Aphorism of the Day: If you think of knowledge in fractal terms, you can see yourself as a wane reflection in the bottom of a rain drop as fat as the cosmos.
Or is that just me pissing on your leg?
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Imagine a viscous, gelatinous alien species that crawls into human ear canals as they sleep, then over the course of the night infiltrates the conscious subsystems of the brain. Called phenophages, these creatures literally feed on the ‘what-likeness’ of conscious experience. They twine about the global broadcasting architecture of the thalamocortical system, shunting and devouring what would have been conscious phenomenal inputs. In order to escape detection, they disconnect any system that could alert its host to the absence of phenomenal experience. More insidiously still, they feed-forward any information the missing phenomenal experience would have provided the cognitive systems of its host, so that humans hosting phenophages comport themselves as if they possessed phenomenal experience in all ways. They drive through rush hour traffic, complain about the sun in their eyes, compliment their spouses’ choice of clothing, ponder the difference between perfumes, extol the gustatory virtues of their favourite restaurant, and so on.
Finally, after several years, neurologists detect the phenophages, and through various invasive and noninvasive means, discover their catastrophic consequences. Even though they have no way of removing the parasites, they are able to reconnect the systems that allow the infected to at least cognize the fact they have no experience. The problem is that doing so seems to drive a good number of these patients, who they term ‘phenophagiacs,’ insane, when they had evinced only psychologically well-adjusted behaviour before.
This scenario raises a number of questions for me, but I thought I would start with the most basic: Are unwitting phenophagiacs actually conscious in any meaningful sense? Are the witting?
A twist on this scenario involves the rise of a psychological condition called ‘phenophagic hysteria,’ where numbers of uninfected individuals, perhaps unduly affected by the intense media attention garnered by the alien infestation, come to believe they are infected even though they are not. They act in all ways as if they had experience, but when queried, they (unlike preoperative phenophagiacs) insist they have no experience whatsoever, that they simply ‘know’ in the absence of any conscious ‘feel’ of any sort. When these individuals are tested, researchers discover that they indeed exhibit a set of activation patterns that are unique to them, and conclude that somehow, these individuals have ‘blocked’ the circuits enabling conscious awareness of their conscious awareness.
So the follow-up question would be: Are phenophagic hysterics conscious in any meaningful sense?
Clearly you’ve been reading Animorphs recently, that series was all the rage in middle school fifteen-twenty years ago. Got Yeerks on the brain?
Never heard of them!
I don’t see how this could be possible. Behavior is triggered not by neutral information but by information associated with stored positive or negative emotional intensity. To supply information to the brain is to have it immediately linked to affective information thus obliterating its neutrality. Where the brain is concerned there is no neutral (non-subjective) information. Neutral information would be impotent in terms of causing behavior and therefore useless to the brain in computing responses (behaviors) appropriate to its circumstances. Therefore, the hosts could not “comport themselves as if they possessed phenomenal experience in all ways. They drive through rush hour traffic, complain about the sun in their eyes, compliment their spouses’ choice of clothing, ponder the difference between perfumes, extol the gustatory virtues of their favourite restaurant, and so on.”
I think this has the makings of a pretty strong objection. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘neutral’ or ‘non-subjective information,’ though. Systematic differences making systematic differences is all I’m presuming, which is to say, that the brain is a biomechanism. Could you explain more, Terry?
One of the things this story seems to suppose is that something like Block’s division of consciousness into phenomenal and access components has some truth. If that were the case, all you really would have to do is emulate the information sent by the phenomenal systems at some point within the access system. That’s the riddle. If you could perfectly simulate the efferent signals coming out of the phenomenal complex, then what could possibly be the difference from a behavioural standpoint? I actually think this might be spun into a strong reductio of Block – I’d actually be surprised if no one has thought of something like it before!
I’m saying that the phenophages could not pass anything short of a complete duplicate of the information contained in the intercepted phenomenal experience and still have their hosts “comport themselves as if they possessed phenomenal experience in all ways.” If the phenophages made any actual modifications in terms of the information they passed on to their hosts these hosts would behave differently from the way they would act had they received direct information from their phenomenal experience.
“If you could perfectly simulate the efferent signals coming out of the phenomenal complex, then what could possibly be the difference from a behavioural standpoint?”
If the simulated efferent signals were entirely faithful to the original signals the intervention of the phenophages would make no difference at all. What I am contending is that they could not pass anything but efferent signals entirely faithful to the originals and have their hosts behave in ways identical to the behaviors that would have been provoked by the original signals.
With regard to phenomenal experiences I am unfamiliar with Block’s hypothesis but I believe there are two components to these phenomena. There is the information arriving from the stimuli being received by the brain to which the brain immediately attaches affective information. Thus “neutral” information is transformed into non-neutral (subjective) information.
I understood that. This is really a question of whether the informatic economy of consciousness can be sectioned and sequestered. The phenophage literally robs the complex of the operations pertaining to phenomenal consciousness. Rather than being informatically integrate with cognition, these processes have been ‘black-boxed,’ with the simulated outputs arising via an entirely different set of informatic processes from the ‘surface’ of this section as it were.
It might serve to strengthen the intuition by changing the scenario: say the phenophages are interdimensional creatures, that they literally remove the neural tissue responsible for phenomenal experience, and connect interdimensional receivers to all the ‘hanging’ neural circuits, feeding the information they would have received, had the phenomenal subsystem remained intact.
