Tag Archives: BBT

Scott’s Aliens return

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Scott Bakker’s alien consciousnesses are back, and this time it’s peer-reviewed.  We talked about their earlier appearance in the Three Pound Brain a while ago, and now a paper in the JCS sets out a new version.

The new paper foregrounds the idea of using hypothetical aliens as a forensic tool for going after the truth about our own minds; perhaps we might call it xenophenomenology. That opens up a large speculative space, though it’s one which is largely closed down again here by the accompanying assumption that our aliens are humanoid, the product of convergent evolution. In fact, they are now called Convergians, instead of the Thespians of the earlier version.

In a way, this is a shame. On the one hand, one can argue that to do xenophenomenology properly is impractical; it involves consideration of every conceivable form of intelligence, which in turn requires an heroic if not god-like imaginative power which few can aspire to (and which would leave the rest of us struggling to comprehend the titanic ontologies involved anyway). But if we could show that any possible mind would have to be x, we should have a pretty strong case for xism about human beings. In the present case not much is said about the detailed nature of the Convergian convergence, and we’re pretty much left to assume that they are the same as us in every important respect. This means there can be no final reveal in which – aha! – it turns out that all this is true of humans too! Instead it’s pretty clear that we’re effectively talking about humans all along.

Of course, there’s not much doubt about the conclusion we’re heading to here, either: in effect the Blind Brain Theory (BBT). Scott argues that as products of evolution our minds are designed to deliver survival in the most efficient way possible. As a result they make do with a mere trickle of data and apply cunning heuristics that provide a model of the world which is quick and practical but misleading in certain important respects. In particular, our minds are unsuited to metacognition – thinking about thinking – and when we do apply our minds to themselves the darkness of those old heuristics breeds monsters: our sense of our selves as real, conscious agents and the hard problems of consciousness.

This seems to put Scott in a particular bind so far as xenophenomenology is concerned. The xenophenomenological strategy requires us to consider objectively what alien minds might be like; but Scott’s theory tells us we are radically incapable of doing so. If we are presented with any intelligent being, on his view those same old heuristics will kick in and tell us that the aliens are people who think much like us. This means his conclusion that Convergians would surely suffer the same mental limitations as us appears as merely another product of faulty heuristics, and the assumed truth of his conclusion undercuts the value of his evidence.

Are those heuristics really that dominant? It is undoubtedly true that through evolution the brains of mammals and other creatures took some short cuts, and quite a few survive into human cognition, including some we’re not generally aware of. That seems to short-change the human mind a bit though; in a way the whole point of it is that it isn’t the prisoner of instinct and habit. When evolution came up with the human brain, it took a sort of gamble; instead of equipping it with good fixed routines, it set it free to come up with new ones, and even over-ride old instincts. That gamble paid off, of course, and it leaves us uniquely able to identify and overcome our own limitations.

If it were true that our view of human conscious identity were built in by the quirks of our heuristics, surely those views would be universal, but they don’t seem to be. Scott suggests that, for example, the two realms of sky and earth naturally give rise to a sort of dualism, and the lack of visible detail in the distant heavens predisposes Convergians (or us) to see it as pure and spiritual. I don’t know about that as a generalisation across human cultures (didn’t the Greeks, for one thing, have three main realms, with the sea as the third?). More to the point, it’s not clear to me that modern western ways of framing the problems of the human mind are universal. Ancient Egyptians divided personhood into several souls, not just one. I’ve been told that in Hindu thought the question of dualism simply never arises. In Shinto the line between the living and the material is not drawn in quite the Western way. In Buddhism human consciousness and personhood have been taken to be illusions for many centuries. Even in the West, I don’t think the concept of consciousness as we now debate it goes back very far at all – probably no earlier than the nineteenth century, with a real boost in the mid-twentieth (in Italian and French I believe one word has to do duty for both ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’, although we mustn’t read too much into that). If our heuristics condemn us to seeing our own conscious existence in a particular way, I wouldn’t have expected that much variation.

