. He seems to me to miss a point here; the advent of the machines has actually transformed the position. It used to be possible to take it for granted that the problem of other minds was outside the scope of science, but the insights generated by AI research and our ever-increasing ability to look inside working brains with scanners mean that this is no longer the case. Science has not yet solved the problem, but the idea that we might soon be able to identify agents by objective empirical measurement no longer requires reckless optimism.

Gunkel also quotes various sources to show that actual and foreseen developments in AI are blurring the division between machine and human cognition (although we could argue that that seems to be happening more because the machines are getting better and moving into marginal territory than because of any fundamental flaws in the basic concepts).  Instrumentalism would transfer all responsibility to human beings, reducing machines to the status of tools, but against that Gunkel quotes a Heideggerian concept of machine autonomy and criticisms of inherent anthropocentrism. He gently rejects the argument of Joanna Bryson that robots should be slaves (in normal usage I think slaves have to be people, which in this discussion begs the question). He rightly describes the concept of personhood as central and points out its links with consciousness, which, as we can readily agree, throws a whole new can of worms into the mix. All in all, Gunkel reasonably concludes that we’re in some difficulty and that the discussion appears to  ‘lead into that kind of intellectual cul-de-sac or stalemate that Hegel called a “bad infinite.”’

He doesn’t give up without considering some escape routes. Deborah Johnson interestingly proposes that although computers lack the metal states required for proper agency, they have intentionality and are therefore moral players at some level. Various others offer proposals which lower the bar for moral agency in one way or another; but all of these are in some respects unsatisfactory. In the end Gunkel thinks we might do well to drop the whole mess and try an approach founded on moral patiency instead.

The question now becomes, not should we hold machines responsible for their actions, but do we have a moral duty to worry about what we do to them? Gunkel feels that this side of the question has often been overshadowed by the debate about agency, but in some ways it ought to be easier to deal with. An interesting proposition here is that of a Turing Triage Test: if a machine can talk to us for a suitable time about moral matters without our being able to distinguish it from a human being, we ought to give it moral status and presumably, not turn it off. Gunkel notes reasonable objections that such a test requires all the linguistic and general cognitive capacity of the original Turing test simply in order to converse plausibly, which is surely asking too much. Although I don’t like the idea of the test very much, I think there might be ways round these objections if we could reduce the interaction to multiple-choice button-pushing, for example.

It can be argued that animals, while lacking moral agency, have a good claim to be moral patients. They have no duties, but may have rights, to put it another way. Gunkel rightly points here to the Benthamite formulation that what matters is not whether they can think, but whether they can suffer; but he notes considerable epistemological problems (we’re up against Other Minds again). With machines the argument from suffering is harder to make because hardly anyone believes they do suffer: although they may simulate emotions and pain, it is most often agreed that in this area at least Searle was right that simulations and reality are poles apart. Moreover it’s debatable whether bringing animals into a human moral framework is an unalloyed benefit or to some extent simply the reassertion of human dominance. Nevertheless some would go still further and Gunkel considers proposals to extend ethical status to plants, land, and artefacts. Information Ethics essentially completes the extension of the ethical realm by excluding nothing at all.

This, then is one of the ways of thinking otherwise – extending the current framework to include non-human individuals of all kinds. But there are other ways: one is to extend the individual: a number of influential voices have made the case in recent years for an extended conception of consciousness, and that might be the most likely way for machines to gravitate within the moral realm – as adjuncts of a more broadly conceived humanity.

More radically, Gunkel suggests we might adopt proposals to decentre the system; instead of working with fixed Cartesian individuals we might try to grant each element in the moral system the rights and responsibilities appropriate to it at the time (I’m not sure exactly how that plays out in real situations); or we could modify and distribute our conception of agency. There is an even more radical possibility which Gunkel clearly finds attractive in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, which makes both agency and patiency secondary and derived while ethical interactions become primary, or to put it more accurately:

The self or the ego, as Levinas describes it… becomes what it is as a by-product of an uncontrolled and incomprehensible exposure to the face of the Other that takes place prior to any formulation of the self in terms of agency.

I warned you this was going to get a bit Continental – but actually making acts define the agent rather than the other way about may not be as unpalatably radical as all that. He clearly likes Levinas’ drift, anyway, and perhaps even better Silvia Benso’s proposed ‘mash-up’ which combines Levinasian non-ethics with Heideggerian non-things (tempting but a little unfair to ask what kind of sense that presumably makes).

Actually the least appealing proposal reported by Gunkel, to me at least, is that of Anne Foerst, who would reduce personhood to a social construct which we assign or withhold: this seems dangerously close to suggesting that say, concentration camp guards can actually withdraw real moral patienthood from their victims and hence escape blame (I’m sure that’s not what she actually means).

However, on the brink of all this heady radicalism Gunkel retreats to common sense. At the beginning of the book he suggested that Descartes could be seen as ‘the bad guy’ in his reduction of animals to the status of machines and exclusion of both from the moral realm; but perhaps after all, he concludes, we are in the end obliged to imitate Descartes’ provisional approach to life, living according to the norms of our society while the philosophical issues resist final resolution. This gives the book a bit of a dying fall and cannot but seem a  bit of a cop-out.

Overall, though, the book provides a galaxy of challenging thought to which I haven’t done anything like justice and Gunkel does a fine job of lucid and concise exposition. That said, I don’t find myself in sympathy with his outlook. For Gunkel and others in his tradition the ethical question is essentially political and under our control: membership of the moral sphere is something that can be given or not given rather like the franchise. It’s not really a matter of empirical or scientific fact, which helps explain Gunkel’s willingness to use fictional examples and his relative lack of interest in what digital computers actually can and cannot do. While politics and social convention are certainly important aspects of the matter, I believe we are also talking about real, objective capacities which cannot be granted or held back by the fiat of society any more than the ability to see or speak. To put it in a way Gunkel might find more congenial: when ethnic minorities and women are granted equal moral status, it isn’t simply an arbitrary concession of power, the result of a social tug-of-war but the recognition of hard facts about the equality of human moral capacity.