If the information arriving at the brain is identical either way what does it matter? Also, the operations are ‘black-boxed’ either way, at least if you accept BBT.
I tend to agree that division in to modules of cognition and phenomenal experience is more than likely a gross simplification. It’s tempting to do it for qualia like “red,” where you can imagine the output of the phenomenal module supplying the token “red” to the input of the cognitive module, as if they operate like computer programming subroutines. This almost treats qualia like classified sensory data, as if the eyes supply a red image to the phenomenal module, which then recognizes “red” and sends that forward to cognition. If the phenophages are actually something to be feared, it means that merely mimicking this process has created some type of deficit in the host, but this can only be if there is something more to the process of phenomenal experience than just forwarding information to cognition, and this kind of starts to sound a little Cartesian theaterish.
Personally, I think “red” is a bad example quale. Something like “fear” is much more revealing because then it becomes obvious that there’s much more to phenomenal consciousness than the modular approach can provide, at least in a single pass. Deliberative thought and phenomenology are more intimately entangled. Usually, you have to think before you become afraid, etc. Actually, it’s my pet theory that there is no real difference between the two at a fundamental level, and qualia are really just red herrings.
Hopefully that makes some sense. I should really preface all my comments on this topic with “I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but…”
Two postscripts:
1. There seems to be some debate over whether emotions qualify as qualia.
2. This Wikipedia quote from “Qualia” is interesting:
Another way of defining qualia is as “raw feels.” A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast, a “cooked feel” is that perception seen as existing in terms of its effects. For example, the perception of the taste of wine is an ineffable raw feel, while the experience of warmth or bitterness caused by that taste of wine would be a cooked feel.
It seems like if the phenophages only forwarded “raw feels” they would be successful and more or less innocuous parasites. If they mimicked “cooked feel” then they would actually be screwing with the host’s cognition, but would they still be able to successfully simulate a person’s behavior?
Cornucopia quoted Wikipedia: “Another way of defining qualia is as “raw feels.” A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast, a “cooked feel” is that perception seen as existing in terms of its effects. For example, the perception of the taste of wine is an ineffable raw feel, while the experience of warmth or bitterness caused by that taste of wine would be a cooked feel.”
I think this nails the problem with qualia. What on earth would “a perception in and of itself” be? For anything to be experienced surely it must excite the nervous system in some way. I submit that the taste of wine is not “an ineffable raw feel” but a constellation of physical sensations. We may characterize this constellation of sensations any way we like but that characterization follows from the sensations and is in no way something “ineffably” separate from them. “Ineffably” just means you haven’t recognized the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) constellation of physical sensations triggering your characterization of them.
I’m actually pulling together a dialogue to discuss this very problem, and lay out my strange way of interpreting the ontological dilemmas posed by ‘raw’ versis ‘cooked feels.’ I’m really finding that the ecologicial rationality literature provides a good way to diagnose and pick apart the impasse. The trick turns on abandoning ‘low-res semantic concepts’ as your ‘unexplained explainers’ and adopting a non-semantic conception of information as your primary explanatory paradigm.
The ‘raw versus cooked’ metaphor captures something of relation at work: for me, it’s best to look at qualia as ‘phenomemes,’ as ‘existence enabling devices’ comparable to the role phonemes play in enabling linguistic meaning. The point is to see that ‘existence’ is a product of a cognitive heuristic, the ‘Master Heuristic,’ which, like all heuristics is ‘matched’ to some restricted range of cognitive contexts. Consciousness, for reasons I hope to make clear, is just not one of those contexts. The only way to make sense of the situation is to abandon the conceptual register belonging to semantic cognition and to adopt that belonging to information. This allows us to see that there is no such thing as ‘raw feels,’ that these are the distorted product of attempting to submit what little information quale provide to the ‘Master Heuristic,’ which reflexively attempts to cognize conscious experience as belonging to its existential inventory. The colour ‘red’ no more exists than the letter ‘m’ means. It is ‘preexistential’ the way the latter is ‘presemantic.’
“I’m actually pulling together a dialogue to discuss this very problem, and lay out my strange way of interpreting the ontological dilemmas posed by ‘raw’ versis ‘cooked feels.’”
Cool! From what have said here I am intrigued.
Where does a ‘memory’ rest? As in remembering an experience, rather than the actual experience of it. Is it similar to a ‘cooked feel’?
I think both memories and dreams occupy a much higher level than either raw or cooked perception, at least as defined by the Wikipedia article. For one thing, both memory and dream can be hopelessly impoverished upon close inspection. The various failures of memory have been well known to the law enforcement profession, and I have personally been fooled by the impoverished nature of dreams. I can’t recount the number of times I’ve awoken to the feeling that I’ve just experienced a fantastically emotive story that I just have to record so that I can write my bestseller or screenplay, only to find upon examination that it’s a pretty schmaltzy idea. The trouble with both dream and memory is that they’re both usually wrapped in a gooey layer of emotion, and sometimes the emotion isn’t even based in anything substantial. For example, you just have this “feeling” of pure love that pervades a certain scene or memory, but when you peek behind the curtain, there’s nothing there.
