Tag Archives: Paul Churchland

Architectonics and the Hard Problem

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twinsCan we solve the Hard Problem with scanners? This article by Brit Brogaard and Dimitria E. Gatzia argues that recent advances in neuroimaging techniques, combined with the architectonic approach advocated by Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, open the way to real advances.

But surely it’s impossible for physical techniques to shed any light on the Hard Problem? The whole point is that it is over and above any account which could be given by physics. In the Zombie Twin though experiment I have a physically identical twin who has no subjective experience. His brain handles information just the way mine does, but when he registers the colour red, it’s just data; he doesn’t experience real redness. If you think that is conceivable, then you believe in qualia, the subjective extra part of experience. But how could qualia be explained by neuroimaging; my zombie twin’s scans are exactly the same as mine, yet he has no qualia at all?

This, I think, is where the architectonics come in. The foundational axiom of the approach, as I understand it, is that the functional structure of phenomenal experience corresponds to dynamic structure within brain activity; the operational architectonics provide the bridge . (I call it an axiom, but I think the Fingelkurts twins would say that empirical research already provides support for a nested hierarchical structure which bridges the explanatory gap. They seem to take the view that operational architectonics uses a structured electrical field, which on the one hand links their view with the theories of Johnjoe McFadden and Sue Pockett, while on the other making me wonder whether advances in neuroimaging are relevant if the exciting stuff is happening outside the neurons.) It follows that investigating dynamic activity structures in the brain can tell us about the structure of phenomenal, subjective experience. That seems reasonable. After all, we might argue, qualia may be mysterious, but we know they are related to physical events; the experience of redness goes with the existence of red things in the physical world (with due allowance for complications). Why can’t we assume that subjective experience also goes with certain structured kinds of brain activity?

Two points must be made immediately. The first is that the hunt for Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) is hardly new. The advocates of architectonics, however, say that approaches along these lines fail because correlation is simply too weak a connection. Noticing that experience x and activation in region y correlate doesn’t really take us anywhere. They aim for something much harder-edged and more specific, with structured features of brain activity matched directly back to structures in an analysis of phenomenal experience (some of the papers use the framework of Revonsuo, though architectonics in general is not committed to any specific approach).

The second point is that this is not a sceptical or reductive project. I think many sceptics about qualia would be more than happy with the idea of exploring subjective experience in relation to brain structure; but someone like Dan Dennett would look to the brain structures to fully explain all the features of experience; to explain them away, in fact, so that it was clear that brain activity was in the end all we were dealing with and we could stop talking about ‘nonsensical’ qualia altogether.

By contrast the architectonic approach allows philosophers to retain the ultimate mystery; it just seeks to push the boundaries of science a bit further out into the territory of subjective experience. Perhaps Paul Churchland’s interesting paper about chimerical colours which we discussed a while ago provides a comparable case if not strictly an example.

Churchland points out that we can find the colours we experience mapped out in the neuronal structures of the brain; but interestingly the colour space defined in the brain is slightly more comprehensive than the one we actually encounter in real life. Our brains have reserved spaces for colours that do not exist, as it were. However, using a technique he describes we can experience these ‘chimerical’ colours, such as ‘dark yellow’ in the form of an afterglow. So here you experience for the first time a dark yellow quale, as predicted and delivered by neurology. Churchland would argue this shows rather convincingly that position in your brain’s colour space is essentially all there is to the subjective experience of colour. I think a follower of architectonics would commend the research for elucidating structural features of experience but hold that there was still a residual mystery about what dark yellow qualia really are in themselves, one that can only be addressed by philosophy.

It all seems like a clever and promising take on the subject to me; I do have two reservations. The first is a pessimistic doubt about whether it will ever really be possible to deliver much. The sort of finding reported by Churchland is the exception more than the rule. Vision and hearing offer some unusual scope because they both depend on wave media which impose certain interesting structural qualities; the orderly spectrum and musical scale. Imaginatively I find it hard to think of other aspects of phenomenal experience that seem to be good candidates for structural analysis. I could be radically wrong about this and I hope I am.

The other thing is, I still find it a bit hard to get past my zombie twin; if phenomenal experience matches up with the structure of brain activity perfectly, how come he is without qualia? The sceptics and the qualophiles both have pretty clear answers; either there just are no qualia anyway or they are outside the scope of physics. Now if we take the architectonic view, we could argue that just as the presence of red objects is not sufficient for there to be red qualia, so perhaps the existence of the right brain patterns isn’t sufficient either; though the red objects and the relevant brain activity do a lot to explain the experience. But if the right brain activity isn’t sufficient, what’s the missing ingredient? It feels (I put it no higher) as if there ought to be an explanation; but perhaps that’s just where we leave the job for the philosophers?