Myself I should say that moral agency is very largely a matter of understanding what you are doing; an ability to allow foreseen contingencies to influence current action. This is something machines might well achieve: arguably the only reason they haven’t got it already is an understandable human reluctance to trust free-ranging computational decision-making given an observable tendency for programs to fail more disastrously and less gracefully than human minds.

Moral patienthood on the other hand is indeed partly a matter of matter of the ability to experience pain and other forms of suffering, and that is problematic for machines; but it’s also a matter of projects and wishes, and machines fall outside consideration here because they simply don’t have any. They literally don’t care, and hence they simply aren’t in the game.

That seems to leave me with machines that I should praise and blame but need not worry about harming: should be good for a robot butler anyway.

Last time I suggested that we might approach the Hard Problem of qualia by first solving the impossible problem of why the world exists at all (what the hell, eh?). How would that work?

Qualia, of course, are the redness of red, the indescribable smelliness of the smell of fish, and so on; the subjective, phenomenal, inexpressible qualities of experience, the bit that the scientific account always leaves out. They are often described as the ‘what it is like’ of an experience, and have been memorably characterised as what Mary, who knows everything about colour, learns when she actually sees it for the first time.

My case is that a large part, perhaps all, of the strange ineffability of qualia arises because what we’re doing is mismatching theory and actuality. It should not really be a surprise that the theory of red coloration does not itself deliver the actual experience of redness, but there is some mysterious element in actual real-life experience that puzzles us. I suggest the mysterious extra is in fact haecceity, or thisness; the oddly arbitrary specificity of real life, which sits oddly with the abstract generalities of a theoretical description. So it would help to know why the actual world is so arbitrary and specific: why it isn’t a featureless void, or a geometric point, or a collection of eternal Platonic archetypes. If we knew that we might know something about qualia; and also, I think about ourselves, since we too are arbitrary and specific, not abstract functions or sets of information, but real one-off items.

So can we therefore answer Jim Holt’s question for him? Some caution is certainly in order. Speculative metaphysics is like hard drink; a little now and then is great, but you need to know when to stop or you may find your credibility, if not your coherence, diminishing. But I think we can sketch out a tentative view which will clarify a few points and indicate some promising lines of inquiry which may well be rather helpful.

Let’s step back and look at the overall cosmic problem more empirically: the world does in fact exist and does seem to be rich and complex. What kind of overall chronology would make sense for a world like that? It could be one that starts, putters along for a finite time, and then stops. It could be one that stretches back indefinitely into the past but eventually stops at some point in the future, or one that started at a definite point in the past but goes on indefinitely. It could be indefinitely prolonged at both start and end. Or it could be one that goes round in a permanent loop.

The thing is, in different ways all these options seem to give us a universe which is unmotivated. If there is a final state in which the universe stops, why not go to that state in the first place – why spend time getting there? If the universe goes in a circle and ultimately reaches the state in which it started, why bother leaving the initial state? Our current view paints a picture of a Universe wound up by a cataclysmic Bang and then steadily running down through expansion and increasing entropy, to nothing, or as near nothing as makes no great difference: but it seems odd to start the world with a flagrant contradiction of the principle of decline that afterwards governs its development. The only world that makes sense in these admittedly vague terms is one that is going somewhere, but somewhere it will never finally reach: the only one that does that, I think, is one that starts and then goes on, not merely expanding, but transcending its earlier states and rising to higher levels of complexity indefinitely.

That doesn’t quite tell us why there is anything at all. What caused this indefinite existential transcendence in the first place? Some kind of ontic horror vacui? An inherent cosmic desire for there to be more stuff? One of the things I noticed in reading Jim Holt’s book was that there are one or two gaps in our conceptual toolkit when we embark on this quest. One of those is that we are looking for a causal explanation but we don’t really have any clear idea of what causation is at a fundamental level. Let me here just breezily offer the suggestion that the laws of causation assert the identity of one state of the world with a later state of the world: so for example to say that the world featured me striking a match in certain appropriate conditions at one moment is equivalent (under these laws) to saying there was fire at a slightly later moment. Now if that is true, the only possible causes of the existence of the cosmos at its first moment are either its non-existence at any earlier moment or its own existence at that first moment (if you allow simultaneous causation). I think this says the universe is either necessarily gratuitous or gratuitously necessary, but I’ll leave it with you there for now.

Why do the contents of the world seem so arbitrary and random? I suggest there are two reasons. First, the ongoing transcendence which drives the universe is nomic as well as ontic. It’s not just that there’s more stuff, there are more, and more complex, underlying laws. Our view of the long-term past and future is therefore obscured: the ancient universe was not just physically smaller but metaphysically impoverished or cramped, too, and long-term extrapolations are systematically thrown off by this. If we could understand the process properly, it may be that things would look less random – though I grant that for the moment this must be an optimistic article of faith rather than a rigorously deduced conclusion.

Let me just pour myself a bit of a digression here on the nature of the laws of nature. It is common to speak of the laws of nature or the laws of physics although this is clearly a metaphor, and a very old one. Few people, I would guess, suppose that the laws of nature are literally written down in some cosmic text and enforced by angelic police officers – although it is not uncommon to suppose that the mathematics we use to describe the world is actually what controls it, which I think may be a similar error.  So what are these laws? One problem for us is that not only are they not written down in any cosmic text, they’re not written down on paper in earthly texts either: so far as I know, no-one has ever set down a comprehensive list of the Laws of Nature. Physics textbooks set out a number of laws, indeed, but these tend to be the non-obvious ones, rather in the way that early dictionaries included only ‘hard’ words. The nearest thing to a full statement might be in those efforts to produce a Naïve Physics that ended up (in my opinion) producing something that actually struck the normal mind as far weirder than mere Newtonian physics; but they were explicitly setting out a misconceived version of the laws.