If you get a chance, check out Eric Schwitzgebel’s chapters on dreams in Perplexities of Consciousness. You can find it: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/PerplexitiesCh1.htm
I think I’d agree. But I think I’m behind on the ‘cooked’ term? How is that distinguished from ‘dream’ or ‘raw’ perception?
As I interpret it, “raw feeling,” which according to the article is the only bona fide type of quale, is the very initial perception of seeing red or tasting wine. So it is before anything else can get a hold on it, or before it has any effect at all. As noted, this may not make any sense because how can it be a perception without having any effect? But certainly, under this definition, things like emotion, memory or dreams are right out. “Cooked feeling” is wedged in prior to cognition, but after initial perception, they are effects caused by initial perception. That’s my take, anyhow.
I don’t see how someone infested with neurophage is different from your classic brain in the vat (assuming neurophage “fake” relevant experiential inputs, and not merely forward them. If they forward them, then “victim” basically has a dumb forwarding proxy in the brain, big fucking deal)
As to the second scenario – it’s reminiscent of a thing a friendly psychiatrist told me about, which is a condition when the patient sincerely believes himself to be no longer living and claims to be a corpse in state of severe deterioration (ifyou are interested, I’ll track down the scientific name of this phenomenon)
Cotard’s. One of the most famous – and freaky! This scenario, if you ponder it a bit, is drastically different than the brain in the vat thought experiment. The idea here is that signals internal to consciousness can be sequestered and simulated.
Welcome back, 01!
Okay… hmmmmm…
#click
so…point is that actual “conscious experience” is missing, replaced by something that takes in all the relevant inputs, black-box style, and then sends all the relevant outputs to all the relevant neural components, black-box style, but, by conditions of thought experiment, does so without giving rise to any conscious-experience hoobaloo, amright ?
That would, at the very least, require possibility of implementing human-type behaviors (“information the missing phenomenal experience would have provided the cognitive systems”) without a conscious experience (unless we allow for phenophage entity to be conscious in its own right, that is, phenophages being “awake and aware of being phenophages”, in which case it’s just a new consciousness running there, which is keenly pretending to be the old one, which would be a sci-fi banality). Not just “some kind of intelligent behavior” but “a behavior associated with a sorta-healthy human” (do note that sleepwalkers don’t quite fit the bill as their behaviors are not quite in line with what one would consider normal for an awake human).
If phenophages manage to do that, then consciousness is not just useless, it’s harmful (assuming phenophages obey thermodynamics) since phenophages apparently manage to re-implement its functionality in a manner that allows them spare energy for some extra activities (breeding and whatnot) in addition to “being intra-brain black-boxes”
As to whether “unwitting” victims are “conscious”, I think that they aren’t simply by thought experiment condition (their consciousness has been replaced by a functionally equivalent black box, the phenophage, which is nonetheless itself not conscious)
witting ones are more interesting case.
BTW, aren’t “unwitting” phenophage victims essentially “detectable p-zombies” ?
More good questions. P-zombie type thought experiments turn on the empirical invisibility of phenomenal consciousness, and so challenge materialists (and to a lesser extent naturalists) to account for this ‘extra ingredient.’ I actually think I have a solution to all these problems, but unfortunately it involves chucking the entire history of philosophy, an utter conceptual reorientation – which I’m beginning to think I’ll take to my grave! The difference with the phenophage is that these zombies are made: the phenophage is what might be called an ‘encapsulation’ thought experiment, where you take the systematic whole, the information that is globally broadcast or integrated, say, and cut it in half in such a way that the behavioural outputs are unaffected. The problem it raises, I think, is that of conscious unity. And given its empirical possibility, what it suggests is 1) that consciousness requires some kind of hitherto undetected nonlocal mechanism, like EMFs ; and 2) that it is likely epiphenomenal, that the field can be disrupted without any corresponding change in observable behaviour.
The question with the witting ones is, What would they say? What could ‘witting’ mean in such an instance?
As to whether “unwitting” victims are “conscious”, I think that they aren’t simply by thought experiment condition (their consciousness has been replaced by a functionally equivalent black box, the phenophage, which is nonetheless itself not conscious)
Sorry I don’t get this – is conciousness some kinda magic that’s outside in the environment and if something blocks you from collecting it with your senses, you are unconcious?
The set up is that a middle man has asserted himself between inputs and brain – and yet the middle man apparently doesn’t fuck with the inputs, just reproduces them perfectly in what it passes on to the brain.
Why on earth does that make you unconcious? If I describe an environment to a blind person, does that somehow make them unconcious because I’m the middle man (of course I couldn’t describe it as well as an eye does, but describing it even better seems to support my claim they are concious)?
@ Callan
Nope, that would be a brain in a vat (with middleman as sensory prostheses)
This setup of this thought experiment is that “phenophages” are inside the brain, taking over whatever structures responsible for conscious experience and disabling them. However, they take in all the “upstream” signals from the underlying structures and produce all the signals that the now-defunct areas of the brain were supposed to produce, ensuring that host remains functional.
The conditions of thought experiment, however, don’t clarify whether phenophages are, in their own right, conscious creatures.
If they are not, then a system consisting of “unwitting” victim and the phenophage is essentially an instrumentally detectable p-zombie
ensuring that host remains functional.
What host?
Your telling me the concious mind is shut down, but there’s still a host? Host body, do you mean? Trouble seems to be about maintaining the same individual identifier when, I’d imagine, traditionally you wouldn’t. But the reasons for changing identifier are initially obscured.
