What if consciousness is just a product of our non-conscious brain, ask Peter Halligan and David A Oakley? But how could it be anything else? If we take consciousness to be a product of brain processes at all, it can only come from non-conscious ones. If consciousness had to come from processes that were themselves already conscious, we should have a bit of a problem on our hands. Granted, it is in one sense remarkable that the vivid light of conscious experience comes from stuff that is at some level essentially just simple physical matter – it might even be that incredulity over that is an important motivator for panpsychists, who find it easier to believe that everything is at least a bit conscious. But most of us take that gap to be the evident core fact that we’re mainly trying to explain when we debate consciousness.
Of course, Halligan and Oakley mean something more than that. Their real point is a sceptical, epiphenomenalist one; that is, they believe consciousness is ineffective. All the decisions are really made by unconscious processes; consciousness notices what is happening and, like an existentialist, claims the act as its own after the fact (though of course the existentialist does not do it automatically). There is of course a lot of evidence that our behaviour is frequently influenced by factors we are not consciously aware of, and that we happily make up reasons for what we have done which are not the true ones. But ‘frequently’ is not ‘invariably’ and in fact there seem to be plenty of cases where, for example, our conscious understanding of a written text really does change our behaviour and our emotional states. I would find it pretty hard to think that my understanding of an email with important news from a friend was somehow not conscious, or that my conscious comprehension was irrelevant to my subsequent behaviour. That is the kind of unlikely stuff that the behaviourists ultimately failed to sell us. Halligan and Oakley want to go quite a way down that same unpromising path, suggesting that it is actually unhelpful to draw a sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious. They will allow a kind of continuum, but to me it seems clear that there is a pretty sharp distinction between the conscious, detached plans of human beings and the instinct-driven, environment-controlled behaviour of animals, one it is unhelpful to blur or ignore.
One distinction that I think would be helpful here is between conscious and what I’ll call self-conscious states. If I make a self-conscious decision I’m aware of making it; but I can also just make the decision; in fact, I can just act. In my view, cases where I just make the decision in that unreflecting way may still be conscious; but I suspect that Halligan and Oakley (like Higher Order theorists) accept only self-conscious decisions as properly conscious ones.
Interesting to compare the case put by Peter Carruthers in Scientific American recently; he argues that the whole idea of conscious thought is an error. He introduces the useful idea of the Global Workspace proposed by Bernard Baars and others; a place where data from different senses can be juggled and combined. To be in the workspace is to be among the contents of consciousness, but Carruthers believes only sensory items get in there. He’s happy to allow bits of ‘inner speech’ or mental visualisation, deceptive items that mislead us about our own thoughts; but he won’t allow completely abstract stuff (again, you may see some resemblance to the ‘mentalistic’ entities disallowed by the behaviourists). I don’t really know why not; if abstractions never enter consciousness or the workspace, how is it that we’re even talking about them?
Carruthers thinks our ‘Theory Of Mind’ faculty misleads us; as a quick heuristic it’s best to assume that others know their own mental states accurately, and so, it’s natural for us to think that we do too: that we have direct access and cannot be wrong about whether we, for example, feel hungry. But he thinks we know much less than we suppose about our own motives and mental states. On this he seems a little more moderate than Halligan and Oakley, allowing that conscious reflection can sometimes affect what we do.
I think the truth is that our mental, and even our conscious processes, are in fact much more complex and multi-layered than these discussions suggest. Let’s consider the causal efficacy of conscious thought in simple arithmetic. When I add two to two in my head and get four, have the conscious thoughts about the sum caused the conscious thought of the answer, or was there an underlying non-conscious process which simply waved flags at a couple of points?
Well, I certainly can do the thing epiphenomenally. I can call up a mental picture of the written characters, for example, and step through them one by one. In that case the images do not directly cause each other. If I mentally visualise two balls and then another two balls and then mentally count them, perhaps that is somewhat different? Can I think of two abstractly and then notice conceptually that its reduplication is identical with the entity ‘four’? Carruthers would deny it, I think, but I’m not quite sure. If I can, what causal chain is operating? At this point it becomes clear that I really have little idea of how I normally do arithmetic, which I suppose scores a point for the sceptics. The case of two plus two being four is perhaps a bad example, because it is so thoroughly remembered I simply replay it, verbally, visually, implicitly, abstractly or however I do it. What if I were multiplying 364 by 5? The introspective truth seems to be that I do something akin to running an algorithm by hand. I split the calculation into separate multiplications, whose answer I mainly draw direct from memory, and then I try to remember results and add them, again usually relying on remembered results. Does my thinking of four times five and recalling that the answer is twenty mean there was a causal link between the conscious thought and the conscious result? I think there may be such a link, but frustratingly if I use my brain in a slightly different way there may not be a direct one, or there may be a direct one which is not of the appropriate kind (because, say, the causal link is direct but irrelevant to the mathematical truth of the conclusion).
Having done all that, I realise that since I’m multiplying by five, I could have simply multiplied by ten, which can be done by simply adding a zero (Is that done visually – is it necessarily done visually? Some people cannot conjure up mental images at all.) and halving the result. Where did that little tactic come from? Did I think of it consciously, and was its arrival in reportable condition causally derived from my wondering about how best to do the sum (in words, or not in words?) or was it thrust into a kind of mental in-tray (rather spookily) by an unconscious part of my brain which has been vaguely searching around for any good tricks for the last couple of minutes? Unfortunately I think it could have happened in any one of a dozen different ways, some of which probably involve causally effective conscious states while others may not.