It’s consequently hard to feel assured that all relevant examples have been covered: but again I will cut boldly to the chase and suggest that all laws of nature are in fact laws of conservation. They can all be reconstituted as assertions of the continued existence of an underlying entity in different cases, usually at different times. Certainly it seems that any law which can be stated in the form of an equation must be of this kind, because the equation of x with y essentially tells us that the quantity of underlying z of which they are both expressions remains the same whichever form we take it in. Laws which assert, or contain, a constant, clearly state the existence of a continuing fundamental entity in even clearer form.

If that’s true, then perhaps the laws of nature could be restated as a list of existential assertions (though some of the entities whose existence is asserted would be a little unfamiliar), which with a list of values would give us a comprehensive anomic account of the world.

Be that as it may, and getting back to the main point, it is at any rate clear that besides any confusion arising from any nomic evolution which may be going on, certain features of the world arise out of the operation of causality over time. Now it could be that time itself is actually constituted by the ontic growth of the universe (the steady drip of extra stuff providing the steady tick of the moments); but in any case that growth clearly requires time. It may be that some of the deep constant features of the universe are sustained in their existence directly by the same inscrutable principle which caused the universe to come into existence in the first place; but others definitely depend on a long stream of complex causality, and this is surely where the haecceity primarily comes in. We could say that everything is necessary, but that while some things are necessary in the light of metaphysics, others are necessary in the light of history.

To restate that: it may well be that the universe in which we find ourselves is actually the only possible one, and the product of a necessary ontological (and nomological) evolution; but the necessity of the details is both obscured from us by the nature of the evolution itself and also genuinely different from the direct necessity of the underlying features in that it derives its necessity through causation over time.

That’s why actual experience and actual qualia seem so strange and so difficult to capture theoretically. I hope that makes sense of some kind and perhaps appeals to some degree: I’m away now to sleep it off.

We discussed once before that old philosophical puzzler: why is there actually anything at all? Jim Holt’s new book Why does the World Exist? is an entertaining but basically serious assault on this fundamental issue.

Near the beginning he has a splendid chapter about nothing (as it were). He’s a little hard on the Greeks and Romans, suggesting that to them the very idea of zero was inconceivable. That’s surely reading too much into the fact that Roman numerals don’t include a symbol for zero (and you know, the Romans themselves didn’t even use those formal numerals when they needed to do everyday sums, but another system altogether). But his brief history of nothing from Heidegger (‘nothing noths’, apparently) through Bergson to Nozick, and his explanation of the problems that arise from confusing nothing and nothingness, is lively in the best kind of way and stimulating. Could nothing even exist? Holt regards true nothingness as tough to conceive of and spends some time on different ways of attempting the feat. I don’t think I find it that hard myself to think that the world might be null and empty or a Euclidean point (there’s a Greek conception that’s pretty close to zero for you).

That is the question that drives this enquiry, though: why all this stuff? Wouldn’t it be more natural if there was nothing? Much of the book is formed of conversations with selected luminaries, and the first of these, Adolf Grünbaum, simply denies that there’s anything puzzling about the world’s existence. All this stuff about creation of a world out of the void is just a hangover from Genesis as far as he’s concerned. That seems a little too easy. Holt’s second interlocutor, Richard Swinburne, thinks by total contrast that the simplest explanation for the cosmos is, in a word, God, though God himself is inexplicable. That, in a quite different way, seems too easy too.

Holt talks to David Deutsch about a quantum multiverse and Steven Weinberg about Theories of Everything, but both, with refreshing clarity and honesty, deny possessing any ultimate answer to his question. Roger Penrose believes in three separate worlds, but his basically Platonic conception doesn’t seem to offer us anything very new, or to me very satisfying.

With John Leslie things start to get interesting, if bizarre: he believes in axiarchism: the universe exists because of the moral requirement that goodness should exist. There seem to be great difficulties with getting ontology from ethics: attentive observers will have noticed that the moral requirement for goodness doesn’t seem to have much direct causative effect in the real world.

The person Holt is most impressed by is Derek Parfit, who appears (I haven’t read Parfit himself on the subject) to offer not so much a theory as a framework in which all possible universes are theoretically available, but one is actualised by a Selector, a principle which prioritises one. Holt likes this framework and he builds on it a theory of his own. For reasons which were never clear to me, he believes we only need to consider four possible Selectors: simplicity, goodness, fullness/non-arbitrariness, and no Selector at all. Surely there are many more possibilities than that, whatever a Selector is supposed to be (and that’s not quite clear either: for Parfit I suspect it is the kind of intermediate convenience that can be cancelled out of the final solution but Holt seems at times to take it as a metaphysical reality)?  Anyway, Holt decides to arbitrate between the Selectors by using them on themselves as meta-Selectors. He thinks only two emerge from this exercise: Simplicity and Fullness. He concludes that if all selectors or no selectors are going to be applied as a result, we end up with a universe of surpassing mediocrity. That seems to be his final view: the world exists like this because it was the most mediocre option the cosmos could come up with. Amusingly he goes on to ask: what could be the reason for my own existence in such a Universe?

Not a convincing conclusion, then, but an intelligent account of the kind that causes the reader to nod in sage agreement or exclaim in frustration by turns.

Turning aside from Holt’s conversations, let’s see if we can get straight the reasons for puzzlement about why there is anything. Well, isn’t it that Occam’s Razor tells us that entities are not to be multiplied, and so we expect a minimal number of entities in our world. Why does Occam work? I think it really operates on two levels. Strictly Occam is a metatheoretic principle of parsimony: it’s not about reality, it’s about which theory we should prefer. Given any set of facts, there is an unlimited number of different theories which will account for them: we need some way of choosing and Occam tells us to pick the simplest account, or more precisely, the one whose picture of the world contains the smallest and least complex set of things. Strict Occam doesn’t tell us that this simplest theory is absolutely going to be the true one, and sometimes it eventually turns out that it isn’t; but going for simplicity seems the most practical way of picking out one version from the range of possible theories: it may be the only fully comprehensive and consistent principle we can apply. (In practice what we often rely on is not a marginal difference of complexity but a kind of Occamic click: sometimes when a good theory comes along it provides an abrupt and substantial drop in the complexity of our world view: all of a sudden quite lot of different things make sense, and that’s really what makes us think the theory must be true.)

