Aphorism of the Day: Here, it turns out, is so bloody small that even experience finds itself evicted and housed over there.
.
From Philosophy TV:
Richard Brown: And you know there is a–I don’t want to say growing movement–but there is a disturbing undercurrent [laughs] of philosophers who are out and saying that they are in fact zombies. So I don’t know if you are aware of this or not but…
Keith Frankish: I’m… [laughs] Not phenomenally.
Richard Brown: Okay… [laughs]
Keith Frankish: [laughs] Yes, I might align myself with this ‘disturbing undercurrent.’
.
I think philosophy of mind–as an institution–is caught in a great dilemma: either they accept the parochial, heuristic nature of intentional cognition, or they condemn themselves to never understanding human consciousness. This was the basis of my interpretation of Frank Jackson’s Mary argument as a ‘heuristic scope of application detector,’ a way to make the limits of human environmental cognition known. Why does it seem possible for Mary to know everything about red without every having experienced red? Why does the additional information provided by experiencing red not obviously count as ‘knowledge’? In other words, why the conflict of intuitions?
The problem, in a nutshell, has to do with informatic neglect (see my previous post for more detail). Heuristic cognition leverages computational efficiencies by ignoring information. Intentional cognition, in particular, systematically neglects all the neurofunctional information pertaining to our environmental tracking. In a sense, this is all that ‘transparency’ is: blindness to the mechanisms responsible for environmental cognition. Given the functional independence of our environments, neglecting this information pays real computational dividends. Given reliable tracking systems, information regarding those systems is not necessary to cognize systems tracked, but only so long as those systems tracked are not ‘functionally entangled’ with the systems tracking. You can puzzle through a small engine repair because the systems doing the tracking in no way interfere with the system tracked. What you might call the medial causal relations that enable you to repair small engines in no way impinge on the lateral causal relations that make engines breakdown or run.
This is why intentional cognition is almost environmentally universal, simply because the environmental systems tracked are almost universally functionally independent of our cognition. I say ‘almost,’ of course, because on the microscopic level this functional independence breaks down as the lateral systems tracked become sensitive to ‘interference’ from medial systems tracking: if photons leave small engines untouched, they have dramatic effects on subatomic particles. This is also why intentional cognition can only get consciousness wrong. When we attempt to cognize conscious experience, we have an instance of a cognitive system that systematically neglects medial causal relationships attempting to track a functionally entangled system as if it were independent. The lateral and the medial are one and the same in these instances of attempted cognition, which quite simply means that neither can be cognized or ‘intuited.’
And this, on the Blind Brain Theory (BBT), is the primary hook from which the ‘mind/body’ problem hangs. What we ‘cognize’ when we draw conscious experience into deliberative cognition is quite literally analogous to Anton’s Syndrome: we think we see everything there is to be seen, and yet we really don’t see anything at all. Consciousness, as it appears to us, is a kind of ‘forced perspective’ illusion. Given that we are brainbound, or functionally entangled, and given the environmental orientation of our cognitive systems, we have no way to ‘intuit’ consciousness absent gross distortions. As such, consciousness as it appears is literally inexplicable, period, let alone in natural terms. It can only be explained away, leaving a remainder, consciousness as it is, as the only thing science need concern itself with.
In this post, I want to consider a recent ‘radical position’ in the philosophy of mind, that belonging to Keith Frankish, and show 1) the facility with which his argument can be recapitulated, even explained, in BBT terms; and 2) how it is nowhere near radical enough.
In his “Quining Diet Qualia,” Frankish notes that defences of what he terms ‘classic qualia,’ understood as “introspectable qualitative properties of experience that are intrinsic, ineffable, and subjective” (1-2) have largely vanished from the literature, primarily because ‘intrinsic properties’ resist explanation in either functional or representational terms. Instead, theorists have opted for a ‘watered-down conception’ of qualia in terms of “phenomenal character, subjective feel, raw feel, or ‘what-is-it-likeness’” (2), what Frankish calls ‘diet qualia.’ The idea behind talking about qualia in these terms makes them palatable to both dualists and physicalists, or ‘theory-neutral,’ as Frankish puts it, since everyone assumes that qualia, in this restricted sense, at least, are real.
