The discovery that a number of people are not only mining the problematic that obsessed me when I was a graduate student, but actually homing in on the same family of texts that I had gravitated to has… well, to put it honestly, convinced me that maybe I’m not so crazy after all. I’m not talking about the new ‘Continental Realists,’ but rather philosophers who are mining parallel, but quite critical tracks: David Roden, Martin Hagglund, and Ray Brassier.
I’m presently reading Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, which is turning into one of those rare syncretic works that handily outruns the ‘original philosophies’ that it explicates, critiques, and attempts to synthesize. It’s certainly not a book I would write, and I actually think it’s unfortunate that Brassier’s imagination became mired in works like After Finitude, which (as far as I can tell) succeeds in being every bit as antiquated as it attempts to be. (I’ll be posting on Meillassoux in the near future, but ‘correlation’ strikes me as a dull attempt to foist the epistemological dilemma as a profound and novel diagnosis of the tradition (Laruelle’s ‘decision’ is much more interesting), backed up with an egregious misreading of Heidegger, and a very curious (given his use of set theory) second-order blindness to way his claim-making cuts against the claims made).
Brassier strikes me as one of those hardy philosophical souls that can actually revel in the ugliness and dread of what ‘it’ discovers/gerrymanders. He has no ‘cherished affirmative misconceptions’ to bring the dove of discursive reason back to the ark of manifest necessity. Nihil Unbound, for instance, argues that nihilism presents a profound opportunity, a way to unshackle philosophy from intentional parochialism. Given my commitment to theoretical incompetence, I’m always inclined to favour claims that cut against human vanity.
In a recent interview for Thauma, Brassier articulates what he thinks is the philosophical question (and which I would argue is the socio-cultural question as well):
“The problem consists in articulating the relation between the dialectical structure of the conceptual and the non-dialectical structure of the real in such a way as to explain how real negativity fuels dialectics even as it prevents dialectics from incorporating its own negativity.”
This is the question I think I ‘answered’ just before abandoning philosophy ten years ago. The jargon is different from the mongrelized terms that I use, which is what might make it seem so alien at first, but it translates readily, I think, into a crucial criterion: any causal explanation of intentionality should also explain why intentionality seems causally inexplicable.
I imagine Brassier would be uncomfortable with this expression because of the way it elides any explicit reference to ‘negativity,’ which is to say, time. The reason I buried time was simply to tease out the way his question brushes up against the Hard Problem, the naturalization of Consciousness, something which mystifies me as much now as it ever did. Why should there be Consciousness at all? I haven’t the fucking foggiest. Why does consciousness have the structure it does? Ah…
We are our brains in such a way that we cannot recognize ourselves as our brains. This is the claim I’ve been flogging for quite some time–the Blind Brain Theory. And if you reread Brassier’s quote, you’ll see the very same ‘in such a way.’ You’ll see, in other words, that Brassier is asking a question about blindness. How can negativity drive dialectics in such a way that dialectics remains curiously blind to negativity?
Enter the null frame theory of the now.
The (dissertation-killing) question I’ve been asking myself for these past ten years is how might the perspectival structure of consciousness hook up with the structure of the thalamocortical system. Since the visual field is the primary way we ‘envisage’ perspective, I asked myself what could neurostructurally account for the peculiar structure of the visual field. The most difficult-to-fathom thing about our visual field, I realized, is the way our periphery fades into ‘edgeless oblivion.’ It’s neurostructural correlate, one can assume, is simply the point at which the information available to integration runs out–an information horizon.
The thalamocortical system (TCS) is literally carved up by information horizons–it simply has to be. If the visual information horizon explains the peripheral vanishing act that structures our visual field, what other structural peculiarities might be explained in information horizonal terms?
The null frame theory of the now (a more complete formulation can be found here) proposes that the most peculiar feature of temporal awareness, the now, is a temporal analogue to the most peculiar feature of visual awareness, the visual margin. The TCS only has access to so much temporal information. If you think about it, the temporal field has to possess a point where ‘timing runs out’ (an LWOS) the same way our visual field possesses a point where vision runs out. So what possible structural consequences might obtain?
Well, where the visual margin enforces visual locality you might expect a temporal margin to enforce temporal locality. We only visually differentiate this and nothing more, because the TCS only has certain visual information and nothing more. Likewise, we only temporally differentiate this and nothing more, because the TCS only has certain temporal information and nothing more. The same way the visual margin has to be the sightless frame of seeing, the temporal margin has to be the timeless frame of timing. The TCS can’t ‘time timing’ any more than it can ‘see seeing,’ though it can access supplementary channels of information to transform both fields into windows.
The temporal field can only discriminate this temporal locality (the TCS can only integrate the temporal information it can access) and nothing more. Thus presence. Since the temporal field cannot discriminate the time of its own temporal discriminating it cannot differentiate itself from itself. Thus abiding presence, which is to say (as crazy as it sounds), self-identity. Since the TCS accesses and integrates this information with supplementary channels, the temporal field becomes an atemporal window onto a temporal world, the same way the visual field becomes a blind window onto a visual world. The latter we call our eyes, the former, our soul.
Even after all these years my skin still pimples when I think about this. The analogy I sometimes use (and worked into an aphorism for The Prince of Nothing) is that of a spiral, how it becomes a perfect circle when viewed on end. The illusion of the circle is a consequence of missing a crucial extra dimension of information. The world projects itself through us, and we confuse the projection for something self-contained, abussos in the sense of Dennett’s ‘skyhooks.’ Abussos, bottomless, everywhere we turn our medial origins are hidden from us.
Information horizons are a consequence of information integration. As Guilio Tononi[1] puts it: “Because integrated information can only be generated within a complex and not outside its boundaries, it follows that consciousness is necessarily subjective, private, and related to a single point-of-view or perspective.” Well, not quite. The only thing that actually follows is that consciousness is private. If concepts as incredibly difficult as subject, POV, and perspective simply ‘fell out of’ information integration then you wouldn’t be reading this. Information horizons follow from information integration, and what I’m saying is that the vexing perspectival structure of consciousness follows from information horizons.
So, to return to Brassier:
“The problem consists in articulating the relation between the dialectical structure of the conceptual and the non-dialectical structure of the real in such a way as to explain how real negativity fuels dialectics even as it prevents dialectics from incorporating its own negativity.”
So the global dynamics of information integration change moment to moment, but this information is not available for integration (in that modality), so the ‘negativity’ (as Brassier terms it) that renders the ‘complex’ (as Tononi terms it) non-self-identical in fact, cannot be taken up as a datum within that complex. So even though we remain utterly ignorant as to why information integration (of any kind) should give rise to consciousness, we can nevertheless explain why consciousness appears to remain self-identical despite the continual transformation of its contents–why Hume bumped into oblivion searching for the Self. ‘Real negativity fuels dialectics even as it prevents dialectics from incorporating its own negativity,’ because the information pertaining to the global process of information integration cannot itself be integrated. Consciousness is literally reflexive because it is irreflexive. The resulting consciousness perceives itself to be a circle it is not rather than the spiral that it is. You, as you read this, are a structurally mandated ’cognitive illusion’ (whatever the hell that means anymore). What the TCS misapprehends, we become, and because everywhere we look we find the spiral, we are perplexed as to what we can be. So we begin interrogating the circle. Philosophizing.
Problem solved?
It seems to me that this is an empirical question, and I invite anyone in the sciences reading this to come up with possible ways this can be empirically pursued. Otherwise, if we simply assume (as we do every time we move between philosophical claims) that this does solve Brassier’s Problem, then a veritable cornucopia of speculative possibilities open up. Enough to make me dizzy, at least.
You watch.
10 years down the line, Chalmers will publish another book crediting himself for these phenomenal ideas.
He won’t even be plagiarizing, just another victim of self-serving memory-related cognitive biases.
“It seems to me that this is an empirical question, and I invite anyone in the sciences reading this to come up with possible ways this can be empirically pursued.”
Yes, of course! For starters, ‘consciousness’ is fuzzy, so someone should go through the trouble of mapping patterns of thalamo-cortical activity as someone awakes from unconsciousness. Start by defining the exact state of the system you care about and then ask the question about what fundamental attributes distinguish it from say… dreamless sleep.
If your theory is correct, it should be possible to expand qualia-space by extending information horizons. “What it is like” to experience this, I have no clue, but I imagine it would be about as trippy as any designer drugs… except the experience would be tethered to reality.
My primary idea would be to extend color-space in an analogous way to how Paul Bach-y-Rita performed his famous sensory substitution experiments. (I think I’ve mentioned this before… if anyone wants to write me a check for $1,000,000 I’ll get right on it)
The “end game” would be to extend the window of temporal perception. I have only the vaguest idea what the cognitive consequences of such a thing would be… you’d literally be expanding your perception of “the present” in both direction. My guess is that it would be hard to do this without causing some severe (possibly disastrous) dissociation. Extend it far back enough and your sense of free will would just shatter, probably permanently.
“Any causal explanation of intentionality should also explain why intentionality seems causally inexplicable.”
This. Seriously, if nothing else, hang on to THIS. Even if everything else you’ve posted turns out to be crackpot bullshit… this is solid.
You might be the first, Jorge.
Riffing on your extended qualia, here’s a scientifically testable hypothesis, if some version of information integration is true, and we learn how to track information horizons in the brain. That psychedelic drugs (THC, LSD, psylocibin) actually ‘augment’ horizons, allowing more crosstalk, but also intensifying perception – colours especially! This could also explain why time seems to slow down on psychedelics.
One of the interesting things about the theory is that it suggests that any conscious system whatsoever would be faced by the temporal margin problem – perhaps all of the problems faced by our brains. Strange: it seems to suggest it would be far better to bet sentient aliens had philosophers than priests!
See what I mean? All kinds of crazy implications.
“it suggests that any conscious system whatsoever would be faced by the temporal margin problem”
It does, although the exact details of how the problem is experienced and reformulated externally in ‘writing’ may be different given the vast differences in the way evolution shapes the alien’s information processing system. It’s hard enough deciphering German philosophy… or Zen koans…
I don’t usually bother with theology, but why haven’t theologians seized on the Hard Problem as their final bastion? It seems like a pretty unassailable fortress to me. It’s never happened, but if a Christian were ever to say to me “yeah, but what about the Hard Problem?” I’d be all like… “well… you got me there…”
I’ve often thought that ‘soul’ isn’t such a bad word for this very reason. Keeps us honest to our confusion.
Regarding alien consciousness, one of the issues would be the degree to which CGII (consciousness generating information integration) admits supplementary access to its horizons. You would think that what makes vision so obvious is it’s ‘channel capacity’: all this stuff seems too obvious to me now, but there really is a sense in which it was… fucking… hard… thinking my way through. Writing “To Be and Not To Be” was easily the most difficult intellectual experience of my life, and if it weren’t for the handy analogue hanging around my visual field (literally!), I’m not sure I would have pulled anything together. So you could speculate that some species would be unable to even frame the encapsulation problem in an intelligible manner, where others might have solved it with allophenomenology alone.
You could see allo-nows being so ineffable as to be incomprehensible, a truly agnosiac blind spot, and others crisp as a Vegas magic show. But still, it strikes me as a powerful empirical generalization to make: that any evolved biological conscious system would have a mind/body problem and etc.
Do you know much about information theory, Jorge? I’m wondering whether anyone as formulated the asymmetry between first order-processing and the second-order processing power required to track that processing – or even if this question pertains or makes sense (because I can see ways in which it wouldn’t).
Just on this
Do you know much about information theory, Jorge? I’m wondering whether anyone as formulated the asymmetry between first order-processing and the second-order processing power required to track that processing – or even if this question pertains or makes sense (because I can see ways in which it wouldn’t).
