A potential solution to the hard problem
Daniel Dennett posted a link to this article on Twitter recently. The article proposes a solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
"The hard problem of consciousness asks why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences." - Wikipedia
I won't try and summarise the already succinct Aeon article (which describes itself as being "only in bare outline"). However, what I found most fascinating is the idea that qualia constitute the self, rather than being something perceived by the self.
As the article notes in relation to blindsight patients who function as sighted despite lacking visual qualia, "they dont take ownership of their capacity to see. Lacking visual qualia the somethingness of seeing they believe that visual perception has nothing to do with them." Extend this lack of ownership via lack of qualia to all qualia and the self itself disappears.
In his article Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995), David Chalmers posed the (hard) question: "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?"
If its claims are true, I believe the article may be on the right path to dissolving this problem - especially the question of why we experience qualia at all.
"The hard problem of consciousness asks why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences." - Wikipedia
I won't try and summarise the already succinct Aeon article (which describes itself as being "only in bare outline"). However, what I found most fascinating is the idea that qualia constitute the self, rather than being something perceived by the self.
As the article notes in relation to blindsight patients who function as sighted despite lacking visual qualia, "they dont take ownership of their capacity to see. Lacking visual qualia the somethingness of seeing they believe that visual perception has nothing to do with them." Extend this lack of ownership via lack of qualia to all qualia and the self itself disappears.
In his article Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995), David Chalmers posed the (hard) question: "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?"
If its claims are true, I believe the article may be on the right path to dissolving this problem - especially the question of why we experience qualia at all.
Comments (239)
I noted the similarity between the "thick moment" and Douglas Hofstadter's I am a strange loop. Prophetic stuff.
That and the suggestion that having a self is evidenced by wanking.
:cool: :up:
If you haven't already read them, I recommend Peter Watt's first contact hard scifi novel Blindsight (2006) and R. Scott Bakker's hard scifi psychothriller Neuropath (2008) both heavily influenced by neuroscientist-philosopher (& Buddhist) Thomas Metzinger's monumental work Being No One (2003). The Aeon article you've linked, Luke, summarizes many of the ideas Metzinger et al's had derived from their research.
Very interesting.
The idea that feedback loops are critical to understanding what goes on seems absolutely right to me. Certainly they make all the difference between a reflex and an action, and seem to explain the phenomenon of blind sight.
But any theory that requires positing a "mental representation" which implies an internal observer (visible in the diagrams of the brain after the paragraph beginning "The key to acquiring phenomenal properties..."} is postponing the hard problem and for that reason seems implausible to me.
I'll have to read this more carefully.
Nice.
Quoting Wiki
Easy problems can be quite elaborate and even proven accurate, but still dont actually touch upon the hard problem itself.
I didn't mean to be too dismissive because I hadn't read the article carefully enough to be sure. I was very surprised that the homunculus turned up. It's such a cliché.
It's quite simple, really. We think of the box on the wall that contains a thermometer and a switch and think that controls the heat. Which it does, in a way. But when you take the box apart, you find, to your dismay, that no part of the box controls the heat. It's the system that controls the heat, not any part of it.
A different kind of example is in the orbit of the planets, etc around the sun. No part of the system that produces that effect is in control of it. It is the balanced system as a whole that keeps the planets in line.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I haven't worked out my approach to the problem. It's on my list of chestnuts that I would like to get my head around one day. But I would start by making sure that the problem isn't in the way it is formulated. My suspicion is that it is not capable of solution and merely demonstrates that Wittgenstein was right about subjective experiences (which is what, I think, "qualia" are supposed to be). I will concede, however, that his response to the expostulation that there is a difference between you experiencing a pain and me experiencing the same pain. He asks what greater difference there could be. I don't think that's enough.
I apologize if I seem dismissive. I don't mean to be. People who deserve respect take the hard problem very seriously.
We as an organism are aware of much that we as a "conscious self" are not.
Experience and awareness (forms of mind) are ubiquitous in nature (unconscious experience).
That inner dialogue and self awareness that we focus on so hard is just a small portion of mental processing and environmental awareness.
Can there be any doubt that mind, experience and consciousness are evolutionary products?
"The jellyfish advances and withdraws" A.N Whitehead
Attraction and repulsion one of natures most fundamental features the forerunners to emotion and feeling which are the forerunners to what we call "self conscious awareness".
The neurology literature is full of examples of the disassociation of the conscious self from the awareness, experience and perception of the organism, blind sight is merely one example.
So my response is based on the fact that describing the mechanisms of how phenomenal experience evolved, doesn't account for the phenomenal experience itself. It gives an origin story, but not an ontological account of the inner aspect itself. Here are keywords that become a sort of "hidden Cartesian theater" from the article:
"Response becomes Privatized...
"Phenomenolization" "recursive activity".
"Sentition evolves to be a virtual form of bodily expression"
These are all pointing to the easier problems/ideas of the mechanics but not what this virtual, recursive, phenomenolization is as to its ontological nature as compared with the other parts of nature.
If there is a bifurcation of "mental" and "physical" it still only gets at the physical mechanisms underpinning the mental. You lose the bifurcation, fine but then what? Proto-panpsychism? Most people can't tolerate that view. Pan-semiotics? Great, but you simply accounted for the computation and not the thing-itself (the phenomenal inner aspect).
:up:
Quoting Ludwig V
Not to be dismissive of the article myself either. Roughly I agree with you -- the "proposed solution" that the article offers is not the problem (the inquiry) that the ongoing philosophical movement of consciousness is facing.
I can already see some good objections and points of weaknesses. It's because there are neuroscientific studies out there that can deny what his article said. I also find some points to be coming out of thin-air.
For example this passage:
I find the underlined cringe-worthy as an analysis of a philosopher. We've always had awareness of the plurality of existence and our own existence. In fact, to refer to "us" presupposes already that I am counting "myself", and vice versa. When philosophers say that the "self" came later after the awareness of others like ourselves, it doesn't mean that we were not aware of our private sensations and perceptions apart from others' private sensations and perceptions. It means that philosophically, or metaphysically, we did not first deliberate on what a "self" is. It was Descartes who first formalized (you can correct me on this) the duality of mind and body. But as common observers of our environment, the early humans and modern humans had it. They got it.
Anyone who wants to deny what I said just above is welcome to correct me.
(Some more criticisms -- "sentition" and "feedback loops". I do get the need in our theory to name our terms as long as we're not trying to re-invent the wheel. And I find that the article attempts to do that. I maybe wrong. )
Again, semantic invention. Except that it didn't happen this way.
The article draws a conclusion from a patient who can find objects in the range of an eye that is blind. Whatever the mechanics of that, Humphrey takes it that there is a difference between sensation and perceptiontheres sight, then theres the mysterious feel [of] our subjective, personal sense of interacting with stimulihe calls it the somethingness of seeing, and this is the underpinning for our having consciousness.
Why are we using science to attempt to back up our feeling of having a personal sense? Why is the feeling mysterious?
With this marvellous new phenomenon [the phenomenal self] at the core of your being, youll start to matter to yourself in a new and deeper way. Youll come to believe, as never before, in your own singular significance.
Ah. Its this mattering and significance that we wanted all along, and all the rest is to justify that (that I begin being special)are we just going to finish the job Descartes started? He goes on to say that if it could be proved that we each have a given, undeniable self that we would treat each other better, which implies we could wash our hands of having to see others as human, having to treat them, as Wittgenstein would say, as having a soul (p 178), and the inevitability that sometimes we do not.
The "thick moment", or what I call the breadth of the present, is what I've been arguing for for years, as what is necessary for an adequate understanding of the reality of free will. This is better known as the concept of a two dimensional time. The second dimension of time allows that one aspect of reality is ahead of another, thereby causal in that relationship of priority, while both are sharing the same 'now' of the present in relation to a linear representation of time.
[quote=https://www.edge.org/conversation/nicholas_humphrey-chapter-11-the-thick-moment]I call it the "thick moment" of consciousness. What matters is that I feel myself alive now, living in the present moment. What matters is at this moment I'm aware of sounds arriving at my ears, sight at my eyes, sensations at my skin. They're defining what it's like to be me. The sensations they arouse have quality. And it's this quality that is the central fact of consciousness.[/quote]
The simple fact of the matter is that we sense the reality around us as activity rather than as a serious of static states, like a movie of still frames. And, since sensation is what provides us with a presentation of what is, at the present in time, we must conclude that there is activity at the present time. Since the passage of time is a requirement for activity, we must conclude that there is actually passage of time at the present. This time which passes at the present cannot be accounted for with a linear representation of time which posits a non-dimensional point at the present, to separate future from past. It must be considered to be a duration of time which is neither past nor future.
Back in the 17th century the "hard rock of philosophy" was the problem of motion, in which "motion has effects which we in no way can conceive".
What happened with that problem? It was accepted and science and philosophy continued - in fact, to this day, the hard problem of motion has not been solved, but we work with what we have.
I suspect the same solution applies to today's peculiar hard problem. We have to accept it as fact, as Locke recognized long before Chalmers.
Indeed. It's interesting also to me that despite indirectly launching a million easy mystical solutions to the hard problem, Chalmers himself is without spiritual beliefs. He agrees with you.
Oh sure, plenty of silly mysticism surrounding this topic. Which is strange, because, as I think you would agree, consciousness is what we are most acquainted with out of everything there is. So the problem must be elsewhere, and lamentably, I agree with Chomsky again (lamentable, because I have difficulty disagreeing with him): the problem is matter, not experience.
We can't understand how the thing we study through physics and biology could possibly lead to experience, that's the problem.
Locke put the issue in a religious matter, which can be interpreted naturalistically, and be on the same page w/Chalmers, or to be more accurate, Chalmers with Locke, as when the latter says:
"We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know
whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance: it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which cannot be in any created being, but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator."
[Bold added]
Replace "God" with "nature", and you have the hard problem, stated over 300 years ago.
Apologies for the length, I got motivated. :cool:
:up:
Quoting Manuel
Yes, the thing we are most familiar with is also the thing which seems strangest. Reminds me of Montaigne, 'We laugh and cry at the same thing.'
Quoting Manuel
Indeed. If humans are still a thing in 300 years, I wonder where culture will locate this problem. I suspect a breakthrough, even if I am a mysterian by nature.
Well, it rings true! :rofl:
Thanks 180, I'll check them out. :up:
:smile:
Yes, I agree.
We develop "work-arounds", such as the idea of entropy, and then the problem gets hidden behind these strange terms. In this way, the problem will be sufficiently suppressed until in the future sometime it rears its ugly head again, in a new problematic form.
Are we?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Because the hard problem of consciousness is a mystery in need of an explanation.
Quoting Antony Nickles
No, it's an answer to the hard problem that we wanted all along.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Where does he say this?
Quoting Antony Nickles
If we treated each other better, then "we could wash our hands of having to see others as human"??
Well the article starts with a study; theres neuroscience behind it attempting to understand consciousness; and the whole point is making a problem out of the body, which is able to be empirically studied, related to the idea of a personss individuality, pictured as their consciousness. Which hair are you trying to split?
Quoting Luke
This is circular. The question was meant to spur the thought that we (philosophers) have created a problem, manufactured the philosophical idea of consciousness for a purpose we are not examining; that, philosophically, this is old ground, even the attempt to bring it certainty (Descartes, Positivism, etc.).
Quoting Luke
Again, here is the quote at the end where he reveals what he wanted and admits why he wanted.
With this marvelous new phenomenon [the phenomenal self] at the core of your being, youll start to matter to yourself in a new and deeper way. Youll come to believe, as never before, in your own singular significance.
The quote is a conclusion unattached to his entire derivation for the purpose of justifying this self. And he is telling you his motivation. Maybe we are confusing his motivation with your own; I submit he is admitting something more self-reflective and honest which is typical of this project. You seem to be just expressing your opinion without explaining why you want an answer.
Quoting Luke
So, think back to the transformation that must have taken place when your ancestors first woke up to the experience of sensations imbued with qualia, and out of nothing the phenomenal self appeared I feel, therefore I am.
He feels hes solved the skepticism of the foundational self (rewording Descartes) by implying that there is something special about my sensations (which are a given). Its the point of the whole article.
Quoting Luke
No, not if we treated each other better?? I said if it could be proved we each have a self, as we wants. Basically, he's saying if we had knowledge of the other (before acting), then we would be moral. Hello Socrates, Kant, yada, yada. Not a new idea, but not one that pans out (ask Dostoyevsky, Nietszche, Wittgenstein). This is a philosophical misconception turned into a scientific or intellectually theoretical problem.
And just saying no its not isnt an argument, its just a contradiction.
I feel your reading intentions into the article that are not being insinuated. I would re-read it once more. This is proposing a mechanism to explain how the subjective experience occurs within the brain. That's the crux and really nothing more.
Humphrey, and many others, take this as a statement of a problem, seeing only that Locke (and Descartes) found it impossible because he was merely working from the contemplation of [their] own ideas. The feeling is that now, with science or some other intellectual solution, we can discovery and know the power to perceive and think. The discovery is, however, that it is impossible to know.
The sneaky part is the first step (as Wittgenstein will say, PI, #308). What Locke wants is knowledge of the other (and ourselves), which is to say, certainty, justified, immutable. What he is saying, despite his hopeful qualifications, is a statement of fact. We will never be certain the other is thinking, because, as Wittgenstein sees, the criteria of thinking is not knowledgenot everything is thought. The other may be quoting, brainwashed, serving platitudes, or just plain making stuff up. The answer is not one of knowing it is working to find out what the other is trying to point out in the context were in (being drawn in Heidegger will say), given the intelligible possibilities, or to make them intelligible. To trust that they are individuating themselves, until it is clear they are not. We must contemplate the other as other, treat them as someone who is seeing something different.
Thus, there is no power to discover, no continuous thought or special, ever-present perception leading to a consciousness; something always there and yours alone. We want others (and ourselves) to be able to be always thinking, everything said be intended, so that we can simply take their words on their face, take ours as clear without being responsible for them further, because they come from our consciousness which is the desire for something foundational.
Quoting Philosophim
I am claiming that there is a reason he is imagining a subjective experience, the evidence being that he says it. That he wants it to be explained by a mechanism is not me reading intentions, it is the implications of his getting to his reason from those means. The idea that there is nothing more is skipping over how this is set up from the history of philosophy. The problem is assumed without considering whether it is framed correctly (see post re Locke above).