Okay, I take the point (I thought we were talking about ‘concious experience’ before – seems that was being mixed in with ‘conciousness’. Kind of like blurring beer and mouth into one singular concept (though it’s divine to do so…)), but it seems like arguing whether the clone of a person cloned at the atomic level (ie, beyond just celular – copying all molecules, so even synaptic information is copied) is concious or not.
The phenophage apparently creates a perfect, atomic level clone.
Seems to be more an arguement about atomic level clones and whether you happen to treat them as being their own entity as much as the ‘natural’ born orignal they were cloned from. Further, whether the clone treats themselves as an entity, after the schism is revealed.
So really this is attack of the clones…
*ducks….runs….*
@ Scott
Sorry – not getting it.
)
The fact that these things are created is largely irrelevant as far as implications go, consciousness-wise.
The fact that they are detectable matters slightly more, but only due to possibility of making “witting infected” (probably not a very bright thing to do, btw
“Unwitting infected”, being essentially p-zombies v0.9 have very similar implications, namely that “consciousness” must be either epiphenomenal, or (in case it is not epiphenomenal) a possibility to create exact functional duplicate of a “conscious” system without actually “implementing” any sort of “consciousness” exists.
I am not sure those two hypotheses (“epiphenomenal consciousness” and “redundant consciousness”) are falsifiable, but if they are, the questions they pose are vanilla questions for empirical scientific inquiry.
The fact that phenophages represent an intervention completely changes the logical stakes vis a vis the p-zombies. Completely. How do phenophages, for instance, trouble physicalism? I don’t see how the unwitting infected imply epiphenomenalism either. The possibility that you can sequester phenomenal consciousness from consciousness in general and still have consciousness-consistent behaviour just means that consciousness-consistent behaviour need not necessarily indicate consciousness, as some in the animal rights debate have argued. The structure has to be the same, as with p-zombies, for your conclusions to follow. A machine doesn’t have to be conscious to do what a different conscious machine does.
@ Callan S.
I think that you’re missing the “kink” of this thought experiment, which is that phenophages somehow re-create “outgoing” signalling of the brain components they replace without causing any sort of “consciousness” to arise. Which is kinda weird, and would require rather odd (but theoretically possible) things to be true (namely, that consciousness either is of no import at all, or that all its functional benefits can be attained through an alternate, consciousness-barren design)
@ Scott
I’d say that the reason they don’t trouble physicalism is the phenophage property of detectability, not their property of being an “intervention”.
Anything that “exists, but is completely, fundamentally undetectable” is problematic for physicalism to some degree.
Imagine a “contagious p-zombie species” that spreads p-zombieism through unprotected sex. Would it still “trouble” physicalism (if all other p-zombie traits, like undetectability, are in place) ?
I’d say yes.
Phenophages don’t – but only because they are detectable (which is a difference I, of course, acknowledge from get-go)
Well, I didn’t just say that it implies epiphenomenalism.
I said it implies either epiphenomenalism OR redundancy of consciousness.
In a hypothetical epiphenomenalist universe phenophages can very well easily exist because consciousness (or lack thereof) is of no functional import anyway.
A universe where “redundancy of consciousness” is true is essentially a universe where one can ” sequester phenomenal consciousness from consciousness in general and still have perfectly identical consciousness-consistent behaviour”
Do note that the claim is stronger, because if the behavior is consciousness consistent, but not perfectly so, then unwitting infected would be “not quite right in the coconut” in demonstrable ways (“he’s a different man now” kind of ways), which would mean the phenophages fail perfectly reproducing the functional aspects of the parts they parasitize.
Possibility of sequestering phenomenal awareness (which is basically the same thing as refactoring the “conscious” agent in a manner that avoids bringing about any such consciousness/phenomenal shenanigans) without causing any functional anomalies would imply that subjective experience (whatever its function it performs, when present), is redundant (in the sense that a different system that lacks “subjective experience” but has exactly, perfectly identical operational envelope can be constructed)
01 has all the same thoughts I have. THAT is freaky.
Haha, that’s how our kind breeds =)
Oh sorry, phenophage. Whatever. You got my meaning.
A nice thought experiment! I will bite and suggest that the answer to your questions:
“Are unwitting phenophagiacs actually conscious in any meaningful sense? Are the witting?”
is given by Ned Block’s distinction between a- and p-consciousness: they have the former but not the latter. They have the kinds of consciousness that actually do cognitive work, but not the ones that just supply causally ineffective qualia.
But I think the deeper question you raise – of whether second-order consciousness (the knowledge of or belief in one’s own phenomenal experience) is important or even constitutive – is a hefty one, not to be briefly (and satisfactorily) answered.
But this is where I think the thought experiment serves as an interesting reductio of Block’s position: if all consciousness is ‘consciousness of’ then the phenophagiacs do not seem to possess consciousness of any sort. What could they be conscious ‘of’? The phenophages block one of the cardinal assumptions we have regarding consciousness: that it is intentional (aimed, directed, etc). This is where I think the way the limitations of cognition understood intentionally become visible, where we can see that it is in fact simply another heuristic, which is to say, a device matched to certain problems, and not others. The second order difficulty, I think, anyway, seems to simply recapitulate this first. What does it mean to be ‘conscious of’ the absence of ‘consciousness of’?