Yes, but why track that in particular?
It’s kind of intent based itself, isn’t it? This process, this one here, is the one to monitor?
Even if you plot a center to start from and have an expanding monitoring circle, where does it stop? A pair of ears and eyes mark the border? But the brain is so affected by conditions outside of that, you can hardly NOT include those in monitoring? Surely it’s as much a part of the thought process as anything? And so this logic expands until your monitoring even the stars in the sky.
It’d maybe take one universe, setup to monitor, in order to monitor another universe? But who monitors the monitor? Hurhurhur!
Just randomly on a perhaps similar topic, I wonder if tie chi is kind of a pseudo self monitoring practice and that’s why it’s calming. The idea is that you already know the movements your going to do (they all happen in slow, very predictable arcs). You already know what your going to think about your future movements prior to actually doing it (by and large, anyway). This ceases, to a large degree, the microphone/speaker feedback loop which generates thoughts…which in turn generates more thoughts when percieved, which in turn generate more thoughts when percieved, etc. But if you know the thoughts you’ll have in advance, there wont be as much perceptive reaction, thus not setting off this cascade. I say psuedo self monitoring because – gah, how to describe it? I’m imagining the cascade as like a number of sheets of paper rising off a surface and each other. This process collapses them, making them back up instead of rising (I can almost hear the beep beep of a truck backing up). Side note: I’m not a tie chi practitioner at all, though I’ve pretended to play one on TV, at times.
This was all just on this little bit. I’m bracing to read the post…workin’ up to it…
I know very little.
I have some people I can pester about this. I don’t know how well computational theory (generally applied only to Turing machines) can be generalized to the way the brain processes information.
The hardest part will be formulating the questions in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a lunatic.
I hear you on that last one. This page has received a crazy amount of traffic (given that I haven’t actually posted to let anyone know about it) these past couple days. Who knows, maybe someone information theory wonk will find us.
A very interesting approach, and one which has a lot of promise, I think. Theory of computation does, I think, have some relevance to these questions simply because Turing machines are universal simulators of classical physics, so to the extent one can model cognitive processes classically, there is a Turing simulation possible. Thus, certain results such as computational irreducibility apply to such models of cognition — which I personally believe have strong implications for some of these questions, as well. However, to a large extent the question of consciousness is left out of theory of computation investigations, which are more concerned with algorithms and their limits and properties rather than specifically issues relating to information feedback loops (spirals). Of course, Bateson’s work (especially _Mind and Nature_) goes a long way towards trying to formulate an intuitive basis for modeling cognition in a naturalized manner, though it is primarily aimed at the very lowest level, minimal conditions needed for any sort of mental functioning of any kind, not really at the level of human consciousness, which by necessity operates many layers above this minimal substrate, if his model makes sense.
I think it is possible, however, through careful introspective exercises, to actually become aware of the spiral quality of cognition; I’ve meditated, myself, for decades, and my personal experience of my own consciousness is not of a unitary circle, but in fact of a a fragmentary feedback process which is far more like a spiral (a broken spiral, in fact). In other words, I think it’s quite possible to change one’s phenomenal awareness to break the illusion of circularity, not merely conceptually, but in terms of one’s moment to moment experience, and this has many interesting and mostly salutary side effects, which can explain, to a large degree, the point, so to speak, of meditation. The Buddhist theory of mind, for instance, is that consciousness is a high-level illusory construct — though they don’t have a specifically materialist model of awareness, they certainly have observed introspectively the fragmentary nature of awareness and the illusory quality of the consolidated now and the apparent unitary consciousness (thus their oft-repeated assertion of the illusory nature of the so-called “self” — although that assertion is quite often misunderstood to be saying “the self does not exist” — they really mean it isn’t a circle, as it appears to be, to use your terminology). But these illusions are not as inevitable as they appear to be; one can break past them, so to speak, with very interesting consequences. This is largely why, I think, in the East, philosophy has a very practical quality — they see it not merely as an abstract way of analyzing our existential situation, but rather as an investigation that can yield direct application in moment to moment awareness/life.
I always think of Hume in Section VI of The Treatise rooting around for personal identity and finding nothing and the way Kant had to go transcendental. This is the reason I don’t think there’s a Phenomenal Self Model (PSM) as Metzinger argues, but rather eclectic ‘opening’ that gets ‘shaped’ by various conceptual schemes. The same way overlapping information horizons allow us to discern the margin of the visual field, we are able to discern our temporal margin as well, via ‘philosophical reflection/ideation’ in my case, but I can see no reason why this ‘marginal discernment’ should not be accomplished by a practice that has been empirically shown to alter activation patterns within our brain. So a way to theorize the phenomenal aspects of meditation would be that it realigns the CGII complex (almost like physically moving your eye with your finger, keeping with the visual metaphor), such that its limits more clearly fall into ‘view,’ until you eventually reach a point where the ‘illusion’ cannot be sustained…
Meditation would be the practice of ‘horizoning,’ actively extending CGII access – expanding consciousness quite literally! Although I don’t think this notion of ‘extending access’ is anything new, the null frame theory explains why this should lead to a phenomenal dissolution of self instead of ‘expansion.’
There you go, Mitsu! If that’s what you mean you just blew my mind!
Yes, although I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “CGII complex” if I understand what you’re getting at that is precisely what I mean. In a sense, the collapse of the illusion of the closed, unitary “self” is also a kind of “expansion” because it makes available awareness of many aspects of mental function which normally exist at the margins; unnoticed. The Buddhist theory, for instance, is that many problems of day to day existence can arise precisely because these mental factors so to speak go unnoticed; it’s difficult to explain precisely what they mean by this because to talk about it requires using language which by its very structure tend to presuppose a unitary subject (I.e. if you say “you can notice such and such and it has this effect” it sounds like you’re saying the unitary subject “notices” this but of course that contradicts the whole point. It’s more accurate to say the overall cognitive flow changes in certain ways which in some sense amount to an expansion and in other ways could be described as the shattering of certain oversimplifying illusions.)
I should add that it’s not as though these practices lead to the actual “destruction” of the illusion of a self necessarily; that is to say, for instance, I still experience this illusion, but it’s just that meditative practice has made it very, very noticeable the frayed edges of the illusion so that it’s quite obvious at each moment so to speak. The same could be said for the illusion of a unitary “now” and many other similar complexes which go akin with all of this. It all ends up having a lot of practical import, though exactly how and why is hard to try to sketch out in a blog comment.
CGII = consciousness generating information integration. A joke to remind us just how mysterious this is, and that concepts are simply cartoons. We are entirely in agreement. It was crashing the illusion of a ‘PSM,’ some cultural self-description, I was referring to. The greater misapprehension of consciousness itself is a magic trick you have to die to escape. No matter how much you draw into integration, the horizon’s always there, if only as a wierd kind of hyperabsence. Even the margins have margins.
But as you said, ‘glimpses of the spiral’ become available: is this primarily because you have seen how the ‘wholeness of the now’ (I call this ‘saturation’) was a lie?
Hi Scott,
My problem with what I take to be Ray’s position is that making the intentional irreducibly normative makes it too “special”. It’s hard to specify what being a naturalist or a physicalist means these days but one commitment – surely – is that there is nothing ontologically special about life, consciousness or meaning: these are just contingent features of the world. The universe is not fundamentally mental or fundamentally alive. As the philosopher of psychology Keith Frankish observed to me recently: this is what it means to posit physics as a fundamental science. So the naturalist bets that no future physics will contain irreducibly mental predicates like ‘x believes…’ or ‘x is conscious of….’. If this bet is right, then meaning and representation are either natural phenomena which (like life) fall out of physical slime or they are froth on the surface of the real that nobody can understand (On grounds of intellectual hygiene I prefer slime to froth).
I think your idea of informational horizons can fit into this naturalistic framework nicely. In fact, I’m not sure how it can be motivated otherwise since it presupposes naturalistic assumptions about the limitations of our cognitive capacities and the way these are constrained in turn by the kinds of environments in which we operate. I’m not sure where it leaves Brassier!
Or me!
One of the reasons I can’t bring myself to believe in BBT is simply that it explains intentionality by explaining it away. Consciousness as experienced becomes a kind of magic trick: the now, personal identity, all the varieties of normativity, aboutness, purposiveness – all these become ‘cognitive illusions.’ It quite literally frightens me: It’s elegant, explaining a whole family of perplexing but obviously related phenomena with a single mechanism. It’s certainly fecund, at least for me – I can’t turn around without seeing a new interpretative possibility, it seems. It allows for empirically testable predictions. It actually exhibits a number of theoretical virtues, with only the Hard Problem as an obvious mulligan. All these years I’ve been telling myself it’s just crazy, a figment of my own cognitive vanity… I’m not quite sure what to make of the possibility that substantial number of other people might call it sane.
The power of BBT derives from the way it can link so much of what we find in philosophy to a theory that can be scientifically arbitrated, perhaps in the near future. Once you make that link between information horizons and the LWOS, you begin to see LWOS’s everywhere in philosophy. As bad as buying a Volvo.
Even the distinction between the real and ideal doesn’t make much sense to me anymore. The ideal is simply a confused ‘projection’ of the real? Or should we chuck this conceptualization altogether, and just talk about fuzzy glasses?
As insane as this sounds, I think I could brainstorm a dozen different ways to take this beyond the pale of traditional philosophy.
Apologies for the typos in the above, I typed my last response on my iPhone
>The greater misapprehension of consciousness itself is a magic trick
>you have to die to escape. No matter how much you draw into integration,
>the horizon’s always there, if only as a wierd kind of hyperabsence.
>Even the margins have margins.
That’s true, but to some extent somewhat beside the point of, say, Buddhist contemplation to pick one example (I think similar things can be said of some other forms of meditative practice, but Buddhist practice is explicitly “about” this subject, explicitly, to a larger and more analytically precise way than many other approaches, in my opinion), because the “goal” so to speak isn’t to actually bring forward to ordinary consciousness or awareness the entirely of what is beyond the margin — because that is, as you put it, impossible for many reasons. Instead, their approach is primarily focused on shattering the illusion of the self-contained, perfect circle — and thereby allowing one’s cognitive flow to, in some sense, be more open to that which lies outside conscious awareness. I.e., if one is always attributing everything one does to a rather cartoon story about a so-called “self” doing and perceiving, it becomes more difficult to deal with many situations (according to their theory, which I more or less buy, for both theoretical reasons and personal experience) because the story itself is inaccurate, and makes it more difficult to allow a larger context into one’s cognitive process. In other words, part of the point of it is to allow forces from “outside” to “come forward” so to speak. A good example of how this can be beneficial in a practical situation might be what athletes call being in a “flow state”; if you’re skiing down a mountain, it helps to let go this illusion of “I am controlling everything” and let some lower-level subsystems, so to speak, take over more directly, because those subsystems are likely to be more effective. This process itself isn’t really entirely a choice; it’s more something one learns to “feel”, so to speak. The idea isn’t to become conscious of everything, in other words, but to open up a space for that which is beyond the margin to function more freely without being blocked or constantly overridden in a heavy-handed, clunky way by another process which is largely based on an oversimplifying abstraction (though useful for, say, symbolic communication and so on).
>But as you said, ‘glimpses of the spiral’ become available: is this
>primarily because you have seen how the ‘wholeness of the now’
>(I call this ‘saturation’) was a lie?