Having written several complex and complicated papers that examine every angle before coming to a conclusion, I have some background to note that this is actually terrible writing. Writing should narrow in on a point so the reader has clarity. After the point is written, let the reader expand from there.
He is right to use the terms and points he is so that even a reader not well versed in philosophy can understand his point. That's fantastic writing. His reference is to sight blindness, and he's attempting to use medical and scientific terminology to explore a concept. Nothing wrong with that. His lack of exploring Locke is not an intention we can fairly make.
He has a problem. He has certain knowledge and vocabulary. From there he constructs an idea that is simple, relatable, powerful, and succinct. That's fantastic philosophy. Critique his main conclusions, the idea of solving the hard problem. If he chooses to sprinkle meaning behind it, why is that relevant to his main point at all? It sounds like you're more upset with where you think this can go than with his immediate idea.
Thats not what hes doing, or at least not how I read it.
The section you quoted does not support your claim that the authors goal is to prove that we each have an undeniable, given self. The fact that we have phenomenal consciousness is simply a given. Thats the hard problem: why do we have phenomenal consciousness (or qualia or feelings) if the brain could function without it? The author is offering a theory of the evolution and purpose of phenomenal consciousness/qualia; a theory of why it evolved.
Towards the end of the article he says that if it evolved the way he suggests, then it might account for empathy, social living, etc., but this is not the main point of the article.
Quoting Philosophim
I am narrowly focused on his point that knowledge of the self will make us matter, and I am trying to show how the desire to matter creates the need for the certainty. Maybe I can help with something youre not clear on.
Quoting Philosophim
But he does bring up Descartes; he does imagine these findings have philosophical import. Just because he doesnt get into the place his claims stake in the history of philosophy doesnt mean they shouldnt be subject to its critique.
Quoting Philosophim
Im not saying there is a fault in not discussing Locke. I thought you might understand my point better in reviewing my response to Manuels bringing up Locke.
Quoting Philosophim
Im not worried where this can go. Im saying it got started from a hidden desire and a misconception. Sometimes philosophy cant be done so close in; this is how someone objecting to skepticism gets stuck trying to prove it wrong.
What I should have said is the need to explain or have knowledge of the purpose of phenomenal consciousness is to desire to solidify it, make it certain, understandable, important. To make it factual, say, as we feel the theory of evolution is.
I realize this is not the point of the article; Im just trying to put its philosophical descriptions and claims in the context of the greater sphere of analytical philosophy. Im saying that the assumption that we have consciousness is a misconception based on a desire to be certain that we matter. This, of course, is a broader discussion. I can let it be for another time.
I think something like that is true. Occasionally you'll get some scientists say that we don't really understand what gravity is, while many other say that we do know what it is, because it is what it does. The latter explanation is misleading, I think.
But yes, some new phenomena or discovery comes to light that sheds some light into what was already deemed extremely problematic centuries ago, like the hard problem, or machines thinking.
Its a misconception that we have consciousness? And no more than an assumption? You arent really aware of your feelings or sensations?
The trick is right in the space between feeling something, being aware of it (rather than suppressing it) and just before the jump to the conclusion that we have consciousness, more than are conscious of: as if it were pointed out, or were embarrassed into acknowledging it, or are touching something with a purpose, or suddenly notice the faint yet unmistakeable smell of bleach, or cant seem to reach our grief. Part of it is the sense that these feelings, thoughts, sensations, must be ours, as if no one has ever been this heartbroken before; the fear that they are trivial, that the other can feel the same; as if I wont have anything. Part of it is having the security that there is something of mine that I cannot be separated from, that knowing myself is at my fingertips (ugh), that, as you say, this at least is given.
Back to Humprey: what would be missing from your life if you lacked phenomenal consciousness? If you had blindsight, blind-touch, blind-hearing, blind-everything? Pace Fodor, Im sure theres an obvious answer, and its the one we touched on when discussing blindsight. Its that what would be missing would be nothing less than you, your conscious self imagine if you were to lack qualia of any kind at all, and to find that none of your sensory experience was owned by you? Im sure your self would disappear.
The stakes are certainly very high. As Descartes found, if we rely on anything else to build our sense of self, it can be taken away. Only if we own what is special about me (keep it inside) can I be ensured that my culture wont minimize me, that others wont define what is acceptable for me to be, that my actions wont be judged to include implications I had not thought about, that I wont just be identified by my suffering. As Wittgensteins nemesis says: But surely another person can't have THIS pain! (PI, #253) as if this were to mean: the same pain, the identical (unique) pain, when it is merely true because there are two bodies; this body and that one. In our case, he would put it that there is a difference in the criteria for the ownership of a self.
[quote=Nicholas Humphries]Why is there any such thing as what philosophers call phenomenal experience or qualia our subjective, personal sense of interacting with stimuli arriving via our sense organs? Not only in the case of vision, but across all sense modalities: the redness of red; the saltiness of salt; the paininess of pain what does this extra dimension of experience amount to? Whats it for? [/quote]
Isn't it rather a strange question?
I kind of feel that way too; as a philosophical orientation it looks odd. However, taken as an object of science it makes sense to puzzle over phenomenal consciousness. And perhaps unlike you, I don't see any reason in principle why it shouldn't be an object of science.
So in philosophical mode my question in place of Humphrey's would be something like, "what is it about a scientific view that makes phenomenal experience look so puzzling?"
That said, I like his answer.
The syntax, I grant you, is inelegant and wordy, but it doesn't seem an especially strange series of questions, given variations of questions just like it come up constantly, here and elsewhere.
Quoting Jamal
Fair. It certainly benefits from sharpening.
I agree, the truly "hard problems" are the ones which get put aside and neglected for the longest periods of time, hundreds or even thousands of years. They tend to be fundamental, basic ontological issues, so that the work-around is basic and foundational to the ensuing conceptual structure which develops from it. A good example is the interaction problem of dualism, which is very closely related to the hard problem of consciousness.
If we take the hard problem as most basic, fundamental, and therefore most ancient, we can see that the classical work-around for this problem has been dualism. But in ancient Greek philosophy, the incompatibility between the material world of becoming, and the logical world of being and not being, was exposed. Since the logical world was apprehended as consisting of ideas which were considered to be immutable eternal truths, the interaction problem developed because it was impossible to show how this realm of immutable "objects" could interact with an ever changing material world.
The work-around for the interaction problem was initiated by Plato, as "the good", and developed by Aristotle as final causation, later blossoming into free will and intention. The modern day "hard problem" is just a form of extreme ontological skepticism, which rejects all of the significant metaphysical work-arounds produced over the past millennia, to bring us right back to the basic, fundamental problem, and have another go at that problem from a new perspective. The "new perspective" is the one currently obtained from all the gained experience and new knowledge developed over that time period.
It appears to be a near-universal intuition that mind is somehow different and separate from matter, a form of thinking that sticks with us and appears all over the place. I think we by now have sufficient evidence to show that mind and matter are not distinct (different) ontological categories, but instead should be considered part of the same phenomena, matter, which we do not understand well at all.
However, within matter, the aspect we are most confident about is our conscious experience, so that specific aspect of matter is less obscure.
And if what I'm formulating is roughly on the right track, as I believe it is, it's no wonder some people think of this as a "hard problem", the only issue is that the problem should be reversed. What we don't understand is matter absent consciousness- we study its structural characteristics only - and we do not understand what 95% of the universe even is, though we must assume it's a variation of physical stuff.
Compared to that picture of matter, consciousness shouldn't be as problematic as discussed in the literature. Of course, there's a whole lot we don't know about it, but to think that it's this massive problem is quite misleading, for the given reasons.
I believe this misses the main crux of the article. It is not about building a sense of self, but about having one; it is not about owning something special about me, but about having any sense of personhood at all. What I take to be the main crux of the article is that the combination of different qualia create a sense of personhood; create me, my conscious self.
The example of blindsight demonstrates one aspect of this; that, although the person functions as a sighted person, without the qualia of sight, it doesnt feel to them that those sighted functions belong to them. It was instead just some qualia-less physical processing that the person was unaware of, like their liver function.
If the same applied to all qualia, then there would be no sense of personhood.
Is it a scientific view that makes it look puzzling, or just the commonsense view of matter as being "inanimate", not to mention insentient and insapient?
I disagree with this. I don't see how "matter" could ever be defined in a way to reconcile the two distinct categories. There would be too much contradiction and incoherency. What you say, i.e. that we do not understand matter, is evidence of this.
If we define a term for the sake of supporting some ontological position, when we do not really understand the thing referred to by that term, as you propose with "matter", then unless the ontological position is absolutely correct (which is extremely improbable), when we use that term in application, contradiction will be inevitable.
:up: Thanks for linking this.
I follow Strawson here, everything is physical, and that means everything. It's a terminological choice, but a coherent metaphysical one, which focuses on the nature of the world.
Within the physical (or material) we understand the conscious aspects of it better than anything by far. But there remains a lot of the physical we understand poorly, which is the non-conscious aspects of the physical (or matter).
What's the incoherence in this view, if you could explain it a bit more?
Yes, in a sense modern QM at least, does once and for all demolish the once very popular, and still intuitive belief, of "dead and stupid matter" - we don't know enough about it to conclude this.
All I emphasize is that it's the scientific aspects, which we know much less well than personal experience, hence not knowing what 95% of the universe is, nor knowing how to connect QM with Relativity, heck, not even knowing what a particle is:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-a-particle-20201112/
If we have trouble with a particle, we have some issues in understanding matter as revealed by physics. Experience is by comparison, easier to us, we can empathize, use intuition, pass laws, read novels, tell jokes, read a room, etc. And we tend to do these things without much effort.
Still a whole lot to learn about experience by way of science, but, again, compared to physics, I think it's substantially less problematic, by quite a margin, I'd wager.
Theyre the same thing. Or in other words, yes, but this is a particular commonsense view that we get from science, from the culture of a secular society in which science has been paramount for a few hundred years. Science, that is, of a particular kindand here I hand wave in the direction of Descartes.
Ill let it go after this because I agree my point is not a critique of the crux of the article (rather, I would say, of its premises). We are all aware (or unaware), sense the world (or are numb to it), feel anger and sadness (or repress it), but what I sense and feel is not unable to be possessed by others, for them to have them. We are interested, traumatized, exaltedme by one thing, you by something different, remembering different things, perhaps differently, but not always different.
But it is no mistake that the sense of personhood is a sense. We want the criteria for a self to be continuous, specific, knowable, so we take as evidence the one thing we feel we cannot not know, awareness of sensationthis self-evident pain I am pierced with, undeniably, unavoidablyand add to that our desire for uniqueness (and control) and you have the individual phenomenal self, backwards engineered from, coincidently, the criteria for truth that philosophy has desired from the beginning.
Yes, and we have even less intuitive sense of what a field is.
Quoting Manuel
I agree, with the caveat that what can be known phenomenologically is not coterminous with what can be known scientifically.
I tend to think the idea of the insentient nature of matter goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Judaism and Christianity, but it's a nuanced issue to be sure, and I'm no expert.
Yes, but to view people or animals as at bottom inanimate or as divided between animate and inanimate might be more recent.
:up: I thought it was worth sharing.
I don't see where you find that in the premises of the article, unless you are talking about the premises created within the history of philosophy that brought about the hard problem. The article itself seems to me to be suggesting the opposite view of that which you are attempting to impose upon it. The article does not mention anything about a "desire for uniqueness" of the individual phenomenal self. Instead, it suggests that the evolution of the phenomenal self may have been the genesis for social living and having empathy with others:
:up:
The point is that when such a theory is applied, incoherencies inevitably arise. We can start with the one most obvious in physics, the so-called wave/particle duality. It is incoherent to say that the same energy, at the same time, moves from one place to another as both a particle and as a wave. The way that energy is transmitted through wave action is completely different from the way that energy moves as an object moving from A to B.
By saying that everything is physical you are saying that the way that physics represents reality is the way that things are. But physics represents reality in a way which is incoherent.
Our commonsense notions lead us astray in regard to the nature of the world. That something can be at the same time a particle and a wave in superposition is a fact about the world, it doesn't make sense to us, too bad, it's what we have.
Yeah, using Straswon's materialism is usually counter-intuitive, so it's hard to express. Materialism as is used today in philosophy means roughly, something like physicSalism, the view that everything can more or less be described by the terms of physics. That's incoherent, it's asking way, way too much of physics, way outside its purview too.
No, by physicalism I mean everything in the world is physical stuff - of the nature of the physical - this means that experience is a wholly physical phenomenon. But if it is true that experience is physical, and history is physical and everything that exists is physical, then clearly the physical goes way beyond what we usually attach to the meaning of the word.
It's a monist claim, usually not accepted because people think that materialism must be physicSalism, I don't think it follows, but I'm in a very small minority here.
What occurs to me, reading that article, is that what his model is describing is ego, the self's idea of itself. I don't think it addresses the aspect of the hard problem concerned with what it means to be.
Quoting Manuel
You could flip this perspective, you know. You're saying that, because we can't define the physical, due to the ambiguous wave-particle nature of matter and the other paradoxes of qm, that it could or must be the case that, if everything exists is physical then the physical must also include the mental. But what if we acknowledged that nothing is completely or only physical, on the grounds that what is physical can never be completely defined, and that what we experience as physical is instead the attribute of a class of cognitive experiences?
Yes, I am claiming that the article is working on (assuming) a certain framework that, yes, is trying to answer or overcome the conclusions of philosophical skepticism.
Quoting Luke
He does say: With this marvelous new phenomenon at the core of your being, youll start to matter to yourself in a new and deeper way. Youll come to believe, as never before, in your own singular significance.
I wanted to say the same thing with unique as he is with singular significance though I take it as a fantasy created by our desire rather than a given state. I think Ive made that as clear as I can.
Its about phenomenal consciousness - which includes that of which we are consciously aware - so I think this is about right.
Quoting Wayfarer
How do you view the hard problem as concerned with what it means to be?
The rest of the quote counters your claims:
This does not reflect a desire for uniqueness.
It's a terminological choice, more than substantive one, though there is some substance. The qm phenomena are curious and interesting, but an extremely miniscule part of what I take the physical to be. In this sense I'd want to say that experience is the most fundamental physical fact we are acquainted with, I choose "physical" because I want to emphasize the world out there, which I think exists without me.
