Aphorism of the Day: The mere fact of cartoons shouts the environmental orientation of our cognitive heuristics. A handful of lines is all the brain needs to create a world. South Park, of all things, likely means we have no idea what we’re talking about when we purport to explain ‘consciousness.’
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Some kind of pervasive and elusive incompatibility haunts the relation between our intuitive self-understanding, what Wilfred Sellars famously referred to as the ‘Manifest Image,’ and our ever deepening natural self-understanding, the ‘Scientific Image.’ The question is really quite simple: How do we make intentionality consistent with causality? How do we make the intentional logic of the subject fit with the causal logic of the object? Most philosophers are what might called semantic Hawks, thinkers bent on finding ways of overcoming this incompatibility, hoping against hope that the resolution will leap out of the conceptual or empirical details. Some are semantic Diplomats, thinkers who have thrown their hands up, arguing the cognitive autonomy of the two domains. And still others, the semantic Profiteers, simply want to translate the causal into an expression of the intentional, to make science one particularly powerful ‘language game’ among others.
I’m what you might call a semantic Defeatist, someone convinced the only real solution is to explain the whole thing away. I think the Hawks are fighting a battle they’ve literally evolved to lose, that the Diplomats, despite their best intentions, are negotiating with ghosts, and that the Profiteers have simply found a way to load the horse and whip the cart. Defeatists, of course, rarely prevail, but they do persist. And so the madness of arguing for the profound and troubling structural role blindness plays in human consciousness and cognition continues. Existence understood as the tissue of neglect. Yee. Hah.
Today, I want to discuss the semantic Hawks, provide a historical and conceptual cartoon of what makes them so warlike, and then sketch out, as best as I can, why I think they are doomed to lose their war.
Like their political counterparts, semantic Hawks are motivated by conviction, particularly regarding the nature of meaning, representation, and truth. Given the millennial philosophical miasma surrounding these concepts, one might wonder how anyone could muster any conviction of any kind regarding their ‘nature.’ I know back in my continental philosophical days it was one of those ‘other guy’ head-scratchers, the preposterous commitment that made so much so-called ‘analytic thought’ sound more like religion than philosophy. But that was bigotry on my part, plain and simple. The Hawks constitute the semantic majority for damn good reasons. They are eminently sensible, which, as we shall see, is precisely the problem.
Historically, you have the influence of Frege and Russell at the beginning of the 20th century. A hundred and fifty years previous, Hume’s examinations of human nature had dramatically disclosed the limits that subjectivity placed on our attempts to think objective truth. Toward the end of the 18th century, Kant thought he had seen a way through: if we could deduce the categorical nature of that subjectivity, then we could, at the very least, grasp the true-for-us. But this just led to Hegel and the delicious-but-not-so-nutritious absurdity of reducing everything to ‘objective subjectivity.’ What Frege and Russell offered was nothing less than a way to pop the suffocating bubble of subjectivity, theories of meaning that seemed to put language, and therefore language users, in clear contact with the in-itself.
Practically speaking, the development of formal semantics was like cracking open caulked-shut windows. Given a handful of rules, you could formalize what seem to be the truth preserving features of natural languages. Of course, it only captured a limited set of linguistic features, and even within this domain it was plagued with puzzles and explanatory conundrums. But it was extraordinarily powerful nonetheless, so much so that it seemed natural to assume that with a little ingenious conceptual work all those pesky wrinkles could be ironed out, and we could jam with a perfectly-pressed Frock of Ages.
The theories of meaning arising out of these considerations in the philosophy of language also seemed–and still seem–to nicely dovetail with parallel questions in the philosophy of mind. Like language, conscious experience clearly seems to put us in logical contact with the world. Experiences, like claims, can be true or false. Phenomenology, like phonology, seems to vanish in the presentation of something else. And this drops us square in the lap of representationalism’s power as an explanatory paradigm: intentionality, meaning, and normativity are not simply central to human cognition, they are the very things that must be explained.
Conscious experience is representational: the reason we see through experience is the same as the reason we see through paintings or television screens. What is presented–qualia or paint or pixilated light–re-presents something else from the world, the representational content. What could be more obvious?
With the development of computers toward the middle of the 20th century, theorists in philosophy and psychology suddenly found themselves with a conspicuously mechanistic model of how it might all work. Human cognition, both personal and subpersonal, could be understood in terms of computations performed on representations. The relation of the mental to the neural, on this account, was no more mysterious than the relation between software and hardware (which, as it turns out, is every bit as mysterious!). And so, given this combination of intuitive appeal and continuity with other ‘hard’ research programs, representational theories of mind proved well nigh irresistible, not only to Anglo-American philosophy, but to a psychological establishment keen to go to rehab after a prolonged bout of behaviourism.
The real problem, aside from deciding the best way to characterize the theoretical details of the representational picture, is one of ironing out the causal details. The brain, after all, is biomechanical, an object belonging to the domain of the life sciences more generally. If you want to avoid the hubristic and (from a scientific perspective) preposterous enterprise of positing supra-natural entities, you need to explain how all this representation business, well, actually works. Thus the decades-long project of theorizing causal accounts of content.
The big problem, it turns out, is one of providing a natural account of content determination that simultaneously makes sense of misrepresentation. Jerry Fodor famously frames the difficulty in terms of the ‘disjunction problem’: you can say that your representation ‘dog’ is causally triggered by sensing a dog in your environment, which seems well and fine. The problem is that your representation ‘dog’ is sometimes causally triggered by sensing a fox in your environment (perhaps in less than ideal observational conditions). So the question becomes what, causally, makes your representation ‘dog’ a representation of a dog as opposed to a representation of a dog or fox. What, in other words, causally explains the way representations can be wrong? This may seem innocuous at first glance, but the very intelligibility of the representational account depends on it. Without some natural way of sorting content determining causes (dogs) from non-content determining causes (foxes or anything else) you quite simply have no causal account of content.
After decades of devious ingenuity, critics (most notably Fodor himself) have always been able to show how purported solutions run afoul some variant of this problem. So why not strike your colours and move on as a Defeatist like me advocates? The thing to remember is that there are at least two explanatory devils in this particular philosophical room: for many, conscious experience, short of representational theories, seems so baffling that the difficulties pertaining to causal content determination are a bargain in comparison. And this is one big reason why anti-representational accounts have made only modest headway over the intervening years: they literally seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
For the Hawk, intentionality is a primary explanandum. Recall the power of formal semantics I alluded to above: not only do logic and mathematics work, not only do they make science itself possible, they seem to be intentional through and through (though BBT disputes even this!). Given that intentionality is every bit as ‘real’ as causality, the question becomes one of how they come together in our heads. The responsible thing, it would seem, is to chalk up their track record of theoretical failure to mere factual ignorance, to simply continue taking runs at the problem armed with more and more neuroscientific knowledge.
