Conscious Entities

Robots.net recently featured the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap (pdf) produced by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. The Future of Humanity Institute has a transhumanist tinge which I find slightly off-putting, and it does seem to include fiction among its inspirations, but the Roadmap is a thorough and serious piece of work, setting out in summary at least the issues that would need to be addressed in building a computer simulation of an entire human brain. Curiously, it does not include any explicit consideration of the Blue Brain project, even in an appendix on past work in the area, although three papers by Markram, including one describing the project, are cited.

One interesting question considered is: how low do you go? How much detail does a simulation need to have? Is it good enough to model brain modules (whatever they might be), neuronal groups of one kind of another, neurons themselves, neurotransmitters, quantum interactions in microtubules? The roadmap introduces the useful idea of scale separation; there might be one or more levels where there is a cut-off, and a simulation in terms of higher level entities does not need to be analysed any further. Your car depends on interactions at a molecular level, but in order to understand and simulate it we don’t need to go below the level of pistons, cylinders, etc. Are there any cut-offs of this kind in the brain? The road map is not meant to offer answers, but I think after reading it one is inclined to think that there is probably a cut-off somewhere below neuronal level; you probably need to know about different kinds of neurotransmitters, but probably don’t need to track individual molecules. SOmething like this seems to have been the level which the Blue Brain settled on.

The roadmap merely mentions some of the philosophical issues. It clearly has in mind the uploading of an individual consciousness into a computer, or the enhancement or extension of a biological brain by adding silicon chips, so an issue of some importance is whether personal identity could be preserved across this kind of change. If we made a compter copy of Stephen Hawking’s brain at the moment of his death, would that be Stephen Hawking?

The usual problem in discussions of this issue is that it is easy to imagine two parallel scenarios; one in which Hawking dies at the moment of transition (perhaps the destruction of his brain is part of the process), and one in which the exact same simulation is created while he continues his normal life. In the first case, we might be inclined to think that the simulation was a continuation, in the latter case it’s more difficult; yet the simulation in both cases is the same. My inclination is to think that the assertion of continuing identity in the first case is loose; we may choose to call it Hawking, but even if we do, we have to accept that it’s Hawking put through a radical alteration.

Of course, even if the simulation hasn’t got Hawking’s personal identity, having a simulation of his brain (or even one which was only 80% faithful) woud be a fairly awesome thing.

The roadmap provides a useful list of assumptions. One of these is:

Computability: brain activity is Turing‐computable, or if it is uncomputable, the uncomputable aspects have no functionally relevant effects on actual behaviour.

I’ve come to doubt that this is probable. I cannot present a rigorous case, but in sloppy impressionistic terms the problem is as follows. Non-computable problems like the halting problem or the tiling problem seem intuitively to involve processes which when tackled computationally go on forever without resolution. Human thought is able to deal with these issues by being able to ’see where things are going’ without pursuing the process to the end.

Now it seems to me that the process of recognising meanings is very likely a matter of ’seeing where things are going’ in much the same way. Computers don’t deal with meaning at all, although there are cunning ploys to get round this in the various areas where it arises. The problem may well be that meanings are indefinitely ambiguous; there are always some more possible readings to be eliminated, and this might be why meaning is so untractable by computation.

Of course, apart from the hand-waving vagueness of that line of thought, it leaves me with the problem of explaining how the problem would manifest itself in the construction of a whole brain simulation; there would presumably have to be some properties of a biological brain which could never be accurately captured by a computational simulation. There are no doubt some fine details of the brain which could never be captured with perfect accuracy, but given the concept of scale separation,it’s hard to see how that alone would be a fatal problem.

When a whole brain simulation is actually attempted, the answer will presumably emerge; alas, according to the estimates in the road map, I may not live to see it.

This piece in the New Scientist suggests that creationists and their sympathisers are seeking to open up a new front. They think that the apparent insolubility of the problem of qualia means that materialism is on the way out; in fact, that consciousness is ‘Darwinism’s grave’. Cartesian dualism is back with a vengeance. Oh boy: if there was one thing the qualia debate didn’t need, it was a large-scale theological intervention. Dan Dennett must be feeling rather the way Guy Crouchback felt when he heard about the Nazi-Soviet pact: the forces of darkness have drawn together and the enemy stands clear at last!

The suggested linkage between qualia and evolution seems tortuous. The first step, I suppose, assumes that dualism makes the problem of qualia easier to solve; then presumably we deduce that if dualism is true, it might as well be a dualism with spirits in (there are plenty of varieties without; in fact if I were to put down a list of the dualisms which seem to me most clear and plausible, I’m not sure that the Christian spirit variety would scrape into the Top Ten); then, that if there are spirits, there could well be God, and then that if there’s God he might as well take on the job of governing speciation. At least, that’s how I assume it goes. A key point seems to be the existence of some form of spiritual causation. Experiments are adduced in which the subjects were asked to change the pattern of their thoughts, which was then shown to correspond with change in the activity of their brain; this, it is claimed, shows that mind and brain are distinct. Unfortunately it palpably doesn’t; attempting to disprove the identity of mind and brain by citing a correlation between the activity of the two is, well, pretty silly. Of course the thing that draws all this together and makes it seem to make sense in the minds of its advocates is Christianity, or at any rate an old-fashioned, literalist kind of Christianity.

Anyway, I shall leave Darwinism to look after itself, but in a helpful spirit let me offer these new qualophiles two reasons why dualism is No Good.

