A Human Phenomenology Project

introspection2We don’t know what we think, according to Alex Rosenberg in the NYT. It’s a piece of two halves, in my opinion; he starts with a pretty fair summary of the sceptical case. It has often been held that we have privileged knowledge of our own thoughts and feelings, and indeed of our own decisions; but the findings of Benjamin Libet about decisions being made before we are aware of them; the phenomenon of blindsight which shows we may go on having visual knowledge we’re not aware of; and many other cases where it can be shown that motives are confabulated and mental content is inaccessible to our conscious, reporting mind; these all go to show that things are much more complex than we might have thought, and that our thoughts are not, as it were, self-illuminating. Rosenberg plausibly suggests that we use on ourselves the kind of tools we use to work out what other people are thinking; but then he seems to make a radical leap to the conclusion that there is nothing else going on.

Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds. If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we think or why we think it.

That seems to be going too far.  How could we ever play ‘I spy’ if we didn’t have any privileged access to private thoughts?

“I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with ‘c'”
“Is it ‘chair’?”
“I don’t know – is it?”

It’s more than possible that Rosenberg’s argument has suffered badly from editing (philosophical discussion, even in a newspaper piece, seems peculiarly information-dense; often you can’t lose much of it without damaging the content badly). But it looks as if he’s done what I think of as an ‘OMG bounce’; a kind of argumentative leap which crops up elsewhere. Sometimes we experience illusions:  OMG, our senses never tell us anything about the real world at all! There are problems with the justification of true belief: OMG there is no such thing as knowledge! Or in this case: sometimes we’re wrong about why we did things: OMG, we have no direct access to our own thoughts!

There are in fact several different reasons why we might claim that our thoughts about our thoughts are immune to error. In the game of ‘I spy’, my nominating ‘chair’ just makes it my choice; the content of my thought is established by a kind of fiat. In the case of a pain in my toe, I might argue I can’t be wrong because a pain can’t be false: it has no propositional content, it just is. Or I might argue that certain of my thoughts are unmediated; there’s no gap between them and me where error could creep in, the way it creeps in during the process of interpreting sensory impressions.

Still, it’s undeniable that in some cases we can be shown to adopt false rationales for our behaviour; sometimes we think we know why we said something, but we don’t. I think by contrast I have occasionally, when very tired, had the experience of hearing coherent and broadly relevant speech come out of my own mouth without it seeming to come from my conscious mind at all. Contemplating this kind of thing does undoubtedly promote scepticism, but what it ought to promote is a keener awareness of the complexity of human mental experience: many layered, explicit to greater or lesser degrees, partly attended to, partly in a sort of half-light of awareness… There seem to be unconscious impulses, conscious but inexplicit thought; definite thought (which may even be in recordable words); self-conscious thought of the kind where we are aware of thinking while we think… and that is at best the broadest outline of some of the larger architecture.

All of this really needs a systematic and authoritative investigation. Of course, since Plato there have been models of the structure of the mind which separate conscious and unconscious, id, ego and superego: philosophers of mind have run up various theories, usually to suit their own needs of the moment; and modern neurology increasingly provides good clues about how various mental functions are hosted and performed. But a proper mainstream conception of the structure and phenomenology of thought itself seems sadly lacking to me. Is this an area where we could get funding for a major research effort; a Human Phenomenology Project?

It can hardly be doubted that there are things to discover. Recently we were told, if not quite for the first time, that a substantial minority of people have no mental images (although at once we notice that there even seen to be different ways of having mental images). A systematic investigation might reveal that just as we have four blood groups, there are four (or seven) different ways the human mind can work. What if it turned out that consciousness is not a single consistent phenomenon, but a family of four different ones, and that the four tribes have been talking past each other all this time…?

Six Consciousnesses

Fry's phenomenologiesOver at Brains Blog Uriah Kriegel has been doing a series of posts (starting here) on some themes from his book The Varieties of Consciousness, and in particular his identification of six kinds of phenomenology.