Pardon my ignorance and bumbling (hopefully not burning) re-entry into discussion, but what is the consciousness of a person in sensory deprivation directed at ?
Plenty. Somatosensory imagery in particular, offline versions of phenomenal experience that apparently develop into full blown hallucinations for some. With the phenophages, you can’t even ‘hear’ your inner voice. But it’s a good question, 01.
I’m not particularly convinced it’s actually focused on internal imagery in the sense my consciousness is now focused on this discussion and the computer before me.
To me, the bizarre, wanton hallucinations in SD, as well as other oddballery that happens in those states is eerily reminiscent of a “dangling pointer” bug.
The weird “consciousness” thingamajig is evolved to be constantly directed at sensory signals, which, normally, are always available, but in SD that data is… well, available no more.
Somatosensory imagery is not necessarily ‘internal imagery’: it refers to the way offline sensory systems still globally broadcast information. But the point you’re driving at is important. Is it possible to section the phenomenal from the cognitive? I don’t think so, and yet it still strikes me that the phenophage is empirically possible…
Is there proof that SD hallucinations are due to “disengaged” senses broadcasting information?
Honest question. I really don’t know.
It seems entirely plausible to me that, under sufficient SD, the sensory system really doesn’t broadcast anything of import, and conscious mind, to put it bluntly, just tries to gobble up data that isn’t there, and gobbles up some other shit instead (causing mayhem and psychosis)
How about another species, as beastly as they are powerful – these ones can know the future of an individual utterly. They can even predict what the brain will do in all that individuals future. They make a recording of what they would do – then in a nanosecond they eat the individuals brain and replace it with the recording, which feeds neural responces out to the body. Apart from the recording, the skull is empty. None of the inputs lead to anything. The eyes track, as the recording dictates they will, but they do not see.
You can watch these victims drive through rush hour traffic, drink wine, etc. Worse, you can argue with these victims, talk with them. Have a back and forth. Love? Yet they are a pure recording, just playing out.
Actually I kinda don’t like my idea now, because of the interplay of the perfect future prediction and predicition of how the brain would respond. It’s ultra, heartbreakingly indirect, rather than being as hollow as I first thought.
How about phenophage are eventually detected because discrepancies show up in talking with the victims. Sure, they talk about red, but certain oddities of speach show – eventually it is discovered that the victims simply speak red, because the word ‘red’ is an output of a series of on/off binary structures, in a roundabout responce to the binary structure they percieve when their eyes are aimed at what we call red. The switch to an utterly binary landscape, an alien landscape they live in yet navigate to ours through ours through effective equivalents, was not just because the phenophage is so sophisticated in it’s predation.
But again, I don’t like my idea – they are still seeing/experiencing on and off. It’s still seems to be this phenomenal peoples talk about. All it’s done is withdraw.
Originally I was going to say ‘So the question is if the phenophage eats all the fairies at the bottom of my garden, do I still have a garden?’, but I thought it didn’t contribute in the same vein – but I don’t like my contributions in regards to it, either. Dang.
Also I insist phenophage’s look like this. “Tonight…YOU”
Oh, or for a more simple scenario; The phenophage triggers a sort of sleep walker syndrome – the sort where some people have been found cooking a meal in their sleep (or apparently traveling to murder someone). At first these stages are relatively short, in between concious stages. But the insidious gnawing of the pheno leads not to longer sleep walker stages, but more alternations – the concious and sleep walker stages get smaller (and more equal in size) as the alternating becomes faster and faster. Soon enough each stage is microseconds in length. Who can say which stage the person is in when they alternate at such high speeds? Effectively they finally blur into what functionally seems a concious adult, but brain scans basically indicate they are sleep walking.
Scientist refer to saccades in human eyes. Small, seemingly pointless movements. Until recently it was found that rather like frog eyes (who see nothing unless it moves), human eyes, if they remain still, become blind/see nothing. Rather like staring at the dot in this image for long enough. The small eye movements make the world remain alive.
These sleep walkers, if presented with enough of a difficult, problematic situation, are measured under brain scans as re-emerging at the concious end of the spectrum. Only in consternation are they concious. However soon enough the phenophage would consume them, rendering them unconcious and as blind as one is to the blue circle in the image above.
~~~
I like this idea better (I think it’s ‘saccade’ – it might be a different name). Sorry for posting too much – cease making interesting posts and I’ll be able to resist posting!
Hey Scott! I’m sorry if you get hammered with this question- but how is progress on The Unholy Consult coming? Your series is awesome.
I’m about 160 000 words in and creeping forward day by day. Not much I can say, except that I wish I could make things happen faster! It’s breaks like these that jeopardize the viability of series.
Well, if you have a zinger then that could revive your marketability….although, duh. But is the series really that endangered? You are constantly referenced in categories with George R R Martin and Joe Abercrombie. You’re there, man. You are a dark fantasy author. You’re name can only get bigger ad bigger. But, anyway- I hope things go well for you on that front. On the less materialistic POV, your series has really been a great addition to the dark fantasy genre. I can not wait to see what happens in the coming books- I’ve been discussing with a buddy and we speculate Kellhus’ motivations; What became of Ishual and the Dunyain, what will happen is you eat sranc (if eating qirri will give you a jolt)? And so on. So if this small blip on the comment board is any motivation- you are writing some awesome stuff. It is deep in content and thoughtful in execution. Fucking Golgotterath. Amaze-balls. I always wondered if someone would combine the sci-fi and fantasy somehow, and you are doing it in a way that’s so mysterious and fucking sweet. If that’s how it is….I suppose there could always be a new twist. Hints at the void and outside and inchoroi are truly the gravy in the story. Please pepper with more if possible. I also love that it is more in the biblical setting rather than English dark ages. Such a fresh look. But, I digress….I’m just rambling. Finish the book Scott! We wait with hungry and drooling neuro-holes.