Of course there’s a difference between what vividly seems true and what careful science tells us is true; indeed if the latter didn’t reveal the limitations of our original ideas this whole discussion would be impossible. I don’t think Scott would disagree about that; and his claim that our cognitive limitations have influenced the way we understand things is entirely plausible. The question is whether that’s all there is to the problems of consciousness.

As Scott mentions here, we don’t just suffer misleading perceptions when thinking of ourselves; we also have dodgy and approximate impressions of physics. But those misperceptions were not Hard problems; no-one had ever really doubted that heavier things fell faster, for example. Galileo sorted several of these basic misperceptions out simply by being a better observer than anyone previously, and paying more careful attention. We’ve been paying careful attention to consciousness for some time now, and arguably it just gets worse.

In fairness that might rather short-change Scott’s detailed hypothesising about how the appearance of deep mystery might arise for Convergians; those, I think, are the places where xenophenomenology comes close to fulfilling its potential.

 

Scott’s Aliens

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blind alienScott Bakker has given an interesting new approach to his Blind Brain Theory (BBT): in two posts on his blog he considers what kind of consciousness aliens could have, and concludes that the process of evolution would put them into the same hole where, on his view, we find ourselves.

BBT, in sketchy summary, says that we have only a starvation diet of information about the cornucopia that really surrounds us; but the limitations of our sources and cognitive equipment mean we never realise it. To us it looks as if we’re fully informed, and the glitches of the limited heuristics we use to cobble together a picture of the world, when turned on ourselves in particular, look to us like real features. Our mental equipment was never designed for self-examination and attempting metacognition with it generates monsters; our sense of personhood, agency, and much about our consciousness comes from the deficits in our informational resources and processes.

Scott begins his first post by explaining his own journey from belief in intentionalism to eliminativist scepticism about it, and sternly admonishes those of us still labouring in intentionalist error for our failure to produce a positive account of how human minds could have real intentionality.

What about aliens – Scott calls the alien players in his drama ‘Thespians’ – could they be any better off than we are? Evolution would have equipped them with senses designed to identify food items, predators, mates, and so on; there would be no reason for them to have mental or sensory modules designed to understand the motion of planets or stars, and turning their senses on their own planet would surely tell them incorrectly that it was motionless. Scott points out that Aristotle’s argument against the movement of the Earth is rather good: if the Earth were moving, we should see shifts in the relative position of the stars, just as the relative position of objects in a landscape shifts when we we view them from the window of a moving train; yet the stars remain precisely fixed. The reasoning is sound; Aristotle simply did not know and could not imagine the mind-numbingly vast distances that make the effect invisibly small to unaided observation. The unrealised lack of information led Aristotle into misapprehension, and it would surely do the same for the Thespians; a nice warm-up for the main argument.

Now it’s a reasonable assumption that the Thespians would be social animals, and they would need to be able to understand each other. They’d get good at what is often somewhat misleadingly called theory of mind; they’d attribute motives and so on to each other and read each others behaviour in a fair bit of depth. Of course they would have no direct access to other Thespians; actual inner workings. What happens when they turn their capacity for understanding other people on themselves? In Scott’s view, plausibly enough, they end up with quite a good practical understanding whose origins are completely obscure to them; the lashed-up mechanisms that supply the understanding neither available to conscious examination or in fact even visible.

This is likely enough, and in fact doesn’t even require us to think of higher cognitive faculties. How do we track a ball flying through the air so we can catch it? Most people would be hard put to describe what the brain does to achieve that, though in practice we do it quite well. In fact, those who could put down the algorithm most likely get it wrong too, because it turns out the brain doesn’t use the optimal method: it uses a quick and easy one that works OK in practice but doesn’t get your hand to the right place as quickly as it could.

For Scott all this leads to a gloomy conclusion; much of our view about what we are and our mental capacities is really attributable to systematic error, even to  something we could regard as a cognitive deficit or disease. He cogently suggests how dualism and other errors might arise from our situation.

