Phrenomenology: Zahavi, Dennett and the End of Being
by rsbakker
We are led back to these perceptions in all questions regarding origins, but they themselves exclude any further question as to origin. It is clear that the much-talked-of certainty of internal perception, the evidence of the cogito, would lose all meaning and significance if we excluded temporal extension from the sphere of self-evidence and true givenness.
–Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
So recall this list, marvel how it continues to grow, and remember, the catalogue is just getting started. The real tsunami of information is rumbling off in the near horizon. And lest you think your training or education render you exempt, pause and consider the latest in Eric Schwitzgebel’s empirical investigations of how susceptible professional philosophers are to various biases and effects on that list. I ask you to consider what we know regarding human cognitive shortcomings to put you in a skeptical frame of mind. I want to put in a skeptical frame of mind because of a paper by Dan Zahavi, the Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, that came up on my academia.edu feed the other day.
Zahavi has always struck me as unusual as far as ‘continental’ philosophers go, at once a Husserlian ‘purist’ and determined to reach out, to “make phenomenology a powerful and systematically convincing voice in contemporary philosophical discussion” (“Husserl, self, and others: an interview with Dan Zahavi”). I applaud him for this, for braving genuine criticism, genuine scientific research, rather than allowing narrow ingroup interpretative squabbles to swallow him whole. In “Killing the straw man: Dennett and phenomenology,” he undertakes a survey of Dennett’s many comments regarding phenomenology, and a critical evaluation of his alternative to phenomenology, heterophenomenology. Since I happen to be a former phenomenologist, I’ve had occasion to argue both sides of the fence. I spent a good portion of my late twenties and early thirties defending my phenomenological commitments from my skeptical, analytically inclined friends using precisely the arguments and assumptions that Zahavi deploys against Dennett. And I’ve spent the decade following arguing a position even more radically eliminativistic than Dennett’s. I’ve walked a mile in both shoes, I suppose. I’ve gone from agreeing with pretty much everything Zahavi argues in this piece (with a handful of deconstructive caveats) to agreeing with almost nothing.
So what I would like to do is use Zahavi’s position and critique as a foil to explain how and why I’ve abandoned the continental alliance and joined the scientific empire. I gave up on what I call the Apple-and-Oranges Argument because I realized there was no reliable, a priori way to discursively circumscribe domains, to say science can only go so far and no further. I gave up on what I call the Ontological Pre-emption Argument because I realized arguing ‘conditions of possibility,’ far from rationally securing my discourse, simply multiplied my epistemic liabilities. Ultimately, I found myself stranded with what I call the Abductive Argument, an argument based on the putative reality of the consensual structures that seem to genuinely anchor phenomenological disputation. Phenomenology not only offered the best way to describe that structure, it offered the only way, or so I thought. Since Zahavi provides us with examples of all three arguments in the course of castigating Dennett, and since Dennett occupies a position similar to my own, “Killing the straw man” affords an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how phenomenology fares when considered in terms of brain science and heuristic neglect.
As the title of the paper suggests, Zahavi thinks Dennett never moves past critiquing a caricature of phenomenology. For Dennett, Zahavi claims, phenomenology is merely a variant of Introspectionism and thus suffering all the liabilities that caused Introspectionism to die as a branch of empirical psychology almost a century ago now. To redress this equivocation, Zahavi turns to that old stalwart of continental cognitive self-respect, the ‘Apples-and-Oranges Argument’:
To start with, it is important to realize that classical phenomenology is not just another name for a kind of psychological self-observation; rather it must be appreciated as a special form of transcendental philosophy that seeks to reflect on the conditions of possibility of experience and cognition. Phenomenology is a philosophical enterprise; it is not an empirical discipline. This doesn’t rule out, of course, that its analyses might have ramifications for and be of pertinence to an empirical study of consciousness, but this is not its primary aim.
By conflating phenomenology and introspective psychology, Dennett is conflating introspection with the phenomenological attitude, the theoretically attuned orientation to experience that allows the transcendental structure of experience to be interpreted. Titchener’s psychological structuralism, for instance, was invested in empirical investigations into the structure and dynamics of the conscious mind. As descriptive psychology, it could not, by definition, disclose what Zahavi terms the ‘nonpsychological dimension of consciousness,’ those structures that make experience possible.
What makes phenomenology different, in other words, is also what makes phenomenology better. And so we find the grounds for the Ontological Pre-emption Argument in the Apples-and-Oranges Argument:
Phenomenology is not concerned with establishing what a given individual might currently be experiencing. Phenomenology is not interested in qualia in the sense of purely individual data that are incorrigible, ineffable, and incomparable. Phenomenology is not interested in psychological processes (in contrast to behavioral processes or physical processes). Phenomenology is interested in the very dimension of givenness or appearance and seeks to explore its essential structures and conditions of possibility. Such an investigation of the field of presence is beyond any divide between psychical interiority and physical exteriority, since it is an investigation of the dimension in which any object—be it external or internal—manifests itself. Phenomenology aims to disclose structures that are intersubjectively accessible, and its analyses are consequently open for corrections and control by any (phenomenologically tuned) subject.
The strategy is as old as phenomenology itself. First you extricate phenomenology from the bailiwick of the sciences, then you position phenomenology prior to the sciences as the discipline responsible for cognizing the conditions of possibility of science. First you argue that it is fundamentally different, and then you argue that this difference is fundamental.
Of course, Zahavi omits any consideration of the ways Dennett could respond to either of these claims. (This is one among several clues to the institutionally defensive nature of this paper, the fact that it is pitched more to those seeking theoretical reaffirmation than to institutional outsiders—let alone lapsarians). Dennett need only ask Zahavi why anyone should believe that his domain possesses ontological priority over the myriad domains of science. The fact that Zahavi can pluck certain concepts from Dennett’s discourse, drop them in his interpretative machinery, and derive results friendly to that machinery should come as no surprise. The question pertains to the cognitive legitimacy of the machinery: therefore any answer presuming that legitimacy simply begs the question. Does Zahavi not see this?
Even if we granted the possible existence of ‘conditions of possibility,’ the most Zahavi or anyone else could do is intuit them from the conditioned, which just happen to be first-person phenomena. So if generalizing from first-person phenomena proved impossible because of third-person inaccessibility—because genuine first person data were simply too difficult to come by—why should we think those phenomena can nevertheless anchor a priori claims once phenomenologically construed? The fact is phenomenology suffers all the problems of conceptual controversy and theoretical underdetermination as structuralist psychology. Zahavi is actually quite right: phenomenology is most certainly not a science! There’s no need for him to stamp his feet and declare, “Oranges!” Everybody already knows.
The question is why anyone should take his Oranges seriously as a cognitive enterprise. Why should anyone believe his domain comes first? What makes phenomenologically disclosed structures ontologically prior or constitutive of conscious experience? Blood flow, neural function—the life or death priority of these things can be handily demonstrated with a coat-hanger! Claims like Zahavi’s regarding the nature of some ontologically constitutive beyond, on the other hand, abound in philosophy. Certainly powerful assurances are needed to take them seriously, especially when we reject them outright for good reason elsewhere. Why shouldn’t we just side with the folk, chalk phenomenology up to just another hothouse excess of higher education? Because you stack your guesswork up on the basis of your guesswork in a way you’re guessing is right?
Seriously?
As I learned, neither the Apples-and-Oranges nor the Ontological Pre-emption Arguments draw much water outside the company of the likeminded. I felt their force, felt reaffirmed the way many phenomenologists, I’m sure, feel reaffirmed reading Zahavi’s exposition now. But every time I laid them on nonphenomenologists I found myself fenced by questions that were far too easy to ask—and far easier to avoid than answer.
So I switched up my tactics. When my old grad school poker buddies started hacking on Heidegger, making fun of the neologisms, bitching about the lack of consensus, I would say something very similar to what Zahavi claims above—even more powerful, I think, since it concretizes his claims regarding structure and intersubjectivity. Look, I would tell them, once you comport yourself properly (with a tremendous amount of specialized training, bear in mind), you can actually anticipate the kinds of things Husserl or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty or Sarte might say on this or that subject. Something more than introspective whimsy is being tracked—surely! And if that ‘something more’ isn’t the transcendental structure of experience, what could it be? Little did I know how critical this shift in the way I saw the dialectical landscape would prove.
Basically I had retreated to the Abductive Argument—the only real argument, I now think, that Zahavi or any phenomenologist ultimately has outside the company of their confreres. Apriori arguments for phenomenological aprioricity simply have no traction unless you already buy into some heavily theorized account of the apriori. No one’s going to find the distinction between introspectionism and phenomenology convincing so long as first-person phenomena remain the evidential foundation of both. If empirical psychology couldn’t generalize from phenomena, then why should we think phenomenology can reason to their origins, particularly given the way it so discursively resembles introspectionism? Why should a phenomenological attitude adjustment make any difference at all?