We could say that everything is an idea (or experience) or something mental. That's fine, so long as an idea has bearer which is not an idea.
With mental... It's hard. I don't want to say that say, what we call "Mars" is constituted (made of) something mental, I don't think it is. But I grant that whatever we know about Mars comes through experience.
As the crux of the issue. Seems to me that Humphries addresses one aspect of the problem - what is the evolutionary rationale for this capacity? Why are humans and other higher animals aware of themselves? It's like 'yes, I can see how the mind produces reflexive awareness of its own inner states'. He talks about the internal systems that allow that, and how it enriches the state of experience, but the rationale for it is evolutionary - how this contributes to our adaptive ability. That's why, I presume, Daniel Dennett posted it, as it dovetails nicely with his evolutionary philosophy, But it doesn't come to terms with the issue of what it means to be - the kind of concerns that animate phenomenology and existentialism. It's a different kind of 'why' - there's an instrumental 'why', and an existential 'why', if you like. I think Humphries addresses the first, but not the second. (Some discussion of this in the comments on the Aeon article, I note.)
Quoting Manuel
You're not alone. Albert Einstein was walking with his friend Abraham Pais one afternoon, when he suddenly stopped and said 'Does the moon cease to exist when nobody's looking at it?' He was asking exactly the same question. I won't address it here though as it's a derailer.
The implication of the sentence is that you also (along with me) will be unique, and I will respect that more: Youll come to believe in your own singular significance. Whats more, it will not just be you [that you will come to believe is singularly significant]. For youll soon realize that other[ s are singularly significant too]. (Emphasis and paraphrasing mine.]
Well, one could say that the moon being mental is surely a very hard problem. :joke:
Seriously though, I hope I won't forget it but, if the issue arises in some thread, let's bring this up to see how this could be tackled, it's quite a provocative idea.
The quote says youll soon realise that other members of your species possess conscious selves like yours. You are resorting to cherry picking and omitting parts of the quote to try and contort it to fit your argument regarding a desire for uniqueness.
How is this related to the hard problem of consciousness?
As I said in my first comment, the question 'why are we subjects of experience?' is a strange question. It's tantamount to asking 'why do we exist?' The question is asked, 'why did consciousness evolve?' Humphrey quotes another philosopher to that effect:
For some reason, this strikes me as manifestly absurd. Even very simple critters are conscious - obviously not rationally self-aware and self-conscious - but some level of consciousness is required for them to react to stimuli and survive, to maintain themselves in existence. It's what differentiates organisms from minerals. So the statement is completely self contradictory - 'a conscious mind could do what it does, even without the attribute that makes it "a conscious mind" '. And I don't know that the phenomenon of blindsight is a persuasive argument for that.
But if you phrase the question 'why do I exist?', it is a much more open-ended question than the question of why the brain is configured in such a way as to give rise to the sense of self. The way the question is addressed by Humphrey is from an objective point of view - how to provide a plausible account for the fact that humans and other higher animals have a sense of self, given evolutionary biology and neurology (which, surprise!, is because it provides an incentive to continue existing - which is, after all, the only answer evolutionary biology can give, as continuing to exist is the definition of what constitutes a living species.) But is that all there is to the question of the nature of conscious existence?
David Chalmers discusses Humphrey's earlier work in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, saying that it fails to address the hard problem of consciousness, suggesting that Humphrey's approach is reductionist and that it relies too heavily on the assumption that consciousness is a mere byproduct of brain function (in other words, assuming what it needs to prove, or begging the question.)
I know that my objection is easily dismissed. The reductionist approach dismisses the whole idea of there being such a problem in the first place! But the question remains whether reductionism has addressed it or whether it's not really seeing it in the first place. (A different kind of blindsight, maybe.)
The reason why it "doesn't make sense" is not that it is counterintuitive, or contrary to commonsense notions, the reason is that it is logically incoherent, as I explained.
Quoting Manuel
Until you define what you mean by "physical" this talk is rather pointless. And, as I explained last post, any attempt to describe the whole world as one kind of stuff will inevitably result in incoherent and contradictory descriptions when you start to apply your definitions in practice. To you, this might appear to be a very miniscule part of reality which gets rendered as incoherent, but that's just an indication that you have a very narrow mind, and the miniscule part you get a glimpse of is just the boundaries which confine that narrow mind. In reality, what is on the other side of that boundary is a whole lot more vast than what fits inside your concept of "physical".
"Materialism is the view that every real, concrete2 phenomenon3 in the universe is physical. Its a view about the actual universe, and for the purposes of this paper I am going to assume that it is true.
2. By concrete I simply mean not abstract. Its natural to think that any really existing thing is
ipso facto concrete, non-abstract, in which case concrete is redundant, but some philosophers like to say that numbers (for example) are real thingsobjects that really exist, but are abstract.
3. I use phenomenon as a completely general word for any sort of existent, a word that carries no implication as to ontological category (the trouble with the general word entity is that it is now standardly understood to refer specifically to things or substances). Note that someone who agrees that physical phenomena are all there are, but finds no logical incoherence in the idea that physical things could be put together in such a way as to give rise to non-physical things, can define materialism as the view that every real, concrete phenomenon that there is or could be in the universe is physical."
I don't understand why you point to my alleged narrow-mindedness, though it could well be the case.
As for the supposed contradiction you raise, I take it to be part of our cognitive constitution. We understand the manifest image (as per Sellars term) and we understand a bit of the scientific image.
We are so constituted that we grasp the two aspects of the world, which are actually different views of the same phenomenon, one being more reflexive and careful (science).
It could easily be the case that some intelligent alien species would see how photons get colours as they are processed in the brain, or they could intuitively understand how gravity or qm works. That's not us.
You have the prerogative to reject this as silly or nonsense. But I personally try to be charitable for a bit, but, we need not be, of course.
Well, if you dont think writing can be paraphrased and drawn out at all its gonna be tough to do philosophy. If you think Ive got it wrong, what do you think he is saying?
Youll come to believe, as never before, in your own singular significance. Whats more, it will not just be you. For youll soon realise that other members of your species possess conscious selves like yours.
And when I say that, Im not asking what you take from it, but to answer the open questions, such as: what do I believe? and how is it the same thing as before, only now more? What is it that could be mine, but yet also something others can have (my own)? And what will not just be you? That which I believe in? That I will not just believe in something that is mine, I will believe in something that is theirs? If so, what and how do I and they possess it? How is mine mine and theirs theirs but they are alike? How is theirs like mine?
How do you account for the reality of abstractions? You say that every real concrete phenomenon is physical. Then you say that "concrete" means "not abstract". So you allow for a category of 'real not concrete', or 'real abstract', as something distinct from 'real concrete'. By your words, abstract things are not concrete, therefore not physical, yet they are real things which you talk about. And, by your words, these abstractions cannot be part of the universe. So where are they?
Quoting Manuel
I point to your effort to restrict your "universe" to exclude abstractions as a narrow-mindedness, because you seem to recognize the reality of abstractions yet you want to force them out of your "universe" through this exclusion, as if abstractions are somehow unreal. When a large part of what is present to your mind is abstractions, yet you want to force these abstractions out of your mind as something unreal, this can be called a narrowing of your mind, an effort to deny the reality of a large part of what is present to your mind.
Quoting Manuel
I don't understand why this would require an alien. if we can see, as I point out, that our representation is incoherent due to a contradictory nature, then we could simply accept that this is a poor representation, and look for the true representation. There is no need to invoke an alien to do this for us.
But look, you claim two different views of the same thing. How would two different views of one thing be possible in a universe which only consists of one thing? Isn't it necessary to assume something which serves to separate one view from another view. Suppose the universe is all one substance, all matter as you claim, such that the observers, the observed, and everything else is simply matter. What would distinguish one view from another view, making this a real distinction. Furthermore, how could there even be something called a view, because all that matter would block any possibility of a view.
For some folks, perhaps, but it is a question which I believe was originally directed at physicalists. How and why we have phenomenal experiences might be considered a challenging question for those who assume that everything is physical, or that the mental and the physical, or the brain and the mind, are identical (and only physical).
Quoting Wayfarer
As the article puts it, blindsight is "visual perception in the absence of any felt visual sensations." For those that view the world in physical terms only, it should not be surprising for everything to function as it would whether or not phenomenal consciousness was associated with brain function; after all, phenomenal consciousness is (somehow) physical too. The condition of blindsight goes some way towards supporting this physicalist view, since it is visual perception without the qualia of seeing. As quoted in the OP, Chalmers' puts the question to physicalists: "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?" If it's all just physical information processing - as the physicalists insist - and there is no mental "stuff" that is categorically different from the physical "stuff", then the physicalists should find that people would behave the same way even if they were not phenomenally conscious. So, how and why are we phenomenally conscious, dear physicalists?
I hope this helps to shed some light on the hard problem (and that I haven't gotten it terribly wrong).
I don't think it's quite the same as asking why we exist. However, it's unsurprising that the "why" question would have some sort of evolutionary answer.
He is talking about the evolution of phenomenal consciousness - when it first appeared on the scene. Upon its inception you'll come to believe in your own singular significance because you are now phenomenally conscious; you now have personhood. This is not born of some fantasy or desire for individuality, or of wanting your individual pains and colours to be unique, but merely finding that you have them for the first time. Furthermore, "it will not just be you" who finds you are now phenomenally conscious, but "you'll soon realise that other members of your species possess conscious selves like yours."
The preceding paragraph in the article may help to put it in perspective:
Am I right to interpret the article to suggest that we essentially dream ourselves into sentience? That the sum of our sensory inputs is formed into a collage that is us?
In that case, it somewhat confirms concepts I already had, intuitively, about consciousness.
I've had the idea that we essentially dream ourself conscious through a constant feedback loop, not only within the brain as we can read about in the article, but that we constantly get a feed from our surroundings that has its properties constant. We see a table and that table will not change its objective physical properties, form, color, smell, and taste, so the stream of input constantly generates a verification of our inputs to our dream state experience.
This is why our dreams act in such abstract and surreal ways, because the stream of verification is lacking. The feedback loop is only the previous feed of sensory information being looped within our minds and never verified by a solid objective reality. So it shifts in all forms, shapes, colors, smells, tastes, and touch.
It is also why when we take psychedelics, our mind process reality like a dream. Because our sensory inputs start to have interferences in both what they signal to the brain and how the brain loops that information, we start to instead dream in an awake state.
It can also explain how and why we change our personality depending on sensory input. When someone has chronic pains they might act with anger in everyday situations and they might even justify it as being part of their persona.
All of this is a side note to the article, but it verifies some ideas about why we experience dreams and psychedelics the way we do and how they affect our sense of self.
When did it first appear?
No.
?
Quoting L'éléphant
Do you doubt that the article offers a proposed solution to the hard problem? Have I created bias by announcing that that's what the article is about? I don't see how the title prevents anyone from expressing their criticism to the points discussed in the article. Furthermore, I doubt that anyone would honestly disagree that the article proposes a solution to the hard problem.
Consciousness is a characteristic of life. All living organisms are conscious. All of them have qualia, i.e. subjective, conscious experience.
(Panpsychism believes that the whole Universe is conscious. But let not this bother us! :smile:)
Things get hard though if we go a few steps further and ask, "Why is there life?" and then "Why is there consciousness at all?" ...
That's a mislabeled response from me. When I said "no", I meant that you are correct in your explanation of the article, but I disagree with the article.
Quoting Luke
Yes, I doubt it, and yes you did.
Quoting Luke
Have they agreed? Sorry if I missed a post here that agreed that the article proposes a solution. I read some who praised the article as a good article or exciting.
Edit:
Just in case I wasn't clear on my first response to the article, I deny that the article promises a solution, I deny that the article has provided an insight (this is important for me) -- what it provided is a caricature of how humans come to be aware of their senses and how it mischaracterized what it meant to philosophy when other philosophers say that our concept of plurality came first before our concept of "self".
If you disagree that the article proposes a solution to the hard problem, then what would you say the article is about? What discussion title would you have used instead?
A rehash of what's already been written about phenomenal experience in philosophy, except with fancy words and invention or creative license, which unfortunately is unwarranted since he was actually talking about biological and physiological activities. We have scientific records, no need to invent things.
Here again are passages lifted from the article -- passages are in quote marks: (I suppose I have to work harder because I'm in the minority of disagreeing with his "solution")
A mental record, in other words, a temporal perception, which has already been written about a thousand times by the likes of Descartes, Hume, A. Shimony, etc.
What are these attractors? He explains it in this passage:
It means retrieving the information from memory. Mind you, bodily functions such as hunger is not memory based, nor the bowel movement ( I will explain it for those uninitiated, upon request).
Quoting Luke
"Nicholas Humphrey's Seeing and Somethingness -- His Personal Account of What Goes On In Our Brain If or When We Have Sensations For Those Who Have Not Studied Or Read Or Understood Neuroscience".
Something.
If it were all just physical information processing and there were no experiential dimension, then there would be no one to find anything, nothing to be found, and indeed, no physicalists or physicalism, either.
Yes please.
Which is it? Is it a rehash of what's already been written about phenomenal experience in philosophy or is he actually talking about biological and physiological activities?
Quoting L'éléphant
Please cite references to their work that addresses the hard problem of consciousness regarding how or why qualia could have evolved, or why we have any phenomenal experiences at all.
Quoting L'éléphant
Is that all it means?
You have not specified where you disagree with the article. I take it you disagree that the author is proposing a theory of the evolution of phenomenal experience which would help to resolve the hard problem of consciousness? However, this disagreement is already addressed by what you've quoted above, which indicates the author has a theory regarding "the creation of a very special kind of attractor, which the subject reads as a sensation with the unaccountable feel of phenomenal qualia." That is the topic of the article. You may have missed the fact that the author proposes a theory regarding the evolution of phenomenal consciousness.
Here is a snippet from the article's introduction:
Quoting Nicholas Humphrey
Quoting L'éléphant
It's a bit wordy. Also, it isn't the topic of the article. The article proposes a theory of the evolution of qualia, about how and why qualia evolved.
If there were no experiential dimension then there would be no hard problem, but since there is, there is.
Consider what it would mean to say that there is no experiential dimension. Unless that possibility is conceivable, then the hard problem isn't conceivable. Can you really conceive an absence of experience?