That’s certainly part of it, a very important part. But again I stress that the process isn’t exactly an ordinary one of “now I see X”, because as I noted above it’s partly about relaxing the notion of an “I” who is “seeing” or understanding something. But yes, “it is seen” somehow that the “wholeness of the now” is a lie — among other things. It’s also possible to see a lot of detailed things (such as how we construct many other things about our sense of where we are, who we are, time and history, space, objects in relation to ourselves, and on and on), in ways which go beyond conceptual understanding to a sort of direct engagement in a very visceral, phenomenological way (for instance, I can describe ex post facto some of my meditation “insights” using this language, but the actual insights themselves don’t present themselves in this format; this description is more a later thing, when I try to make sense of it verbally or intellectually.) You can see, however, that this explains to some extent why many meditation experiences are difficult to describe or explain — especially in ordinary language (the language you’re using here allows more possibility for a kind of explanation — I’ve also spent time thinking about, for instance, computational neuroscience, etc., so find some metaphors from there to be useful as well.)
Your description of ‘opening oneself to the process’ is almost precisely the one I use for the anti-hero of my epic fantasies… I think we are on the same page, Mitsu, eerily so. Your ‘not exactly’ qualifiers, the need to hedge between the way concepts close down on the experiences you are trying to describe – this is all stuff that I take as given. So much so, I urge you not to stop! The brain is a metabolic miser, and it’ll try to economize wherever it can, to the detriment of many a ‘difficult to describe’ event or thing.
The vocabulary I’ve developed is actually quite extensive: this post of yours has convinced me to post my glossary as a work in progress, in point of fact. I tried to develop a second-order ‘heuristic notation’ to try to describe what it was Heidegger was doing in terms that could be translated into traditional philosophical discourse – I was just so sick of everyone talking past one another. The ironic effect was that it simply rendered me unintelligible to everyone! But it’s what I used for the reading I gave of Laruelle in “Rhapsophy,” for instance, how I compared non-philosophy to deconstruction, and the how I ‘improvised’ a satiric doppelganger of Laruelle’s view. I translated what I read into my terms, did the work, then translated it back into the original idiom. Exercises like these convince me of the theoretical usefulness of the vocabulary, but only so long as it continually tagged as an interpretative heuristic, to avoid being economized into some kind of mathesis. It’s simply another cartoon.
Since I don’t think you can talk Zen without talking cartoons, I’ll be interested to see what you make of the larger comic strip.
I look forward to taking a look at it!
“The thalamocortical system (TCS) is literally carved up by information horizons–it simply has to be. ”
I think the technical term for a “literally carved up” brain is “lobotomized.”
To be honest, I find much of this too jargon-ridden to follow. Credit where credit is due, that quote from Brassier is the absolute nadir in the piece.
I would like to know why “thalamocortical” system is invoked so consistently. Why exclude the amygdala, for example, given it’s known role in emotional processing? Is memory not a feature of consciousness (i.e., what about the hippocampus)? Are philosophers all reading from the same book, and if so, what is it?
Also, what is intended by this: “The most difficult-to-fathom thing about our visual field, I realized, is the way our periphery fades into ‘edgeless oblivion.’”
Why is that hard to fathom? To what extent is the phenomenon explained by the 1) differential spatial frequency resolution present in the retina; 2) the differential representation of the central and peripheral visual field in cortex?
Our eyes move – that’s why the cortical representation of the fovea is so massive. Pick a word in a book and fixate it. Try to read other words a few words away from it without moving your eyes. The fact that you can’t is because your visual systems lacks the spatial resolution to do so – we are all legally blind a few degrees away from our current point of focus.
Is the invisibility of the retinal scotoma related to this idea of edgeless oblivion? I assume you’ve tried the the trick of tucking your index finger into the blind spot created where the optic nerve exits the back of the eye (close one eye, fixate a point (pick an object on a wall), hold your finger about a foot in front of you, then move it about 15 degrees in the direction of the open eye). You should be able to “see” that you cannot see the your finger from the tip to the first knuckle (you must shift visual attention without shifting your eyes).
Is that the same?
The oblivion is not edgeless – the ability to detect edges of a given spatial frequency is a function of retinal eccentricity.
This is why I came to hate philosophy (which I majored in, way back in the day). They so often confuse what they don’t know for what is unknown.
The worst are the qualia arguments I recall – Imagine someone who experiences seeing “green” when the rest of us would experience seeing “red.”
The only reasonable answer is “No.”
What about turquoise – what does he see? Now purple. Now draw me the spectral absorption curves for his cone opsins, and a wiring diagram of retinal ganglion cells with either red-green or blue-yellow color opponency for that person that makes all that work.
But…but…what about “grue” and “bleen”?
Gack.
Not to pick on anyone, but…
“Riffing on your extended qualia, here’s a scientifically testable hypothesis, if some version of information integration is true, and we learn how to track information horizons in the brain.”
If we can’t “track information horizons in the brain”, it’s not a testable hypothesis yet. How about one we can test, with existing technology, today?
“…but I can see no reason why this ‘marginal discernment’ should not be accomplished by a practice that has been empirically shown to alter activation patterns within our brain.”
There is nothing we can do that does not “alter activation patterns in the brain.” We can guess what images people are looking at based on fairly crude fMRI measurements already. We can also be far more specific about which activation patterns we mean – there’s a substantial literature on memory formation and how it relates to theta rhythms in the hippocampus, for example. We can do stimulus reconstruction based on high gamma-band activity in distributed sets of electrodes for electrocorticography.
Oh – if anyone is interested in information theory (as it seems, some are), I would recommend this course:
http://www.infotheory-class.org/
It’s totally free, and online. Neuroscientists use it constantly to measure the quality (not, note, “qualia-ty”) of the representation of sensory signals in the spiking patterns of neurons, or groups thereof.
There are some other excellent courses available if you scroll down. You can basically go to Stanford for free, which is amazing.
“It seems to me that this is an empirical question, and I invite anyone in the sciences reading this to come up with possible ways this can be empirically pursued.”
Sorry – I honestly missed the question that precedes “this” in the foregoing. What exactly is the empirical question here?
What you’re talking about really doesn’t address the issues in the post, at all. Of course one can look at activation patterns in the brain and map them into, say, visual patterns — but this doesn’t explain qualia, or consciousness. If you already have an intuitive idea that “people can see” and then you look at activation patterns, obviously you can map those into “this person is seeing this” but it simply doesn’t address the question of why, for instance, we feel like we’re seeing, why it feels that it is an “I” which seems to be feeling this, and so on. In other words, you seem to be claiming that these problems are trivial because you can simply talk about signal processing in the brain, but that’s a kind of circular argument: if you already assume that you know how brains can generate mental phenomena, and that brains do generate them, then you can do whatever intuitive mapping you wish between activation patterns and mental phenomena which you already have an intuitive grasp of because you are also human. That doesn’t get you very far at all with respect to these questions, however, it’s just eliding over the issue by missing the point.
Thalamocortical system is simply a possible candidate. The theory doesn’t turn on it, just the assumption that consciousness is somehow tied to recursive information access distributed through parts of the brain.
What’s hard to fathom is the phenomenal aspect of the margin. I’m afraid I don’t see the relevance of any of your points.
Which is why I said testable instead of now testable. Charity, please.
You begin by admitting you couldn’t follow: Seems to me you should asking questions, not passing judgements, ohlo. Almost everything here just misses the point. Beyond that, bear in mind that this is still a philosophical theory, one that has a scientific future. The only thing that makes it interesting is its implications.
I asked a series of questions (indicated by question marks). I was asking for clarification, most specifically, of the visual field, it’s edge, and the relationship to the “information horizon.”
I began by noting I found “much” of it too jargon-ridden to follow, then I asked specific questions about the parts that seemed most clear to me (ok, technically I began with a joke spoofing my own literal-mindedness).
“Since the visual field is the primary way we ‘envisage’ perspective, I asked myself what could neurostructurally account for the peculiar structure of the visual field. The most difficult-to-fathom thing about our visual field, I realized, is the way our periphery fades into ‘edgeless oblivion.’ It’s neurostructural correlate, one can assume, is simply the point at which the information available to integration runs out–an information horizon.”
Perhaps you mean something different, but the visual field is a term of art in vision science, denoting the region where incident photons can strike responsive regions of the retina. Did you mean something else?
No snark – My questions about the structure of the retina and visual cortex were attempts to see if that’s what you meant by a “neurostructural” account of the way our periphery (again, in vision science a term of art for the edges of the retina, and the corresponding edges of the visual field).
What, precisely, is intended by the “phenomenal aspect” of the margin? I just don’t know what you mean, here.
Charity, huh?
If you don’t want to answer my questions, you’re under no obligations to do so. It’s your blog.
But please don’t tell me to ask questions in the context of not answering the ones I have asked.
Besides…
“It seems to me that this is an empirical question, and I invite anyone in the sciences reading this to come up with possible ways this can be empirically pursued.”
Like, say, someone who works in systems and computational neuroscience?
I outlined how the edges of this Problem are being pursued with reference to blindsight, links to online courses on information theory where you can learn about “second order information”.
No points for charity, huh?
I take your point about a “philosophical theory” and a “scientific future.” My argument is that there’s no line that connects them, nor will there be. I recommend the scientific present nibbling on the edges of this problem already.
Apologies for playing rough, though.
No, I’m claiming the point is pointless. I’m claiming that qualia is a religious concept, and this is an argument about doctrine.
(I had written a longer post, but clicked it into oblivion by accident).
I am not trying to “get very far” with these questions – I am arguing that these questions will not take anyone very far, because they are poorly posed.
It’s navelgazing – some people like their navels. I get that. I have no issue with how people entertain themselves. But I reject the notion that this is a Serious Philosophical Issue, and don’t consider the fact that some people take it seriously as evidence that it is.
Assume monkeys can be trained to indicate perceptual shifts for bistable images like the Necker Cube. If I can predict what the monkey will report that it sees, when the stimulus is constant, would that address the issues you feel I’ve elided?
So you reject something you openly admit you don’t understand?
SNAP!
I’m going A.J. Ayers on this one.
True, false, and….?
You are! And remember what happened to him: he devised a theory of meaning that, by his own criteria, was meaningless!
In the interests of charity (which I think is a stretch for the internet, but let’s better angel this, shall we?)…
I fully concede that I’ve made my point in a needlessly dickish way. However, it’s hard to be earnestly dismissive. It just feels wrong, somehow.
I genuinely do not share some of the intuitions that seem to motivate the belief that there is a hard problem at all (I am not alone in this, c.f. Dennett). I don’t find it odd that I can’t see the back of my head, let’s say. Why should we not be blind to having a brain, much as we are to having a spleen? Does my enteric nervous system have a rich mental life I don’t share?
This is an occupational hazard – if someone makes an argument that we can never objectively study something, my reaction is simply: “Well, fuck that then.” This emperor seems naked to me.
I frankly don’t see that there are any implications (is it an argument about animal rights? artificial intelligence?). I think I must have a different utility criterion. We won’t be curing philosophical zombies when we “solve” this problem. But it seems to me that anyone who’s gotten blackout drunk has snuck up on the issue, a bit.
And honestly – do the arguments for qualia on the Wikipedia page not seem moronic? They all, in some way, presuppose the falsity of eliminative materialism as part of the premises.
Does that make me an atheist among believers, or a chemist among alchemists?
p.s. I have reread many of the arguments for qualia. Consider it penance.
I’m a tough old cookie, ohlo! I just like to agree about what is being disagreed about. All I resent is the feeling of typing for no reason.
The fact is that it feels wrong to me as well! It would appease my philosophical vanity to be proven right, but that’s it. The rest of it just makes be want to drown myself in my bathtub.
For me when it comes to philosophy I try to only be dismissive of the committment to the claim. One of the things that makes this particular claim so ‘philosophically radical’ is that it does what Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, Augustine, Aristotle, McTaggart, and a host of others have down – argue the shape and constitution of the now in a way possessing farreaching philosophical implications – in a manner that brain science should be able to answer in the near future.
