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Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

3/31/2020

Stanislas Dehaene — if I'm implicitly biased towards him, I now know why.

For the rest of the research in this series, I'm going to be going over the work of neuroscientists. This is because, as Patricia Churchland stated in the last post, "Philosophy is a proto-science that must remain in touch with empirical discoveries." As a philosopher, however, my goal here is not to gain or present a detailed lesson of all the most complicated inner workings of the brain (read neuroscientists for that). Nor is it to get into a deep debate about the methodologies, assumptions, and conclusions of the people working in this field (read philosophers of science for that). What I'm looking for in this series are findings or hypotheses which have implications for the rest of my philosophical worldview. Is that going to require *some* knowledge of brain anatomy and mechanisms? Yes. But it's not that scary or difficult.

One of the best guides for this world is Dr. Ginger Campbell, whose podcast Brain Science is up to 170 episodes now as of this post. Recently, Campbell posted an incredible four-part series on consciousness that was really a key inspiration for me to finally tackle this subject as well. In the first of these podcasts (called What is Consciousness?), Campbell gave her own summaries of some of the latest and best books on consciousness. Before she dives into them, Campbell notes that while they do have their differences, there are still three concepts they all share:

Consciousness requires a brain
Consciousness is a product of evolution
Consciousness is embodied

While I'm always happy to hear from people with an evolutionary perspective, previous posts in this series make it clear that there are enough quibbles about the term "consciousness" to remain wary of saying it is a coherent enough concept to deserve a label. That throws into question whether a brain is required for it or not. But, if you grant each neuroscientist their hypothetical definition of consciousness, then we can understand what they are talking about and the rest of their claims remain valid within that perspective.

Okay. Time for the first summary. Campbell kicked off her series by discussing Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Here are the most important points from that:

Three key ingredients were required to move the study of consciousness into the lab: 1) a better definition of consciousness; 2) methods to manipulate consciousness experimentally; and 3) a new respect for the study of subjective phenomena (compared to behaviorism).
The definition Dehaene uses is called Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (an offshoot of Bernard Baars' Global Workspace Theory)
GNWT states: consciousness is global information broadcasting within the cortex.
Consciousness adds functionality, ability to hold information in mind, and flexible behavior.
Wakefulness, vigilance, and attention enable conscious access, but they are separate things.
Some of the main methods used to study this are: binocular rivalry, attentional blink, and masking.
No amount of introspection can tell us how our brain works.
Most of what our brain does is outside of our conscious access. Many phenomena do not require consciousness to occur. We drastically underestimate this.
If our brains can do so much without consciousness, then what is it for?
Brains make unconscious predictions as if they were using Bayesian logic, but seem to need consciousness to interpret ambiguous images. Also, consciousness plays a very important role in learning (e.g. subliminal learning doesn’t work).
Only consciousness allows us to entertain lasting thoughts. It also allows us to create algorithms, a step-by-step way of solving a problem. It allows for flexible routing of information, and appears to be necessary for making a final decision.
Consciousness is an important element of social information sharing. It condenses information, [making it easier to transfer].
Our self is just a database that is filled through social experience. Consciousness is the mind’s reality simulator.
When conscious access occurs: brain activity is strongly activated when a threshold of awareness is crossed. At that point the signal spreads to many brain areas. There are four highly reproducible signals associated with this. Signature 1: activation in parietal and prefrontal circuits. Signature 2: a slow wave called P3 that pairs late, approximately 1/3 sec after stimulus (i.e. consciousness lags behind the world). Signature 3: deep brain electrodes detect late and sudden bursts of high frequency oscillations. Signature 4: information exchange across distant brain areas.
Virtually every circuit in the brain, cortical and subcortical, can participate in conscious and unconscious processes.
In Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, conscious access occurs when perception, or any other signal, crosses a critical threshold and is broadcast across the brain.
50 milliseconds seems to be a limit for the shortest exposure to a signal that we can detect.
We can only perceive one signal at a time. And there is a 1/3 second time lag. Error prediction makes up for this.
Consequences of consciousness include: the ability to respond, the ability to hold ideas in our mind, and the ability to act flexibly.
Dehaene does not show mere "correlates of consciousness" because correlation does not show causation. Correlation just finds things that are present when consciousness is perceived, and absent when it is not perceived. Dehaene's four signatures fit this. Causation would require recreation of conscious states using artificial means and this is now being done using deep brain stimulation.
Higher brain regions do appear to be essential.
Putting together all the evidence inescapably leads to a reductionist conclusion. The electrical activities of neurons can create a state of mind, or equally destroy an existing one.
Dehaene thinks Chalmers swapped the labels. It is the easy problem that is hard, while the hard problem seems hard because it engages ill-defined intuitions. Once our intuition is educated by cognitive neuroscience and computer simulations, he thinks Chalmers' hard problem will evaporate.

Brief Comments
Dehaene offers lots of persuasive evidence for the brain activities that occur during events that we humans can report (i.e. conscious vs. unconscious activities). It is fascinating to see the list of functions this enables as that presumably provides some guides about what is likely to have evolved later as the long evolutionary history of consciousness has unfolded. For example, it seems plain to me that there would be a massive evolutionary advantage for a brain to be able to predict reality rather than wait 1/3 of a second for the processing of inputs. So far, that seems like a good candidate to help answer the question of what consciousness is for. I'll wait to look at more evidence from other scientists, though, before proclaiming too much. Stick around for that in the next few posts.

What do you think? Is Chalmers' hard problem fading away as our understanding of the correlates of consciousness grows? Or as we even begin to dabble in the causation of our conscious experience itself? If this is all too new or confusing to give an answer to that, I recommend trying a short video on Global vs. Local Theories that is part of a recently released introductory course on the brain and consciousness. Let me know in the comments below if that helps or if anything else would.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy

8 Comments

Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy

3/29/2020

2 Comments

As I make the transition in this series from philosophy to neuroscience, a natural step between these two disciplines (some might even call it an evolutionary step) would clearly be with the work of Patricia Churchland. She's a philosopher and neuroscientist who thinks that "philosophers are increasingly realizing that to understand the mind one must understand the brain."

I'll start with a few snippets from the podcast Nous, and its episode: Patricia Churchland on How We Evolved a Conscience. Churchland has a book out now called Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, which I know is not the same thing as consciousness, but her discussion still has some relevant information for us.

There were some philosophers who thought that if we went off and really studied the language of what we MEAN by the word consciousness, we’d be able to understand it. But other philosophers said, wait a minute, we might be mistaken about what we mean.
Philosophy is a proto-science that must remain in touch with empirical discoveries. Science cannot tell us why something is right or wrong. However, science gives us all sorts of information that we take into account.
Why did we become social? It started when we became warm blooded. Warm blooded creatures need about 10 times more nutrition though. One way to compensate for this requirement was for mammals to develop a new structure in the brain—a cortex—which allowed them to store a tremendous amount of information in the brain and to integrate it. The cortex relied on the subcortical parts of the brain for motivations, sleep/wake patterns, etc., but the cortex allowed for a kind of predictive prowess that had not been seen on the planet before.
This all comes with a cost though. You can’t have memory unless you can build structure on the neuron. To tune the brain up to an environment requires that you are super immature when you are born. Snakes just are born and go off into the world. Mammals can’t. It was like evolution took a step backwards. This immaturity then led to the need for caregiving, which led to parents who care. Once caring for offspring turns on, family units, sociality, norms, and morality all take off.