Consider the empirical criteria we might use when we assert that a sleeping person is unconscious. Then consider the rational arguments the the sleeping person uses after waking up, when they infer on the basis of amnesia to have been unconscious during sleep.
Is our empirical criteria regarding the present unconsciousness of a sleeping person the same as, or even comparable to, the amnesia that the awoken person appeals to when inferring "self unconsciousness" in the past?
Why not?
Quoting sime
Yes.
By definition, there does not exist empirical criteria for asserting self-unconsciousness in the present. So the proposition "I am presently unconscious" is presumably meaningless when taken in the fullest possible sense. In which case, an assertion of self-unconsciousness can only amount to a speculative hypothesis regarding an absence of a previous mental state (or equivalently, of the presence of an unconscious past mental state).
Typically, a person appeals to a present state of amnesia to infer that they were unconscious in the past. Whether or not one accepts the validity of this inference depends on one's conception of memory. An empiricist isn't likely to regard an inability to remember the past as saying anything literal about the past.
Granting this, how does it imply that the hard problem is inconceivable?
We can take the hard-problem in it's broadest sense, as asking what grounds the existence of first-personal phenomenological criteria that are used to understand propositions?
For phenomenologists who consider first-personal phenomenological criteria to be the very essence of meaning, the question is circular and makes no sense from their perspective. Which is what i was getting at above.
On the other hand, scientists working in the natural sciences will either side with the phenomenologist or not, depending on whether they believe the inter-subjective empirical criteria that they use to understand scientific theories to be ultimately grounded in first-person phenomenology or in pure reason. (e.g whether they are ultimately empiricists equipped with a deflationary understanding of truth and an anti-representationalist understanding of their own minds, or whether they are ultimately rationalists equipped with a correspondence understanding of truth and a representational understanding of themselves).
As for Dennett, he sometimes sounds like a rationalist who agrees with the phenomenologist that the question is meaningless, but for opposite reasons, namely due to a narrow interpretation of the natural sciences as denying the question on the basis of it being materially inconsequential (as opposed to be phenomenologically inconsequential)
Quoting sime
Dreamless sleep. A time in ones being, where there was no awareness of such. But one wakes up, and continues to experience, despite the lost time.
Perhaps the same in a coma. I'm less sure of that as I have had Dreamless sleep but never been in a coma.
Experts in meditation claim total absence of thought during trance. Again I cannot verify. But it seems possible to continue exist without directly experiencing that existence in a given moment of time. Ie to have "blackouts" or lost time. The failure or purposeful pause of memory.
Perhaps the hard problem is inconceivable for phenomenolgists, but I'm not a phenomenologist.
More simply, I can conceive of a point in time before there was any life or conscious beings in the universe.
So what is your definition of unconsciousness? Is it a pure postulate, or something that reduces to empirical criteria?
A dictionary definition would suffice.
Quoting sime
I don't believe that we know the meanings of any words based solely on observation or experience; there is always some rationality or reasoning associated with knowing the meaning or use of a word. So...both.
How can one that conceives, truly conceive of a state of non-conceivability (ie. a state with no consciousness).
That's like "something" trying to conceive of true absolute "nothingness." It's impossible. As the process of conceiving as well as the conception itself are both "something."
You may be able to conceive of a time before conceptions (consciousness and it's thoughts/concepts) but it would be a very inaccurate and biased one.
Biased toward something trying conceptualise a state it can never be by virtue of the fact it can conceive in the first place.
Consciousness cannot know the lack of it. Again, as "knowing" is a process of the conscious.
Right, and as I said if there were no experiential dimension there would be nothing else either, so putting the question as to why there is experience is really equivalent to putting the question as to why there is anything at all, or why there is something rather than nothing.
I thought we were on the same side. Were you unable to conceive of a state with no consciousness in your examples of dreamless sleep, coma and meditation? One needn't conceive of one's own unconsciousness in order to conceive of unconsciousness; one can imagine other people being unconsciousness. And I think many would agree that rocks and other inanimate objects are also in a "state with no consciousness". Regardless, I believe that one can conceive of one's own unconsciousness; such as before they were born or after they die. Moreover, if a state with no consciousness could not be conceived, then how could you or I understand what the phrase "state with no consciousness" means? It's not a logical contradiction like a square circle. Surely you can imagine a state with no consciousness, at least in other people and objects, and perhaps even a state of the universe at a particular time.
Quoting Benj96
Whether or not it would be an inaccurate or biased conception, you've acknowledged here that it is conceivable.
Quoting Benj96
Sure, I can't experience being unconscious while I'm conscious, or know "what it's like" in this sense, but that's a different story to whether I can merely conceive of myself being unconcious; to merely imagine it.
The question "why does phenomenal experience exist" may seem analogous to the question "why does anything exist". I agree that the question can be viewed in this way. I still tend to view it this way myself occasionally. But I believe that the hard problem can be expressed in a way that distinguishes these two seemingly identical questions.
As defined by the IEP article, "the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is something it is like for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states light up and directly appear to the subject."
Expressed in this way, it could be viewed as a question that is not solely about the existence of conscious experience, but about why some physical states are conscious and others are not.
Some claim that we are in fact in such a situation, that we don't really experience anything at all but just have the illusion that we do. Assuming that were so, should we attribute the same illusions to the p-zombie human world? But then, if experience is just an illusion, isn't having an illusion of experience having experience after all? This is reminiscent, in a different register, of the Cartesian 'cogito'.
Also, if there were no experience then there would be no sense of time and memory. Time itself may be an illusion, but it seems impossible to think of a sense of time as an illusion, and memories might be confabulated, but it seems impossible to think of the sense of remembering as an illusion. Those elements, time and memory, seem to be indispensable to creativity, to the production of novelty, and so it seems impossible to imagine p-zombies being able to produce civilization and all its products,
If that were true it would mean that without consciousness humans could never have evolved, and the should also be true of animals. There does seem to be a kind of immanent imperative in being itself to evolve, so maybe that is why there is consciousness, because without it, evolution would be impossible. I won't go all the way to invoking the overarching teleology of entropy as @apokrisis does; that is another conversation.
But, I haven't addressed your question about why some physical states are conscious and others not. This could be taken in two ways; you might be understood to be asking it of all physical states whatever or just referring to the bodily physical states of humans and other organisms. Assuming the latter, then I would say it is because so much awareness would be too confusing. If you were asking it of the former, then I would in turn ask whether we know that all physical states are not conscious to some minimal degree. If they were then this would be the panpsychist or panexperientialist answer to the "hard" question as to how 'brute' matter could by virtue of mere configuration and complexity, become conscious.
The bowel movement is controlled by the enteric nervous system. They call it the second brain -- without input from our self-awareness (the central nervous system), the ENS can function fully on its own. No, it can't write a Shakespeare masterpiece or Vivaldi's Four Seasons, but it's a powerful network of guts and enzymes and bacteria.
Thanks. I was expecting a philosophical not a biological answer (eg a definition of what memory means to some philosophers). I knew about the enteric nervous system (though I'd forgotten the name). If it records some information, and later uses that information to make a decision, I would call that memory, or even a 'mental record'. I don't see the point of restricting to the central nervous system when discussing the mind from a philosophical point of view.
BTW, I think the the immune system is a better example of information processing outside the CNS. It has a very large and long-term memory.
I touched on this issue in another thread. In philosophy, the accepted belief is the causal theory of perception -- which means the CNS, and which means they accept the duality of existence and consciousness: the physical brain and the mind that perceives of time. Without the temporal perception, we would be like the enteric nervous system -- able to perform a function, but without self-awareness, no time perception, no self.
Quoting GrahamJ
No, that's not correct. The ENS could function without the input from the CNS. It doesn't record information, as we know information. It's not through memory. I don't know how to explain it.
The closest word I could think of is reflex.
This is human consciousness dependent. As in determining the consciousness of something based on the state of human consciousness. Hypothetically, if a rock had a very basic consciousness, it would likely be unprovable by human standards/degree of qualification of what consciousness constitutes.
We believe consciousness of primates and dogs for example to be more than that of plants and fungi, and that to be more than that of bacteria, and that of bacteria to be more than that of inorganics or rocks for example. We measure consciousness in its similarity to us (Human-centric consciousness criterion).
But there is no clear cutoff between something that is living and something that is unliving. That boundary is grey as viruses demonstrate. Neither officially living, nor officially dead.
For me consciousness is a steady and gradual emergence in parallel to complexity and degree of control of the agent (beholder of consciousness).
Quoting Luke
I can imagine it yes (construct a basic simulation or imagine it, make an analogy), I cannot however experience it. Conscious beings cannot "experience unconsciousness" as it is the lack of experience.
I don't think the question should be why all human activities - including those of recent history - were not produced blind. However, it can reasonably be asked why phenomenal experience developed in the first place. I don't believe that anyone actually is a p-zombie, but I can conceive of such a thing. You might be able to imagine - as the article suggests - that some present-day animals do blindly react to their environments without any self-awareness.
Quoting Janus
Who make this claim?
Quoting Janus
This addresses the question of why some bodily states are not conscious, but it does not address the question of why some bodily states are conscious.
Quoting Janus
I'm aware this is one possible explanation, but I'm not a pansychist.
In your previous post, you seemed to be arguing that "a state with no consciousness" was inconceivable (i.e. unimaginable). I disagreed with that. However, now you are saying: that "a state with no consciousness" is not able to be (consciously) experienced. I don't disagree with that, as I stated in my last response.
Allow me to clarify. We cannot conceive "accurately" of a "state of inconceivabilty." We can conceive of it for sure. But that isn't to say the conception reflects the true state (ie accuracy). The conception is instead very much shy of the actual state.
In the same way we cannot experience the state of "non-experience" or lack-thereof. We can estimate it from the bias of consciousness. But consciousness (the conceiver) cannot experience the unconscious (inconceived) directly. It can merely imagine the idea of it.
A conscious being is both a "conceiver" and an "experiencer". The difference is that a conception is fictional or constructed/imaginary/not actual whilst an experience is something "actual" or "real".
At least by what I understand.
Can one "experience conception". Yes. They can experience imagination. That isn't to say the experienced (imagination) is the same/as concrete as the experience (something grounded/realised by the self).
How do you know that what I imagine "a state with no consciousness" to be like would be "very much shy of the actual state"?
I think Dennett claims something along these lines; that experience and consciousness are either epiphenoma or a kind of illusion.
Quoting Luke
Good point. I guess there would have to be some advantage to having some bodily states be conscious. We may not be able to answer that question, though.
I may be wrong, but I believe that even illusionists like Keith Frankish do not claim "that we don't really experience anything at all". I believe they make the more modest claim that qualia do not have the properties of privacy, ineffability, etc. that Dennett mentions in Quining Qualia, or that we should not be misled into the misconception that phenonenal consciousness implies the homunculus view of an "inner show" or Cartesian theatre.
Quoting Janus
The article linked in the OP proposes an answer to that question.
You may well be right, but I, in my limited reading of Dennett, had got the impression that he thinks that experiencing something is kind of like a mirage or an afterimage that is not real, whatever that could be taken to mean.
I never understood why there would need to be an homunculus in order for there to be an "inner show". Phenomenologically speaking there certainly seems to be an inner show when I close my eyes, and neuroscience seems to tell us that the "outer show" we see with open eyes is really an inner show.
For example, I remember reading about experiments that showed that if someone is upside down for long enough the image of the environment will be inverted to be "the right way up", and that for a while if subjects subsequently stand up they will see things upside down.
Quoting Luke
Right, I only scanned it: I will try to find the time to read it more closely.
I understand, and I'm not sure if I'm completely in agreement with Dennett's views. However, the article helped me to understand - as I stated in the OP - "the idea that qualia constitute the self, rather than being something perceived by the self." I think this helps to explicate the idea of the homunculus.
On the homunculus view, there is an "inner self" that has a perspective on the sensory information of colours, sounds, tastes, smells, etc. that are located inside the body. On the non-homunculus, non-"inner self" view, the perspective locates the sensory information of colours, sounds, tastes, smells, etc. in the world instead of inside the body. I take the latter to be a more sensible view.
In the latter case, the body is the self; in the former case, there's a smaller (homunculus) self located inside the (body) self, a step removed.
I think the source of much confusion lies in this, that experience cannot be inside the brain/ body we know, because it is just a model, a part of our experience, a part of the world-model. It's very hard to talk about this without becoming confused.
This model works well if we assume that the self is no more than the combined constitution of sensations and/or perceptions, but Im left wondering if there may be more to the self than that. In particular, where does language and ones internal monologue - ones thoughts - fit in to this model?
Are ones thoughts on the same constitutive footing as ones qualia in terms of their sense of self or are ones thoughts a step removed or a step higher than ones qualia? Would I still have a sense of self without any qualia but with my thoughts? And is the role played by my thoughts any more important to, or constitutive of, my sense of self than the the role played by my qualia?
Interesting questions! If qualia are constituted by our awareness of experience, which we would have, presumably, even without language, are thoughts, or at least a certain class of thoughts, only possible in virtue of an added symbolic layer of experience and/ or judgement made possible by language?
I imagine that pre-linguistic humans and some animals have a sense of self and other, but no abstract general notion of 'self' and 'other'. Could we have the abstract notion of self, of entity and identity, without the more primordial sense of difference, leading to the sense of self and other(s)?
The idea that that which views illusions is, itself, an illusion makes no sense. The idea that an illusion is viewing itself makes no sense.
The argument that consciousness and the self are illusory does not entail that we don't exist. As I understand it, it is more saying that we imagine consciousness and the self to be in some kind of way persistent entities, and that this is an illusion of reification.
Your 'mirage' example, the illusory appearance of water on a road or plain will "fool" a camera just as it may fool a human.
In any case I'm not arguing for the position I have (rightly or wrongly) imputed to Dennett; it doesn't make convincing sense to me. either, but I acknowledge that making sense is a subjective matter; meaning that what makes sense to me may not make sense to you.
Quoting JanusThe camera will only record what happens in a certain part of the spectrum. It will also record what the magician does with the cards. But it does not see the illusions. It is not amazed because it expected one thing and got another, despite not seeing how it could possibly have happened. Only we sees illusions.
Quoting JanusTrue enough.
