More support for the illusionist perspective in a paper from Daniel Shabasson. He agrees with Keith Frankish that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, and (taking the metaproblematic road) offers a theory as to why so many people – the great majority, I think – find it undeniably real in spite of the problems it raises.
Shabasson’s theory rests on three principles:
- impenetrability,
- the infallibility illusion, and
- the justification illusion.
Impenetrability says that we have no conscious access to the processes that produce our judgements about sensory experience. We know as a matter of optical/neurological science that our perception of colour rests on some very complex processing of the data detected by our eyes. Patches of paint or groups of pixels emitting exactly the same wavelengths of light may be perceived as quite different colours when our brains take account of the visual context, for example, but the resulting colours are just present to consciousness as facts. We have no awareness of the complex adjustments that have been made.
This point is particularly evident in the case of colour vision, where the processing done by the brain is elaborate and sometimes counter-intuitive. It’s less clear that we’re missing out on much in the way of subtle interpretive processing when we detect a poke in the eye. Generally though, I think the claim is pretty uncontroversial, and in fact our limited access to what’s really going on has been an important part of other theories such as Scott Bakker’s Blind Brain.
Infallibilty says that we are prone to assume we cannot be wrong about certain aspects of our experience. Obviously most perceptions could be mistaken, but others, more direct, seem invulnerable to error. I may be mistaken in my belief that there is a piano on my foot, or about the fact that my toe is crushed; but surely I can’t be wrong about the fact that I am feeling pain? Although this idea has been robustly challenged, it has a strong intuitive appeal, perhaps partly out of a feeling that while we can be wrong about external stuff, mental entities are perceived directly, already present in the mind, and therefore immune from the errors that creep in during delivery of external information.
Justification is a little more subtle; the claim is that for any judgement we make, we believe there is some justification. This is not the stronger claim that there is good or adequate justification, just the view that we suppose ourselves to have some reason for thinking whatever we think.
Is that true? What if I fix my thoughts on the fourth nearest star to Earth which has only one planet orbiting it, and judge that the planet in question is smaller than Earth? If I knew more about astronomy I might have reasons for this judgement, but as matters stand, though I feel confident that the planet exists, I have no reasons for any beliefs about its size relative to Earth.
In such a case, I believe Shabasson would either point to probable justifications I have overlooked (perhaps I am making a mistaken but not irrational assumption about a correlation between size and number of planets) or more likely, simply deny that I have truly made the relevant judgement at all. I might assert that I really believe the planet is small, but I’m really only playing some hypothetical game. I think in fact, Shabasson can have what he needs for the sake of argument here pretty much by specification.
Given the three principles, various things follow. When we judge ourselves to be having a ‘reddish’ experience, we must be right, and there must be something in our mind that justifies the judgement. That thing is a quale, which must therefore exist. This follows so directly, without requiring effortful reasoning, it seems to us that we apprehend the quale directly. Furthermore, the quale must seem like something, or to put it more fully, there must be something it seems like: if there were nothing a quale were like, there would be no apparent difference between a red and a green quale; but it is of the essence that there are such differences.
What is it like? We can’t say, because in fact it doesn’t exist. Though there really are justificatory properties for our judgements about perceptions, they are not phenomenal ones; but impenetrability means we remain unaware of them. Hence the apparent ineffability of qualia. Impenetrability also gives rise to an impression that qualia are intrinsic; briefly it means that the reddish experience arrives with no other information, and in particular nothing about its relation to other things; it seems it just is. Completing the trio, qualia seem subjective because given ineffability and intrinsicality, they are only differentiable through introspection, and introspection naturally limits access to a particular single subject.
I don’t think Shabasson has the whole answer (I think, in particular, that the apparent existence of qualia has to do with the particular reality of actual experience, a quality obviously not conveyed by any theoretical account), but I think there are probably several factors that account for our belief in phenomenal experience, and he gives a very clear account of some significant ones. The use of the principle of justification seems especially interesting to me; I wonder if it might help illuminate some other quirks of human psychology.
Seems like the whole problem with qualia, and consciousness in general, revolves around a flawed analysis of an introspection event. One of the most important tasks that the brain performs is objectifying sense data. We are object detectors.
When we first perceive redness it is that and no more. However, if we then consciously direct our attention to our own perception of redness, we turn that raw perception into an object. This allows us to turn it around, roll it over, and think about what the redness means. However, once having done this, it is impossible to unthink it. We can no longer see this particular redness input as a raw perception. Now it is a thing and we have to live with it.
In a way, introspection changes what it is looking at. Consciousness turns redness into a quale and then wonders how can it be and whether it is real. One can’t think about redness easily without making it into something.