As a Defeatist, however, I think the problem is thoroughly paradigmatic. I don’t worry about throwing out the baby with the bathwater simply because I’m not convinced the baby ever existed (unlike the Profiteers, for instance, who think the baby was switched in the hospital). For the Hawk, however, this means I have nothing short of an extraordinary explanatory and argumentative burden to discharge: not only do I need to explain why there’s no intentional baby, I need to explain why so many are so convinced that there is. Even worse, it would seem that I need to also explain away formal semantics itself, or at least account for its myriad and quite dazzling achievements. Worse of all, I probably need to explain Truth on top of everything.
The Blind Brain Theory (BBT) has crazy things to say about all these things. But I lack the space to do much more than wedge my foot in the door here. None of these burdens will be discharged in what follows. If I manage to convince a soul or two that their ingenuity is better wasted elsewhere, so much the better. But all I really want to show is that BBT is worth the time and effort required to understand it on its own terms. And I hope to do this by using it to formulate two, interrelated questions that I think are so straightforward and so obviously destructive of the representationalist paradigm, they might actually merit the hyperbole of this post’s title.
The first point I want to make has to do with heuristics, particularly as they are conceived by the growing number of researchers studying what is called ‘ecological rationality.’ Any strategy that solves problems by ignoring available information is heuristic. ‘Rules of thumb’ work by means of granularity and neglect, by ignoring complexities or entire domains if need be. As a result, they are problem specific: they only work when applied to a limited set of specifically structured challenges. As Todd and Gigarenzer write,
“The concept of ecological rationality–of specific decision-making tools fit to particular environments–is intimately linked to that of the adaptive toolbox. Traditional theories of rationality that instead assume one single decision mechanism do not even ask when this universal tools works better or worse than any other, because it is the only one thought to exist. Yet the empirical evidence looks clear: Humans and other animals rely on multiple cognitive tools. And cognition in an uncertain world would be inferior, inflexible, and inefficient with a general purpose optimizing calculator…” (Ecological Rationality, 14)
Ecological rationality looks at cognition in thoroughly evolutionary terms, which is to say, as adaptations, as a ‘toolbox’ of myriad biomechanical responses to various environmental challenges. It turns out that optimization strategies, problem-solving approaches that seek to maximize information availability in an attempt to generate optimal solutions, are not only much more computationally cumbersome (and thus an evolutionary liability), they are also often less effective than far simpler, far cheaper, quicker, and more robust heuristic strategies.
Todd and Gigarenzer give the example of catching a baseball. Until recently the prevailing assumption was that fielders unconsciously used a complex algorithm to estimate distance, velocity, angle, resistance, wind, and so on, to calculate the ball’s trajectory and anticipate where it would land–all within a matter of seconds. As it turns out, they actually rely on rules of thumb like the gaze heuristic, where they fix their gaze on the ball high up and start running so that the image of the ball rises at a continuous rate relative to their gaze and position. Rather than calculate the ball’s trajectory, they let the trajectory steer them in.
For our purposes, the important aspects of heuristic troubleshooting are 1) informatic neglect, the strategic omission of information; and 2) ecological matching, the way heuristics are only effective for a certain set of problems.
As far as I know, no one in consciousness research and philosophy of mind circles has bothered to think through the more global implications of informatic neglect on cognition, let alone consciousness. Most everyone with a naturalistic bent accepts the heuristic, plural nature of human and animal cognition. But no one to my knowledge has thought through the fact that the ‘representational paradigm’ is itself a heuristic.
How can we know the ‘R-paradigm’ is heuristic? Well… Because of the need to provide a causal account of content-determination!
Causal information, in other words, is the information neglected, the very thing the R-paradigm elides. I think you could mount a strong argument that the R-paradigm has to be heuristic simply on evolutionary, developmental grounds. But the primary reason is structural: there is simply no way for the brain to track the causal complexities of its own cognitive systems, even if it paid evolutionary dividends to do so. This structural fact, you could suppose, finds expression in the paradigmatic absence of neurofunctional information in so-called representational cognition.
The R-paradigm is heuristic–full stop. It systematically neglects information. This means (or at the very least, strongly suggests) that the R-paradigm, like all other heuristics, is ecologically matched to a specific set of problems. The R-paradigm, in other words, it is not a universal problem-solving device.
And this means that the R-paradigm is something that can be applied out-of-school–that it can be misapplied. Understood in these terms, the tenacious nature of the content-determination problem (and the grounding problem more generally) takes on an entirely new significance: Is it merely coincidental that Hawkish philosophers cannot conceptually (let alone empirically) explain the R-paradigm in causal terms–which is to say, in terms of the very information the R-paradigm neglects?
Perhaps. But let’s take a closer look.
As a heuristic, the R-paradigm necessarily has a limited scope of applicability: it is a parochial problem-solver, and only appears universal thanks (once again) to informatic neglect. It seems relatively safe to assume that the R-paradigm is primarily adapted to environmental problem-solving or third-person cognition. If this were so, we might expect it to possess a certain facility for causal relations in our environments. And indeed, as the transparency that motivates the Hawks would suggest, it’s tailor made for causal explanations of things not itself. It neglects almost all information pertaining to our informatic relation to our environment, and delivers objects bouncing around in relation to one another–fodder for causal explanation.
Small wonder, then, everything goes haywire when you take this heuristic to the question of consciousness and the brain. Neglecting your informatic relation to functionally independent systems in your environment is one thing; Neglecting your informatic relation to functionally dependent systems in your own brain is something altogether different. The R-paradigm is quite literally a heuristic that neglects the very information required to cognize consciousness. How could it not misfire when faced with this problem? How could it come remotely close to accurately characterizing itself?
The problem of content determination, on the BBT account, is actually analogous to the problem of self-determination–which is to say, free will. In the latter, the problem is one of causally squaring the circle of ‘choice,’ whereas in the former the problem is one of causally squaring the circle of ‘meaning.’ Where cause flattens choice, it simply sails past meaning. And how could it be otherwise, when nothing less than truth is the long-sought-after ‘effect’?