Quoting Patterner
The camera records the illusion we call a mirage, which means the illusion is a real phenomenon. The idea that self and consciousness are illusions is the idea that they are real, but not what we naively think they are, just like the mirage. The illusion consists in thinking that something is something it is not.
I believe they think it is a physical process, just like anything else. Of course, that begs the question as to what exactly "physical" denotes.
Are you suggesting properties of the physical that we have not yet discovered?
Any ideas? We understand the physical in physical ways. If an aspect of the physical is not accessible to our physical ways, what do we do?
I would not say mathematics is physical. Even if it began as counting physical things, it has certainly become something else. Yet we do not understand mathematics because of our senses, or any of the devices we've invented to enhance our senses.
Well, sure. There's no doubt that the brain's functions are needed for consciousness.
Is ChatGPT conscious? What about a future version that passes the Turing Test?
I meant human consciousness. That's the kind we're talking about at the moment. Obviously, the human brain's functions wouldn't be necessary for non-human consciousnesses.
Ah. I'm sure it will happen. I dont know if it has already. But theres no explanation for our consciousness that would rule out machine consciousness. If its just physical processes, machines can do that. If it's panprotopsychism, then a machine's particles would also have that property.
I guess if we have souls, then a machine probably wouldn't. Although, if souls are attracted to, and enter arrangements of matter that have certain characteristics/abilities, then that would work. But not in the religious sense of souls.
Quoting RogueAI
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that ChatGPT is conscious, then would its consciousness not be as dependent on a physical substrate as the human?
Ah. I'm sure it will happen.
I agree that machine consciousness is metaphysically possible, but I'm far from sure it will happen. Evolution has had around 500 million adapting neuron 'design' and the way neurons interconnect, to result in us. It's not obvious to me that human ingenuity can achieve a sufficiently similar result. (More likely seeming to me, is that humans could develop a nonconscious AI that then proceeds to design a conscious AI, but that is scary^2 and I tend to doubt that humanity is that stupid.)
I'm also inclined to raise an ethical objection to an attempt to create a conscious AI, in that I think it is almost a certainty that initial attempts at a conscious AI which did result in consciousness, would result in an 'insane' consciousness.
However, what I found most fascinating is the idea that qualia constitute the self, rather than being something perceived by the self.
I haven't read through the full thread, so forgive me if you have already done so, but could you point out a specific passage from the article that you interpreted as promoting such a view?
In his article Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995), David Chalmers posed the (hard) question: "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?"
I think Dennett suggested that it was an evolutionary "neat trick". In other (anthropomorphising of evolution) words, it is a means evolution stumbled upon which achieved an adaptive end. Perhaps a more adaptive end could have been reached by neurological processes evolving differently with no consciousness evolved, and perhaps not.
I see consciousness as a function of our brain's innate tendency to develop a model of physical reality based on our sensory and motor interactions with reality. Qualia might be seen as the symbols various parts of our brain present to 'modeling central' to represent the state of things in reality - the marks on the map, so to speak. Consciousness may simply be, what happens when some parts of the brain are outputting symbols in the form we associate with qualia. while simultaneously other parts of our massively parallel processing brains are monitoring the cloud of symbols being presented.
I don't see why it would be unreasonable to answer Chalmers with, "That's just the way evolution went." Unfortunately succinct perhaps, and I could suggest reasons to think that's the case, but I think this post is long enough.
BTW, there is another angle on this: if some AI passes the Turing test, meaning that it can convince anyone that it is conscious, would it necessarily follow that it is, in fact, conscious? In other words, if to be conscious is to experience, would an AIs ability to convince us that it is conscious prove that it experiences anything?
Have you read the article? It's not long.
Quoting the article
Quoting wonderer1
"That's just the way evolution went" does not explain the "adaptive end", the evolutionary purpose, or the biological advantage of the development of phenomenal consciousness. In other words, it does not answer the hard problem of why we have phenomenal consciousness. "Evolution did it" is about as explanatory as "God did it".
Which properties of particles give rise to a group of particles being aware of things, aware of itself, and aware of its awareness? How do we trace this macro property down the levels to the properties of the particles?
Also, there's meaning, as I mentioned here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/807412
This must also explain teleology. DNA doesn't have a vision of the future that it is trying to bring about. It does not have a plan of bringing about anything. It doesn't intend an acorn to become an oak tree. It doesn't envision a human, and work towards creating one. And it does not know it has brought about anything once it has. Everything it does is the result of the properties of particles and physics.
Yet one conglomerate of particles has a clear vision of the future, and acts to bring it about. Its actions are caused by a future state. A state that might never even be realized. Which micro property gives us this ability? Which scientific principle allows it? I know someone who talked about his plan to go to a concert. He said his clothes would be at the concert because of the laws of physics. As his body moves, the laws of physics do not allow his clothes to do anything but move with him. If things like consciousness, awareness, and teleology are nothing more than the laws of physics, then he will attended the concert for the same reason his clothes will. A more complex web of interacting particles than the reason his clothes will be there, but still just particles of properties, and the laws of physics.
I don't think it could convince us that it's conscious. We would always wonder if it really is conscious. Passing the Turing Test is just a milestone, it doesn't confer consciousness.
I wonder what will happen. Will the law be that nothing not human can be conscious, so there will be no rights? Knowing humanity, I don't expect we will give them the benefit of the doubt, and treat them like fellow sentients; like equals.
That said, I would believe an AI is conscious if it acted in a spontaneous way that could not be explained by its programming, and which showed that it really cared about something.
The physical processes would work fine without being aware of themselves. They do so in many other life forms. Damage is being done, the sensory system detects the damage, and it pulls away. How many other species even learn from the experience, and avoid the thing that caused the damage whenever they sense it?
There are machines that can perceive different frequencies of the visible spectrum with much greater accuracy than we can. They can perform actions based on which frequency they perceive. They can choose between actions if there are multiple perceptions.
If all off our mental activity is entirely physical, how is it we are not like those other life forms and machines? We [I]aren't[/I] like them. How is what makes us different accomplished?
It is a hasty generalization to go from, "The behavior of many lifeforms occurs without consciousness." to, "All of the behavior of humans could occur without consciousness."
The fact is, we expect the behavior of humans who are unconscious to be different from the behavior of humans who are conscious. So what reason do we have to think human behavior in general could be as it is without consciousness?
You have selected a pattern of behavior that is relatively trivial and can be explained relatively trivially. How about if we decide the behavior of interest is composing sonnets? How many species are doing it? Why don't we expect a poet to be as apt to produce a sonnet while under anesthesia, as she was before she was under anesthesia?
We have a different evolutionary history that resulted in us having different brains than other species do.
I need clarification as to how to take your question. Are you asking how evolution resulted in human brains being as they are? Are you asking, given the way human brains are, how is consciousness a consequence of that brain structure? Something else?
I might answer your question by saying, "With lots of neurons which have lots of connections to other neurons." I don't suppose that is very satisfying though. However, it is not as if we have a complete schematic diagram of a human brain that scientists can study, so it doesn't seem surprising to me that neuroscientists don't have the thorough explanation we might like.
Do you think that if physicalism is the case, it is reasonable to expect neuroscientists to be able to answer your question in a comprehensive way at this point in human history, and if so why?
I just skimmed through parts of it. It was interesting, but to be honest, I asked my question because based on what I did read I thought it unlikely that the authors suggested the notion that "qualia constitute the self".
Thank you for quoting the specific excerpt. However, I'm still not seeing why you think the author suggested that "qualia constitute the self". I think the authors would likely agree with the statement that, "If there were no qualia there likely would be no self.", but that is a different statement.
First off, I made that statement with the following sentence immediately after, "Unfortunately succinct perhaps, and I could suggest reasons to think that's the case, but I think this post is long enough."
Yes, I know I did not support my answer to Chalmer's question. I thought I made it obvious that I recognized that. I only have so much time to participate in these discussions, so I suggested an 'in a nutshell' answer.
Suppose miraculously I was able to produce an accurate account of every detail of the evolutionary path leading to humans. Would it then be unreasonable to conclude with, "So that's just the way evolution went?"
BTW, Do you think Chalmers is an evolution skeptic?
That's one way to detect consciousness. Maybe there won't be any Ai's that claim they're conscious. Maybe they'll always just say, "I don't have experiences. I'm a p-zombie".
Thoughts - both linguistic and visual imaginings - are based on sensory input. Verbs, nouns, syntax/grammar reflect the actions, objects/locations and structure or relationship between theses respectively.
Language reflects the 4 dimensions we exist in. The Who, what, where, when, how and why reflect the features of the reality we sense - subjects, material, location, time, relationships and cause-effect.
If you haven't read the full article, then how are you in a position to question my reading of it? You think that your ability to guess about the parts that you didn't even bother to read is better than my actual reading of the article? If you think it's unlikely for the authors to suggest that "qualia constitute the self" then read the bloody article and find out. Have you read it all yet?
Quoting wonderer1
Explain why you think "qualia constitute the self" is not implied by the article:
Quoting the article
Quoting wonderer1
Firstly, that isn't a quote from the article. Secondly, how does your statement "if there were no qualia there likely would be no self" not imply that "qualia constitute the self"? I might be wrong about it, but it seems to me to be strongly implied by the article.
Quoting wonderer1
Oh sorry, I didn't realise you were busy.
Quoting wonderer1
I don't consider myself a Chalmers expert by any stretch, but from what I've read, no, I don't think Chalmers would be sceptical about evolution.
Have you read any fiction? Language need not "reflect the 4 dimensions we exist in". Neither is language limited to that function alone. Language can have other uses besides those you mentioned.
My questions - in the section that you quoted - were about the self. I don't see how your post addresses that (assuming that you intended to).
No I'm not talking about the content of language. I'm speaking about the structure of language.
Fiction writings still uses nouns, verbs, adjectives, grammar and syntax. Read what I said more carefully.
Quoting Luke
I answered it. Human spoken language is based on sensorium - the input and construction of our perceptions (qualia). Language is on a higher tier if cognition than sensory input. But requires it.
Languages structure reflects how we communicate our perceptions of time (syntax/chronology), verbs (action), grammar (relationship/mechanics), location and objects (nouns) and adjectives (distinction/définition). Language is communicable coding for these things.
I don't suppose you'd accept, "Through the use of mutant superpowers."?
Anyway, I'm at work now and undoubtedly my brain will be contemplating in the background, whether and how to respond further in light of you having gotten so riled up over me questioning you. So we'll see what the results of those background processes are later.
In the meantime, some things for you to contemplate...
Aren't qualia transient events?
What would it mean to say that something is composed of transient events?
Could you clarify the point of these remarks in relation to the section you quoted? I don't follow how your references to the structure of language relate to my questions about the self.
Have you read the full article yet? If so, explain why you believe the article does not indicate or imply that "qualia constitute the self". If you have not bothered to read the full article, I see no reason to respond to you further.
I wish you would have saved me the time by dismissing my claim of "mutant super powers" and just moving on, but...
I've been following neuroscience for 36 years while having a background in electrical engineering and having studied the behavior of artificial neural nets. Thirty-six years ago, while contemplating what seemed like a weirdness to my cognitive processing (despite my scoring highly on various standardized tests) I had an epiphany about how variations in low level neural interconnection might explain my relative weirdness. Although I had myself tested for learning disabilities soon after (and was diagnosed as having one) it wasn't until 14 years ago that my wife recognized that it was likely that I was on the autism spectrum. This past year I happened on empirical evidence supporting my epiphanic hypothesis.
https://autismsciencefoundation.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/minicolumns-autism-and-age-what-it-means-for-people-with-autism/
Anyway, over the past 36 years, that insight I had into the functioning of human brains has been the basis for a lot of prescience. For example, I foreshadowed the two system view presented by Kahneman in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, though I was coming at things from a neuroscience perspective whereas (to the best of my knowledge) Kahneman came to the two systems view on the basis of psychological findings.
I would put it more like, I thought the probability was high that I was bringing a much more relevantly informed perspective to reading the article than you did. Furthermore, my understanding of the sort of information processing that neural networks are good at, leads me to understand the importance of testing my intuitions. So I saw questioning your interpretation of the article as a good test of my intuitions which were based on merely skimming the article.
Yeah, I've read the article now, and I still don't have the foggiest idea why you think Humphrey was suggesting what you think he was. Anyway, I've reached out to Humprey. So maybe we will learn from him what his view is.
Whether I subconsciously picked up on it during my initial skim I have no idea, but when I read it through today I noted that Humphrey puts scare quotes around self when he first uses the phrase the self. That leads me to believe that Humphrey was only using the word self as a matter of convenience in conveying his idea to a lay audience, and also seems to me like a point against your interpretation.
I think that what most people mean by "the self" includes not just qualia, but that which acts on the basis of qualia as well, and at the very least. That which acts on the basis of qualia is not itself qualia.
1. I didn't suggest it was a quote from the article.
2. I've explained that I think the 'self' is more than qualia, and I think the functionality of the self would be likely to break down without qualia to sustain its functionality. Not immediately, but given time.
Nobody is forcing you to reply.
Quoting wonderer1
Okay, but bringing a more informed perspective to reading the article requires actually reading the article.
Quoting wonderer1
You tested them; it seems they failed.
Quoting wonderer1
Then I don't understand how you are reading the sections I quoted for you recently, or the article as a whole. What would you say is the main point(s) of the article?
Quoting wonderer1
If this is the basis for your argument against my reading - or for your reading - then you're putting a hell of a lot of weight on it. Since you have provided almost nothing else to support your "intuitions" against my reading, I think you may have missed the forest for this twig.
Quoting wonderer1
How does this relate to the article? How is it relevant?
Quoting wonderer1
I know you didn't suggest it was a quote from the article; I was merely pointing out that it wasn't a quote from the article. I don't necessarily think the author would disagree with your statement, either, but I think your argument might be stronger if you used evidence from the article - the author's own words - instead of a statement you think the author might agree with.
Quoting wonderer1
Those are your opinions about the self. You seem to simply assume, without evidence, that the article agrees with your view of the self. But it remains to be shown that my reading is incorrect, and you have done very little to demonstrate that. Your intuition is not evidence.
You might consider that my reading of the article is correct and that you actually disagree with the article itself (including its view of 'the self').
Luke,
Since it seems like you are much more interested in point scoring than in understanding, I'm inclined to drop the discussion. However, if you want to present, what you believe to be a sound argument for your interpretation, I might be enticed to discuss it further.