This is total overcomplication. There is a vaguely ludicrous aspect to the notion that consciousness is an illusion. ‘illusion’ is exactly of course – in one sense – conscious experience is, and no more.
But i suspect the use here is linked more to theories of accuracy. Cosnciousness is a biological aretfact. A fact of nature, like teeth or bats. It has properties. But it is what is is. no more and no less. It is not obliged or required in any way to be consistent with a theory of the truth of the external world. Not being consistent with a mental construct of the external world is of no relevence whatsoever to the objective reality of conscious experiences. Hence it is of no consequence in any way, shape or form what our beliefs are about conscious experience – they have no bearing on the existence of those experiences. We can say ‘consciousness is an illusion’ or ‘it’s not real’ all you like, but that isn’t enough to make then go away. You still have conscious experiences, whether you believe in them or not.
The problem is not consciousness – which is indefatigably real. It’s not qualia – in your face, every day, no matter what you may think of their ‘superfluousness’ (as if that matters) . The problem is in the lunacy that says nature has to make sense to a certain standards of contemporary intelligibility. That’s the illusion that’s fooling computationalists and spawning reams of the craziest intellectual drivel imaginable.
JBD
..illude allude elude may be the nature-movement of our consciousness…that observation may be phenomenon to us…
That people have false beliefs about X is woefully inadequate to show that X is illusory. Else, we must conclude that there are no such things as whales, since there are no giant fish that spume mist and can swallow a man whole. If a philosopher explains something away, it still remains to be shown that what was explained away was central to a viewpoint, and not just incidental. Infallibility isn’t central to qualia.
I think what is perhaps missed here is that “illusory” doesn’t always mean that the thing being viewed doesn’t exist, just that it is not what it seems. So, depending on what the person using “illusory” meant, that people have false beliefs about X is indeed adequate to show that X is illusory. When Dennett (and most others, I assume) talks about consciousness being illusory, he means that it isn’t what we perceive it to be not that it is imaginary or non-existent. So illusory in this sense is about false beliefs. Experiments have shown that we make decisions before we consciously think we do. That’s a false belief.
Does Illusionism propose, all experience is phenomenon–all non experience is phenomenon, to be here…
As I understand it, the idea is to make knowledge of our subjective states like knowledge about external objects, in order to make it just as fallible. But I think there’s a hitch here: knowledge about external objects is fallible because it is mediated—primarily, there is knowledge about our mental states, which we use to infer knowledge about external objects. This inference is fallible, and with it, the knowledge it generates (or rather, the beliefs it makes us form).
So if we want to make knowledge about mental states just as fallible as knowledge about external objects, then it seems we would have to insist that this knowledge, too, is somehow mediated, indirect in the same sense. But then, what’s the medium? And is that fallible, too? There seems to be a sort of regress lurking.
In that sense, it seems to me that removing knowledge of conscious states from the special place it usually inhabits threatens to leave us on epistemologically shaky ground: if our knowledge isn’t grounded in conscious states, what then is it grounded in? Do we have any good grounds for believing anything at all?
I think the first two principles are obviously true for anyone familiar with neuroscience and psychology. The third I think could be worded better. I would state it that we’re often not aware of why we reach the judgments we do. (This is actually another aspect of the impenetrability principle applied to unconscious reasoning.) Again, not something controversial for anyone familiar with psychological research.
The idea that our external senses might be wrong is widely accepted, but the idea that our inner senses may also be wrong seems hard for many people to accept. Indeed, I think a major divide in the philosophy of mind is between people who do accept that introspection is unreliable, and those who don’t. If you do accept it, then many of the “mysteries” of consciousness seem like nothing more than artifacts of that unreliability.
I understand what you mean when you say “introspection is unreliable” but it seems like the wrong perspective to me. Unreliable makes sense only if it is compared to some expected “true” value. How much data should “reliable” introspection yield? Introspection clearly can’t tell us the whole story of what is happening in the brain. One way to think of introspection is as similar to a car dashboard. It shows some important data about the car’s current state in real time. Obviously it doesn’t show everything but it isn’t designed to. We would call it unreliable only if, say, the speedometer showed the wrong speed.
Can mind-body-presence in time, be a relevant way to understanding illusionism…
…The phenomenon of relativity-in a moment …
Paul #9,
Fair point. In a healthy individual, it is reliable enough for many everyday functions. But then the exact same thing can be said about our external senses. By “unreliable”, I meant unreliable for purposes of understanding the architecture of the mind.