The first, widely recognised, is that arranging linkages between the two worlds, or two kinds of stuff required by dualism, always proves impossible. In resurrecting ‘Cartesian dualism’ I don’t suppose the new qualophiles intend to restore the pineal gland to the role Descartes gave it as the unique locus of interaction between body and soul, but they will find that coming up with anything better is surprisingly difficult. There is a philosophical reason for this. If you have causal connections between your worlds - between spirits and matter, in this case - it becomes increasingly difficult to see why the second world should be regarded as truly separate at all, and your theory turns into a monism before your eyes. But if you don’t have causal connections, your second world becomes irrelevant and unknowable. The usual Christian approach to this problem is to go for a kind of Sunday-best causal connection, one that doesn’t show up in the everyday world, but lurks in special invisible places in the human brain. This was never a very attractive line of thinking and in spite of the quixotic efforts of those two distinguished knights, John Eccles and Karl Popper, it is less plausible now than ever before, and its credibility drains further with every advance in neurology.

The second problem, worse in my view, is that dualism doesn’t really help. The new qualophile case must be, I suppose, that our ineffable subjective experiences are experiences of the spirit, and that’s what gives them their vivid character. The problem of qualia is to define what it is in the experience of seeing red which is over and above the simple physical account; bingo! It’s the spirit. To put it another way, on this view zombies don’t have souls.

But why not? How does the intervention of a soul turn the ditchwater of physics into the glowing wine of qualia? It seems to me I could quite well imagine a person who had a fully functioning soul and yet had no real phenomenal experiences: or at any rate, it’s as easy to imagine that as an unsouled zombie in the same position. I think the new qualophiles might reply that my saying that shows I just haven’t grasped what a soul is. Indeed I haven’t, and I need them to explain how it works before I can see what advantage there is in their theory. If we’re going to solve the mystery of qualia by attributing it to ’souls’, and then we declare ’souls’ a mystery, why are we even bothering? But here, as elsewhere with theological arguments, it seems to be assumed that if we can get the question into the spiritual realm, the enquiry politely ceases and we avert our eyes.

It is, of course, the same thing over on the other front, where creationists typically offer criticism of evolutionary theory, but offer not so much as a sniff of a Theory of Creation. Perhaps in the end the whole dispute is not so much a clash between two rival theories as a dispute over whether we should have rational theories at all.

The annual Loebner Prize has been won by Elbot. As you may know, the Loebner competition implements the Turing Test, inviting contestants to put forward a chat-bot program which can conduct online conversation indistinguishable from one conducted with a human being. We previously discussed the victory of Rollo Carpenter’s Jabberwacky, a contender again this year.

One of Elbot’s characteristics, which presumably helped tip the balance this year, is a particular assertiveness about trying to manage the conversation into ’safe’ areas. One of the easiest ways to unmask a chat-bot is to exploit its lack of knowledge about the real world; but if the bot can keep the conversation in domains it is well-informed about, it stands a much better chance of being plausible. Otherwise the only option is often to resort to relatively weak default responses (’I don’t know’, ‘What do you think?’, ‘Why do you mention [noun extracted from the input sentence]?).

But aren’t Elbot’s tactics cheating? Don’t these cheap tricks invalidate the whole thing as a serious project? Some would say so: the Loebner does not enjoy universal esteem among academics, and Marvin Minsky famously offered a cash reward to anyone who could stop the contest.

We have to remember, however, that the contestants are not seeking to reproduce the real operation of the human brain. Humans are able to conduct general conversation because they have general-purpose consciousness, but that is far too much to expect of a simple chat-bot. The Turing Test is sometimes interpreted as a test for consciousness, but that isn’t quite how Turing himself described it (he proposed it as a more practical alternative to considering the question ‘Can machines think?’).

OK so it’s not cheating, but all the same, if it’s just fakery, what’s the value of the exercise? There are several answers to this. One is the ‘plane wing’ argument: planes don’t fly the way birds do, but they’re still of value. It might well be that a program that does conversation is useful in its own right, even if it doesn’t do things the way the human brain does; perhaps for human/machine interfaces. On the other hand, as a second answer, it might turn out that discoveries we make while making chat-bots will eventually shed some light on how some parts of the brain put together well-structured and relevant sentences. If they don’t do that, they may still lead to the discovery of unexpectedly valuable techniques in programming: solving difficult but apparently pointless problems just for the hell of it does sometimes prove more fruitful than expected. A fourth point which I think perhaps deserves more attention is that even if chat-bots tell us nothing about AI, they may still tell us interesting things about human beings.  The way trust and belief are evoked, for example: the implicit rules of conversation, and the pragmatics of human communication.

The clincher in my view, however, is that the Loebner is fun, and enlivens the subject in a way which must surely be helpful overall. How many serious scientists were inspired in part by a secret childhood desire to have a robot friend they could talk to?

In a way you could say Elbot is attempting to refine the terms of the test. A successful program actually needs to deploy several different kinds of ability, and one of the most challenging is bringing to bear a fund of implicit background knowledge. No existing program is remotely as good at this as the human brain, and there are some reasons to doubt whether they ever will be. In the meantime, at any rate, there may be an argument for taking this factor out of the equation: Elbot tries to do this by managing the conversation, but in some early Loebner contests the conversations were explicitly limited to particular topic, and maybe this approach has something to be said for it. I believe Daniel Dennett, who was once a Loebner judge, suggested that the contest should develop towards testing a range of narrower abilities rather than the total conversational package. Perhaps we can imagine tests of parsing, of knowledge management, and so on.

At any rate, the Loebner seems in vigorous health, with a strong group of contenders this year: I hope it continues.

So, another bastion of mysterianism falls. Cognition Technologies Inc has a semantic map of virtually the entire English language, which enables applications to understand English words. Yes, understand. It’s always been one of your bedrock claims that computers can’t really understand anything; but you’re going to have to give that one up.

