Tag Archives: qualia

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’?

What’s Wrong with Dualism?

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I had an email exchange with Philip Calcott recently about dualism; here’s an edited version. (Favouring my bits of the dialogue, of course!)

Philip: The main issue that puzzles me regarding consciousness is why most people in the field are so wedded to physicalism, and why substance dualism is so out of favour. It seems to me that there is indeed a huge explanatory gap – how can any physical process explain this extraordinary (and completely unexpected on physicalism) “thing” that is conscious experience?

It seems to me that there are three sorts of gaps in our knowledge:

1. I don’t know the answer to that, but others do. Just let me just google it (the exact height of Everest might be an example)
2. No one yet knows the answer to that, but we have a path towards finding the answer, and we are confident that we will discover the answer, and that this answer lies within the realm of physics (the mechanism behind high temperature superconductivity might be an example here)
3. No one can even lay out a path towards discovering the answer to this problem (consciousness)

Chalmers seems to classify consciousness as a “class 3 ignorance” problem (along the lines above). He then adopts a panpsychism approach to solve this. We have a fundamental property of nature that exhibits itself only through consciousness, and it is impossible to detect its interaction with the rest of physics in any way. How is this different from Descartes’ Soul? Basically Chalmers has produced something he claims to be still physical – but which is effectively identical to a non-physical entity.

So, why is dualism so unpopular?

I think there are two reasons. The first is not an explicit philosophical point, but more a matter of the intellectual background. In theory there are many possible versions of dualism, but what people usually want to reject when they reject it is traditional religion and traditional ideas about spirits and ghosts. A lot of people have strong feelings about this for personal or historical reasons that give an edge to their views. I suspect, for example, that this might be why Dan Dennett gives Descartes more of a beating over dualism than, in my opinion at least, he really deserves.

Second, though, dualism just doesn’t work very well. Nobody has much to offer by way of explaining how the second world or the second substance might work (certainly nothing remotely comparable to the well-developed and comprehensive account given by physics). If we could make predictions and do some maths about spirits or the second world, things would look better; as it is, it looks as if dualism just consigns the difficult issues to another world where it’s sort of presumed no explanations are required. Then again, if we could do the maths, why would we call it dualism rather than an extension of the physical, monist story?

That leads us on to the other bad problem, of how the two substances or worlds interact, one that has been a conspicuous difficulty since Descartes. We can take the view that they don’t really interact causally but perhaps run alongside each other in harmony, as Leibniz suggested; but then there seems to be little point in talking about the second world, as it explains nothing that happens and none of what we do or say. This is quite implausible to me, too, if we’re thinking particularly of subjective experience or qualia. When I am looking at a red apple, it seems to me that every bit of my subjective experience of the colour might influence my decision about whether to pick up the apple or not. Nothing in my mental world seems to be sealed off from my behaviour.

If we think there is causal interaction, then again we seem to be looking for an extension of monist physics rather than a dualism.

Yet it won’t quite do, will it, to say that the physics is all there is to it?

My view is that in fact what’s going on is that we are addressing a question which physics cannot explain, not because physics is faulty or inadequate, but because the question is outside its scope. In terms of physics, we’ve got a type 3 problem; in terms of metaphysics, I hope it’s type 2, though there are some rather discouraging arguments that suggest things are worse than that.

I think the element of mystery in conscious experience is in fact its particularity, its actual reality. All the general features can be explained at a theoretical level by physics, but not why this specific experience is real and being had by me. This is part of a more general mystery of reality, including the questions of why the world is like this in particular and not like something else, or like nothing. We try to naturalise these questions, typically by suggesting that reality is essentially historical, that things are like this because they were previously like that, so that the ultimate explanations lie in the origin of the cosmos, but I don’t think that strategy works very well.

There only seem to be two styles of explanation available here. One is the purely rational kind of reasoning you get in maths. The other is empirical observation. Neither is any good in this context; empirical explanations simply defer the issue backwards by explaining things as they are in terms of things as they once were. There’s no end to that deferral. A priori logical reasoning, on the other hand, delivers only eternal truths, whereas the whole point about reality and my experience is that it isn’t fixed and eternal; it could have been otherwise. People like Stephen Hawking try to deploy both methods, using empirical science to defer the ultimate answer back in time to a misty primordial period, a hypothetical land created by heroic backward extrapolation, where it is somehow meant to turn into a mathematical issue, but even if you could make that work I think it would be unsatisfying as an explanation of the nature of my experience here and now.