Related to Jochen’s point in #7: An interesting consequence of illusionism about qualia is that the ostensible discriminations we make between objects based on their perceived qualitative differences are all illusory too. Nothing *really* appears red, blue or orange to us, or tastes sweet or sour, or exhibits any other qualitatively rendered property by which we ordinarily identify it; it only seems that way. Quite the bullet to bite!
SelfAwarePatterns:
The thing is, our external senses are wrong because they are relayed to us via internal impressions—i.e. some external object causes a certain sensation, we perceive that sensation and then infer its cause. It’s that inference that may be faulty, because the same sensation may have different causes (an actual stone fell on your foot vs. an evil demon manipulating your nerve endings in the right way).
In order for our ‘internal senses’ to be wrong in the same way, they’d likewise have to be mediated—i.e. we would have to make inferences about our subjective states. But what is it that we use to infer our subjective states? Through which medium are they relayed to us? And do we then experience that directly, or does it have to be relayed to us again, leading to a regress?
Jochen,
I think the answer is that internal senses are also mediated. In order to reach conclusions about our experiences, that information must be gathered from various regions in the brain across neural circuits. Not every region is equally accessible to the information gatherer region(s); many (most?) aren’t accessible at all.
For example, there is no introspective access to the raw sensory data coming in to the occipital lobe. Introspection only gets access to the prepared versions that have already gone through layers of inference. Likewise, there are many aspects of our reasoning which are opaque to it.
In my mind, the best way to think of introspection and its relation to the overall mind is like that of a news media to a city. Many people in the city learn what’s going on in the city by reading the news media. But the information from the media is mediated by the reporters and their ability to gather information. The information is always summarized, simplified, and gappy. But the news audience doesn’t have access to all the raw noise filled data that the reporters see, who themselves miss a lot. Nevertheless, the city’s collective conception of itself is heavily driven by what comes from the news media.
On regress, I think we have to be careful here not to be tripped up by the limitations of language. When we use words like “we” or phrases like “experience that directly”, we have to remember that we’re talking about how the components of “we”, the self, interact, and that experience is a process, a construction, with its own components, which we’re discussing when talking about things being inferred. So, at one level, “we” do “experience” things directly. But the ability of the self to experience either the environment or aspects of itself is subject to a wide number of limitations.
But Paul (#5), false beliefs don’t necessarily show illusion even in the weaker sense of misperceiving something that actually exists. After all (and without denying a continuum) there’s a difference between perception and belief. It’s not that whales *look* inherently fishy to most people; they just reasoned their way into that wrong conclusion. And philosophers have reasoned their way into a lot of wrong conclusions about qualia. But as to whether the man in the street *perceives* conscious experience to be those ways, I say “not guilty”.
Jochen (#7), you left something out. Judgments about the external world are not only mediated, but also typically relational. “Ann is a few feet away from Bob,” I judge, thereby not only pointing to Ann, but relating her to Bob and spatial distance and feet. If I say “this experience seems red” I thereby relate it to experiences of fire trucks, apples, and cherries. If I try to back away from any such commitments, I wind up just attending to something and saying “That!” in my head. But “That!” is just an exclamation, not a judgment. As soon as I try to describe anything, error becomes conceivable, though not necessarily significantly probable.
Paul Torek. True, there are beliefs that are reasoned falsely rather than perceived falsely. But when something is called an “illusion”, I interpret it as being about false perceptions. I suppose there are cases where we use “illusion” to refer to falsely reasoned beliefs. Is the perception of a whale as a fish really a falsely reasoned belief? That’s debatable. Without having thought about it for too long, my guess is that the brain uses a little of each to make the conclusion and the distinction between the two is mostly in the minds of philosophers and cognitive scientists. I will agree that reasoning is required to reach the conclusion that a whale is not a fish. However, there’s the perception of the whale breathing through its blowhole and its tail moving vertically.
1-15
When “That” happens Illusion-Disillusion may become two forces evolving to three forces as Presence…
…and may represent a ‘whole answer’ to “Why would you even think that”…
I find illusionism fairly convincing in that it explains ineffable qualia. Qualia are a blind spot in the system (consciousness). In order to grasp them, one would have to jump out of the system, but the system is oneself. The paradoxical nature is why Hofstadter had so much fun writing about all this stuff in GEB.
You can view qualia as meaningless cognitive symbols. You can swap one with another within its class, as per the spectral inversion experiment. It explains why certain reducible things like emotion are not properly considered quales. Emotion is thought with sensation. It doesn’t explain why there are classes of qualia: colors, tastes, sensation, etc. I wonder if synesthesia (tasting colors, etc.) is a clue here.