Oh, yes, I read about that. In fact it’s been mentioned in several places. I thought the Engadget headline got to the root of the issue pretty well - ’semantic map opens way for robot uprising’. I suppose that’s pretty much your view. It seems to me just another case of the baseless hyperbole that afflicts the whole AI field. There are those people at Cyc and elsewhere who think cognition is just a matter of having a big enough encyclopaedia: now we’ve got this lot who think it’s just a colossal dictionary. But having a long list of synonyms and categories doesn’t constitute understanding; or my bookshelf would have achieved consciousness long ago.

Let me ask you a question. Suppose you were a teacher? How would you judge whether your pupils understood a particular word? Wouldn’t you see whether they could give synonyms, either words or phrases that meant the same thing? If you yourself didn’t understand a word what would you do? You’d go over to that spooky bookcase and look at a list of synonyms. Once you’d matched up your new word with one or two synonyms, you’d understand it, wouldn’t you?

I know you’ve got all these reservations about whether computers really this or really that. You don’t accept that they really learn anything, because true human learning implies understanding, and they haven’t got that. They don’t really communicate, they just transfer digital blips. According to you all these usages are just misleading metaphors. According to you they don’t even play chess, not in the sense that humans do. Now frankly, it seems to me that when the machine is sitting there and moving the pieces in a way that puts you into checkmate, any distinction between what it’s doing and playing chess is patently nugatory. You might as well say you don’t really ride a bike because a bike hasn’t got legs, and that bike-riding is just a metaphor. However, I recognise that I’m not going to drive you out of your cave on this. But you’re going to have to accept that machines which use this kind of semantic mapping can understand words at least to the same extent that computers can play chess. Concede gracefully; that’ll be enough for today.

I’ll grant you that the mapping is an interesting piece of work. But what does it really add? These people are using the map for a search engine, but is it really any better than old-fashioned approaches? So we search for, say ‘tears’; the search engine turns up thousands of pages on weeping, when we wanted to know about tears in a garment. Now Cognition’s engine will be able to spot from the context what I’m really after. Because I’ve searched for ‘What to do when something tears your trousers’ it will notice the word trousers and give me results about rips. But so will Google! If I give Google the word trousers as well as tears, it will find relevant stuff without needing any explicit semantics at all. These people don’t understand why a ’semantic map’ is necessary for a search engine, and they’re sceptical about Cognition’s ontology (in that irritating non-philosophical sense).

Wrong! When you do a search on Google for ‘What to do when something tears your trousers’ the top result is actually about tears from your eye, believe it or not. Typically you get all sorts of irrelevant stuff along with a few good results. But to see the point, look at an example Cognition give themselves. Their legal search demo (try it for yourself), when asked for results relating to ‘fatal fumes in the workplace’ came up with a relevant result which contains neither ‘fatal’ nor ‘workplace’, only ‘died’ and ‘working’. This kind of thing is going to be what Web 3 is built around.

If this thing is so good, why haven’t they used it for a chatbot? If this technology involves complete understanding of English, they ought to breeze through the Turing test. I’ll tell you why: because that would involve actual understanding, not just a dictionary. Their machine might be able to look up meaning of pitbull and find that the synonym dog, but it wouldn’t have a hope with the lipstick pitbull, or are they the ones with all the issues.

Nobody says the Cognition technology has achieved consciousness.

I think you are saying that, by implication. I don’t see how there can be real understanding without consciousness.

Or if there is, it won’t be real consciousness according to you - just a metaphor…

Somewhat belatedly I came across an interesting paper by W Tecumseh Fitch the other day (Actually I came across Beau Siever’s discussion of Daniel Dennett’s  discussion of the paper.) in which he boldly tackles the thorny subject of original intentionality, claiming it’s all based on what he calls nano-intentionality.

Fitch declares himself a defender of intrinsic intentionality. Intentionality, as you may know, is aboutness, meaningfulness: things like books and films are said to have derived intentionality: they are about things because the people who made them and the people who read or watch them interpret them as being about something, conferring meaning on them. But some things, our own thoughts, for example, are not about things because of what anyone else thinks, they just are intrinsically about things. How they manage this has always been a mystery.

Dennett, in fact, denies that there is any such thing as intrinsic intentionality - how can anything just inherently be about something? It’s this view that Fitch wants to challenge; strangely, Dennett says it’s all a misunderstanding and he agrees with Fitch.

How can this be? Well, Dennett would be right to reject intrinsic intentionality if it meant that we just say things are magically about things and that’s the end of the story; but really when people speak of intrinsic intentionality it is usually a kind of promissory note: they mean, here in people’s minds is where meaning originates; we don’t know how yet, but meanings in minds are different to meanings in books. Fitch means to say; this is where meaning originates, and I think I can tell you how. I think Dennett is comfortable with theories of intentionality which provide a decent naturalistic interpretation - and if that’s what we’re doing, he doesn’t really care too much whether we’re calling it intrinsic, or original, or whatever.

Fitch’s view still seems at odds with Dennett’s in many ways; he rejects the idea that computers could have intrinsic intentionality, and in general his ideas would seem to fit well with those of Searle, Dennett’s arch-enemy. Searle says that consciousness arises from certain kinds of biological material as a result of some properties of that material which we don’t understand (yet - Searle is sure that further scientific research will enable us to understand them). Nanointentionality would seem to fit into that view quite well.

So what is it? Fitch says that biological organisms exhibit a responsiveness to their environment which no machine can emulate. When we’re cut, we heal up: our flesh extemporises, forming functional but ad hoc patterns of tissue that patch up the gap. Amoebas and smaller single-celled organisms respond to their surroundings, not just in a pre-organised way, but flexibly, managing to respond and adapt even to new circumstances. This kind of responsiveness to the environment, in his view, is the elementary precursor to true intentionality: the responses are not, in detail at least, writtn into the organism, and they are, at a basic level, goal-directed.