BBT isn’t at all friendly to qualia, I don’t think. But it doesn’t categorically rule them out. The thing to remember about Dennett’s qualia eliminitivism is that it is philosophical through and through. His arguments against qualia, I actually see as arguments for BBT! The difference is, I think BBT explains why qualia should pose such philosophical problems in the first place.
But you do realize that, by your own criterion, you should be every bit as dismissive of your stance against qualia as any other ‘merely philosophical’ argument? Your responses abound with philosophical guesses, ohlo! None of know what the fuck we’re talking about here, which is why the best way to proceed is to get as good a sense of the position as possible first. Let’s just go one question at a time.
So, what is it that you don’t understand about the visual field (as opposed to the field of vision)? You seem to presume that it assumes the ‘reality of qualia, which is false.
Like @rsbakker, I too agree that dualist explanations for qualia feel wrong — I’d go further to suggest they’re incoherent. But this doesn’t mean we have to assert qualia are a mere myth. I think one can go quite a ways towards attempting to explain WHY we feel qualia are real (or most people feel they are real) — in a purely monist view of the universe (I call myself “monist” rather than “materialist” because to my mind “materialism” tends to imply a restriction on the possible models of the universe which might be considered valid, something which I think is just another form of metaphysical superstition. For all we know the “material world” could have many radically bizarre properties — we already know it is quite bizarre, and it could be far more bizarre than we’ve ever imagined. For instance, I’m not certain that mental phenomena might not also include things like quantum microtubule collapse or other bizarre nonlocal phenomena or who knows what else — but such things would still fit within a monist picture of the world.) In other words, without abandoning monism, can one start to account for why human beings think the sentence “I feel like I am seeing” makes sense? Can one account for the fact that we seem to have this impression of being a “self”? I think it is, in fact, possible to begin to take a stab at these problems, so one need not simply assert by fiat that qualia are a non-problem, but rather one can come up with models which might begin to explain WHY we think and talk as though we have qualia, as though sentences about qualia mean something, and why we think we experience a unified now (the binding problem), and so on.
This is one of the rare times when I think I’ve actually agreed with everything in a communication this long! I too take monism as a posit, while remaining agnostic on materialism – on as many metaphysical commitments as I can, actually. Same with consciousness: we’re just picking the paint off the brain. The same goes for qualia, any account that explains them away without explaining why so many find them so compelling is insufficient.
For me this all just follows from Theoretical Incompetence (TI), the fact that we’re so bad at theoretical reasoning outside the sciences, and the way cognition is prone to close down on possibilities as a result.
philosophy based on “thought experiments” is playing the piano wearing oven mitts.
“But you do realize that, by your own criterion, you should be every bit as dismissive of your stance against qualia as any other ‘merely philosophical’ argument?”
of course – the only way to win is not to play. i’ve been consistent on this point (i.e. the pointlessness of this). but as my roommate in college once said, “sometimes you have to beat a dead horse just to convince someone else that they can’t ride it.”
i had thought, having taken “philosophy of consciousness” in college, that it might be interesting to revisit some of these issues. it seems there’s been no progress since.
“So, what is it that you don’t understand about the visual field (as opposed to the field of vision)? You seem to presume that it assumes the ‘reality of qualia, which is false.”
no. i presume that when we see red, certain neurons fire in certain patterns, full stop. the rest is nonsense, as A.J. would say.
i was trying to get a sense of whether you knew anything about the neural basis of the visual field, and whether that knowledge is in any way relevant to your notion of “perceptual oblivion” and the “information horizon”, but i couldn’t seem to get that across.
my argument remains that if by doing so (introducing what i see as facts that predict the relevant facets of perceptual experience), i am “missing the point”, then there isn’t one (i.e., philosophy is a wank) worth pursuing, much as i concluded in college.
i am sorry if you feel i have wasted your time. i certainly feel i have wasted mine.
there is no reason for further typing, as you say.
I’ll put my cards on the table: in my view, qualia are likely to be a kind of meta-phenomenon — consciousness in general, made up of many layers upon layers of feedback loops of information flow (a la Gregory Bateson, every new layer creates a new logical level of abstraction). Thus, it is quite possible to talk about “feeling like I am seeing” because we in fact DO have introspective access to our own mental functioning in the form of self-referential feedback loops. This is of course an undeveloped intuition, but I believe it has to be something along these lines.
Thus, a machine that simply recognizes faces, say, would not “feel” anything when it is recognizing faces — but you could, if I am right, build a machine that “feels” itself think or perceive, as it were. It would have to be a hell of a lot more complex than the machines we currently have built, capable of self-referential internal representations.
But if I am correct, your idea that the “feeling of seeing red” is merely activation patterns in the visual cortex would simply be wrong. I really think many people thinking about these issues have spent far too little time thinking about how mental processes have to work (in terms of comparing earlier and later information in causal feedback loops a la Gregory Bateson).
i wrote: “i presume that when we see red, certain neurons fire in certain patterns, full stop.” i very purposefully did not write the “feeling of seeing red”.
i give up. again.
I’m sorry, ohlo, but I’m not sure what’s gone wrong. It seems like you’re saying you don’t need to understand the view to know it’s bullshit. It also seems like you’re saying that your (very controversial) philosophical view is true, end of story, so discussion is useless. I’m trying here man.
I’m familiar with all the neurophysiology of vision you’ve brought up: I just don’t see it’s relevance to the thesis. Was it just to test me?
But just to spare you future difficulties: AJ’s theory of nonsense is nonsense, according to AJ’s theory of nonsense – this is why he’s famous: as a kind of poster boy for performative contradiction, not because anyone serious actually buys what he says. I don’t think you’re doing yourself any favours citing him.
fine. you win.
your painting really does look exactly like a real unicorn.
The painting you can’t see? What’s going on, ohlo?
i see it just fine – i just don’t “feel” like i really see it, ya’know?
i am starting to seriously consider the possibility that i am a philosophical zombie.
(don’t ask me what it feels like to be one, though, because i’m drawing, like, a total blank).
Note to the Author/Marketer (just so you don’t confuse resignation for rancor):
i will be sending The Prince of Nothing to a very good friend of mine who will be in prison through the Christmas Hollydaze.
top prison reading recommendation? that’s not nothing.
>i very purposefully did not write the “feeling of seeing red”
Yes, but your assertion doesn’t explain why people think the phrase “the feeling of seeing red” has a meaning. I think it’s possible to explain why this is, you simply assert, in a circular manner, that it is meaningless. Reminds me a lot of the behaviorists who asserted that it was meaningless to talk about internal cognitive states — until experimental evidence came in which made the behaviorist position rather untenable.
Again, I think you’re engaging in wishful thinking — because you can’t think of an explanation for why people would claim they can talk meaningfully about qualia, you wish that the phenomenon is meaningless.
But there are lots of other questions beyond qualia — for instance, why do we think we are unitary selves, why do we think we experience the “now”, and so on — people certainly do talk about such experiences, whether one thinks such talk is meaningless or not. I think it’s possible to investigate why this might be, neurophysiologically and in terms of computational considerations.
“Yes, but your assertion doesn’t explain why people think the phrase “the feeling of seeing red” has a meaning.”
exactly – i don’t think it’s worth explaining. you do. it’s hard for me to not-discuss it by discussing it, yes?
“Again, I think you’re engaging in wishful thinking — because you can’t think of an explanation for why people would claim they can talk meaningfully about qualia, you wish that the phenomenon is meaningless.”
i would say that I think the people who think they have talked meaningfully about qualia are wrong. they will obviously disagree. i can think of explanations for why they disagree, few of them flattering (e.g., Chalmers is a dipshit).
“I think it’s possible to investigate why this might be, neurophysiologically and in terms of computational considerations.”
maybe, but there seems to be no interest in discussing cases where people have done so with the rigor that would qualify it as science. i find the foofyness of the armchair version aversive.
no one is under any obligation to convince me this matters rather than simply discussing it with the people who do.
“sometimes chocolate tastes like blueberries to me! philosophy!”
go nuts.
>i don’t think it’s worth explaining. you do.
That doesn’t matter! I’m not saying that we have different *opinions* about the worthiness of this topic; I’m saying the fact that you don’t have an explanation for why people say things like this is evidence that you’re wrong. In other words, if you were right, then there would be no reason why anyone would ever say things like “I know what it feels like to hear”. The fact that they DO say things like this is something which ought to be explained by any sensible account of cognition.
>who think they have talked meaningfully about qualia are wrong
I’m not referring to philosophers — I’m referring to everyday people. People, in general, think statements such as “This is what it feels like to see/hear/etc.” mean something. Only certain philosophers (such as yourself) attempt to convince yourselves that this sentence actually doesn’t mean anything at all. But I think the *reason* you think this is simply because you’ve bought into an assumption that the dualists make, e.g., that qualia would have to be generated by “mind stuff” — i.e., that ideas about qualia (or that of the “self” or the “now” — even more complex concepts which are undoubtedly used by people in language and thought) could only be valid if a religious “mind stuff” actually existed.
But that’s not the case. There’s no need for that assumption; that “mind stuff” is somehow implicated in concepts such as these. You’re taking, essentially, a religious argument and applying it to models of cognition — and saying, well, if I don’t believe in this religious idea, then an entire class of concepts (which *ordinary* people use all the time), must be meaningless.
That is, essentially, a religious point of view, not an empirical one. One which is wrong, for the same reasons dualism is wrong (it’s also a view which makes incorrect predictions, predictions which are in direct contradiction to observation). What I’m arguing for (and I think @rsbakker is making a parallel argument) is a more scientific view of the world — one which doesn’t leap to religious conclusions about the nature of mind.
first, i very much resent being called a philosopher.
touche’.
my whole point has been “misosophy” if anything.
i suppose it is kinda nice to be told why i think the things i do, what i “wish”, my “*reasons*”. it saves me the trouble.
thanks for taking the time
now, THIS….if you’re just trying to wind me up, is absolutely stellar:
“What I’m arguing for (and I think @rsbakker is making a parallel argument) is a more scientific view of the world — one which doesn’t leap to religious conclusions about the nature of mind.”
i’m taking a moment to marvel at it….it really ices this particular cake. i must have passed through some sort of epistemological wormhole…
i’m starting to think this is a bizarre instantiation of the anthropic principle. nonconscious beings, i assume, don’t discuss the fact of not being conscious.
for the record, though, the consensus view from the scientific world is that this is all the worst kind of horseshit. that’s why i’m exercised by it.
>I must have passed through some sort of epistemological wormhole
Your position is religious in that you agree with dualists that subjective references could only have meaning if dualism is true. I (along with most scientists) think that phenomena of mind can’t possibly be explained by a dualist view — I think dualism *can’t* be correct, not that it might be correct but isn’t. I think a single, monist world has to underlie all behavior and phenomena; you seem to think certain behavior, because it is for some reason associated in your mind with dualism, can’t have an explanation because it is meaningless or some other silliness. If it were meaningless, it wouldn’t have evolved as a behavior (while it’s difficult to argue about the “reality” of subjective experience, it’s certainly not difficult to acknowledge that people behave and use language as though internal cognitive experiences exist — and your picture simply doesn’t have a way of explaining or even predicting this.)