That's a nice short, sharp, prod to get us philosophers studying the evolution of brains. A much more rigorous argument can be found in Churchland's essay "Neurophilosophy", which was a chapter in the fantastic edited collection How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism. Here are some useful points from that essay:

The words “mind” and “brain” are distinct. Even so, that linguistic fact leaves it open whether mental processes are in fact processes of the physical brain. … [For physicalists] the important problem concerns how the brain learns and remembers, how the brain enables us to see and hear and think, and how it enables us to move our eyes, legs, and whole body. Their problem concerns the nature of the brain mechanisms that support mental phenomena. Interestingly, dualists also have a closely related set of problems: how does soul stuff work such that we learn and remember, see and hear and think, and so forth. Whereas in neuroscience, physicalists have a vibrant research program to address such questions, dualists have no comparable program. No one has the slightest idea how soul stuff does anything.
Studies of a few patients who had suffered bilateral damage to the hippocampus showed them to be severely impaired in learning new things. … Memory losses associated with dementing diseases also linked memory with neural loss and further suggested the tight link between the mental and the neural. Important also are studies of attention using brain imaging along with single neuron physiology. These varied studies suggest that at least three anatomic networks, connected but somewhat independent of the other, are involved in different aspects of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control.
Developments in psychology, especially visual psychology, also implicated neural networks in mental functions, and this work tended to dovetail well with neuroscientific findings on the visual system. Explanations of color vision, for example, depended on the retina’s three cone types and on opponent processing by neurons in the cortical areas. … Visual hallucinations were known to be caused by physical substances such as LSD or ketamine, and consciousness could be obliterated by drugs such as ether, as well by other substances employed by anesthesiologists, such as propofol. No evidence linked these drugs to soul stuff.
Short-term memory can be transiently blocked by a blow to the head or by a drug such as scopolamine; emotions and moods can be affected by Prozac and by alcohol; decision making can be affected by hunger, fear, sleeplessness, and cocaine; elevated levels of cortisol cause anxiety. Very specific changes in whole-brain activity corresponding to periods of sleep versus dreaming versus being awake have been documented, and explanations for the neuronal signature typifying these three states have made considerable progress. In aggregate, these findings weighed in favor of the physical brain, not of some spooky “soul stuff.”
A methodological point may be pertinent in regard to the dualist’s argument: however large and systematic the mass of empirical evidence supporting the empirical hypothesis that consciousness is a brain function, it is always a logically consistent option to be stubborn and to insist otherwise, as do Chalmers and Nagel. Here is the way to think about this: identities—such as that temperature really is mean molecular kinetic energy, for example—are not directly observable. They are underwritten by inferences that best account for the mass of data and the appreciation that no explanatory competitor is as successful. One could, if determined, dig one’s heels in and say, “temperature is not mean molecular kinetic energy, but rather an occult phenomenon that merely runs parallel to KE.” It is a logically consistent position, even if it is not a reasonable position.
With the benefit of contemporary physics, we can see that the causal interaction between nonphysical stuff such as a soul with physical stuff such as electrons would be an anomaly relative to the current and rather well-established laws of physics. More exactly, it would affect the law of conservation of energy. If brains can cause changes external to the physical domain, there should be an anomaly with respect to conservation of energy. No such anomaly has ever been seen or measured.

Brief Comments
In previous posts, we saw how argument alone could make the case that thinking of consciousness as a non-material or panpsychic phenomenon is not helpful. Now, we see a glut of empirical evidence supporting the idea that consciousness is a physical phenomenon. Does that prove the case? Of course not. Knowledge is never proved in this way. Churchland's point, however, is exquisite, and right on the nose, that one can always dig their heels in about this and remain consistent, while also being unreasonable. This is something all philosophers should keep in mind.

What do you think? Any other important points jump out at you from these quotes? Let me know in the comments below.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution

2 Comments

Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution

3/27/2020

12 Comments

In the last post, I introduced Dan Dennett's evolutionary perspective on consciousness. I mentioned that he's been working on this for decades, and during that time he has been a ...productive... philosopher to say the least. That sometimes makes him challenging to keep up with, but I personally think his quality is very high, so I wanted to spend one more post with him before making the transition to hearing from neuroscientists.

In this post, I'll be relying on another podcast with Sean Carroll — Episode 78: Dan Dennett on Minds, Patterns, and the Scientific Image. In a recent January 2020 tweet, Dan Dennett himself said that this was, "Another excellent interview, this time with Sean Carroll. If you haven't overdosed on Dennett in the last few days, this will clarify key points." Here, then, are some of those key clarifying points:

[Do you have a simple definition of consciousness?] No. But that’s okay. That’s the way science works too. There’s no perfect definition of time or energy, but scientists get on with it.
Consciousness emerges (in the innocent sense, not the woo one), and the idea that consciousness is one thing, that everything in the universe is either conscious or not, that the light is either on or off—that is a fundamental error. But it is very widespread.
The search for the simplest form of consciousness, therefore, is a snipe hunt. Starfish have some elements of consciousness, so do trees, and bacteria. (But not electrons.) We can argue about motor proteins. The question of “where do you draw the line?” is an ill-motivated question. Where do you draw the line between night and day?
Electrons can’t accrue memories. They do not change over billions of years. They do not participate in the arrow of time, so there is no way for them to be said to have intentions, feelings, purposes, or goals.
Human consciousness is much different from the consciousness of other species. This is an embattled view, but I’m pretty sure of it. It’s hard to see this because consciousness has a moral dimension and we want to be kind to animals. But don’t worry. The conscious properties we share with mammals and birds, and to some degree with reptiles and fish, are significant. Moral significance itself is also a graded notion.
UK law says it is now illegal to throw a live octopus onto a hot grill. This one species is an honorary vertebrate. It’s not all cephalopods, although maybe it should be. Lobsters can be boiled. Squid can be grilled live. Vertebrates must all be treated humanely. The law has to draw a line and these need to be reasonable to a vast majority of the people.
Human minds are profoundly different from other minds, because they are obliged to articulate reasons. This is why I’m interested in the history and evolution of language.
If I ask you to picture a rope and climbing up it, you can do it. I specifically chose those objects and actions because it is exactly what a chimp in a zoo is familiar with. If I asked a chimp to do the same thing, could it? We don’t know, but I suspect not, because you can’t do it wordlessly. You need to be able to interact using language. Without language, I don’t think you have the cognitive systems for self-simulation and self-probing that we have. ... Language allows us to be conscious of things we otherwise wouldn’t be able to be conscious of. If you believe that recursion and self-representation are crucial to consciousness, then language is a huge part of that as a useful tool.
Degrees of freedom is something I’m using more lately. It is an opportunity for control. Degrees of freedom can be clamped or locked down to be removed. How many degrees of freedom do humans have? Millions and millions of things we can think of. We have orders of magnitude more that we can think of than a bear does, even with roughly the same number of cells. So, our complexity is higher. The options a bear has are a vanishing subset of the options that we have. Learning to control these options is not now a science. It is an art.
Many theories of consciousness only have half of the theory. The upward stream. But what then? What does consciousness enable or take away from? The answer is that almost anything can happen [with consciousness]. But we need a neuroscientific theory as to how that happens.