I conclude that to deal with this properly we really need a different way of thinking. I fear it might be that all we can do is contemplate the matter and hope pre- or post-theoretical enlightenment dawns, in a sort of Taoist way; but I continue to hope that eventually that one weird trick of metaphysical argument that cracks the issue will occur to someone, because like anyone brought up in the western tradition I really want to get it all back to territory where we can write out the rules and even do some maths!

As I’ve said, this all raises another question, namely why we bother about monism versus dualism at all. Most people realise that there is no single account of the world that covers everything. Besides concrete physical objects we have to consider the abstract entities; those dealt with in maths, for example, and many other fields. Any system of metaphysics which isn’t intolerably flat and limited is going to have some features that would entitle us to call it at least loosely dualist. On the other hand, everything is part of the cosmos, broadly understood, and everything is in some way related to the other contents of those cosmos. So we can equally say that any sufficiently comprehensive system can, at least loosely, be described as monist too; in the end there is only one world. Any reasonable theory will be a bit dualist and a bit monist in some respects.

That being so, the pure metaphysical question of monism versus dualism begins to look rather academic, more about nomenclature than substance. The real interest is in whether your dualism or your monism is any good as an elegant and effective explanation. In that competition materialism, which we tend to call monist, just looks to be an awfully long way ahead.

Why would you even think that?

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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.

The Meta-Problem

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Maybe there’s a better strategy on consciousness? An early draft paper by David Chalmers suggests we turn from the Hard Problem (explaining why there is ‘something it is like’ to experience things) and address the Meta-Problem of why people think there is a Hard Problem; why we find the explanation of phenomenal experience problematic. While paper does make clear broadly what Chalmers’ own views are, it primarily seeks to map the territory, and does so in a way that is very useful.

Why would we decide to focus on the Meta-Problem? For sceptics, who don’t believe in phenomenal experience or think that the apparent problems about it stem from mistakes and delusions, it’s a natural piece of tidying up. In fact, for sceptics why people think there’s a problem may well be the only thing that really needs explaining or is capable of explanation. But Chalmers is not a sceptic. Although he acknowledges the merits of the broad sceptical case about phenomenal consciousness which Keith Frankish has recently championed under the label of illusionism, he believes it is indeed real and problematic. He believes, however, that illuminating the Meta-Problem through a programme of thoughtful and empirical research might well help solve the Hard Problem itself, and is a matter of interest well beyond sceptical circles.

To put my cards on the table, I think he is over-optimistic, and seems to take too much comfort from the fact that there have to be physical and functional explanations for everything. It follows from that that there must indeed at least be physical and functional explanations for our reports of experience, our reports of the problem, and our dispositions to speak of phenomenal experience, qualia, etc. But it does not follow that there must be adequate and satisfying explanations.

Certainly physical and functional explanations alone would not be good enough to banish our worries about phenomenal experience. They would not make the itch go away. In fact, I would argue that they are not even adequate for issues to do with the ‘Easy Problem’, roughly the question of how consciousness allows us to produce intelligent and well-directed behaviour. We usually look for higher-level explanations even there; notably explanations with an element of teleology – ones that tell us what things are for or what they are supposed to do. Such explanations can normally be cashed out safely in non-teleological terms, such as strictly-worded evolutionary accounts; but that does not mean they are dispensable or not needed in order for us to understand properly.

How much more challenging things are when we come to Hard Problem issues, where a claim that they lie beyond physics is of the essence. Chalmer’s optimism is encapsulated in a sentence when he says…

Presumably there is at least a very close tie between the mechanisms that generate phenomenal reports and consciousness itself.

There’s your problem. Illusionists can be content with explanations that never touch on phenomenal consciousness because they don’t think it exists, but no explanation that does not connect with it will satisfy qualophiles. But how can you connect with a phenomenon explanatorily without diagnosing its nature? It really seems that for believers, we have to solve the Hard Problem first (or at least, simultaneously) because believers are constrained to say that the appearance of a problem arises from a real problem.