>the consensus view from the scientific world
Haha, that’s truly absurd. This is partly why I called you a “philosopher” earlier — what “scientific world” are you talking about? My own academic training was in physics, I have many friends doing cognitive science, computational neuroscience, experimental psychology, and they either don’t think about these questions very deeply, or if they do, they certainly haven’t adopted your fringe position. You are espousing a view which Daniel Dennett puts forward (a philosopher, not a scientist), but as I said before, I think it’s a view mostly only philosophers (or people once trained in philosophy) would take up — the rest of us don’t hold such dogmatic views (certainly not views which are so heavily steeped in dualist assumptions). The binding problem, the problem of consciousness, etc., are perfectly legitimate topics in neuroscience as it is practiced and discussed by scientists — I’m sure you can find some neuroscientists with a Dennett viewpoint, but you can find many who either don’t think about this stuff or talk about the binding problem without any difficulty whatsoever.
Identifying mental states with activation states cannot be correct, and you can see this is a fairly trivial (and entirely materialist) way. Suppose a “mental state” were simply a snapshot of the activation of neurons at a specific instant in time. Let’s further say you could reproduce this, in principle, in neurons in a lab.
Let’s further say that these neurons were all separated out, one neuron per petri dish, so to speak. You have some giant lab with billions of neurons, and you then activate these billions of neurons so that at a given instant, they’re in the same activation states as neurons in your earlier snapshot.
Would these billions of neurons be in the “same mental state” as the brain? Clearly, the answer is no. This is even more obvious if you consider some sort of biosynthetic brain where a large number of neurons in the artificial brain were physically identical. Thus, the billions of neurons might contain a large subset which could be permuted at will. Clearly, permuting actual neurons in a living brain would scramble that brain so the “mental state” would have to be quite different — but there’s no way to really distinguish the permuted states in this “petri dish brain”.
Thinking a bit more carefully about this, it’s obvious that what we mean by “mental state” must be something that includes the causal connections between prior and later states. I.e., the “spiral” that @rsbakker alludes to in his post. Mental states are spread out in time and space… part of a causal spiral of connectivity… not merely snapshots of physical states at a given instant. Mental state = brain state MUST be wrong.
If you really think carefully about this, it becomes obvious “why” we think of mental states as non-physical; because they are in the trivial sense that they’re really second-order relations between states set up in a causal feedback network of some kind. In other words, mental states are related to information processes which are smeared out in time and space, they’re not snapshots of physical states, though they don’t depend on anything non-physical, in this picture. No need to posit dualism here, but the trivial mind state=physical state is trivially wrong.
Once you start to think about this carefully it becomes possible to see that while qualia, the “now”, the “self” are in many ways illusory (there we agree), they’re not meaningless, at all. They make perfect sense as phenomena that one could expect cognitive processes to start to talk about and use internally for symbolic self-representation. No need to adopt the religious dualist picture at all, either to “believe” that qualia are what they appear to be or to nonsensically insist that people are uttering nonsense syllables when they refer to it.
i can’t wait to see what my straw man does next!
“Let’s further say you could reproduce this, in principle, in neurons in a lab.”
no. there is no reason to concede this, given what we know. this is precisely where the problems start. this is where the arguments in favor of qualia go so horribly awry, as i’ve suggested in prior posts.
you are correct in noting that few scientists think about these things, because it strikes them as a waste of time (perhaps “horseshit” is too strong, but at least one does. is “fluff” ok?). that’s pretty much all i’ve said. the dualist view you claim i have (but don’t) isn’t relevant.
it’s also why your “argument” based on giant fake brain is a waste of time, and contributes nothing to our understanding of actual mental states in actual brains.
…”part of a causal spiral of connectivity”
this is nonsense. in what sense is it “spiral” exactly? are you still using the sense of “spiral” implied by the analogy to the circle (i.e., a form that can be mistaken for something else from a different perspective)?
what you see as “dogmatism” is more properly “agnosticism”, and it’s simply this – talk about “qualia” and related topics, using the armchair thought experiments typical of analytic philosophy (including yours) is a waste of time, and won’t teach us anything meaningful about how consciousness arises in actual neural systems.
nothing in that commits me to a dualist position. i think i was unclear in using the term “meaningless”, and you interpreted it as “lacking interpretable semantic content” when i was making a judgement of value – that what philosophers of mind have contributed to the topic is worthless. is that more clear?
“If you really think carefully about this, it becomes obvious “why” we think of mental states as non-physical; because they are in the trivial sense that they’re really second-order relations between states set up in a causal feedback network of some kind. In other words, mental states are related to information processes which are smeared out in time and space, they’re not snapshots of physical states, though they don’t depend on anything non-physical, in this picture. No need to posit dualism here, but the trivial mind state=physical state is trivially wrong.”
again, this just seems like blather to me. “second order” is what sense exactly? is “causal feedback” a necessary and sufficient condition for mental states, or are other “network” properties relevant? what would “non-causal” feedback even mean?
you’re trying to dig a hole with a noodle. i started by saying “stop digging for gold there, that won’t work. we have better tools over here in the scientists’ tool shed, and there’s reason to believe that your treasure map is fake.”
now i’m just pointing and laughing.
“what “scientific world” are you talking about?”
neuroscientists, mostly. perhaps i should have been more specific. cognitive scientists may go for this sort of thing, or AI researchers. fair point.
“Once you start to think about this carefully it becomes possible to see that while qualia, the “now”, the “self” are in many ways illusory (there we agree)…”
no, we don’t agree. i don’t even know why you think i think these things are “illusory” (i think bakker may think that). i don’t think about them in those terms, which is the point i keep trying and failing to make.
you’re not explaining something i don’t know, you’re performing the inutility of discussing these issues in these ways.
however, i should note that i do believe you are trying to help, as you see it, which is a generous impulse, and i commend it.
accept that i am “beyond help” in this regard.
>because it strikes them as a waste of time
>neuroscientists, mostly
That’s not the case, either. You’re simply projecting your own proclivities on other people. As you ought to know, consciousness (explaining it, trying to understand it) is a very active area of discussion and research in neuroscience. If anything, it’s one of the more active areas.
>analytic philosophy
As I said before, my background is technical: math, physics, computer science. I’ll certainly agree that analytic philosophy is for the most part nonsense (to the extent I’ve been unfortunate enough to be exposed to it, that’s been my experience as well). I can understand, if you were trained in analytic philosophy, being traumatized by the experience. I certainly sympathize: it’s pretty much filled with rambling, incoherent, illogical reasoning. Like many trauma victims, however, you’re overreacting to past abuse, so to speak…
>”agnostic”
Here’s what you said, earlier:
“Now draw me the spectral absorption curves for his cone opsins, and a wiring diagram of retinal ganglion cells with either red-green or blue-yellow color opponency for that person that makes all that work.”
You went on to talk further about signal processing, activation patterns, and so on, as though this were relevant to the question being discussed here. But, as I attempted to explain in my argument, the details of signal processing aren’t the point, because activation patterns are not the source of qualia.
>no. there is no reason to concede this, given what we know.
Oh, give me a break. Of course there’s a reason to concede this. The argument does not depend on how practically difficult it would be to set this up.
Similarly, the argument is precisely the same if you’re talking about, for instance, a computer simulation of a brain. Let’s say the operation of a brain is governed by classical physics — it’s a solid result from computability theory that if that were the case, then it could be simulated on a sufficiently powerful Turing machine in polynomial time to arbitrary precision. Instead of talking about isolated petri dishes, you can talk about isolated simulated neurons which you coerce into a given state.
All of this is patently obvious.
>this is nonsense. in what sense is it “spiral” exactly? are you still
>using the sense of “spiral” implied by the analogy to the circle
>(i.e., a form that can be mistaken for something else from a
>different perspective)?
Oh come on, you seem incapable of thinking metaphorically here. The point is quite simple: the causal relationships in any cognitive system have to be at least circular, or more complex. But it’s more akin to a spiral, because once the information has traveled around the circuit, it’s arriving at a later time. This metaphor applies to pretty much any feedback system, from a simple thermostat to a human being. Obviously the analogy to a spiral is highly inaccurate when you get to the complexity of the neural network of a human being, but the point remains that what constitutes mental events has to do with comparing earlier and later states; it doesn’t inhere in just a frozen snapshot of a brain or computer memory or whatever it is you’re using.
Obviously I’m speaking rather briefly here; the basic ideas are much more fully worked out in Bateson’s _Mind and Nature_, which is an attempt to come up with a materialist explanation for mental phenomena.
some things need to be corrected, here:
“That’s not the case, either. You’re simply projecting your own proclivities on other people.”
no, YOU. heh.
As you ought to know, consciousness (explaining it, trying to understand it) is a very active area of discussion and research in neuroscience. If anything, it’s one of the more active areas.”
at best, it’s a subset of cognitive neuroscience. again, it’s critical to distinguish between “perceptual experience” (the plain-ole’ “i see red”) and the “qualia”-version (“i feel that i see red”). the former, yeah, we talk about it. the latter, we ignore.
really, though, a fraction of a percent of neuroscientists study this. i promise – take a random walk through the poster sessions at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, and you may not see one for DAYS. i know this is true because i did so a few weeks ago.
now, if you mean research on perception, or include “pain” as a “mental state”, then yes, absolutely. but none of them care about “feeling like i am feeling pain.” it’s just pain.
it may seem like one of the “more active areas” because it’s what you yourself read about, and what appears in the popular press (ion channel biophysics, not so much). most of neuroscience is cellular and molecular, and systems and sensory neuroscience deals with this subject almost not at all, at least not in the sense being discussed above.
“I’ll certainly agree that analytic philosophy is for the most part nonsense”
PROGRESS!
“Oh, give me a break. Of course there’s a reason to concede this. The argument does not depend on how practically difficult it would be to set this up.”
the utility of the argument, i would argue, very much does. the scientific take – the one requiring a testable hypothesis – is that if the experiment is so difficult it can’t be done, then do something else.
“Let’s say the operation of a brain is governed by classical physics — ”
nope. again, what i am insisting on is the fact that these facile exercises in “in principle” this, and “given” that are assuming premises that still need to be examined. tell me why i can ignore quantum mechanical descriptions here. you are dramatically underestimating the stochasticity in the response of even a single neuron, from trial to trial, for a constant stimulus under laboratory conditions. but sure, let’s use classical physics to model vesicles shooting across 100 trillion synapses.
the computer you would need would likely have to be bigger than the existing universe. the only scientifically sound response here, as i’ve argued is, “no. that’s a waste of time.”
the problem is that without knowing how neural systems give rise to consciousness, it’s impossible to know whether the differences in the instantiation are determinative with respect to the manifestation of consciousness. the analogy to turing machines doesn’t really add anything, because you can’t prove that human brains fall into the requisite computational class.
“Oh come on, you seem incapable of thinking metaphorically here.”
not incapable, unwilling. i continue to argue that these and similar metaphors are too loose to have value (c.f. digging, noodle).
(I should clarify: when I say activation patterns are not the source of qualia, I mean that they can’t be equivalent to qualia. Qualia and other similar “subjective” phenomena have to be part of a smeared-out time series/comparison/difference computational process; the details of a specific signal processing circuit aren’t relevant, because the “feeling of seeing red” isn’t simply a snapshot of the activation patterns of the visual cortex.)
I don’t see how this follows. The ‘activation pattern’ in the brain of a person ‘seeing red’ is different than the ‘activation pattern’ in the brain of a person ‘feeling of seeing red.’ The latter activation pattern (whether in a brain, a billion petri dishes or a computer program) should indeed cause the person/petri-complex/computer to act ‘as if’ it were experiencing the qualia of seeing red.
I would further assert that disagreement with this conclusion can only be sustained by an appeal to duality . . .
Oh, lest I forget — this is really the statement that illustrates the problem:
>No, I’m claiming the point is pointless. I’m claiming that qualia
>is a religious concept, and this is an argument about doctrine.