Like choice, aboutness is a heuristic, a way of managing environmental relationships in the absence of constitutive causal information. It is a kluge–perhaps the most profound one. No conspiracy of causal factors can conjure representational content because the relationship sought is an exceedingly effective but nevertheless granular substitutefor the lack of access to those selfsame factors.
Of course it doesn’t seem that way, intuitively speaking. Consider the example of the gaze heuristic, given above. Does it make sense to suppose the gaze heuristic is actually an optimization algorithm? Of course not: Informatic neglect is constitutive of heuristic problem-solving. So why did so many assume that some kind of optimization algorithm underwrote ball catching? Why, in other words, was the informatic neglect involved in ball-catching something that required experimental research to reveal? Well, because informatic neglect is just that: informatic neglect. Not only is information systematically elided, information regarding this elision is lacking as well. This effectively renders heuristics invisible to conscious experience. Not only do we lack direct awareness of which heuristic we are using, we generally have no idea that we are relying heuristics at all. (Kahneman’s recent Thinking, Fast and Slow provides a wonderful crash course on this point. What he calls WYSIATI, or What-You-See-Is-All-There-Is, is a version of ‘informatic neglect’ as used here).
Aboutness not only seems ‘sufficient,’ to be the only tool we need; it also seems to be universal, a tool for all problem-solving occasions. Moreover, given the profoundly structural nature of the informatic neglect involved, the fact that the brain is necessarily blind to its own neurofunctionality, there is a sense in which aboutness is unavoidable: if the gaze heuristic is one tool among many, then aboutness is our hand, a ‘tool’ we cannot but use, (short of fumbling things with our elbows). More still, you can add to this list what might be called the ‘ease of worlding.’ One need only watch an episode of South Park to appreciate how primed our cognitive systems are, and how little information they require, to generate ‘external environments.’ It’s easy to forget that the ‘representational images’ that surround us are actually spectacular kinds of visual illusions. Structure a meagre amount of visual information the proper way, and we automatically cognize depth in flat surfaces populated with non-existent objects.
Aboutness provides the structural frame of our cognitive relation to our environments, conjuring worlds automatically at the least provocation. Given this, you could argue that representational theories of mind are a kind of ‘forced move,’ a theoretical step we had to take in our attempts to understand consciousness. But you can also see why it’s something a mature scientific account of consciousness and cognition requires we must see our way past. As soon as you acknowledge the intimate, inextricable relationship between mind and brain, you acknowledge that the former somehow turns on neurofunctionality–which is to say, the very thing systematically neglected by aboutness.
Reflecting on conscious experience means feeding brain processes to a heuristicthat spontaneously and systematically renders it causally inexplicable. In a sense, this explains the charges of ‘homunculism’ you find throughout the literature. The idea of a ‘little observer in the head’ that mistakenly ‘objectifies’ or ‘hypostatizes’ aspects of conscious experience is more than a little impressionistic. Framed in terms of heuristics and informatic neglect, the metaphoric problem of homunculism becomes a clear instance of heuristic misapplication: How can we trust a heuristic obviously designed to cognize our environments absent neurofunctional information to assist our attempts to cognize ourselves in terms of neurofunctional information?
If anything, one should expect that such a heuristic system would cognize the brain in non-neurofunctional terms, which is to say, as something quite apart from the brain. In other words, given something like an aboutness heuristic, one should expect dualistic interpretations of consciousness to be a kind of intuitive default. And what is more, given something like the aboutness heuristic, one should expect consciousness to be exceedingly difficult to understand in causal–which is to say, naturalistic–terms. Using the aboutness heuristic to cognize the brain environmentally, in the third-person, isn’t problematic simply because isolating causal relations in functionally independent systems is its stock and trade. Neglecting all the enabling machinery between the cognizing brain and the brain cognized facilitates cognizing the latter because that machinery is irrelevant to its function. Blindness to its own enabling machinery literally facilitates seeing the enabling machinery of other brains. Using the aboutness heuristic to cognize the brain in the first-person, therefore, is bound to generate intuitions of profound difference, as well as drive an apparently radical cognitive wedge between the first-person and third-person. What is obvious in the latter, becomes obscure in the former, and vice versa.
The route from the aboutness heuristic, the implicit device we are compelled to use given the structural inaccessibility of neurofunctional information, to the philosophically explicit R-paradigm described above should be obvious, at least in outline. Using the aboutness heuristic to cognize the brain in the first-person–or metacognitive applications–will tend to make an ‘environment’ of conscious experience, transform it into a repertoire of discrete elements. Since these elements seem to automatically vanish like paint or pixels in the apparent process of presenting something else, and since the enabling machinery is nowhere to be found, the activity of the aboutness heuristic is mistaken for a property belonging to each element. They are dubbed ‘representations,’ discrete ‘vehicles’ that take the something-else-presented as their ‘content’ or ‘meaning.’
Since the informatic neglect of causality is also constitutive of this new, secondary aboutness relation between thing representing and thing represented, it must be conceived in granular, normative terms–which is to say, in terms belonging to still another heuristic adapted to the structural neglect of causal information. And this, of course, kicks the door open onto another domain of philosophical perplexity (and another longwinded bloghard).
But as should be clear, if we take the mechanistic paradigm of the life sciences as our cognitive baseline, which representational theories of mind purport do, then it should be quite clear that there are no such things as representations (not even in the environmental sense of paintings and television screens). What we call ‘representations,’ what seems to be so obvious to basic intuition, is actually an artifact of that intuition, a ‘rule of thumb’ so profound that it seems to structure conscious experience itself, but really only provides an efficient shortcut for cognizing gross features of our environments absent any constitutive neurofunctional information.
We have no representations, not of dogs or foxes or anything else. Rather, we have nets bound into sensimotor loops that endlessly trawl our environments for patterns of information, sometime catching dogs, sometimes missing. Homomorphisms abound, yes. But speaking of homomorphic cogs within a mechanism is a far cry from speaking of representational mechanisms. The former, for one, is genuinely scientific!–at least to the extent it doesn’t require positing occult properties.
And perhaps this should come as no surprise. Science has been, if nothing else, the death-march of human conceit.
But I’m sure anyone with Hawkish sympathies is scowling, wondering exactly where I took a hard turn off the edge of the map map. What could be more obvious than our intentional relation to the world? Not much–I agree. But then not so long ago one could say the same about the motionlessness of the Earth or the solidity of objects. As I mentioned, I have come nowhere near discharging the explanatory and argumentative burdens as likely perceived by proponents of representational theories of mind. But despite this, the following two questions, I think, are straightforward enough, obvious enough, to reflect some of that burden back onto the representationalist, and perhaps test some Hawkish backs:
1) What information does the R-paradigm neglect?
