Lamps Instead of Ladies: the Hard Problem Explained
by rsbakker
Definition of the Day – Insight: what happens when a new blindness makes our old blindness its bitch.
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The so-called “hard problem” is generally understood as the problem consciousness researchers face closing Joseph Levine’s “explanatory gap,” the question of how mere physical systems can generate conscious experience. The problem is that, as Descartes noted centuries ago, consciousness is so damned peculiar when compared to the natural world that it reveals. On the one hand you have qualia, or the raw feel, the ‘what-it-is-like’ of conscious experiences. How could meat generate such bizarre things? On the other hand you have intentionality, the aboutness of consciousness, as well as the related structural staples of the mental, the normative and the purposive.
In one sense, my position is a mainstream one: consciousness is another natural phenomena that will be explained naturalistically. But it is not just another natural phenomenon: it is the natural phenonmenon that is attempting to explain itself naturalistically. And this is where the problem becomes an epistemological nightmare – or very, very hard.
This is why I espouse what might be called a “Dual Explanation Account of Consciousness.” Any one of the myriad theories of consciousness out there could be entirely correct, but we will never know this because we disagree about just what must be explained for an explanation of consciousness to count as ‘adequate.’ The Blind Brain Theory explains the hardness of the hard problem in terms of the information we should expect the conscious systems of the brain to lack. The consciousness we think we cognize, I want to argue, is the product of a variety of ‘natural anosognosias.’ The reason everyone seems to be barking up the wrong explanatory tree is simply that we don’t have the consciousness we think we do.
Personally, I’m convinced this has to be case to some degree. Let’s call the cognitive system involved in natural explanation the ‘NE system.’ The NE system, we might suppose, originally evolved to cognize external environments: this is what it does best. (We can think of scientific explanation as a ‘training up’ of this system, pressing it to its peak performance). At some point, the human brain found it more and more reproductively efficacious to cognize onboard information – data from itself – as well. In addition to continually sampling and updating environmental information, it began doing the same with its own neural information.
Now if this marks the genesis of human self-consciousness, the confusions we collectively call the ‘hard problem’ become the very thing we should expect. We have an NE system exquisitely adapted over hundreds of millions of years to cognize environmental information suddenly forced to cognize 1) the most complicated machinery we know of in the universe (itself); 2) from a fixed (hardwired) ‘perspective’; and 3) with nary more than a million years of evolutionary tuning.
Given this (and it seems fairly airtight to me), we should expect that the NE system would have enormous difficulty cognizing consciously available information. (1) suggests that the information gleaned will be drastically fractional. (2) suggests that the information accessed will be thoroughly parochial, but also, entirely ‘sufficient,’ given the NE’s rank inability to ‘take another perspective’ relative the gut brain the way it can relative its external environments. (3) suggests the information provided will be haphazard and distorted, the product of kluge-type mutations.
In other words, (1) implies ‘depletion,’ (2) implies ‘truncation’ (since we can’t access the causal provenance of what we access), and (3) implies a motley of distortions. Your NE is quite literally restricted to informatic scraps.
This is the point I keep hammering in my discussions with consciousness researchers: our attempts to cognize experience utilize the same machinery that we use to cognize our environments – evolution is too fond of ‘twofers’ to assume otherwise, too cheap. Given this, the “hard problem” not only begins to seem inevitable, but something that probably every other biologically conscious species in the universe suffers. The million dollar question is this: If information privation generates confusion and illusion regarding phenomena within consciousness, why should it not generate confusion and illusion when regarding consciousness itself?
Think of the myriad mistakes the brain makes: just recently, while partying with my brother-in-law on the front porch, we became convinced that my neighbour from across the street was standing at her window glaring at us – I mean, convinced. It wasn’t until I walked up to her house to ask whether we were being too noisy (or noisome!) that I realized it was her lamp glaring at us (it never liked us anyway), that it was a kooky effect of light and curtains. What I’m saying is that peering at consciousness is no different than peering at my neighbour’s window, except that we are wired to the porch, and so have no way of seeing lamps instead of ladies. Whether we are deliberating over consicousness or deliberating over neighbours, we are limited to the same cognitive systems. As such, it simply follows that the kinds of distortions information privation causes in the one also pertain to the other. It only seems otherwise with consciousness because we are hardwired to the neural porch and have no way of taking a different informatic perspective. And so, for us, it just is the neighbour lady glaring at you through the window, even though it’s not.
Before we can begin explaining consciousness, we have to understand the severity of our informatic straits. We’re stranded: both with the patchy, parochial neural information provided, and with our ancient, environmentally oriented cognitive systems. The result is what we call ‘consciousness.’