In the end the biggest difference between me and the sceptics may come down to what we are prepared to call conscious; they only want the states I’m calling self-conscious. Suppose we take it that there is indeed a metaphorical or functional space where mental items become ‘available’ (in some sense I leave unclarified) to influence our behaviour. It could indeed be a Global Workspace, but need not commit us to all the details of that theory. Then they allow at most those items actually within the space to be conscious, while I would allow anything capable of entering it. My intuition here is that the true borderline falls, not between those mental items I’m aware of and those I merely have, but between those I could become aware of if my attention were suitably directed, and those I could never extract from the regions where they are processed, however I thought about it. When I play tennis, I may consciously plan a strategy, but I also consciously choose where to send the ball on the spur of the moment; that is not normally a self-conscious decision, but if I stopped to review it it easily could become one – whereas the murky Freudian reasons why I particularly want to win the game cannot be easily accessed (without lengthy therapy at any rate) and the processes my visual cortex used to work out the ball’s position are forever denied me.
My New Year resolution is to give up introspection before I plunge into some neo-Humean abyss of self-doubt.
Avoiding putting too much trust in introspection is a good idea. It’s not reliable for understanding the mind.
The basic idea of the linked article struck me as self-evident, at least unless we bring in dualism as an option. But it doesn’t seem like we could discuss consciousness if it didn’t have at least some causal influence, not to mention that an epiphenomenal consciousness wouldn’t provide any survival benefit from an evolutionary perspective.
On whether consciousness must include self-consciousness to *be* consciousness, I don’t think there is a fact of the matter on this. It’s a matter of which definition of “consciousness” we want to use. Primary consciousness is widespread in vertebrates. But metacognition, the ability to introspect, seems far less prevalent.
Consciousness is to unconscious processes as a house is to bricks and wood.
Some might feel its sensible to argue that the house has no function, its just the combined function of all the bricks and wood that does all the work. But it’s a lawyer’s argument, rhetorical and without substance.
Of course it’s ok to talk about the function of the house, its a different level of explanation.
Conscisouness must come from unconscious processes, because consciousness itself comes unconsciously bidden. We can’t readily think our way through to turning our consciousness off. It just happens without our conscious will.
I think it is problematic to talk of conscious and unconscious processes. This is the same fallacy as Searle committed with his famous Chinese Room. Dividing the brain into two kinds of process can only be done with a detailed understanding of how the brain works and, I suspect, a more precise definition of what makes a process “conscious”.
It’s like asking which parts of a car make it go. We can only answer this by having a detailed understanding of how a car works and a more precise definition of what we mean by a “go process”. Even if we have both these things, it still seems arbitrary and useless. The fuel tank is definitely required for the car to go very far but does the fuel tank “go” in any reasonable sense?
The problem is that a car’s ability to go is pretty much an emergent property, a property of the car as a whole, rather than a property that some of its parts have. Same for consciousness in the brain. Consciousness is something the brain does and it seems likely it involves some processes in the brain and not others. It’s just not well-defined to say any one of these processes is a “conscious process”.
Paul, a “conscious process” could be well defined, like, say, a process whose input constitutes a symbolic sign, and whose output serves a purpose relative to a meaning of the symbolic sign. Then you could identify a mechanism which could potentially have millions of such symbolic signs as input, and some internal mechanism called, say, attention, for determining which subset of active inputs actually gets used to generate an output. That output could (in part) constitute a short-term memory which serves to boost the activity of long term memories which share similar features. Those long term memories might then become available as potential inputs, depending on how they interact with the attention mechanism.
So these millions of (symbolic sign) inputs acting as an “attention space”, combined with a short-term memory space, could make up a “global workspace”. At no time would any single set of information be globally broadcast (how inefficient would that be), but any two inputs could theoretically be combined into a concept in the short-term memory space, and, under the right circumstances, possibly be turned into a long term memory and thus part of the attention space.
Now where could we find a mechanism known to have millions of inputs from sensory areas of the brain as well as executive parts of the brain as well as linguistic parts of the brain, …
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[all roads lead to the thalamus]
“…Their real point is a sceptical, epiphenomenalist one; that is, they believe consciousness is ineffective. All the decisions are really made by unconscious processes; consciousness notices what is happening and, like an existentialist, claims the act as its own after the fact…”
Peter, I’m guessing that if pressed you would restrict conscious episodes to those involving phenomenal experience, e.g., experiences with sensory qualities such that there is something it is like to undergo them (pain, red, the usual suspects). To be conscious and engage in conscious activity is for there to be something it is like to engage in it, even if it’s just thinking a thought. If there is nothing it is like, then there’s nothing conscious about the episode (e.g., talking in one’s sleep).
So the question of the efficacy of consciousness, construed as phenomenal experience, is whether experienced qualities play causal roles in behavior over and above their neural correlates. From a third-person scientific perspective, it doesn’t look like they do, since qualities don’t ever appear in materialist explanations of behavior; they aren’t observables which are in a position to play, or not play, causal roles. But the observable neural processes associated with consciousness certainly *are* involved in such explanations, and if we call these processes “conscious processes” then that gives consciousness thus construed a causal role, e.g., in the way you say it does when playing tennis.