2) How does this impact it’s scope of applicability?
The difficulty these questions pose for representationalism, I would argue, is the difficulty a sustained consideration of informatic neglect and its myriad roles pose for consciousness research and cognitive science as a whole.
Scott, I’ve copied my last response from your Out-Danning Dennett thread here. It seems appropriate:
Scott: “I don’t think there’s such a thing as ‘representations’ that can do mechanistic explanatory work or ‘egocentric perspectives’ that require positive explanations.”
I assume you believe that there is a real physical world of which you have a conscious experience. Am I wrong? I assume that you believe that our experience of this real world is indirect rather than direct (i.e., you are not a naive realist). Then isn’t it proper to think of your experience of the world as a personal *representation* of the real world around you rather than the real thing? If not, why not?
If there are such personal representations, the evidence is overwhelming that they exist as dynamic patterns of neuronal activity in the brain and, as such, these representations constitute the essential source of our internal egocentric/perspectival stimulation that enables us observe and learn about the world we live in. So, in this heuristic, representations really do mechanistic explanatory work. For an example of the kind of work they do, see *The Cognitive Brain*, Ch. 12, “Self-Directed Learning In a Complex Environment”, here:
http://www.people.umass.edu/trehub/thecognitivebrain/chapter12.pdf
Scott:
“1) What information does the R-paradigm neglect?”
“2) How does this impact it’s scope of applicability?”
1. The R-paradigm neglects all information about the workings of the brain that realizes our representations as well as a vast amount of potential information about the world that it represents.
2. Its scope of applicability is limited to situations where the paradigm enables us to understand and predict relevant events.
And what ‘situations’ might those be?
I suppose this reflects why Nonmen can’t see paintings, you devious…
Ignoring the interesting circumstance of language within the confines of heuristic BB, I think there’s little hope in actually naming a specific neglect. Very few scientists have had the luxury of diagnosing their own neurological deficiencies and there’s been plenty of quality argument here at TPB suggesting that BB has little natural instinct as to when or where to question its own sufficiency.
Until neuroscience begins archiving the various data from imaging and defining categorization, say, neuroanomalous vs. neurocommon and their distinctions of structures and categorical sensory thresholds or those thresholds between GB and BB, for instance, there’ll be little traction in terms of understanding lack.
Hopefully, humanity tends to those questions before committing to progress. Elsewise, we’ll be scratching our heads, wondering how we didn’t see that wall…
But then you won’t be the only commentator at the ballpark.
I was wonder whether anyone would pick up on the Nonmen! You know, I sometimes have this wierd feeling that I’m that kid in Sixth Sense, wandering around, seeing all these instances of neglect as clear (if not moreso) as any other theoretical posit, knowing that it’s inevitable that people think me crazy. But that’s what makes finding the right questions so damned important. Questions make ignorance visible, and I think these two here do a pretty good job calling attention to the dimensions of the neglect involved in aboutness, and the wishful thinking required to think it has nothing to do with our problems understanding consciousness. But we shall see…
Scott, as you look at your computer screen at the moment it appears to be a particular size. Now double your distance from the screen. The image of the screen on your retinas is now half the size as it was before, yet you experience your computer as being the same size it was before — it didn’t seem to shrink in size. This is an example of the size-constancy of our brain’s visual representation of the world. It is explained by the neuronal structure and dynamics of the retinoid system. Imagine how difficult a problem we would have if we had to learn to recognize each object separately for each size of its retinal projection. Size constancy of visual representations is just one example of many where the heuristic notion of brain representation is applicable. The most important of all is the brain representation of our egocentric spatial surround.
But you do see how this fits perfectly with what I’m saying? The most intuitive way to understand object continuity given stimulus variation is representationally – I’m not arguing that. I’m just saying something you already acknowledge: that your intuition is heuristic. Representations provide a simple, intuitive way to understand your experience of continuity in conditions of stimulus variation. But, unfortunately, they do so by eliding the very neurofunctional information under putative investigation. There is nothing possessing the property ‘true of’ in your head, and even if there were, there would be no work for it to do. Rather there are homomorphic elements bound up in neural machinery bound up in natural environments. Just consider how granular, how simplistic and elegant, your description of the experience of size constancy is, and how “the neuronal structure and dynamics of the retinoid system” is nowhere apparent within it. This is all I keep saying, Arnold. You don’t need ‘representational engines’ to explain representational intuitions – you just need engines. This is Spinoza’s Sin: attributing the form of the conditioned to the condition. Even setting aside all the endless problems nagging representational theories of mind, Occam’s razor is on my side, isn’t it?
But back to my original question: Which situations?
Just when I thought I was getting it you say, “This is Spinoza’s Sin: attributing the form of the conditioned to the condition.” If the conditions that give rise to an object don’t determine the object’s form then what does?
The problem lies in thinking the form of the condition must RESEMBLE the form of the conditioned. Like thinking that a miniature tree lies huddled inside every nut, or that DNA is shaped like people.
Okay thanks. I get it now.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Do computers store ‘representations’?
My guess is Scott would say ‘no’, and Arnold would say ‘yes’.
Am I right?
No, to confirm your guess! This is another angle where BBT throws intuition under the bus to provide a parsimonious explanation away. The parallel between the program/implementation dichotomy and the mind/body problem is no coincidence. The effective relation in computer programming is implementation to implementation, with our semantic self-understanding understood as an artifact of the informatic constraints placed on deliberative cognition whenever it ‘reflects’ on this relation. Our cognitive systems literally access a truncated fraction which they cannot recognize as a truncated fraction, and so confuse for the whole. Once again, we confuse our heuristic activity for a property belonging to brains on the one side and to computers on the other.
Thanks for keeping things clear. I am particularly pleased about this because I think it is one of the best explanations of the current state of affairs in philosophy and science that I have come across.
Some highlights that stood out for me:
“The question is really quite simple: How do we make intentionality consistent with causality?”
A beautifully concise way of putting it.
“you could argue that representational theories of mind are a kind of ‘forced move,’ a theoretical step we had to take in our attempts to understand consciousness. But you can also see why it’s something a mature scientific account of consciousness and cognition requires we must see our way past.”
Yes! Please people let’s move on!
