Flat thinking

Nick Chater says The Mind Is Flat in his recent book of that name. It’s an interesting read which quotes a good deal of challenging research (although quite a lot is stuff that I imagine would be familiar to most regular readers here). But I don’t think he establishes his conclusion very convincingly. Part of the problem is a slight vagueness about what ‘flatness’ really means – it seems to mean a few different things and at times he happily accepts things that seem to me to concede some degree of depth. More seriously, the arguments range from pretty good through dubious to some places where he seems to be shooting himself in the foot.

What is flatness? According to Chater the mind is more or less just winging it all the time, supplying quick interpretations of the sensory data coming in at that moment (which by the way is very restricted) but having no consistent inner core; no subconscious, no self, and no consistent views. We think we have thoughts and feelings, but that’s a delusion; the thoughts are just the chatter of the interpreter, and the feelings are just our interpretation of our own physiological symptoms.

Of course there is a great deal of evidence that the brain confabulates a great deal more than we realise, making up reasons for our behaviour after the fact. Chater quotes a number of striking experiments, including the famous ones on split-brain patients, and tells surprising stories about the power of inattentional blindness. But it’s a big leap from acknowledging that we sometimes extemporise dramatically to the conclusion that there is never a consistent underlying score for the tune we are humming. Chater says that if Anna Karenina were real, her political views would probably be no more settled than those of the fictional character, about whom there are no facts beyond what her author imagined. I sort of doubt that; many people seem to me to have relatively consistent views, and even where the views flip around they’re not nugatory. Chater quotes remarkable experiments on this, including one in which subjects asked political questions via a screen with a US flag displayed in the corner gave significantly more Republican answers than those who answered the same questions without the flag – and moreover voted more Republican eight months later. Chater acknowledges that it seems implausible that this one experiment could have conditioned views in a way that none of the subjects’ later experiences could do (though he doesn’t seem to notice that being able to hold to the same conditioning for eight months rather contradicts his main thesis about consistency); but in the end he sort of thinks it did. These days we are more cautious about the interpretation of psychological experiments than we used to be, and the most parsimonious explanation might be something wrong with the experiment. An hypothesis Chater doesn’t consider is that subjects are very prone to guessing the experimenter’s preferences and trying to provide what’s wanted. It could plausibly be the case that subjects whose questions were accompanied by patriotic symbols inferred that more right-wing answers would be palatable here, and thought the same when asked about their vote much later by the same experimenter (irrespective of how they actually voted – something we can’t in fact know, given the secrecy of the ballot).

Chater presents a lot of good evidence that our visual system uses only a tiny trickle of evidence; as little as one shape and one colour at a time, it seems. He thinks this shows that we’re not having a rich experience of the world; we can’t be, because the data isn’t there. But isn’t this a perverse interpretation? He accepts that we have the impression of a rich experience; given the paucity of data, which he evidences well, this impression can surely only come from internal processing and internal models – which looks like mental depth after all. Chater, I think, would argue that unconscious processing does take place but doesn’t count as depth; but it’s hard to see why not. In a similar way he accepts that we remember our old interpretations and feed them into current interpretations, even extrapolating new views, but this process, which looks a bit like reflection and internal debate, does not count as depth either. Here, it begins to look as if Chater’s real views are more commonsensical than he will allow.

But not everywhere. On feelings, Chater is in a tradition stretching back to William James, who held that our hair doesn’t stand on end because we’re feeling fear; rather, we feel fear because we’re experiencing hair-rise (along with feelings in the gut, goose bumps, and other physiological symptoms). The conscious experience comes after the bodily reaction, not before. Similar views were held by the behaviourists, of course; these reductive ideas are congenial because they mean emotions can be studied objectively from outside, without resort to introspection. But they are not very plausible. Again, we can accept that it sometimes happens that way. If stomach ache makes me angry, I may well go on to find other things to be angry about. If I go out at night and feel myself tremble, I may well decide it is because I am frightened. But if someone tells a ghost story, it is not credible that the fear doesn’t come from my conscious grasp of the narrative.