From a third-person perspective all of that conscious cognizing you do on the court is efficacious in terms of certain neural goings-on – the conscious processes – but not in terms of the *qualitative* goings-on that only you are privy to. This doesn’t worry me since the neural mechanisms get the job done quite handily. And since (private, unobservable) phenomenal experience doesn’t appear in the same causal, explanatory space of its observable neural correlates, I don’t think it’s fair to call it epiphenomenal or ineffective with respect to behavior.
No, actually I wouldn’t want to go that way.
It seems odd to use a task like walking (or driving) that we have to learn. We didn’t just install a program and gain the skill a la Neo in the Matrix, these unconscious tasks had to be ingrained as habits (I think it was Ravaisson who noted this? That it’s more like training an animal within you – sadly this is second hand, haven’t read On Habit).
In fact whether it’s walking, driving, cooking, and so on it seems these tasks aren’t discretely unconscious or conscious but rather there is a spectrum between something like a reflexively dealing w/ an itch while at the movies and something I’m actively learning and needing focus.
How is”consciousness” defined/measured, inter subjectively, across species? Over what time frame?
James. Yes, a conscious process could be well-defined, as I specifically indicated. However, it could only be done if we already knew how the brain works, which we do not. Your example is imaginary. I am not saying it couldn’t be true, just that we don’t have knowledge that comes close to the level indicated by your example. I am not at all convinced by arguments about what signals feed into what areas of the brain. We haven’t even been able to resolve what the signals represent or what the brain areas do.
“No, actually I wouldn’t want to go that way.” (6)
I’m wondering what picks out conscious episodes if not phenomenal experience on your view?
As I recall Searle abandoned the Chinese Room argument for the stronger claim that “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” is not even wrong as the idea is completely nonsensical. (The paper’s title is the question in quotes)
That said I think Lanier, having a compsci background, makes the argument clearer in “You Can’t Argue with a Zombie”.
Is Observation becoming independent enough, in the global work space…
That, humans working towards sustaining Being Here, any where in this global work space…
…then defines and describes consciousness and experience, for our global work space…
SAP writes, “not to mention that an epiphenomenal consciousness wouldn’t provide any survival benefit from an evolutionary perspective.” That’s putting it mildly! Conscious processes increase the brain’s thirst for glucose, which is already highly demanding. There is no frickin way that evolution would put up with that kind of resource drain for an ineffective activity. A kind of creature that had epiphenomenal consciousness wouldn’t last longer than a generation or two.
The blithe overlooking of this point by epiphenomenalists always make me suspect they’re secret dualists – and maybe they’re keeping the secret from themselves, as well as the rest of us.
Either that, or they’re giving us the lawyer’s argument that Stephen Pritchard points out.
Paul in 13: “Conscious processes increase the brain’s thirst for glucose, which is already highly demanding. There is no frickin way that evolution would put up with that kind of resource drain for an ineffective activity.”
Agreed, but we needn’t appeal to the experiential, phenomenal aspect of conscious (neural) processes to account for the functional advantages that got them naturally selected. And it’s that aspect that picks them out as *conscious* processes. What is experience per se good for, I wonder? (related commentary in 5 above)
There is an extended paper by these authors at
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full
also with a commentary. It includes a great Enid Blyton quotation, which covers what I think is a key point – when you are talking, for example giving a report of your current conscious experience, you are talking far too fast for it to be a conscious process.
Re: the paper, the last part about somehow still having free will and personal responsibility seems in direct contrast to what came before…to the point it almost seems like some artistic attempt at ironic(right term?) comedy.
This seems to be the classic problem of comaptiblists, they want their determinist materialist physical closure but don’t want to face the implications of what they are arguing for.
Tom #14,
We needn’t appeal to the internal combustion aspect of cars to explain their driving uphill or accelerating. After all, I just saw a Tesla, which has no internal combustion, perform these activities very well.
That doesn’t mean we can take the internal combustion engine out of *my* car and have it work just fine. Just because you can build an X that does Y without Z, doesn’t mean that no X’s rely on their Z to do Y.
Paul, I’ve got no argument with what you say in 17. What I don’t get is how phenomenal experience – the hallmark of conscious processes – plays an additional causal role above and beyond what its neural correlates play in behavior control. Can you shed light on that?
Tom, I’m not seeing any daylight between a phenomenal experience and the neural processes that embody it. So there’s no “above and beyond” to be queried. See also Stephen Pritchard’s comment #2.
Tom (#18), what if the phenomenal experience simply is an abstract reference to the neural correlate?
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Paul: “I’m not seeing any daylight between a phenomenal experience and the neural processes that embody it.”
If there is none (such that they are identical), then we don’t need to refer to phenomenal experience in explaining behavior, only the neural goings-on. But experience per se is what picks out conscious neural processes as opposed to unconscious neural processes. If experience doesn’t play its own additional role, then what makes conscious processes special compared to unconscious processes, such that they were naturally selected for? It could only be their cognitive functions, not experience per se. I still don’t see what experience is good for, so if you have any ideas do tell.
There’s still the possibility that “we” are just social intermediaries that communicate with other epiphenomena and have no real say in calling the shots. It may still just be a spectator sport to us, yet we serve a vital evolutionary function all the same, that of communicating to the largely unconscious agents that actually get things done.
The beauty (or horror) of it is that the illusion could be utterly seamless, and it strikes at the very heart of notions like “free will”. If you aren’t actually the entity calling the shots, does it really matter what you think or will at all?