Brief Comments
I can't say that Dennett puts a foot wrong here. His commitment to evolutionary thinking and following evidence leads to some conclusions that are out of step with much of society, but I find myself pretty much right there with him. I would question his point about electrons not having any elements of consciousness, but that's probably just based on terminology, and speculation that we may someday get from physics to chemistry to biology (where Dennett finds conscious elements). Without a good theory of abiogenesis (i.e. the origin of life), Dennett seems happy to pragmatically confine himself to studying consciousness as if it were a material phenomenon. I agree that's a useful hypothesis to hold until something better comes along.

I also really liked Dennett's use of the engineering terminology "degrees of freedom". This reminds me of "the parable of the immune system" that the evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson often uses to make a point. For example, on The Psychology Podcast (Episode 167: Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science), Wilson said:

"The human immune system is immensely modular. We inherit it, and it does not change during our lifetime. It is something that evolved by genetic evolution, but it is triggered by environmental circumstances just as the evolutionary psychologists like to point out. The adaptive component of the immune system is highly evolutionary. That’s the ability of antibodies to vary and for the successful antigens to be ramped up. So that’s an evolutionary process that takes place during the lifetime of the organism. The whole thing is densely modular but also amazingly open-ended. Why can’t we say the same thing about the human behavioral system?"

It seems obvious (to me anyway) that we can say the same thing about our behavior—that it adapts during our lifetimes to successful and unsuccessful interactions with the environment. And it seems that more and more consciousness might give life more and more degrees of freedom as it helps an organism make more and more sense of its environment. But to really consider that, we'll need to consider Dennett's questions, "But what then? What does consciousness enable or take away from?" And do to that, it's time to turn to the neuroscientific theories of consciousness being developed and explored by scientists.

What do you think? Does Dennett's evolutionary perspective continue to make sense? Are there any gaps in the story that need more explanation? Let's discuss that in the comments below.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective

12 Comments

Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective

3/25/2020

6 Comments

In the last post, I introduced illusionism using an interview with Keith Frankish. (Which he himself retweeted!) I mentioned that illusionists don't think our conscious experience is an illusion, just that our experience of it is papering over what's really going on behind the scenes. It's a little like pointing out that old projection movies give us the illusion of fluid motion on the screen when in reality there is just a series of still images flying by too fast for us to perceive. But what, then, is the reality behind our illusion of consciousness?

That's the question we'll be diving into for pretty much the rest of the series. Most of the research into that question has been done by neuroscientists, but before we get to them, there's one more pure philosopher we ought to consider to help set the stage, and that is Dan Dennett. Dennett has been prominently working on consciousness for decades. I'll be honest that I've never gone back and read his 1991 doorstopper Consciousness Explained, but I figure his 2017 book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds would supplant that now. Plus, the neuroscience has exploded since 1991, so why go back? The wikipedia entries that I've linked to for those books offer very quick summaries, but I'm going to focus in this post on a Google Talk that Dennett gave about FBtBaB. Here are the most important points from his hour-plus talk:

The history of life is an R&D project, a design process that exploits information in the environment to create, maintain, and improve the design of things.
R&D takes time and energy. There are two main types: evolution by natural selection, and human intelligent design. There have been intelligent designers for only about 100,000 years. You should not read back our intelligent design efforts into nature.
Evolutionary design is purposeless, foresightless, extremely costly (99% of everything that ever lived died childless), and very slow. Intelligent design is purposeful, goal directed, somewhat foresighted, governed by cost considerations, and relatively fast.
A termite mound might be 70 million clueless termites. A brain might be 86 billion clueless neurons. There are no captains, lieutenants, or generals in the brain. How [then] do you get a mind capable of intelligent design out of such a brain?
Short answer: You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain. A termite colony is a bare brain. Intelligent designers have well-equipped brains. They have thinking tools.
Long answer: Cultural evolution designed thinking tools that impose novel structures on our brains: virtual machines that could travel and be installed on different brains to give them powers they otherwise didn’t have (“apps we download into our necktops”).
Darwin’s strange inversion of reason: in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not necessary to know how to make it.
Turing’s strange inversion of reason: in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not necessary to know what arithmetic is.
These yield Dennett’s bumper sticker: Competence Without Comprehension
The upshot of this is that the mind (consciousness, understanding, etc.) is the effect, not the cause. It’s not a mind-first universe; it’s a matter-first universe. Minds came recently.
There’s a difference between how come ("Why are planets spheres?") and what for ("Why are ball bearings spheres?"). The teleology of "what for" enters the world gradually. Darwin showed that it didn’t always have to be there.
Panpsychism is the view that everything is conscious. And I almost agree with it, but I just have to change the view a little bit. I call my view “pan-niftyism” — every atom is nifty, every electron is nifty. The question then is, is there any difference between panpsychism and pan-niftyism? They both explain the same thing—nothing. To say conscious things are made out of conscious things doesn’t necessarily follow. Colored things aren’t made of colored things.
The (Paul) MacCready Explosion: 10,000 years ago, human population plus livestock and pets were approximately 0.1% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Today, it is 98%. This is probably the biggest, fastest, biological change on the planet ever. Genes don’t explain it. Technology does.
[The creation of] eukaryotic cells was one of the first great transfers of technology. A recent one is the invasion of human brains by symbiotic thinking tools called memes.
These memes are “free floating reasons” as opposed to the reasons that saturate the biotic world. Trees, fungi, bacteria, non-human animals, etc. all do things for reasons. But they aren’t aware of them. We can be.
Bach was a top example of experimenting with purpose. He deeply understood his instruments and the history and theory of music in order to prolifically produce genius compositions. How [then] to get from blind genetic evolution to Bach?
First step is synanthropic words. Synanthropic means things that thrive along with humans (e.g. seagulls, cockroaches, etc.). Nobody owned the first words; they were just habits that developed. [E.g. screeching for certain predators or specific dangers.]
Next are domesticated words. Domesticated means the reproduction is controlled. For words, this means conscious choosing of one over the other. This leads to differential replication. Meanings or pronunciations can change over time, but the best ones survive, usually without even noticing why.
The next step are coined words, deliberately designed, although their survival is still down to selection. Then there are technical terms, which are very carefully designed, and curated under strong group pressure. E.g. phenotype vs. genotype. These are hyper-domesticated words.
This describes the age of intelligent design—ever-controlled more and more in a top-down method. Now, however, we are entering the age of post-intelligent design, where we have learned that the power of evolution is smarter than we are so we can create without comprehension. [Thus going from Bach back to bacteria.]

Brief Comments
I really don't have much to add to this other than that it's a good introduction to the ideas that complexity can arise very gradually without foresight, and the cultural evolution of language is a good hypothesis for providing an instrumental difference maker in the kind of minds that we humans have. If you are reading this post on a website called evolutionary philosophy, you probably already agree with this. But I wanted to stop and make this point specifically before l go on a deeper dive into Dennett's thoughts in the next post.

Oh and I had to share this talk because I loved Dennett's quip about pan-niftyism. That surrender to explaining nothing is essentially my view of the panpsychists' project (if you can even call it a project). So, this post puts a nice bow on the end of that discussion too.