I think Chater’s argument for the non-existence of the self is perhaps his most alarming. It rests on a principle (or a dogma; he seems to take it as more or less self evident) that there is nothing in consciousness but the interpretation of sensory inputs. He qualifies this at once by allowing dreams and imagination, a qualification which would seem to give back almost everything the principle took away, if we took it seriously; but Chater really does mean to restrict us to thinking about entities we can see, touch or otherwise sense. He says we have no conscious knowledge of abstractions, not even such everyday ones as the number five. The best we can do is proxies such as an image of five dots, or of the numeral ‘5’. But I don’t think that will wash. A collection of images is not the same as the number five; in fact, without understanding what five is, we wouldn’t be able to pick out which groups of dots belonged to the collection. Chater says we rely on precedent, not principle, but precedents are useless without the interpretive principles that tell us when they apply. I don’t know how Chater, on his own account, is even aware of such things as the number five; he refuses to address the metaphysical issues beyond his own assertions.

I think Chater’s principle rules out arithmetic, let alone higher maths, and a good deal besides, but he presumably thinks we can get by somehow with the dots. Later, however, he invokes the principle again to dismiss the self. Because we have no sensory impressions of the self, it must be incoherent nonsense. But there are proxies for the self – my face in the mirror, the sound of my voice, my signature on a document – that seem just as good as the dots and numerals we’ve got for maths. Consistency surely requires that Chater either accepts the self or dumps mathematics.

As a side comment, it’s interesting that Chater introduces his principle early and only applies it to the self much later, when he might hope we have forgotten the qualifications he entered, and the issues over numbers. I do not suggest these are deliberate presentational tactics, rather they seem good evidence of how we often choose the most telling way of giving an argument unconsciously, something that is of course impossible in his system.

I’m much happier with Chater’s view of AI. Early on, he gives a brief account of the failure of the naive physics project, which attempted to formalise our ‘folk’ understanding of science. He seems to conflate this with the much wider project of artificial general intelligence, but he is right about the limitations it points to. He thinks computers lack the ‘elasticity’ of human thought, and are unlikely to acquire it any time soon.

A bit of a curate’s egg, then. A lot of decent, interesting science, with some alarming stuff that seems philosophically naive (a charge I hesitate to make because it is always possible to adduce sophisticated justifications for philosophical positions that seem daft on the face of it; indeed, that’s something philosophers particularly enjoy doing).

14 thoughts on “Flat thinking

  1. Pingback: Flat thinking – Health and Fitness Recipes

  2. I like that this post is often towards self’s relevance to science to function perhaps to everything, thanks…

  3. It sounds like Chater gets carried away with the limitations shown by neurological and psychological studies.

    James-Lange theory, the idea that the emotion is triggered, and cycles through the body before we consciously feel it, really captivated me when I first read about it. The problem is that there are many pathways between the lower level brain structures that generate reflexive affects, and the higher level cortical ones that construct felt emotions. And the fact that damage to intermediate structures, such as the amygdala, can reduce the experience of fear and other emotions, seems to be a major strike against James-Lange.

    As you note Peter, that doesn’t mean we can’t sometimes experience emotions due to the resonance loop between our interoceptive feelings (such as how our gut feels) and the cortical machinery that interprets those feelings as originating from emotions.

  4. Brain may be more like registration of emotion, sensation or mentation, for feeling of activity-self…

  5. On consistent views, it might be that some people are more ‘of the moment’ and some other people are more ‘stick in the mud’ adherent to certain views. Also on particular subjects they might differ in this – Nick is perhaps more ‘of the moment’ than he realised, yet he’s being a ‘stick in the mud’ consistent adherent that we don’t have consistent views. It’s possible that certain philosophical investigations of cognitive science cause a semi-akratic crash state like that.

    Also the picture used here looks like the main character from ‘Despicable Me’.

  6. A lot of overestimation goes on about the completeness and accuracy of scientific explanations. It’s clear that ‘awareness’ represents only a small slice of ‘mental goings-on’. There’s substantial evidence that, even with free choices decisions are made seconds before we are aware of making them. I like to advocate for a holistic or systemic approach because I think it mitigates the individual-centric biases that tend to obscure what is and what isn’t meaningful. For example, Cogito ergo Sum is compelling. But it is also somewhat tautological. I like to recast it as “Thought is occurring now,” which has the same ontological force, but encompasses the entire noetic-noematic landscape.

  7. I’m not fond of the test that suggests our choices are made before we are aware, because the test that conclusion comes from is based on basically choosing at random. In order to choose at random you HAVE to draw from a source that is beyond your conscious perception or otherwise its not random, it’d be decided!