One can actually see Zahavi shift to abductive warrant in the last block quote above, in the way he appeals to the intersubjectively accessible nature of the ‘structures’ comprising the domain of the phenomenological attitude. I suspect this is why Zahavi is so keen on the eliminativist Dennett (whom I generally agree with) at the expense of the intentionalist Dennett (whom I generally disagree with)—so keen on setting up his own straw man, in effect. The more he can accuse Dennett of eliminating various verities of experience, the more spicy the abductive stew becomes. If phenomenology is bunk, then why does it exhibit the systematicity that it does? How else could we make sense of the genuine discursivity that (despite all the divergent interpretations) unquestionably animates the field? If phenomenological reflection is so puny, so weak, then how has any kind of consensus arisen at all?
The easy reply, of course, is to argue that the systematicity evinced by phenomenology is no different than the systematicity evinced by intelligent design, psychoanalysis, climate-change skepticism, or what have you. One might claim that rational systematicity, the kind of ‘intersubjectivity’ that Zahavi evokes several times in “Killing the straw man,” is actually cheap as dirt. Why else would we find ourselves so convincing, no matter what we happen to believe? Thus the importance of genuine first-person data: ‘structure’ or no ‘structure,’ short of empirical evidence, we quite simply have no way of arbitrating between theories, and thus no way of moving forward. Think of the list of our cognitive shortcomings! We humans have an ingrown genius for duping both ourselves and one another given the mere appearance of systematicity.
Now abductive arguments for intentionalism more generally have the advantage of taking intentional phenomena broadly construed as their domain. So in his Sources of Intentionality, for instance, Uriah Kriegel argues ‘observational contact with the intentional structure of experience’ best explains our understanding of intentionality. Given the general consensus that intentional phenomena are real, this argument has real dialectical traction. You can disagree with Kriegel, but until you provide a better explanation, his remains the only game in town.
In contrast to this general, Intentional Abductive Argument, the Phenomenological Abductive Argument takes intentional phenomena peculiar to the phenomenological attitude as its anchoring explananda. Zahavi, recall, accuses Dennett of equivocating phenomenology and introspectionism because of a faulty understanding of the phenomenological attitude. As a result he confuses the ontic with the ontological, ‘a mere sector of being’ with the problem of Being as such. And you know what? From the phenomenological attitude, his criticism is entirely on the mark. Zahavi accuses Dennett of a number of ontological sins that he simply does not commit, even given the phenomenological attitude, but this accusation, that Dennett has run afoul the ‘metaphysics of presence,’ is entirely correct—once again, from the phenomenological attitude.
Zahavi’s whole case hangs on the deliverances of the phenomenological attitude. Refuse him this, and he quite simply has no case at all. This was why, back in my grad school days, I would always urge my buddies to read phenomenology with an open mind, to understand it on its own terms. ‘I’m not hallucinating! The structures are there! You just have to look with the right eyes!’
Of course, no one was convinced. I quickly came to realize that phenomenologists occupied a position analogous to that of born-again Christians, party to a kind of undeniable, self-validating experience. Once you grasp the ontological difference, it truly seems like there’s no going back. The problem is that no matter how much you argue no one who has yet to grasp the phenomenological attitude can possibly credit your claims. You’re talking Jesus, son of God, and they think you’re referring to Heyzoos down at the 7-11.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that phenomenology is religious, only that it shares this dialectical feature with religious discourses. The phenomenological attitude, like the evangelical attitude, requires what might be called a ‘buy in moment.’ The only way to truly ‘get it’ is to believe. The only way to believe is to open your heart to Husserl, or Heidegger, or in this case, Zahavi. “Killing the straw man” is jam packed with such inducements, elegant thumbnail recapitulations of various phenomenological interpretations made by various phenomenological giants over the years. All of these recapitulations beg the question against Dennett, obviously so, but they’re not dialectically toothless or merely rhetorical for it. By giving us examples of phenomenological understanding, Zahavi is demonstrating possibilities belonging to a different way of looking at the world, laying bare the very structure that organizes phenomenology into genuinely critical, consensus driven discourse.
The structure that phenomenology best explains. For anyone who has spent long rainy afternoons pouring through the phenomenological canon, alternately amused and amazed by this or that interpretation of lived life, the notion that phenomenology is ‘mere bunk’ can only sound like ignorance. If the structures revealed by the phenomenological attitude aren’t ontological, then what else could they be?
This is what I propose to show: a radically different way of conceiving the ‘structures’ that motivate phenomenology. I happen to be the global eliminativist that Zahavi mistakenly accuses Dennett of being, and I also happen to have a fairly intimate understanding of the phenomenological attitude. I came by my eliminativism in the course of discovering an entirely new way to describe the structures revealed by the phenomenological attitude. The Transcendental Interpretation is no longer the only game in town.
The thing is, every phenomenologist, whether they know it or not, is actually part of a vast, informal heterophenomenological experiment. The very systematicity of conscious access reports made regarding phenomenality via the phenomenological attitude is what makes them so interesting. Why do they orbit around the same sets of structures the way they do? Why do they lend themselves to reasoned argumentation? Zahavi wants you to think that his answer—because they track some kind of transcendental reality—is the only game in town, and thus the clear inference to the best explanation.
But this is simply not true.
So what alternatives are there? What kind of alternate interpretation could we give to what phenomenology contends is a transcendental structure?
In his excellent Posthuman Life, David Roden critiques transcendental phenomenology in terms of what he calls ‘dark phenomenology.’ We now know as a matter of empirical fact that our capacity to discriminate colours presented simultaneously outruns our capacity to discriminate sequentially, and that our memory severely constrains the determinacy of our concepts. This gap between the capacity to conceptualize and the capacity to discriminate means that a good deal of phenomenology is conceptually dark. The argument, as I see it, runs something like: 1) There is more than meets the phenomenological eye (dark phenomenology). 2) This ‘more’ is constitutive of what meets the phenomenological eye. 3) This ‘more’ is ontic. 4) Therefore the deliverances of the phenomenological eye cannot be ontological. The phenomenologist, he is arguing, has only a blinkered view. The very act of conceptualizing experience, no matter how angelic your attitude, covers experience over. We know this for a fact!
My guess is that Zahavi would concede (1) and (2) while vigorously denying (3), the claim that the content of dark phenomenology is ontic. He can do this simply by arguing that ‘dark phenomenology’ provides, at best, another way of delimiting horizons. After all, the drastic difference in our simultaneous and sequential discriminatory powers actually makes phenomenological sense: the once-present source impression evaporates into the now-present ‘reverberations,’ as Husserl might call them, fades on the dim gradient of retentional consciousness. It is a question entirely internal to phenomenology as to just where phenomenological interpretation lies on this ‘continuum of reverberations,’ and as it turns out, the problem of theoretically incorporating the absent-yet-constitutive backgrounds of phenomena is as old as phenomenology itself. In fact, the concept of horizons, the subjectively variable limits that circumscribe all phenomena, is an essential component of the phenomenological attitude. The world has meaning–everything we encounter resounds with the significance of past encounters, not to mention future plans. ‘Horizon talk’ simply allows us to make these constitutive backgrounds theoretically explicit. Even while implicit they belong to the phenomena themselves no less, just as implicit. Consciousness is as much non-thematic consciousness as it is thematic consciousness. Zahavi could say the discovery that we cannot discriminate nearly as well sequentially as we can simultaneously simply recapitulates this old phenomenological insight.
Horizons, as it turns out, also provide a way to understand Zahavi’s criticism of the heterophenomenology Dennett proposes we use in place of phenomenology. The ontological difference is itself the keystone of a larger horizon argument involving what Heidegger called the ‘metaphysics of presence,’ how forgetting the horizon of Being, the fundamental background allowing beings to appear as beings, leads to investigations of Being under the auspices of beings, or as something ‘objectively present.’ More basic horizons of use, horizons of care, are all covered over as a result. And when horizons are overlooked—when they are ignored or worse yet, entirely neglected—we run afoul conceptual confusions. In this sense, it is the natural attitude of science that is most obviously culpable, considering beings, not against their horizons of use or care, but against the artificially contrived, parochial, metaphysically naive, horizon of natural knowledge. As Zahavi writes, “the one-sided focus of science on what is available from a third person perspective is both naive and dishonest, since the scientific practice constantly presupposes the scientist’s first-personal and pre-scientific experience of the world.”
As an ontic discourse, natural science can only examine beings from within the parochial horizon of objective presence. Any attempt to drag phenomenology into the natural scientific purview, therefore, will necessarily cover over the very horizon that is its purview. This is what I always considered a ‘basic truth’ of the phenomenological attitude. It certainly seems to be the primary dialectical defence mechanism: to entertain the phenomenological attitude is to recognize the axiomatic priority of the phenomenological attitude. If the intuitive obviousness of this escapes you, then the phenomenological attitude quite simply escapes you.
Dennett, in other words, is guilty of a colossal oversight. He is quite simply forgetting that lived life is the condition of possibility of science. “Dennett’s heterophenomenology,” Zahavi writes, “must be criticized not only for simply presupposing the availability of the third-person perspective without reflecting on and articulating its conditions of possibility, but also for failing to realize to what extent its own endeavour tacitly presupposes an intact first-person perspective.”
