Monthly Archives: November 2018

Can we talk about this?

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Can we even talk about qualia, the phenomenal parts of conscious experience? Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent, as Wittgenstein advised, not lingering to resolve the paradoxical nature of the very phrase ‘whereof we cannot speak’ – it seems to do the very thing that it specifies cannot be done. We see what he meant, perhaps.

There is certainly a difficulty of principle in talking about qualia, to do with causality. Qualia have no causal effects – if they did, they would be an observable part of the world of physics, and it is part of their essential definition that they are outside, or over and above, the mere physical account. It follows, notoriously, that whatever we say or write about qualia cannot have been caused by them. At first glance this seems to demolish the whole discussion; no-one’s expressed belief in qualia can actually be the causal result of experiencing them.

But it is possible to talk sensibly of things that did not cause the talk. It takes a weirdly contorted argument to defend the idea that when I refer to Julius Caesar, the old Roman himself caused me to do it, but perhaps we can lash something together. It’s worse that I can talk of Nero and Zero the rollicking Romans, who existed only as heroes of a cartoon strip. If you’re still willing to grant them some causal role in physics, perhaps somehow through the material existence of the paper and ink in which they were realised, remember that I can even talk intelligibly about Baesar, who has no existence whatever, and in all likelihood was never spoken of before. He really cannot have caused me to write that last sentence.

So I would say that the absence of causal effects does not provide a knock-down reason why I cannot speak of qualia, though the fact that the other cases without causality involve entities that are fictions or delusions cannot be comfortable if I  want my qualia to be real. It seems as if there must be a sort of pre-established harmony effect going on, so that my words remain truthful on the matter even though they are not causally determined by it, which feels, as technical metaphysicians say, kind of weird.

But apart from the difficulty of principle, it seems awfully difficult to speak of qualia in practice too. How can we verbally pick out a particular quale? With real things, we choose one or more of their most salient attributes; with imaginary entities, we just specify similar properties. But qualia have no individual attributes of their own; the only way to pick them out is by mentioning the objective sensation they accompany. So, we typically get a quale of red, or a red quale. This is pretty unsatisfactory, because it means many interesting questions are excluded from consideration. We cannot really ask whether every sensation has a quale; we cannot ask how many qualia there are, because our way of referring to them just has baked into it the assumption that they exactly match up with the objective sensations. If green, as a matter of fact, was the only colour with no qualia, the fact would be occluded from us by the only language we can use to discuss the matter.

All of this might seem enough to justify our concluding that talk of qualia adds nothing to talk of objective sensations, so that even if, by some uncovenanted harmony, our talk of qualia proves to be metaphysically true, it has absolutely no informative value, and might as well be abandoned. What remains is the unconquerable conviction that there is something there, or to use the little phrase on which so much metaphysical weight has been rested, ‘there is something it is like’ to, for example, see red.

Can this phrase be explicated into something clearer? The first problem is the ‘it’; are we actually speaking of anything there? To me it seems that the ‘it’ in ‘something it is like’ is as merely grammatical as the ‘it’ in ‘it is raining’, which does not cause us to entertain the idea that there is something ineffable and non-physical about precipitation. The second problem is the ‘like’ which suggests we are making a comparison while leaving it quite unclear what is being compared. Is seeing red meant to be like seeing another colour? Is seeing red phenomenally meant to be like seeing red objectively (whatever that would mean)? In fact we seem obliged to conclude that no actual comparison is being made. Suppose we assert of hang-gliding or our first taste of champagne ‘there’s nothing like it!’  Are we managing here to assert after all that these experiences are unaccompanied by qualia? Surely not. If anything we’re saying that the relevant qualia are exceptionally powerful.

In the end, doing my honest best, I think ‘there is something it is like to see red’ simply asserts that the experience of seeing red really exists. I’m fine with that, and there are genuine mysteries attached; but there still seems to be nothing more we can say about qualia as a result. Haven’t we all been a bit too accepting for a bit too long of ‘there Is something it is like’?

Good vibrations?

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Is resonance the answer? Tam Hunt thinks it might be.

Now the idea that synchronised neuron firing might have something to do with consciousness is not new. Veterans of consciousness will recall a time when 40 hertz was thought to be the special, almost magical frequency that generated consciousness; people like Francis Crick thought it might be the key to the unity of consciousness and a solution to the binding problem. I don’t know what the current state of neurology on this is, but it honestly seems most likely to me that 40 hertz, or a rate in that neighbourhood, is simply what the brain does when it’s thrumming along normally. People who thought it was important were making a mistake akin to taking a car’s engine noise for a functional component (hey, no noise, no move!).

Hunt has a bit more to offer than simply speculating that resonance is important somehow, though. He links resonance with panpsychism, suggesting that neurons have little sparks of consciousness and resonance is the way they get recruited into the larger forms of awareness we experience. While I can see the intuitive appeal of the idea, it seems to me there are a lot of essential explanatory pieces missing from the picture.