What do you think? Do you have any hesitations or questions about the role evolution can play in the history of that thing we currently call consciousness?

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?

6 Comments

Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?

3/23/2020

8 Comments

Those dots aren't actually there. What else could be an illusion?

In the third post in this series, David Chalmers mentioned that there has been an upsurge within consciousness philosophy towards a position called illusionism. In today's post, I want to begin to explore that position by listening to Keith Frankish, a leading proponent of illusionism. In an October 2019 episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Frankish discussed Why Consciousness is an Illusion. Here are the most important points from that discussion:

The simplest way to put it is that [illusionism is] offering a different model of what consciousness is. This model rejects a central theory that dominates most people’s thinking about consciousness. Consciousness in that sense is illusory and doesn’t exist.
Our common-sense view of what our inner experience is like is not as solid and reliable as we think. We tend to assume we encounter a presentation of the visual world that is full and complete in every detail right down to the periphery, but it turns out that is wrong. That is an illusion. That’s an introspective illusion. Even in the matrix we would be having this illusion that we have a complete visual field. Once you allow that, you’re opening a wedge here to the idea that introspection itself might be a construction.
Let me say a bit more about the realist picture and just how odd this picture is. Dan Dennett calls this a sort of Cartesian theatre. The idea that there is this inner display of experience for conscious awareness. The outer world effectively creates this private cinema screen that we (and who are we?) witness. This kind of view of introspection does presuppose an introspect-or. That’s one thing that needs to be hashed out.
For Descartes this was easy because he envisioned an immaterial soul doing the witnessing, and it has special access. I suppose if there is an immaterial soul then all bets are off as to what it can do. But most philosophers now think it is just a brain. We aren’t two things, but just an embodied brain.
We are complicated creatures by any account, and we have some sort of self-awareness of our own mental processes, but it wouldn’t be surprising if that picture weren’t totally accurate. Why would nature have equipped us to be super-neuroscientists or to have a super understanding of our own mental processes? We don’t need that. Maybe we have something that’s much more sketchy and caricatured.
Here’s a way I put this in a paper. These properties are anomalous [i.e. deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected]. They’re not like other properties of the body like digestion, respiration, reproduction, etc. They’re also not like other mental properties like emotion or other things that don’t involve consciousness—we don’t have good cognitive accounts of what’s going on there. ... There are three approaches we could take to that. One is to say that yes they are anomalous and we’ve got to do some radical theorising to account for them. We have to do some heavy-duty metaphysics to say they’re not a part of the physical world. Or perhaps (and this is gaining in popularity) they are a fundamental feature of reality, like the intrinsic nature of all matter is conscious in this way, or that all matter has this intrinsic phenomenal aspect to it. [That's panpsychism.]
[Digression from illusionism to consciousness in general:]
If you really want to be realist about consciousness, you’ve got to put it into the natural world somewhere, and it doesn’t fit in easily. So, maybe, [panpsychism is] one way of getting consciousness into the natural world. Or maybe it just pops into existence when you get complex enough brains. That’s a sort of emergence. You start where nature is building brains and the original ones don’t have this phenomenal aspect to them, they just process information and get bigger and bigger and bigger. At some point between the first organisms and us, the lights came on inside. All that information processing, which was doing all the work, led to the lights coming on in a phenomenal aspect. Then the question is when did this happen? We can’t be sure, because we can’t strictly tell if other creatures, or indeed anyone else has this. There is a sort of arbitrariness here where things click on.
Is this any more arbitrary than the fuzziness surrounding the definition of life? I think consciousness is worse than this in two ways.
One is that there doesn’t seem to be an in-between condition where there is a little bit of an interior world. Either there is something it is like to be something that has this first-person experience or there isn’t. It may be very impoverished or boring for what it is like to be an electron or an amoeba or whatever, but it is still either or. It either does have this first-person experience or it doesn’t. It’s hard to see how it could have half a perspective. The inner lights are either on or off.
Second, with life it’s just difficult to specify what you count as life and what you don’t. There is no hidden fact here; it’s just what you say. It’s a terminological issue. With consciousness, there are radically hidden facts. No matter how clearly we define this thing, we can’t tell where it is and where it isn’t. If someone says my cup has it, there is no test you can do to prove it.
[Returning to illusionism:]
Let me get back to the three broad positions you can take on this. ... [The third position] is a more conservative response that says we can kind of explain all this in terms of standard resources of cognitive science by talking about representations in the brain and maybe some sort of self-awareness. Maybe when we start to represent our own awareness to ourselves, that’s when this apparent subjective experience comes in. ... That’s been the standard view. Illusionism just goes a bit further. Yes, there are some sort of introspective mechanisms here, but what they are doing is misrepresenting their targets. It’s not that these brain states, these targets, really are that. We have these simple, private, qualitative states. But actual brain states are much more complicated than that. Brain states merely present like that. And that is the illusion.
Here is an analogy. In the middle ages, people thought other people were possessed by demons. Modern psychology gives a different explanation of what is happening. Now, do we say that’s what demons really are? Schizophrenia is what demons are? Or do you say, "Stop thinking about it that way. Stop using the word demons altogether. This isn’t an explanation of what demons really are." That’s what I’m asking us to do with consciousness.
Some people start with the presumption that qualia is presented to us in a way that is immediate and transparent. They are revealed to us. There is nothing hidden about them. Just by having the experience, and attending to the experience, we can know the character of that property. I think it’s pretty obvious that if that is your conception of the problem that needs to be explained, then science isn’t going to help you with that. This presupposes a relationship between the subject and the object that you couldn’t have in any physical conception of the world. To these people, to suggest that science has something to say here is to miss the point of the target for the whole debate.
But we can reconfigure that. We can reconceptualise that; i.e. we are not hard wired to think that way. People who are into Buddhist philosophy tell me that this is what Buddhist thinkers have been doing for a long time. So, I think it’s an open question about how able we are to shake off this picture.

Brief Comments
As I noted in the second post of this series, Sam Harris does indeed use observations from his meditation practice to puncture the idea that consciousness is "presented to us in a way that is immediate and transparent." So, illusionism, while sounding pretty dire on the face of it, seems to be nothing more than the resting place for people who have dropped the supernatural attributes of consciousness, but haven't made the leap to panpsychism to explain it either. Illusionism doesn't say that conscious experience doesn't exist; just that it isn't what people generally think it is. This is important to note because there are still a lot of philosophers who ridicule illusionism by misunderstanding the position.

The problem I see with Frankish's view is that he's still talking about consciousness like an essentialist, talking as if it were one essence that either exists or does not. His claim that consciousness is either on or off seems deeply problematic in an evolving universe. But not all illusionists feel that way. What might they think is behind the illusion then? That will be the subject of the next two posts from perhaps the most famous developer of this idea—Dan Dennett.

What do you think? Are you more comfortable with dualism, panpsychism, or illusionism? Or do you have another name for your position here?

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness

8 Comments

Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness

3/21/2020

6 Comments

In the last post, I acknowledged that there may indeed be an impossible problem for studies of consciousness. David Chalmers makes his distinction here between the "easy problems" and the "hard problem", but by renaming them the "hows" and "the ultimate why", it becomes easier to see that Chalmers is really just playing the infinite regression game of why, why, why, why, why..... That is always an impossible loop to get out of, but we can still make efforts towards each new why whenever we find it useful and possible.