“If anything, one should expect that such a heuristic system would cognize the brain in non-neurofunctional terms, which is to say, as something quite apart from the brain. In other words, given something like an aboutness heuristic, one should expect dualistic interpretations of consciousness to be a kind of intuitive default”
I think you have nailed it here. No wonder dualism is so pervasive.
“the activity of the aboutness heuristic is mistaken for a property belonging to each element.”
This explains so much!
I’m glad you think so, Terry, because it’s the synopsis that I feel the least confident about!
I was replying to the Spinoza post so I don’t know if those comments were seen. One of them was actually eaten as spam, I think.
In that comment I was “accusing” your theory of dualism, in a way that overturns the model. Through the BBT we could be able to describe well the way consciousness actually works, but what happens in the greater brain is and will continue to be obscure. Or better: the maximum possible goal is to know consciousness, while the rest remains obscure. Or more obscure than how it appears now.
So this recreates a dualism because our consciousness becomes known territory totally depended on a large, dark shape that can’t be described. Like “magic”, or ghosts, or supernatural entities, or a computer simulation:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2216189/Do-live-Matrix-researchers-say-way-prove-do.html
So I was saying the BBT’s result is about simply broadening the uncertainty.
But there’s also another thread, and it is about the relationship between consciousness and physics. I believe that consciousness can’t be explained independently. Consciousness is too connected with the construction of reality to let one explanation work in isolation. And so the “big” needs to be put at peace with the “small”.
This IS an issue because on the nature of free will and meaning there’s THAT side of the debate that’s making claims. I linked this in that post, but I really hope people look at it, because it shows the way the problem can be seen from that different angle. Which I believe is actually dominant right now in science:
I don’t see where the dualism arises in BBT, outside of questions of access and availability, or what allows me to recognize that you are coming from a different angle. Otherwise, it collapses the gross granularity of real and ideal, subjective and objective, and on and on, replacing them with degrees of information and effectiveness. You have to be more explicit.
The Carroll talk was definitely interesting. But, this is isn’t the first time physicists have declared ‘case closed.’ And the warmed over pragmatism he argued for at the end is not one I think even a sizeable minority of physicists would endorse. His talk is actually deceptive in that he makes the move from uncontroversial scientific claim-making to very controversial philosophical claim-making without noting the transition, and implying that it all simply followed obviously. All you have to do is ask, “What is a story?” to see that his trousers had dropped to his ankles. He can’t answer that question. Nor can he tell you what ‘value’ is. And yet he opines as if it were plain as day that these things are what we take them to be, that the ‘Man as meaning-maker myth’ were actually scientific gospel. He even goes so far to suggest that it doesn’t even matter what they are from a life sciences perspective. All we need do is ‘decide to believe in them’! This is as bad as the hackneyed, warmed over stuff you get in Hollywood blockbusters. Like Prometheus: “I choose to believe.”
What does ‘choose mean’? How do we know whether we’ve chosen wrong? If only our interests matter, how do we negotiate incompatible interests? If only interests matter, why bother with ‘moral progress’? And so on, and so on.
All you have to do is look at the way he frames his examples. If he was really interested in discussing the complexity our intentional straits (as opposed to simply papering over them) then he wouldn’t have spiked the punch on gay marriage by framing the debate in terms of a simplistic binary choice between the adopting the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ or assenting to the liberal consensus position. Way too easy. And completely dismissive of arguments against gay marriage that don’t commit the fallacy or rely on arguments from authority… (although his view actually makes the problem with the latter less problematic, insofar as all arguments become arguments from authority on his account).
“He even goes so far to suggest that it doesn’t even matter what they are from a life sciences perspective. All we need do is ‘decide to believe in them’! This is as bad as the hackneyed, warmed over stuff you get in Hollywood blockbusters. Like Prometheus: “I choose to believe.””
I think there is a difference between ‘choosing to believe’ because you want something to be true and choosing a belief based on an ongoing dialectic of conjecture and criticism. The former is a final decision about what is ‘right’ (or what should be ‘right’) while the later is an ongoing process of moral evolution continually adapting to new information. This type of continuous social moral choice making necessarily involves what matters to people in an evolving society. I think this is what Carroll when he refers to deciding to believe.
I understand what you’re saying, and I reckon that everyone who chooses to believe X would argue that they do so on the basis of some “ongoing dialectic of conjecture and criticism.” So I’m not sure you can make your distinction stick. And this is the underlying point, the way the problem of the criterion (what makes a choice (pretending there is such a thing) a ‘good’ choice) plays itself out as power in pragmatic attempts to circumvent the problem. What makes a good choice good is what everyone else decides is in their interest. All Carroll is doing is trying to make the dilemma dissappear by complicating it.
“What makes a good choice good is what everyone else decides is in their interest.”
Remove the “else” (because you participate too) and I think this has always been they way it works. How else would morality arise? People collectively decided what kinds of behavior are needed in order for their groups to thrive. This is true of tribes and it is true of nations. Religions lends people-chosen moral principles a seemingly absolute authority but in reality they are social agreements.
Yeah, the whole “physicists writing about things they don’t know jack shit about” is getting tiring. You give a person a degree in rocket science and suddenly they think because they know how to properly carry out a Lorentz transformation that they know metaphysical truth. The one that irks me the most is a recent book by Lawrence M. Klauss claiming to “explain” why there is something instead of nothing.
The new priesthood wears lab coats, but its all the same old shit dangling underneath.
I was pointing out that Carroll video because I recognized in it the same philosophy that I saw in the video with Stephen Hawking I linked some time ago. In that video too the human beings were celebrated as an unique phenomenon in the vastness of cosmos, and it was said that we possess meaning and so are free to do with it what we want (the matter of responsibility).
I don’t know if this “warmed over” perspective is one that they tell the general public as a matter of simplification, or if they really BELIEVE in that idea.
But again it was the same idea expressed by some revered neuroscientist: the idea of emergence as something following its own rules and so valid to be analyzed on its own level. Which is what Carroll is saying:
The story is emergent. It exists only on that level, and it can be wholly explained in reductionist terms. BUT the same as you can describe the temperature in a system without dealing with the single atoms, and STILL observe something valid and true, SO you can look at a “story”, know it is made of little bits, but still make sense of it as a whole, in a way that is valid and true.
He’s saying that in this description of stratified reality, the tier we occupy, whether it is meaning or physical world, has been “explained”. And he’s saying that the unexplained that we have “above” and “below” still doesn’t affect our own layer, because when it does then it BEHAVES following rules we know, and when it sinks down or up, it follows unknown rules but that don’t directly affect us.