Logically, that is not quite the case; we could say that our dispositions to talk about phenomenal experience arise from merely material causes, but just happen to be truthful about a second world of phenomenal experience, or are truthful in light of a Leibnizian pre-established harmony. Some qualophiles are similarly prepared to say that their utterances about qualia are not caused by qualia, so that position might seem appealing in some quarters. To me the harmonised second world seems hopelessly redundant, and that is why something like illusionism is, at the end of the day, the only game in town.

I should make it clear that Chalmers by no means neglects the question of what sort of explanation will do; in fact he provides a rich and characteristically thorough discussion. It’s more that in my opinion, he just doesn’t know when he’s beaten, which to be fair may be an outlook essential to the conduct of philosophy.

I say that something like illusionism seems to be the only game in town, though I don’t quite call myself an illusionist. There’s a presentational difficulty for me because I think the reality of experience, in an appropriate sense, is the nub of the matter. But you could situate my view as the form of illusionism which says the appearance of ineffable phenomenal experience arises from the mistaken assumption that particular real experiences should be within the explanatory scope of general physical theory.

I won’t attempt to summarise the whole of Chalmers’ discussion, which is detailed and illuminating; although I think he is doomed to disappointment, the project he proposes might well yield good new insights; it’s often been the case that false philosophical positions were more fecund than true ones.

Fundamentals

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You may already have seen Jochen’s essay Four Verses from the Daodejing, an entry in this year’s FQXi competition. It’s a thought-provoking piece, so here are a few of the ones it provoked in me. In general I think it features a mix of alarming and sound reasoning which leads to a true yet perplexing conclusion.

In brief Jochen suggests that we apprehend the world only through models; in fact our minds deal only with these models. Modelling and computation are in essence the same. However, the connection between model and world is non-computable (or we face an infinite regress). The connection is therefore opaque to our minds and inexpressible. Why not, then, identify it with that other inexpressible element of cognition, qualia? So qualia turn out to be the things that incomprehensibly link our mental models with the real world. When Mary sees red for the first time, she does learn a new, non-physical fact, namely what the connection between her mental model and real red is. (I’d have to say that as something she can’t understand or express, it’s a weird kind of knowledge, but so be it.)

I think to talk of modelling so generally is misleading, though Jochen’s definition is itself broadly framed, which means I can’t say he’s wrong. In his terms it seems anything that uses data about the structure and causal functioning of X to make predictions about its behaviour would be a model. If you look at it that way, it’s true that virtually all our cognition is modelling. But to me a model leads us to think of something more comprehensive and enduring than we ought. In my mind at least, it conjures up a sort of model village or homunculus, when what’s really going on is something more fragmentary and ephemeral, with the brain lashing up a ‘model’ of my going to the shop for bread just now and then discarding it in favour of something different. I’d argue that we can’t have comprehensive all-purpose models of ourselves (or anything) because models only ever model features relevant to a particular purpose or set of circumstances. If a model reproduced all my features it would in fact be me (by Leibniz’ Law) and anyway the list of potentially relevant features goes on for ever.

The other thing I don’t like about liberal use of modelling is that it makes us vulnerable to the view that we only experience the model, not the world. People have often thought things like this, but to me it’s almost like the idea we never see distant planets, only telescope lenses.

Could qualia be the connection between model and world? It’s a clever idea, one of those that turn out on reflection to not be vulnerable to many of the counterarguments that first spring to mind. My main problem is that it doesn’t seem right phenomenologically. Arguments from one’s own perception of phenomenology are inherently weak, but then we are sort of relying on phenomenology for our belief (if any) in qualia in the first place. A red quale doesn’t seem like a connection, more like a property of the red thing; I’m not clear why or how I would be aware of this connection at all.

However, I think Jochen’s final conclusion is both poignant and broadly true. He suggests that models can have fundamental aspects, the ones that define their essential functions – but the world is not under a similar obligation. It follows that there are no fundamentals about the world as a whole.

I think that’s very likely true, and I’d make a very similar kind of argument in terms of explanation. There are no comprehensive explanations. Take a carrot. I can explain its nutritional and culinary properties, its biology, its metaphorical use as a motivator, its supposed status as the favourite foodstuff of rabbits, and lots of other aspects; but there is no total explanation that will account for every property I can come up with; in the end there is only the carrot. A demand for an explanation of the entire world is automatically a demand for just the kind of total explanation that cannot exist.

