The hard problem of...'aboutness' even given phenomenality. First order functionalism?

Quoting Danno

Given that some neural processes experience qualia, and even knowing that neural networks are exquisitely correlated with a world around, how are qualia inside the brain about that world rather than just the inside of a brain?

I think this question is kin to how do we know what's real? That distinction is a function of rationality. It's a way of dividing experience up into different categories: magical, mechanical, mystical, and mundane. Though these categories have probably always been part of human consciousness, there's reason to believe human societies weigh the available data differently. For instance, what one society deems internal is treated as external to another. In other words, the very question here is likely to be an aspect of our culture and worldview. It would seem we don't have much of a vantage point on ourselves in this regard, so attempting to answer it may just be a journey in around our present cultural landscape.

Quoting Danno

Given that some neural processes experience qualia,

The implication here (correct me if I'm wrong), is that neurons exist outside the mind and there is some mind-independent stuff that neurons are made of. I don't take that as a given. Why should I?

Oh no I was just trying to say that our phenomenality is a given for this post (as opposed to illusionism or something). I try to be monist.

Reply to Danno

Given that some neural processes experience qualia, and even knowing that neural networks are exquisitely correlated with a world around,how are qualia inside the brain about that world rather than just the inside of a brain?

I think this specific issue may be a problem of misleading demarcation and division; i.e., a definitional problem. We want to explain how phenomena are "about" the world. But then we take it as a given that phenomena are "produced/occur" "in brains," without direct reference to the objects being experienced. Indeed, people often go even further, claiming (without good evidence IMHO) that we can be confident that phenomena are produced only by the activity of neurons and the patterns of action potentials.

Well, right there, we've already divided the "production of phenomena" from "objects in the 'external' world," as a given. It's assumed out the gate.

This being the case, we shouldn't be the least bit surprised if we find ourselves with the same sorts of problems that Kantians have with their dualism issues. Our scientific theories likewise presuppose that "external objects" are not part of the process of their coming to be experienced phenomenally, at least not in any direct sense. I've heard champions of Kant claim that Kant's great genius has been "vindicated by neuroscience." Maybe. But might it be that modern theories of consciousness have simply recreated his same dogmatic mistakes?


Such a division is an extremely strong tendency in how the science of consciousness is generally explained. However, I don't see much strong scientific support for the division. It is generally supposed that, if we see a tree, it will be because a tree is actually in front of us. That is, the tree is part of the physical processes that produces the phenomenal experience of the tree.

On the face of it, I see nothing wrong with saying that objects actually possess properties related to how they are experienced. It seems to be a mistake to assume that any phenomenal properties must be created by "the brain." This is just crypto dualism (and not even that hidden).

Putting it another way, "being experienced" is a relationship a tree can have with a person. This "being experienced" can be thought of as a unified physical process involving both tree and person. There is no real division I am aware of, the processes that make up the person seeing the tree, the tree, and the surrounding environment flow into one another, and demarcating them in any absolute sense is impossible.

A person placed in front of a tree in a vacuum does not see a tree. They will be quite dead. There is no light to reflect off the tree either. Experience is only "produced by brains" under an extremely narrow and (on the cosmic scale) extremely uncommon set of environmental conditions. It only appears to us that brains go on producing consciousness in all sorts of environments because we avoid going into the types of environments that cause consciousness to cease (plus, getting into the void of space or the interior of a star isn't easy).

We also only experience external objects when there are proper interactions between us and them. Thus, to my mind, there is no reason we should approach "aboutness" as necessarily something that starts at central nervous system. However, when we presuppose that the process must start at the boundaries of the CNS, we end up with the problems of Kantianism. This means having to talk about "representation" as some sort of sui generis thing, instead of simply talking about cause and the fact that "effects are signs (representations) of their causes," in the more general sense that is true for all physical interactions.

Could facing up to functions being somehow (somehow) first-order fundamental (with implications for internalism-externalism, organic-inorganic, selectpsychism - panpsychism) help face up to the 'aboutness' problem, in a way that's consistent with known physics? (somehow)

I think so. There are some interesting ideas floating around vis-a-vis fundamental physics and information. There are ways in which we can see that physical interactions themselves have a certain necessary element of perspective; as Rovelli says "entanglement is a dance for three." There is the "thing that generates an effect" (object), "the means through which the effect is generated" (sign), and "the thing effected by the sign" (interpretant). The effect of any one sign depends on the recipient, and this is clear in even very simple cases like mixing two reactive versus two non-reactive liquids together.