About the dualism:
if it’s true as you say there there’s an abyss between what we see and actual truth of the workings of our brain, THEN it’s a dualism: what you can hope to know, and what will defy your semantic inclusion.
So at its extreme, the BBT defines a model when you can aspire to describe consciousness, recognizing its fallacies, but understanding how things work outside it seem unlikely. So it seems to me that the BBT closes itself, creating that dualism. The dualism doesn’t exist, because what we got here is the product of what’s produced over there, but as far as we are concerned, we are isolated on this side, so the dualism is realized.
My experience is that when you press these ‘separate but equal’ guys with questions like, ‘So my feeling of making choices without any causal constraint is true?’ they start piling up the provisos in a hurry. But this is just bad faith on their part, a gap between their epistemic rhetoric and their actual epistemic commitments. The real problems arise when you begin pressing them on the details of their ‘separate but equal’ semantic sphere.
Carroll himself asserts that semantic autonomy is a hoax: you are not free to ‘believe whatever you want’ on his model. So long as play by the rules as we physicists define them, then you are free to do X and Y. What about biologists? Can we violate their rules? And neuroscientists? What about them? And cognitive psychologists? What do I believe when they tell me my feeling of willing is a cognitive illusion? What happens to your ‘decisions’ then?
The whole frame he presents is a caricature – wishful thinking. It’s all knotted together into big wheezing mess.
I still don’t get what you mean by ‘dualism.’ You seem to using in its pejorative sense, the way philosophers are prone to divide everything up according to master categories – real/ideal, true/false, objective/subjective – categories that BBT transforms into sliding scales. But if you just mean that BBT is dualistic because it divides information according to what we can and cannot access, then I’m not sure what the problem is. But if you mean that BBT lapses into a form of subjectivism because of this division, that there’s a noumenal realm of ‘information itself’ that we can’t access, then you’re misunderstanding the position, simply interpreting it within the intuitive, heuristic framework of the very positions it replaces. You’re begging the question.
I found that link with the stuff about the emergence of meaning in consciousness (or more or less the same theme, see how they talk about responsibility). It’s from Gazzaniga:
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-11-28/michael-gazzaniga-whos-charge-free-will-and-science-brain/transcript
There’s nothing wrong with the dualism I was talking about, or it’s not bad for the theory itself. I’m only wrapping it up in simple terms and figure out the consequences.
So I was simply saying that sealing the model from this side (meaning you can’t know what’s beyond) has the consequence that anything could be plugged in on the other side. It’s just one big doubt replaceable with all sort of magic, metaphysics or whatever.
It depends if you believe a model will grant more control and progressively empty out what we think about ourselves (so making progress), or if you believe that the model really just seals the door: meaning that the model defines an area that is “knowable” (the area of consciousness), and another area that is “unknowable” (the area non-semantic). That is: no matter what scientific progress we achieve.
The form of subjectivism could be the practical consequence of the latter scenario.
About the rest, for me the deal is about whether or not this model of “floaty” reality is plausible or not. It’s as if we occupy a layer of physical reality that we completely understand, cushioned above and below by larger layers of “unknown”. A kind of suspended state. This model he makes is again very similar to the bubble of reality evoked in other contexts. Can we trust a model of reality where only a bubble is defined and the rest of the ocean where the bubble drifts remains unknown?
Carroll says we can. Because we understand everything that comes in a certain range within our physical reality. This creates another analogy, because this “lit space” of known physics is again similar to the “lit space” of consciousness. IF we can known physical reality accordingly to the chunk of physics we understand, THEN, maybe, we can hypothesize we understand ourselves in the measure we understand that bubble of experience that is consciousness.
So, if INSTEAD you say that, nope, consciousness is an hoax. We are deceived. Why? Because what appears in consciousness is MADE by the unknown that surrounds it. And so nothing in consciousness can be properly described as long you don’t hold the model of what’s beyond that BUILDS it.
SO, wouldn’t this apply to physics in general, and so debunking entirely what Carroll is saying even as an hypothetical scenario? Because, following the same patterns, it is obvious that what happens in the physics on OUR LEVEL is MADE directly by the physics above and below that are completely unknown to us.
Which leads back to the dualism above: in what measure what we can discover about consciousness lets us understand what’s beyond? Can we study the conditioned to properly discern the condition?
Can we study the conditioned to properly discern the condition?
No, we can’t.
The Consciousness Bubble
This bubble is fixed and impenetrable. It is true that within the Consciousness Bubble we can never know the source of what we are aware of. Introspection cannot penetrate the bubble and gain access to the source. But we are not limited to introspection.
The Physics Bubble
This bubble is elastic and permiable. It has been expanding to include more and more of the exterior. In the last 50 years this expansion has increased exponentially.
Neither bubble is an insurmountable boundary.
I agree entirely, so long as you append ‘over time.’ They constitute formidable obstacles at any given moment, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Speaking of physics, people are going to extraordinary lengths to defend the notion of free will.
“The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data.”
Is this even true? It seems completely absurd.
As a historical idea, probably.
If you look at that quote clinically, it simply says the new principles contradict the older idea. If the new principle was that dogs have eight legs, it would contradict the older idea. Which is quite a true thing to say.
If as you read it you lend it some sort of claim beyond that – well, that’s probably what the writers of such sentences bank on occuring. Unclaimed explainers.
That’s hardly a clinical analysis. You could just as easily appliy the eight legged dog analogy towards any new idea challenging an old one, without examining the details of either. Argue against the paper’s merits all you want, but I’d prefer you do it without resorting to such rhetorical parlor tricks.
Check out that Flickers of Freedom link on my blogroll Frank. Lots and lots of ingeniuty is being thrown at the problem – and yet nothing ever seems to click.
Frank, even if there was no intention to do what I described, my reply to Abalieno remains the same. That quote, in itself, simply says one idea contradicts another – and that is all.
You could just as easily appliy the eight legged dog analogy towards any new idea challenging an old one.
Atleast in that quote, there is no challenge (barring a kind of ‘I’m gunna take you down’ use of the word ‘challenge’). I’m just working with what Abalieno quoted.
@Callan
Cutting edge analysis, isn’t it? Of course the writers’ explanations are going to to be “unclaimed” if you read nothing more than a sentence in isolation.