It’s as though we were talking about lightning, and the traditional theory of lightning was that it was sent from the Heavens by Zeus. The fact that this is the traditional theory to explain lightning doesn’t make lightning a “religious concept”. Lightning has a scientific explanation, and so should qualia or any other subjective phenomenon which people report having.
I think I’d address this in an annoying middle ground. First
Thus, it is quite possible to talk about “feeling like I am seeing”
This is full of semantically ambiguous fluff. The word ‘feeling’? Can that get much more vague?
Take this as an example: We sit someone down, without saying anything, in a seat with a screen in front of them and three buttons, marked ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’. The screen shows red, green or blue for several seconds, randomly. The reason we haven’t said anything is to get language out of this – lets say the dude is in the seat and skip why he does the following (we can all make up an excuse for why he might), he eventually hits the button marked red when he sees the colour red. Hits the button marked blue when he sees blue. Until he gets bored or we finish and pay him his money.
Okay, so that correlation that happens (or let’s assume). Why then are we investigating someones spoken language, of something like “I feel I’m seeing red”? Why are we investigating something which…lets put it charitably, is a fairly ‘creative’ medium of mutual signaling? I mean, I’m practically saying there’s a difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. Why look at people talking the talk, when they tend to be semantically vague and downright…creative…in how they talk?
Ochlocrat,
Also, what is intended by this: “The most difficult-to-fathom thing about our visual field, I realized, is the way our periphery fades into ‘edgeless oblivion.’”
Why is that hard to fathom? To what extent is the phenomenon explained by the 1) differential spatial frequency resolution present in the retina; 2) the differential representation of the central and peripheral visual field in cortex?
You have to think less of it as vision fading to nothing and more about YOU fading to edgless oblivion. Where do you end?
If your vision fades off into edgeless oblivion, what does that suggest about the nature of your mind? A similar structure? Or do you just want to talk about eyes? Because clearly there isn’t just a set of eyes involved – even a zombie has a brain. Or two, if it’s come across a snack!
On the other matter unless I’m not getting Mitsu right, it seems like a simple component isn’t being described.
Lets describe an input output
A——–B
The big line between input A and output B is important. Because were going to Add C, which like a spy, taps into the line and listens in on the input, duplicating a copy of the signal for its own use.
C
/
A——–B
Okay, so you can just keep saying qualia don’t exist and it’s just an input into a system. But I’m not sure you’d argue against there being a system sampling the input lines (taking an input from an input, or even taking an input from a preprocessed input, to get complicated but more accurate). I think Mitsu is talking about that, but he keeps using the word qualia and that really doesn’t get down to the meat and bones of the matter. Too fluffy.
I dunno. At the very least, I doubt you’d argue against the idea of a system which samples input/preprocessed inputs and processes them in a different way to the usual A/B process?
Of course the formatting of my diagram goes to hell. C and it’s little tapping in line should be in the middle of A——-B, not sitting on top of A. C taps into the line.
Yes, what could it possibly mean to talk about “the feeling of seeing red” or the feeling of anything? It seems to me that the problem is that many people seem to think this is simply obvious, a given, and perhaps evidence of “mind stuff” — dualism. Others come along and think that’s nonsense, and prefer, say, eliminative materialism (Dennett).
But when I really think about what it means when I say I “feel I’m seeing red”, it’s not merely identifying a color (as though I were a simple neural network classifier) — it also is associated with other things (red “feels” warm, for instance). Red is associated also with many other things in our culture (stop lights, warning signs). Furthermore I can remember seeing red — I can call up past instances of seeing red and reproduce them in some way (most likely by reactivating some of the subsystems involved when I actually see red). Each of these associations themselves have associations, so when I see red, I might subtly have a feeling of — Santa? molten lava? Hot peppers? My body feeling warm? And so on.
Artists, for instance, call red a “warm” color and blue a “cool” color (which is ironic since that’s the opposite of what physicists would call it — red is associated with lower black body radiation temperatures, and blue with higher). I’d venture to guess that, for whatever reasons, these associations (warm and cool) are the same for most humans.
I’m not suggesting this is all there is to it, but it is at LEAST this. As human beings, when we see anything at all, a whole slew of associations happen, associations which connect to other associations and so on in a cascade, i.e., a very high dimensional space of activations, which cause further associations and so on in a complex set of ongoing feedback loops, requiring memory, etc. All of this happens pretty much automatically, without conscious direction for the most part. I think most people would agree something like this is goes on.
So to say, for instance, that “seeing red”, for human beings, is simply comprised of the activation patterns of early stages of the visual cortex — that’s obviously wrong. Much more is happening. We clearly have feedback loops on top of feedback loops — we can remember, at least in the short term, our thought process — the fact that I can even write this means I must have some introspective access to my perceptual process — more “spiral” feedback loops; i.e. I can remember that when I see red I associate it with warmth, and I can even think back on what associations I had the last time I saw red, what feelings in my body it generated, and so forth.
A simple machine that just classifies colors (i.e., a straight-through neural network with no recurrent connections and no memory, for instance) would clearly have none of this; no introspective feedback loops about its own processing, no associations with warmth or cold, no conceptual associations, no memory of even having classified anything and so forth. It would just flow the data through and give an output and that’s it. In fact, it wouldn’t even use the result of its own classification for anything — it would take a human being looking at the output to interpret it and use it for anything further.
A way to look at this isn’t “what is the feeling of seeing red”, but rather “what are the minimal functions an organism must have to generate the behavior that they would say about themselves that they feel they’re seeing red”. Listing out these functions, you have to have a system which is far, far more complex than a straight-through color classifier; it would have to have memory, introspective feedback loops, complex associations including “body sensations” and so on. Simple machines don’t have these functions. However, unlike dualists, I would argue that it should be possible in principle to build a complex machine that would be able to generate this behavior, and who would we to be to say it is wrong? It seems to me such a machine would have every “right” to say it feels itself seeing as we do.
@unJon: I don’t think so. The point of my thought experiment is that there’s no meaning to an activation pattern out of context (i.e., frozen in time). Again, it’s simpler to think about an artificial neural network, because these neurons are “pure”, so to speak. Suppose we build an ANN that is designed to recognize color (this isn’t quite a trivial as it may seem, since color in human vision isn’t simply recognizing a frequency of light, but it depends on the ambient light, i.e., a color which appears red in one picture may appear a different color when the surrounding colors change — color detection is context-dependent.) Now with an ANN the “neurons” can be made to be exactly identical; thus it’s easy to imagine building an ANN such that all the neurons are interchangeable; the only thing that distinguishes them are their activation levels and connection weights. For the sake of imagination, let’s make these things physical devices, i.e., they’re realized in hardware (it doesn’t change the logical structure of the argument but it aids intuition I think).
Now, imagine we train this network to distinguish colors, red, green, blue, and so on. An activation pattern of this network which corresponds to “red” would make sense when the network is placed in front of an image with some appropriate optical sensors or a digital camera input. But a randomized, permuted network where individual elements happened to be in the same states as elements in the ANN would have no such interpretation. Since all the nodes of this ANN are identical, you could permute the separated elements if they were all isolated — but obviously permuting the nodes would destroy the “meaning” of the activation pattern if you were talking about a real ANN set up to detect color, just as scrambling the neurons in a human brain would do considerable damage…
I think this makes the point very clear: mental process requires context. You have to think about the temporal flow of information over a period of time, and causal connections over a period of time. Ultmately for mental process to have any “use” or function or “meaning” you have to consider the context, the way information flows, even how it comes in from the “world”, goes through the cognizing system, and flows back out. For anything like “feeling” there has to be memory, recurrent flows of information, and so on, the causal links end up being circular (spiral) or more complex, by necessity.
I want to add this, which just occurred to me to mention: I think Bateson’s point, and it’s a point rarely appreciated by many, is that we tend to think of the world as “states of affairs” which inhere in frozen snapshots in time, and his view is that is the main reason why we have difficulty thinking about mental processes, which inherently are information processes with feedback loops of varying complexity. In other words, he aimed to demonstrate that anything which looks like a computational process of some kind has to have feedback loops in it, i.e., to provide meaning or context, as a necessary condition. Thus while we intuitively model the world in a kind of third-person way as snapshots of “states”, when it comes to mental process, you really need to think about the entire system in context, with flows of information and comparisons of states (differences).
Either you just pulled a bait and switch, or I misunderstood you the first time. If your thought experiment is isomporphic to: (a) put me in front of red, so that my brain shows the “I feel red” activation pattern; (b) freeze time; (c) randomly reconnect my neurons so that the same neurons are activated, but the structure of what neuron connects to what is completely different; (d) unfreeze time; (e) deduce whether new brain “feels red”?
I guess, well, duh? Of course structure is an essential quality. >_>
Now run the complementary thought experiment: (a) put me in front of red, so that my brain shows the “I feel red” activation pattern; (b) freeze time; (c) clone my neurons (down to the position/momentum combo of the last atom); (d) organize them in a structure that matches my brain; (e) activate the ones that are activated in the freeze frame; (f) unfreeze time; (g) deduce whether new brain “feels red”.
If you think this new brain doesn’t feel red, you are a dualist.
>Of course structure is an essential quality
What I’m trying to get at is to think a lot more carefully about what we mean by “structure”. Think about what this means — structure really means causal connections between neurons. I mean, if you just froze a brain with the neurons in a particular neurochemical state, somehow (or, let’s say you froze a computer simulation of a brain in a particular state), in what sense would it matter what the “structure” was? It wouldn’t matter at all.
The point of “structure” is that there is a network of causal connections which allows information to flow and be compared over time, and to be coupled with the “outside world” so to speak (I don’t think it’s possible to actually strictly separate “inside” and “outside” here, really, but that’s a different point). In other words, what I’m saying is that cognition is always a process, and there really isn’t any meaning to the idea of a snapshot of a mental state. Mental states, so to speak, always require at least a little bit of time.
For instance, suppose I were to modify the thought experiment somewhat — instead of randomizing the structure of the simulated brain, I were simply to randomize the time sequence of events. So, at one instant I put all the neurons into a specific activation state, then in the next time step (let’s say we’re simulating this on a computer), I put them into another state from a completely different snapshot of the brain activation, and so on, indefinitely. So you just have a random series of essentially causally-disconnected activation states for this simulated brain. Would you still say this “brain” were going through a whole slew of “mental states”? Or would you say this was nothing “mental” going on at all?
What I’m saying is the idea that a “mental state” is a snapshot of a physical state is itself a kind of dualist assumption — it implies that there is “mind stuff” that can be in a particular “state” — I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think that’s an intuitive mistake which arises because we are inappropriately using our intuitive picture about the physical world, where we do think things have certain states which can be captured in snapshots — and applying it to the realm of cognition, which I think is fundamentally an *information feedback process*.
There is no “mind stuff”. Mind stuff != physical stuff, whether it’s dualist physical stuff or neuron activation states. I’m saying mental activity can’t really be described in terms of “states” at all, really — you really only have mental processes, and you can talk loosely about the process in a short time span, but not at an instant.
I think were making new posts rather than using the reply function (which can get quite scatty for discussion purposes, I’d agree), so I’ll use new replies.
Mitsu,
So to say, for instance, that “seeing red”, for human beings, is simply comprised of the activation patterns of early stages of the visual cortex — that’s obviously wrong. Much more is happening. We clearly have feedback loops on top of feedback loops
The thing is, your starting to create a defintion who’s extent is dictated by the cascade of processes your trying to encapsulate and define. The way your looking at it, the process can expand your definition to whatever size, because were not just to follow the core vision process, there’s another process after that. But that process activates another process, so that must be…wait, that activates another process, so that’s part of the def…wait, it called another process! And so on. And in each individual, the number of cascading processes is going to be more or less than in others, and the types of processes called often differing in individuals.