Although I believe this, I find it hard to accept; it leaves my mind with an unscratched itch. If we can’t explain the world, how can we assimilate it? Through contemplation? Perhaps that would have been what Laozi would have advocated. More likely he would have told us to get on with ordinary life. Stop thinking, and end your problems!

 

 

Our grip on reality…

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Are we losing it?

Nick Bostrom’s suggestion that we’re most likely living in a simulated world continues to provoke discussion.  Joelle Dahm draws an interesting parallel with multiverses. I think myself that it depends a bit on what kind of multiverse you’re going for – the ones that come from an interpretation of quantum physics usually require conservation of identity between universes – you have to exist in more than one universe – which I think is both potentially problematic and strictly speaking non-Bostromic. Dahm also briefly touches on some tricky difficulties about how we could tell whether we were simulated or not, which seem reminiscent of Descartes’ doubts about how he could be sure he wasn’t being systematically deceived by a demon – hold that thought for now.

Some of the assumptions mentioned by Dahm would probably annoy Sabine Hossenfelder, who lays into the Bostromisers with a piece about just how difficult simulating the physics of our world would actually be: a splendid combination of indignation with actually knowing what she’s talking about.

Bostrom assumes that if advanced civilisations typically have a long lifespan, most will get around to creating simulated versions of their own civilisation, perhaps re-enactments of earlier historical eras. Since each simulated world will contain a vast number of people, the odds are that any randomly selected person is in fact living in a simulated world. The probability becomes overwhelming if we assume that the simulations are good enough for the simulated people to create simulations within their own world, and so on.

There’s  plenty of scope for argument about whether consciousness can be simulated computationally at all, whether worlds can be simulated in the required detail, and certainly about the optimistic idea of nested simulations. But recently I find myself thinking, isn’t it simpler than that? Are we simulated people in a simulated world? No, because we’re real, and people in a simulation aren’t real.

When I say that, people look at me as if I were stupid, or at least, impossibly naive. Dude,  read some philosophy, they seem to say. Dontcha know that Socrates said we are all just grains of sand blowing in the wind?

But I persist – nothing in a simulation actually exists (clue’s in the name), so it follows that if we exist, we are not in a simulation. Surely no-one doubts their own existence (remember that parallel with Descartes), or if they do, only on the kind of philosophical level where you can doubt the existence of anything? If you don’t even exist, why do I even have to address your simulated arguments?

I do, though. Actually, non-existent people can have rather good arguments; dialogues between imaginary people are a long-established philosophical method (in my feckless youth I may even have indulged in the practice myself).

But I’m not entirely sure what the argument against reality is. People do quite often set out a vision of the world as powered by maths; somewhere down there the fundamental equations are working away and the world is what they’re calculating. But surely that is the wrong way round; the equations describe reality, they don’t dictate it. A system of metaphysics that assumes the laws of nature really are explicit laws set out somewhere looks tricky to me; and worse, it can never account for the arbitrary particularity of the actual world. We sort of cling to the hope that this weird specificity can eventually be reduced away by titanic backward extrapolation to a hypothetical time when the cosmos was reduced to the simplicity of a single point, or something like it; but we can’t make that story work without arbitrary constants and the result doesn’t seem like the right kind of explanation anyway. We might appeal instead to the idea that the arbitrariness of our world arises from it’s being an arbitrary selection out of the incalculable banquet of the multiverse, but that doesn’t really explain it.

I reckon that reality just is the thing that gets left out of the data and the theory; but we’re now so used to the supremacy of those two we find it genuinely hard to remember, and it seems to us that a simulation with enough data is automatically indistinguishable from real events – as though once your 3D printer was programmed, there was really nothing to be achieved by running it.

There’s one curious reference in Dahm’s piece which makes me wonder whether Christof Koch agrees with me. She says the Integrated Information Theory doesn’t allow for computer consciousness. I’d have thought it would; but the remarks from Koch she quotes seem to be about how you need not just the numbers about gravity but actual gravity too, which sounds like my sort of point.

Regular readers may already have noticed that I think this neglect of reality also explains the notorious problem of qualia; they’re just the reality of experience. When Mary sees red, she sees something real, which of course was never included in her perfect theoretical understanding.

I may be naive, but you can’t say I’m not consistent…

Our unconscious overlords…

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alien-superWe are in danger of being eliminated by aliens who aren’t even conscious, says Susan Schneider. Luckily, I think I see some flaws in the argument.

Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the Universe, she suggests; others probably have been going for billions of years longer. Perhaps, but maybe they have all attained enlightenment and moved on from this plane, leaving us young dummies the cleverest or the only people around?

Schneider thinks the older cultures are likely to be post-biological, having moved on into machine forms of intelligence. This transition may only take a few hundred years, she suggests, to ‘judge from the human experience’ (Have we transitioned? Did I miss it?). She says transistors are much faster than neurons and computer power is almost indefinitely expandable, so AI will end up much cleverer than us.

Then there may be a problem over controlling these superlatively bright computers, as foreseen by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates. Bill Gates? The man who, by exploiting the monopoly handed to him by IBM was able to impose on us all the crippled memory management of DOS and the endless vulnerabilities of Windows? Well, OK; not sure he has much idea about technology, but he’s got form on trying to retain control of things.

Schneider more or less takes it for granted that computation is cogitation, and that faster computation means smarter thinking. It’s true that computers have become very good at games we didn’t think they could play at all, and she reminds us of some examples. But to take over from human beings, computers need more than just computation. To mention two things, they need agency and intentionality, and to date they haven’t shown any capacity at all for either. I don’t rule out the possibility of both being generated artificially in future, but the ever-growing ability of computers to do more sums more quickly is strictly irrelevant. Those future artificial people of whom we know nothing may be able to exploit the power of computation – but so can we. If computers are good at winning battles, our computers can fight their computers.

Schneider also takes it for granted that her computational aliens will be hostile and likely to come over and fuck us up good if they ever know we exist. They might, for example, infect our systems with computer viruses (probably not, I think, because without Bill Gates providing their operating systems computer viruses probably remained a purely theoretical matter for them). Sending signals out into the galaxy, she reckons, is a really bad idea; our radio signals are already out there but luckily it’s faint and easily missed (even by unimaginably super-intelligent aliens, it seems). Premature to worry, surely, because even our earliest radio signals can be no more than about a hundred light years away so far – not much of a distance in galactic terms. But why would super-intelligent entities behave like witless bullies anyway? Somewhere between benign and indifferent seems a more likely attitude.

To me this whole scenario seems to embody a selective prognosis anyway. The aliens have overcome the limitation of the speed of light, they feed off black holes (no clue, sorry) but they still run on the computation we currently think is really smart. A hundred years ago no-one would have supposed computation was going to be the dominant technology of our decade, let alone the next million years; maybe by 2116 we’ll look back on it the way we fondly remember steam locomotion.

Schneider’s most arresting thought is that her dangerous computational aliens might lack qualia, and so in that sense not be conscious. It seems to me more natural to suppose that acquiring human-style thought would necessarily involve acquiring human-style qualia. Schneider seems to share the Searlian view that qualia have something to do with unknown biological qualities of neural tissue which silicon can never share. Even if qualia could be engineered into silicon, why would the aliens bother, she asks – it’s just an extra overhead that might add unwanted ethical issues. Most surprisingly, she supposes that we might be able to test the proposition! Suppose that for medical reasons we replace parts of a functioning human brain with chips, we might then find that qualia are lost.

But how would we know? Ex hypothesi, qualia have no causal powers and so could not cause any change in our behaviour. Even if the qualia vanished, the fact could not be reported. None of the things we say about qualia were caused by qualia; that’s one of the bizarre things about them.

Anyway, I say if we’re going to indulge in this kind of wild speculation, let’s really go big; I say the super-intelligent aliens will be powered by hyper-computation, a technology that makes our concept of computation look like counting on your fingers; and they’ll have not only qualia, but hyper-qualia, experiential phenomenologica whose awesomeness we cannot even speak of. They will be inexpressibly kindly and wise and will be be borne to Earth to visit us on special wave-forms, beyond our understanding but hugely hyperbolic…

Illusionism

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frankish-illusionConsciousness – it’s all been a terrible mistake. In a really cracking issue of the JCS (possibly the best I’ve read) Keith Frankish sets out and defends the thesis of illusionism, with a splendid array of responses from supporters and others.

How can consciousness be an illusion? Surely an illusion is itself a conscious state – a deceptive one – so that the reality of consciousness is a precondition of anything being an illusion? Illusionism, of course, is not talking about the practical, content-bearing kind of consciousness, but about phenomenal consciousness, qualia, the subjective side, what it is like to see something. Illusionism denies that our experiences have the phenomenal aspect they seem to have; it is in essence a sceptical case about phenomenal experience. It aims to replace the question of what phenomenal experience is, with the question of why people have the illusion of phenomenal experience.