The most fundamental problem here is that I simply don’t see how resonance between neurons could ever explain subjective experience. Resonance is a physical phenomenon, and the problem is that physical stuff just doesn’t seem to supply the ‘what-it-is-like’ special quality of experience. Hard to see why co-ordinated firing is any better in that essential respect than unco-ordinated. In fact, in one respect resonance is especially unsuitable; resonance is by its nature stable. If it doesn’t continue for at least a short period, you haven’t really got resonance. Yet consciousness often seems fleeting and flowing, moving instantaneously and continuously between different states of awareness.

There’s also, I think, some work needed on the role of neurons. First, how come our panpsychist ascent starts with neurons? We either need an account of how we get from particles up to neurons, or an account of why consciousness only starts when we get up to neurons (pretty complex entities, as we kee finding out). Second, if resonating neurons are generating consciousness, how does that sit with their day job? We know that neurons transmit signals from the senses and to the muscles, and we know that they do various kinds of processing. Do they generate consciousness at the same time, or is that delegated to a set of neurons that don’t have to do processing?  If the resonance only makes content conscious, how is the content determined, and how are the resonance and the processing linked? How does resonance occur, anyway? Is it enough for neurons to be in sync, so that two groups in different hemispheres can support the same resonance? Can a group of neurons in my brain resonate with a group in yours? If there has to be some causal linkage or neuronal connection, isn’t that underlying mechanism the real seat of consciousness, with the resonance just a byproduct?

What about that panpsychist recruitment – how does it work? Hunt says an electron or an atom has a tiny amount of consciousness, but what does ‘tiny’ mean? Is it smaller in intensity, complexity, content, or what? If it were simply intensity, then it seems easy enough to see how a lot of tiny amounts could add up to something more powerful, just as a lot of small lights can achieve the effect of a single big one. But for human consciousness to be no more than the consciousness of an atom with the volume turned up doesn’t seem very satisfactory. If, on the other hand, we’re looking for more complexity and structure, how can resonance, which has the neurons all doing the same thing at the same time, possibly deliver that?

I don’t doubt that Hunt has answers to many of these questions, and perhaps it’s not reasonable to expect them all in a short article for a general readership. For me to suspend my disbelief, though, I do really need a credible hint as to the metaphysical core of the thinking. How does the purely physical phenomenon of resonance produce the phenomenal aspect of my conscious experience, the bit that goes beyond mere data registration and transmutes into the ineffable experience I am having?

A different Difference Engine

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Consciousness as organised energy is the basis of a new theory offered by Robert Pepperell; the full paper is here, with a magazine article treatment here.

Pepperell suggests that we can see energy as difference, or more particularly actualised difference – that is to say, differences in the real world, not differences between abstract entities. We can imagine easily enough that the potential energy of a ball at the top of a slope is a matter of the difference between the top and bottom of the slope, and Pepperell contends that the same is equally true of the kinetic energy of the ball actually rolling down. I’m not sure that all actualised differences are energy, but that’s probably just a matter of tightening some definitions; we see what Pepperell is getting at. He says that the term ‘actualised difference’ is intended  to capture the active, antagonistic nature of energy.

He rejects the idea that the brain is essentially about information processing, suggesting instead that it processes energy. He rightly points to the differing ways in which the word ‘information’ is used, but if I understand correctly his chief objection is that information is abstract, whereas the processing of the brain deals in actuality; in the actualised difference of energy, in fact.

This is crucial because Pepperell wants us to agree that ‘there is something it is like’ to undergo actualised difference. He claims we can infer this by examining nature; I’m not sure everyone will readily agree, but the idea is that we can see that what it is like to be a rope under tension differs from what it is like to be the same rope when slack. It’s important to be clear that he’s not saying the rope is conscious; having a ‘what it is like’ is for him a more primitive level of experience, perhaps not totally unlike some of the elementary states of awareness that appear in panpsychist theories (but that’s my comparison, not his).

To get the intuition that Pepperell is calling on here, I think we need to pay attention to his exclusion of abstract entities. Information-based theories take us straight to the abstract level, whereas I think  Pepperell sees ‘something it is like’ as being a natural concomitant of actuality, or at any rate of actualised difference. To him this seems to be evident from simple examination, but again I think many will simply reject the idea as contrary to their own intuitions.

If we’re ready to grant that much, we can then move on to the second part of the theory, which takes consciousness to be a reflexive form of what-it-is-likeness. Pepperell cites the example of the feedback patterns which can be generated by pointing a video camera at its own output on a screen. I don’t think we are to take this analogy too literally, but it shows how a self-referential system can generate output that goes far beyond registration if the input. The proposal also plays into a relatively common intuition that consciousness, or at least some forms of it, are self-referring or second order, as in the family of HOT and HOP theories.

Taken all in all, we are of course a long way from a knock-down argument here; in fact it seems to me that Pepperell does not spend enough time adumbrating the parts of his theory that most need clarification and defence. I’m left not altogether seeing why we should think it is like anything to be a rope in any state, nor convinced that reflexive awareness of our awareness has any particular part to play in the generation of subjective consciousness (it obviously has something to do with self-awareness). But the idea that ‘something it is like’ is an inherent part of actuality does have some intuitive appeal for me, and the idea of using that as a base for the construction of more complex forms of consciousness is a tantalising start, at least.