@Scott
Regarding not making the free will arguments stick, I’m going to borrow an extensive quote from one of my favorite books:
Awesome quote, Frank! This is one way of characterizing the schizoid tendencies in modern culture for instance, the fact that we live in a society that simultaneously accommodate and confirm Eckhart Tolle and Thomas Metzinger. The only problem I have with this little theory of narrative and agency and their compensatory roles is the way it seems to anthropomorphize the problem, which is to say, approach it with narrative and intentional assumptions! In fact the underlying explanation is almost certainly going to blind and senseless, the confluence of numerous factors. The BBT account turns on this, and looks at the rise of purpose, narrative, etc., as the result of selective pressure for ‘delayed gratification’ perhaps in part, but also as the artifact of mere information availability, what mutation provide what wiretap when against a background of very constrictive background constraints.
abort tags! abort!
Btw, are “homomorphic elements” kinds of patterns in the brain that we identify with and then inherit as a sense of consciousness, and then even use to shape the way we see things outside?
Something like: the human is what takes the shape of the container? (though, our bottle is invisible)
They’re just the ways the brain recapitulates structural fragments of its environments in the course of interacting with them.
I was mistaking homo-morphic as if human-morphic.
But I think that’s the point. Your BBT describes the way consciousness is and appears, because its “shape and feel” are determined by the structure itself. The condition gives shape to the conditioned. And there’s nothing fancy in the passage because the whole deal (of the BBT) is about recognizing the shapER. What gives that kind of form and aspect and feel.
So from this point of view what’s homomorphic is also human-morphic. Because “human” is simply the peculiar shape consciousness takes when it is bottled up in the subjective experience.
Here’s the Stephen Hawking’s video that connects some other parts:
@25:00 there’s the part of the fish in the fishbowl (it also deals with “representations” afterwards) and the resulted distortion in the perception of reality. The thesis is that even if reality is distorted, the physics would be the same. Yet this section is concluded with the following statement:
“Reality itself is in the mind of the beholder.”
After that it considers the possibility of an artificial reality. The conclusion is: “It doesn’t matter”.
The conclusion to the whole thing:
“Meaning itself is simply another piece of the model of reality that we each build inside our own brain.” A bubble of reality in the conscious mind.
And then the sloppy conclusion that leads back to what Carroll was saying:
“The meaning of life is what you choose it to be.”
You need to check out the “Thinker as Tinker” post, Abe. It’ll shed some light on this oscillating ‘in-the-universe-in-the-head’ structure, and how to think around it.
This time I went through it (almost) without any stumbling. One needs to be hooked into certain ideas in order to properly follow. No wonder that occasional readers could find this blog completely unreadable
Anyway, it was really quite impressive and smooth. But by the end of it I was left with the idea that the whole thing doesn’t seem against the concept of “consciousness as CEO”. At least in a general, non literal form.
The way you put things, evolution has directed the heuristics to maximize their efficiency. So it’s a strategic development. This means that an idea such as “love” is extremely powerful in its applicability, since it brings an human being to cultivate relationships, build a family, procreate and so on. So from this point of view the abstraction of the stuff selected to enter consciousness was made in order to be “applicable”. Strategically important (and not random or superfluous).
So consciousness as CEO, as the domain where pragmatic information is dealt with.
What’s misperceived is maybe who’s actually responsible, but this model seems to suggest that these heuristics are extremely important and carefully selected, and that the greater brain instead deals with other minutiae that are less strategically important and crucial.
Do you agree with this or there’s another step missing?
I forget to mention that now I’ll go through this:
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html
And keeping what I just read in mind, see if they can be congruous with each other. Hofstadter’s idea of “Analogy as the Core of Cognition” sounds fairly compatible, as a mean to define these representation machines, working by ways of analogy.
Now that I read that one too it seems to be they fit enough.
Hofstadter is concerned about his “Cognition as analogy” may resemble too much to a Cartesian theater and so to the idea of the homunculus that has the negative consequence of infinite regress, and so unable to really explain anything.
I was considering that Bakker’s theory, resembling to Hofstadter’s one, runs into similar issues. But as Hofstadter explains how it doesn’t actually run into a problem of infinite regress, so does Bakker. They don’t dodge the issue of perception, and so it’s not simply about putting the action within another unexplained homunculus.
So my only doubts remain about how Bakker’s theory fits with the “consciousness as CEO” as explained above.
I’m afraid I let this languish too long to pick on the thread of your thought, Abe. Would you mind rephrasing your argument/question?
Scott: I rearranged your sentences:
“The question is really quite simple:
How do we make intentionality consistent with causality?
How do we make the intentional logic of the subject fit with the causal logic of the object?
Some kind of pervasive and elusive incompatibility haunts the relation between our INTUITIVE SELF UNDERSTANDING, what Wilfred Sellars famously referred to as the ‘Manifest Image,’ and our ever deepening natural self-understanding, the ‘SCIENTIFIC IMAGE’ ”
By a scientific image we mean, neural maps, semantic descriptions, aka objective data and descriptions. As we discussed, the human mind is very well adapted to observing the external world, but I think we’ve convinced ourselves we cannot understand our inward selves. I agree more with Nagel that it takes an objective view to understand consciousness and therein lies the rub, because we have not found the bridging principle (Chalmers) or Factor X for neural function so we search endlessly instead reading the maps and descriptions. The theories of consciousness are broken glass all over the floor (Bakker).
Our intentionality and intuition originate in the same part of our body. The shortest english sentence is also the skinniest letter.
All objective data, symbols, linguisitics, meanings etc. are complex sentences aka HOT’s; which are based in intuition, and without the Factor X we lose (or never had) our intuitive bridge.
Once we have the intuiitve bridge, figuring out how all of the parts play together from the spinal cord to the frontal lobes is straightforward. Even the layering in the neocortex is straightforward. (Read my previous posts).
Can it be that simple?….I say definitely YES.
Yeah, but the question ‘what is story’ surely complicates this – like old style buildings with their beautiful achitecture, what’s involved with this investigation that preserves heritage rather than demolishing it all down to spinal chord and frontal lobes? Then perhaps building efficient concrete battery farms on the rubble? Or like various colourful species of animals, what stops this process from enacting simple slash and burn of the various semantic ecosystems? After all, what use is a RL panda to us? So why not disregard it as you slash and burn that forest? Equally, why not just see through all the symanto fauna and disregard it in ones actions, indifferent to whether it’s crushed or made extinct?
Sorry to go from old buildings to endangered species there. Similar principle though.