But in addition there is second pseudo-Occamic principle lurking below the surface: things don’t happen/exist for no reason.  Whereas the strict version of Occam is epistemic, this idea is ontological: it doesn’t just tell us what to think it tells us what probably exists, and prompts us to think that the simplest theories are not just the most convenient to adopt, but more likely to be true than any others. It is mainly this pseudo-Occamic idea that leads us to be, not happy as kings (as Robert Louis Stevenson suggested) but puzzled that the world is so full of a number of things. Leslie’s axiarchism seems almost to invert this principle, claiming that good stuff can indeed spring into existence for no other reason than its intrinsic ethical qualities.

We should notice that the pseudo-Occamic principle mainly tells us that things don’t change; so if there were nothing to begin with, nothing could be expected to come of it (a point Holt covers in his discourse on nothing, by the way); but even if there is something, we should expect the universe to be relatively uneventful. So even if it’s easy for Grünbaum to shrug off our Occamic propensity to prefer a theory which gives us a cosmic nothing, he also needs to explain why we seem to be in the midst of a world which has a long complex history and is constantly changing.

One possible answer here is some form of the Anthropic Principle: we’re in a world with that long complex history because otherwise it couldn’t contain us. As we know, the anthropic principle comes in a variety of forms: at one end there are unobjectionable versions which say: the fact that we find ourselves in a world that contains enough detail for human beings to be part of it is no more surprising than the supposed stroke of luck that we got ourselves born on a planet with an atmosphere: if it had been otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. At the other extreme are scarily idealist versions of the principle which say that our existence actually reaches back in time and reconfigures the fundamental constants of the universe.

Another reason we might want the anthropic principle is to help us whittle down a multiverse. Multiverses of one kind or another seem to be a popular option for helping to explain the world, but again they come in reasonable and less reasonable forms. Parfit seems to have one variety in which slightly different laws or constants operate in different regions of space; but other conceptions have sets of universes which implement everything that isn’t logically contradictory. There are problems with this, not least with the issue of identity across worlds. Multiversians would have it that are universes where I never wrote this post – but there aren’t, because I did: those people who failed to write it are people exactly like me, not me: and it follows that all possibilities are not realised after all, and cannot be, no matter how much the worlds proliferate. Personally I suspect that since the alternative universes make no difference to our world, merely providing an explanatory convenience which they could do even if they didn’t in fact exist, they might as well not exist.

Anyway, what has all this got to do with consciousness? Puzzlement over the existence of the world is partly, I submit, puzzlement over why there are such specific and apparently arbitrary details to it. Why anything, yes, but even if something,why on earth all this? That is strongly related to the questions why me? and What on earth am I? There is a special intractability to questions of this kind: we don’t want the answer to be purely logical because then we would get eternal archetypes, and we’re not that; but we don’t want something random, arbitrary, or notional either because after all we are real. Theories are about generalities, but we’re asking for a theory of the particular. It is haecceity – thisness – that makes us and our qualia so special, but haecceity seems to require an unprecedented kind of explanation that doesn’t exist.

Next time I’ll attempt to give it…

I’ve been reading A.C. Grayling’s biography of Descartes: he advances the novel theory that Descartes was a spy. This is actually a rather shrewd suggestion which makes quite a lot of sense given Descartes’ wandering, secretive life. On balance I think he probably wasn’t conducting secret espionage missions – it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure, of course – but I think it’s certainly an idea any future biographer will have to address.

I was interested, though, to see what Grayling made of the stove.  Descartes himself tells us that when held up in Germany by the advance of winter, he spent the day alone in a stove, and that was where his radical rebuilding of his own beliefs began.  This famous incident has the sort of place in the history of philosophy that the apple falling on Newton’s head has in the history of science: and it has been doubted and queried in a similar way. But Descartes seems pretty clear about it: “je demeurais tout le jour enfermé seul dans un poêle, où j’avais tout le loisir m’entretenir de mes pensées”.

Some say it must in fact have been a bread-oven or a similarly large affair: Descartes was not a large man and he was particularly averse to cold and disturbance, but it would surely have to have been a commodious stove for him to have been comfortable in there all day. Some say that Bavarian houses of the period had large stoves, and certainly in the baroque palaces of the region one can see vast ornate ones that look as if they might have had room for a diminutive French philosopher. Some commonsensical people say that “un poêle” must simply have meant a stove-heated room; and this is in fact the view which Grayling adopts firmly and without discussion.

Personally I’m inclined to take Descartes’ words at face value; but really the question of whether he really sat in a real stove misses the point. Why does Descartes, a rather secretive man, even mention the matter at all? It must be because, true or not, it has metaphorical significance; it gives us additional keys to Descartes’ meaning which we ought not to discard out of literal-mindedness. (Grayling, in fairness, is writing history, not philosophy.)

For one thing Descartes’ isolation in the stove functions as a sort of thought-experiment. He wants to be able to doubt everything, but it’s hard to dismiss the world as a set of illusions when it’s battering away at your senses: so suppose we were in a place that was warm, dark, and silent?  Second, it recalls Plato’s cave metaphor. Plato had his unfortunate exemplar chained in a cave where his only knowledge of the world outside came from flickering shadows on the wall; he wanted to suggest that what we take to be the real world is a similarly poor reflection of a majestic eternal reality. Descartes wants to work up a similar metaphor to a quite different conclusion, ultimately vindicating our senses and the physical world; perhaps this points up his rebellion against ancient authority. Third, in a way congenial to modern thinking and probably not unacceptable to Descartes, the isolation in the stove resembles and evokes the isolation of the brain in the skull.