    That said I think that internet is always lagging behind actions based on emotions (which is basically all actions when you trace their source for long enough). We all walk backwards into the future, kind of like we’re stuck in a cave facing a wall rather than the entrance of the cave or something!

  8. It may be worth recalling that on an evolutionary standpoint the W. James position cannot be avoided. Before human self-consciousness came up in evolution our animal ancestors had only bodily experiences and bodily reaction. It is only when our pre-human ancestors reached the perfromance of representing themselves as existing entities that they began to have conscious experiences.
    Regarding basic emotions like fear, it seems logically reasonable to consider that for us humans the conscious experience comes after the bodily reaction, not before. A heritage of our animal past. And behaviorists having supported similar views should not, I feel, be used as a negative argument because self-consciousness (representing oneself as an existing entity like we represent others) makes unavoidable the performance of introspection. And it is precisely that capability for introspection that makes possible the human analysis of our conscious experiences, allowing us to consider that some human emotions (like the sense of beauty) come before bodily reactions.

  9. Christophe, I’m not sure that’s strictly true. Psychology and sociology both recognize quite a large spectrum of states of conscious awareness. A newborn infant isn’t conscious in the same sense as a university-educated philosophy student, for example, even though the requisite hardware is there. Certain primates achieve an experimentally identifiable level of consciousness equal to, say, a 2 year old human. Whereas others rise to the level of self-awareness of a 5 year old. The point is, consciousness is an internal state which usually has certain external features. We certainly can’t deny that many lower animals exhibit behaviours which, in a human would evidence consciousness. And there are no grounds for denying they are having an internal experience of some kind.

  10. –Splintered Mind post–today–
    Hasn’t the slippery slope of consciousness been on-going since we left Socratic here-ism for Platonic there-ism…
    …That we seem to forget we are conscious–forgetting we have the only means at our disposal–our consciousness–with which to Be conscious…
    …Perhaps we have–just so much attention towards consciousness because everything else on this planet is so interesting that we set aside our consciousness–as though it does not need attention…

    #8 well said…

  11. Mike, I can only partialy agree with you. Evolution is indeed a continuity and the level n often contains elements of the n+1. True for phylogenetics (elements of self-consciousness in non human apes) and ontogenetics (preliminary sense of conscious self in babies). But there are some differences among levels that cannot today be explained by simple continuity. Self-consciousness is one of them.
    Agents capable of self-consciousness can globally think about themselves as existing entities, physically and mentaly. They are capable to represent themselves as such entities, and are capable to think about these representations. We humans naturaly recognize ourselves in mirrors, as existing entities we know about. Some apes sometimes touch marks on their heads when faced to a mirror (sometimes after a needed training). The MSR only illustrates some continuity in evolution.
    Regarding experiences, it is obvious that animals have their experiences (they feel pain). And apes probably have some complex feeling when seeing their hand hold a stick to catch termites. But this is far from being a consciousness of oneself as existing and acting in the environment. Animals experiences contain feelings about interactions with their environment and about proprioceptions. But these feelings cannot be related to a representation of oneself as an existing entity, precisely because animals do not possess such representations.
    This being said, I believe that we are getting close to an understanding about the nature of self-consciousness based on performances of life (keeping in mind that the nature of life is unknown). See my home page.

  12. Christophe, I understand your argument perfectly. But my interpretation would be that this is a semantic distinction only. In the end, it is just a different degree of the same phenomenon which is the referent. I agree that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny works well here. I also agree that life-performances is a good concept. I am, at heart, a pragmatist. Other than self-awareness itself, are the pragmatic consequences of a ‘merely conscious’ entity different from those of a ‘self-conscious’ entity in typical contexts?

    Good discussion.

  13. Christophe 8 & 11

    That was a lovely observation you made about the evolution of emotions and consciousness.

    It is unfortunate you missed the mark by trying to say primates have no sense of self. It seems more likely that there is a continuum from simple life forms to more complex where consciousness starts, expands and becomes more complex (such as single cell animals which have no self through worms, fish, lizards, small mammals to apes). The sense of self isn’t just one thing, it starts with just representing your own physical self and gets more complex until we finally have a full autobiographical representation of self. Apes likely have a fairly highly developed sense of self.

    Damasio’s book “Self Comes to Mind” is a good read on the subject of the self’s role in consciousness.

  14. some people tend to be more instinctive types/flat thinkers stuck in fallacies, others – aren’t.

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