Never fear. One of the few things I have faith in is the STORY. It will overcome, even if the frailties of its author make for an ordeal or two.
Even still, pimpage never hurts! Thanks, JV!
I really hope you belong to the Second Apocalypse forums, JV. Cheers.
> jeopardize the viability of the series
makes me sad. Your stories are the best! This brain is blindly encouraging you.
This brain is encouraged! Publishing is in a state of turmoil right now, and they seem more and more inclined to look at midlisters who reliably pay their way, like me, as blocking a spot for a potential bestseller. It pays to be quick the times are a changin.
I’m glad your encouraged! Let me quantify how much I like your stories: 8.5 months. That’s how long ago you put up False Sun and warned of spoilers. I’m refusing to read it and have kept myself from temptation for 8.5 months. Don’t care if it’s 108.5 months, I’ll wait.
No reddit? That’s good. You do want to have time for family and work. Srsly tho, r/philosophy (imho) stinks. Disclaimer: this coming from a guy who teaches philosophy and can’t stand it. You might like r/cogsci. I like r/firstworldanarchists. What about r/pareidolia?
8.5 months? Man, will you ever be pissed if it turns out not to have mattered! I’m a spaz about spoilers myself, so I empathize.
But I have to say, a philosopher commenting about how much they like my stories on a philosophy post – that raises eyebrows. What do you think of Al’s crazy little position, Mitt?
8.5 months, 8.5 years, I don’t care. I like Earwa whatever. That’s the thing, I love your stories, but I can’t be bothered with the philosophy. I’m sorry. I can see you are very invested in it, but I’ve already written myself and everyone else off as a dreaming meat. Schizophrenic, just as you say. I’m also sorry I can’t comment on the other stuff. I only come around for the latest word on Akka and Co, but I don’t want to hang out in the forum. I like my surprises surprising. Disclaimer: I am a philosopher in the janitorial manner–adjuncting till my rationalization engine fails.
Dreaming meat? Sounds oddly familiar… Why not meaty dreams? Or why not chuck the meat and dreams altogether? Or why…
The rationalization engine never fails – you know that!
You caught me! Uncited referrence to the work of Terry Bisson:
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
Someone even made a video out of it:
Yes, that thing won’t stop. I guess if it did, ‘I’ would stop too.
Fucking brilliant! I had to forward that to the Peripheral Theory folks… [end meat pounding keys no
“Fan” fiction thought experiment:
The Casual Vacancy comes out this week and we all know that all critics must write an extremely negative, scathing review of it because that rich (expletive deleted) has to be put in her place. There is no room for variation in opinion with this title, in order to be considered a ‘real’ critic, one must hate the book as deeply as all right-thinking people hate mein kampf.
So, since most critics probably wrote a skeleton-slam review of the book back when it was announced in march (since all critics know they don’t actually have to read the book to know how much they will hate it) who can write the best example of the in-group reviews we’ll be seeing?
Alternatively, since the critics will be filling in the blanks in their slams soon, perhaps even better would be to make a Literary Critic Mad Libs entry for The Casual Vacancy?
or perhaps this is an ‘Anti-Fan’ fiction proposal…
Congratulations Scott. You are the top spot on reddit.com/r/philosophy today. Unfortunately, it’s a relatively small subreddit and the site, collectively, has the attention span of a gnat… nonetheless, I will keep pushing.
Good stuff!
My eyes almost fell out of my head when I saw the hit count last night! But no comments, alas. How does it work with reddit? People have linked posts of mine before, but without even approaching the amount of traffic your post has.
The funny thing is that I came across this quote from this mathematician in SA yesterday complaining about how he regularly receives emails from cranks claiming to have solved the P and NP problem, and I thought, Yep – that’s me! I’m really starting to think that the internet, simply because it exposes people to so much more messaging, actually forces them to rely more on unconscious value-attribution mechanisms to streamline their time.
Thank you, Jorge. It’s a pretty radical pill I’m trying to sell, and it’ll likely take years of pimpage before the medicine starts to get through.
Phenophages. I think I’ve got one. Mine keeps telling me to close the lid after I’ve flushed and not to burp so loud when quaffing beers.
The post seems a vague on several points.
If you say the unwitting phenophagiacs are fed consciousness, then surely they must be conscious. So what’s the real question?
You say that the witting phenophagiacs are insane, and insanity is a form of consciousness, so why ask whether they’re conscious?
Lastly, you say that phenophagic hysterics are conscious (but don’t know it), and then finally ask whether they are conscious???
There seems to be some implicit theme to these questions that I don’t see.
The challenge has to do with the neural basis of consciousness. We know (given a mountainous amount of evidence) that consciousness turns on the brain, but when we root through the brain we find absolutely nothing resembling consciousness, raising the question of whether consciousness plays any causal role – perhaps brains can do everything we do without any consciousness whatsoever, including generating first-person reports of consciousness! This scenario tweaks that intuition in what I think are interesting ways.