Before continuing down that path, however, we have to deal with an objection being raised that it is not in fact possible to study consciousness. This objection is currently being made by a philosopher of consciousness from Durham University in the UK named Philip Goff. If you'll remember from post 2 in this series, Goff is a prominent proponent of panpsychism, which is the idea that psyche (mind) is pan (everywhere). Panpsychism is one of the concepts that physicalists / materialists like Sam and Annaka Harris are increasingly considering as a solution to the problem of how conscious entities arise from seemingly non-conscious materials. They think that maybe consciousness is just a fundamental attribute of the universe. I think we have a lot of investigating to do into our definitions and understanding of consciousness before we can make much sense of that claim, but Philip Goff doesn't think we can even do that. To best understand his point of view, I recommend reading an open exchange of letters ("On the Problem of Consciousness, Panpsychism, and More") which Goff had with the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci. Pigliucci has also been a professor of science in the fields of ecology and evolution, and he has written a book about how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, so he is more than up for the task of debating Goff. Here are the most important points they made:

Philip Goff:

1st core issue: the problem of consciousness is radically unlike any other scientific problem. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that consciousness is unobservable. ... What we want a theory of consciousness to explain are the qualities of experience, e.g. the [*redness*] of red experiences. These qualities can only be known about by attending to experience from the 1st-person perspective; they are invisible to 3rd-person observation. This makes the problem of consciousness utterly unique: in every other scientific problem, we are trying to explain the data of 3rd-person observation.
2nd core issue: the case against materialism. There is something that needs explaining that can only be known about from the first-person perspective. We know that consciousness exists not from observation and experiment, but from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. ... If the predicates of neuroscience could convey what it’s like to see red, then a colour-blind neuroscientist would be able to know what it’s like to see red by reading relevant neuroscience.
3rd core issue: is panpsychism coherent? Overall, I can’t see any reason to doubt the coherence of the claim that experiential properties are the categorical properties underlying those dispositions.
4th core issue: why should we believe panpsychism? Panpsychism, I believe, is the simplest theory able to accommodate both 3rd-person observation and experiment, and the subjective qualities of experience. ... I think physical science alone cannot explain consciousness and hence we must turn to alternative ways of accounting for it.

Responses from Massimo Pigliucci:

[1st core issue] Are you then discarding a lot of what psychology and cognitive science has done since the demise of behaviourism? Because part of the business of those sciences is to systematically study first-person phenomena, including people’s intentions, motivations, emotions, and so forth. All of which are not directly observable and become data only via self-reporting. That has not been an obstacle to the scientific investigation of those phenomena, which we can even study experimentally, for instance, by inserting electrodes in the brain, or using localized magnetic stimulation and asking the subjects what they feel. Why you think this is an issue at all is beyond my comprehension, frankly. ... A scientific theory of consciousness—if we will have one—will provide a detailed mechanistic understanding of how the human brain generates first-person experience, using people’s self-reports as data. Once we have that, there is nothing above and beyond it that requires further explanation. We would be done.
[2nd core issue] What you call “knowledge of qualitative experience,” and allege to be beyond scientific reach, I call experience. You are using “knowledge” in a very loose fashion. ... That would be a category mistake: we are talking about explaining the experience, not having it. ... Experiential knowledge is a different beast from theoretical knowledge. Science isn’t going to give you the experience. ... It used to be that people would make the kind of argument you are putting forth to the effect that there was something special, irreducible to materialism, about life. They called it élan vital, vital essence. You are postulating the consciousness equivalent of an élan vital, for which there is no need.
[3rd core issue] If by coherent you mean logically so, then sure, we agree. But literally an infinite number of models of the world are logically coherent. That doesn’t help at all. ... You seem convinced that analytical metaphysics, the kind of approach developed in ancient Greece and that I would have thought died with Descartes, is still a valuable project. You are not the only one, of course; David Chalmers is another prominent advocate. But this is simply a rabbit hole that leads to an absurd proliferation of “coherent” or—worse yet—simply “conceivable” scenarios that tell us absolutely nothing about how the world actually works.
[4th core issue] The issue is whether there is empirical reason to consider panpsychism. ... If you think that your theory does not, and cannot, make contact with empirical reality, then you simply don’t have a theory. You have a speculation that can never be tested. ... There is absolutely nothing in modern physics or biology that hints at panpsychism, and you have acknowledged that no empirical evidence could possibly bear on the issue. That acknowledgement, for me, is the endpoint of our discussion. Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game. ... The path you, Chalmers, and others are attempting to chart has already been tried, centuries ago, and has brought us—as David Hume put it—nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Brief Comments
I had the good fortune to meet Philip Goff recently when he gave a talk about these ideas to a small, local, Humanist group. He's a nice guy who is impressively well-versed on the literature of materialism and consciousness, but I have to say that his arguments strike me as deeply confused. His latest book for the general reader is titled Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. But when I pressed him for how it could possibly be scientific if he also thinks the study of consciousness is empirically impossible, he admitted that was a question his editors asked, and he didn't have a good answer for them other than that we needed to rethink what we mean by science. I'm sorry, but that sounds exactly like pseudoscience, and Massimo did an excellent job of dismissing it.

To me, materialism / physicalism is still a viable primary hypothesis, and scientific investigations may yet find deeply sufficient explanations for consciousness in such a material universe. Goff worries that we can't get 3rd-person reports on consciousness for science, but that's literally true for everything. As a recent article in Scientific American pointed out ("How to Make the Study of Consciousness Scientifically Tractable"), there is no 3rd-person, objective, view from nowhere. "There is always a somewhere, a perspective, a subject." The key is realising that all progress in knowledge comes from "intersubjective confirmation". Naomi Oreskes called this "scientific consensus" in her latest book, Why Trust Science?, which I recently reviewed.

What do you think? Before we go on, are there other fundamental questions you have about studying consciousness? Or have we reached intersubjective confirmation that scientific consensus is possible? Let me know in the comments below.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem

6 Comments

Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem

3/19/2020

44 Comments

In the last post in this series, I shared a couple of podcasts that knocked down the common / religious / folk views of consciousness, which sees it as something separate from our bodies, unchanging, or immortal. Close observations of the world—whether scientific or meditative—just don't find any evidence for that kind of consciousness. And yet, we seem confident that we, ourselves, have it. So where does consciousness come from? That has been the subject of the mind-body problem in philosophy for centuries. Most modern people (especially of non-religious persuasions) now see the mind as embedded in the body. But since bodies are made up of the same physical stuff as the rest of the observable universe, it's unclear how minds could possibly ever arise from such stuff. In 1996, in his book The Conscious Mind, the philosopher David Chalmers called this "the hard problem of consciousness" and it remains a deep sticking point for philosophers and scientists today.