Having, as he believes, obtained this narrow foothold, Fitch seeks to build on it. Cells working together can build up an information processing system which inherits from them the spark of aboutness while adding to it new capacities. When they reach the level where options can be modelled and accepted or rejected, full-blown consciousness and true intrinsic intentionality dawn. There’s something a little surprising about this; Fitch is relying for most of the work on the kind of functional organisation he otherwise rejects. At least half of the powers of intentionality seem to come, not from the initial spark, but the way the neurons process information - the sort of thing you might think was perfectly amenable to computation (I see Dennett nodding happily). It prompts another thought, too: Fitch denies that mere silicon can have the kind of open-ended responsiveness of an amoeba. If we swap cells for transistors, that may be right; but what if the computer moves down a notch and simulates the parts (perhaps even the molecules) of the amoeba? Since Fitch is committed to naturalism, it seems hard to exclude computers from having the properties of living things so absolutely as he wishes.

There is also a problem down there with the nano-intentionality, too. Fitch sees the responsiveness of the eukaryotic organisms (he’s prepared to exclude the prokaryotes) as having a directedness which prefigures proper intentionality. But I doubt it. This directedness is a real and interesting quality, resembling what Grice called natural meaning: those spots mean measles; that spade means a hole to be dug. This is a good place to be looking for the roots of intentionality; indeed, my own view would have them somewhere in this area. The snag is that natural meaning has a tendency to separate out into two parts; the fitness of a thing for a result, and derived intentionality. The first of these has nothing of intentionality in it, properly understood; a spade may be specially fit for digging, but a large snowbank is especially fit for avalanches; large black clouds are fit for rain; there’s no real meaning at work. The element of derived intentionality lies in the eye of the beholder; the spade is about digging because that’s the way it was designed, and that’s the way I mean to use it. This is intentionality, but resoundingly not the intrinsic kind we’re after.

So, if we look at Fitch’s amoeba, we can analyse its responsiveness. In part it’s simply a fitness to go on surviving no different in principle from the cloud’s fitness to rain; in part it’s a purposefulness which we and FItch can’t help reading into it. Take away these two elements, and the foothold on which Fitch stands disappears, I think.

I see that the annual Julian Jaynes Conference took place last month. As you may  know, Jaynes put forward a surprising theory of consciousness which suggested it had a relatively recent origin. According to Jaynes ancient human beings, right up into early historical times, had minds that were divided into two chambers. One of these chambers was in charge of day-to-day life, operating on a simple, short-term emotional basis for the most part (though still capable of turning out some substantial pieces of art and literature, it seems). The occasional interventions of the second chamber, the part which dealt in more reflective, longer-term consideration were not experienced as the person’s own thoughts, but rather as divine or ancestral voices restraining or instructing the hearer, which explains why interventionist gods feature so strongly in early literature. The breakdown of this bicameral arrangement and the unification of the two chambers of the mind were, according to Jaynes, what produced consciousness as we now understand it.

I find this bicameral theory impossible to believe, but it does have some undeniably engaging qualities. The way it gives a neat potential explanation for divine voices and for certain modern mental disorders gives it a superficial plausibility, especially when expounded with Jaynes’ characteristic eloquence and panache. It’s tempting to think of it as a drastically overstated version of  an essentially sound insight, but even if it’s completely wrong, thinking about its flaws is a stimulating exercise.

At this year’s conference, Stevan Harnad gave a speech in two parts, beginning with some slightly disjointed personal reminiscences of Jaynes - he mentions that he found it impossible to write an obituary for Jaynes and you get the feeling that his emotions are still making it a difficult subject for him to talk about - and then going on to a philosophical discussion of the interesting question of whether Jaynes would have kicked a dog, and why not.

Why shouldn’t he? For Jaynes, after all, consciousness was uniquely human; no other creature had gone through the breakdown of a bicameral mind. There’s nothing especially wrong with kicking unconscious objects and since dogs lack consciousness, there should be no particular reason not to kick one; but Harnad was sure Jaynes, a gentle and civilised man, would certainly not have done so. In fact, he had confirmed this in conversation with Jaynes during his lifetime. Jaynes said it was true that dogs in themselves did not deserve the same moral consideration as conscious entities like human beings; but that we should by all means refrain from kicking dogs unnecessarily because of the moral consequences for the kicker and onlookers. Kicking dogs is a bad, desensitising act, unworthy of the moral dignity of human beings even though dogs don’t fundamentally matter.

This is an interesting answer, and I think it’s intellectually tenable. We should, on the whole, refrain from slashing rose bushes to pieces, and from smashing beautiful porcelain, even though plants and pots are not conscious. But as Harnad suggests, we may doubt the sincerity of the argument – it has the air of a rationalisation run up to defend a weak spot in a wider case rather than something sincerely believed. We might think that a better line of argument was available to Jaynes if he had been willing to say that unconscious creatures can still be moral objects, which is surely true.

Harnad, ultimately, wants to say that dogs are indeed moral objects because they have feelings, or so our mirror neurons tell us; and that empathy is enough to make us hold off, even Julian Jaynes. Although I suspect this overstates the role of mirror neurons, he’s surely right to think that the possession of feelings is enough to constitute a moral object. As Jeremy Bentham put it, ‘The question is not, can they reason?, nor can they talk? but, can they suffer?’