The stove metaphor has other possible implications, but for us the most interesting thing is perhaps how it embodies and possibly helped to consolidate one of the most persistent metaphors about consciousness, one that has figured strongly in discussion for centuries, remains dominant, yet is really quite unwarranted. This is that consciousness is internal. We routinely talk about “the external world” when discussing mental experience. The external world is what the senses are supposed to tell us about, but sometimes fail to; it is distinct from an internal world where we receive the messages and where things like emotions and intentions have their existence. The impression of consciousness being inside looking out is strongly reinforced by the way the ears and the brain seem to feed straight into the brain: but we know that impression of being located in the head would be the same if human anatomy actually put the brain in the stomach, so long as the eyes and ears remained where they are. In fact our discussions would make just as much sense if we described consciousness as external and the physical world as internal (or consciousness as ‘above’ and the physical world as ‘below’ or vice versa)

If we take consciousness to be a neural process there is of course, a sense in which it is certainly in the brain; but only in the sense that my money is in the bank’s computer (though I can’t get it out with a hammer) or Pride and Prejudice is in the pages of that book over there (and not, after all, in my head). Strictly or properly, stories and totals don’t have the property of physical location, and nor, really, does consciousness.

Does it matter if the metaphor is convenient? Well, it may well be that the traditional inside view encourages us to fall into certain errors. It has often been argued (and still is) for example that because we’re sometimes wrong about what we’re seeing or hearing, we must in fact only ever see an intermediate representation, never the  real world itself. I think this is a mistake, but it’s one that the internal/external view helps to make plausible.  It may well be, in my opinion, that habitually thinking of consciousness as having a simple physical location makes it more difficult for us to understand it properly.

So perhaps we ought to make a concerted effort to stop, but to be honest I think the metaphor is just too deeply rooted. At the end of the day you can take the thinker out of the stove, but you can’t take the stove out of the thinker.

A couple of year back I mentioned some ideas put forward by Mark Muhlestein:  a further development of his thinking has now been published in Cognitive Computation: an accessible version is here.

The paper addresses the question of whether a computational process could support consciousness. Muhlestein begins by briefly recounting some thought-experiments proposed by Maudlin and others. Suppose we run a computation which instantiates consciousness: then we run the same process but remove all the unused conditional branches, so that now the course of the process is fixed. In the second case the computer goes through the same set of states (does it, actually?), but we’d be disinclined to think it could be conscious; it’s just a replay. In fact, it’s hard to see why ‘replaying’ it makes any difference since the relevant states all exist in the record, so that inert record itself probably ought to be conscious. Worse than that, since we could, given a sufficiently weird and arbitrary decoding, read random patterns in rocks as recording the same states, an indefinite number of copies of that same consciousness would be occurring constantly pretty much everywhere.

That’s more or less how the argument runs, anyway, and what’s proposed to fix the problem is the idea that for consciousness to occur, the computation must have the property of counterfactual sensitivity. It must, in other words, have had the capacity to go another way.  Without that property, no consciousness. The notion has a certain intuitive plausibility, I think: we can accept that in order for me to have the experience of seeing something, the fact that it was a red square and not a blue circle must be relevant; and that consciousness perhaps must be part of a stream which is, in some unobjectionable sense, free-flowing.

Muhlestein proposes a new thought experiment with a truly formidable apparatus. He set up a physical implementation of Conway’s Game of Life and uses that in turn to implement a computer on which his processes can be run. Because his implementation of Life uses cellular automata which display and detect states using light, he can now intervene anywhere he likes by simply shining an external light into the process.

If that last paragraph is unintelligible, don’t worry too much: all you need to know for the purposes of the argument is that we have a computer set up so that we have a special power to intervene arbitrarily from outside and constrain or alter the process which is running as it progresses. Muhlestein now takes a conscious computational process (in fact he proposes to scan one on a whole-brain basis from his friend Woody – don’t try this at home, kids!) and runs it on his set-up; but here’s the cunning part: he uses his light controls not to interfere, but to project the same process back onto itself. In effect, he’s over-determining the process: it runs normally by itself, but his lights are enforcing a recorded version of the same process at the same time.

Now, the computation is taken to be conscious when running normally. It runs in exactly the same way when the lights are on; it simply loses the counterfactual sensitivity: it could no longer have gone another way. But why would extra lights on the process deprive it of consciousness? The outputs will be exactly the same, any behaviour of the conscious entity will be the same, and so on. Nothing about the fluidity or coherence of the process changes. Yet if we say it remains conscious, we have to give up the idea that counterfactual sensitivity makes a difference, and then we’re back in difficulty.

What do we say to that? Muhlestein ultimately concludes that there is no satisfactory way out short of concluding that in fact the assumptions are wrong and that computational processes are not sufficient for consciousness.

Old Peter (the version of myself that existed a couple of years ago) thought the problem was really about appropriate causality, though I don’t think he explained himself very cogently. He would rightly have said that bringing counterfactuals into it is dangerous stuff because they are a metaphysical and logical minefield. For him the question would be: do the successive states of the computation cause each other in appropriate ways or do they not? If they do, we may have a conscious process; if the causal relations are disrupted or indirect, we’re merely waving flags or playing with puppets. So in his eyes the absence of counterfactual sensitivity in Muhlestein’s example is not decisive and his lights do not remove the consciousness unless they disrupt the underlying causality of the computation: unless they make a difference, in short. Causal over-determination of the process is irrelevant. The problem for Old Peter is in explaining what kinds of causal relations between states have to obtain for the conscious computation to work. His intuition told him that in real processes, including those in the brain, each event causes the next directly, whereas in simulations the causal path is through a model or a script. Unfortunately we could well argue that this kind of indirect causal path is also typical of computation, leading us back to Muhlestein’s conclusion by a different route.  Myself, I’m no longer  completely sure either that it is a matter of indirect causality or that computational processes are necessarily of that kind.

For myself I should still be inclined towards suspicion of counterfactual sensitivity, but I would be more inclined to say that what we’re missing is the element of intentionality; before we can complete the analysis of the problem we need to know what it is that endows a brain process with meaning and aboutness. The snag with that strategy is that we don’t know.