I haven’t read the book (yet) and there may be important bits missing from the necessarily brief account given in the blog posts, but it looks very interesting. Kriegel’s starting point is that we probably launch into explaining consciousness too quickly, and would do well to spend a bit more time describing it first. There’s a lot of truth in that; consciousness is an extraordinarily complex and elusive business, yet phenomenology remains in a pretty underdeveloped state. However, in philosophy the borderline between describing and explaining is fuzzy; if you’re describing owls you can rely on your audience knowing about wings and beaks and colouration; in philosophy it may be impossible to describe what you’re getting at without hacking out some basic concepts which can hardly help but be explanatory. With that caveat, it’s a worthy project.

Part of the difficulty of exploring phenomenology may come from the difficulty of reconciling differences in the experiences of different reporters. Introspection, the process of examining our own experience, is irremediably private, and if your conclusions are different from mine, there’s very little we can do about it other than shout at each other. Some have also taken the view that introspection is radically unreliable in any case, a task like trying to watch the back of your own head; the Behaviourists, of course, concluded that it was a waste of time talking about the contents of consciousness at all: a view which hasn’t completely disappeared.

Kriegel defends introspection, albeit in a slightly half-hearted way. He rightly points out that we’ve tacitly relied on it to support all the discoveries and theorising which has been accomplished in recent decades. He accepts that we cannot any longer regard it as infallible, but he’s content if it can be regarded as more likely right than wrong.

With this mild war-cry, we set off on the exploration. There are lots of ways we can analyse consciousness, but what Kriegel sets out to do is find the varieties of phenomenal experience. He’s come up with six, but it’s a tentative haul and he’s not asserting that this is necessarily the full set. The first two phenomenologies, taken as already established, are the perceptual and the algedonic (pleasure/pain); to these Kriegel adds: cognitive phenomenology, “conative” phenomenology (to do with action and intention), the phenomenology of entertaining an idea or a proposition (perhaps we could call it ‘considerative’, though Kriegel doesn’t), and the phenomenology of imagination.

The idea that there is conative phenomenology is a sort of cousin of the idea of an ‘executive quale’ which I have espoused: it means there is something it is like to desire, to decide, and to intend. Kriegel doesn’t spend any real effort on defending the idea that these things have phenomenology at all, though it seems to me (introspectively!) that sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. What he is mainly concerned to do is establish the distinction between belief and desire. In non-phenomenal terms these two are sort of staples of the study of intentionality: Bel and Des, the old couple. One way of understanding the difference is in terms of ‘direction of fit’, a concept that goes back to J.L. Austin. What this means is that if there’s a discrepancy between your beliefs and the world, then you’d better change your beliefs. If there’s a discrepancy  between your desires and the world, you try to change the world (usually: I think Andy Warhol for one suggested that learning to like what was available was a better strategy, thereby unexpectedly falling into a kind of agreement with some religious traditions that value acceptance and submission to the Divine Will).

Kriegel, anyway, takes a different direction, characterising the difference in terms of phenomenal presentation. What we desire is presented to us as good; what we believe is presented as true. This approach opens the way to a distinction between a desire and a decision: a desire is conditional (if circumstances allow, you’ll eat an ice-cream) whereas a decision is categorical (you’re going to eat an ice-cream). This all works quite well and establishes an approach which can handily be applied to other examples; if  we find that there’s presentation-as-something different going on we should suspect a unique phenomenology. (Are we perhaps straying here into something explanatory instead of merely descriptive? I don’t think it matters.) I wonder a bit about whether things we desire are presented to us as good. I think I desire some things that don’t seem good at all except in the sense that they seem desirable. That’s not much help, because if we’re reduced to saying that when I desire something it is presented to me as desirable we’re not saying all that much, especially since the idea of presentation is not particularly clarified. I have no doubt that issues like this are explored more fully in the book.
Kriegel moves on to consider the case of emotion: does it have a unique and irreducible phenomenology? If something we love is presented to us as good, then we’re back with the merely conative; and Kriegel doesn’t think presentation as beautiful is going to work either (partly because of negative cases, though I don’t see that as an insoluble probem myself; if we can have algedonia, the combined quality of pain or pleasure we can surely have an aesthetic quality that combines beauty and ugliness). In the end he suspects that emotion is about presentation as important, but he recognises that this could be seen as putting the cart before the horse; perhaps emotion directs our attention to things and what gets our attention seems to be important. Kriegel finds it impossible to decide whether emotion has an independent phenomenology and gives the decision by default in favour of the more parsimonious option, that it is reducible to other phenomenologies.
On that, it may be that taking all emotion together was just too big a bite. It seems quite likely to me that different emotions might have different phenomenologies, and perhaps tackling it that way would yield more positive results.
Anyway, a refreshing look at consciousness.