Eliminating Common Sense

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BermudezThe more you know about the science of the mind, the less appealing our common sense ideas seem. Ideas about belief and desire motivating action just don’t seem to match up in any way with what you see going on. So, at least, says Jose Luis Bermudez in Arguing for Eliminativism (freely available on Academia, but you might need to sign in). Bermudez sympathises with Paul Churchland’s wish to sweep the whole business of common sense psychology away; but he wants to reshape Churchland’s attack, standing down the ‘official’ arguments and bringing forward others taken from within Churchland’s own writing on the subject.

Bermudez sketches the complex landscape with admirable clarity. He notes Boghossian has argued that eliminativism of this kind is incoherent: but Boghossian construed eliminativism as an attack on all forms of content. Bermudez has no desire to be so radical and champions a purely psychological eliminativism.

If something’s wrong with common sense psychology it could either be that what it says is false, or that what it says is not even capable of being judged true or false. In the latter case it could, for example, be that all common sense talk of mental states is nothing more than a complex system of reflexive self-expression like grunts and moans. Bermudez doesn’t think it’s like that: the propositions of common sense psychology are meaningful, they just happen to be erroneous.

It therefore falls to the eliminativist to show what the errors are.  Bermudez has a two-horned strategy: first, we can argue that as a matter of fact, we don’t rely on common sense understanding as much as we think. Second, we can look for ways to show that the kind of propositional content implied by common sense views is just incompatible with the mechanism that actually underlie human action and behaviour as revealed by scientific investigation.

There are, in fact, two different ways of construing common sense psychology. One is that our common sense understanding is itself a kind of theory of mind: this is the ‘theory theory’ line. To disprove this we might try to bring out what the common sense theory is and then attack it. The other way of construing common sense is that we just use our own minds as a model: we put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and imagine how we should think and react. To combat this one we should need a slightly different approach; but it seems Bermudez’s strategy is good either way.

I think the first horn of the attack works better than the second – but not perfectly. Bermudez rightly says it is very generally accepted that to negotiate complex social interactions we need to ascribe beliefs and desires to other people and draw conclusions about their likely behaviour. It ain’t necessarily so. Bermudez quotes the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the much-cited example where we have been arrested: if we betray our partner in crime we’ll get better terms whatever the other one does. We don’t, Bermudez points out, need to have any particular beliefs about what the other person will do: we can work out the strategy from just knowing the circumstances.

More widely, Bermudez contends, we often don’t really need to know what an individual has in mind.  If we know that person is a butcher, or a waiter, then the relevant social interaction can be managed without any hypothesising about beliefs and desires. (In fact we can imagine a robot butcher/waiter who would certainly lack any beliefs or desires but could execute the transactions perfectly well.)

That is fine as far as it goes, but it isn’t that hard to think of examples where the ascription of beliefs seems relevant. In particular, the interpretation of speech, especially the reading of Gricean implicatures, seems to rely on it. Sometimes it also seems that the ascription of emotional states is highly relevant, or hypotheses about what another person knows, something Bermudez doesn’t address.

It’s interesting to reflect on what a contrast this is with Dennett. I think of Dennett and Churchland as loosely allied: both sceptics about qualia, both friendly to materialist, reductive thinking. Yet here Bermudez presents a Churchlandish view which holds that ascriptions of purpose are largely useless in dealing with human interaction, while Dennett’s Intentional Stance of course requires that they are extremely useful.

Bermudez doesn’t think this kind of argument is sufficient, anyway, hence the second horn in which he tries to sketch a case for saying that common sense and neurons don’t fit well. The real problem here for Bermudez is that we don’t really know how neurons represent things. He makes a case for kinds of representation other than the sort of propositional representation he thinks is required by the standard common sense view (ie, we believe or desire that  xxx…). It’s true that a mess of neurons doesn’t look much like a set of well-formed formulae, but to cut to the chase I think Bermudez is pursuing a vain quest. We know that neurons can deal with ascriptions of propositional belief and desire (otherwise how would we even be able to think and talk about them) so it’s not going to be possible to rule them out neurologically. Bermudez presents some avenues that could be followed, but even he doesn’t seem to think the case can be clinched as matters stand.

I wonder if he needs to? It seems to me that the case for elimination does not rest on proving the common sense concepts false, only on their being redundant. If Bermudez can show that all ascriptions of belief and desire can for practical purposes be cashed out or replaced by cognition about the circumstances and game-theoretic considerations, then simple parsimony will get him the elimination he seeks.

He would still, of course, be left with explaining why the human mind adopts a false theory about itself instead of the true one: but we know some ways of explaining that – for example, ahem, through the Blindness of the Brain  (ie that we’re trapped within our limitations and work with the poor but adequate heuristics gifted to us, or perhaps foisted on us, bu evolution).