All in all, I found it interesting to look back a bit. It seems clear to me that over the years this site has been up I have made some distinct progress with consciousness: every year I know a little less about it.

The subtitle of Leonard Mlodinow’s book Subliminal makes bold claims: The Revolution of the New Unconscious and what it Teaches us about Ourselves.

Mlodinow is a talented fellow: I first became aware of him as Stephen Hawking’s co-author on The Grand Design (I blamed him then for the terrible jokes in that book, but the evidence of Subliminal, which is amiable but wince-free throughout, I think Hawking was probably to blame for them after all). Being Hawking’s colleague is probably the nearest the modern world can offer to being God’s assistant, but in addition Mlodinow has done impressive original work in physics and written successful screenplays.

The book is a wide-ranging compilation of a lot of interesting stuff. In the early stages of the book, it seems Mlodinow is basing his claims on contemporary technology and fMRI in particular: he tells us it is transforming our knowledge. But in fact not much of the research he reports is dependent on scanning. It feels as if the book might have changed direction in the writing, as Mlodinow found that most of the stuff he wanted to include actually didn’t involve advanced technology after all, but retained in the text the laudatory stuff about fMRI which it no longer really justifies.

How come the scanners don’t feature more strongly? One possible reason is sort of indicated when Mlodinow talks about how experimental subjects were shown to rate wine more highly when told it was expensive. Mlodinow wants to say that the tasters did not merely give the ‘expensive’ wine better ratings, but actually enjoyed it more: so he tells us that fMRI scans showed activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, ‘a region that has been associated with the experience of pleasure.’  Has been associated (not necessarily by me) associated with (not necessarily controlling or unambiguously diagnostic of). If the trumpet sounds as uncertainly as that, we must ask whether whether we’re really being told anything of value. Of course we know why Mlodinow is so hesitant. First, nobody has a really clear idea of what the orbitofrontal cortex does; it seems to be involved in addiction and motivation – but for Mlodinow’s purposes we need to be talking about the qualia-laden appreciation of fine bouquets and the like, which may well be an unrelated matter.  Second, fMRI is a fuzzy and ambivalent tool  and the wider implications of the data it produces are always debatable. Third, this business of real pleasure is a philosophical swamp: put aside all the Hard Problem issues: were the subjects experiencing real pleasure, or did they just think they were experiencing pleasure, or were they just thinking about pleasure? Was the pleasure straightforwardly gustatory, or did it come from thinking what smart guys they were and wishing their friends could see them now? These are not mere quibbles; the latter case for example, would be much less interesting than the radical and somewhat implausible claim that beliefs about price really change the experience.

That points to a general difficulty: books of this kind often give us stuff that is interesting, new, and well-founded; but the stuff that is well-founded isn’t new and the stuff that is interesting is debatable and looks over-interpreted. I wouldn’t say Mlodinow escapes this pitfall entirely. He tips his hat generously to Freud, which is nice, but that’s surely the Old Unconscious. The wine experiment – how many eyebrows would that have raised around the table at Plato’s symposium? Perhaps not many. Mlodinow tells us yet again the story of how Nixon lost out to Kennedy in 1960; people who could see him on TV were less inclined to think he had won the debate than those who merely heard him on the radio. Well, we’ve known that people are influenced by candidates’ appearance at least since Pericles took to appearing in a helmet which both reminded the electorate of his generalship and concealed the weird shape of his head. Do we even know that people were unconscious of being influenced by Nixon’s appearance? It seems quite possible that some of them drew the entirely conscious conclusion that he looked too rough and too shifty to be credible (a verdict which some would argue was borne out by later history, incidentally). On the other hand, Mlodinow reports research showing that people named ‘Brown’ are significantly more likely to marry other people called ‘Brown’ than statistical chance would warrant. Is that true?  Or is there some quirk here  – perhaps there are ‘Brownsvilles’ where by chance or history a concentration of Brown families mean you’re more likely to meet people of that name than random population matching would suggest? I don’t know, but I’m left in doubt, and as a human being myself I need something pretty strong to convince me to give up my strong intuitive understanding that surnames are not generally relevant to my species’ mating decisions.

The point that electors may have assessed Nixon’s appearance emotionally but consciously leads us to another difficulty: quite a bit of the research Mlodinow recounts doesn’t really bear on his thesis about the unconscious. He recounts the experiment, by now fairly well-known, in which an experimenter asked a stranger for directions: accomplices interrupted the conversation by carrying a door between the two, behind which the experimenter was switched for someone else: subjects often resumed the conversation without noticing the change in their conversational partner (the book here sort of undercuts the experiment by including pictures in which it is clear that the two experimenters were not that dissimilar in looks, and, if I may be rude,  also of a rather unstriking generic appearance, too).

The experiment is interesting, but how does it show that the unconscious is more important than we thought? Is there any suggestion that the difference was recognised unconsciously while being ignored consciously? Well, no: in fact we might think that this is the sort of thing the conscious wouldn’t deal with, leaving itself to be warned by unconscious processes, so if anything the hit is against the effectiveness and influence of the unconscious. Simply showing errors in conscious beliefs does not establish a revolution in favour of a new unconscious.

But then Mlodinow never formulates what he means by either the old or the new unconscious. We don’t even know whether he thinks the unconscious really amounts to one thing, several different unconsciousnesses, or simply a lot of default non-conscious mechanisms. The word ‘consciousness’ notoriously covers a number of different entities or processes, but we never get told explicitly which of them Mlodinow believes in or which of them he wants to dethrone. If you want to carry out a revolution against one form of mental activity and in favour of another, you really need to offer a pretty clear of view about what those different forms actually are and what roles they play, don’t you? Mlodinow would never try to get away with such vagueness if he were trying to sell us a revolution in physics, so the fact that he seems to think it will do for consciousness suggests an unattractive casualness, to say nothing worse. Perhaps in a way it’s evidence in his favour that Mlodinow never seems to have noticed consciously that so much of his material doesn’t really bear on his thesis; perhaps his unconscious is subtly offering us a different verdict.