Dennett’s discursive sin, in other words, is the sin of neglect. He is quite literally blind to the ontological assumptions—the deep first person facts—that underwrite his empirical claims, his third person observations. As a result, none of these facts condition his discourse the way they should: in Heidegger’s idiom, he is doomed to interpret Being in terms of beings, to repeat the metaphysics of presence.
The interesting thing to note here, however, is that Roden is likewise accusing Zahavi of neglect. Unless phenomenologists accord themselves supernatural powers, it seems hard to believe that they are not every bit as conceptually blind to the full content of phenomenal experience as the rest of us are. The phenomenologist, in other words, must acknowledge the bare fact that they suffer neglect. And if they acknowledge the bare fact of neglect, then, given the role neglect plays in their own critique of scientism, they have to acknowledge the bare possibility that they, like Dennett and heterophenomenology, find themselves occupying a view whose coherence requires ignorance—or to use Zahavi’s preferred term, naivete—in a likewise theoretically pernicious way.
The question now becomes one of whether the phenomenological concept of horizons can actually allay this worry. The answer here has to be no. Why? Simply because the phenomenologist cannot deploy horizons to rationally immunize phenomenology against neglect without assuming that phenomenology is already so immunized. Or put differently: if it were the case that neglect were true, that Zahavi’s phenomenology, like Dennett’s heterophenomenology, only makes sense given a certain kind of neglect, then we should expect ‘horizons’ to continue playing a conceptually constitutive role—to contribute to phenomenology the way it always has.
Horizons cannot address the problem of neglect. The phenomenologist, then, is stranded with the bare possibility that their practice only appears to be coherent or cognitive. If neglect can cause such problems for Dennett, then it’s at least possible that it can do so for Zahavi. And how else could it be, given that phenomenology was not handed down to Moses by God, but rather elaborated by humans suffering all the cognitive foibles on the list linked above? In all our endeavours, it is always possible that our blindspots get the better of us. We can’t say anything about specific ‘unknown unknowns’ period, let alone anything regarding their relevance! Arguing that phenomenology constitutes a solitary exception to this amounts to withdrawing from the possibility of rational discourse altogether—becoming a secular religion, in effect.
So it has to be possible that Zahavi’s phenomenology runs afoul theoretically pernicious neglect the way he accuses Dennett’s heterophenomenology of running afoul theoretically pernicious neglect.
Fair is fair.
The question now becomes one of whether phenomenology is suffering from theoretically pernicious neglect. Given that magic mushrooms fuck up phenomenologists as much as the rest of us, it seems assured that the capacities involved in cognizing their transcendental domain pertain to the biological in some fundamental respect. Phenomenologists suffer strokes, just like the rest of us. Their neurobiological capacity to take the ‘phenomenological attitude’ can be stripped from them in a tragic inkling.
But if the phenomenological attitude can be neurobiologically taken, it can also be given back, and here’s the thing, in attenuated forms, tweaked in innumerable different ways, fuzzier here, more precise there, truncated, snipped, or twisted.
This means there are myriad levels of phenomenological penetration, which is to say, varying degrees of phenomenological neglect. Insofar as we find ourselves on a biological continuum with other species, this should come as no surprise. Biologically speaking, we do not stand on the roof of the world, so it makes sense to suppose that the same is true of our phenomenology.
So bearing this all in mind, here’s an empirical alternative to what I termed the Transcendental Interpretation above.
On the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, consciousness can be seen as a serial, broadcast conduit between a vast array of nonconscious parallel systems. Networks continually compete at the threshold of conscious ‘ignition,’ as it’s called, competition between nonconscious processes results in the selection of some information for broadcast. Stanislaus Dehaene—using heterophenomenology exactly as Dennett advocates—claims on the basis of what is now extensive experimentation that consciousness, in addition to broadcasting information, also stabilizes it, slows it down (Consciousness and the Brain). Only information that is so broadcast can be accessed for verbal report. From this it follows that the ‘phenomenological attitude’ can only access information broadcast for verbal report, or conversely, that it neglects all information not selected for stabilization and broadcast.
Now the question becomes one of whether that information is all the information the phenomenologist, given his or her years of specialized training, needs to draw the conclusions they do regarding the ontological structure of experience. And the more one looks at the situation through a natural lens, the more difficult it becomes to see how this possibly could be the case. The GNW model sketched above actually maps quite well onto the dual-process cognitive models that now dominate the field in cognitive science. System 1 cognition applies to the nonconscious, massively parallel processing that both feeds, and feeds from, the information selected for stabilization and broadcast. System 2 cognition applies to the deliberative, conscious problem-solving that stabilization and broadcast somehow makes possible.
Now the phenomenological attitude, Zahavi claims, somehow enables deliberative cognition of the transcendental structure of experience. The phenomenological attitude, then, somehow involves a System 2 attempt to solve for consciousness in a particular way. It constitutes a paradigmatic example of deliberative, theoretical metacognition, something we are also learning more and more about on a daily basis. (The temptation here will be to beg the question and ‘go ontological,’ and then accuse me of begging the question against phenomenology, but insofar as neuropathologies have any kind of bearing on the ‘phenomenological attitude,’ insofar as phenomenologists are human, giving in to this temptation would be tendentious, more a dialectical dodge than an honest attempt to confront a real problem.)
The question of whether Zahavi has access to what he needs, then, calves into two related issues: the issue of what kind of information is available, and the issue of what kind of metacognitive resources are available.
On the metacognitive capacity front, the picture arising out of cognitive psychology and neuroscience is anything but flattering. As Fletcher and Carruthers have recently noted:
What the data show is that a disposition to reflect on one’s reasoning is highly contingent on features of individual personality, and that the control of reflective reasoning is heavily dependent on learning, and especially on explicit training in norms and procedures for reasoning. In addition, people exhibit widely varied abilities to manage their own decision-making, employing a range of idiosyncratic techniques. These data count powerfully against the claim that humans possess anything resembling a system designed for reflecting on their own reasoning and decision-making. Instead, they support a view of meta-reasoning abilities as a diverse hodge-podge of self-management strategies acquired through individual and cultural learning, which co-opt whatever cognitive resources are available to serve monitoring-and-control functions. (“Metacognition and Reasoning”)
We need to keep in mind that the transcendental deliverances of the phenomenological attitude are somehow the product of numerous exaptations of radically heuristic systems. As the most complicated system in its environment, and as the one pocket of its environment that it cannot physically explore, the brain can only cognize its own processes in disparate and radically heuristic ways. In terms of metacognitive capacity, then, we have reason to doubt the reliability of any form of reflection.
On the information front, we’ve already seen how much information slips between the conceptual cracks with Roden’s account of dark phenomenology. Now with the GNW model, we can actually see why this has to be the case. Consciousness provides a ‘workspace’ where a little information is plucked from many producers and made available to many consumers. The very process of selection, stabilization, and broadcasting, in other words, constitutes a radical bottleneck on the information available for deliberative metacognition. This actually allows us to make some rather striking predictions regarding the kinds of difficulties such a system might face attempting to cognize itself.
For one, we should expect such a system to suffer profound source neglect. Since all the neurobiological machinery preceding selection, stabilization, and broadcast is nonconscious, we should expect any metacognitive attempt to solve for the origins of consciousness to end in dismal failure. In fact, given that the larger cognitive system cognizes environments via predictive error minimization (I heartily recommend Hohwy’s, The Predictive Mind), which is to say, via the ability to anticipate what follows from what, we could suppose it would need some radically different means of cognizing itself, one somehow compensating for, or otherwise accommodating, source neglect.
For another, we should expect such a system to suffer profound scope neglect. Once again, since all the neurobiological machinery bracketing the selection, stabilization, and broadcast is nonconscious, we should expect any metacognitive attempt to solve for the limits of consciousness to end in failure. Since the larger cognitive system functions via active environmental demarcations, consciousness would jam the gears, to be an ‘object without edges,’ if anything coherent at all.
We should expect to be baffled by our immediate sources and by our immediate scope, not because they comprise our transcendental limitations, but because such blind-spots are an inevitable by-product of the radical neurophysiological limits on our brain’s ability to cognize its own structure and dynamics. Thus Blind Brain Theory, the empirical thesis that we’re natural in such a way that we cannot cognize ourselves as natural, and so cognize ourselves otherwise. We’re a standalone solution-monger, one so astronomically complicated that we at best enjoy an ad hoc, heuristic relation to ourselves. The self-same fundamental first-person structure that phenomenology interprets transcendentally—as ontologically positive, naturalistically inscrutable, and inexplicably efficacious—it explains in terms of neglect, explains away, in effect. It provides a radical alternative to the Transcendental Interpretation discussed above—a Blind Brain interpretation. Insofar as Zahavi’s ‘phenomenological attitude’ amounts to anything at all, it can be seen as a radically blinkered, ‘inside view’ of source and scope neglect. Phenomenology, accordingly, can be diagnosed as the systematic addumbration of a wide variety of metacognitive illusions, all turning in predictable ways on neglect.