“I’m not seeing any daylight between a phenomenal experience and the neural processes that embody it.”
Me either. Once we know how the brain works, along with its consciousness subsystem/component/?, my guess is we’ll all wonder why it was ever an issue. Until then, people need to ask themselves a simple question. What should perception of one’s own brain’s functioning be like anyway? The “miracle” of consciousness is really just a reflection of the miracle that is the whole brain. Or, putting it another way, why do we think how consciousness works is a special mystery when we don’t really know how the brain works, of which consciousness is just a part?
Consciousness is a mechanism by which we can reinforce or suppress thoughts that affect our survival. Consciousness allows us to roll ideas around in our head and to allow those ideas to be processed by more brain subsystems. I obviously have no proof of this but I believe it is a plausible reason for consciousness’ existence and evolution.
Good ?ay of describing, and g?od piece off writing tto t?ke ?nformation ab?ut m? presentation subject, ?hich ? am going to convey ?n school.
Consciousness as in Subjectivity is only mysterious if we insist the physical is limited to that which fits into a perfect mathematical reducible-to-physics description…but it’s arguable nothing does, since it’s questionable that description of relations fully give us knowledge of relata.
For example there doesn’t seem to be complete knowledge of Causation found within mathematical description either, going back to Feynman “complaining” about the seemingly random 4 out of 100 photons reflected off a mirror surface layer.
Is comparing ‘unconsciousness and consciousness’ like comparing low energy particles and high energy particles…
…”Cosmic rays are not the only sign of high energy particles in the distant universe. Additional evidence comes (like most astronomical data) from visible light and other types of electromagnetic waves, e.g. x-rays and radio waves.
Such waves usually arise in one of two ways–by “photon processes” and by processes resembling the broadcasting of radio waves…
…Photon processes are related to the quantum nature of light, discovered only in the 20th century, by which light or any other electromagnetic wave is only created or absorbed in definite “energy packets” called photons. The shorter the wavelength, the more energetic the photon–for instance, since blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light, its photons are more energetic. Certain black-and-white films can be safely handled in photographic darkrooms illuminated by deep red light, because the red photons do not carry enough energy to initiate the chemical changes that darken the film.
Photons of visible light have about 2 electron volts (ev), while medical x-ray photons may have energies of 50,000 ev and those of gamma rays reach 1,000,000 ev and even more.”
Every composition of particles in this cosmic ray seem to be doing something, what is our composition of particles to be doing, today…
@Arnold: Well according to a paper a few posts down many physicists think of energy as a fictional placeholder. 🙂
I think Paul (Comment 23) has the right of it. Consciousness seems to me to be in no more (but no less) need of explanation than the rest of brain activity. That having been said, I’d guess that from an evolutionary perspective consciousness is a great advantage if it makes our mental activity available to be shared. Could human beings have language without consciousness? Could we have civilization without language? If consciousness is a necessary precondition for the development of language that would at least make it worth it’s glucose. Obviously, claiming that consciousness give evolutionary advantages that make it worth it’s glucose is not the same as explaining how it works. I don’t know if we have anything like enough knowledge about brain mechanics to make philosophical speculation much more than a source of entertainment.
Michael (29), I don’t think anyone disputes the functional, adaptive role of the brain processes associated with conscious experience, including their role in language and communication. But it isn’t brain processes that define consciousness and that pick out conscious episodes, it’s conscious *experience* – the phenomenology of what it’s like to be conscious, e.g., to undergo pain. What isn’t clear to me, and I’ve never come across a good account of it, is how the experience of pain adds to what its neural correlates accomplish in learning and behavior control. If, as Paul Torek suggests, the experience of pain is *identical* to its neural correlates, then that experience can’t play an additional causal role beyond what the neurons are doing. In which case, conscious processes (the neural processes associated with our having experiences) aren’t anymore causally effective than unconscious processes with respect to our having experiences, but only with respect to their functions.
I do see a bit more in speculation than pure entertainment. Speculation on the consciousness mechanism may inspire experimentation, both psychological and neurobiological. IMHO, this is way more important than looking for a supernatural component to consciousness. One reason we are interested in animal consciousness is that we can compare human abilities to animal abilities to see what advantages we have over them that make our kind of consciousness worth the glucose, to borrow the phrase. I’m definitely not saying that animals lack consciousness. However, if we knew enough about consciousness to break it down into component functionalities, we could see which are missing in various animals and perhaps identify their particular evolutionary advantage.
Experiencing oneself is consciousness…
…it appears not as a before or after interacting-functioning, it appears as function in presence…
Its the philosopher’s work to present their efforts towards consciousness to all of humanity…
…suffering these efforts becomes an open door to values in our cosmos universe…
…like the effort ‘be here now’ and ‘what ever is needed is in front of you’…
Happy New Year
@Arnold: Sadly philosophy academia seems to have abandoned the kind of thing you speak of, see the intro to the Golden Chain.
Tom (21),
You “don’t need to refer to phenomenal experience” de dicto, but you still refer to them de re. Just as I refer to internal combustion de re when I say “the part of my car that provides the power”, even though I didn’t use the words internal combustion. Which answers what consciousness was naturally selected for: in perfect analogy to internal combustion, it’s *a* way of getting the job done. In the case of phenomenal consciousness, it provides the organism with *a* way to sense its own internal states. Doesn’t need to be the only conceivable way, and doesn’t need to have any *conceptual* connection between the survival function (self-regulation) and the mechanism (consciousness).