If we were looking at a computer, are we trying to work out the hardware, or the software? Because trying to treat both as the same thing leads to the software calling more processes, which we then treat those called processes as if that’s a hard part of the computer. But it’s not hardware. You can have ten computers with identical hardware but very different software in each. You wont get down to figuring what that base hardware is, if you keep following the process cascade of the very different software in each comp. It will just distract and confuse your investigation.
Worse, were talking about software which is able to write more software. I’d fear asking someone there feelings is simply a prompt for more software to be written, which would then be spoken, which may prompt more software to be written…etc. That’s why I gave my example test, to try and clamp down on that growth process.
What I’m basically saying is that the problem of qualia I think ought to be rephrased, as I said before, into the problem of explaining the behavior that people think it means something when they say they “feel” themselves seeing things. Obviously as @ochlocrat keeps shouting, it’s really complicated! We don’t have a detailed model of it! Etc. And of course the actual situation in human beings must be really complicated. But I totally disagree with him that this means we can’t say anything useful at all about the problem.
The first thing I’m trying to argue is that eliminative materialism MUST be false. It cannot be the case that mental states = physical states of the brain. That just misunderstands the nature of cognitive processing. The whole dualist/materialist debate I think comes down to this fundamental misunderstanding, in my view. Dualists think, physical stuff can’t have mental states! But then they come up with bizarre arguments that really make no sense at all — I classify Searle’s Chinese Room argument as one of the senseless mistaken arguments along these lines, as well as many similar arguments (such as the idea of replacing every neuron with a person in China with a telephone, and so on). But all these arguments do is replace a physical system with another physical system which seems outlandish, but if you buy materialism any of these systems ought to be thought to have mental functioning in some sense of the word.
I think my arguments, above, are far more logically compelling. There’s no way eliminative materialism can be correct, because it assumes that there is such a thing as a “mental state”. I don’t think there is. At best there’s a brief time window which can be cut out of a process. It’s quite possible that we record our own mental processing as though it were a series of “states” — i.e., at this moment I felt happy, then I saw red, and so on. But to think clearly about cognition you have to, as I keep saying, consider time. This is I believe a relatively universal argument that doesn’t depend on the specific details of how the cognitive computation is carried out, or whether it involves quantum mechanics or whatever else.
Once you get past this idea of “mental state” = “physical state” I believe it’s possible to make reasonable guesses which could eventually lead to testable predictions. For instance, why do we use the word “feel” to describe feeling like we’re seeing something? I suspect it’s an analogy to feeling affect, i.e., things like emotions, or sensations in the body. However, people suffering from DPD (depersonalization disorder) report they don’t “feel” anything — they no longer experience affect. They ALSO report that they don’t feel as though they are even “there” — it’s as though their experiences are happening “to someone else”.
In other words, the behavior that philosophers attribute to qualia may simply be an analogy to things we think we “feel” in other contexts. I think when I see colors, I actually DO also “feel” something — it’s an association. And if I were suffering from DPD, that I think might eliminate the sense that I am experiencing qualia in the usual sense of the word. If we can narrow down the neurophysiological basis for DPD, we might also get at one of the mechanisms behind what people call “feeling like they’re seeing”.
Is this a noodle to dig a hole? I really don’t think so.
“What I’m basically saying is that the problem of qualia I think ought to be rephrased, as I said before, into the problem of explaining the behavior that people think it means something when they say they “feel” themselves seeing things.”
What I’m basically saying is that the problem of God’s existence ought to be rephrased, as I am saying now, into the problem of explaining the behavior that people think it means something when they say they “feel” themselves feeling the power of His Almighty presence and love.
(do you see the problem yet?)
Noodle.
>really, though, a fraction of a percent of neuroscientists study this.
You’re making a simple logical error, again. I’m claiming that questions such as the binding problem, and consciousness, and so on, are perfectly legitimate questions to most neuroscientists, as well as cognitive scientists, experimental psychologists, and so forth … many of whom I talk with, are friends of mine, and so on. it’s simply not, as you quixotically claim, considered to be “nonsense.” You seem to be claiming that the fact that most neuroscientists aren’t actively working on the problem is relevant to this — it obviously isn’t. It’s as though the fact that most physicists aren’t working on, say, branes-based cosmology means that there’s a “scientific consensus” that studying this is nonsense. There’s no such “scientific consensus”, whatsoever.
The projection you’re making is assuming that because YOU think these questions are pointless, everyone does. That’s just silly.
>“Oh, give me a break. Of course there’s a reason to concede this. The argument
>does not depend on how practically difficult it would be to set this up.”
>
>the utility of the argument, i would argue, very much does. the scientific take
>– the one requiring a testable hypothesis – is that if the experiment is so
>difficult it can’t be done, then do something else.
First of all, your assertion again makes no sense at all, logically. I’m making a universal, logical argument about the general nature of all cognitive models that are in any way based on what one might recognize as a materialist model (not that I’m a strict materialist, as I explained earlier — I’m a monist.) Of course, I was trained in physics, and without these sorts of arguments Einstein would have never come up with relativity theory.
>nope. again, what i am insisting on is the fact that these facile exercises in
>“in principle” this, and “given” that are assuming premises that still need to
>be examined. tell me why i can ignore quantum mechanical descriptions here.
>you are dramatically underestimating the stochasticity in the response of even
>a single neuron, from trial to trial, for a constant stimulus under laboratory
>conditions. but sure, let’s use classical physics to model vesicles shooting
>across 100 trillion synapses.
Again, none of this is relevant at all. My argument is against eliminative materialism, it’s not a theory of consciousness. For that purpose, none of these considerations matter whatsoever.
(In other words: my argument holds for any version of eliminative materialism, at least those based on physics, even quantum physics. I don’t need to understand how consciousness arises in detail to show that eliminative materialism must be false.)
“You’re making a simple logical error, again. I’m claiming that questions such as the binding problem, and consciousness, and so on, are perfectly legitimate questions to most neuroscientists, as well as cognitive scientists”
i understood “one of the more active areas” to be a statement about how many neuroscientists are actively working on the problem to mean anything, since that what it typically means. so of course the numbers are relevant.
“You seem to be claiming that the fact that most neuroscientists aren’t actively working on the problem is relevant to this — it obviously isn’t.”
of course it is, at least to some extent. scientists choose to work on problems they feel they can make headway on (there’s also commercial relevance, policy shaped funding realities, etc., obviously). i have heard plenty of sensory neurophysiologists express unwillingness to study “attention” because they feel it’s too poorly defined, and that it doesn’t meet their standard of rigor. with consciousness, such comments are more common, particularly the difficulty of defining it in a useful way.
for fun, i just polled my labmates (all sensory neurophysiologists) about this, and the consensus was that most hadn’t given the concept much thought. i asked “what do you think about the study of consciousness in neuroscience?”
only one (of 5) was familiar with the term “qualia”, and only he was familiar with the philosophical literature surrounding the issue. one referenced this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project
they did seem to enjoy spitballing definitions of consciousness, and trying to contrive a ranking system for levels of it. however, they generally thought that it was very difficult to define in a way to design experiments around.
the real problem here is that you continue to confuse what it is that i think is nonsense. it’s not the binding problem (though, i should note that among neuroscientists the term is more typically about binding of perceptual features within and across sensory modalities, not in the “unity of consciousness” sense), or consciousness. it’s the approach taken when talking about them in analytical philosophy, and thought experiments.
“First of all, your assertion again makes no sense at all, logically. I’m making a universal, logical argument about the general nature of all cognitive models that are in any way based on what one might recognize as a materialist model (not that I’m a strict materialist, as I explained earlier — I’m a monist.) Of course, I was trained in physics, and without these sorts of arguments Einstein would have never come up with relativity theory.”
i guess i’m not buying the idea that you’re the einstein of consciousness, despite your oft-referenced training in physics (also, this analogy to relativity theory seems flawed, like, “logically” flawed in ways having to do with testable empirical consequences).
What, you don’t buy that I’m the Einstein of consciousness? My raging ego is hurt, haha.
Part of the problem with our little debate is that you’ve shifted what you’re saying. Way above there you made claims that there’s a “scientific consensus” that studying consciousness was a waste of time, and you also made the explicit claim that “qualia is a religious concept”. It is primarily these vast overreaching statements which I am arguing against, because they’re clearly not correct — your much more limited claim that you personally believe that what analytic philosophers say about qualia or consciousness is a waste of time — that I don’t really have much objection to, since for the most part, I agree. I’ve read many absolutely horrifically illogical arguments on this topic, and the mind-body literature is rife with confused circular reasoning, etc.
But I think you’re wrong about the reason why the typical analytic philosophy thought experiment is bogus. In nearly every case, the bogosity of the thought experiment can be revealed by a careful examination of the underlying assumptions. Most of the mind-body thought experiments (Chinese Room Argument, etc.) have at their core some sort of circularity — they assume the conclusion. As you pointed out, many of the arguments for qualia simply assume the falsity of eliminative materialism as part of the argument — they are circular arguments.
But, in your rightful distaste for thought experiments, I think you’re throwing out too much. Thought experiments can be useful as metaphorical tools to help understand logical situations. The point of my argument, above, is to shine a light on a problem with the way we typically think about cognition — the point is simply to focus attention on the fact that cognitive computations, whether realized in brains or computers, only make sense when you think about them as computations across time, i.e., when there are causal connections between the cognitive apparatus and the environment which allow for temporal comparisons between “earlier” and “later” states. (I would argue, in fact, that it is these temporal comparisons which actually create the impression of time “flowing” forward — i.e., I think the arrow of time has to do with computation/cognition).
As for my claims at being the Einstein of consciousness — I have been thinking about these issues for quite a long time, I’ve studied computational neuroscience, connectionist models, theory of computation, etc.., however I’d say as I noted earlier that my thought experiments were inspired primarily by Gregory Bateson’s work which I mentioned before, as well as the work of Brian Cantwell Smith of the University of Toronto (whom I spent a weeklong seminar with) — who wrote _On the Origin of Objects_. My thought experiments, above, are my own ideas, but they just build on the work of these other folks (plus my revulsion at the poor quality of much of analytic philosophy on the subject of the mind-body problem — not that I think all philosophy is bogus, however — I think there’s a lot to be said for many philosophers, but yes, a lot of it is bogus, I agree with you there.)
What I’m basically saying is that the problem of qualia I think ought to be rephrased, as I said before, into the problem of explaining the behavior that people think it means something when they say they “feel” themselves seeing things. Obviously as @ochlocrat keeps shouting, it’s really complicated! We don’t have a detailed model of it! Etc. And of course the actual situation in human beings must be really complicated. But I totally disagree with him that this means we can’t say anything useful at all about the problem.
The thing is, what people say they feel – well, it’s like confirmation bias. They just say something and…never include a dismantle condition to it. I kind of suspect Ochlocrat has an instinctive drive to crack down on stimulating that process further – but that’s a big guess by my own instinctive evaluation.
And if he is, he’s right as I measure it – if someones clinging onto something not at all the case, what can you do to explain anything about it? Although (and I’m serious), writing fantasy on the subject might help with that. But in terms of direct explanation, are you sure you can explain anything when the subject is something that cannot be wrong in any way, shape or form whatsoever? Granted if someone has adopted some capacity for it to be wrong/some dismantle condition, yeah, I’d pay there’s probably some room for explanation there.
The first thing I’m trying to argue is that eliminative materialism MUST be false. It cannot be the case that mental states = physical states of the brain. That just misunderstands the nature of cognitive processing.