Smell all about it

nostrilsSmell is the most elusive of the senses. Sight is beautifully structured and amenable to analysis in terms of consistent geometry and a coherent domain of colours. Smells… how does one smell relate to another? There just seems to be an infinite number of smells, all one of a kind. We can be completely surprised by an unprecedented smell which is like nothing we ever experienced before, in a way we can’t possibly be surprised by a new colour (with some minor possible exceptions). Our olfactory system effortlessly assigns new unique smell experiences to substances that never existed until human beings synthesised them.

There don’t even seem to be any words for smells: or at least, the only way we can talk about them is by referring to “the smell of X”, as in a “smoky smell” or “the smell of lemons”. We don’t have to do that to describe shapes or colours: they can be described as “blue”, or “square” without our having to say they are “sky-coloured” or “the shape of a box”. (Except perhaps in the case of orange? Is “orange” short for ‘the colour of oranges’?) Even for taste we have words like “bitter” and “sweet”. The only one I can think of for smells is “nidorous’, which is pretty obscure – and in order to explain it I have to fall back on saying it describes the “smell of” burning/cooking meat. All we have to describe smells is “strong” and “faint” (my daughter, reading over my shoulder, says what about “pungent”? She does not consider “pungent” to be merely a synonym of “strong” – you may be indifferent to a strong smell, but not to a pungent one, she claims).

With that by way of preamble, let me introduce the interesting question considered here by William Lycan: does smell represent? When we smell, do we smell something? There is a range of possible answers. We might say that when I smell, I smell sausages (for example). Or that I smell a smell (which happens to be the smell of sausages). Or I might say I just have a smell experience: I may know that it’s associated with sausage smells and hence with sausages, but in itself it’s just an experience.

Lycan (who believes that we smell a gaseous miasma) notes two arguments for something like the last position – that smell doesn’t represent anything. First, introspection tells us nothing about what a smell represents. If I were a member of a culture that did not make sausages or eat meat, and had never experienced them, my first nose-full of sausage odour would convey nothing to me beyond itself. It’s different for sight: we inherently see things, and when we see our first sausage there can be no doubt we are seeing a thing, even if we do not yet know much about its nature: it would be absurd to maintain we were merely having a visual experience.

The second argument is that smells can’t really be wrong: there are no smell illusions. If a car is sprayed with “new car” perfume to make us think that it is fresh off the production line, we may make a mistake about that inference, but our nose was not wrong about the smell, which was real. But representations can always be wrong, so if we can’t be wrong, there is no representation.

Lycan is unimpressed by introspective evidence: the mere fact that philosophers disagree about what it tells us is enough, he feels, to discredit it. The second argument fails because it assumes that if smells represent, they must represent their causes: but they might just represent something in the air. On getting a whiff of my first sausage I would not know what it was, but I might well be moved to say “What’s that appetising (or disgusting) smell?”  I wouldn’t simply say “Golly, I am undergoing a novel olfactory experience for some opaque reason.”  I think in fact we could go further there and argue that I might well say “What’s that I can smell?” – but that doesn’t suit Lycan’s preferred position. (My daughter intervenes to say “What about ‘acrid’?”)

Lycan summarises a range of arguments (One is an argument by Richardson that smell is phenomenologically “exteroceptive”, inherently about things out there: Lycan endorses this view, but surely relying on phenomenology is smuggling back in the introspection he was so scathing about when the other side invoked it?). His own main argument rests on the view that how something smells is something over and above all the other facts about it. The premise here is very like that in the famous thought experiment of Mary the colour scientist, though Lycan is not drawing the same conclusions at all. He claims instead that:

I can know the complex of osphresiological fact without knowing how the rose smells because knowing is knowing-under-a-representation… that solution entails that olfactory experience involves representation.