But Frankish doubts that qualia make sense in even this minimal sense. To illustrate his suspicion, he introduces the concept of ‘zero qualia,’ which he defines as those “properties of experiences that dispose us to judge that experiences have introspectable qualitative properties that are intrinsic, ineffable, and subjective” (4). His strategy will be to use zero qualia to show that diet qualia don’t differ from classic qualia in any meaningful sense.
Now, one of the things that caught my eye in this paper was the striking resemblance between zero qualia and my phenophage thought experiment from several weeks back:
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. (TPB 21/09/2012)
By defining zero qualia in terms of their cognitive effects, Frankish has essentially generated a phenophagic concept of qualia–which is to say, qualia that aren’t qualitative at all. I-know-I-know, but before you let that squint get the better or you, consider the way this conceptualization recontextualizes the supposedly minimal commitment belonging to diet qualia. By detaching the supposed cognitive effects of phenomenality from phenomenality, zero qualia raise the question of just what this supposedly neutral ‘phenomenal character’ is. As Frankish puts it, “What could a phenomenal character be, if not a classical quale? How could a phenomenal residue remain when intrinsicality, ineffability, and subjectivity have been stripped away?” (4). Zero qualia, in other words, have the effect of showing that diet qualia, despite the label, are packed with classic calories:
The worry can be put another way. There are competing pressures on the concept of diet qualia. On the one hand, it needs to be weak enough to distinguish it from that of classic qualia, so that functional or representational theories of consciousness are not ruled out a priori. On the other hand, it needs to be strong enough to distinguish it from the concept of zero qualia, so that belief in diet qualia counts as realism about phenomenal consciousness. My suggestion is that there is no coherent concept that fits this bill. In short, I understand what classic qualia are, and I understand what zero qualia are, but I don’t understand what diet qualia are; I suspect the concept has no distinctive content. (4-5)
Frankish then continues to show why he thinks various attempts to save the concept are doomed to failure. The dilemma is structured so that either the proponent of diet qualia takes the further step of defining ‘phenomenal character,’ a conceptual banana peel that sends them skidding back into the arms of classic qualia, or they explain why dispositions aren’t what they really meant all along.
Now on the BBT account, qualia need to be rethought within a consciousness and cognition structured and fissured by informatic neglect. The heuristic nature of intentional cognition means that medial neurofunctionality is always neglected. And as I said above, this means deliberative reflection on conscious experience constitutes a clear cut ‘scope violation,’ an instance of using a heuristic to solve a problem it never evolved to tackle. Introspective intentional cognition, on this account, is akin to climbing trees with flippers.
Of course it doesn’t seem this way–quite the opposite in fact–and for reasons that BBT predicts. Like medial neurofunctionality, the limits of intentional cognition are also lost to neglect. Short of learning those limits, the scope of applicability of intentional cognition, universality is bound to be the default assumption. So our intentional cognitive systems make sense of what they can oblivious of their incapacity. The ease with which they conjure worlds out of pixels and paint, for instance, demonstrates their power and automaticity. BBT suggests that something analogous happens when intentional cognition is fed metacognitive information: the information is organized in a manner amenable to intentional, environmental cognition.
As asserted above, the point of the intentional heuristic is to isolate and troubleshoot lateral environmental relations (normative or causal) against a horizon of variable information access. Thus it ‘lateralizes,’ you could say, the first-person, turns it into little environment. The problem is that this ‘phenomenal environment’ literally possesses no horizon of variable access (cognition is functionally entangled, or ‘brainbound,’ with reference to experience) and, thanks to the interference of the medial neurofunctionality neglected, no lateral causal relationships. Like Plato’s cave-dwellers, intentional cognition is quite simply stuck with information it cannot cognize. ‘Phenomenal character’ becomes a round peg in a world of cognitive squares: as it has to be on the BBT account.