I’m not sure I’m really arguing here, but if you had a grid of binary conditions, 100 by 100 in side, but you can only percieve a 2 by 2 grid somewhere inside it – if that’s you perceiving your own grid, then mental state, a small part, essentially is physical state? Of course, really it’s the big picture, the 100×100 that matters. But still, part of what you percieve is direct mental state? I feel angry – I’m detecting a bunch of synapses firing that might get someone punched in the face. Sure, I’m only detecting a tiny part of the grid, but what I’m detecting is to some degree, just what is.
Granted, thinking about the grid can, because of the data flowing through the detector, the process behind the detector and finally, back out into the 100×100 grid, wash away what was detected. Which is probably why, when one is angry, counting to ten helps abate the rage. You detect the 2×2, then set off a process which by and large washes over it.
Dualists think, physical stuff can’t have mental states! But then they come up with bizarre arguments that really make no sense at all — I classify Searle’s Chinese Room argument as one of the senseless mistaken arguments along these lines, as well as many similar arguments (such as the idea of replacing every neuron with a person in China with a telephone, and so on). But all these arguments do is replace a physical system with another physical system which seems outlandish
It doesn’t seem outlandish? Weird, your sure they weren’t arguing for you?
because it assumes that there is such a thing as a “mental state”. I don’t think there is. At best there’s a brief time window which can be cut out of a process.
Are you sure your not arguing this because as is, it’s really impossible for you (or me) to grasp the entire state of a brain, including the section doing the entire grasp? In regards to my 100×100, 2×2 example, I’m not sure of the absence of a mental state=physical state. Just the absence of being able to percieve it. Or more to the point, ones native mental states are one of ignorance to the physical state. Those native mental states wont == physical state, I’d agree.
This is I believe a relatively universal argument that doesn’t depend on the specific details of how the cognitive computation is carried out, or whether it involves quantum mechanics or whatever else.
I think the specific logic of it all is paramount. But whether its people in china on the phone, a brain built in minecraft or whatever means the original uses, as long as the logic is there then it’s there (though hormonal effects on thinking and body mass, environmental effects on distribution of hormones…that gets way fiddley).
In other words, the behavior that philosophers attribute to qualia may simply be an analogy to things we think we “feel” in other contexts. I think when I see colors, I actually DO also “feel” something — it’s an association. And if I were suffering from DPD, that I think might eliminate the sense that I am experiencing qualia in the usual sense of the word. If we can narrow down the neurophysiological basis for DPD, we might also get at one of the mechanisms behind what people call “feeling like they’re seeing”.
I think the thing to note is that you don’t feel yourself feeling yourself seeing something. The feeling is one stage, just at feeling yourself seeing. If you think of part of the brain as having a finger like appendage, bending over and feeling other parts of the brains activity, that probably sums it up.
Of course the feedback loop of such a detection system would be, in my opinion, incredibly complicated in terms of math. Real mathematical works of art – and as I’ve ragged at Scott before (or any passer by who needed an ear full), I think our ugly ability to percieve, to grunt terms like ‘machine’, is what makes the these discussions seem horrible in how their ‘reduction’ of the human condition. When that’s just because were not complex enough to see how complex we are.
Forgive me some general human affirmation at the end there, eh?
It’s difficult to talk about this stuff because there’s always this hidden homunculus in all these arguments. What I’m saying is that talking about mental states gets confused at every turn by the fact that people aren’t absolutely carefully clear about what would have to be the case for there to be any sort of perception in any meaningful sense of the word.
Let’s take this first example: you’re talking about “perceiving” a 2×2 part of a grid. But what is it that is doing the “perceiving” of that 2×2 grid? There’s no homunculus that “perceives” something. The whole point is, here, we’re trying to figure out how to build a model of cognition that doesn’t invoke any dualist magic, anywhere.
There’s no 2×2 “grid” that can “perceive itself”. What I’m saying is that any sort of mental process itself must be the thing which computes the perception, so to speak. In fact, obviously it’s impossible for any cognitive system to actually perceive all of itself — that would lead to an infinite regress and an explosion in computational complexity. What it would have to do, clearly, is narrow down considerably what it is perceiving, if it is perceiving its own mental state.
When eliminative materialists want to point to a physical state and say “this is a mental state”, they want to point to the whole system that is doing the perceiving. It’s not just the 2×2 grid of “angry” — it’s the whole system that is monitoring the 2×2 bit of grid, and what it is doing, and its state, and so on. What I’m saying is that it’s nonsense to talk about the “mental state” of such a thing at a given instant. Mental functioning, in my view, is always a process spread out over time.
Of course it’s possible that the computation that involves “being angry” starts out from a bit of data in a 2×2 grid. But that can’t be all there is to it. The 2×2 grid doesn’t perceive itself. It feeds into a whole system which itself has to compute over time.
>@ochlocrat
>“What I’m basically saying is that the problem of qualia I think ought to be rephrased, >as I said before, into the problem of explaining the behavior that people think it means >something when they say they “feel” themselves seeing things.”
>
>What I’m basically saying is that the problem of God’s existence ought to be
>rephrased, as I am saying now, into the problem of explaining the behavior
>that people think it means something when they say they “feel” themselves
>feeling the power of His Almighty presence and love.
No no, you’re confusing things again. “God” is used as an explanation — i.e., this is more akin to my example of you thinking that lightning is “religious” because people think lightning is caused by Zeus throwing bolts down from the Heavens. So, here, the analogous thing wouldn’t be “God’s existence” — but rather the meaningfulness of words related to having subjectively spiritual experiences. You might say, well, when people say they’re having a spiritual experience, because they think this is caused by a supernatural entity, that means study of spiritual experiences is scientifically pointless because some people think they have supernatural causes. (I.e., just as many people think qualia must have a dualist explanation).
But, in fact, I think spiritual experiences must be part of a single world — there isn’t some external thing “outside the universe” which can sensibly be said to “cause” things “in the universe” — any such thing would have to be just another part of the universe, ultimately subject to some sort of investigation (even if it is beyond human capability to fully comprehend). But religious people don’t want a God which is part of the universe — they want a God outside the universe, and that makes no sense to me whatsoever. It’s incoherent — anything that exists is by definition part of the universe.
But in any event this is a sidetrack — the point is spiritual experiences CAN be studied, and one can even think about why they might occur for a variety of computational reasons. People do these experiments, in fact, fMRI studies and so on. I can even make certain high dimensional optimization arguments for why at least some spiritual experiences may be able to occur in any complex cognitive system.
“Part of the problem with our little debate is that you’ve shifted what you’re saying. Way above there you made claims that there’s a “scientific consensus” that studying consciousness was a waste of time, and you also made the explicit claim that “qualia is a religious concept”
i think i finally see why you have assumed i think a number of things i don’t. i was not sufficiently clear, perhaps. i don’t think “perceptual experience” is a religious concept, but i think the notion of “qualia” as propounded by analytic philosophers is, since it has so often been used to argue for dualism, or in bizarre thought experiments, that as we have now both noted typically smuggle in unwarranted premises. to me, it seems like it has been deliberately defined as something out of reach of any kind of empirical test, and that’s why i used the term “religious”. i do see why that’s confusing, since i could and should have written “the concept of qualia” not merely qualia. in the analogy about God’s existence, i was imagining that you were using “qualia” similarly (in fact, that’s what i took “problem of qualia” to suggest), when you simply meant what i would call perceptual experience.
i take your point about studying religious experience via fMRI – in fact, many studies in cognitive neuroscience ask subjects to perform mental tasks. my point is not so much about the ontological status of “mental images”, and more about the fact that scientists, much as Skinner advocated, really do try to match some objective measure of behavioral performance to some neural correlate, and avoid relying on self-reports to the extent possible (for some things, this is quite difficult).
i also think that language is a rather poor medium for describing perceptual experience (e.g., describe the taste of cinnamon without referring to it). i’m actually making less broad claims than you have alleged – in this case, that the scientific study of ineradicably subjective experiences is problematic.
i just don’t care about the “ontological status” of mental states much. i don’t worry that i’m a brain in a vat, and so on. i think people who think Zeno’s arrow paradox is compelling should have a crossbow aimed at their heads.
i am not sure why you emphasize the notion that mental states have temporal extent – in neuroscience, that is accepted as given, insofar as measuring neural responses always requires decisions about what interval to use, as well as the temporal resolution, in the case of spike trains. if philosophers really have insisted that mental states can be “freeze-framed”, then i think that’s as goofy as you do. if there’s a connection to “eliminative materialism”, then i’m not familiar with it.
i am quite interested in the fact that neural responses to stimuli can show such radically different temporal structure than the time course of the stimuli themselves. i study it, in fact.
“But religious people don’t want a God which is part of the universe — they want a God outside the universe, and that makes no sense to me whatsoever. It’s incoherent — anything that exists is by definition part of the universe.”
in my lab there is one of us who isn’t an atheist, and he takes dualism on, well, faith. basically, “given that god exists, why shouldn’t there be souls and other things?” i find it very odd.
Eh, it’s just as odd as having a god like certainty this ‘god’ idea is not the case, if you think about it. That’s just doing the same thing.
Granted, given the number of ‘fairies at the bottom of the garden’ claim types it’s possible to dream up, it’s hard to not simply fall into the utterly dismissive position on a vast quantity of them.
i agree that a proper atheist shouldn’t categorically assert that god does not exist (and i wasn’t).
i think the null hypothesis on “Does ____ exist?” has to be “no”. i shouldn’t have to prove ghosts don’t exist, for example (lack of evidence ≠ evidence of absence, etc.).
what i meant by “odd” was the the specific idea of going “all-in” metaphysically – taking the ghosts with the god, so to speak.
Why shouldn’t you have to prove ghosts don’t exist? ‘Should’ is a funny word. I wonder if it’s a slight inflection that’s the seperator here. I mean, religious folk could also say “I shouldn’t have to prove ghosts/gods don’t exist” as well. But with the inflection that they don’t have to disprove what they believe in. Or even see it as a hypothesis.
Eh, just tooling around with the word ‘should’. It’s a funny word. You should all know that!
Mitsu,
I think I have to urge “Charitable reading, please!” myself. I’ve described part of the brain having a finger like appendage, bending over and taking an input stream from other parts of the brain. I use the term ‘percieve’ as a flattering version of input. Even ‘input’ has a certain amount of ‘intent’ soaked into it. I could just as much read your “how to build a model of cognition that doesn’t invoke any dualist magic, anywhere.” as “how to build a model of dualist magic that doesn’t invoke any dualist magic, anywhere.”. If there’s no homunculus, then there’s no cognition either. Or atleast that’s how I see it. If your really getting down to the nuts and bolts then you drop words like ‘cognition’ and start talking in terms of bit A activates bit B, lots of.
I mean, c’mon, surely there’s a dial here were using? With the dial on low, we talk about people, with the dial on high we talk about physics processes. I don’t think cognition makes it to the high end of the dial, does it? I was just trying to work at a lower position on the dial that you seemed to be working at? Just hit me up with where the dial is at and I’ll work from there.
If I’m being casual nihilistic in saying that, yep, I get that.
When eliminative materialists want to point to a physical state and say “this is a mental state”, they want to point to the whole system that is doing the perceiving. It’s not just the 2×2 grid of “angry” — it’s the whole system that is monitoring the 2×2 bit of grid, and what it is doing, and its state, and so on. What I’m saying is that it’s nonsense to talk about the “mental state” of such a thing at a given instant. Mental functioning, in my view, is always a process spread out over time.
I’m not sure what an eliminative materialist is trying to define there? Like taking a photo of someone who’s in the midst of speaking a sentence, that single snap shot is both a capture of the configuration of the moment and yet doesn’t really capture the sentence. Are they trying to say the former is the latter?