Hunt (22),
Sounds like you haven’t made up your mind. If consciousness is for communication, then it’s not epiphenomenal. What would happen to civilization if communication stopped? It would collapse. That’s very phenomenal, and not at all epi- 😉
Sci says “For example there doesn’t seem to be complete knowledge of Causation found within mathematical description either”
I would say instead, that the mathematical descriptions provided in physics describe all the causation that there actually is. Or at any rate, some future physics may do that, and I wouldn’t bet on it having a much richer notion of causation. People often have more demanding notions of Causation – but so much the worse for those.
@ Paul: “…I wouldn’t bet on it having a much richer notion of causation. People often have more demanding notions of Causation – but so much the worse for those.”
Causation would include questions such as “Why don’t the Laws of Physics change at certain times/places?” which one cannot see as being ultimately explicable within physics itself. Yet the question asks something obvious of the very ground physics rests upon.
That doesn’t seem demanding to me?
Not to go too far afield from the article, so I’ll just say it seems to me one can take a similar attitude to consciousness and the limits of mathematical description.
Each individual consciousness could still be pure epiphenomenal, while still playing a part in group communication. Picture two cars, each having a driver and a passenger. In each car the passenger talks over a one-way radio to the driver in the other car. Based on that, the driver of the other car decides where to drive. No other communication happens (let’s assume the passenger and driver are separated by a plastic partition, like a taxi cab). Each passenger has no control over their own driver; they are essentially passive epiphenomenon. Further, they are playing a very limited role. They might as well be speaking to the wind; however the driver of the other car is listening.
To be or not to be Is two questions ask by a person experiencing a moment, the coming and going, of consciousness…
I hope everyone realizes that whenever an analogy is used to describe consciousness, the analogy may be valid for the “thing” which is the analogy; but it is not valid for the “thing-in-itself” which is the true nature of consciousness. As a phenomenon, consciousness itself is outside the boundaries of analogues. Consciousness requires a new paradigm of reasoning not rationality, because rationality itself is the meta-problem of consciousness.
Sci.. the very ground that physics rests upon is a children’s story, one that adults have yet to outgrow; and that’s the story-book fairytale that there is this mystical, magical some “thing” that commands unwavering, unquestioning obedience from its unknowing, unsuspecting subjects. Do a mind experiment folks: What makes a meaningful relationship between two adults work? Unwavering, unquestioning obedience to a benevolent overlord; or is it something else?
Good luck…
Paul (34): “Which answers what consciousness was naturally selected for: in perfect analogy to internal combustion, it’s *a* way of getting the job done. In the case of phenomenal consciousness, it provides the organism with *a* way to sense its own internal states.”
Ok, just need an account of how phenomenal consciousness (experiences such as pain, sweet, red, etc.) accomplishes this sensing and why unconscious processes involving the same sorts of neural substrates are not up to the task (if indeed this is the function of consciousness). I still don’t see what the causal role of experience per se is, as distinct from the associated neural mechanisms that we know are operating in self-regulation and behavior control. Unless that role is specified, then I don’t see how phenomenal consciousness is getting *any* job done.
@ Lee: I’d agree that the underlying premises of physics being shaky from a metaphysical standpoint, but of course experimentally its success is incredible.
I expect similar success in neuroscience, with a similar explanatory gap if we insist science cannot extend beyond just mathematical modeling.
At least with Consciousness we have exploration of the qualitative “mysterious” side via psychology+humanities, whereas Causation offers no alternative doorway into its mysteries that I can think of.
Addendum: This timely Aeon essay on the blind spot in science:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience
Sci #36,
What’s the difference between laws of physics changing over place and time, and laws of physics being more complicated than we thought (by virtue of having extra time/place parameters)?
Although it reminds me of a lame joke I coined back when physicists wondered if the fine-structure constant was changing over time. God not only plays dice with the universe, He changes the rules in the middle of the game!
Hunt #37,
Your hypothesis has each driver listening to the “other car’s” passenger, which in evolutionary terms means listening to a person who has at best about 50% genetic similarity to themselves. But not listening to *their own car’s* “passenger”, who always has 100% genetic similarity, and thus is much more likely to have the driver’s best evolutionary interests at heart. I’ve got to give you credit: you’ve come up with a whole new way for epiphenomenalism to fly in the face of evolutionary biology.
Tom #40,
There’s no evidence for “unconscious processes involving the same sorts of neural substrates” as conscious ones. Unless you mean “same sorts” very broadly, in which case, trivially, nobody denies that there are unconscious neural processes. They just aren’t the ones informing the global neuronal workspace that (for example) this taste is sweet. Nor could the “associated neural processes” appear without consciousness – that’s the whole point of the identity theory. Now you may think the identity theory is wrong, but refusing to take it seriously is not a way of showing that it is wrong.
@ Paul Torek:
To bring in a quote from the subsequently mentioned Barkai paper:
“It is the ultimate purpose of this program to distill all found regularities to a minimal set of irreducible regularities, dubbed the laws of physics.”