In one way I wonder whether it isn’t better to stick with raw scepticism than frame the whole thing in terms of an illusion. There is a danger that the illusion itself becomes a new topic and inadvertently builds the confusion further. One reason the whole issue is so difficult is that it’s hard to see one’s way through the dense thicket of clarifications thrown up by philosophers, all demanding to be addressed and straightened out. There’s something to be said for the bracing elegance of the two-word formulation of scepticism offered by Dennett (who provides a robustly supportive response to illusionism here, as being the default case) – ‘What qualia?’. Perhaps we should just listen to the ‘tales of the qualophiles’ – there is something it is like, Mary knows something new, I could have a zombie twin – and just say a plain ‘no’ to all of them. If we do that, the champions of phenomenal experience have nothing to offer; all they can do is, as Pete Mandik puts it here, gesture towards phenomenal properties. (My imagination whimpers in fear at being asked to construe the space in which one might gesture towards phenomenal qualities, let alone the ineffable limb with which the movement might be performed; it insists that we fall back on Mandik’s other description; that phenomenalists can only invite an act of inner ostension.)

Eric Schwitzgebel relies on something like this gesturing in his espousal of definition by example as a means of getting the innocent conception of phenomenal experience he wants without embracing the dubious aspects. Mandik amusingly and cogently assails the scepticism of the illusionist case from an even more radical scepticism – meta-illusionism. Sceptics argue that phenomenalism can’t be specified meaningfully (we just circle around a small group of phrases and words that provide a set of synonyms with no definition outside the loop) , but if that’s true how do we even start talking about it? Whereof we cannot speak…

Introspection is certainly the name of the game, and Susan Blackmore has a nifty argument here; perhaps it’s the very act of introspecting that creates the phenomenal qualities? Her delusionism tells us we are wrong to think that there is a continuous stream of conscious experience going on in the absence of introspection, but stops short of outright scepticism about the phenomenal. I’m not sure. William James told us that introspection must be retrospection – we can only mentally examine the thought we just had, not the one we are having now – and it seems odd to me to think that a remembered state could be given a phenomenal aspect after the fact. Easier, surely, to consider that the whole business is consistently illusory?

Philip Goff is perhaps the toughest critic of illusionism; if we weren’t in the grip of scientism, he says, we should have no difficulty in seeing that the causal role of brain activity also has a categorical nature which is the inward, phenomenal aspect. If this view is incoherent or untenable in any way, we’re owed a decent argument as to why.

Myself I think Frankish is broadly on the right track. He sets out three ways we might approach phenomenal experience. One is to accept its reality and look for an explanation that significantly modifies our understanding of the world. Second, we look for an explanation that reconciles it with our current understanding, finding explanations within the world of physics of which we already have a general understanding. Third, we dismiss it as an illusion. I think we could add ‘approach zero’: we accept the reality of phenomenal experience and just regard it as inexplicable. This sounds like mysterianism – but mysterians think the world itself makes sense; we just don’t have the brains to see it. Option zero says there is actual irreducible mystery in the real world. This conclusion is surely thoroughly repugnant to most philosophers, who aspire to clear answers even if they don’t achieve them; but I think it is hard to avoid unless we take the sceptical route. Phenomenal experience is on most mainstream accounts something over and above the physical account just by definition. A physical explanation is automatically ruled out; even if good candidates are put forward, we can always retreat and say that they explain some aspects of experience, but not the ineffable one we are after. I submit that in fact this same strategy of retreat means that there cannot be any satisfactory rational account of phenomenal experience, because it can always be asserted that something ineffable is missing.

I say philosophers will find this repugnant, but I can sense some amiable theologians sidling up to me. Those light-weight would-be scientists can’t deal with mystery and the ineffable, they say, but hey, come with us for a bit…

Regular readers may possibly remember that I think that the phenomenal aspect of experience is actually just its reality; that the particularity or haecceity of real experience is puzzling to those who think that theory must accommodate everything. That reality is itself mysterious in some sense, though: not easily accounted for and not susceptible to satisfactory explanation either by induction or deduction. It may be that to understand that in full we have to give up on these more advanced mental tools and fall back on the basic faculty of recognition, the basis of all our thinking in my view and the capacity of which both deduction and induction are specialised forms. That implies that we might have to stop applying logic and science and just contemplate reality; I suppose that might mean in turn that meditation and the mystic tradition of some religions is not exactly a rejection of philosophy as understood in the West, but a legitimate extension of the same enquiry.