I've heard Chalmers talk about this to loads of different people (e.g. Tom Stoppard discussed his play about it with him), but the best conversation I've come across was with the physicist Sean Carroll on his podcast Mindscape - Episode 25. The first 50 minutes of the podcast are particularly relevant, so here are the most important lines from that:

[Sean Carroll] David describes himself as a naturalist, someone who believes in just the natural world, not a supernatural one. Not a dualist who thinks there’s a disembodied mind or anything like that. But he’s not a physicalist. He thinks that the natural world not only has physical properties, but mental properties as well. He’s convinced of the problem, but he’s not wedded to any solutions yet.
[David Chalmers] The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how physical processes in the brain somehow give rise to subjective experience. ... When it comes to explaining behaviour, we have a pretty good bead on how to explain that. In principle, you find a circuit in the brain, maybe a complex neural system, which maybe performs some computations, produces some outputs, generates the behaviour. Then, in principle, you’ve got an explanation. It may take a century or two to work out the details, but that’s roughly the standard model in cognitive science. This is what, 20 odd years ago, I called the easy problem. Nobody thinks they are easy in the ordinary sense. The sense in which they are easy is that we’ve got a paradigm for explaining them.
[DC] The really distinctive problem of consciousness is posed not by the behavioural parts but by the subjective experience. By how it feels from the inside to be a conscious being. I’m seeing you right now. I have a visual image of colours and shapes that are sort of present to me as an element of the inner movie of the mind. I’m hearing my voice, I’m feeling my body, I’ve got a stream of thoughts running through my head. This is what philosophers call consciousness or subjective experience. I take it to be one of the fundamental facts about ourselves, that we have this kind of subjective experience.
[SC] Sometimes I hear it glossed as "what it is like" to be a subjective agent.
[DC] That’s a good definition of consciousness actually put forward by my colleague Thomas Nagel in an article back in 1974 called “What is it like to be a bat?” His thought was that we don’t know what it is like. We don’t know what a bat’s subjective experience is like. It’s got this weird sonar capacity that doesn’t correspond directly to anything we humans have. But presumably there is something it is like to be a bat. A bat is conscious. On the other hand, people would say there is nothing it is like to be a glass of water. If that’s right, the glass of water is not conscious. So, this “what it’s like” way of speaking is a good way of serving as an initial intuition pump for the difference we’re getting at between systems that are conscious and systems which are not.
[SC] The other word that is sometimes invoked in this context is the “qualia” of the experiences we have. There is one thing that it is to see the colour red, and a separate thing to have the experience of the redness of red.
[DC] This word qualia may have gone a little out of favour over the last 20 years, but you used to have a lot of people speaking of qualia as a word for the sensory qualities that you come across in experience. The paradigmatic one would be the experience of red vs. the experience of green. There are many familiar questions about this. How do I know that my experience of the thing we call red is the same as the experience you have? Maybe our internal experiences are swapped. That would be inverted qualia, if my red were your green. ... We know that some people are colour blind. They can’t make a distinction between red and green. ... I have friends that have this and I’m often asking them, what is it like to be you? Is it all just shades of blue and yellow? We know that what it is like to be them can’t be what it is like to be us.
[DC] When it comes to consciousness, we’re dealing with something subjective. I know I’m conscious not because I’ve measured my behaviour or anybody else’s behaviour, but because it’s something I’ve experienced directly from the first-person point of view. You’re probably conscious, but it’s not like I can give a straight up operational definition of it. We could come up with an AI that says it’s conscious. That would be very interesting. But would that settle the question of whether it’s having subjective experience? Probably not.
[SC] Alan Turing noted a “consciousness objection” [to his Turing test], but said he can’t possibly test for that so it’s not meaningful.
[DC] Yes. But it turns out consciousness is one of the central things that we value. A) It’s one of the central properties of our minds. B) Many people think it’s what actually gives lives meaning and value. If we weren’t conscious, if we didn’t have subjective experience, then we’d basically just be automata for whom nothing has any meaning or value. So I think when it comes to the question of whether sophisticated AI’s are conscious or not, its going to be absolutely central to how we treat them, to whether they have moral status, whether we should care if they continue to live or die, whether they get rights, and so on.
[SC] To get our cards fully on the table, neither of us are coming at this from a strictly dualist position. Neither of us are resorting to a Cartesian disembodied mind that is a separate substance. Right? As a first hypothesis, we both want to say that we are composed of atoms and obeying the laws of physics. Consciousness is somehow related to that but not an entirely separate category interacting with us. Is that fair to say?
[DC] Yes, although there are different kinds and degrees of dualism. My background is in mathematics, computer science, and physics, so my first instincts are materialist. To try to explain everything in terms of the processes of physics: e.g. biology in terms of chemistry and chemistry in terms of physics. This is a wonderful great chain of explanation, but when it comes to consciousness, this is the one place where that great chain of explanation seems to break down. That doesn’t mean these are the properties of a soul or some religious thing which has existed since the beginning of time and will go on after our death. People call that substance dualism. Maybe there’s a whole separate substance that’s the mental substance and somehow that interacts and connects up with our physical bodies. That view, however, is much harder to connect to a scientific view of the world.
[DC] The version I end up with is sometimes called property dualism. This is the idea that there are some extra properties of things in the universe. This is something we already have in physics. During Maxwell’s era, space and time and mass were seen as fundamental. Then Maxwell wanted to explain electromagnetism and there was a project that tried to explain it in terms of mass and space and time. That didn’t work. Eventually, we ended up positing charge as a fundamental property with some new laws of physics governing these electromagnetic phenomena and that became just an extra property in our scientific picture of the world. I’m inclined to think that something slightly analogous to this is what we have to do with consciousness.
[SC] You think that even if neuroscientists got to the point where, for every time a person was doing something we would all recognise as having a conscious experience, even if it was silent—for example, experiencing the redness of red—they could point to exactly the same neural activity going on in the brain, you would say this still doesn’t explain my subjective experience?
[DC] Yes. That’s in fact a very important research program going on right now. People call it the program of finding the neural correlates of consciousness (the NCC). We’re trying to find the NCC or neural systems that act precisely when you are conscious. This is a very important research program, but it’s one for correlation, not explanation. We could know when a special kind of neuron fires in a certain pattern that that always goes along with consciousness. But the next question is why. Why is that? As it stands, nothing we get out of the neural correlates of consciousness comes close to explaining that matter.
[DC] We need another fundamental principle that connects the neural correlates of consciousness with consciousness itself. Giulio Tononi, for example has developed his Integrated Information Theory where he says consciousness goes along with a mathematical measure of the integration of information, which he calls phi. The more phi you have, the more consciousness you have. Phi is a mathematically and physically respectable quantity that is very hard to measure, but in principle you could find it and measure it. There are questions of whether this is actually well defined in terms of the details of physics and physical systems, but it’s at least halfway to something definable. But even if he’s right that phi—this informational property—correlates perfectly with consciousness, there’s still this question of why.