By making the move to ‘cognitive dispositions,’ zero qualia bank on our scientific knowledge of the otherwise neglected axis of medial neurofunctionality. The challenge, for the diet qualia advocate, is to explain how phenomenal character anchors this medial neurofunctionality (understood as cognitive dispositions), to explain, in other words, what role ‘phenomenal character’ plays–if any. But of course, thanks to the heuristic short-circuit described above, this is precisely what the diet qualia advocate cannot do. The question then becomes, of course, one of what ‘diet’ amounts to. Either one moves inside the black box and embraces classic qualia or one moves outside it and settles for zero qualia.
But of course, neither of these options are tenable either. Dispositional accounts, though epistemologically circumspect, have a tendency to be empirically inert: the job of science is to explain dispositions, which is to say, use theory to crack open black boxes. Epistemological modesty isn’t always a virtue. And besides, there remains the fact that we actually do have these experiences!
Frankish’s real point, of course, is that philosophy of mind has made no progress whatsoever in the move to diet qualia, that phenomenality remains as impervious as ever to functional or representational explanation and understanding. But he remains as mystified as everyone else about the origins and dynamics of the problem. I would append, ‘only more honestly so,’ were it not for claims like, “I think everyone agrees that zero qualia exist,” in the interview referenced above. I certainly don’t, and for reasons that I think should be quite clear.
For one, consider how his ‘cognitive dispositions’ only run one way, which is to say, from the black box of phenomenality, when the medial neurofunctionality occluded by metacognitive deliberation almost certainly runs back and forth, or in other words, is exceedingly tangled. And this underscores the artificiality of zero qualia, the way they can only do their intuitive work by submitting to what is a thoroughly distorted understanding of conscious experience in the first place. The very notion that phenomenal character can be ‘boxed,’ cleanly parsed from its cognitive consequences, is an obvious artifact of neurofunctional informatic neglect, the way, intentional cognition automatically organizes information for troubleshooting.
On the BBT account, the problem lies in the assumption that intentional cognition is universal when it is clearly heuristic, which is to say, an information neglecting problem-solving device adapted to specific problem-solving contexts. The ‘qualia’ that everyone has been busily arguing about and pondering in consciousness research and the philosophy of mind are simply the artifacts of a clear (once you know what to look for) heuristic scope violation. There are no such things, be they classic, diet, or zero.
Now given that the universality of intentional cognition is the default assumption of nearly every soul reading this, I’m certain that what I’m about to say will sound thoroughly preposterous, but I assure it possesses its own, counterintuitive yet compelling logic (once you grasp the gestalt, that is!). I want to suggest that it makes no more sense to speak of qualia ‘existing’ than it does to speak of individual letters ‘meaning.’ Qualia are subexistential in the same way that phonemes are ‘subsemantic.’
But they must be something! your intuitions cry–and so they must, given that intentional cognition is blind to its heuristic limits, to the very possibility that it might be parochial. It has no other choice but to treat the first-person as a variant of the third, to organize it for the kinds of environmental troubleshooting it is adapted to do. After all, it works everywhere else: Why not here? Well, as we have seen, because qualia are neurofunctionally integral to the effective functioning of intentional cognition, they are a medial phenomenon, and as such are utterly inaccessible to intentional cognition, given the structure of informatic neglect that characterizes it.
But this doesn’t mean we can’t understand them, that McGinn and the Mysterians are correct. McGinn, you could say, glimpsed the way phenomenality might exceed the reach of intentional cognition while still assuming that the latter was humanly universal, that we couldn’t gerrymander ways to see around our intuitions, as we have, for example, with general relativity or quantum mechanics.
Consciousness presents us with precisely the same dilemma: cling to heuristic intuitions that simply do not apply, or forge ahead and make what sense of these things as we can. If the concept ‘existence’ belongs to some heuristic apparatus, then the notion that qualia are subexistential is merely counterintuitive. Otherwise, relieved of the need to force them into a heuristic never designed to accommodate them, we can make very clear sense of them as phenomemes, the combinatorial building blocks of ‘existence,’ the way phonemes are the combinatorial building blocks of ‘meaning.’ They do not ‘exist’ the way apples, say, exist in intentional cognition, simply because they belong to a different format. ‘What is redness?’ makes no sense if we ask it in the same intuitive way we ask, ‘What are apples?’ The key, again, is to avoid tripping over our heuristics. Though redness eludes the gross, categorical granularity of intentional cognition, we can nevertheless talk apples and rednesses together in terms of nonsemantic information–which is just to say, in terms belonging to what the life sciences take us to be: evolved, environmentally-embedded, information processing systems.