That does make some sense, I feel (What about “osphresiological”! we’re really working on the vocabulary today, aren’t we?). You may be asking yourself, however, whether this is a question that needs a single answer. Couldn’t we say, yes sometimes smells represent miasmas, but they can also represent sausages; or indeed they can represent nothing.

Lycan, in what I take to be a development of his view, is receptive to the idea of layering: that in fact smells can represent not just a cloud of stuff in the air, but also the thing from which they emanated. That being so I am not completely clear why we should give primacy to the miasma. Two contrary cases suggest themselves. First, suppose there is a odour so faint I don’t even perceive it as such consciously, but have a misty sense of salsiccian (alright, I made it up) presence which makes me begin to think about how agreeable a nice Cumberland sausage for lunch might be. Wouldn’t we say that in some sense the smell represented sausages to me: but we can’t say it represented a miasma because no such thing ever entered my mind?

Second, if we accept layering we might say that the key point is about the essential or the minimal case: we can smell without that smell representing a sausage, but what’s the least it can represent and still be a smell? Can it represent nothing? Suppose I dream and have an odd, unrecognisable experience. Later on, when awake, I encounter a Thai curd sausage for the first time and find that the experience I had was in fact an olfactory one, the smell of this particular kind of comestible. My dream experience cannot possibly have represented a sausage, a miasma, a smell, or anything but itself because I didn’t know what it was: but, it turns out, it was the smell of curd sausage.

I think your reaction to that is likely to depend on whether you think an experience could be a smell experience without being recognisable as such; if not, you may be inclined to agree with Lycan, who would probably reiterate his view that smells are sensing-under-a-representation. That view entails that there is an ineffability about smell, and Lycan suggests this might help account for the poverty of smell vocabulary that I noted above. Interestingly it turns out that this very point has been attacked by Majid and Burenhult, albeit not in a way that Lycan considers fatal to his case. Majid and Burenhult studied the Jahai, a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe on the Malaysian peninsula, and found that they have a very rich lexicon of odour terms, such as a word for “the smell of petrol, smoke and bat droppings” (what, all of them?). It’s just us English speakers, it seems, who are stuck with acrid nidors.

A General Taxonomy of Lust

kiss… is not really what this piece is about (sorry). It’s an idea I had years ago for a short story or a novella. ‘Lust’ here would have been interpreted broadly as any state which impels a human being towards sex. I had in mind a number of axes defining a general ‘lust space’. One of the axes, if I remember rightly, had specific attraction to one person at one end and generalised indiscriminate enthusiasm at the other; another went from sadistic to masochistic, and so on. I think I had eighty-one basic forms of lust, and the idea was to write short episodes exemplifying each one: in fact, to interweave a coherent narrative with all of them in.

My creative gifts were not up to that challenge, but I mention it here because one of the axes went from the purely intellectual to the purely physical. At the intellectual extreme you might have an elderly homosexual aristocrat who, on inheriting a title, realises it is his duty to attempt to procure an heir. At the purely physical end you might have an adolescent boy on a train who notices he has an erection which is unrelated to anything that has passed through his mind.

That axis would have made a lot of sense (perhaps) to Luca Barlassina and Albert Newen, whose paper in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research sets out an impure somatic theory of the emotions. In short, they claim that emotions are constituted by the integration of bodily perceptions with representations of external objects and states of affairs.

Somatic theories say that emotions are really just bodily states. We don’t get red in the face because we’re angry, we get angry because we’ve become red in the face. As no less an authority than William James had it:

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

This view did not appeal to everyone, but the elegantly parsimonious reduction it offers has retained its appeal, and Jesse Prinz has put forward a sophisticated 21st century version. It is Prinz’s theory that Barlassina and Newen address; they think it needs adulterating, but they clearly want to build on Prinz’s foundations, not reject them.