What’s particularly interesting is the discussion Harnad provides about feelings (in the loosest sense; any kind of mental intimation, including but not limited to sensory input). He begins by pointing out that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is not a logical deduction but a claim about the infallibility of certain thoughts or feelings. To think that one exists can’t be a mistake because non-existent people don’t think at all. Harnad scrupulously points out that it’s the existence of the the thought itself which is established, rather than the existence of the more problematic self. However, other feelings have a similar kind of infallibility; we can be wrong about whether we’ve got a bad tooth, but not that it feels like toothache. Harnad notes that a similar kind of infallibility attaches to what we mean or understand. We can of course use words that don’t, in the wider world, have the meaning we wanted, but we can’t be wrong about what we meant internally. Harnad describes this as the distinction between wide and narrow meaning; it largely corresponds with the more controversial distinction between intrinsic and derive intentionality (thoughts have meanings because somehow they just do; books have meanings only because they record and evoke thoughts).

It all comes down to feelings according to Harnad. “2×2=4″ does not feel the same to us as “Kétser kettõ négy”, but if, like him, we spoke Hungarian, they would feel very similar, because they mean the same thing.

This is very interesting. The problem of intentionality, of meaningfulness, is one of the principal problems of consciousness, but it tends in my view to be somewhat neglected - perhaps partly because it’s so difficult to find anything worth saying about it. New ideas in this area are very welcome, and on the face of it Harnad’s suggestion is plausible (sincerity and strong feelings seem to go together at any rate). The chief problem, perhaps, is that even if it’s true, this insight doesn’t move us on as much as we should like. There’s no accompanying theory of feelings, and since Harnad has explicitly chosen the vaguest and widest interpretation of the term, we still don’t know all that much about the fundamental nature of intentionality.

My feeling, on the whole, is that in fact the true essence of meaningfulness lies elsewhere; a feeling that x is an invariable accompaniment to believing that x, but does not constitute the belief. Two cheers for Harnad, though, and a third for Jaynes, whose legacy remains so productive.

There are a few philosophical problems which occur spontaneously to people who know nothing of academic philosophy but have a naturally thoughtful inclination. The problem of free will is one, I think, and probably so is qualia; many people who never heard of David Chalmers sometimes ponder the ‘hard question’, asking themselves how they know that the blue they see ‘in their heads’ is the same as the blue other people see. David M. Black has put his finger on another of these problems in his paper on The Ownership of Consciousness. Why am I me and not someone else? Black’s main purpose lies elsewhere - he wants to suggest that talk of spirituality can be a valuable way of discussing structures in the subjective part of the world, complementing the reductive scientific account which deals with the objective aspects. That’s an attractive project (though I think he allows himself too much too easily in assuming that subjective experience has causal effects).But it was the issue posed by the title of the paper that particularly caught my attention.

Now of course, there is a sense in which this is is an absurd enquiry. Whoever I am, that person is me: I can’t not be me, by definition. Self and consciousness are intertwined, so that the ownership of my consciousness can never really be in doubt. I am my consciousness. It would make more sense to ask why I have this body than to ask why I have this consciousness. So it might seem that the mystery of why I am who I am is really about on a par with the mystery of how I was lucky enough to be born on Earth, rather than on a planet without an atmosphere; not really a mystery at all.

But suppose, we might say, we strip away the details of my body and my life and pare me down to the essential nub of experiencing entity. What makes this nub any different from other such nubs, and why is it linked with the life of this particular human organism rather than any other?

Some would say in response that there is no such nub; it’s exactly my history and my physical constitution that make my consciousness what it is; so again it’s no surprise, properly understood, that my experiences belong to me and not to anyone else. Strip away all those supposedly inessential features, and you strip me away with them. Others would accept that it’s my history and composition that define me as me, but feel, possibly on the basis of introspection, that there still is something to me over and above all that. They might find this final ingredient in an inscrutable panpsychic quality of matter itself; others have suggested a kind of universal experiential substrate or background. Instead of individual nubs, we have a kind of Universal self; a line of thought which is highly compatible with some religious and mystical views.

However, I think both sides of this argument are missing the point. To say that my individual consciousness arises from or is constituted by my physical nature and background is not actually to dispose of the essential problem at all, because my physical nature and background are also inexplicably particular. Perhaps the underlying problem is the vexed question of why anything is anything in particular: it’s just that in the case of my own experience and my own existence the question hits me with a force it lacks when I’m merely wondering about a chair. The basic problem is haecceity or thisness (the same problem which in my view lies at the root of the qualia problem).

The difficulty of this issue is that it seems no kind of explanation will do. One way to explain the arbitrary complexity of the world would be to assume that everything is really a logical necessity, so if we were clever enough we could deduce all truths from first principles, like Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought which, beginning with the cogito had got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone could switch it off, if I remember correctly. Even if we could pull off such staggering feats of deduction, the explanation is no good because if everything exists only by virtue of logical necessity everything exists in an eternal Platonic world, the opposite of the mutable diversity we set out to explain. A more scientific view would have it that the current state of the world derives from previous states in accordance with the laws of physics, so that the explanation is essentially historical. But this is no better. We now have an expanded set of laws; beside those of logic, we need those of mathematics and those of physics. But they’re still laws, so we’re still Platonic and immutable unless some arbitrary graininess somehow crept in at the beginning of it all. Nowadays we’re readier to accept that huge chaotic complexity can arise out of small beginnings; but not out of nothing. Explaining that original graininess is as difficult as explaining the haecceity of the world was to start with.

And what about those laws of physics? Do they too reduce to logical or mathematical necessity, or is there some arbitrary element involved; and if so, how do you explain that? One line we could take is to say that all the possible variations of the underlying constants are realized in some possible world. The problem of how we got these particular laws of physics then turns into the same sort of vacuous problem as the ones mentioned above: if the laws weren’t like that, you wouldn’t be here to wonder about it.