That may be just a little hard: there’s a lot of very readable stuff about genuinely interesting research here, but the Revolution of the New Unconscious seems to me to have gone missing.

So now let’s look at the review by Richard Brown of Rocco J. Gennaro’s new book, which sets out his HOT.  I should disclose that I have not read Gennaro’s book, so I’m merely reviewing a review of a theory. You could call it a higher order review.

Gennaro’s own concerns feature concepts strongly: his theory includes conceptualism, the belief that concepts provide key structure for our conscious experience.  This causes him some difficulty over animals and infants, as he needs them to have sufficiently advanced concepts to form the required higher order awareness. He needs at least some account of how the required concepts are acquired (or how they came to be innate), and he needs to avoid getting into the bootstrap bind where you need to have sophisticated conceptual structures in order to pick up the concepts you need in order to have sophisticated conceptual structures.

My personal bias is that conceptualism tends to bring unnecessary complications, and in this particular case I’m not sure why we need to make the weather so heavy (though no doubt Gennaro has his reasons). All we need is the awareness of an awareness: the higher order awareness does not need to look through to the objects in the external world. The conceptual apparatus required surely ought therefore to be modest, and I wouldn’t fight very hard against the idea that it could be built in or be the result of a very early internal rewiring exercise in the infant mammalian brain.

The main point of interest for us is the difference which Brown sets out between his own view and Gennaro’s. This hinges on a fundamental point: are we talking about higher order awareness of a mental state (Gennaro), or of our being in that mental state (Brown)? At this point I’d say I find Brown’s view, which he characterises as the non-relational view, more appealing. It seems important to specify that the awareness involved must be ours, after all.

However, both sides claim that their view is best able to deal with the kind of objections raised by Block and discussed last time, arising from cases where we have the higher order awareness but actually through some error the lower-order awareness which it targets is not actually there. Gennaro, it seems, wants to disqualify these states altogether: where the first-order state is not there, there’s no consciousness. If you’re not seeing something red, you can’t have the subjective consciousness of redness. This is neat in its way, but seems arbitrary (How come subjective experience, of all things, comes to have a special kind of immunity from error?), and surely we want to retain the possibility of a subjective experience not based in reality? I can see that some might argue that dreams lack real subjective experience, but are we prepared to say the same of illusions and mirages? That seems a high price to be paying.

Brown’s escape route is quite different: by adopting the non-relational view he can cut free from the first-order state altogether. Who cares whether it’s there or not? It’s just about the right kind of second-order state, that’s all. This may seem a little weird, but after all the orthodox view of qualia, our subjective experiences, is that they are largely decoupled from ordinary causal reality. On Brown’s view, if we see green, we can have the experience of red without invalidating the experience. We’ll still behave as though we were having the experience of green.  Block might denounce our qualia as fake, but meh, if that’s what you mean by fake, all qualia were always fake, so who cares?

The logic of that seems faultless, but I couldn’t help feeling that my sympathies were swinging back to Gennaro somewhat. Brown mentions a second problem, the problem of the rock: why can’t we make a rock conscious by having the right kind of second-order mental state about it? For Brown’s decoupled  view, there’s no problem because we’re not even talking about the first order awareness – rock, schmock, it’s simply irrelevant. Gennaro does have to face the issue and it seems he seeks to do it simply by disqualifying rocks with an additional rule or specification. Brown considers this another unattractively arbitrary lash-up, and perhaps it is, but in another light it seems far closer to common sense (though of course the realm of common sense is some way off by now in any event).

For myself the net effect of the discussion is to make me feel more strongly than before that if we are to have a HOT (and I’m not absolutely wedded to that in itself), we’d do much better to stick with what Block calls the unambitious variety, the kind that doesn’t seek to explain subjective experience or exorcise those deadly sirens we call qualia.

You may have seen the very interesting review that Micha kindly mentioned recently. I plan to discuss that next week, but before talking about Higher Order Theories (HOTs) it seemed best to set the context by talking about Ned Block’s paper which seeks to demolish them.

Higher Order theories come in many flavours, but the basic proposition is that a mental event, a thought or a feeling, is conscious if there is another thought about it, that original mental event. The basic intuition is that you can be aware of something unconsciously, but when you’re aware of your awareness it’s conscious.

Not everyone likes this perspective (Roger Penrose caustically pointed out that pointing a video camera at itself doesn’t make it conscious) and some would say either that it only explains certain varieties of consciousness or that it only explains certain aspects of consciousness. Nevertheless, HOTs have had a long run as respectable contenders, representing one of the major areas where we might choose to look for The Answer.

Block’s paper last year was unusual in seeking to offer something like a knock-down destruction of the case, or perhaps it would be more accurate to sought he meant to pursue the HOTists until their last hiding place had been flushed out. His targets were not the modest theorists who claim that HOTs may explain some varieties of aspects of consciousness, but the ones he characterised as ‘ambitious’: in particular those who claim HOTs could explain the ‘what-it- is-likeness’ (let’s call it WIIL) of conscious experience.

The starting point is the uncomfortable fact that we can have thoughts about being in conscious states we’re not in fact in. We can think we’re seeing red when in fact we’re seeing green, or not seeing anything at all. You might well feel that this in itself is something of a blow for HOTs, and your first reaction might be that they should give up any claim of a conscious state where there is no state to work with. That sounds sensible but the retreat is not so easy as it seems if we want to retain WIIL for dreams and illusions, as we surely do.  In any case, Block’s targets take the opposite path: sure there can be WIIL in those cases, they reply.

Now Block springs the trap. So you’re saying, he observes, that an episode is conscious if it is the object of a simultaneous higher order thought?  And that thought is a sufficient condition for a conscious episode. Yet it’s also a necessary condition that that episode is the object of a higher order thought. Yet in this case we have only the one, higher-order thought to work with (and we can assume it ain’t self-referential). So there is no conscious episode. We’ve got necessary and sufficient conditions which are not compatible – what madness is this?