Isn’t whatever the brain does called consciousness? You seem to be saying that consciousness and the brain are two separate things. If brain activity isn’t consciousness, then what else is?
What did they look for, in emperical terms, when they looked for conciousness?
Imagine a viscous, gelatinous alien species that crawls into human ear canals as they sleep, then over the course of the night infiltrates the conscious subsystems of the brain. Called phenophages, these creatures literally feed on the ‘what-likeness’ of conscious experience. They twine about the global broadcasting architecture of the thalamocortical system, shunting and devouring what would have been conscious phenomenal inputs. In order to escape detection, they disconnect any system that could alert its host to the absence of phenomenal experience. More insidiously still, they feed-forward any information the missing phenomenal experience would have provided the cognitive systems of its host, so that humans hosting phenophages comport themselves as if they possessed phenomenal experience in all ways. They drive through rush hour traffic, complain about the sun in their eyes, compliment their spouses’ choice of clothing, ponder the difference between perfumes, extol the gustatory virtues of their favourite restaurant, and so on.
Finally, after several years, neurologists detect the phenophages, and through various invasive and noninvasive means, discover their catastrophic consequences. Even though they have no way of removing the parasites, they are able to reconnect the systems that allow the infected to at least cognize the fact they have no experience. The problem is that doing so seems to drive a good number of these patients, who they term ‘phenophagiacs,’ insane, when they had evinced only psychologically well-adjusted behaviour before.
This scenario raises a number of questions for me, but I thought I would start with the most basic: Are unwitting phenophagiacs actually conscious in any meaningful sense? Are the witting?
A twist on this scenario involves the rise of a psychological condition called ‘phenophagic hysteria,’ where numbers of uninfected individuals, perhaps unduly affected by the intense media attention garnered by the alien infestation, come to believe they are infected even though they are not. They act in all ways as if they had experience, but when queried, they (unlike preoperative phenophagiacs) insist they have no experience whatsoever, that they simply ‘know’ in the absence of any conscious ‘feel’ of any sort. When these individuals are tested, researchers discover that they indeed exhibit a set of activation patterns that are unique to them, and conclude that somehow, these individuals have ‘blocked’ the circuits enabling conscious awareness of their conscious awareness.
So the follow-up question would be: Are phenophagic hysterics conscious in any meaningful sense?
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So, essentially we have Morpheus staring at Neo in his eggshell in the farm, and totally unable to bring Neo out of the Matrix. This leads other free humans, who now know the Matrix exists, to come to believe that they’re actually in the Matrix, when they actually are not, and somehow cease to be aware of being self-aware.
Okay, my problems with the scenario are manifold. I don’t think you can get there from here. While external stimuli have been shown to significantly affect consciousness and potentially break down self-awareness, purely internal belief has not, to my knowledge. I’m talking about brainwashing, hypnosis, and traumatic experiences. It’s like trying to strangle yourself: you can’t do it, because you fall unconscious and lose control of your hands before you can die, and the autonomous systems force you to breathe at the moment your hands fall. To cause one to become unaware of oneself, you must already be incapable of being aware of yourself, which requires already having altered your awareness of yourself. Catch-22.
Second, the phenophage victims (PVs) have consciousness. Even if we altered the phenophage definition such that they could also alter the sensory input to the host, that only leads to a divergence between reality and perceived reality. Some humans already struggle with this issue in the form we call schizophrenia. (And to a lesser extent, sensory handicapped individuals, notably Helen Keller.) Is a schizophrenic conscious? Certainly. He’s aware of himself, even if his perception of his place in the universe is wrong. The PV lacks correct association to the world around him, but does not lack the awareness that a self exists. The PH, on the other hand, has incorrectly interpreted the PV’s issue: the existence of the phenophage parasite does not interfere with self-awareness, only with the self’s association to the true, rather than perceived, reality. The PV is conscious of himself, but maybe not you.
What would someone incapable of self-awareness be like? Frankly, you’re talking about a vegetable. He could not analyze any sensory input, because his mind could not identify the inputs as potentially affecting the mind, requiring avoidance or action to avoid consequences to the self caused by the “other”. To acknowledge pain is to acknowledge that one has a body, which immediately demands self-awareness. I don’t think blocking “conscious awareness of their conscious awareness” leads to anything except a vegetative state, since a suitably complex system that must respond to external inputs based on self-determined (rather than preprogrammed) responses cannot give up that complexity and still respond to the basic inputs that require only self-awareness, rather than higher level understanding of one’s self-awareness. That was complex and wordy. Basically, if you can still catch a baseball, then you require an understanding of both self and “other”, so you’re still aware that you’re self-aware. You can’t make the choice to catch the baseball without awareness that a self exists to make the catch. You can’t give up that awareness without losing the ability to choose to catch the baseball, so Bakker’s PH should be incapable of the higher functions that require a relative association in space or time with the self, and that accounts for everything we physically do every day.