But that’s no good. Even if we could get over the problems involved in the idea of parallel worlds, which seems to involve the problematic retention of identity between non-identical entities, how can we deal with the concept of all possible sets of laws of physics? Typically in these discussions it is assumed that we’re talking about variations in the value of a few constants, but things are much worse than that. Apart from the sheer bogglement of universes where the value of gravity is determined by quadripedal blurpton interactions in the trouser-pocket of fourth-order fried bread, if all possible sets of laws are realised, that includes universes whose laws and constitution are the same as ours up until 2009, when the blurptons abruptly take over. In short, anything could happen at any time; to say that all possible laws of physics are realised in some universe is in effect to declare that there are no laws of physics and that everything happens arbitrarily.

That is another possible position, of course, though an utterly unsatisfactory one. Taking a more traditional tack, we could say that the world is the way it is because of the will of God; but for philosophers, that’s no good. We need to know whether God was working on logical principles, and if it wasn’t pure logic, where did His axioms or His quirks of personality come from?

In the last century it was finally established that there is something in maths that isn’t reducible to logic; not much, but an essential little something which can be construed in different ways. It seems to me that in the same way there’s some fundamental element in metaphysics that isn’t any kind of law; but I have no idea how to construe it at all.

Consciousness, however, does not require language. Nor does it require memory. Or perception of the world, or any action in the world, or emotions, or even attention. So say Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi.

(Koch and Tononi? Sounds an interesting collaboration - both in the past have been the co-authors with grand panjandrums of the field - Koch worked with Francis Crick and Tononi with Gerald Edelman. They have some new ideas here, however.)

I don’t think everyone would agree that consciousness can be stripped down quite as radically as Koch and Tononi suggest. I actually find it rather tricky to get a good intuitive grasp of exactly what it is that’s left when they’ve finished: it seems to be a sort of contentless core of subjectivity. Particular items on the list of exclusions also seem debatable. We know that some unfortunate people are unable to create new memories, for example, but even in their case, they retain knowledge of what’s going on long enough to have reasonable short-term conversations. Could consciousness exist at all if the contents of the mind slid away instantly? Or take action and perception; some would argue that consciousness requires embodiment in a dynamic world; some indeed would argue that consciousness is irreducibly social in character. Again we know that some unlucky people have been isolated from the world by the loss of their senses and their ability to move, without thereby losing consciousness: but these are all people who had perception and action to begin with. Actually Koch and Tononi allow for that point, saying that whether consciousness requires us to have had certain faculties at some stage is another question; they merely assert that ongoing present consciousness doesn’t require them.

The most surprising of their denials is the denial of attention - some people would come close to saying that consciousness was attention. If there were no perception, no memory , and no attention one begins to wonder how consciousness could have any contents: they couldn’t arrive via the senses; they couldn’t be called up from past experience; and they couldn’t even be generated by concentrating on oneself or the surrounding nullity.

However, let’s not quibble. Consciousness has many meanings and covers a number of related but separable processes. The philosophical convention is that he who propounds the thesis gets to dictate the definitions, so if Koch and Tononi want to discuss a particularly minimal form, they’re fully entitled to do so.

What, then, do they offer as an alternative essence of consciousness? In two words, integrated information. A conscious mind will require many - hugely many - possible states; but, they argue, this is quite different from the case of a digital camera. A 1 megapixel camera has lots of possible states (one for every frame of every possible movie, they suggest - not sure that’s strictly true since some frames will show identical pictures, not that that makes a real difference); but these states are made up of lots of photodiodes whose states are all fully independent, By contrast, states of the mind are indivisible; you can’t choose to see colours without shapes, or experience only the left side of your visual field.

This sounds like an argument that consciousness is not digital but irreducibly analogue, though Koch and Tononi don’t draw that conclusion explicitly, and I don’t think either of them plan to put away their computer simulations. We can, of course, draw a distinction between consciousness itself and the neural mechanisms that support it, so it could be that integrated, analogue conscious experience could be generated by processes which themselves are digital or at least digitizable.

At any rate, they call their theory the Integrated Information Theory (IIT); it suggests, they say, a way of assessing consciousness in a machine, a superior Turing Test (they seem to think the original has been overtaken by the performance of the chatterbot Alice, which with due respect to Alice seems premature, though I have not personally tried out Alice’s Silver Edition). Their idea is that the candidate should be shown a picture and asked to provide a concise description; human beings will easily recognise, for example, that the picture shows an attempted robbery in a shop and many other details, whereas machines will struggle to provide even the most naive and physical descriptions of what is depicted. This would surely be an effective test, but why does integrated information provide the human facility at work here? It’s a key point about the theory that as well as elements of current experience being integrated into an indivisible whole, current experience is integrated with a whole range of background information: so the human mind can instantly bring into play a lot of knowledge the machine can’t access.

That’s all very well, but this concept of integration is beginning to look less like a simple mechanism and more like a magic trick. Koch and Tononi offer a measure of integrated information, which they call Φ: it represents the reduction in uncertainty, expressed in bits, when a system enters a particular state. Interestingly, the idea is that high values of Φ correspond with higher levels of consciousness on a continuous scale; so animals are somewhat less conscious than us on average; but it also must be possible to be more conscious than any human to date has ever been: in fact, there is no upper limit in theory to how conscious an entity might be. This is heady stuff which could easily lead on to theology if we’re not careful.