So what does Prinz say? His view of emotions fits into the framework of his general view about perception: for him, a state is a perceptual state if it is a state of a dedicated input system – eg the visual system. An emotion is simply a state of the system that monitors our own bodies; in other words emotions are just perceptions of our own bodily states.  Even for Prinz, that’s a little too pure: emotions, after all, are typically about something. They have intentional content. We don’t just feel angry, we feel angry about something or other. Prinz regards emotions as having dual content: they register bodily states but also represent core relational themes (as against say, fatigue, which both registers and represents a bodily state). On top of that, they may involve propositional attitudes, thoughts about some evocative future event, for example, but the propositional attitudes only evoke the emotions, they don’t play any role in constituting them. Further still, certain higher emotions are recalibrati0ns of lower ones: the simple emotion of sadness is recalibrated so it can be controlled by a particular set of stimuli and become guilt.

So far so good. Barlassina and Newen have four objections. First, if Prinz is right, then the neural correlates of emotion and the perception of the relevant bodily states must just be the same. Taking the example of disgust, B&N argue that the evidence suggests otherwise: interoception, the perception of bodily changes, may indeed cause disgust, but does not equate to it neurologically.

Second, they see problems with Prinz’s method of bringing in intentional content. For Prinz emotions differ from mere bodily feeling because they represent core relational themes. But, say B&N, what about ear pressure? It tells us about unhealthy levels of barometric pressure and oxygen, and so relates to survival, surely a core relational theme: and it’s certainly a perception of a bodily state – but ear pressure is not an emotion.

Third, Prinz’s account only allows emotions to be about general situations; but in fact they are about particular things. When we’re afraid of a dog, we’re afraid of that dog, we’re not just experiencing a general fear in the presence of a specific dog.

Fourth, Prinz doesn’t fully accommodate the real phenomenology of emotions. For him, fear of a lion is fear accompanied by some beleifs about a lion: but B&N maintain that the directedness of the emotion is built in, part of the inherent phenomenology.

Barlassina and Newen like Prinz’s somatic leanings, but they conclude that he simply doesn’t account sufficiently for the representative characteristics of emotions: consequently they propose an ‘impure’ theory by which emotions are cognitive states constituted when interoceptive states are integrated with with perceptions of external objects or states of affairs.

This pollution or elaboration of the pure theory seems pretty sensible and B&N give a clear and convincing exposition. At the end of the day it leaves me cold not because they haven’t done a good job but because I suspect that somatic theories are always going to be inadequate: for two reasons.

First, they just don’t capture the phenomenology. There’s no doubt at all that emotions are often or typically characterised or coloured by perception of distinctive bodily states, but is that what they are in essence? It doesn’t seem so. It seems possible to imagine that I might be angry or sad without a body at all: not, of course, in the same good old human way, but angry or sad nevertheless. There seems to be something almost qualic about emotions, something over and above any of the physical aspects, characteristic though they may be.

Second, surely emotions are often essentially about dispositions to behave in a certain way? An account of anger which never mentions that anger makes me more likely to hit people just doesn’t seem to cut the mustard. Even William James spoke of striking people. In fact, I think one could plausibly argue that the physical changes associated with an emotion can often be related to the underlying propensity to behave in a certain way. We begin to breathe deeply and our heart pounds because we are getting ready for violent exertion, just as parallel cognitive changes get us ready to take offence and start a fight. Not all emotions are as neat as this: we’ve talked in the past about the difficulty of explaining what grief is for. Still, these considerations seem enough to show that a somatic account, even an impure one, can’t quite cover the ground.

Still, just as Barlassina and Newen built on Prinz, it may well be that they have provided some good foundation work for an even more impure theory.

 

Heidegger vindicated?

Picture: Martin Heidegger. This paper by Dotov, Nie, and Chemero describes experiments which it says have pulled off the remarkable feat of providing empirical, experimental evidence for Heidegger’s phenomenology, or part of it; the paper has been taken by some as providing new backing for the Extended Mind theory, notably expounded by Andy Clark in his 2008 book (‘Supersizing the Mind’).