Because of course, the flip side of all this confusion regarding qualia is the question of how a mere machine can presume to ‘know truth,’ as opposed to happening to stand in certain informatic relationships with its environments, some effective, others not. When it comes to conundrums involving intentionality, qualia are by no means lonely.
“The ‘qualia’ that everyone has been busily arguing about and pondering in consciousness research and the philosophy of mind are simply the artifacts of a clear (once you know what to look for) heuristic scope violation. There are no such things, be they classic, diet, or zero.”
Okay people, there you have it. Now we can move on. Finally!
What’s the difference between “knowing truth” and the feeling that you get when you think you know truth, and so isn’t this just another subexistential quale? Eventually it looks like all intention is going to get sucked up by the same black hole. By the way, I for one don’t really mind. I’m not as bothered by the implications of BBT as you are. In fact, as I’m interested in creating conscious AI, I welcome the inevitable discovery that we are all, at some basic level, zombies. Conscious experience, no matter what it turns out to be, is pretty damn amazing, so at worst we’re all going to end out being Fabulous Zombies.
“Fabulous Zombies” – Great name for a band!
Cornucopia: I hope I didn’t let this languish too long for you to get back to it. But this comment stuck, and has actually nagged me for the past several days. I’m expecially interested to know what you mean regarding ‘all intention is going to get sucked up by the same black hole”? Would you mind elaborating?
Environmental heuristics :O?!
I wrote a couple hundred words and then something clicked.
Are you suggesting that we diagnose neglect using the environmental heuristics GB evolved in order to experience its environment as a model for the cognitive heuristics BB uses to experience GB?
Lol, dude…
It is kinda screwy, isn’t it? But what other route is there?
It strikes me that this what you’ve always been saying.
Its seems an obvious place to start inquiring, in hindsight, and seems to describe where you’ve begun with The Last Magic Show. I’ve definitely been trying to imagine new neglects analogous to the plethora of heuristic biases the cognitive sciences have already uncovered…
I actually think this might be a way to make philosophy, understood as human thought trapped within various ‘neglect dilemmas,’ a sub-domain of cognitive psychology. Stay tuned for a future post!
I don’t think I penetrate these posts – do they describe what is going on? Or is that the hard question? Really I need to work off of some theory, rather than invalidate a whole bunch of theories and leave a gaping hole, exacerbated by my looking at the colours of my computer screen.
Is it something like a kind of reflex action upon input from a light receptor, along with reflexes from a memory duplication of that reflex – with the latter reflex and memory layered several times? Eventually enough memories align to see the ‘qualia’ – atleast until you get ‘bored’ of it, which is where the line up of memories runs out?
I have real trouble just leaving a gaping hole – or do the threads cover some ideas on what to fill it with and I’ve missed that?
And here be a wall of text. Sorry.
“the job of science is to explain dispositions, which is to say, use theory to crack open black boxes.”
Uhm, no, it isn’t. Observation of the effects under study comes first, which makes the box no longer entirely black. Theory explains the observations, which leads to experiment (which may involve black boxes to ensure no trickery is being used), then comparison of results to predicted behavior decides whether we need to go back to start, and only after sufficient repetition of successful experiements does Theory become Law. To say “theory” cracks the black box is like saying rocks carved the Great Lakes. The rocks could not carve the Lakes without mile thick ice driving them. Theory is only one part of the process — observation, experiment, and comparing results to predictions are just as vital to the scientific method as Theory.
So, let’s move on to the topic.
You present that since information neglect leads to superior processing power of heuristics, all you need to do is prove information neglect’s existence, and you have then proven heuristics are the mode of thought of humans.