Whatever that irreducible set is, we can ask why those regularities don’t become irregular/inconstant. Another way to look at the limitations of physics is to consider this essay by Hawking on physics & Godel’s Incompleteness:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/godel-and-the-end-of-physics.html
Paul (44), should the identity theory pan out then the causal powers of phenomenal consciousness are exactly those of its neural realizers. So one naturally wonders what the contribution of experience per se is, e.g., what role is played by the fact that the global neuronal workspace is being informed that this taste is sweet? In any case, scientific explanations of behavior will always default to neurally-realized processes subserving self-regulation and behavior control; they don’t and won’t bring in the qualitative, phenomenal character of experience as a causal player, simply because what’s available to observation and potential control are the neural correlates of consciousness, not the phenomenology. You will say that, given the identity hypothesis, in observing and controlling these neural processes, we are actually observing and controlling the phenomenology and therefore that it plays a causal role. But nowhere in scientific accounts of behavior is the qualitative character of experience (e.g., the fact that the neuronal workspace is informed that this taste is sweet) cited as an explanatory factor.
As a qualia realist (but not an identity theorist), I think we’re better off acknowledging a phenomenal-physical explanatory parallelism, in which third-person explanations traffic in the NCC and their functions, and first-person explanations traffic in phenomenal experience. About which see part 7 of the paper Peter discusses at https://www.consciousentities.com/2018/10/not-objectifiable/
Paul (31), I also see more value in speculation than mere entertainment, but I think some kinds of speculation are more likely to be valuable than others. Specifically philosophical speculation seems to me to be particularly prone to dualism or theism or some other sort of supernaturalism. It is therefore much less likely to inspire experimentation of any kind than other sorts of speculation.
Tom (30), if conscious experience is something different than or in addition to brain processes what sort of thing is it? What is it about consciousness that leads some people to believe it is in principle inexplicable by merely physical processes? I confess that I have never perceived my own consciousness to be miraculous, so I have never felt that it stands in need of any supernatural explanation. Maybe the better question might be what is it about some people that leads them to believe consciousness is in principle inexplicable by merely physical processes. I suggest if the experience of pain is identical to its neural correlates then it has no existence independent of them. I’d say based on your comments, particularly (46) you reject that idea. My sense is that some of us are dualists, qualia realists, phenomenalists etc. and some of us are materialists, physicalists, scientistics (meaning people prone to scientism) etc. for reasons of taste, personal history and so on. I consider myself a member of the latter tribe, but I concede the evidence does not yet suffice to rule out the other side.
Michael (47), my current hypothesis is that conscious experience is a species of representational content, and since as a rule we don’t find the terms of representation in the world as they represent it (e.g., we don’t find concepts or numbers in physical spacetime as they represent it in our theories), we shouldn’t expect to find qualia in the world either. And we don’t. We only find the physical objects that we perceive *in terms of* qualia. Why some representational content should end up as a private, qualitative, representational reality for cognitive systems like ourselves is an interesting, tough question. But as a naturalist I certainly don’t think there’s anything miraculous or supernatural going on, only that we are necessarily in a representational relation to reality such that we have to give representations their due, and not expect that content (e.g., qualia) will be identical to the physical vehicles that carry it (neurons). See the draft paper linked at https://www.consciousentities.com/2018/10/not-objectifiable/ for details and also “Dennett and the reality of red” at the website linked to my name above. Hope this helps!
Tom (46), I agree that scientists (today) don’t go around citing subjective experiential qualities to explain behavior. For the good reason that the “correlations” as you call them – identities, as I call them – are not solidly established. Once they are, such cautions can and should be thrown to the wind. A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. And so would the brain process that appreciates that sweetness.
Paul T., well at least we’re both qualia realists, not darn illusionists like Dennett and Frankish who claim that there’s nothing it is like to have experiences – no phenomenology.
Re identity, let’s say the correlations have been totally nailed down so we know exactly which sorts of neural processes are (in your words) identical to experiences. The interesting question to me is *what about* those processes makes them *identical to* experiences when other sorts of processes using broadly similar neural substrates are not? Seems to me it could only be the sorts of functions they perform as supported by their particular organization and information processing. But even after pinning down the functions we can ask why, for example, should the processes that “provide the organism with *a* way to sense its own internal states” be identical with experiences? It’s hard (for me) to resist the conclusion that phenomenology is some sort of entailment or outcome of instantiating those functions, which seems to me is somewhat different than saying it’s identical to those functions (but maybe not). It’s the nature of that entailment that I think constitutes the hard problem. But even on your identity theory, I think the question of *why* the identity holds needs an answer.
Tom Clark (50): I don’t believe Dennett denies experience. In fact, I think he has been forced to say this explicitly though I don’t have the reference at hand. Perhaps this comes from a common misunderstanding of “illusionism”, at least how Dennett uses the word. In everyday usage, “illusion” often refers to visions of things that are 100% imaginary. This corresponds to one definition: “a false idea or belief” (Google). But another is “a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses”. I think this latter definition more accurately captures Dennett’s meaning. Consciousness and experience are not how they appear to us. I would go even further to say that, via introspection, we are simply not a reliable source of explanation for our own consciousness and experience.
Dennett using “illusion” this way was a big mistake, IMHO. I wonder if he chose it deliberately to cause controversy.
Paul Topping (51), you’re right that Dennett doesn’t deny we have experiences, but he has long denied that we have *phenomenology*, construed as non-physical properties to which we have direct access (what he claims is the common conception of qualia). However, he grants that experiences involve representational contents, e.g., red, and it seems to me that such contents count as phenomenology: the “what it is like” to have an experience of red. So I think he should change his mind about the reality of phenomenology. See “Dennett and the reality of red” at the website linked to my name above – it is a careful assessment of his view as set forth in his latest book.