As a onetime phenomenologist I can appreciate how preposterous this must all sound, but I ask you to consider, as honestly as that list I linked above allows, the following passage:
This flow is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted, but it is not ‘something in objective time.’ It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow’; of something that originates in a point of actuality, in a primal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all this, we lack names. Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, 79.
Now I think this sounds like a verbal report generated by a metacognitive system suffering source and scope neglect yet grappling with questions of source and scope all the same. Blind to our source blindness, our source appears to stand outside the order of the conditioned, to be ‘absolute’ or ‘transcendental.’ Blind to our scope blindness, this source seems to be a kind of ‘object without edges,’ more boundless container than content. And so a concatenation of absolute ignorances drives a powerful intuition of absolute or transcendental subjectivity at the very limit of what can be reported. Thus domesticated, further intuitive inferences abound, and the sourceless, scopeless arena of the phenomenological attitude is born, and with it, the famed ontological difference, the principled distinction of the problem of being from the problems of beings, or the priority of the sourceless and scopeless over the sourced and the scoped.
My point here is to simply provide a dramatic example of the way the transcendental structure revealed by the phenomenological attitude can be naturalistically turned inside out, how its most profound posits are more parsimoniously explained as artifacts of metacognitive neglect. Examples of how this approach can be extended in ways relevant to phenomenology can be found here, here, and here.
This is a blog post, so I can genuinely reach out. Everyone who practices phenomenology needs to consider the very live possibility that they’re actually trading in metacognitive illusions, that the first person they claim to be interpreting in the most fundamental terms possible is actually a figment of neglect. At the very least they need to recognize that the Abductive Argument is no longer open to them. They can no longer assume, the way Zahavi does, that the intersubjective features of their discourse evidence the reality of their transcendental posits exclusively. If anything, Blind Brain Theory offers a far better explanation for the discourse-organizing structure at issue, insofar as it lacks any supernatural posits, renders perspicuous a hitherto occult connection between brain and consciousness (as phenomenologically construed), and is empirically testable.
All of the phenomenological tradition is open to reinterpretation in its terms. I agree that this is disastrous… the very kind of disaster we should have expected science would deliver. Science is to be feared precisely because it monopolizes effective theoretical cognition, not because it seeks to, and philosophies so absurd as to play its ontological master manage only to anaesthetize themselves.
When asked what problems remain outstanding in his AVANT interview, Zahavi acknowledges that phenomenology, despite revealing the dialectical priority of the first person over the third person perspective on consciousness, has yet to elucidate the nature of the relationship between them. “What is still missing is a real theoretical integration of these different perspectives,” he admits. “Such integration is essential, if we are to do justice to the complexity of consciousness, but it is in no way obvious how natural science all by itself will be able to do so” (118). Blind Brain Theory possesses the conceptual resources required to achieve this integration. Via neglect and heuristics, it allows us to see the first-person in terms entirely continuous with the third, while allowing us to understand all the apories and conundrums that have prevented such integration until now. It provides the basis, in other words, for a wholesale naturalization of phenomenology.
Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that phenomenology is at a crossroads. The days when the traditional phenomenologist could go on the attack, actually force their interlocutors to revisit their assumptions, are quickly coming to a close. As the scientific picture of the human accumulates ever more detail—ever more data—the claim that these discoveries have no bearing whatsoever on phenomenological practice and doctrine becomes ever more difficult to credit. “Science is a specific theoretical stance towards the world,” Zahavi claims. “Science is performed by embodied and embedded subjects, and if we wish to comprehend the performance and limits of science, we have to investigate the forms of intentionality that are employed by cognizing subjects.”
Perhaps… But only if it turns out that ‘cognizing subjects’ possess the ‘intentionality’ phenomenology supposes. What if science is performed by natural beings who, quite naturally, cannot intuit themselves in natural terms? Phenomenology has no way of answering this question. So it waits the way all prescientific discourses have waited for the judgment of science on their respective domains. I have given but one possible example of a judgment that will inevitably come.
There will be others. My advice? Jump ship before the real neuroinformatic deluge comes. We live in a society morphing faster and more profoundly every year. There is much more pressing work to be done, especially when it comes to theorizing our everydayness in more epistemically humble and empirically responsive manner. We lack names for what we are, in part because we have been wasting breath on terms that merely name our confusion.
Just a thought. If bbt is true, isn’t it impossible for us to evaluate this truth? Doesn’t it follow from the fundamental lack of scope and limit comprehension, the radical neglect as evidenced via bbt, that it’s out of the question for a creature such as you and me to reach and access the bbt conclusion? If we are wired in the proposed way so that we cannot grasp our own grasping, cannot direct our cognitive and metacognitive apparatuses toward themselves, how could we ever truthfully make the positive bbt-claim that we are naturally constrained so as to short circuit when we try to turn towards ourselves? Since this means bracketing the conclusion on neglect and heuristics and stepping out of that sphere to evaluate it, bbt would seem to reduce itself to a skeptical (non-)position à la Sextus Empiricus.
BBT advises that we look at what kind of information a given conceptual tool neglects, then reason backward to what the problem-ecology of that tool might look like. So the question it would ask here is whether cognition is something that a commonsense, bivalent notion of truth could possibly solve. Insofar as truth is a normative/intentional concept (the arch-normative/intentional concept, if you take Davidson’s word for it!), it’s pretty plainly adapted to the solution of problems in the absence of causal information. Since the scientific understanding of cognition requires causal information, we really should expect ‘truth’ will jam the gears of any attempt to understand cognition that takes it as criterial. And this, of course, is precisely what we find in cognitive science. Nobody has a clue as to how to naturalize truth or correctness. Semantic externalism is pretty much dead. The enactivists keep hammering at the representationalists on these very grounds – the ‘hard problem of content’ as Hutto and Myin call it.
BBT manages to slip quite effortlessly through problems of performative contradiction like this, any of the tu quoque arguments raised against eliminativism, actually. But then these arguments simply beg the question by assuming the very interpretation of truth (or whatever the intentional concept) that the eliminativist is calling into question. (The updated SEP article on eliminativism actually does a good job unpacking this). Where eliminativisms generally fall short is on the abductive side of the issue: they assert that intentional phenomena (or some subset thereof) are unreal without explaining why we seem so convinced they are or how they seem to do all the work that they do. Since the eliminativism of BBT falls out of a prior account of what intentional phenomena actually are, why they dupe us, and how they manage to do work, it doesn’t suffer that problem. Here’s some of the things it has to say about truth.
“One could find solace that evolution overshot / mistargeted with our cognition” == One could find solace that evolution might have overshot / mistargeted with our cognition.
Well, I still do not see why this critique automatically would beg the question by super imposing intentional concepts. “Truth” aside, the postulation of bbt that heuristics go all the way down and that medial neglect is rock bottom seems to to me rather to indicate an aporia inherent in the theory itself. Because if it is stated that medial neglect is fundamental this cannot be overcome. But in the very positing of this brute fact it is still overcome. Ergo: transcendence/closure paradox. In short, if bbt were “true”, “real”, “graspable”, operational or at work in any sense so fundamental, we could not be aware of it.
I’m not sure why, unless one conflates intuition with inference. It would be like saying we could never know that free will was an illusion because we can never infer that we are unable to intuit what drives our behaviour.
One could find solace that evolution overshot / mistargeted with our cognition.
You see, evolution is kinda imprecise, resulting in peculiar “over-adaptive” phenotypes (Tardigrades evolved a number of adaptations for coping with rather earthly matters such as droughts and cold winters, but the biochemistry involved proved so effective that it allows them to survive hard vacuum, extensive cryogenic freezing, and severe irradiation way above and beyond anything that can be found on earth).
Tardigrades evolved to conquer your local stale mud-pit, but through a biochemical coincidence they can weather both outer space and our good friend Chernobyl.
So we still may harbor optimistic hopes that our brains have kind of “overshot” the evolutionary “mark” somewhat like Tardigrade bodies did, in the sense that despite being evolved merely for killing other tribal assholes, hunting rabbits and picking roots, we will nonetheless be able to comprehend both the universe at large and the nature of our very own mind.
And for a bunch of hairless apes evolved for hunting and vicious intragroup/intergroup conflicts, we’re doing remarkably well so far.
Zahavi claims. “Science is performed by embodied and embedded subjects, and if we wish to comprehend the performance and limits of science, we have to investigate the forms of intentionality that are employed by cognizing subjects.”
All this talk of embodied and embedded reminded me of Roden’s critique of critical posthumanism in that first few chapters. I saw you mentioned his treatment of dark phenomenology. In fact I’m working through his 4.2 section tonight dealing with the naturalization of phenomenology and his rejection of the transcendental… etc.
One wants to almost ask Zahavi why he doesn’t just give up chasing the tail on the donkey and become a neuroscientist… 🙂
Dang, I’m torn… I’m almost 3/4 way finished with your first Prince of Nothing tale and was going to read it tonight… 🙂 hahah!