You have ignored several important alternate explanations.
First, information neglect can speed up any type of processing, not just heuristically based systems. In computer programming, you learn that more information = more processing, so long as the algorithm stays the same. Bigger databases = slower databases, after all. And there is nothing in computer science’s rules that make the calculations concerning increasing processing needs unique to computers: they are broadly applicable, but easier to test in a lab on a computer than yanking a brain out of someone and testing on that. We already know that when you’re thinking hard, you burn more calories than when you’re not. (Shows up on imaging as increased heat generation and blood flow, indicating more oxygen is being delivered.) Therefore, it does not matter if your processing is heuristic or unique, less information usually equates to faster and simpler systems, even when the process being run is unique instead of heuristic.
Second, information neglect, when taken too far, makes the algorithm fail; regardless of whether the algorithm is heuristic or unique. Were IN that prevalent, we would see failure of thought due to neglect causing the wrong heuristic to be used. That’s a problem with heuristics: in a suitably complex environment, trying to select from a limited set of generalized solutions can result in wasted processing. Information neglect only decreases processing requirements in a complex system, if the heuristic for selecting the correct heuristic takes less processing than the reduction in processing from using a unique process in the first place. Your collection of heuristics needs a layer of thinking that selects the appropriate heuristic to use, which does not sound to me like it could succeed if it was itself a heuristic. A heuristic selecting a heuristic is going to have two layers of generalizations leading to higher probability of nonsensical results. But in making the selection process unique, you are now facing the problem that the original heuristic may as well have been unique, and skipped the wasted thought on the selection process altogether. As system complexity increases (ie. the number of heuristics increase), the processing spent selecting the correct heuristic is exponentially proportional to the number of heuristics.
Third, information invention (no idea what you’d call it, but it’s where you add information to a qualia) can also improve performance. You are considering only the case when you retain the same algorithm and reduce the data it deals with, which does lead to information neglect reducing processing requirements. Increasing the amount of information can also lead to the use of a different, though faster, heuristic that may actually involve more inputs. Not all algorithms are created equal: using a reasonable assumption with the qualia can permit a simpler heuristic to replace a high processing hog, lower input heuristic. Information neglect can lead to efficiencies, but so can information invention.
Fourth, heuristics are generalizations, and as such, can be applied to data sets incorrectly, creating inaccurate results. We would not be able to detect that inaccuracy in ourselves, though others with different heuristic patterns would. We should be able to detect those inaccuracies. If we were solely creatures of heuristics, this should be relatively common, especially in the young. As I pointed out, we don’t so much teach the young how to think, but how to prioritize. Children can figure out some choices are bad due to painful consequences, but that’s just gaining the personal knowledge of those consequences, not creating a different heuristic. We only need the one. (Pain = bad, X causes pain, therefore X = bad.)
So, we know from various magicians’ tricks and optical illusions that information neglect from sensory input is in fact real. Our eyes discard data points constantly. Our ears can do it, too, but we get much less information from those in the first place, so it takes a lot of sound channels to put us in that state (ie. a dance hall). The problem is that information invention is also used by magicians and optical illusions, too. Your mind will add colour where there is none, fill in for missing words in someone’s speech, and so on. Information neglect is only 1/3rd of the story, since information invention is 1/3rd, and accurate information the rest.
You want to know how the mind works? Here, I’ve got a bit of a test for you. Actually, it’s a two parter. The first is a fun party game, but it will show if you are capable of doing the second part.
Experiment 1 (takes about 5 mins):
Find a table or desk away from all pictures and photographs, and grab a pencil and paper. Stop reading until you have that place prepared. Seriously. Stop here until you’re prep’ed. If you read too much beyond the actual test, you’ll want to cheat.
There’s no time limit, but most are done in 3 minutes: just stop when you’re satisified or don’t care enough to continue.
Task: Go to that prepared place and draw, from memory, a bicycle of any type you prefer and once done, come back and continue reading. Start.