I think the Thespian account is the most accessible and persuasive account Scott has given to date of his view, and it perhaps allows us to situate it better than before. I think the scope of the disaster is a little less than Scott supposes, in two ways. First, he doesn’t deny that routine intentionality actually works at a practical level, and I think he would agree we can even hope to give a working level description of how that goes. My own view is that it’s all a grand extension of our capacity for recognition, (and I was more encouraged than not by my recent friendly disagreement with Marcus Perlman over on Aeon Ideas; I think his use of the term ‘iconic’ is potentially misleading, but in essence I think the views he describes are right and enlightening) but people here have heard all that many times. Whether I’m right or not we probably agree that some practical account of how the human mind gets its work done is possible.

Second, on a higher level, it’s not completely hopeless. We are indeed prone to dreadful errors and to illusions about how our minds work that cannot easily be banished. But we kind of knew that. We weren’t really struggling to understand how dualism could possibly be wrong, or why it seemed so plausible.  We don’t have to resort to those flawed heuristics; we can take our pure basic understanding and try again, either through some higher meta-meta-cognition (careful) or by simply standing aside and looking at the thing from a scientific third-person point of view. Aristotle was wrong, but we got it right in the end, and why shouldn’t Scott’s own view be part of getting it righter about the mind? I don’t think he would disagree on that either (he’ll probably tell us); but he feels his conclusions have disastrous implications for our sense of what we are.

Here we strike something that came up in our recent discussion of free will and the difference between determinists and compatibilists. It may be more a difference of temperament than belief. People like me say, OK, no, we don’t have the magic abilities we looked to have, so let’s give those terms a more sensible interpretation and go merrily on our way. The determinists, the eliminativists, agree that the magic has gone – in fact they insist – but they sit down by the roadside, throw ashes on their heads, and mourn it. They share with the naive, the libertarians, and the believers in a magic power of intentionality, the idea that something essential and basically human is lost when we move on in this way. Perhaps people like me came in to have the magic explained and are happy to see the conjuring tricks set out; others wanted the magic explained and for it to remain magic?

Blind Brain

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Blind AquinasBesides being the author of thoughtful comments here – and sophisticated novels, including the great fantasy series The Second Apocalypse – Scott Bakker has developed a theory which may dispel important parts of the mystery surrounding consciousness.

This is the Blind Brain Theory (BBT). Very briefly, the theory rests on the observation that from the torrent of information processed by the brain, only a meagre trickle makes it through to consciousness; and crucially that includes information about the processing itself. We have virtually no idea of the massive and complex processes churning away in all the unconscious functions that really make things work and the result is that consciousness is not at all what it seems to be. In fact we must draw the interesting distinction between what consciousness is and what it seems to be.

There are of course some problems about measuring the information content of consciousness, and I think it remains quite open whether in the final analysis information is what it’s all about. There’s no doubt the mind imports information, transforms it, and emits it; but whether information processing is of the essence so far as consciousness is concerned is still not completely clear. Computers input and output electricity, after all, but if you tried to work out their essential nature by concentrating on the electrical angle you would be in trouble. But let’s put that aside.

You might also at first blush want to argue that consciousness must be what it seems to be, or at any rate that the contents of consciousness must be what they seem to be: but that is really another argument. Whether or not certain kinds of conscious experience are inherently infallible (if it feels like a pain it is a pain), it’s certainly true that consciousness may appear more comprehensive and truthful than it is.

There are in fact reasons to suspect that this is actually the case, and Scott mentions three in particular; the contingent and relatively short evolutionary history of consciousness, the complexity of the operations involved, and the fact that it is so closely bound to unconscious functions. None of these prove that consciousness must be systematically unreliable, of course. We might be inclined to point out that if consciousness has got us this far it can’t be as wrong as all that. A general has only certain information about his army – he does not know the sizes of the boots worn by each of his cuirassiers, for example – but that’s no disadvantage: by limiting his information to a good enough set of strategic data he is enabled to do a good job, and perhaps that’s what consciousness is like.