[DC] Prima facie, it looks like you could have had a universe where the integration of information is going on, but no consciousness at all. And yet, in our universe, there’s consciousness. How do we explain that fact? What I regard as the scientific thing to do at this point is to say that in science, we boil everything down into fundamental principles and laws, and we need to postulate a fundamental law that connects, say phi, with consciousness. Then that would be great, maybe that’s going to be the best we can do. In physics, there’s a fundamental law of gravitation, or a grand unified theory that unifies all these different forces. You end up with some fundamental principles and you don’t take them further. Something has to be taken as basic. Of course, you want to minimise our fundamental principles and properties as far as we can. Occam’s razor says don’t multiply entities without necessity. Every now and then, however, we have necessity. Maxwell was right about this with electromagnetism. Maybe I’m right about the necessity in the case of consciousness too.
[SC] You’ve hinted at one of your most famous thought experiments there by saying you can imagine a system with whatever phi you want, but we wouldn’t call it conscious. You take that idea to the extreme and say there could be something that looks and acts just like a person but doesn’t have consciousness.
[DC] Yes. This is the philosopher’s thought experiment of the zombie. ... The philosopher’s zombie is a creature that is exactly like us functionally, behaviourally, and maybe physically, but it’s not conscious. It’s very important to say that nobody, certainly not me, is arguing that such zombies actually exist. ... I’m very confident there isn’t such a case now, but the point is that it at least seems logically possible. There’s no contradiction in the idea of there being an entity just like you without consciousness. That’s just one way of getting at the idea that somehow consciousness is something extra and special that is going on. You could put the hard problem of consciousness as, why aren’t we zombies?
[SC] How can I be sure that I’m not a zombie?
[DC] There’s a very good argument that I can’t be sure you’re not a zombie. All I have is access to your behaviour. But the first-person case is different. In the first-person case, I’m conscious, I know that more directly than I know anything else. Descartes said in the 1640’s this is the one thing I can be certain of. I can doubt everything about the external world, but I can’t doubt that I’m thinking. I think therefore I am. I think it’s natural to take consciousness as our primary epistemic datum. Whatever you say about zombies I know that I’m not one of them because I know I’m conscious.
[SC] What makes me worried is that the zombie would give itself all those same reasons. So, how can I be sure I’m not that zombie?
[DC] To be fair, you’ve put your finger on the weakest spot of the zombie hypothesis and for the ideas that come from it. In my first book, The Conscious Mind, I had a whole chapter about this called this "The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment" that stems from the fact that my zombie twin would say, and do, and write all of the things I was. We shouldn’t take possible worlds too seriously, but what is going on in the zombie world is what philosophers call eliminativism, where there is no such thing as consciousness and the zombie is making a mistake. There is a respectable program in philosophy that says we’re basically in that situation in our world, and lately there has been an upsurge in people taking this seriously. It’s called illusionism.
[DC] Illusionism is the idea that consciousness is some kind of internal introspective illusion. Think about what’s going on with the zombie. The zombie thinks it has special properties of consciousness, but it doesn’t. All is dark inside. Illusionists say, actually, that’s our situation. It seems to us we have all these special properties—those qualia, those sensory experiences—but in a way, all is dark inside for us as well. There is just a very strong introspective mechanism that makes us think we have those special properties. That’s illusionism.
[DC] I’ve been thinking about this a lot and wrote an article called “The Meta Problem of Consciousness” that just came out. The hard problem of consciousness is why are we conscious, why do these physical processes give rise to consciousness. The meta problem of consciousness is: why do we think we’re conscious? Why do we think there’s a problem of consciousness? Remember, the hard problem says the easy problems are about behaviour, and the hard problem is about experience. Well, the meta problem is ultimately about behaviour. It’s about the things we do and the things we say. Why do people go around writing books about this? Why do they say, "I’m conscious", "I’m feeling pain"? Why do they say, I have these properties that are hard to explain in functional terms? That’s a behavioural problem. That’s an easy problem.
[SC] Aside from eliminativism and illusionism, which are fairly hard core on one side, or forms of dualism on the other side, there is this kind of “emergent” position one can take that is physicalist and materialist at the bottom, but doesn’t say that therefore things like consciousness and subjective experiences don’t exist or are illusions. They are higher order phenomena like tables or chairs. They are categories that we invent to help us organise our experience of the world.
[DC] My view is that emergence is sometimes used as a magic word to make us feel good about things we don’t understand. How do you get from this to this? It’s emergent! But what do you really mean by emergent? I wrote an article about this once where I distinguished weak emergence from strong emergence. Weak emergence is basically the kind you get from lower level structural dynamics explaining higher level structural dynamics: the behaviour of a complex system, the way traffic flows in a city, the dynamics of a hurricane etc. You get all sorts strange and surprising and cool phenomena emerging at the higher level. But still, once you understand the lower level mechanisms well enough, the higher-level ones just follow transparently. It’s just lower level structure giving you higher level structure according to the following simple rules. When it comes to consciousness, it looks like the easy problems may be emergent in this way. Those may turn out to be low-level structural and functional mechanisms that produce these reports and these behaviours that lead us to being awake, and no one would be surprised if these were weakly emergent in that way. But none of that seems to add up to an explanation of subjective experience, which just looks like something new. Philosophers sometimes talk about emergence in a different way. Strong emergence involves something fundamentally new emerging via new fundamental laws. Maybe there’s a fundamental law that says when you get this information being integrated then you get consciousness. I think consciousness may be emergent in that sense, but that’s not a sense that helps the materialist. If you want consciousness to be emergent in a sense that helps the materialist, you have to go for weak emergence and that is ultimately going to require reducing the hard problem to an easy problem.
[DC] Everyone has to make hard choices here and I don’t want to let you off the hook by just saying, “Ah it’s all ultimately going to be the brain and a bunch of emergence.” There’s a respectable materialist research program here, but that involves ultimately turning the hard problem into an easy one. All you are going to get from physics is more and more structure and dynamics and functioning and so on. For that to turn into an explanation of consciousness, you need to find some way to deflate what needs explaining in the case of consciousness to a matter of behaviour and functioning. And maybe say the extra thing that needs explaining, that’s an illusion. People like Dan Dennett, who I respect greatly, has tried to do this for years, for decades. At the end of the day, most people look at what Dennett’s come up with and they say “Nope, not good enough. You haven’t explained consciousness.” If you can do better, then great.
[DC] I’ve explored a number of different positive views on consciousness. What I haven’t done is commit to any of them. I see various different interesting possibilities, each of which has big problems. Big attractions, but also big problems to overcome.