Good, you’re done and back, or you’re not playing (boo!!!!). I know, I know, you said you’re a bad artist and I don’t really care about that. Get a picture of a bike (Google has plenty of images) and compare it to yours anyway. Or get someone else to look at it.
This is what we’re looking for: is every part in the right location on the bike? I don’t care if your wheels aren’t round: are they in the right place? Two wheels about the same size, front and back, on the same level ground, peddles in between, chain connecting peddles to rear wheel, handlebars above front wheel, seat above back? Some readers are laughing since they think everyone can do it, but more than half of humans can’t. The chain may be on the handlebars, seat where a wheel goes, etc. I’ve seen some of those failed attempts. Those of us that do get them right can do something that those that did not can’t do. We can picture that bicycle in our minds, and that’s why everything is in the right place, even if we can’t draw a lick. I can do it, which might explain my engineering degree. I can spin that bike in my head in all directions, to see it at any angle. From speaking to collegues, my capacity is actually limited compared to some engineers, since they claim to see it in near-real solid form, where I would describe mine as more ghostly and “thin” of substance. More than enough to get by since solidity is just a cool feature.
Experiment 2:
Now, here’s the real test, and I apologize to those that couldn’t do the first, because you probably can’t do this either. In your mind’s eye, visualize a motorcycle. I can do it and read, so I hope you can too. Now, here’s the question: when you see the bike, you see all the parts, but did all the part names enter your mind too? Did you have to think of the chain, struts, fork, seat, oil filter, exhaust, pistons, battery, headlight, brakes, chassis, etc. and build the bike up from parts? Or do you just see the entire bike as a complete bike, and not have to concern yourself with ensuring all the pieces are there? The answer is the latter, I expect, if you’re like me. Poof — complete bike, all parts present without even thinking about it. You know, though, when you read my list above, suddenly every one of those parts popped on the bike for you, didn’t they? In my mind, they almost grow in size, but only the two or three latest on the list are highlighted in any way. By the time you got to “chassis”, the chain was not popping anymore, was it? That’s the limits of short term memory. We can only hold 5-9 things in our cognitive mind for study at once — one of which was a bike, another is this text, and some may be the monitor or other distractions, so really only 1-4 beyond the bike itself — and so as you read that list of 11 parts, I eventually forced the start of that list out of your mind because no one can store 12. (Now that you know what I was doing, you might try it again and try to keep all the parts in your mind. Teehee.) That’s a form of information neglect, but it’s only part of the story.
Bausece if taht wree the olny way our mdins wroekd, you cu’olndt raed tihs stnenece. That’s a classic thought exercise. You can read that, because our brains have learned that really only the first and last letters in a word need to be in the right place to read: I didn’t scramble those, just the inner ones of 4+ letter words. Some rare people couldn’t read it, but I doubt anyone on this forum couldn’t. If _ll we d_ _s _eglec_ _nformatio_ in _ords, we _ouldn’_ read _nythin_ wher_ _hos_ key _etter_ were _issin_. With enough context, our brains will invent the information that we need in order to make sense of what we see or do. Where, now, is the neglect, or are you satisfied invention occurs as well? Is neglect still in the srbcameld letters? Do you r____y t__k it is t__t s____e and you d___t n__d the o___r l_____s in the w___s? You still need all of the letters to read it at your normal rate, even if you can eventually puzzle out the larger gaps in knowledge I just created: just having first and last isn’t enough, so the information neglect is particular, not random, in nature. Our minds do not discard potentially useful data without good reason. Our minds discard the inner order, but not the letters themselves. And this is something that is common to pretty nearly everyone. The letter order neglect isn’t random, and does enter into a system (word to concept retrieval, in the case of reading) that may well be heuristic given how often we use it, but I think I’ve shown that the same system also operates with information invention (so long as we haven’t neglected too much info, which gets us into signal theory). Information invention is, perforce, a processing hog, but it’s not possible in a solely neglectful, heuristic system. The other remarkable thing is that nearly all humans do this the same way: if we developed heuristics solely on qualia-based experience, the pattern recognition method that makes that sentence readable would not be common. A process this common has to be instinctive and somehow genetic. But how could we evolve a pattern regonition technique for letters that have only existed for 4000 years? It takes 100000 to evolve in even a small physical way, but this is a complex mental system that couldn’t have simply leapt into being. Obviously, this is some other part of our brain manifesting in the alphabetical writing system. How could an instinctive, neglectful, heuristic system be modified so consistently by the broad spectrum of human minds with vast cultural gulfs creating a wide variety of experience? Answer: qualia had nothing to do with it in the first place.