Yeah, but no; I may be irredeemably Western and wedded to scientism, but rightly or wrongly, meditation doesn’t scratch my epistemic itch. Illusionism may not offer quite the right answer, but for me it is definitely asking the right questions.

Architectonics and the Hard Problem

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twinsCan we solve the Hard Problem with scanners? This article by Brit Brogaard and Dimitria E. Gatzia argues that recent advances in neuroimaging techniques, combined with the architectonic approach advocated by Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, open the way to real advances.

But surely it’s impossible for physical techniques to shed any light on the Hard Problem? The whole point is that it is over and above any account which could be given by physics. In the Zombie Twin though experiment I have a physically identical twin who has no subjective experience. His brain handles information just the way mine does, but when he registers the colour red, it’s just data; he doesn’t experience real redness. If you think that is conceivable, then you believe in qualia, the subjective extra part of experience. But how could qualia be explained by neuroimaging; my zombie twin’s scans are exactly the same as mine, yet he has no qualia at all?

This, I think, is where the architectonics come in. The foundational axiom of the approach, as I understand it, is that the functional structure of phenomenal experience corresponds to dynamic structure within brain activity; the operational architectonics provide the bridge . (I call it an axiom, but I think the Fingelkurts twins would say that empirical research already provides support for a nested hierarchical structure which bridges the explanatory gap. They seem to take the view that operational architectonics uses a structured electrical field, which on the one hand links their view with the theories of Johnjoe McFadden and Sue Pockett, while on the other making me wonder whether advances in neuroimaging are relevant if the exciting stuff is happening outside the neurons.) It follows that investigating dynamic activity structures in the brain can tell us about the structure of phenomenal, subjective experience. That seems reasonable. After all, we might argue, qualia may be mysterious, but we know they are related to physical events; the experience of redness goes with the existence of red things in the physical world (with due allowance for complications). Why can’t we assume that subjective experience also goes with certain structured kinds of brain activity?

Two points must be made immediately. The first is that the hunt for Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) is hardly new. The advocates of architectonics, however, say that approaches along these lines fail because correlation is simply too weak a connection. Noticing that experience x and activation in region y correlate doesn’t really take us anywhere. They aim for something much harder-edged and more specific, with structured features of brain activity matched directly back to structures in an analysis of phenomenal experience (some of the papers use the framework of Revonsuo, though architectonics in general is not committed to any specific approach).

The second point is that this is not a sceptical or reductive project. I think many sceptics about qualia would be more than happy with the idea of exploring subjective experience in relation to brain structure; but someone like Dan Dennett would look to the brain structures to fully explain all the features of experience; to explain them away, in fact, so that it was clear that brain activity was in the end all we were dealing with and we could stop talking about ‘nonsensical’ qualia altogether.

By contrast the architectonic approach allows philosophers to retain the ultimate mystery; it just seeks to push the boundaries of science a bit further out into the territory of subjective experience. Perhaps Paul Churchland’s interesting paper about chimerical colours which we discussed a while ago provides a comparable case if not strictly an example.

Churchland points out that we can find the colours we experience mapped out in the neuronal structures of the brain; but interestingly the colour space defined in the brain is slightly more comprehensive than the one we actually encounter in real life. Our brains have reserved spaces for colours that do not exist, as it were. However, using a technique he describes we can experience these ‘chimerical’ colours, such as ‘dark yellow’ in the form of an afterglow. So here you experience for the first time a dark yellow quale, as predicted and delivered by neurology. Churchland would argue this shows rather convincingly that position in your brain’s colour space is essentially all there is to the subjective experience of colour. I think a follower of architectonics would commend the research for elucidating structural features of experience but hold that there was still a residual mystery about what dark yellow qualia really are in themselves, one that can only be addressed by philosophy.