The argument in sum is pretty damn strong: Consciousness (as it is) evolved on the back of existing, environmentally oriented cognitive systems. Therefore, we should assume that the kinds of information privation effects pertaining to environmental cognition also apply to our attempts to cognize consciousness. (1), (2), and (3) give us good reason to assume that consciousness suffers radical information privation. Therefore, odds are we’re mistaking a good number of lamps for ladies – that consciousness is literally not what we think it is.
Given the breathtaking explanatory successes of the natural sciences, then, it stands to reason that our gut antipathy to naturalistic explanations of consciousness are primarily an artifact of our ‘brain blindess.’
What we are trying to explain, in effect, is information that has to be depleted, truncated, and distorted – a lady that quite literally does not exist. And so when science rattles on about ‘lamps,’ we wave our hands and cry, “No-no-no! It’s the lady I’m talking about.”
Now I think this is a pretty novel, robust, and nifty dissection of the Hard Problem. Has anyone encountered anything similar anywhere? Does anyone see any obvious assumptive or inferential flaws?
Three Pound Brain 
“The NE system, we might suppose, originally evolved to cognize external environments: this is what it does best. ”
To make this more detailed: how does it cognize and what does ‘cognize’ mean? My answers: I think to answer these questions, we have to keep in mind that the NE system does this for a purpose (survival, reproduction ect.). The brain gets a lot of information, for a big part useless information for the mentioned purpose, so a important part of the NE systems work is filtering. Once the important information is filtered, it has to be memorized. To do this with using very little memory, the information gets linked to a symbol (this is meant in a very broad metaphorical sense)
Consciousness as I see it is the sum of the remembered symbols – most of time the newer ones having a bigger influence in the experience of consciousness, the most recent filtered information input, and something which can be called ‘thinking’, ‘processing’ or ‘cognizing onboard information’, as you put it.
“Does anyone see any obvious assumptive or inferential flaws?”
For my part, the answer is no (probably because I agree with you here) with one tiny exeption 😉
“We have an NE system exquisitely adapted over hundreds of millions of years to cognize environmental information suddenly forced to cognize 1) the most complicated machinery we know of in the universe (itself)”
I think the NE system can’t be forced to cognize “itself“, because it has no information about “itself“. All it has is the indirect picture of itself. Neuroscience takes a different approach, which can complement the picture of itself and cast off it’s mistakes.
One thing is sure: If we really want to understand consciousness, we have to be very careful to avoid the mistakes that we are hardwired to do.
“(1) suggests that the information gleaned will be drastically fractional.”
Because I see (1) differently it means for me that the information will not even be fractional, but delusional.
PS: Sorry for my multiple replys, but I’m not always satisfied with my posts and need/want to write more.
Probably not a very well thought out responce by me (by my own standards, even), but…
Before we can begin explaining consciousness
To me, this and other references to an existant thing is a speed bump. The text itself is refering to this existant thing. Then it’s questioning it’s existance. Then it refers to this existant thing. Back and forth. That or maybe it’s an attempt to take one word, whip away it’s definition like a table cloth from under plates, and leave it with another definition. But to be honest I don’t think that works (assuming it’s even being done, for the mean time) unless the redefinining is explicit – otherwise it tries to change the definition, but then the next referal to conciousness simply revives the prior definition.
Never mind the sort of psudo implicit knowledge invoked. You know implicit knowledge, where a couple who live together can end up talking like “Do you know where the…” “It’s above the…” “Ah, right. Got it!” and that sort of half assed talking does actually work out and they find the stuff. But then we get to ‘conciousness’ though and it’s “You know that…” “Oh yeah, it’s…”. So the referal to ‘conciousness’ ends up a bit like refering to someones favorite colour. How on earth do you start acting like you can say something about what that is better than they can? At best, maybe, you can only start to dismantle that it’s a favorite colour kind of thing that’s invoked (because to them they just know what your refering to). Otherwise each time you invoke the word ‘conciousness’, you simply bring to mind and reaffirm their favorite colour and wipe all the intervening text from their mind.
Finally I think it relies upon an accademic training/habit that the reader is going to leave blank some kind of space in terms of the subject. I mean, it’d be hard enough for most folk to leave blank the question of whether Bin Laden was armed and wielding it when he was shot (I feel pretty much on one side of the fence myself). So we get to their own conciousnesses and their going to lay out a blank sheet for you and say ‘Hey, fill it in how you wanna, Imma lending this to you carte blanc for the mo!’? It seems to lean on an individual being trained to do this – which to me makes it not so robust. Or atleast I have to work from some theory of mine, I wont just give up a blank sheet. I’m guess most others would be similar, but if not, then this would just be an edge case thing.