Scott, I use the word “representation” to mean something that *represents* something else in accordance with this dictionary definition:
def. represent : to take the place of in some respect
If you are using the word “representation” in a different sense, then we are probably arguing at cross purposes.
In response to Jorge, I would say yes, computers do store representations. What is stored in a digital code, for example, can serve to take the place of your favorite photograph for the purpose of creating a visible image of the photograph on your computer screen.
Getting back to the cognitive brain, most of our cognitive representations are either pre-conscious or non-conscious. It is only after a preconscious representation is projected into retinoid space that it becomes part of our conscious experience — an integral part of our phenomenal world. For an account of the neuronal mechanisms that create our cognitive representations see *The Cognitive Brain*, Ch. 3, “Learning, Imagery, Tokens, and Types: The Synaptic Matrix”, here:
http://people.umass.edu/trehub/thecognitivebrain/chapter3.pdf
and Ch. 4, “Modeling the World, Locating the Self,and Selective Attention: The Retinoid System”, here:
http://people.umass.edu/trehub/thecognitivebrain/chapter4.pdf
If that’s the explicit definition you’re working with, then the question is one of your implicit commitments. Do you, for instance, think that representations are, in and of themselves, true or false of the world? Most everyone who uses the term ‘representation’ thinks of them as objects possessing semantic properties.
How you know, Arnold, if computers store ‘representations’ of the world so much as mechanisms (containing homomorphisms) that when combined with the activity of human cognition, generate what we experience as little pieces of the world?
I was going to say that it’s fairly obvious that a “representation” stored on a computer exists as such only in the presence of an observer that interprets it.
Otherwise it’s undifferentiated information.
Might it not clear up some confusion if we said that computers and brains take in, store, and process information? According to the ‘program’ this information may be processed to produce representations (on a monitor or in conscious awareness).
Hi Scott — I’m inclined to agree that talk about the mind manipulating representations with such-and-such content is always or almost always a simplified model of what is going on. We will probably never get the clean, causal account of content that Fodor wants; things are just too haywire. What do you think about its value as a fiction or a simplification, acknowledged as such? On Nancy Cartwright’s view of science, all scientific models are fictions or simplifications, so then the question would become whether it’s a useful or a misleading one. Compare “quarks” and “strings”, maybe?
I’m not familiar with Cartwright, but I think Dennett, for instance, when he argues his mild realism is too optimistic that the patterns are ‘real.’ He speaks of astronomical compression, but not of depletion or outright distortion. So consider how it seems clear the ‘feeling of willing’ is illusory. Now if all intentional phenomena/intuitions share the same basic pattern of causal neglect, to what degree should we expect them to be likewise ‘illusory’? That’s not a question that can be answered in advance, but it’s clearly an important one to ask. The thing is, once you realize the fractured, fragmentary, and environmental nature of whatever this… is, and the profound nature of our first-person blindness to it, all bets are off. Quarks had to be groped toward. This is what we got out of the gate. I think there’s a good chance that science will do what it generally does: force us to abandon or utterly rethink our traditional assumptions.
Scott: “Do you [Arnold], for instance, think that representations are, in and of themselves, true or false of the world?
No, I don’t think representations are true or false of the world. I think brain representations are a useful biological adaptation that, on balance, enable us to cope with aspects of the world that we cannot change and, where possible, reconstruct the world to better meet our needs and desires. This latter effort sometimes has unforeseen consequences. The neuronal machinery that gives us our phenomenal representations, while optimized for some essential tasks, often distorts our conscious experience of other aspects the world, The moon illusion in which the horizon moon is seen as much larger than the zenith moon is a good example of such an error in representation,
Scott: “Most everyone who uses the term ‘representation’ thinks of them as objects possessing semantic properties.”
I’m not sure what you mean by “semantic properties”. In my view, brain representations of features of the world provide the grounding/meaning of public languages. See *The Cognitive Brain* (TCB), Ch. 6, “Building a Semantic Network”, Fig. 6.5 , here:
http://people.umass.edu/trehub/thecognitivebrain/chapter6.pdf
Is this what you mean re semantic properties? You might also take a look at TCB, “The Pragmatics of Cognition”, pp.300-301, here:
http://people.umass.edu/trehub/thecognitivebrain/chapter16.pdf
Arnold, you have been using the word “representation” differently than Scott. Scott’s entire post was about a particular concept in Continental philosophy of mind which is generally used when trying to explain intentionality.
Start here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-representation/
Jorge, I’m not a philosopher and I thank you for your link to *representation* in plato.stanford.
From the Stanford link: “I will use it [representational theory] here to refer to any theory that postulates the existence of semantically evaluable mental objects, including philosophy’s stock in trade mentalia — thoughts, concepts, percepts, ideas, impressions, notions, rules, schemas, images, phantasms, etc”
According to the above qualifier, I’m really not sure how my use of the word “representation” is different from Scott’s because the *contents* of the brain representations that I propose *are* semantically evaluable within the putative semantic mechanisms of my theoretical model of the cognitive brain. We will know more about this when Scott responds to my last reply to him (Oct. 23).
Your use omits intentional concepts. If you think a computer stores intentional concepts, you should write a book and revolutionize computer science and philosophy simultaneously.
Jorge, If an *intentional concept* is a proposition about something in the world, then I do not think that computers store intentional concepts. If I correctly understand what is meant by an intentional concept, only conscious entities could have intentional concepts because only conscious entities have an egocentric representation of the world in which they exist. As I say on p. 302 of *The Cognitive Brain*, I don’t address the question of “intentionality” directly because I have no clear sense of the norms of engagement on the issue.
I’m really not sure how my use of the word “representation” is different from Scott’s because the *contents* of the brain representations that I propose *are* semantically evaluable within the putative semantic mechanisms of my theoretical model of the cognitive brain.
Probably if it just read…
I’m really not sure how my use of the word “representation” is different from Scott’s because the *contents* of the brain representations that I propose *are* mechanically evaluable within the putative mechanisms of my theoretical model of the cognitive brain.
…it’d cross the difference neatly.
The R-paradigm is quite literally a heuristic that neglects the very information required to cognize consciousness. How could it not misfire when faced with this problem? How could it come remotely close to accurately characterizing itself?
Seems a bit of an atom splitter? It seems to involve grasping an accurate characterisation that you can’t grasp an accurate characterisation?
Okay, maybe it’s a bit picky – it’s not asking for the whole thing to be accurately characterised (in how it does not accurately characterise), granted. But surely this loops on itself to some degree?