It all seems like a clever and promising take on the subject to me; I do have two reservations. The first is a pessimistic doubt about whether it will ever really be possible to deliver much. The sort of finding reported by Churchland is the exception more than the rule. Vision and hearing offer some unusual scope because they both depend on wave media which impose certain interesting structural qualities; the orderly spectrum and musical scale. Imaginatively I find it hard to think of other aspects of phenomenal experience that seem to be good candidates for structural analysis. I could be radically wrong about this and I hope I am.

The other thing is, I still find it a bit hard to get past my zombie twin; if phenomenal experience matches up with the structure of brain activity perfectly, how come he is without qualia? The sceptics and the qualophiles both have pretty clear answers; either there just are no qualia anyway or they are outside the scope of physics. Now if we take the architectonic view, we could argue that just as the presence of red objects is not sufficient for there to be red qualia, so perhaps the existence of the right brain patterns isn’t sufficient either; though the red objects and the relevant brain activity do a lot to explain the experience. But if the right brain activity isn’t sufficient, what’s the missing ingredient? It feels (I put it no higher) as if there ought to be an explanation; but perhaps that’s just where we leave the job for the philosophers?

The Incredible Consciousness of Edward Witten

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Edward WittenWe’ll never understand consciousness, says Edward Witten. Ashutosh Jogalekar’s post here features a video of the eminent physicist talking about fundamentals; the bit about consciousness starts around 1:10 if you’re not interested in string theory and cosmology. John Horgan has also weighed in with some comments; Witten’s view is congenial to him because of his belief that science may be approaching an end state in which many big issues are basically settled while others remain permanently mysterious. Witten himself thinks we might possibly get a “final theory” of physics (maybe even a form of string theory), but guesses that it would be of a tricky kind, so that understanding and exploring the theory would itself be an endless project, rather the way number theory, which looks like a simple subject at first glance, proves to be capable of endless further research.

Witten, in response to a slightly weird question from the interviewer, declines to define consciousness, saying he prefers to leave it undefined like one of the undefined terms set out at the beginning of a maths book. He feels confident that the workings of the mind will be greatly clarified by ongoing research so that we will come to understand much better how the mechanisms operate. But why these processes are accompanied by something like consciousness seems likely to remain a mystery; no extension of physics that he can imagine seems likely to do the job, including the kind of new quantum mechanics that Roger Penrose believes is needed.

Witten is merely recording his intuitions, so we shouldn’t try to represent him as committed to any strong theoretical position; but his words clearly suggest that he is an optimist on the so-called Easy Problem and a pessimist on the Hard one. The problem he thinks may be unsolvable is the one about why there is “something it is like” to have experiences; what it is that seeing a red rose has over and above the acquisition of mere data.

If so, I think his incredulity joins a long tradition of those who feel intuitively that that kind of consciousness just is radically different from anything explained or explainable by physics. Horgan mentions the Mysterians, notably Colin McGinn, who holds that our brain just isn’t adapted to understanding how subjective experience and the physical world can be reconciled; but we could also invoke Brentano’s contention that mental intentionality is just utterly unlike any physical phenomenon; and even trace the same intuition back to Leibniz’s famous analogy of the mill; no matter what wheels and levers you put in your machine, there’s never going to be anything that could explain a perception (particularly telling given Leibniz’s enthusiasm for calculating machines and his belief that one day thinkers could use them to resolve complex disputes). Indeed, couldn’t we argue that contemporary consciousness sceptics like Dennett and the Churchlands also see an unbridgeable gap between physics and subjective, qualia-having consciousness? The difference is simply that in their eyes this makes that kind of consciousness nonsense, not a mystery.

We have to be a bit wary of trusting our intuitions. The idea that subjective consciousness arises when we’ve got enough neurons firing may sound like the idea that wine comes about when we’ve added enough water to the jar; but the idea that enough ones and zeroes in data registers could ever give rise to a decent game of chess looks pretty strange too.

As those who’ve read earlier posts may know, I think the missing ingredient is simply reality. The extra thing about consciousness that the theory of physics fails to include is just the reality of the experience, the one thing a theory can never include. Of course, the nature of reality is itself a considerable mystery, it just isn’t the one people have thought they were talking about. If I’m right, then Witten’s doubts are well-founded but less worrying than they may seem. If some future genius succeeds in generating an artificial brain with human-style mental functions, then by looking at its structure we’ll only ever see solutions to the Easy Problem, just as we may do in part when looking at normal biological brains. Once we switch on the artificial brain and it starts doing real things, then experience will happen.