There is a way out which those unused to philosophical discussion may find a little odd: this consists of saying that in these cases, where we have a second-order thought about an experience we’re not actually having, there is an object of the second order thought after all: it’s simply one that doesn’t exist, that’s all.  We must remember here that the objects of thought are slippery customers; we often think about things that don’t exist (Pokemon, the sixth wife of Henry VII, the house I would have built if I had won the lottery, square circles).

But, says Block, if you take that route, where’s your WIIL (or maybe in this case it should be WIIAL –What It Isn’t Actually Like)? It’s now fake WIIL – and you can’t rest content with that.

I’ve omitted some important technicalities and details in the foregoing, but I hope the gist comes through: where does it leave us?  It seems an effective argument to me, and I would add that for those who are seeking the essence of WIIL, it seems intuitively unlikely to me that it could ever have resided in thoughts about thoughts: that brings it all back into the head, whereas what it is like ought to out there with ‘it’. Those who never believed in WIIL will not, of course, be troubled by any of this.

So following Block’s demolition, the advocates of HOT admitted their error, thanked him for clarifying, and issued a full retraction. No, of course they didn’t, as we shall see…

The unity of the soul is an ancient doctrine from which we have inherited a strong belief in the unity of consciousness. In certain lights this assumption of unity seems unquestionable, but it has actually been a continual problem; it could almost be argued that the history of understanding the mind has been a history of giving up on unity.

Like other persuasive doctrines that have turned out to be problematic in the long run, we can trace this one back to Aristotle, but it is tied in to a widely-held set of scholastic/ancient ideas about metaphysics. I believe the argument runs more or less like this: the soul is not physical, therefore it lacks extension (which is a physical property); if it lacks extension it necessarily lacks parts, and if it lacks parts it must be single and unified. The soul is a substance, in the old philosophical sense of something incapable of being analysed or broken down. Substances in this sense used to be considered necessary building blocks of reality, required in order to have a secure ontological foothold.  Otherwise the process of analysis would be bottomless and unending, and nothing would ever be completely clarified, which would be intolerable (although I notice contemporary physics seems to tolerate a position not altogether unlike this).  Readers may well by now feel parts of their own souls waving urgent hands to attract attention to a host of salient objections, but let’s avoid getting bogged down in this treacherous territory and move on a bit.

Descartes, say what you will about his dualism, effected a radical change for the better when he restricted the interventions of the soul to the pineal gland: on his view it did its stuff there and the rest of the body worked like a machine, according to the same physical laws as any inanimate stuff. Until then it had been largely assumed that the soul directly activated the body without needing any kind of transmission mechanism. Now I say ‘until then’, but the remarkable fact is that people went on thinking that way for a long time afterwards. As late as 1850, Helmoltz’s measurement of the speed of nerve impulses was resisted by some on the grounds that the vital impulse must act throughout the body simultaneously. When your arm moved, it was because you wanted it to, and it, as part of you, wanted to too.  I believe there was a school of thought that held out for a middling point of view, accepting that in principle the brain controlled the body by nerve impulses, but confidently expecting that they would be too blindingly fast to ever be measured. This, of course, proved to be quite wrong, but the nineteenth-century debate is in some ways quite reminiscent of the more recent discussion of Libet. Muller and others thought Helmholtz must be wrong because he was introducing a delay between will and act; people suppose Libet must be wrong because he introduces a delay between deciding to act and awareness. All such delays are intolerable if we insist on the absolute unity of the conscious mind because you can’t have a delay between a thing and itself.

Another prominent example of the problems flowing from unity is the vexed issue of the binding problem. Given that sensory inputs come in by different pathways at different speeds and get processed in different ways in different parts of the brain, how is it we end up with a smoothly integrated picture of reality which assigns the right qualities to the right objects and unrolls steadily in real time without jumps, pauses, or lipsynch errors? There are various ways, more or less satisfactory or problematic, in which the brain might ensure everything is properly put together when it arrives in consciousness, but if we’re not assuming consciousness is a single united destination, the problem wouldn’t arise in the first place.

Perhaps, though, the binding problem gives us a clue about why unity seems so undeniable – because the contents of consciousness look united. Isn’t that it?

Well, sort of, but when I sit down and conscientiously introspect, I don’t really detect a lot of unity. At the moment I have strings of explicit words running through my mind a moment before I type them: I moment ago as I sat in uffish thought, I had thoughts about the same subject which were wordless. Half an hour ago I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, though I was certainly conscious, and a bit before that I was largely absorbed by experiencing the taste of scrambled egg. An hour before that I was dreaming and some time before that in a blank state of which I can’t say for sure whether I remember it or not.

It’s worse than that, because at all these times there were also things in the penumbra of my mind which I was aware, or perhaps only pre-aware or potentially aware of. Hume famously said that when he looked into his mind he found only a bundle of sensations; but how simple it would be if the sensations were really always bundled; if they were always of the same broad kind; and if they were all merely sensations, instead of including bits of broken intentionality, fragments of half-or potentially meaningful intimations, things that might be the phenomenally detectable end of affordances, incipient recognitions and implicatures and an exquisitely ineffable and shadily located intimation that there may soon be the emergence of what we can call a gut feeling finely balanced on the cusp between the affective and the merely digestive. A bundle? Really a heap, or even a cloud, would be far more orderly and unified than my subjective experience.

What does bind things together is a kind of bird’s nest framework of memory linking now to then, and then to some other experience, and so on; but this is not all that useful. For one thing these linkages are loose – what they provide is the kind of tangled and ad hoc unity the cables behind my stereo have achieved unbidden – and they are fallible, not part of the essence of consciousness. I see nothing absurd about the idea of my  having moments of consciousness which are neither remembered nor involve remembering.

Yet even so I find it intuitively impossible to abandon the idea of some unity somewhere, even if I can’t quite put my finger on it at the moment. Things would be so much easier if we didn’t exist, but there we are.