All you've done in this discussion is accuse me of misreading the article, based on the scantest of evidence, even though you only skimmed and did not bother to read it fully yourself. Despite not reading the entire article, you believed that you would have a "more relevantly informed perspective" based on your self-proclaimed "mutant super power" intuitions.
It's not a matter of point scoring; you've simply been unwilling and unable to support your baseless accusation regarding my reading of the content of the article. Therefore, I'm not interested in discussing it with you further.
Yes, but its not an argument, its a shift in perspective. Philosophy wants something with certainty, universality, uniqueness, etc. apart from our fallible, limited human interactions, which the world doesnt provide, so it creates objects and frameworks that only rely on knowledge and intellectual solutions. At times we do have personal experiences (like witnessing a train crash), which we can keep (private as hidden) to ourselves (until expressed), but our experience and feelings are not always unique. Im stressed about money like you are. I dont (always) have an individual experience in going to the store. The ideas of consciousness, sensation, appearance, reality, are all manufactured by philosophy, partly to feel like we are necessarily special, as I discussed above.
What do you mean by saying that they're manufactured? Are you saying that they're a fiction? You need to prove that, not simply assert it and so we're doing philosophy.
Well, in the way philosophy pictures them yes. I moved the discussion here because the article above provides some history of the parallel picture that neuroscience labors under. Philosophy has never liked being wrong so the fact that we can be (and that we are responsible for that) leads it to create the conclusion that we must not have direct access to the world (or we are ensured it), that we only see the appearance of something, or that our individual perspective is somehow partial or lacking or individual (my sensation or perception). That way we can have a problem to solve or a kind of knowledge or rationality to find so we will know whats right, how to settle disputes with others, and we wont be deceived or mistaken or judged. This is more of a story than an argument, but if there is a particularly egregious dismissal we could take that as a case study.
Because of the causal closure of the physical
When philosophers like Chalmers ask questions like "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?" they don't really mean 'why' in the sense of "what evolutionary benefit has it?" They're looking for a 'how', as in "Explain how, exactly, that information processing (or whatever function) somehow produces/causes/is-identical-with consciousness?"
EDIT: my own tentative view is that only consciousness is causal.
The idea that physical closure means there's no evolutionary role for consciousness is another great reason why there needs to be a better understanding of what emergence is and what it means.
It doesn't have to be either/or.
Maybe. I think that would make a great topic for a thread. Does psychological causation compete with physical causation?
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/
This is, I think, a fairly well written article by a physicist on the idea.
EDIT:
This is a nice quote from the article:
Quoting Sean Carroll
He does think consciousness is real - he doesn't think it's downwardly casual. It's casual at it's own level of abstraction. He's not trying to explain what consciousness is exactly or how it comes to be, he's just outlining his view of why "physics is casually closed" doesn't have to mean "consciousness isn't real and doesn't do anything".
Instead, he's laying the ground work for a view where consciousness is real and does do things, at its own level of abstraction.
There's this intuition people have that if something isn't fundamental it's not real. That's a big part of this drive to make consciousness fundamental. I think he's building up a picture for consciousness to be non fundamental, and to be the emergent consequence of physics events, and for it to be emergently real anyway.
And I'm not entirely convinced by his exact formulation, but I think the mission is 100% correct, the mission to allow for non fundamental things to be real. I think human consciousness isn't fundamental, and I think human consciousness is real.
There's talk of weak emergence vs strong emergence - I call this class of views "middle emergence".
Oh, OK. Can you give an example of consciousness causing something in a way that doesn't tread on the toes of any physics?
Meant to type layer btw.
My intuition tells me that there's one really important boundary - the boundary between the fundamental, and everything else. The fundamental is causally closed, but all other layers can be argued to interact to each other and also to still be sensitive to fundamental-level events. I think Sean Carroll, based on his language, would like to imagine every layer as quasi-independent (but always necessarily consistent with the fundamental) but... I think that misses some things.
But maybe my intuition is shit, who knows?
But at other times it makes sense to me that -stuff is made of stuff-, and it being made of stuff doesn't mean it's not real. You know?
Edit. It's really hard to type causal instead of casual using swipe text on my phone
Then I don't know, but I feel like it's relevant somehow.
I think we need a way for non fundamental things to still be real. Basically. Because WE are non fundamental, and my mind is the most real thing I know.
There are plenty of good reasons, supported by science, to believe indirect realism over direct realism, as I discussed at length here.
But I don't understand how we got to this point. You were saying something about us wanting to help each other if we're in pain, and somehow conclude from this that indirect realism is false? Your reasoning is confusing.
Thats pretty straightforward so maybe we discuss it in that thread.
From where I've been looking, that was the mistake Descartes made. Your mind does the knowing, your mind presents you with the "I" to attach the knowing to, and your mind is making that proclamation, not just that it is real, but apparently is most real in an apparent hierarchy of reality. Just like Descartes; mind choosing itself over matter (and, like everyone, since at least Plato, whose Minds privileged Mind, Idea, Spirit, over "flesh". And after all of that, not only has your mind made a pre-biased assessment of itself, but I don't even think your mind is real. Your body is. Mind is its projections which have evolved such that aware-ing our real natures has been completely overshadowed.
As for the so-called hard problem, the problem itself is a projection; a mechanism which we have interpreted as preventing the flow of Mind's projections from body to body. Yet look at us, and how shared our experiences really are by Mind's methods of communication. Telepathy is not necessary. It's not that we are intersubjective; its that the Subject does not separate Mind. The bodies are "permeable". Mind is one process moving through humanity as History. Subjectivity is exactly tied to the Subject, which because it stands in for the Body, and because we perceive, because of History thus far bodies as separate, we assume the Subject too is an isolated mind. And the quality of experience, or qualia, may differ micro-locally from body to body; but these variations are how Mind moves, and do not isolate us. We share the same Narratives going forward in our becoming, because we construct that Narrative together.
Quoting bert1
I agree with you. How do we know that blind sight patients, or those that disassociate their awareness from their consciousness aren't merely misusing language in describing their experience? It seems to me that only someone that assumes that their consciousness is something like a soul that can exist apart from their body (which I would argue most people believe) would say such things.
Think about it. Do we go about our lives with the conscious experience of focusing on each step that we take when walking from one room to another? No. One could say that our walking happens unconsciously, yet we don't disassociate our self from the act of our walking. Walking is something that we learned a long time ago and we have become so good at it that it happens almost instinctively in that we don't have to put much, if any conscious effort into doing it. But when we were toddlers and we were learning how to walk we had invoke a conscious effort into doing it. We had to focus on the intricacies of the placement of our feet, our balance, the surface we were walking on, etc.
Now that we can walk on auto-pilot we don't disassociate our walking from our self because we say things like, "I walked over from my house..." It is only in these special (mystical) circumstances of blind sight and drug use that individuals use language in such a (mystical) way as to disassociate their selves from their awareness.
The same can be said regarding riding a bike and driving a car. Can a blind sight person do such things? Could a blind-sight person tell the difference between a ripe and rotten apple by their sight alone?
If the answer to these questions is "no", then p-zombies are false. There is a use to consciousness, and this is what defines us as humans and different than other animals.
I think the primary role of consciousness is in our learning, as it takes conscious effort to learn anything. Blind-sight is in the domain of the instincts. Instincts are built-in learned behaviors based on limited stimuli. Consciousness provides a much more detailed model of our environment and as such has made us much more adaptable to sudden changes in the environment that instincts are not able to. Instincts are best for environments that change little and slowly.
Of course, none of this actually addresses the hard problem of how "physical" neurons are produces/causes/is-identical-with "non-physical" consciousness. But, IMO, the hard problem is based another faulty assumption of dualism. I believe a type of informational-monism could be the solution where the world is not physical/non-physical. It's all information.
I propose, the neurons generate "images" which trigger feelings, activity, more images.
Human "consciousness" was once, like other animals, "attuned" to the feelings and activities, and not the images which evolved to trigger conditioned responses. Under this regime of Human Mind, however, attention is focused on the images; the latter which has evolved into a system governed by its own laws. mechanics, and dynamics. Far from the images strictly serving a "shortcut" to conditioned responses fit for survival, they now "inform" all experiences, and the triggered feelings or activities, are perceived as incidental, biproducts, in support of the images.
But the images are not only non-physical. From a metaphysical/epistemological perspective, they are fleeting and empty processes, Signifiers. Variations among "Subjects" are not only di minimis, but are literally, immaterial.
I just think that using terms like "physical" and "non-physical" isn't helpful because you have to define what those words mean and how something that is "physical" can generate something "non-physical". It seems to me that the solution would involve some sort of monism where the objects of thought are of the same type as any other object - information.
Even "images" invokes some kind of Cartesian theatre. "Sensations", I think, would be better and attention is the amplification of certain sensations over others.
How does a colorless neuron generate the sensation of color, or an odorless neuron generate the sensation of smell? Why is it that when you attempt to observe my mental processes you see neurons and a brain but when I observe my mental processes I am observing an experience of the world made of shapes, colors, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings, but not neurons?
We have no reason to believe that non-human life does more than process data. So, the application of the sensation-perception distinction to non-human life is gratuitous. AI shows representations generating appropriate responses can be fully explained with no appeal to subjectivity, qualia, or concepts properly so-called (signs that do not need to have their physical structure recognized in order to signify).
In perception, the world is not just "doing its own thing." We only sense it because it is acting on us. So, in perception, "what is happening in the world" and "what is happening to me" are inseparably bound. What is happening is the world is acting on me. Of course, we can distinguish the cause (the world is acting) from the effect (modifing my neural state) mentally, but they are, in fact, inseparable. The world modifying my neural state is identically my neural state being modified by the world. Evaluating is a second movement, and one that occurs much less often.
What the observations of the blindsighted monkey (Helen) show is that is that visual data processed by the optic tectum is not connected to the same response subsystems as data processed by the visual cortex. The observations of blindsighted humans show that the production of visual qualia is not essential to the production of visual knowledge.
Since to know x is to be conscious of x, consciousness does not depend on qualia in an essential way. Qualia are merely the contingent forms of some kinds of perception. Of course, if you were normally sighted, being deprived of normal visual qualia will make you unsure that you are really seeing what you are in fact seeing using the optic tectum. Still, the information is in the mind and can be used, so with experience one can know that she knows -- to be conscious of the data lacking qualia.
Clearly, sensations, what is happening to me, are not the same as ideas. My leg has been in one position to long. Without thinking, I move it. I have too much CO2 in my blood. Without thinking, I yawn. In both cases there is an evaluation, but it is automatic, and no idea is generated. Similarly, innumerable brain processes proceed without consciousness. So, consciousness and ideas are not an automatic side-effect of neural processing. Something more than neural processing is required and, as I showed in my paper, what that is cannot be deduced using physical science.
Saying they are "dreamed up by the brain" is vacuous. What is the mechanism of this dreaming and how does it produce the requisite properties? How do physical or mathematical operations produce intentional effects, when physics and mathematics do not even describe intentionality?
Here is the transition from the description of an organism acting in a purely physical way, to a "subject" which can enter into subject-object relations -- in other words, a conscious being. Up to this point increasingly complex forms of data processing have been described, but without subjectivity. Now, as a deus ex machina, we have subjectivity. We are entitled to an account of how an organism evolves into a subject, but none is given. Yet, to be conscious is to be a subject able to enter into the subject-object relation of knowing.
Why would you expect this? Since unobserved physical processes are deterministic, any physical effect consciousness produces has to be something that is not determined by physics -- that treads on its toes. Why is that a bad thing? Physics is an abstraction. It is based on attending to physical phenomena while prescinding from the inseparable subjective phenomena. So, physics necessarily produces an incomplete picture of reality.
I not sure if I would. I think I was replying to @flannel jesus who might expect it and did give an answer. See above.
What do you mean by "the fundamental" and why would it not interact when it acts? The only candidate I can think of is God, but there are no events in God.
:up: And how we got to 'physicalism' was by two steps: first, declare that 'the physical' and 'the mental' are two separate substances but exist basically side-by-side. Then, point out that there is no way to demonstrate the existence of a 'mental substance'. Voila.
I don't blame you. Moreover, you are right, that I haven't exactly described anything.
Quoting Harry Hindu
At the clear-to-me risk, that in my insistence (as a courtesy) on brevity, I will repeat my failure, I may as well say something about this. It can happen because the physical, the only reality, is not really generating anything. That you think it is a new reality generated out of an existent utterly other reality, you are in the common human illusion. Or, you are, at least, mistaken.
I think traditional phenomenology, which addresses, as you raised, the problem of understanding objects as they "must be" vs as they "appear" to us; that is moving into new directions. One, is that the traditional did not throw its net out far enough. If it had, it would have left to Science how we sense red, or the aroma of coffee. The real question phenomenology is after is why we "experience" it as red. And this is the result of images, once constructed and saved in memory to trigger a feeling which in turn triggered a drive and action (like many sentient animal), now have developed into its own sophisticated system of constructing images (using neurons) to trigger ultimately feeling and action.
It is only because that once strictly organic system of conditioning responses for survival has evolved in humans into Mind, that "red" and "aroma" have meaning, a mechanism in the system wherein those once strictly organic feelings, are attached to Narratives--experiences.
And how does something physical generate these experiences? You rightly asked. It doesn't generate anything real at all. These are "codes" hijacking feelings to create this illusion of meaning and that meaning matters. It doesn't. Matter matters.
It seems to me that you do not mean by "reality" what most of us mean by it. Most of us mean by "reality" the kind of thing that we encounter in experience. When you say that reality does not generate real experience, you cannot possibly be using reality in this sense.
One test of whether something is real, is whether it can do something. Our experiences do many things. They inform us, modify our responses, etc. So, they pass the test.
I think they DO have an explanation (though I think that explanation is probably unprovable to us). I think there is some layer of truth that doesn't have an explanation, but I don't think fundamental physics is it. I also don't think this has much to do with what I've been saying.
The Munchausen trilemma is proof enough that there is some truth which has no explanation. Some truth(s) which form the basis for all other truths.
I don't think a new reality is generated out of an existent other reality. I was referring to your use of the word, "generate". I didn't use the term. I initially responded to bert1's mention of the relations, "produces/causes/is-identical-with". I'm not a dualist. The dualist is the one with the hard problem, not a monist.