Ha! Well thematically speaking, the two books fit together seamlessly! If you haven’t noticed, all these debates turn on the darknesses that come before. ‘My darkness is bigger than your darkness, so na!’ I’m thoroughly enjoying your serial review, btw. I would sound off, huge, but I’m still in the middle of doing an interview with David, asking him all the hard questions. It’s taking him longer and longer between replies… 😉
Regarding Zahavi, the philosophical imaginarium runs so deep that I don’t have any illusions of disturbing dogmatic slumbers, so much as troubling dreams with examples of just how REAL the cognitive revolution is going to be. It would be really nice, though, if I could get an honest to goodness exchange with someone committed to the phenomenological cause.
But I fear the cover of my book doesn’t recommend me…
Also, you should know Craig that no one says ‘dang’ anymore.
Dang!!! I do 🙂 Does this mean I’m ‘no one’… always wanted a Joycean name, or maybe Blake’s Nobodaddy… bad ass impossibles!
No. Just old. Really, really… old.
Yes… I resemble that remark. Hey, I’m 62 and proud of it kiddo… and, I doubt anyone uses that term too much either. 🙂 ahha
You don’t look it! Me, on the other hand. The mirror is a bit of phenomenology I could do without.
Scott said: ” It would be really nice, though, if I could get an honest to goodness exchange with someone committed to the phenomenological cause.”
When I read this, Evan Thompson came to mind as someone I would like to see you have an exchange with . Have you ever reached out to him?
He’s at U Toronto too, isn’t he? I really liked his Mind in Life. And his review of Deacon’s book was the best of the lot, I thought.
Per his website (http://evanthompson.me/) he’s now at Univ. British Columbia.
he does some good work (more careful than most who ab-use his work) but was on the wrong side of:
http://www.cogsci.northwestern.edu/speakers/2012-2013/dialogue.php
It is interesting that you liked Mind in Life. Do you think autopoiesis has no hope of solving intentionality?
Not at all. The great gaping hole in Mind in Life is the same as the one in Incomplete Nature. Both look at the problem of intentionality dogmatically, as a problem that does not require consideration of the problem-solver to resolve. Intentionality is something that has to obtain independently of interpreters, for them. But the fact is, human cognition ‘goes heuristic’ for ALL problems involving complex relata–all of them. One of the things we commonly do is attribute intrinsic efficacy to things only possessing efficacy within complicated systems. Money is the most glaring example: it only possesses ‘value’ given attunement within a larger system. The system crashes, and the ‘efficacy’ apparently belonging to money evaporates. So here we have this astronomically complicated communicative system, and here we have all these ‘skyhooks,’ or free-floating efficacies, and the goal, for the dogmatist, becomes one of conjuring some naturalistic description of them, when the first thing they need to explain is how intentional cognition could be anything other than radically heuristic, given the complexity of the systems involved.
Autopoiesis completely game games the operational closure of the RS to neglect entirely it’s aietiological openness to signals outside of horizonal ambit. Still I think they give a nice theoretical armchair account of the closure of the RS. They even discuss how the model of reflection arises from the irreflexive in some parts but in the end it’s all made a kind of fichtean positioning of languaging
Very interesting. Where might I find these particular accounts, Josef?
But re a/p ‘solving’ intentionality. If you actually look at a/p theres a kind of nihilism in it. Maturana’s saving grace was the givenness of circularity and the already constitutive distinguishing unifying Observer. The generative level postulated as ‘mechanism’ in the restricted sense outlined in the ontology of observation admits of *nothing* resembling purposes, agency, nor even functions, nor even mechanisms itself. His zero time cybernetics doesn’t even include minimal vestiges of history as articulated through notions like ’causes’, ‘history’, and on this dimension of the structure determined state transformations of the neuronal network there isn’t even any circularity except in the sense of structural closure, and so on. These are all facets of the cognitive domains of the organism that the theory is supposed to simply account for.
Concerning my comment about closure of RS. In the original paper it’s stressed again and again that differences that make no difference don’t show up for a cognitive system, and this at the level of the cell and neuronal networks, at the level of the organism, and at the level of the structurally coupled community of observers. Given the highly formal and postulative nature of autopoiesis what I found is that it is still unable to account for the basic character of experience that rends it quixotic and difficult to subsume under the remit of naturalistic explanation. But maturana doesn’t address experience. Cognition in his sense is just the basic inductive character of sequences of production of behavior in living coupling to the niche. But he just leaves neglect aside and drops what might be called the realistic attitude and takes it that the ampliative recursive extension of cognitive domains is just a basic non privative feature of organisms. But he maintains a crucial dimension of intentionality, namely the production of orders of ‘autonomy’ in spite of the thesis of structure determinism.
Sounds close to what I would say regarding the ‘mark of the cognitive,’ anyway. Systems that behaviourally solve environments via sensitivity to past environments are generally what gets labelled ‘representational’ and therefore ‘cognitive’ in most cogski circles. I have a post coming up on this topic specifically, actually.
My position is simply that enactivisms are simply eliminativisms that lose nerve on the way. I’ve been debating Erik Myin on this issue for months now, actually.
yes and no. maturana is very much a transcendental philosopher invested in human-worldnedness and how it has grounding priority over the natural.
Okay, this is worth a re-read (texts like this needs to be ruminated 🙂 )
Some quick things that immediately captured my superficial perception
This… description is immediately reminiscent of some sort message-passing interprocess communication system.
But not a tidy and sophisticated one, like DBus. More like, something slightly uncanny, like Android’s broadcast/broadcastReciever shtick (which does qualify the definition of a message-passing IPC system).
I am not going to run anywhere far with this, but that certainly seems like a curious parallel.
On a different note, I wonder how GNWT in general (and specifically the “conscious broadcast as prerequisite for verbal report” claim) deals with the observation that there are people with no internal monologue (said people can communicate verbally, but “experiences” and “thought” are not exposed as a verbalized “internal monologue”) and things like Tourette syndrome (the cases where tics are coherent utterances like coprolalia or echolalia).
P.S.:
And a little bit of an embarrassing confession:
I’ve always had trouble precisely “grokking” the difference between an introspectionist stance and the fabled phenomenological attitude.
After reading this, I am even more confused.
You just gotta believe, 01!
You’re far from alone.
Where should I look to investigate a message-passing interprocess communication system?
So basically, phenomenological attitude is just fanciful rhetorics. Heh.
You might want to start with the exocerebrum :), and unless you actually intend to become a
sorcerercoder of some sort, you might not want to dwell much furtherhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing
Also do take a look at Android’s BroadcastReciever… solution.
Here’s one of the more friendly overviews:
http://www.edureka.co/blog/android-tutorials-broadcast-receivers/
It is eerily reminiscent of Wallace’s “coalescence/ignition” stuff, at least to me.
I should note, however, that message-passing interprocess communication systems aren’t essentially “serial”, but you could maybe see an occasion when a message is passed “globally” as “serial process” in the sense that there is only one global set of destinations (which is “all of them, duh”), though such circumstances aren’t usually referred with the term “serial” (they are “broadcasts” 🙂 ) and calling it such may cause… confusion and agitation.
Also, I think you will enjoy debugger evasion (anti-debugging), at least on conceptual level (fundamental unreliability of introspection plagues computers, too!)
Hey, Scott, while browsing for other things ran across something you’d love to hate or at least argue against which seems to be touted by Roger Scrutton and a myriad of other non-neruoscientists… Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity by Raymond Tallis.
I figured he’s the type of thinker you love to destroy or at least question.
From the blurb:
With the formidable acuity and precision of both clinician and philosopher, Tallis dismantles the idea that “we are our brains”, which has given rise to a plethora of neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines laying claim to explain everything from art and literature to criminality and religious belief, and shows it to be confused and fallacious, and an abuse of the prestige of science, one that sidesteps a whole range of mind–body problems.
The belief that human beings can be understood essentially in biological terms is a serious obstacle, argues Tallis, to clear thinking about what human beings are and what they might become. To explain everyday behaviour in Darwinian terms and to identify human consciousness with the activity of the evolved brain denies human uniqueness, and by minimising the differences between us and our nearest animal kin, misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and degrading account of humanity. We are, shows Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biologism.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more ideal a foil Tallis seems… You put a bee in my bonnet, good sir!
Yea, realizing his commitments to Idealism, phenomenology etc. I thought this would be a perfect specimen for your rebuttal point by point. 🙂
Re S.C. Hickman
” Yea, realizing his commitments to Idealism, phenomenology”
Wait, you can be into both of those things at the same time ?
Have you read Husserl? Remember he was committed to bracketing reality, and creating a conceptual realm of ‘Ideal Objects’ in the mind. His phenomenology grew out of a confrontation with the whole tradition of German Idealism… and many of the conceptual aspects of all phenolmenolgists are trapped in Idealist problematics… same goes for such thinkers as Badiou, Meillassoux, Zizek, etc. from the materialist side… Idealism can be found in many if not all philosophers whether they call themselves phenomenologists, realists, materialists, etc. There is not such thing as a pure Idealism: read Idealism: The History of a Philosopy Iain Hamilton Grant and cohorts… gives a great rundown …
Craig have you noticed Ian actually says some things quite salient to BBT. In the goldsmith’s lecture particularly he seems to try to hammer home how representation will always fall short of the mark given that a generative phenomenon always “loses” its condition or obscures its grounds in the process of being conditioned. He might even say something like information is always lost in any temporal processes, and I think this is true generally for any complex system. I think we can understand this from dynamical systems theory. Any stochastic system, or non newtonian system, with multipath structure (there are single which more than one arc leading to the state), will suffer an inability to reconstruct a retrodiction of its history given its current state.