(Just to be clear, my comment in 50 was in response to Paul Torek in 49.)
I have read “Dennett and the reality of red” twice but I really have a hard time seeing what the conflict is about. As a computer scientist, I rely on more of a processing model of the human brain. Visual input sometimes gets processed into a signal that the human calls “red”. The simplest way to trigger that signal is by placing an object in front of the person that reflects the red part of the spectrum with sufficient lighting. Sometimes this same signal can be triggered internally by some other brain process (dream, hallucination, etc.), and sometimes it can be triggered by an external object that our instruments say is not red but lighting or other external conditions cause our brain to process it as red. This seems so straightforward to me that I have trouble understanding how “qualia” and “phenomenology” help. There are certainly mysteries as to how it all works but I’m not seeing the controversy your paper presents. It is probably just a matter of my ignorance of these philosophical terms but perhaps that is also a good thing. 😉
Paul (53), no worries if none of this seems like a problem to you. Lots of folks don’t share the puzzlement about how and why we have conscious experience and as you say maybe that’s just as well. They can be more productive!
Tom (50),
I think your question of why particular brain processes are identical to sweet subjective tastes, amounts to something like, why does THIS (looks at an fMRI scanner with a person in it drinking apple juice) feel like THIS (drinks apple juice). And that question has a meta-answer, in Chalmer’s language (the “meta-problem of consciousness”) which is that there will never be a satisfying object-level answer. Where by “satisfying” I mean “becomes intuitively obvious without leaning on the known correlations”. See my reply #6 to the Entangled Consciousness thread on this website.
Paul (55), I guess one way to approach this is to ask if any other identities in nature that we discover empirically (e.g., that water is H2O) pose the same puzzlement. I can’t think of any off the bat. So why should there be no satisfying answer to why certain brain states/processes just *are* experiences? That there isn’t is one reason that I think identity is the wrong relation, but here we part ways.
Tom,
The hard problem of consciousness is an epistemic one, although it often poses as ontological. And self-reference is key to the existence of the hard problem. Since water doesn’t have knowledge, there is no corresponding problem for it, regarding different routes to knowledge of its water-ness vs its H2O-ness. And for us, there is also no hard problem of H2O-ness, because there is no self-reference involved.
Paul (57), I’ve never cottoned to the epistemic/ontological distinction when it comes to characterizing problems, since one’s claimed ontology (what fundamentally exists) is always a function of what one claims to know (or is reasonably certain) exists. We get at the structure and nature of reality via our investigations of it, so we can’t really separate existence claims from knowledge claims. Re consciousness, we want to find out what sort of thing it is, and if you tell me that it’s identical to certain brain states or processes, that’s an ontological claim about what fundamentally exists, seems to me. To substantiate that claim, you have to provide evidence, relevant reasoning, inference to the best explanation, etc. to show that in fact you know it’s the case. Which of course you’ve tried to do to the best of your ability, as have I but to make the opposite case.
I like Peter Godfrey-Smith’s recent musings on the topic:
http://petergodfreysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Explanatory-Gap-2019-PGS-K-Dst2.pdf
“A materialist gives a story about how animals come to perceive, act, remember, and so on, and the critic says: “OK, but why should it feel like anything to be such an organism?” There will come a point where this seems a misguided question - a question asked because the critic is not seeing the nose on their face, or the wood for the trees, or the university for the colleges. At that point, we know the gap is closed. We are not at that stage yet.”
That consciousness: halts-stops at our subjectivity and objectivity, keeps us limited to duality…
…the ‘next stage’ could include adding neutrality to the ontology, making room for “phenomenal observation”…
This could relegate ‘phenomenal consciousness’ to (as) material…
1) Is Godfrey-Smith giving an explanatory disunity argument between biology & physics in conceiving how to cross the gap?
At the end he begins to talk of new physics – which renders physicalism at best promissory but arguably hollow as a metaphysics – but I’m not sure how we went from the input-output of non-living matter to organisms?
2) Isn’t the Hard Problem of H2O the Hard Problem of All Matter:
“What *is* matter beyond its relations in the equations, and why do those relations hold even if in probabilistic fashion?”
The latter part could be the Hard Problem of Causation, which Physicalism – like all the Isms – have to explain. It’s a problem from Consciousness, though potentially related.
One relation would be we need Intentionality to talk about causes, as that is how we discern the cause from the effect – by dividing the world into the human conception of the world we hold in our minds. Another would be Consciousness and Causation concern the actual nature of the relata whereas physicalism seems to fundamentally be about the study of their relations?
“Is Godfrey-Smith giving an explanatory disunity argument between biology & physics in conceiving how to cross the gap?”: I don’t think so. It’s just, as Bunge (whose PhD was on quasi-classical trajectories of the electron) realised in the 1950s, the kind of physics that can predict the trajectory of a fly or a soccer ball will look awfully like ethology or anthropology.