Less complex systems that are preprogrammed can respond and catch the baseball, but they were never self-aware in the first place. I’ll talk about computers in a second, but I’d rather talk about insects first. We think they are capable of some level of self-determination, but some studies have shown that they are actually closer to robots than we really suspected. There is one wasp (tarantula hawk, IIRC) that plants its egg on tarantulas and then buries it in the hole. It goes through a ritual, digging the hole, moving the spider closer, checking the hole, then dragging the spider in. The experimenter moves the spider away from the hole when the wasp checks the hole, and the wasp pulls the spider close again, and checks the hole again, rinse and repeat. It will never learn and will always go back to that “move spider” step if the experimenter moves the spider while it checks its hole. That’s a preprogrammed response. The wasp is capable of the complex decision-making to get a spider from some random place to the hole, but not the higher complexity decision to escape its loop. So, yes, a suitably simple biological system can lack self-awareness, and give the illusion of awareness, but when investigated, you learn that the system was never self-aware, only a system of preprogrammed responses that emulates complexity. In other words, your parallel to the PH isn’t in the wasp, since humans lack adequate preprogrammed responses to give up self-awareness. (See “vegetative state”. Without a consciousness, our bodies do not protect themselves.) Some people may choose not to see the loops they trap themselves in, but that is an ego issue that can be overcome.
The closest analogy to the insect’s behavior is a modern computer. Despite some programs coming close to human capacity for linguistic analysis and repartee, it is all fake — simulations to be specific. Computers cannot think for themselves. They do only math, which we also do, but abstract thought is not a matter solely of mathematics, at least not yet. Math can simulate some human thought processes, and programs can be written such that a machine can interpret the sensors on its own chassis and react according to a set of protocols like the wasp, but like the wasp can never transcend their programs to determine that what it is doing is self-destructive. (Robot haulers in shipyards come to mind.) They seem like they are thinking, but in truth it is rigid and only as creative as the programmers: the responses were determined by a group of humans and turned into a set of rules for the computer to follow. Turing’s test has proven woefully easy to trick with simulations. That does beg the question of “What is consciousness worth if we can just fake it?” but that’s for another day.
So how do we even determine if something is self-aware in the first place? You suggest that there are “circuits” in the brain devoted to it, but I don’t think it’s quite that complex. The very act of turning signals from the optic nerve into patterns and concepts (like table, chair, etc.) all fundamentally result in a relationship to the visual system that provides that input. As the body moves, perspective moves, and the relationship to the “other” becomes obvious to a sufficiently analytical system like our brain that already understood that concept. In order for a system to defend itself from data input, it must have a fundamental understanding of the relationship of that data to its self, or else someone must predetermine what those responses will be for the system. Where the system starts as complex, reliant on the self-awareness and awareness necessary to protect the self, no preprogrammed responses exist, and so the loss of that awareness does not leave the individual capable of defending itself from harmful data input. Even if a single moment occurred where awareness of self-awareness ceased, the next time something moved in one’s vision, the association of the “otherness” of the moving object would immediately re-establish the concept of self and the awareness of self, because “other” cannot exist without the knowledge of self. The alternative, where an individual remains unaware of the “otherness” and relationship of other to self is not dissimilar to autism. There we might have a problem with the idea of consciousness in extreme cases, but such individuals are readily identified because of their strangeness, and would not require Bakker’s medical proofs to establish as having a mental issue. Extreme autistics are incapable of keeping themselves alive. Bakker has created an autistic of such high function we can’t tell he’s autistic. I don’t think that is even conceptually possible for a system without preprogrammed responses in place to take over for the loss of concept of “self”.
The flexibility of the human mind to adapt to new sensory input is remarkable, and I think that fact also reveals that the phenophage is, in the end, irrelevant to the topic of consciousness. Some surgeries have been letting people who have been blind since birth see (removing pressure from abnormal growths on the optic nerve, for instance.) Despite decades of blindness, they can see immediately upon opening their eyes. The sight analysis systems, even if diverted to other tasks, take up their function regardless of disuse. So the PV, if the phenophage can be forced to provide accurate sensory data (couple electrical probes and a low voltage jolt or two should bring the parasite into a new line of motivation), will be able to process reality correctly despite a short vacation in the Bahamas. The PV is always conscious of himself — only the ability to associate to reality is interfered with. Schizophrenics that can overcome their unreal worlds through drugs jump back and forth between reality and unreality. Is consciousness defined such that they are conscious only when on drugs?
So, let’s bring it back to point. The PH is not technically defined as lacking self-awareness, but as choosing to no longer create experience through a lack of awareness of self-awareness. So, question… are there people that cannot form new experiences right now?
Sadly, yes. Some forms of brain damage cause the brain to move thoughts into long-term memory inconsistently or not at all, essentially causing a person to become stuck in time, in a mockery of Groundhog Day. There is also Alzheimer’s, which does worse by degrading memory, not just preventing new ones. Are these humans conscious?
I’ve talked to some of the former, but none of the latter. Yes, without a doubt, they are self-aware. I urge anyone approaching this from a purely intellectual standpoint to find an appropriate facility and speak with those so afflicted. They can carry on a conversation, actually learn new concepts (I was teaching them to use computers, very slowly), do not respond to input robotically but instead with creativity and insight, and without being told, you wouldn’t even know they were afflicted in the short term (I didn’t: I was told she wouldn’t retain my teaching after the session). In the long term, you’ll find yourself teaching the same concepts over and over, but that is really the only difference.
So, in the end, yes, the Phenophage Hysterics are conscious. And they walk amoung us now, tragically.