Heuristic cognition does explain some of what humans do, but it is hardly enough to explain the rigorous and perfectionist attitudes of engineers and artists. Heuristics work well for sensory input, because we do not have time to deal with every little thing our senses detect. Our minds must discard massive amounts of information in order to make sense of the most important bits — just 5-9 items can be thought about at any instant, so the senses must discard down to that number regardless of consequences. (Which is why people must stop paying attention to cell phones and texts while driving: it can cause you to put too much weight on what you’re reading or listening to and miss sensory input like the woman crossing the road in front of you. We do not multiprocess (do two things at once), only multitask (switch between multiple tasks), except maybe for some extremely rare individuals like Einstein. Multitasking puts your attention in the wrong place when you’re switched over to the conversation you’re having. If YOU think you are an ultra-rare multiprocessor, try playing a first-person shooter or racing video game while answering someone’s math questions at the same time, with no perceptible shooting/driving errors and no delay answering the math problems, especially when the video game is putting you thorugh its worst. If you can’t, then put the dang machines down when driving, because I just proved it hurts you in the processing unit! And stop thining that you’re a multiprocessor! Nearly NO ONE is!) Further, while information neglect can help when time is vital, when time is not and we are operating on pre-stored concepts loaded into short-term memory from long-term, heuristics and neglect are disadvantageous. Rules of thumb do not help draw out the optimal solution when we have time to think about the issues involved: they lead to standard, often inaccurate, solutions that save time making decisions, but lack detail and don’t deal with the correct contextual paradigm when dealing with unique problems. In order to correct the general solution to the specific problem, you would be able to identify an interim/test proposal for a solution, and a processing stage that corrected that proposal to the specifics of the problem. I think we would all leap up and say, “I know those!” if they existed, and I’m not. I get the full solution, not a solution and a partial solution, when I solve a problem. You would have to theorize a inaccessible short-term memory store that hid the heuristic solution from us and revealed only the corrected, specific solution. It is always true that our minds are going to discard irrelevant information, since that only wastes processing power and distracts us to put other irrelevancies in our short-term memory, but we do have conscious control over short-term memory items. By reviewing the pre-determined important elements of a problem (which ironically may itself be a heuristic), we refresh them in short term memory, allowing the cognitive systems to concentrate on the vital elements without fear of discarding relevant data… until a distraction replaces one of those elements. Operating on memory items permits truly unique thinking. Cognition can be limited in scope without being heuristic.
Ultimately, I have to entirely reject the idea that information is solely neglected, and only heuristic systems exist in my mind. I have seen just too much creativity in my own science and others’ art to accept that possibility. Both require sudden development of new thought patterns unrelated to old paradigms and thus, old heuristics. A purely heuristic system requires evolutionary modification of thought processes to create new concepts, which denies the great leaps of insight that occur in the engineers I have worked with. A heuristic that created an inspirational thought would require similar inputs to have modified some other heuristic adequately to create the unique and seemingly spontaneous insight. Heuristics create generalized solutions, and so cannot lead to uniquely new ideas.
You’re over-reading a number of my claims here, Chris. A little more charity in your interpretations would streamline the debate, otherwise it’ll simply be a string of ‘That’s not what I meant,’ etc. Assume the most charitable reading of what I’m saying, then begin your criticisms there.
Okay, then how’s this:
RSB: “I think philosophy of mind–as an institution–is caught in a great dilemma: either they accept the parochial, heuristic nature of intentional cognition, or they condemn themselves to never understanding human consciousness.”
What experiments could be run to prove or disprove your theory that we must accept the existence of heuristics as the foundation of intentional cognition? Essentially, how can we prove the heuristic nature of cognition is true?