I like the lamp lady – I think it starts to lend a virtual perspecitve on the gut brain, because you’re not about to get a physical perspective (barring nasty accidents, nyuck, nyuck…okay, not funny…). Weve all been in situations like that, like walking around looking for sunglasses when they are propped up on our foreheads.
I don’t seem any “obvious assumptive or inferential flaws,” just the lurking dangers, though I might not be scouring the post enough for the former two.
Found a really good quote the other morning while reading on my deck (though in Dirty Minds, Kayt Sukel is discussing these issues within the context of “Love Potion Number 9” ;)):
“When one considers the unknowns involved in these chemicals and how they influence each other, the problem with so-called love-promoting brain chemistry supplements becomes readily apparent. As these pills modulate oxytocin, testosterone, or vasopressin in the body and the brain (if indeed they even have the power to do so), they may very well be altering other chemical and receptor types that are just as important to social bonds. They may change the body’s endogenous production and regulation of these chemicals and receptors over time. Without a better understanding of all the ingredients of this complex neurobiological cocktail, one can never know if those changes are to our benefit or detriment.”
I mean, for some clear examples of what Bakker’s been talking about with the Semantic Apocalypse just substitute “oxytocin, testosterone, and vasopressin” with any other neurotransmitters and “social bonds” with any other human behavior.
Unrelated, but this is a bit of Bakker-bait I couldn’t resist sharing, and seems like he could be a much more interesting writer for you to start a raging war with–he’s a extreme reader of literary fiction who “claims” he wants literary fiction to be more literary. Here’s his article, “My Stephen King Problem: A Snob’s Notes:”
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=737&fulltext=1&media=
“And then one day King came up in the course of a discussion my wife and I had about my own writing — which she found to be a little dark and not really, if I understood her, something she wished to curl up with at night. I agreed that it was a little dark, and I also said that I probably (and probably wrongly) didn’t give enough credence to the idea that people (or my characters) could change or become better. We talked about why people read the fiction they read. My wife, who works in the medical field, made the perfectly valid point that not everybody reads fiction for the reasons I read it. (Among the things I hope for when I open a book of fiction is that each sentence I read will be right and true and beautiful, that the particular music of those sentences will bring me a pleasure I wouldn’t be able to find the exact equivalent of in another writer, that I will be continually surprised by what a particular writer reveals about particular human beings and the world they inhabit. A great book of fiction will lead me toward some fresh understanding of humanity, and toward joy.) My wife felt it was wrong to stand in judgment of people who read fiction in order to escape from life, and I said she was right: I didn’t feel morally superior because I read John Cheever or David Foster Wallace or William Styron or Zadie Smith or Mary Lee Settle instead of Stephen King.
I did feel, however, that I demanded something different (something more?) from a novel than I guessed most of the readers of Stephen King did. (Not that this made me morally superior, just more demanding, a high-maintenance reader.) Though of course I’d never read a King novel (or story), so maybe I was wrong.”
I meant to type he wants genre fiction to be more literary, but somehow wrote literary fiction to be more literary. He probably wants both, and it’s an amusing mistake on many levels. :-p
I’m actually corresponding with him in the hopes of setting up an email debate that we can jointly publish…
I didn’t feel morally superior because I read John Cheever or David Foster Wallace or William Styron or Zadie Smith or Mary Lee Settle
He ducked under the police tape and surveyed the crime scene. “Jesus, this is a bad one! What’d he use, a piano?”
“Name dropping…”
Frankly the fact that we are aware that we are aware is amazing enough to keep me sitting and thinking for a while. Add to it that we are incorrectly aware of our awareness and that we are aware of that fact and I get dizzy.
In order to be sure I am interpreting this correctly let me translate it to my language in a way that you can re-translate to your own and see how well it matches so you can correct me.
You think it is a direct result of our need for recognition of external threats to ensure our survival that ensures that we will incorrectly interpret internal cognition. When we look at our cognition we will see people where it is really just lamps.
Maybe that metaphor is more apt even still.
I think that we mostly use cognition to justify the behaviors that really just result from our “instinctual reactions” (for lack of a better term). In other words, the genetics that have evolved from previous successes in our ancestors mix with the cerebral trial and error abacus that counts up results of past actions and adjusts for the future (my hand hurt when I hit it with a hammer, therefore I will avoid doing that again) to lead to an immediate interpretation and reaction which we then use the conscious mind to justify. Sometimes our justification is not sensible and so when you examine the cognition of others it looks erratic.
In other words: There will never be a person in there, just a bunch of light bulbs that are on a timer or some other automatic switch.