I don't see it as two realities. There is one reality and reality is a causally connected relationship. If there are multi-verses and those multi-verses have a causal impact with events in our universe, then the multi-verse is one reality. If they don't then there are multiple realities but we'd have no way of showing that and would be pointless to try.
Quoting ENOAH
None of this explains how an illusion is created by something that is not illusory. An illusion is a misinterpretation of sensory data, not that the data itself isn't real.
A mirage is exactly what you'd expect to experience given the nature of light and how it interacts with your eye-brain system. In explaining the causes you don't dispel the illusion. Instead, you make it a real consequence of real causes.
The one thing that I am sure of is the existence of my mind. From there, everything else is unprovable. Yes, even solipsism could be true. I am not a solipsist because I wonder if there isn't an "external" world, then why does it seem like there is? The same could be asked about consciousness. If the mind is an illusion then why is it so brute?
We may not have direct access to the world but don't we have direct access to our "illusion"? My mind, illusion or not, is part of reality. There are causal forces at play where my mind is the effect of prior causes and my mind is the cause of subsequent effects. Culture is one of the effects of human minds on the world.
If the mind is an illusion then what does that say about all the scientific knowledge based on observations? If our observations of the world are not real, then does that mean our understanding of brains and neurons is not real? Asserting that the mind is an illusion, or not real, pulls the rug out from under all the scientific knowledge we've accumulated.
Quoting Dfpolis
I agree. I define reality as a causally linked system.
Quoting Dfpolis
If there is some fundamental aspect to reality then wouldn't it follow that there is an aspect of reality that does not need a reason for happening. I mean, what does fundamental mean if not that there is some aspect that "just is". If not, then there would be an infinite regress of reasons, or reality is an infinite causal chain with no beginning and no end, or another possibility could be a loop of causality.
Of course, not everything can be proven, Aristotle showed that 2500 years ago. Some truths are fundamental. That does not mean that they cannot be justified. The Münchhausen trilemma, as presented in the Wikipedia, makes a faulty assumption, viz. that the third alternative is "The dogmatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts which are merely asserted rather than defended." Not all defenses are deductive. We may come to truth in non-deductive ways. We may, for example, abstract from one case principles that do not depend on the details of the case, but necessarily apply to all similar cases.
Consider Aristotle's example of a builder building a house being identically a house being built by a builder. It allows one to see that every happening is a doing, and vice versa. (The identity of action and passion). Here, experience is used, not as an unproved premise, but as a basis for reflection.
Of course there are no infinite regresses of causes. Believing that there are is like believing that your Xbox will work when you plug it into an infinite series of substations with no power station at the end -- because there does not need to be an end!
It does not follow that the end of the line of explanation can be unexplained. If we allow that exception, then "Whatever is needs an explanation" has an exception and is false. If it is false in one case, why should it not be false in others? A basic principle of science will fail if things can "just happen."
Instead, we should hold to our logic and examine what is going on more closely. What we see in the series before its end term is that every element is explained by another; however, our principle does not demand that. It demands that there be an explanation, not that the explanation be something else. So, it is possible that a term can be self-explaining and if it is, then, it would be the end of the line, because no other is required to explain it. Indeed, that is the only way we can have an end of the line.
Not just anything can be self-explaining. Things have explanatory or causal power in light of what they are. So, whatever ends the line must have a nature that requires no outside explanation. It cannot be contingent, but must, by its very nature, be necessary.
Quoting Dfpolis
Some of the assumptions here (animal cognition as internal processing of external data, perception as a one-way relation between an independently constituted external environment and an organism) are content with older neurobiological thinking, but autopoietic enactivist approaches view things differently, as Evan Thompson explains:
Enactivism asserts that via sensory-motor coupling with an environment, an organism enacts a world. The organisms interactions with its environment are characterized by a certain functional autonomy, such that what constitutes its world is determined on the basis of its normative goals. Subjective consciousness arises out of this normatively driven activity.
This is far from the position I am taking. My position involves no such division. It does involve a close adherence to the principle of parsimony -- specifically that we not posit phenomena for which we have no evidence. I am not and never have been a behaviorist, nor do I question the importance of consciousness and subjectivity to the operation of human minds. I do object to the reanimation of the analogous introspection of non-human minds without an empirical warrant, with my specific point being that since we can explain all of our observations of non-human cognition using the data processing paradigm, there is no warrant to posit either subjectivity or consciousness in that domain.
Neither is this my position. If you read my paper on the Hard Problem, you will see that it closes this gap. My work in progress is near completion and makes a significant step toward explaining this integration by showing how neurally encoded information can become intentionally active = active in the intentional theater of operations. That does not explain why there is an intentional theater of operation (why consciousness and subjectivity exist), but does show how physical activity can be linked to intentional operations.
Quoting Joshs
This is a most peculiar claim. It seems to imply that there is no per-existing environment that informs the organism and might kill it if it went unsensed. It reminds me of a claim I heard earlier this year that one one died of COVID.
Quoting Joshs
And so, in a single sentence the Hard Problem is solved!
Here is the logic of this, assuming that you mean consciousness evolves "out of this normatively driven activity." Evolution works because some variations are inheritable and increase the reproductive success of the the variant organism. To apply that paradigm, one must show:
(1) That consciousness has physical effects -- for if it did not, it could not increase reproductive success.
(2) That consciousness has a physical basis -- for if it did not, it could not be encoded in DNA to be inherited.
In other words, you must provide a physicalist solution to the Hard Problem.
However, as I showed in my paper, this is is logically impossible. The reason is simple. Physical science begins with a fundamental abstraction. Although all knowledge involves a knowing subject and a known object, the physical sciences focus on physical objects and prescind from the knowing subject and her experiences. They therefore lack the concepts and data required to connect their findings to the intentional theater of operations and its elements (e.g. subjective consciousness).
So, you cannot do what is required to show that consciousness can evolve without bringing in the data on knowing subjects as subjects the physical sciences have abstracted away.
At last, a point we agree upon. We each have our own projection of the world, and different species may have non-overlapping projections. We do not have the magnetic sense of some birds or the echo sense of bats.
This distorts the interactive nature of cognition, and indeed, of life itself. We have only marginal control over what we sense. Sensibles act on senses, not vice versa. Sentient beings spend significant resources reacting to their environments. So, biological neural nets, while they may have re-entrant features are not circular systems. Rather, in sensing, environmental objects modify our neural net, and that modification is our neural representation of those objects.
So, there is no biological data processing? How, then, does visual edge extraction work? Why are AI neural nets able to simulate biological behavior?
How do you define "meaning"? Without a definition that allows "meaning" to be created by a physical operation, this is mere hand waving, a faith claim -- what Evan Thompson would like to be the case, not anything that has been shown. To create "meaning" as an intentional state requires an intentional operation and none is indicated.
This is vitalism pure and simple. Physics is completely deterministic except for quantum observations, which Thompson is not invoking. So, something in addition physical operations is required for patterns of activity not be predetermined. In humans, we observe subjective awareness, which physics prescinds from. In non-humans the only way to subjectivity is via the deprecated practice of analogous introspection.
I agree with this Aristotelian position.
You're probably right. I understand the definition you provided. However, it causes me some conflicts if you're saying that reality is reality, and that definition can apply "throughout" all "forms".
What about this? Mediated reality and Ultimate Reality.
Mediated reality is encountered by us and has effects, but (I say here) is mediated by minds re-presentation of Ultimate Reality. So when I look at an apple. There is the real apple which I would have seen had my sensation not been mediated by mind's re-presentation of "apple" (fruit, shape, red, eat, doctor away, rotten at the core, not pear, not orange, not wax etc).
If someone, more skilled than I, were able to pursue that properly, they would unveil the absence all along, of a so-called hard problem. The physical state is acting physically. The mental so called state is a mediated reality such that, it is ultimately not real like the physical state, but a system of fleeting and empty projections. Nothing "other" has arisen in the brain's place. Rather, the organism is no longer "attuned" to its feelings and drives, as such, but rather these re-presentations evolved to monopolize the triggering of all feelings and drives.
It seems like at one time happy was a certain pleasant feeling the human animal would get if satiated, bonding, no threats, etc (I hypothesize); and that, now (since Mind "emerged") happy is an infinite possibility of sentences beginning with the Subject, "I": I am happy because I. But the fact is, the animal is still feeling tgat certain pleasant feeling, only "I" think the feeling is in the sentences, I am happy because I.
This is what I mean by the "experience" is not Real but mediated/constructed and projected, displacing what is "really" real.
Quoting Harry Hindu
My apologies for putting words in your mouth.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Harry Hindu
These are very helpful. Thank you. I need to look into/think these through.
Quoting Harry Hindu but this makes me wonder about the words. I am not certain about this. Yes my mind exists. If a thing which exists, is by definition real. Then I see where the "problem" is, because I would not settle at that.
If anyone cares to go back to the start of this thread, the article which is is about is in Aeon Magazine, How Blindsight Answers the Hard Problem of Consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey. That is the proposed solution in question. There's also an interesting book about the topic, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness (not related to Nicholas Humphrey but exploring similar themes), the abstract of which states 'Combining evolutionary, neurobiological, and philosophical approaches allows Feinberg and Mallatt to offer an original solution to the hard problem of consciousness.'
You're actually into a very tough problem here, which is the appearance and reality distinction. You're wanting to claim that 'the apple' (read: any object) has a 'real existence' (ultimate reality) which exists (is real) irrespective of and outside of our mediated experience of it.
The problem being, that if all experience and judgement of objects is mediated by our sensory and intellectual faculties (per Kant) then the apple (or object) as it is in itself, is not something we ever know.
So - how do you get outside that mediated experience to see things as they truly are? A natural answer might be that this is what science does, but when you get down to the fundamental constituents of physical reality, which are the objects of quantum physics, then the Observer Problem rears its head. And the philosophical import of that, is precisely that you cannot detect such entities as they are independently of any act of measurement (according to what is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics).
It is of course true that science explores and explains a vast panorama of phenomena, but recall that phenomena means 'what appears', and 'what appears' always appears to a subject, who him or herself is never disclosed in the observation (but whose presence is implicated in the above-mentioned 'observer problem'.)
My two cents worth is that David Chalmer's original paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, is pointing to a philosophical issue, which is not a problem that can be addressed by scientific means as a matter of principle. And this is because of the ineradicably first person nature of conscious experience, which is not amenable to the third person methodology of the natural sciences.
Whereas his opponents claim that:
[quote=Daniel Dennett] In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science. [/quote]
(It's worth noting that the essay at the head of this OP was linked by Dennett in the first place, because Humphrey's theory is compatible with Dennett's, as they're both materialists.)
So Humphreys, Dennett, and the other advocates of 'naturalised epistemology' view the hard problem as something that can be solved. In that sense, they can fairly be accused of actually ignoring the root of the problem itself, which, according to David Chalmers and others, is not a problem to be solved, but a way of pointing out an unavoidable limitation of objectivity viz a viz the subjective nature of experience. Phenomenology and existentialism understands this in a way that the objective sciences cannot.
See Thomas Nagel's What Daniel Dennett Gets Wrong (Oct 2023) for an analysis of the in-principle shortcomings of materialism in philosophy of mind.
Also The Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience (also in Aeon Magazine and now a book.)
Thank you, you are consistently helpful.
I think you accurately assessed what I am, in deed trying to do.
If I recognize that I cannot get out of the mediated and see as they really are, on the one hand; and on the other, that "my" body already does--it is "I" who cannot--I don't think that would be satisfactory.
I see the "problem" but cannot be convinced that the truth must fit into a "scheme" which allows for the human mind to "know" it; or that the truth cannot have contradictions within a human made logic.
Perhaps what I truly need to face up to, is the fact that such a truth, if it exists and does not live up to human "reasoning" cannot be mutually pursued in a forum which necessarily prides itself in the mastery of human reason.
Yet, it seems not only notwithstanding the walls I keep hitting, but because of them, I am enriching myself and informing my hypotheses by such pursuit.
Just to clarify, in case you think it makes a difference. You're right that that's what I'm wanting, but the wording makes it sound dualistic. There is 'the apple'. It has its one and only existence. That existence is veiled by our mediated perception. Or, we do not perceive that one and only existence, but a re-presentation of it. Because we now see 'the apple' ineluctably as "An Apple."
...I guess that's what you're saying. Maybe it's the "outside of" which gave it this dualistic feel.
Its called the hard problem for a reason! Youre dealing with a question that is at the basis of a great many philosophical questions and there are no easy answers.
I take an idealist approach. I see philosophical materialism (physicalism, reductionism) as being part of the problem to which a properly-constituted idealist philosophy is the solution. And I will say there's support for this within cognitive science, or the type of cognitive science which stresses the sense in which the mind constructs our experienced reality. Take a look at my thread The Mind-Created World.
Also check this video out.
"By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums"--- Wayfarer, from your thread.
Funny thing is, see below, my liberty taken with your quote, which I have precisely thought in almost the exact terms:
By investing Mind with a status, as if it is a being, the being, ultimately existing in the universe, independently of any Body, we absolutize it. We designate it as real, irrespective of and without acknowledging that any knowledge of it is knowledge of itself. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums, one being that the Body is the dubious "entity" while the mind is certain, and therefore, it's constructions being tge determinate of certainty.
Given that we are indeed subjects of experience, and that we are part of a species, a language group, a culture, and so on, there is, of course, a vast domain of objective facts. I have no wish to deny that, or to say that these facts are a matter of individual predeliction. What I'm drawing attention to is that even the undeniably objective always occurs to a subject.
Take a look at that video, I also provide it as a footnote to the original essay.
I agree; not real; specifically not real.
Quoting Wayfarer
It might be that my reference to the Body as real, reads like an empiricist or conventional physicalist. I think they are correct but their reasoning is no less constructed than that of an Idealist, or whatever my own is, which is not empricist.
My reference to Body as real has built-in to it the recognition that the real cannot be spoken of. The instant I communicate, it is Mind and therefore that "qualified real" but not ultimately real.
When I reverse the order in your quote, it is not to say that Mind is just organic functions in some dogmatic scientific sense. I'm saying this process which mediates so called objective reality (I don't use "objective") is the very same process arriving at the determination that "it" is independently real, for some, the ghost in the machine.
I'm saying the [awesome] being is tge machine. The ghost is there, has an effect, but structurally*, is fleeting code.