“from the input-output of non-living matter to organisms?”: This is the line going back to Bergson, I believe. That those processes that are self-sustaining/autopoeitic are ordinary matter, but by being the right kind of partitioning off from the environment automatically have a point of view, which was implicit, but developed a nervous system that, by evolution, explicitly matches that point of view. All the other kinds of partitioning are still there, but they don’t persist as a single unitary process going back 4.2 billion years or so. Current reading Ruyer’s Neofinalism (1953), where one chapter is ‘The Reciprocal Illusion of Incarnation and “Material” Existence’. It starts
“…The [dualistic] opposition, as it emerges from recent observations and experiments, is instead between (1) the organism as a set of tools or a set of organs insofar as they are tools and (2) consciousness (primary or secondary, organic or cerebral) that assembles multiple elements in such as way as to turn them into “amboceptors” in a causal chain and that thematically oversees the operation of organic machines, regulates them in case of lesion or failure, and thus gives to organic structures the property of equipotentiality…how can two types of existents as heterogeneous as consciousness and the body be intimately joined together in the unity of the living being?”
You may not like his solution: ‘the problem is illusory for the excellent reason that there is no body. The “body” is the byproduct of the perception of a being by another being. The perceived being is perceived by definition as an object…”. He doesn’t discuss qualia, ‘cos they didn’t exist back in 1953 😉
As to the hard problem of causation, there are heaps of physicists who talk causation all the time. I think specifically of Crutchfield.
Tom,
I agree the identity theory is an ontological claim. And regarding the epistemic routes to “sweet subjective taste” and “brain process” respectively, it, combined with neuroscience, makes specific predictions. (Or one might say, it gets out of the way of neuroscience, and lets it make the predictions. Whereas, substance dualist interactionism could make different predictions.)
The prediction from neuroscience is that sweetness is projected from the gustatory and olfactory cortex into the global neuronal workspace. By contrast, the “brain process” concept activates the visual cortex (pictures of brains) and verbal areas, and projects from there into the global neuronal workspace. So the epistemic routes to “sweetness” and “brain process” will be very different, and thinking about brain processes as such will, according to the identity hypothesis, never bring to mind sweetness, except insofar as the thinker knows of and refers to brain-mind correlations.
Of course, property dualism (your view?) makes exactly the same predictions as identity theory. At the cost of added complexity. It is like admitting that Clark Kent and Superman will always show up at exactly the same places, yet insisting that they are still two different people.
@ David Duffy: It is interesting to think the descriptions of organic entities could apply to inorganic entities (and vice versa). I’ve wondered if, at a higher level closer to our macro-world, we’d consider the electrons dancing in their clouds would be thought of as semi-organic in way viruses are.
Not sure I understand Ruyer…it seems he is advocating a kind of Idealism?
“He doesn’t discuss qualia, ‘cos they didn’t exist back in 1953 ?”
Heh, the word qualia make not’ve been coined until late in the game but I think the idea of the Hard Problem goes back to the materialist Democritus? ->
Intellect: “Color is by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void.”
Senses: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”
I wonder how many more millennia we’ll have to wait for materialism to find an answer. 😉
“As to the hard problem of causation, there are heaps of physicists who talk causation all the time. I think specifically of Crutchfield.”
Curious -> Do they have an explanation for why the Laws of Physics don’t change? I’ve seen some interesting answers but not sure any of these (God, Platonism, Observer-Partincipancy, Dumb Luck) would find large agreement.
Sci: “a kind of Idealism” – actually Roman Catholic scientistic monism (?!?). “Raymond Ruyer, described by Deleuze as ‘the latest of Leibniz’s great disciples’, the latest theorist of the monad, is among the lesser-known figures Deleuze uses throughout his writings” [Elizabeth Grosz]. He liked Whitehead, and influenced the enactivists.
Paul (63): “The prediction from neuroscience is that sweetness is projected from the gustatory and olfactory cortex into the global neuronal workspace.”
Of course what’s projected according to neuroscience are various neural spike trains and neurotransmitters – the experience of sweetness makes no appearance in neuroscience and never will I don’t think. But I take your point that on the identity theory these goings-on *just are* the experience of sweetness. And likewise entertaining the “brain process” concept (an experience equally invisible to neuroscience) just is a (different) set of brain processes, one that conjures up in the mind’s eye various neural states of affairs. And of course neural states of affairs seem nothing like sweetness. So we don’t immediately see how experiences can just *be* brain processes.
I’m not sure why you call these different claimed identities different epistemic routes, however. What’s epistemically at issue (to me) is the identity claims themselves. On the basis of what evidence and argument is the identity claim established as a known fact? That there is a close correlation between reports of sweetness and certain neural goings-on can’t be all there is to it. There’s something about these goings-on that *entails* experience.
I wouldn’t call my view property dualism, but rather a variant of representationalism in which, as a general rule, representational content like qualia won’t be found in the world as represented in terms of that content. We will only find the content *vehicles* (e.g., neural goings-on) characterized in terms of such content, whether qualitative (experience) and/or quantitative (science). Following the work of Metzinger, I speculate on why experience, as a variety of representational content, ends up as qualitative for the instantiating system. You’ve seen the paper once, now see it again! https://www.consciousentities.com/2018/10/not-objectifiable/
If we seek the parsimonious and un-complex answer…surely Idealism of some variety is the best bet?
Meta-cognition, or reflective thinking , requires that first-order thoughts be in some sense reflectively graspable, else there’s nothing to evaluate. Reflectively graspable thoughts serve, or at least potentially serve, as input to on-going thought—hence the value of “inner-speech”. It’s at least a kind of feed-back. Implicit or explicit norms of reasoning can then get to work—or not.
How is it possible to think and talk and write about something that has literally zero effect on one’s behavior? If subjective experience is an epiphenomenon, what causes one to think and talk and write about it? Is it just a staggering coincidence?