But I don’t believe that. I’m a romantic. I think there is some way to overcome the natural instinct, I just don’t have any hard evidence to back it up. I do know that continued efforts at it seem to bare fruit (like the occasional successful diet) but I can’t tell if the efforts beget the fruit or the fruit begat the efforts. It could be explained by Scott Adams’s pleasure unit theory: If you get enough pleasure from being fit you won’t need the pleasure from the cheesecake that would detract from thin pleasure. Therefore you avoid cheesecake and chock it up to self-control.
If it is true that we have no control over ourselves we can’t be held accountable for our atrocities, but to make the world a better place all people committing atrocities should be done away with. But why bother since if we have no control and our cognition is only an illusion to make us feel aware then who cares if we survive? We are just animals anyway.
But that is more a foray into another topic than a response to your blog. I might not even be able to reach out and grasp the actual topic here. I’m too stuck in the moralistic morass.
Essentially I ask, is there a real question to be asked? Are we even actually aware?
holly crap. I just read the back cover of Neuropath. I guess I have nothing original add. Go fig.
Frankly the fact that we are aware that we are aware is amazing enough to keep me sitting and thinking for a while.
Well, it’s interesting to consider an alternate theory that we aren’t aware. Much as animals aren’t aware. In the alternate theory, if you think of a dog, what you have is kind of like a dog being very, very intently watched by another dog. The second dog is no more aware for it’s intent watch of the first. What you have is A: an influence on the first dogs behaviour by the second dog, creating a complicated feedback loop (the loop itself could even be considered a third entity) and B: the second dog is watching the first so intently it does not think it exists and instead thinks it is actually the dog it watches. Possibly leading to a large feeling of being ‘in control’ and ‘free will’, since what it watches, it see’s and understands (and as said, it think it is what it watches – so it thinks it sees all (it is) and understands all (it is)). And that’s without throwing in the added complication of having a very limited capacity to watch the first dog!
And yeah, I’m walking right into ‘watcher and watched’ stuff here. It’s really annoying to walk in a shadow!
I think your example of you and your brother-in-law on the porch perceiving a lady/lamp is a little faulty for this essay…..mainly because I just watched one of your interviews on youtube and you reference what helps you write your fantasy material!! So is it fair to use a night of “partying” and that state you were in as the example of how the senses collect information? Because I was partying at the Scorpions show in Chicago last Friday and I think the way I cognized four rock gods swinging their guitars in unison to tasty 80’s rock solo licks was perhaps a little inflated….although sufficient!
In any case- interesting piece. Despite an atheist stance, I almost want to throw out a reference to “soul” as an underlying reason for your question of consciousness. But I already see the flaws- it’s the same as arguing creation in place of evolution, and similarly annoying arguments for divine intervention.
Although, just for fun- its kind of like the Chorae in Judging Eye- it can’t always be seen in it’s true state. And if we are all a sliver of the god (again, I’m just tossing out the idea for fun…I’m not sure if I subscribe….or don’t subscribe for that matter!), perhaps that limited processing of the info we perceive is because our soul, or brain, is but a sliver of processing equipment. We never will be able to have total consciousness.
Or perhaps it is just easier on a finite ball of meat designed to process the jungle with electricity and chemicals to only take in that which is necessary for food, survival, and procreation. The fact that we can creep past basic instinct with abstract thought is just a very strange bi-product of our higher tier brains. Maybe a mutation of the instinct itself.
OK, I’m talking gibberish. Love the books- I’m just starting White Luck and look forward to it.
Ryan posted:
“Are we even actually aware?”
I am. It’s axiomatic for me, the ground of everything else, an invulnerable Gordian knot. What IS interesting, are the questions posed by Eric Schwitzgebel and Scott regarding our ‘sufficiency’. Meaning, that even though the qualia of ‘red’ seems irreducible and fully contained (“encapsulated” to use a Bakkerism) it is anything but. There’s a lot to the qualia of ‘red’ that our conscious mind doesn’t perceive. Dennet’s memory-qualia thought experiments suggest that qualia are actually a memory integration phenomenon.
OK, that’s my wank contribution for this circle jerk.
My true question is whether we are aware or just deluded into thinking we are aware. When people sit down with a Freudian analyst who takes them through their own life and explains it according to Freudian theories it makes sense. Then when another therapist uses Attachment theory with the same individual it also makes sense. We might just use cognizance to explain behaviors we have observed in ourselves. We are little kids holding the second steering-wheel connected to our car-seats, thinking we are driving when all we are really doing is feeling better about ourselves.
Again, I don’t believe this. I just think it is worth arguing.
“My true question is whether we are aware or just deluded into thinking we are aware.”