If we make the assumption that normally qualia appear the same to all of us, i.e. red appears the same to all of us, then qualia are a natural result of the architectures of our brains. We can further assume that animals perceive them the same as us, proportional to how far diverged our brains are from theirs. Synesthesia is then some kind of organic brain disorder that mixes qualia.
Has the source of ‘redness’ just kind of become opaque?
I mean, if you take a desert island example with a child growing up on it with an adult, what will happen? The adult might point at something that is the same color of the conscious entities title here. That adult might make a sound which most english speakers would identify as ‘red’.
Okay, say the child takes up that when pointed at, the thing to say or the word to think in the head is ‘red’.
Where’s the quale?
Is there really any access to ‘redness’, or have we just forgotten the teacher that pointed at a span of similar colour and made a noise and we linked the two up (arbitrarily), so now it appears there IS a ‘redness’? Rather than we’re just tossing around a made up word in responce to some responce to the world we don’t actually have any grasp on? Did quale simply arise from making too much of words?
I mostly agree with the author’s assumed architecture for getting from visual sensory stimulation to a “non-phenomenal property” (which I assume is a certain set of neuronal firing rates, one of his options for realization thereof) a specific value of which identifies a particular color name (eg, “reddish”). However, I find the author’s overall argument unconvincing because as best I can tell, it ultimately hinges on an assertion that phenomenal experience as we commonly understand it is inconsistent with some of his logical conclusions and therefore can’t exist. But I have a speculation about how phenomenal experience might emerge from the very architecture the author assumes. There’s a little more to it, but in brief the idea is as follows.
First, consider aural phenomenal experience. Aural sensory stimulation results in neural activity the details of which are transparent to our awareness. However, such neural activity manifests itself as the aural phenomenal experience of “audible sounds”, eg, a musical instrument playing a sustained concert A. Clearly, there is no actual “sound” in the head, that’s just the way the occurrence of the neural activity is presented to our awareness. Similarly, neural activity consequent to visual sensory stimulation is presented to our awareness as a field of patches of uniform, distinguishable regions representing corresponding regions of the FOV. We learn to associate color names with such regions and hence describe them as being this or that color. But they aren’t really “colored” in the sense we commonly use that word. Nevertheless, we get used to describing the content of our visual phenomenal experience using color names. We don’t describe our aural phenomenal experience that precisely since very few people learn to identify distinguishable tones with musical note names. Consequently, it’s easy to overlook that the manifestations of the results of stimulation of the two sensory modes are analogous. Hence, the (supposed) colors in visual phenomenal experience seem more mysterious than the sounds in aural phenomenal experience.
Of course, exactly how the manifestations are produced remains an open question, but one that seems likely to be answered more easily than the same question re visual phenomenal experience (as typically imagined) since the manifestations are not assumed to involve “colors” in mental processes, where none should be.
A Universe of movement, light and vibrations even enough for a I am or a Self to Be…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#/media/File:Cie_Chart_with_sRGB_gamut_by_spigget.png
A computer could model the visual chromacity using algorithms and simulate all of our color quales, but would not have our color experiences because we are not computers but systems of complex biochemistry which enact all of the forces of nature in our neurons to give us experience.
How I would evaluate it, we simply lose track of our internal processes at a certain point (which isn’t hard to imagine – we don’t have innate knowledge of the internal processes of our kidneys, for example, and no one disputes that). We actually have the opposite of ‘experience’ in as there is a certain event horizon where we can’t track ourselves responding to external or internal stimuli. This horizon we have for millennium called ‘experience’ or similar for a lack of physical ability to say anything else about it.
It would be very hard to make a computer that actually does the same processing as an on average human does past this horizon line. But no, it wouldn’t be impossible. At worst the requirement is material duplication of the materials that are involved in the process.
An AI could just as much have its own horizon line – but without working on it, it would likely occur in far different positions to a human.
We lived without knowing about the infra red spectrum for so very long, for simply being blind to it. But that was okay, because we didn’t know it so we didn’t have to say anything about it. But at a certain point in our own brains we run blind, as blind as we are to infra red. But processes clearly occur – so we had to account for it in some regards.
Solipsism would be true if we had no memory of the past and ability to predict the future. The illusionists seem to be fixated on visual qualities like patches of red and green. The illusionism of experienced qualia would be true if the visual system which is the most highly evolved system in nature were a standalone system which the language of illusionism attempts to do. The visual system is highly integrated into the other neural systems if you just follow the pathways into the limbic and motor system via the thalamus etc. With that in mind, the entire paper and theory is an interesting and easy read.
sTANDING ALONE AT A
24-25…
…’standing alone at an event horizon’…This is a great blog…
Download And Install Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mysteryapk” documents.