A certain "aboutness" and "correlative" element seems baked in. Yet how this builds up into the "aboutness" of experience, that's a real head scratcher. I don't think we answer it by only looking at neuronal activity, however.

Although they say in passing this should use "ingredients that are widely accepted as being nothing over and above physical or functional ingredients", they don't go into functionalism.

This is a common position, but it seems wrong-headed. We've been beating our heads against the same problem for more than half a century. The wide variance between theories and continual proliferation of new theories would seem to suggest that we are missing something quite fundamental. Part of the problem may be that we start with building blocks that simply assume consciousness doesn't exist, then try to construct consciousness from them. Second, if function is going to play a key role in defining consciousness, then it seems that form probably should too. Yet our general starting point is to deny any "real" causal efficacy to form over and above efficient causes.

Quoting Danno

Given that some neural processes experience qualia...

Bear in mind 'neural processes' do not experience anything, as they're not subjects of experience. It is an example of the 'mereological fallacy' which arises when you mistakenly ascribe to the properties of individual components of a complex system attributes which are only properly characteristic of the whole. The point about qualia (which is actually a rather unpleasant piece of academic jargon for 'qualities of experience') is that they are real for subjects, and not in any other sense.

Reply to Wayfarer I happen to agree about the unpleasantness of the term qualia (and I try to keep in mind Dennett's caution about it not actually being more specific than just phenomenal experience). I don't see that your mereological point applies to what I said because I did use the plural.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus I've been through a similar line of thought about extended consciousness between entities. Partly after reading an Italian academic who'd been an AI/robotics engineer; I forget his name which began with M. One thing he suggested that, as creative as we humans are, there's no evidence we can imagine ourselves into experiencing a new colour we haven't perceived first, but then we can experience it without the eyes though, as if time has not passed in some sense? I wasn't sure how serious he was in the end though, he seemed to be running life coaching courses based on the universe actually being colourful it's not just in our heads.

"Second, if function is going to play a key role in defining consciousness, then it seems that form probably should too"

What do you mean by form - the actual stuff we're made of? I tend to agree with the physicist Smolin that it must be relevant - so that as he puts it, the solution will be a mixture of functional (specific to the organism) and reductive (in his speculation, that info about causal history is built into particles, as energy and momentum are he says).

I still have no clue though what determines which of our functions (by whatever definition of function and as ascribable from outside knowledge) are experienced consciously. It does seem to be hierarchical? So if phenomality is baked in, somehow it gets funneled up into e.g. overall visual scene rather than the initial array along the optic nerve from each eye (upside down).

Reply to Danno Reply to Danno

Quoting Danno

Could facing up to functions being somehow (somehow) first-order fundamental (with implications for internalism-externalism, organic-inorganic, selectpsychism - panpsychism) help face up to the 'aboutness' problem, in a way that's consistent with known physics? (somehow)

Enactivists like Evan Thompson abandon functionalism in favor of an integrated approach that also does away with qualia, input-output directionality, representationalism and computationalism. Enactivism makes ‘aboutness’ the central organizing principle of living systems in that living things are defined by their normative, goal-oriented interaction with an environment.

In the traditional functionalist conception, cognition is treated as fundamentally distinct from emotion. Cognitivist explanations focus on the abstract problem-solving characterization of cognitive tasks, the structure and content of symbolic representations, and the nature of the algorithms for manipulating the representations in order to solve a given problem. Cognitivism goes hand in hand with functionalism in the philosophy of mind, which in its extreme computational form holds that the embodiment of the organism is essentially irrelevant to the nature of the mind. It is the software, not the hardware, that matters most for mentality.

Cognitivism made meaning, in the sense of representational semantics, scientifically acceptable, but at the price of banishing consciousness from the science of the mind. (In fact, cognitivism inherited its consciousness taboo directly from behaviorism.) Mental processes, understood to be computations made by the brain using an inner symbolic language, were taken to be entirely nonconscious. Thus the connection between mind and meaning, on the one hand, and subjectivity and consciousness, on the other, was completely severed.

Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world. Cognition or sense-making is the intentional and normative engagement of the system with its environment. One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Unless the processes that make up a system constitute that system as an adaptive self-sustaining unity, there is no perspective or reference point for sense-making and hence no cognizing agent. Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.

Given that some neural processes experience qualia, and even knowing that neural networks are exquisitely correlated with a world around, how are qualia inside the brain about that world rather than just the inside of a brain?

very simply, "aboutness" is an illusion