Because, if you’re right and we cannot proceed without that taken as truth, but that assumption happens to be wrong, then we are doomed to being unable to understand consciousness, since both sides of your statement deny understanding consciousness. A different version of that statement is: if we cannot understand consciousness without accepting the heuristic nature of the conscious mind, but that assumption is wrong, are we doomed to never understanding consciousness?
Proving that assumption true is vital for you to progress in the understanding of consciousness. Intellectual analysis is inadequate to prove it, since science requires all four parts fo the scientific method be applied; therefore, science tells us experimentation is next. So, what experiements do you propose?
Or, if I misunderstand that statement and you’re actually stating that everyone else in philosophy is caught in a false trap concerning heuristics, how can we prove or disprove heuristics in order to get them out of it? Regardless of whether I am misinterpreting the statement or not, the next step is the same: develop experiements to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I’ve shown you some simple, relevant mental experiments. It really shouldn’t be that hard. If it is, then the Dilemma philosophy is actually trapped in is that it has become an intellectual pit where no conclusions can ever be drawn because we lack the technology to observe the activities of the brain, and so therefore can never draw a single accurate conclusion about anything until we simply wait for the tools to become available. You could intellectually find the dead right answer, and never know it, because you cannot prove it correct without experiment.
Most everyone who takes evolution’s role seriously accept the heuristic nature of cognition, so I actually find this line of questioning quite confusing. Heuristics are computational shortcuts, plain and simple, and evolution is fond of shortcuts.Check out Todd and Gigarenzer’s Ecological Rationality for an in depth account of the nature of heuristics and their ubiquity in nature. And a huge number of heuristics have been identified already via a number of mundane and ingenious experimental methods. Check out Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow for a whirlwind tour. The easiest way to determine whether a problem-solving device is heuristic or not is to simply look at how it treats available information. If it attempts to take all that information into account then it is not a heuristic. If it ignores information, as is the case with intentional cognition, then it seems pretty clear that it is. What else would it be? An optimization device that ignores information? I’m not sure I can make any sense out of this.
This position isn’t Mysterian at all. It simply explains why we have such difficulty. In no way does it rule out the possibility that new heuristic approaches can be developed. It simply suggests that the situation with consciousness is not unlike the situation with quantum mechanics, where the limits of heuristic intuition force us to adopt counter-intuitive methods. Why do you think consciousness is so difficult?
R. Scott Bakker, thanks very much for responding to my post over on Levi Bryant’s blog. It is clear after reading this post that I was misunderstanding your position to some degree. You are using the term “heuristic” slightly differently than I thought, and it is now clear to me why you believe that we do not have meta-cognition of our heuristic systems (and I agree).
I would really love to have a further discussion on this topic with you. I am particularly curious to hear what you would make out of some of Merleau-Ponty’s theories (have you read much Merleau-Ponty)? I really love Merleau-Ponty, but you have read much more widely in the cognitive science literature than I have. So I am particularly curious to find out how well some of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas hold up in relation to current research.
At the moment, I am in graduate school, and we are nearing the end of the semester, and so I am in paper mode, so I do not have as much time to devote to the discussion as I would like, but I am going to keep following your blog, and will post at some point in the future and perhaps we can have a fuller discussion.
I cannot end this comment without saying how much I enjoyed your book Neuropath. In fact, my current interest in cognitive science/neuroscience is largely a result of having read Neuropath over Christmas break. It had the same effect on me that I think it had on Levi Bryant. I had a full scale existential crisis (in a good way). It really shook up a lot of things that I had taken for granted which is always enjoyable for me. So thanks for that. Take care.
Sorry I missed this in my vacation kerfuffle, Brian. I’m glad you liked Neuropath. Given your interest in MP, you might find my Heidegger piece, “One-Eyed King” of some use. Dreyfus and Varela are the go-to guys for the connection between phenomenology and cognitive science, however. Personally, I think they’re way of the mark, but then… I actually have a fullblown piece on Mary and the Knowledge Argument coming up.