*if I'm not mistaken, either earlier, or in that other thread, you "admitted" to not requiring any comment regarding the structure of Mind. And I think, once we recognize that its structure is signifiers in memory constructing and Projecting "stories", we can better understand those philosophical conundrums, the hard problem, among them.
Then human minds aren't fundamental, they exist because of physics, and indirectly those other things exist because of physics too.
So we have a sensory projection that we can adapt and/or respond, but in addition, in some cases there is more than that. There is awareness, thought and judgement with its possibility of falsehood. At the level of sensation we do not judge, we respond. Errors are ineffective responses, not falsehoods. At the intellectual level, we judge, affirming or deny this of that. The result (our new intellectual representation) either reflects reality adequately for our purpose or not. That implies that we have purposes, not just needs.
The April-May 2024 issue of Philosophy Now has an article by Raymond Tallis entitled The Illusion of Illusionism. Speaking of Consciousness, Tallis says, There is . . . . nothing in matter or energy as seen through the eyes of physics that explains how a part of the material world might become aware of itself. {my bold} The Aeon article is extremely interesting in terms of the science, but it only describes a separate pathway for sensory signals to reach the brain, and sheds no light on how those signals are interpreted into a meaningful mental experience.
In the Aeon article Humphrey quotes Encyclopedia Britannica (1929) : "One theory holds that each atom of the physical body possesses an inherent attribute of consciousness". {my bold} But Humphrey seems to think we have "moved on" from that Panpsychism solution to the Hard Problem. Ironically, the "all mind" approach has recently become popular among some prominent psychological scientists : e.g. Christof Koch.
Humphrey seems to favor the Psychonic Theory*1: "The psychonic theory contends, in the end, that consciousness equals synaptic function. It is evident where consciousness, defined as psychonic energy,".{my bold} It describes a stimulus/response mechanism that produces an "electrical aura", but nothing we could interpret as conscious awareness. Therefore, to be effective, that Psychonic Energy must include the missing something that Tallis noted..
My own pet theory is philosophical instead of scientific, and it postulates a form of Energy that could be described as Psychonic, but I call it Enformy, alluding to Plato's Forms. And, like Panpsychism, it postulates that the potential for Consciousness is inherent in the Energy that causes all transformations in the material world. So, my hybrid theory has one foot in Physicalism, and one in Panpsychism.
My amateur philosophical thesis says that there is "something in [s]matter and[/s] energy" that might explain how the physical world could become aware of itself. That "something" is the power to transform one kind (form) of thing into another. It is implicit in the program of Evolution, which began with nothing but a speck of Potential, and constructed the vast multiplex world of matter/energy/mind we now sentiently "see" around us*2. Unfortunately, the original source of that transformative power will be another "hard" philosophical problem.
I may have more to say about the Blindsight article in another post. But I'm in over my head as it is, so the less I say the better. . . . for now. As you said, there are no easy philosophical answers. :smile:
*1. The psychonic theory of consciousness
If human behaviour is composed of Unit Responses and if, in the preceding section, without any reference at all to consciousness, we have briefly described what such a response is and how it is determined, can we say with the behaviorist that there is no need to postulate the entrance of any conscious factor in the process beginning with stimulus and ending with final reaction?
https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2006-20942-004
*2. Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations, to have affective consciousness, subjective states that have a positive or negative valence
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/sentience#:~:text=Sentience%20is%20the%20capacity%20to,From%3A%20Neuroscience%2C%202022
Quoting Dfpolis
Very nice
Quoting Dfpolis
Firstly, sorry, but you might need to apply some imagination because I am not using words precisely, nor necessarily properly (from an academic/conventional perspective). Does the following help in any way? Please bear with my use of "real" for e.g.
1. There is a real consciousness humans have, like all animals, at least, albeit in varying "complexities." It is organic attunement to organic feelings drives movements sensations presently and with no movement in time, possibly not space, as in monistic ("aware-ing"). But Ive said too much because we cannot know aware-ing; aware-ing is "pre" knowing. Our only access to aware-ing is being the aware-ing.
2. The aware-ing can organically attune, when feelings of pleasure arise, aware-ing pleasure; pain, aware-ing pain. Apple comes into view, aware-ing apple. Not "I" subject of the sentence see apple object. Aware-ing x-ing is one present event; no duality because Mind hasn't constructed difference yet.
3. Once mind emerged (through (to oversimplify) the evolution of Language) aware-ing x-ing was displaced by "I" am looking at an apple, or I am enjoying this Icecream.
4. While at one time (and still, I'll explain later) organic aware-ing processed x-ing as x-ing engaged with body in the oneness/present processes of Nature just being; now displaced by mind, aware-ing attunes to apple, or pleasure, or icecream; and, it does so riding on the back of this "I" and what it engages with is, by the Laws of mind, necessarily "different". First, they are objects, to body's "I". Second, they are apple not orange; pleasure not pain.
5. So now "aware" of an object acting on my senses just means that the natural aware-ing, where there is no hard problem, is displaced by mediating processes of constuctions and projects. Such that there is the "illusion" of a hard problem; the illusion that we are "aware" of an "object" when really we have constructed it then projected it as object.
Quoting Dfpolis
This quote supports/addresses, the immediately preceding. But the last sentence brings up a new point. You are exactly right. For Mind. For Mind, one of its driving mechanisms is that the Signifiers move to construct meaning; they run through a dialectic, and settle upon knowledge or belief. Until the process recycles for any given "truth" from this is an apple to God is metaphysically necessary. And the mechanism which allows for each settlement at the end of each dialectic is function: what is, given all movements gathering at this locus in History, the fittest settlement? What is the fittest representation to manifest into the world? It is functional to believe a certain red fruit is an apple. If a philosopher proposed tge necessity of God, it would be functional to settle there.
So yes, the constructions and projections of Mind serve a purpose. It is only body which is satisfying simply its needs.
Except for the reference to non-human animals, this is very Aristotelian. He characterizes the mind/intellect (nous) as nothing until it thinks something. He would say that we have the potential to know and objects have the potential to be known, but neither is actually anything until knowing occurs.
It seems to me that we cannot and do not know that non-human animals are subjects of awareness in the way we are. They are certainly conscious in the sense of being responsive, but that is not the same thing.
Quoting ENOAH
Again, this is a very classical position. First, the subject knowing the object is identically the object being known by the subject. They are one in the moment. Second, we can't distinguish aspects of oneness until we are first aware of the whole. Maritain writes of "distinguishing to unite." He means that we are aware of a whole, then divide it up mentally, (say, into subject and object), and then put it back together: "I see the apple." Making distinctions and judgements is the end of a process that begins with a whole. We don't start with the parts and then build wholes.
Quoting ENOAH
That is what I was trying to describe.
Quoting ENOAH
The "hard problem" is not a real problem. It is like the difficulty of cutting apart concepts using scissors. If you think that all dividing is done using knives and scissors, it is a very hard to know how we can divide the ideas of red and green. The problem is not in the dividing, but in demanding that it be done using unsuitable methods.
Nice chatting.
I found the article scientifically interesting, but philosophically unsatisfying. As I noted to : "The Aeon article is extremely interesting in terms of the science, but it only describes a separate pathway for sensory signals to reach the brain, and sheds no light on how those signals are interpreted into a meaningful mental experience" --- how we experience Qualia.
In Semiology, a Signal is distinguished from a Sign, in that a "signal" is not inherently meaningful to the observer, but a "sign" has personal significance to the recipient of the signal*1. That distinction is what Gregory Bateson defined as Information or Meaning*2 : "the difference that makes a difference" to a sentient viewer. So, a camera can detect a Signal (e.g. photon), but only a mind will interpret it as a meaningful Sign (e.g. predator!).
As you noted, a key distinction is the ability to "take ownership" (make it personal ; subjective) of the incoming objective information. The article's author seems to assume that feedback loops in the brain could somehow convert an abstract quantitative Signal into a meaningful qualitative Sign. And I agree. But how? That's the philosophical "hard question". :smile:
*1. Sign :
In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign.
https://en.wikipedia.org wiki Sign_(semiotics)
Note --- A "sign itself" (signal) is some physical event (Quanta of energy) that can be used to convey information. But the energy (e.g. light) must be interpreted by the receiver into meaning (a sign). For example, smoke rising into the air only indicates that perhaps a bush is burning, but pulsed smoke signals from Indians on a bluff indicate that some intentional message is available to one who knows the code.
*2. Information :
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson's phrase the difference that makes a difference has a powerful and intuitive resonance. He was talking about how a 'difference' can represent information that helps us see a situation from a different angle. This can reveal new possibilities for understanding or acting.
https://metalogue.co.uk/2023/01/23/how-did-we-get-back-here-again/
Note --- The first difference is a physical event (signal) and the second difference is a meaningful change (significance) in the mind of the observer : one who can tell the difference. For example, Anatole France is attributed with creating the meme, Vive la difference! referring to the differences between women and men. That gender difference is typically significant only to one of the diametrically opposite sex. Alphabet genders (LGBTQ) only muddle the signal.
*3. FWIW, here are a few more comments on the Aeon article :
A. In mammals, an incoming signal can be just quantitative : yes or no (1 or 0). But a sensation is a range of quantities : pain from 0 to 10. For humans, a sensation can be qualified as a metaphor, a likeness ; what it is like.
B. A Quantum is a unit of Perception. A Quale is a unit of Conception. Both signal & sign are transmitted via Energy, but the mind must convert objective sensory Quanta into subjective sentient Qualia.
Quale : a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.
C. Psychonic energy may explain the physical signals, but not the subjective meaning of sensations.
D. Self consciousness = self ownership
E. Qualitative sensations are evaluations
Yes. The Hard Problem is not a "real" problem, it's an "ideal" problem. It's not a Scientific problem, but a Philosophical dilemma. It's not a problem of isolated material things, but of integrated mental concepts.
The "unsuitable methods" are those of Philosophy, as contrasted with Physics. "Cutting apart concepts using scissors" is a reductive method, which converts a whole concept into disconnected bits. The Properties of the analyzed bits may not be the same as the Qualia of the whole concept. :nerd:
Quoting Dfpolis
In Physics there is no such thing as Potential, since it is nothing until actualized. But it is a useful Philosophical notion, allowing us to think about how Nothing can become Something. For example, an isolated AAA battery has Zero voltage, but the potential for 1.5 volts, when actualized by plugging into a complete circuit : a whole recursive system.
Like the concept of Time (a process of becoming), the concept of Mind is not a particular Thing, but a continuum of Knowing. So, when we analyze Consciousness --- the process of transforming incoming objective sensory data into subjective meaning --- we gain bits of digital Data but lose the continuous personal Meaning of a complete concept. Nous is nothing (potential) until it thinks about something, then it becomes an Idea, an immaterial representation of something.
Sorry, I'm just riffing on a theme, for my own amusement, using unsuitable methods. :smile:
1. I can differentiate between the sensation of blue I am seeing, and my awareness of that sensation of blue I am currently seeing. I can differentiate myself as the seer from the sensation of blue itself.
2. I don't think it can differentiate between the faculties of sensation and intellection. There's more to consciousness and cognition than just qualia. I can entertain universals, abstractions, conceptualizations, mathematics, symbols, possibilities etc. If the self is qualia, how come the higher order faculties of intellection? Does this not raise issues about how to differentiate between humans and animals, if selfhood is identical to qualia?
I'm sympathetic to the line of thinking that does attempt to unravel the hard problem, however, rather than simply solve it. I think something has gone wrong in the way the question has been posed, and I think a view of consciousness not based on qualia would be better.
We see that there are different levels of representation. Relative to me, on the highest level there is a representation, a ``picture'', of the world as perceived by consciousness. Within such the highest level ``picture'' there are lower level ``pictures'' associated with other observers. If we do not take this into account an do not distinguish between different levels of representation, then we have the ``hard problem of consciousness''. The problem is in our failure to recognize that lower level representation of the world (a ``picture'') within a third person's brain under our scientific investigation cannot be identified with the higher level of representation (associated with the experimenters consciousness). And the experimenters consciousness, is just a representation (a picture) in my consciousness.
The highest level of representation of the experienced world is associated with consciousness. On the other hand, the world is described by a wave function. This means that there is close relationship between consciousness and wave function. The lower lever representation of the world in another person's brain is not consciousness, and if we wish to understand how consciousness can arise in that person's brain we have ``the hard problem of consciousness''. Consciousness and the associated wave function are the highest level concepts, and cannot be derived from the lower level concepts.
Solipsism is avoided by postulating that wave function (consciousness) can be localized in any brain (either within a particular Everett's world or somewhere else in the multiverse). Thus, I could have been at the place of another person. Namely, wave function is a mathematical object whose evolution is determined by its initial value, which can be either such, or others. A wave function can be associated with a universe in which the ``I (me feeling) is in Bobs brain, seeing Alice as a representation (a ``picture) in his brain. Or alternatively, a wave function can be associated with a universe, such that the ``I is in Alices brain seeing Bob as a representation (a ``picture) in her brain. In other words, the wave function of the universe can be localized in or associated with Bobs brain, or it can be localized in Alices brain. Other possible forms of wave function can exist in principle, for instance, a wave function not sharply localized in ones particular brain , or within one particular Everett branch at all, but being spread over a larger range of branches. Mystical experiences reported by many people can be understood as being associated with such wave functions.
So, a wave function associated with a particular me feeling, localized in a particular head, is just a possible collapse of an all possibilities embracing wave function. One of the many possibilities is the existence of the universe fine tuned for life. And of course, the wave function associated with or describing my conscious experience, has collapsed into such a fine tuned world.
I guess the most important part about this in this particular context is just that it doesn't really distinguish us from animals except for us thinking on a higher level and any spiritual additions.
Visual sensation always and already has nothing to do with the self. It's when sensation gets immediately translated/assimilated to perception (to simplify: sensation mediated by language) that the Subject steps in and the visual sensation becomes a linear, more or less narrative experience. No longer seeing [the nameless thing presently]. Now I am seeing an apple. This translation of sensation into a linear event, an always becoming, necessarily unified by a Subject in order to conform to the logic of its dynamic, gives rise to the illusion that "I see apple" and "You see apple" are irreconcilable alienated. But really both of us are human organisms sensing the same thing with the visual sense organ etc. There is no qualitative difference until the particular embodied mind constructs a Fictional one.