Relating the research so strongly to Heidegger puts it into a complex historical context. Some of Heidegger’s views, particularly those which suggest there can be no theory of everyday life, have been taken up by critics of artificial intelligence. Hubert Dreyfus in particular, has offered a vigorous critique drawing mainly from Heidegger an idea of the limits of computation, one which strongly resembles those which arise from the broadly-conceived frame problem, as discussed here recently. The authors of the paper claim this heritage, accepting the Dreyfusard view of Heidegger as an early proto-enemy of GOFAI .

For it is GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) we’re dealing with. The authors of the current paper point out that the Heideggerian/Dreyfusard critique applies only to AI based on straightforward symbol manipulation (though I think a casual reader of Dreyfus  could well be forgiven for going away with the impression that he was a sceptic about all forms of AI), and that it points toward the need to give proper regard to the consequences of embodiment.

Hence their two experiments. These are designed to show objective signs of a state described by Heidegger, known in English as ‘ready-to-hand’. This seems a misleading translation, though I can’t think of a perfect alternative. If a hammer is ‘ready to hand’, I think that implies it’s laid out on the bench ready for me to pick it up when I want it;  the state Heidegger was talking about is the one when you’re using the hammer confidently and skilfully without even having to think about it. If something goes wrong with the hammering, you may be forced to start thinking about the hammer again – about exactly how it’s going to hit the nail, perhaps about how you’re holding it. You can also stop using the hammer altogether and contemplate it as a simple object. But when the hammer is ready-to-hand in the required sense, you naturally speak of your knocking in a few nails as though you were using your bare hands, or more accurately, as if the hammer had become part of you.

Both experiments were based on subjects using a mouse to play a simple game.  The idea was that once the subjects had settled, the mouse would become ready-to-hand; then the relationship between mouse movement and cursor movement would be temporarily messed up; this should cause the mouse to become unready-to-hand for a while. Two different techniques were used to detect readiness-to-hand. In the first experiment the movements of the hand and mouse were analysed for signs of 1/f? noise. Apparently earlier research has established that the appearance of 1/f? noise is a sign of a smoothly integrated system.  The second experiment used a less sophisticated method; subjects were required to perform a simple counting task at the same time as using the mouse; when their performance at this second task faltered, it was taken as a sign that attention was being transferred to cope with the onset of unreadiness to hand. Both experiments yielded the expected results.  (Regrettably some subjects were lost because of an unexpected problem – they weren’t good enough at the simple mouse game to keep it going for the duration of the experiment. Future experimenters should note the need to set up a game which cannot come to a sudden halt.)

I think the first question which comes to mind is: why were the experiments were even necessary?  It is a common experience that tools or vehicles become extensions of our personality; in fact it has often been pointed out that even our senses get relocated. If you use a whisk to beat eggs, you sense the consistency of the egg not by monitoring the movement of the whisk against your fingers, but as though you were feeling the egg with the whisk, as though there was a limited kind of sensation transferred into the whisk. Now of course, for any phenomenological observation, there will be some diehards who deny having had any such experience; but my impression is that this sort of thing is widely accepted, enough to feature as a proposition in a discussion without further support.  Nevertheless, it’s true that it this remains subjective, so it’s a fair claim that empirical results are something new.

Second, though, do the results actually prove anything? Phenomenologically, it seems possible to me to think of alternative explanations which fit the bill without invoking readiness-to-hand. Does it seem to the subject that the mouse has become part of them, part of a smoothly-integrated entity – or does the mouse just drop out of consciousness altogether? Even if we accept that the presence of 1/f? noise shows that integration has occurred, that doesn’t give us readiness-to-hand (or if it does, it seems the result was already achieved by the earlier research).

In the second experiment we’ve certainly got a transfer of attention – but isn’t that only natural? If a task suddenly becomes inexplicably harder, it’s not surprising that more attention is devoted to it – surely we can explain that without invoking Heidegger? The authors acknowledge this objection, and if I understand correctly suggest that the two tasks involved were easy enough to rule out problems of excessive cognitive load so that, I suppose, no significant switch of attention would have been necessary if not for the breakdown of readiness-to-hand.  I’m not altogether convinced.

I do like the chutzpah involved in an experimental attempt to validate Heidegger, though, and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that bold and ingenious experiments along these lines might tell us something interesting.