To illustrate this idea of the reduction of uncertainty, the authors compare our old friend the photodiode with a human being (suppose it to be a photodiode with only two states), When the lights go out, the photodiode eliminates the possibility of White, and achieves the certainty of Black. But for the human being, darkness eliminates a huge range of possibilities that you might have been seeing; a red screen, a blue one, a picture of the statue of Liberty, a picture of your child’s piano recital, and so on. So the value of Φ, the reduction in uncertainty, for human beings is much vaster than that for the photodiode. Of course measuring Φ is not going to be straightforward; Koch and Tononi say that for the moment it can only be done for very simple systems.
That’s fair enough, but the idea seems problematic to me. For one thing, the reduction of uncertainty on this argument seems to be, not vast, but infinite. When the lights went out in your competition with the photodiode, you could have been seeing a picture of one grain of sand; you could have been seeing a picture of two grains of sand, and so on for ever. So it seems the value of Φ for all conscious states is infinite. Hang on, though; is even darkness that simple? Remembering that Koch and Tononi’s integration is not limited to current experience, the darkness might cause you to think of what it’s like when you’re about to fall asleep; an unexpected hiatus in the cinema eighteen months ago: a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight. In fact, it might seem like the darkness which enshrouds a single grain of sand; the indefinably bulkier darkness which hides two grains of sand… So both states involve an infinite amount of information, and the value of Φ for all states of consciousness is - zero.

I think Koch and Tononi have succeeded in targeting some of the real fundamental problems of consciousness, and made a commendably bold and original attack on them. But they need a clear explanation of how their kind of integration works if IIT is really going to fly.

There is clearly a close relationship between consciousness and language. The ability to conduct a conversation is commonly taken as the litmus test of human-style consciousness for both computers and chimpanzees, for example. While the absence of language doesn’t prove the absence of consciousness - not all of our thoughts are in words - the lack of a linguistic capacity seems to close off certain kinds of explicit reflection which form an important part of human cognition. Someone who had no language at all might be conscious, but would they be conscious in quite the same way as a normal, word-mongering human?
It might therefore seem that when Jordan Zlatev asserts the dependence of language on consciousness, he is saying something uncontroversial. In fact, he has both broader and more specific aims: he wants to draw more attention to the relationship on the one hand, and on the other readjust our view of where the borders between conscious and unconscious processes lie.

It seems pretty clear that a lot of the work the brain does on language is unconscious. When I’m talking, I don’t, for example, have to think to myself about the grammar I’m using (unless perhaps I’m attempting a foreign language, or talking about some grammatical point). I don’t even know how my brain operates English grammar; it surely doesn’t use the kind of rules I was taught at school; perhaps in some way it puts together Chomskyan structures, or perhaps it has some altogether different approach which yields grammatical sentences without anything we would recognise as explicit grammatical rules. Whatever it does, the process by which sentences are formed is quite invisible to me, the core entity to whom those same sentences belong, and whose sentiments they communicate. It seems natural to suppose that the structure of our language is provided pre-consciously.

Zlatev, however, contends that the rules of language are social and normative; to apply them we have to understand a number of conventions about meanings and usage; and whatever view we may take of such conventions their use requires a reflective knower (Zlatev picks up on a distinction set out by Honderich between affective, perceptual, and reflective consciousness; it’s the latter he is concerned with). To put it another way, operating the rules of language requires us to make judgements of a kind which only reflection can supply, and reflection of this kind deserves recognition as conscious. Zlatev is not asserting that the rules of grammar at work in our brain are consciously know after all: he draw a distinction between accessibility and introspectability; he wants to say that the rules are known pre-theoretically, but not unconsciously.

Perhaps we could put Zlatev’s point a different way: if the rules of language were really unconscious, we should be incapable of choosing to speak ungrammatically, just as we are incapable of making our heart beat slower or our skin stop sweating by an act of will. Utterances which did not follow the rules would be incomprehensible to us. In fact, we can cheerfully utter malformed sentences, distinguish them from good ones and usually understand both. Deliberate transgressions of the rules are used for communicative or humorous effect (a rather Gricean point). While the theory may be hidden from introspection, the rules are accessible to conscious thought.

If the rules of language were unconscious, asks Zlatev, how would we account for the phenomenon of self-correction, in which we make a mistake, notice it, and produce an emended version? And how could it be that the form of our utterances is often structured to enhance the meaning and distribute the emphasis in the most helpful way? An unconscious sentence factory could never support our conscious intentions in such a nicely judged way. Zlatev also brings forward evidence from language acquisition studies to support his claim that unconscious mechanisms may support, but do not exhaust, the processes of language.

At times Zlatev seems to lean towards a kind of Brentano-ish view; language requires intentionality, and nothing but consciousness can provide it (alas, in a way which remains unexplained). Intriguingly, he says that he and others were deceived into accepting the unconsciousness of language production at an earlier stage by the allure of connectionism, whose mechanistic nature only gradually became clear. I think connectionists might feel this is a little unfair, and that Zlatev need not have given up on connectionist approaches to reflective judgement simply because they are ‘mechanistic’.

All in all, I think Zlatev offers some useful insights; his general point that a binary division between conscious and unconscious simply isn’t good enough is indeed a good one and well made. I wonder whether this is a point particular to the language faculty, however. Couldn’t I make some similar points about my tennis-playing faculty? Here too I rely on some unconscious mechanisms, and couldn’t tell you exactly which arm muscles I used in which way. Yet making my hand twist the racquet around and move it to the right place also seems to require some calculated, dare I say reflective, judgements and the way I do it is exquisitely conditioned by tactics and strategy which I devise and entertain at a fully self-conscious level.

Be that as it may, it’s bad news for the designers of translation software if Zlatev is right, since their systems will have to achieve real consciousness before they can be perfected.

I was reading somewhere about SETI and I was struck by the level of confidence the writer seemed to enjoy that we should be able, not only to recognise a signal from some remote aliens, but actually interpret it. It seems to me, on the contrary, that finding the signal is the ‘easy problem’ of alien communication. We might spend much longer trying to work out what they were saying than we did finding the message in the first place. In fact, it seems likely to me that we could never interpret such a signal at all.