Medial neglect in this sense seems inescapable: the system is doomed to possess at best an heuristic relation to itself. But part of the puzzle–I think I’m beginning to realize at least!–involves cobbling together a bestiary of heuristics and the problem ecologies corresponding to them. It seems entirely possible to me that artificial systems, even though barred from cognizing cognition in situ, could nevertheless have quite detailed and powerful synoptic comportments to their own cognition, using logs or what have to reconstruct salient episodes. Their self-relation would be heuristic in a sense that actually dovetails, as opposed to apparently contradict, the high-dimensional facts of what they happen to be. So in a strange sense, not all neglect would be equal.
To me the ultimate ‘mind-body problem’ is the fact that minds never survive the destruction of the brains in which they are incarnated. If minds exist somehow independently of the brains in which they are incarnated why do those minds disintegrate in lockstep as the brain disintegrates due to Alzheimer’s or a stroke or a gunshot wound? It’s perfectly fair to judge a book by its cover (otherwise why would publishers pay to have covers designed?) and judging by the blurb Mr. Tallis sounds like a creationist, or a theist of some other sort. I think anyone who claims that mind is something more than biological owes an explanation of what that more is, and I think in order for that explanation to be legitimate it has to explain why the mind seems to be bound to the brain in the way it does.
Yep! Phineas Gage was the ultimate desecration of the soul that every dualist has to account for.
“What if science is performed by natural beings who, quite naturally, cannot intuit themselves in natural terms?”
If short of specialized learning, metacognitive neglect as the only game in town naturally leads to the illusion of metacognitive sufficiency, and if this illusion serves as the ur-intuition upon which all of our other intuitions of what it means to be human are based, then you’re using specialized leaning to arguing against a default “undeniable, self-validating experience” that comes naturally to everyone and doesn’t take years of academic immersion to apprehend. How do you convince people to consider with an open mind the pandora’s box of counterintuitive obscenities that’s coming out of neuroscience when the opposite view is not only the default but the only thing they’ve ever known?
I’ve started to notice a kind of argument from incredulity being used against the implications coming out of neuroscience. It goes something like this:
You just have to be wrong about neuroscience because what else can I possibly be besides the human I think I am? To prove me wrong is to annihilate the very concept of the human that informs ever part of our subjective experiences. This lets me dismiss your position out of hand, since why are you even debating me if “you” don’t exist and have no such thing as the “will” to present an argument?
Regardless of how obviously flawed that argument appears to people who don’t buy into the intuition of metacognitive sufficiency, the same seems to serve as an equally obvious and adequate defense for those who do. Its very circularity renders their faith in the unified autonomous self all but unassailable.
All of this leaves me very pessimistic regarding the persuasive power of your naturalized view to sway the minds of anyone who’s not already inclined to depressive realism.
Seems like I fucked up that first link. At least I didn’t bork your entire comment page.
Why futurologists are always wrong – and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians
It’s just versions of the tu quoque argument or performative contradiction argument, one of which I received above here, just a couple days ago. It’s actually very easy to show people the question begging nature of the strategy. The crazy thing is the way they’ll concede and simply parrot the argument back again. I’m convinced metacognitive dogmatism (or the illusion of self-transparency, as Carruthers calls it) is a kind of reflex, that you literally have to train your interlocutors to catch themselves falling for it. We quite simply have no error-signalling capacity to vet our metacog intuitions, so it seems they HAVE to be true.
But that said, it’s the basis of my pessimistic theory of akratic society, or Disney World culture, where the technical/adminstrative realities are predominantly governed by mechanistic thinking/problem-solving, and the culture at large is swaddled in deepening illusions of autonomy. The reflex, I think, is simply too hard for most to overcome.
It’s like seeing what appears to be an obviously sick person admit to the possibility of being sick in some dismissively hypothetical way on the one hand, while in the same breath staunchly deny the very possibility for themselves because they claim the alternative simply too terrible to contemplate. And as you pointed out it’s maddening in the way that the logical shortfall of this line of thought seems to have no bearing on its argumentative power to assuage the believer.
Insofar as adopting this “concede yet not concede” strategy towards circumstances that hold power over one’s life can lead to increased suffering in the long run, seeing people fall into this reflex trap yet suspecting there is no effective way to convince them otherwise strikes me as profoundly tragic. Right at the most opportune time for society to force the very mechanisms of technical/administrative realities to guarantee some kind of future accommodation for anachronistic noocentrism, those with the best professional training in persuasion are busy trying to convince everyone that Disney World culture is all we’ll ever need.
For example there’s nothing intrinsically impossible about a society that values “an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” to the point that it would funnel the material surplus of increasingly automated production towards supporting its citizens at having a “life of production” that by itself produces nothing economically valuable aside from the feeling of purpose. But such an idea seems so ass backwards bizarre under the rubric of capitalism that I start to doubt myself for even thinking it. I feel like it wouldn’t take much to convince most people that this kind of thing is indeed crazy talk.
Word. That last is about the most extreme version of akratic society I could imagine… and it seems like it already applies now. It makes sense. This is what video game culture begins in, and we’re about to witness it engulf worlds with the same exponential improvement as always: companies actually hire researchers to study the nature of reward! They are explicitly in the feeling of purpose business, just disposable ones.
It’s tricky when you get to this level of complexity, though. What register do we use to think this through in anything resembling a responsible manner? Or do we just qualify, qualify, qualify?
The truth/falsehood of a statement is not usually relevant to it’s plausibility, for all the reasons noted in the list linked to at the top of the post. At the risk of seeming a gnostic snob, one might argue that convincing people that their personhood is less than it seems might not be that good an idea.
And capitalism is funny in that it seems to me to depend on perceived scarcity. As the supply of a good approaches infinity the price of that good approaches zero, which is why ordinary breathing air is free. If automated production can drive the cost of all goods to zero I suspect most of us will adjust to a life of leisure pretty quickly. Breathing air is intrinsically valuable but not economically valuable because we don’t have a good way to own the atmosphere and withhold it from people who can’t pay for it. If machine production so far outstrips human production that nothing humans produce is economically valuable and if humans continue to own the mechanized means of production the question becomes what will the vast majority of humans who do not own means of production give to the small handful who do? It seems clear that the only thing they will have to offer is worship. If technology does give a small number of humans godlike power over the means that other humans need to live and leaves those godlike humans with their humanity (greed, vanity, selfishness etc) intact capitalism will truly become a religion.
I agree with you on the ‘not a good idea’ angle. I sometimes feel like a schizophrenic, addicted to the buzz of continually pushing the BBT implicature outward, yet thinking I’m committing some kind of cultural atrocity by doing so. If it weren’t for the profundity of the consequences should it turn out I am right and no one ever cracked this particular code, I think my addiction would be blunted quite a bit.
That last is about the most extreme version of akratic society I could imagine… and it seems like it already applies now. It makes sense. This is what video game culture begins in, and we’re about to witness it engulf worlds with the same exponential improvement as always:
Well that definition outs me as Akratic, I guess. But what was there supposed to be – an endless final frontier where everyone will be facing the ‘real deal’, whatever that is (it’s whatever is ‘not game’, I guess. The no-game!) so as to be really, really doing something? Is that why people worship work – because the shit of it is some kind of indicator it might be some real deal? Some sort of mount doom to travel to?
I think these are the kinds of questions that sketch nature of the real dilemma. Have these particular sense-making heuristics taken us as far as we can go?
Yeah. Along with the ‘If you even use words to argue this, then you have just affirmed words as meaningful and mattering! Duh duh dah!’ stuff.
Trying to look at it from their perspective though, the BBT proposition leaves them with no other model of reference to self. Faced with that staggering self reconstruction task – well, were like hermit crabs – we wont leave one shell until we have another shell to go to. Those pitching BBT may have constructed another shell (including ‘I don’t want to believe BBT to be true’) for themselves. But it’s an unfair expectation if you are somehow able to build shells and the other person is completely unaware of even the idea of it, to pitch something that demands the leaving of one shell, when they have no where to go to (while for you, you did).
Wait a moment, I’ve just re-re-re-read the part that fascinated First so much, this one:
“On the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, consciousness can be seen as a serial, broadcast conduit between a vast array of nonconscious parallel systems. Networks continually compete at the threshold of conscious ‘ignition,’ as it’s called”
And while I am not any kind of programmer or engineer, I recall First explaining me that serial port is a kind of port where there’s one chunk at a time is being sent to or from device.
I call shenanigans.
Not on serial port of course, but on the serial part of the “consciousness can be seen as a serial broadcast conduit” thing
I can obviously maintain conscious attention of two or more things at a time.