Here is my heavily opinionated, epistemological hard-ass stance:
To me, the question makes no sense, which is a bit of a beef I have with Thomas Metzinger and Scott’s ‘magic trick’ analogy. We talk about being aware, we express confusion about our awareness, and furthermore we can communicate with each other about the problem and we both know what we’re talking about! The phenomenological frame problem is a tricky thing to communicate, but most people ‘get it’ and understand why it is a problem. We might not have the consciousness we think we have, but we have “something” and furthermore that something can be encoded by language, and can be objectively defined (that which is missing in dreamless sleep and comes back when I wake).
The fact is, all this talk about the neural correlates of consciousness isn’t it making go away… it’s bizarrely making it more ‘real’ to me even as it anchors it more and more under a materialistic framework!
The best argument Scott has brought forth to support the kind of eliminativist position espoused by Metzinger was actually in Light, Time and Gravity. The character of Nancy reveals the ephemeral nature of conscious experience (temporal encapsulation) to Dylan. When you die, you go back to nothing, so was there anything to begin with?
You’re right that it is worth thinking about.
Awesome:
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-paper-in-draft-if-materialism-is.html
Scott, you need to put this guy on your blog roll.
Mr. Bakker, you wrote in your recent article that Blind Brain Theory softens the Hard Problem, but from what I can see it actually tries to eliminate it.
I understand it so that the very question does not make sense in the context of BBT, since the theory recognizes awareness as nothing more than a specific erroneous type of information manipulation, so we think “the raw feel” is “something else entirely”, “indescribable”, “irreducible” because thats what we are hardwired to think.
Does it mean that any system performing such actions is subjected to (illusionary)qualia as much as any human is?
Its probably possible to limit ourselves with one particular qualia(“pain” for instance) and make a working model of a part of a blind brain. And this thing will be in “pain”. A machine in neverending agony!
Given time my university acquaintances probably could make a program that would manipulate(distort) incoming data in this particular way. And according to BBT In a very rudimentary way it would be a primitive “conscious” entity. it will “think” that it “feels” something and according to BBT its just the thing thats going on in our heads!
For the life of me, I cannot believe that.
Just a bit off topic, saw a review of a FPS video game the other day where they seemed to be hyjacking the FPS genre in order to raise uncomfortable question (particularly in terms of the players own easy inclination toward killing). Nor does it’s advertising suggest it does so. Thought it might be interesting to see what’s happening in another spectrum of media: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/goodgame/video/xml/20120710_2030.xml&item=06
Y’all might wanna print dis here thing out and paste it on yer walls.
http://xkcd.com/1080/
I understand that people want to stroke their own ego’s and discuss the nonsensical or the non-existent or simply put, the non-important, but can you hurry up and release a damn book? I expect my authors to be slaves!
Instead of writing blog posts which are pages and pages long, and garner very little interest, could you please concentrate on what made you actually start this blog – you know, being a writer, and having fans who bought your books, every book, despite however poor or great they were?
I expected to have The Unholy Consult this July. Instead I now hear it’s been pushed back a year. A YEAR!?!?. It seems lately when you have released a book the release date has almost become a play toy, that just gets pulled longer and longer.
Bare in mind that several fans can’t really be bothered waiting 2 years or 3 years per book. It’s almost a decade since you started this ‘Saga’, and to quote Wikipedia on your plans:
“When Bakker began writing the series in the early 2000s, however, he found it necessary to split each of the three novels into its own sub-series to incorporate all of the characters, themes and ideas he wished to explore. Bakker originally conceived of seven books, a trilogy and two duologies. This later shifted to two trilogies and one duology, with the acknowledgment that the third series may also expand to a trilogy.”
So presumably you’ve got another 4 books to write yet, if not more. Going off the fact you’ll probably take 2-3 (or more) years to write each book, is anyone from the start of the saga still going to be around 2 decades later or so? I doubt many.
It seems you’ve gone from a well respected author, to a blogger and some form of ‘mini-celeb’.
“[…] is anyone from the start of the saga still going to be around 2 decades later or so?”
I will 🙂
Take your time Scott, even if it would be 5 years between the books.
I’ve heard he sleeps as well, instead of writing!
Just as much as sleep is down time, I’m pretty sure these blog posts are written in his down time. Chill out posts, essentially. I doubt they get in the way of writing the books any more than his sleeping does. But that’s my guesstimate, of course.
Off topic:
i09 has a list featuring “39 of the greatest opening sentences from fantasy novels.” The Darkenss that Comes Before is included in the list. 🙂
http://io9.com/5925288/great-opening-sentences-from-classic-fantasy-novels