But we also need to take account of the recursively self-referential nature of consciousness. Scott takes the view (others have taken a similar line), that consciousness is the product of a special kind of recursion which allows the brain to take into account its own operations and contents as well as the external world. Instead of simply providing an output action for a given stimulus, it can throw its own responses into the mix and generate output actions which are more complex, more detached, and in terms of survival, more effective. Ultimately only recursively integrated information reaches consciousness.

The limits to that information are expressed as information horizons or strangely invisible boundaries; like the edge of the visual field the contents of conscious awareness  have asymptotic limits – borders with only one side. The information always appears to be complete even though it may be radically impoverished in fact. This has various consequences, one of which is that because we can’t see the gaps, the various sensory domains appear spuriously united.

This is interesting, but I have some worries about it. The edge of the visual field is certainly phenomenologically interesting, but introspectively I don’t think the same kind of limit seems to come up with other senses. Vision is a special case: it has an orderly array of positions built in, so at some point the field has to stop arbitrarily; with sound the fading of farther sounds corresponds to distance in a way which seems merely natural; with smell position hardly comes into it and with touch the built-in physical limits mean the issue of an information horizon doesn’t seem to arise. For consciousness itself spatial position seems to me at least to be irrelevant or inapplicable so that the idea of a boundary doesn’t make sense. It’s not that I can’t see the boundary or that my consciousness seems illimitable, more that the concept is radically inapplicable, perhaps even metaphorically. Scott would probably say that’s exactly how it is bound to seem…

There are several consequences of our being marooned in an encapsulated informatic island whose impoverishment is invisible to us: I mentioned unity, and the powerful senses of a ‘now’ and of personal identity are other examples which Scott covers in more detail. It’s clear that a sense of agency and will could also be derived on this basis and the proposition that it is our built-in limitations that give rise to these powerfully persuasive but fundamentally illusory impressions makes a good deal of sense.

More worryingly Scott proceeds to suggest that logic and even intentionality – aboutness – are affected by a similar kind of magic that similarly turns out to be mere conjuring. Again, results generated by systems we have no direct access to, produce results which consciousness complacently but quite wrongly attributes to itself and is thereby deluded as to their reliability. It’s not exactly that they don’t work (we could again make the argument that we don’t seem to be dead yet, so something must be working) more that our understanding of how or why they work is systematically flawed and in fact as we conceive of them they are properly just illusions.

Most of us will, I think want to stop the bus and get off at this point. What about logic, to begin with? Well, there’s logic and logic. There is indeed the unconscious kind we use to solve certain problems and which certainly is flawed and fallible; we know many examples where ordinary reasoning typically goes wrong in peculiar ways. But then there’s formal explicit logic, which we learn laboriously, which we use to validate or invalidate the other kind and which surely happens in consciousness (if it doesn’t then really I don’t think anything does and the whole matter descends into complete obscurity); hard not to feel that we can see and understand how that works too clearly for it to be a misty illusion of competence.

What about intentionality? Well, for one thing to dispel intentionality is to cut off the branch on which you’re sitting: if there’s no intentionality then nothing is about anything and your theory has no meaning. There are some limits to how radically sceptical we can be. Less fundamentally, intentionality doesn’t seem to me to fit the pattern either; it’s true that in everyday use we take it for granted, but once we do start to examine it the mystery is all too apparent. According to the theory it should look as if it made sense, but on the contrary the fact that it is mysterious and we have no idea how it works is all too clear once we actually consider it. It’s as though the BBT is answering the wrong question here; it wants to explain why intentionality looks natural while actually being esoteric; what we really want to know is how the hell that esoteric stuff can possibly work.

There’s some subtle and surprising argumentation going on here and throughout which I cannot do proper justice to in a brief sketch, and I must admit there are parts of the case I may not yet have grasped correctly – no doubt through density (mine, not the exposition’s) but also I think perhaps because some of the latter conclusions here are so severely uncongenial. Even if meaning isn’t what I take it to be, I think my faulty version is going to have to do until something better comes along.

(BTW, the picture is supposed to be Thomas Aquinas, who introduced the concept of intentionality. The glasses are suppose to imply he’s blind, but somehow he’s just come out looking like a sort of cool monk dude. Sorry about that.)