Well, I don’t think anyone underestimates the scope of the task, but you know it can hardly be impossible. For example, we send off a series of binary numbers; binary is so fundamental, yet so different from a random signal, that they would be bound to recognise it. The natural thing for them to do is echo the series back with another term added. Once we’ve got onto exchanging numbers, we send them, like say 640 and 480 over and over. If they’re sophisticated enough to send radio signals, they’re going to recognise we’re trying to send them the dimensions of a 2d array. Or we could go straight to 3D, whatever. Then we can send the bits for a simple image. We might do that Mickey Mouse sort of picture of a water molecule: odds are they’re water-based too, so they are bound to recognise it. We can get quite a conversation on chemistry going, then they can send us images of themselves, we can start matching streams of bits that mean words to streams of bits that mean objects, and we’ll be able to read and understand what they’re writing. OK, it’ll take a long time, granted, because each signal is going to take years to be delivered. But it’s eminently possible.

The thing is, you don’t realise how many assumptions you’re making. Maybe they never thought of atoms as billiard balls, and to them methane is more important than water anyway. Maybe they don’t have vision and the idea of using arrays of bits to represent images makes no sense to them. Maybe they have computers that actually run on hexadecimal, or maybe digital computers never happened for them at all, because they discovered an analogue computing machine which is far better but unknown to us, so they’ve never heard of binary. But these are all trivial points. What makes you think their consciousness is in any way compatible with ours? There must be an arbitrarily large number of different ways of mapping reality; chances are, their way is just different to ours and radically untranslatable.

Every human brain is wired up uniquely, but we manage to communicate. Seriously, if there are aliens out there they are the products of biological evolution – no, they are, that’s not just an assumption, it’s a reasonable deduction – and that alone guarantees we can communicate with them, just as we can communicate with other species on Earth up to the full extent of their capability. The thing is, they may be mapping reality differently, but it’s essentially the same reality they’re mapping, and that means the two maps have to correspond. I might meet some people who use Urgh, Slarm, and Furp instead of North and South; they might use cubits for Urgh distances, rods for Slarm ones, and holy hibbles for the magic third Furpian co-ordinate, but at the end of the day I can translate their map into one of mine. Because they are biological organisms, they’re going to know about all those common fundamentals: death and birth, hunger, strife, growth and ageing, food and reproduction, kinship, travel, rest; and because we know they have technology they’re going to know about mining and making things, electricity, machines – and communication. And that guarantees they ‘ll be able and willing to communicate with us.

You see, even on Earth, even with our fellow humans, it doesn’t work. Look at all the ancient inscriptions we have no clue about. Ventris managed to crack Linear B only because it turned out to be a language he already knew; Linear A, forget about it. Or Meroitic. We have reams and reams of Meroitic writing, and the frustrating thing is, it uses Egyptian characters, so we actually know what it sounded like. You can stand in front of some long carved Meroitic screed and read it out, knowing it sounds more or less the way it was meant to; but we have no idea whatever what it means: and we probably never will.

What you’re missing there is that the Cretans and the Meroitic people are never going to respond to our signals. The dialogue is half the point here: if we never get an answer, then obviously we’re not going to communicate.

Though I like to think that even if we picked up the TV signal of some distant race which had actually perished long before, we’d still have a chance of working it out because there’d just be more of it, and a more varied sample than your Egyptian hieroglyphs which let’s face it are probably all Royal memorials or something.

Look, you argue that consciousness is a product of evolution. But what survival advantage does phenomenal experience give us – how do qualia help us survive? They don’t, because zombies could survive every bit as well without them. So why have we got them? It seems likely to me that we somehow got endowed with a faculty we don’t even begin to understand. One by-product of this faculty was the ability to stand back and deliberate on our behaviour in a more detached way; another happened to be qualia, just an incidental free gift.

So you’re saying aliens might be philosophical zombies? They might have no real inner experience?

Somehow I knew it would come back to qualia eventually.

More than that - I’m not just saying they might be zombies, but that’s one possibility, isn’t it?

Incidentally, I wonder what moral duty would we owe to creatures that had no real feelings? Would it matter how we behaved towards them…? Curious thought.

Even zombies have rights, surely? Whatever the ethical theory, we can never be sure whether they actually are zombies, so you’d have to treat them as if they had feelings, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, to be honest, I don’t think I like where you seem to be going with this.

No, well the point is not that they might be zombies, but that instead of our faculty of consciousness, they might have a completely different one which nevertheless served the same purpose from an evolutionary point of view and had similar survival value. We’re the first animals on Earth to evolve a consciousness: it’s as if we were primitive sea creatures and have just developed a water squirt facility, making us able to move about in a way no other creature can yet do. But these aliens might have fins. They might have legs. You sit there blandly assuming that any mobile creature will want to match squirts with us, but it ain’t necessarily so.

No, your analogy is incorrectly applied. I’m not saying they’d want to match squirts; I’m saying we’d be able to follow each other, or have races, or generally share the commonalities of motion irrespective of the different kit we might be using to achieve that mobility.

Your problem here is really that you can’t imagine how an alien could have something that delivered the cognitive benefits of consciousness without being consciousness itself. Of course you can’t; that’s just another aspect of the problem; our consciousness conditions our view of reality so strongly that we’re not capable of realising its limitations.

Look, if we launch a missile at these people, they’ll send us a signal, and that signal will mean Stop. It’s those cognitive benefits you dismiss so lightly that I rest my case on. For practical purposes, about practical issues, we’ll be able to communicate; if they have extra special 3d rainbow qualia, or none, or some kind of ineffable quidlia that we can never comprehend – I don’t care. You might have alien quidlia buzzing round your head for all I know; that possibility doesn’t stop us communicating. Up to a point.

You know that Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand what he was saying?

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Yes, I do know; just one of many occasions when he was talking balls. In fairness to old Wittless he also said ‘If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think; all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.’

And the same goes for writhing aliens.