I could even make this comically self-referential by opening a tab with some video where some person… let’s say, pays attention to more than one thing at a time, in one of the two windows I am paying attention to.
But the drop-off is very dramatic and very well supported. It’s the evidence that gets cited all the time to motivate texting and driving laws. In fact, it’s also possible to pay unconscious attention to things!
The ‘seriality’ of it, the nearest I can tell, turns on various channels or modalities. So on the type of masking paradigms many researchers use they’ll use varying means to isolate nonconscious percepts that are eventually outcompeted for conscious broadcasting. So it’s like there ‘can only be one’ in the Highlander sense, only with a handful of other ones as well. Or who knows? It could be you’re picking up nonconscious attention, and simply neglecting how bare that capacity is until you draw it into you main focus. This seems to be the illusion that kills texting drivers, for instance.
Third asks an interesting question.
Interesting because, on one hand, the assumption that the “IPC of the brain” is, in a way, a serial arrangement (even if merely “serial because global”) would nicely explain what is consciousness for.
You see, when you need to connect a bunch of stuff over a serial interface, you need something to act as a “master”, with every other participant being a “slave”.
The “master” part of the IPC is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin can, a subsystem that controls the process of communication, prioritizing messages, polling other participants for updates, and even deciding who gets to “talk” at all.
Because the communication protocol over a serial interface isn’t obliged to have provisions for exposing internal states of “slaves”, so “slave” components are oftentimes very “blackboxy” from “master”‘s perspective (lol, that didn’t sound very sensitive, did it ? 🙂 )
That would neatly explain why some aspects of our cognition are very introspection-proof, which is very neat indeed.
Now, if we assume that there is some parallelism inherent to our hypothetical IPC, the resources available are still finite (you can’t have “infinite communication parallelism” in the real world, hurrrrrr) and thus there needs to be a mechanism for managing message priorities and resource allocation (which can be an explicit separate system, like some daemon process, or you could try to do it in a “decentralized-ish” fashion which is rather inefficient in terms of resources but might have some fringe use-cases)
Since in both cases a resource-efficient implementation would have some kind of “master” process dealing with stuff like routing, allocation of resources, polling, and policy management, it seems challenging to me to come up with a falsifiable prediction that would discriminate between “hypothetical serial brain IPC” case and “hypothetical parallel brain IPC” (do note that “seemingly handling two different things simultaneously” does not appear to be a good discriminatory case – you can simultaneously communicate with more than one “slave” over a serial connection as long as there’s enough bandwidth available, and in fact, your computer probably does if it has a proud forest of USB hubs to call its own)
So yes, Third is right by pointing out that the case for “brain’s consciousness” being a “certainly serial” system to be a bit overstated (I kind of took it for granted unthinkingly, and I have to admit, that probably merely reflects the trouble I have with physical multitasking).
However, making a falsifiable prediction that would reliably distinguish between a “parallel consciousness” and a “cleverly implemented serial consciousness” appears to be a very nontrivial task.
This is very neat, and very near the way Dehaene and his colleagues analogize what’s going on. Add a learning component to this, and the need to solve novel environmental problems, and I think we’re getting very close to what consciousness might be for. The initial selection pressure perhaps arose out of the kinds of functional management demands you enumerate. You need to coordinate activities to the production of singular outputs, behaviours that enhance selection (and this entails bandwidth), and this requirement never goes away. But what happens when the slaves begin making useful comments outside of their proscribed sphere? I don’t believe in general cognition. What I do believe in is the possibility of creative misapplication. So imagine a system rich in promiscuous slaves, one that has evolved to maximize the exaptational capacities of the system of a whole as a means of overcoming novel environmental problems. Such a system, it seems to me, would look an awful lot like general cognition.
I think the very notion of “proscribed sphere” is problematic here.
Evolved systems don’t really have such a thing as “proscribed sphere”, just some spheres where something can operate with varying degree of success, thanks to nothing more than a long chain of coincidences.
Again, the term “mis” application implies that there is a “proper” application.
There isn’t.
There are varying degrees of success in application (ranging all the way from “good enough to thrive in this environment” to “fatal”), and there’s a changing asshat of an environment that’s prone to throwing curveballs and monkey-wrenches all around.
In a way, every application in evolution is mis-application (those fin’s weren’t initially “designed” to be paws, let alone hands 🙂 )
Yeah, sure.
Why not ?
It doesn’t seem to be a particularly pessimistic conclusion or even a particularly outrageous conclusion, unless one has some kind of “free will” or “unique human nature full of FREEDOM and PUPPIES” pre-commitments.
And while I am skeptical of “big” general intelligence/cognition as a concept (IIRC, all currently known “general” decision theories are computationally intractable, not to mention that a truly “general” cognition system would also seemingly run afoul of godel incompleteness theorem), the matter isn’t entirely settled and is largely dependent on what we consider to be a “general” cognition system (ironically, the term seems to be sometimes used as a smarter sounding placeholder for a “human-equivalent” cognition system).
P.S.:
It seems to me that the underlying “pessimistic current” in your work hinges on undeclared assumption that we won’t be able to tell when our subsystems start reporting outright bullshit (very low success of application, so to say) and will somehow, metaphorically speaking, drive ourselves into a wall due to this.
It is, of course, a possibility (much like discovering a “halting input” for human consciousness is a theoretical possibility 😉 )
But so far, our weird conglomerate of subsystems has worked out pretty well!
It even managed to (slightly distorting a slightly controversial turn of phrase from a certain wonderful work of fiction) rape math and philosophy into itself, despite the fact that “ancestral problem ecology” was remarkably lacking in those two.
We just need to be really careful with our first Oscar 😉
Playing the
devil’s03’s advocate a bit here, it could be that the system is really parallel, but the task of tracking the road got a shit stick in terms of resource allocation and a disproportionate amount of “technically parallel” resources (computational resources, bandwidth, what have you) is being committed to the very attractive task of finding out what BadDragon9023 said to VixieShadow on Twitturd.“Parallel” doesn’t really mean “everyone gets a fair share”
Can you ? I think it’s another medial neglect. i bet it’s more like visual saccades, where we don’t see the process that stitched together the perception of simultaneity. So you just don’t see you rapid attention shifts or how it time shared serially
Well, it might be.
Then, maybe using myself as example is unfair, as I am hardly a “typical” woman as far as “upstairs wiring” goes.
I don’t have internal monologue, (none at all, and it was bloody surprising to learn that such a thing as “internal monologue” exists and is considered “normal”) but I do have algolagnia (which is a surprisingly nifty thing to have)
I wonder if all these things are somehow linked, or I just happened to win some kind of gene-jackpot
03,
I don’t have internal monologue
How do you read, then?
Even if my mind is putting on someone elses voice (or my guess of their voice!), I’m hearing an internal monologue (from them, in this case).
Re: how do I read
TLDR version:
quickly
Full version:
When I read, especially when I read stuff like technical text, I kind of get images and imagine concepts, but not words. It is rather hard to describe, in part because of how fast the process happens, which makes it rather hard to keep “track” of as an experience.
sometimes – especially for text which has actual, you know, dialogue, I might imagine the characters speaking (though mostly it’s still more like internal images than internal speech), but that experience doesn’t match what scientific literature and people talked to describe as “internal monologue”.
I imagine the dialogue the way I would imagine other sounds – like, I dunno, a train’s whistle (you can “imagine the sound of a train’s whistle” as a sound and not as a narration, I suppose, right ? ), and at no point does a “narration” that I would “ascribe to myself” arise
For quite a long time I assumed that when characters in literature “thought to themselves” something or other as a monologue, it was just a literary device, like a metaphor of sorts.
So it’s like how some people are visual learners, while others are listening learners and others learn by doing. Here it’s strongly towards a visual/internal visualisation?
It’s not traditional internal narration, but a flashing series of images is a kind of narration, when you think of narration as just being a story. You get the occasional movie or TV show where they have no one speak, just the visual events, for example.
you can “imagine the sound of a train’s whistle” as a sound and not as a narration, I suppose, right ?
Yes, I think so. But just as much as I can imagine the actual sound in my head instead of those words, I can imagine the sound of people talking – which is just another sound. Or my own voice – granted there’s a range of feelings and intituitions before that voice – sometimes I have a feeling and it takes some time to put it into ‘human readable format’. Sometimes I never manage to express it in words in my head/words that can be expressed externally.
But in the end words are like train whistles. Just finer granulation.
One of the things I like to think about is shouting words inside ones head. What is ‘volume’ when it comes to such a thing? Just the idea of volume, really. No wonder there’s so much conciousness debate if people don’t consider their idea of themselves is itself just an idea of something, not an actual something, like the shouting thought is just an idea of shouting, not actual shouting.
Anyway, I ramble. Stream of conciousness, something something, dark side.
03, i think the notion is a kind of idealization. we use this idealizations to mediate the fact that we are as blinkered to the internal as we are to the external (actual causal processes underwriting folk ontologies) i hear fragments of sentences, and so forth, and when i think things through i often whisper or mouth words without making sounds (this is actually actually common according to chomsky), but its nothing like a fully structured monologue, until you actually use it to occasion a language entry move and produce a real monologue.
While reading this I was struck by some things that I have been thinking about recently.
Specifically, the idea that we can discriminate far more colors simultaneously than sequentially caught my eye. I study hearing, where “sequentiality” is the rule. In psychophysics, people are often tested on auditory discriminations with a 3IFC paradigm (3 interval forced choice), where they are tasked with identifying which of the 3 stimuli is the oddball. This is a cognitively demanding paradigm because it relies so heavily on memory.
This leads to the question of what aspects of recent neural activity in a given structure can be effectively parsed by others connected to it. In a sense then, we need to consider something like neglect when thinking about information processing among different neural structures. I have a paper that deals with this with respect to contrast adaptation in primary visual cortex (V1), where we show that V1 – but not the lateral geniculate nucleus – effectively chooses NOT to maximize information transmission, but instead to promote response selectivity by ignoring small input perturbations. We provide a mathematical estimate of this degree of “neglect”, effectively.
We also know, for example, that an Ideal Observer (a mathematical model that uses the optimal decoding strategy for a given set of observations) based on responses of auditory nerve fibers will often show trends that recapitulate trends in human psychoacoustic performance on various tasks. This is good, since it suggests that the model has captured an interesting aspect of human performance. However, it is also often the case that the model outperforms actual people by an order of magnitude or more on the task. I find this interesting in the context of the ‘privileged access’ we imagine we have to our own minds. It’s simply a fact that for many tasks, for many experimental models, neuroscientists with a decent physiology rig can outperform animal (and human) subjects doing some perceptual task on that task with access to just a few well-chosen spiking patterns. Our models of population codes – rather than explaining why we’re good at something – have to explain why we’re not much, much BETTER at it.
It is quite popular to relate “psychometric” and “neurometric” measures of performance on various perceptual tasks. More and more, however, I find myself frustrated by how unconstrained this process is, given our ignorance of the effective information loss that occurs when tasking a memory system that indexes the activity of a sensory system with “reporting” the results of a given discrimination. For example, if we can demonstrate that all the information necessary to perform a perceptual task is present in the activity patterns of a group of neurons (this happens a lot, and has happened often in my own research), how do we explain the fact that psychophysical results clearly show we aren’t using it? Neuroscientists often can reconcile the psychometric and neurometric curves by implementing a suboptimal decoding strategy (for example, limiting the temporal resolution of the model’s access to spiking data).
[WIth animal models, where we have both the neural and behavioral data, one must question whether the animals are “doing their best” when their “problem ecology” is quite clearly geared to getting stuff (e.g. treats), not “kicking ass at tone in noise detection” per se.]
Obviously, Bakker is using “neglect” in the sense of “radically heuristic” cognition, which is a different explanatory level than the one I’m working at, but I think that it’s interesting that something very like “neglect” creeps into basic neurophysiology, since the style of information transfer implemented by neurons in a given signal pathway is typically not ‘invertible’ and so involves profound information loss. Of course, neglect can only be defined relative to a particular “problem ecology” – the same can be said of what is “informative” (though perhaps not “information” in the technical sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory). Still, I find this a concrete way of confronting the notion that “we” cannot possibly “know” all of what our brains “know.”
“Heuristics” may be akin to “encoding strategies” at a different level of description, on this view, as much what we are, as what we do.
Bakker, welcome to the Empire. Tell your friends in the Alliance that all their base are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive. Make your time.
I’ve read elsewhere in this blog that something like 20% of the calories we actually use are burned in our brains. Are there energy savings to be had from this suboptimal processing? Do scientists track the calorie use associated with various neurological activities?
” Of course, neglect can only be defined relative to a particular “problem ecology” – the same can be said of what is “informative” (though perhaps not “information” in the technical sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory). Still, I find this a concrete way of confronting the notion that “we” cannot possibly “know” all of what our brains “know.” “Heuristics” may be akin to “encoding strategies” at a different level of description, on this view, as much what we are, as what we do. ”
yes a kind/attitude of pragmatism/tinkering than is the only way forward.
brer noir adds this quote in his essaying review:
So in the end David Roden is opting for intervention and experimentation, a direct participation in the ongoing posthuman emergence through both ethical and technological modes. Instead of it being tied to any political or corporate pressure it should become an almost Open Source effort that is open and interdisciplinary among both academic and outsiders from scientists, technologists, artists, and bodyhackers willing to intervene in their own lives and bodies to bring it into realization. He will quote Stelarc, a body hacker, saying,
Perhaps Stelarc defines the problem of a post-anthropocentric posthuman politics best when describing the role of technical expertise in his art works: “This is not about utopian blueprints for perfect bodies but rather speculations on operational systems with alternate functions and forms” (in Smith 2005: 228– 9). I think this spirit of speculative engineering best exemplifies an ethical posthuman becoming – not the comic or dreadful arrest in the face of something that cannot be grasped. (Roden, KL 4397)
http://darkecologies.com/2014/10/26/david-rodens-speculative-posthumanism-conclusion-part-8/
This is another thing I hope to push David on in our interview. I think this is definitely an epistemically modest way to be optimistic about the posthuman – this is the kinda bullet I want to bite – but I just don’t see how the transvaluation of value doesn’t drive the bus to the precipice. Even admitting that ‘value’ possesses a nonanthropocentric future, I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work: a future where our disconnected descendants simply diddled their reward systems day in and day out will obviously be the future ‘valuable’ to them. I just don’t see how the value question can be disconnected from the here and now. Imagine arguing to the pagan Romans that they had no call to malign the prospect of a future Christian Empire because those Christians might be quite happy with that particular imperium. For me, the posthuman clearly demarcates the ecologically bounded nature of our moral heuristics, which is to say, the problem of meaning now.
rsb, yes to this acting as a boundary-concept and to the here and now focus, beyond that sci-fi…
be interested in how d.r. responds to all of this, as for optimism not really my thing.
passed this thread along to:
http://plasticbodies.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/the-end-of-phenomenology-reviewed-at-review-31/
Truly fascinating stuff. I caught a Firestein TED talk a couple weeks back and he said something about their being 12 000 people involved in visual research alone, and as boggling as I found that number, I didn’t so much disbelieve him as wonder how the hell anyone can keep up, what kind of institutional mechanisms the Neuroscientific Empire has put in place to assure that someone, somewhere, has some kind of meaningful overview. So for instance, all the neuro/psychometric discrepancies you point should be of interest to neurocogs researching metacognition – is it really left to informal channels for these kinds of cross-pollinating influences to occur? Could it be the case that there is some kind of thread running through all of it, but that there’s just simply so much information being generated that no one has any hope of discharging research obligations, and finding the right level of generality required to pick the bigger patterns out. It feels like a fricking ocean when I do my neuro-safaris any more.
I say this appreciating that neglect is my hammer, so I’m prone to see nails… One way to look at what I’m doing is replacing representation with neglect as the primary ‘bridge concept’ between the neuro and the psycho. It really struck me when you mentioned the differences in explanatory levels – it’s one of those comments that remind me just how much needs to be done to understand how those levels interlock, what kind evidential relations obtain, and so forth. Fact is, I’m a bloody hobbyist, and there’s simply no way I can mind these kinds of p’s and q’s, let alone mine them for potential implications.
Also, and apropos of this, do you follow Chris Eliasmith at all, ochlo? The ‘semantic pointers’ he used in SPAUN pretty explicitly rely on ways to deal with dimensionality problems, collapsing and inflating information. I’m curious whether anyone has done any research on whether the brain has a common strategy to deal with selective information uptake, whether it’s a klugic mess, or what have you…
meaningful overview? benchworkers don’t need no stinking overview…
This is precisely what I provide: the stink.
As you say, the data glut is one of the key issues of the 21st Century, all this data being generated in all the various disciplines… with no real workable strategies to sort it through algorithmic filters etc. Even the best DataMining systems fall way short at the moment, and even outfits like the NSA know their behind the eight-ball even with all that fancy mesh their building in Utah. If the spy networks are behind, what will academia and scientifia do?
Noticed a new work coming out November 23rd of next month:
The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists
Must admit, did like the “Zoo” chirp. 🙂
Me too! I’m just too much a wanker to let the philosophy alone, otherwise.
03 comment where she mentioned multitasking made me think of Adele Diamond who runs the Developmental Cognitive Neroscience lab at Univ. British Columbia (http://www.devcogneuro.com).
I first encountered her when she presented at one of the Mind and Life Dialogues with the Dalai Lama and talked about the Prefrontal cortex and Executive Functions. I enjoyed her presentation and have tried to follow her work over the years. She had a paper, “Executive Functions” published in The Annual Review in Psychology (Vol. 64, 2013) that I thought was interesting (as a layperson). http://www.devcogneuro.com/Publications/ExecutiveFunctions2013.pdf
Mind & Presentation:
Oops…above should read: Mind & Life presentation (that’s what I get for posting while drinking).
[…] *[Originally posted 2014/10/22] […]