Brief Comments
I've never given much weight to Chalmers' zombie problem. Relying on "conceivable worlds" strikes me as a reformulated ontological argument for the existence of God—i.e. if you can imagine it, it must be so. But our imaginations can be wrong in all sorts of ways; possibly even in ways we can't imagine. That's why Descartes was wrong too. Cogito ergo sum should have been I think, therefore I think I think.

In this interview, however, Chalmers has convinced me there is a "hard" problem, but I think it is misnamed. Hard implies that it could be cracked. But what Chalmers keeps retreating to is ultimately an unanswerable question. After every new explanation of consciousness that could ever come along—from believing that consciousness is in our bodies, all the way to defining a theoretically perfect neural correlates of consciousness—Chalmers continually just asks, "Why?" Why is there consciousness rather than none? I think this is perfectly analogous to asking "why is there something rather than nothing?" But As Arne Naess pointed out, all worldviews have to start with some hypotheses. You can never get outside of everything in order to see everything. To claim that you can, is like trying to blow a balloon up from the inside. And Chalmers' infinite regression of "why" sure seems a balloon we can never get outside of.

So, I'd like to make a distinction for Chalmers' hard problem between the how and the why. How do physical processes lead to subjective experience? Why do physical processes lead to subjective experience? The ultimate why is ultimately an impossible problem. The hows along the way to that ultimate why may be difficult, but we can make progress with them. And they can tell us important things about life. Maybe it will turn out that consciousness—whatever we mean by that—will be fundamental to the universe in the way that electromagnetism is right now. Or maybe we'll find something else. But let's spend our time studying those hows, rather than getting caught up debating impossible whys.

Of course, there are other problems with objectively studying these "easy" problems of subjective consciousness. And that's what we'll look at next time.

What do you think? Is the hard problem of consciousness hard? Impossible? Easy? Or something else?

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery

44 Comments

Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery

3/17/2020

16 Comments

As I begin this series on consciousness, a good place to start is by knocking down preconceived notions that may be common here. This is something the Buddhists have been doing for hundreds of years and a good guide to this way of thinking is Sam Harris. Sam has studied meditation for years, including on very long silent retreats in India, but he is now much better known as a hyper-rational neuroscientist who is one of the four horsemen of the New Atheists. How does he bring these experiences together? His books, meditation app, and podcast are full of discussions about this, but I'll choose two particular podcasts to focus on.

The first is Episode #181- The Illusory Self. Most of this episode is a discussion with the writer and meditation teacher Richard Lang, but the introductory comments from Sam from 5:27 to 13:30 are particularly useful for my purposes. For those who can't listen to it, I'll copy the entire transcription of this portion of the podcast into a comment at the bottom of this post. But here are the most important lines:

In today’s podcast I want to give you skeptics one more shot understanding what I’m up to with meditation. There are specific insights here into the nature of mind that I consider to be the most important things I have ever learned.
I’ve been slow to understand just how much intellectual work is being done for me by the fact that I’ve had certain experiences in meditation. And these experiences have made certain features of the mind obvious.
The reality is that if you can pay sufficient attention to your mind, the illusion [of free will and the self] disappears. It becomes obvious that everything is just arising on its own, including one’s thoughts and intentions and other mental precursors to action.
Consider the analogy that I’ve sometimes used to the optic blind spot. You make two marks on a piece of paper. You stare at it. You close one eye, look at one of the marks, and bring the paper closer until the second mark disappears. This is a very simple procedure that allows you to see something right on the surface of consciousness that you would otherwise spend your entire lifetime overlooking.
In seeing the blind spot, you’re actually seeing something subjectively, as a matter of direct experience, that reveals a deeper truth about the eye. Well, I can also say that the non-existence of an unchanging self in the middle of experience, an ego, the feeling that we call I, is also predicted by the structure and function of the brain. ... There’s no account of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology that would make sense of an unchanging self freely exercising its will. Meditation is ultimately a very simple procedure that allows one to discover the absence of this fake self directly.

Next, I'd draw your attention to Episode #159 - Conscious, which is a discussion with Sam's wife Annaka Harris about her book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Once again, there are a lot of interesting things said in this podcast, and I'll transcribe several relevant minutes in a comment below, but here are the most important lines:

The [hard] problem is, why is it that any configuration of non-conscious material can suddenly have the experience of being that matter? There’s no explanation that we could think of that could make this less mysterious. It’s always non-conscious matter getting arranged in a very specific way so that it suddenly lights up from the inside. It seems that no matter how much we know about the brain, there’s nothing that will ever make this less mysterious.
The most primary intuitions we have about consciousness live in two questions I like to keep asking myself. The first one is: is there any behavior on the outside of a system that can tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system?
The second question is: is consciousness doing anything? Is it serving a function?
The idea that consciousness might not be doing anything is problematic from an evolutionary point of view because people wonder then why it would have evolved. Surely it must be doing something, because it must be expensive metabolically on some level.
So the argument about the evolution of consciousness is one that sends many people down the path of wondering if it is possible that consciousness is a fundamental feature of matter, that it is there in some form all the way down.
The name for that general family of views is panpsychism.
In my book I cite the title of this great article by Philip Goff, which is: “Panpsychism may be crazy, but it’s also most probably true.” That got me to the point where I started to take panpsychism more seriously. ... Once you’re able to break through the illusion of the self, these sorts of theories are easier to entertain or imagine.

Brief Comments
Having done a bit of meditation over the last 15 years, I can see the value of paying close attention to where thoughts, feelings, and intentions arise from. I can easily agree with Sam that there is no "unchanging self in the middle of experience, an ego, the feeling that we call I." But whenever Sam goes on about there being no self, I like to remember Laurence Krauss telling him he was pretty sure he could find a self somewhere within the vicinity of his body. He and Sam could be using different definitions for what the self is, however, and that's something I'll explore more later.

As for Annaka's points, I first wanted to let her introduce the idea of "the hard problem of consciousness" here. There will be much more about that in the next article focusing on David Chalmers who coined that term. As for Annaka's primary questions about consciousness, I think the first one looking for conclusive evidence of consciousness is a common error of essentialist thinking in an evolving universe where lines are blurry and there are no on/off eternal essences. Dan Dennett will address that later but it's important to see right away that looking for "consciousness" doesn't reveal any obvious answers. As for what consciousness does, that depends a lot on how it is defined, which neuroscientists have been teasing out over the last several years. Whether they find panpsychism all the way down will be up for interpretation. I'll cover much more about that further down the line.

What do you think? Are you even a you? Is the hard problem of consciousness hard to you?

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series

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Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series

3/15/2020

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With the onset of the Covid-19 coronavirus, many of us are in the midst of a time for self-isolation. So...I figured this would be the perfect time to try to isolate the self!

It's an exciting time for the study of consciousness right now with a wide range of ideas and scientific studies being discussed and released. For a while now, I have felt that I've not written enough about this subject to wrap my head around it all, but after going through a deluge of podcasts, talks, and articles about it, I think the time is finally right for me to dive in. I've also just agreed to take part in a one-on-one public discussion about this (and other things) for a Darwin Day lecture in 2021, so I really do need to get up to speed.

With that said, I'm going to do something different on the blog here. Rather than write one ginormous post about consciousness, I'm going to publish this as a long series of shorter posts. I'm going to try to do this every other day to give people a little time to read, listen, digest, and comment along the way, but I don't want this to spread out too long so the plot gets lost along the way. Right now, I've got 16 posts in mind, so this will take a little over a month. Hopefully that will get us through the worst of this pandemic. Here's the plan:

1.   Introduction to the Series
2.   Sam and Annaka Harris on A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
3.   David Chalmers on The Hard Problem of Consciousness
4.   Phillip Goff vs. Massimo Pigliucci on Panpsychism
5.   Keith Frankish on Why Consciousness is an Illusion
6. Dan Dennett (Part 1) on Consciousness from Bacteria to Bach and Back
7.   Dan Dennett (Part 2) on Responses to His Work
8. Patricia Churchland on Neuroscience and the Evolution of Our Brains
9.   Stanislas Dehaene on Consciousness and the Brain
10.   Antonio Damasio on The Strange Order of Things
11.   Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt on Consciousness Demystified
12.   Joseph Ledoux on The Deep History of Ourselves
13.   Michael Graziano on Rethinking Consciousness
14.   Christof Koch on The Feeling of Life Itself
15. Steven Gimbel on What a Theory Is
16.   Additional Considerations from Evolutionary Philosophy
17.   Conclusion — My Current Theory of Consciousness

I'll be back soon for part 2. In the meantime, spread the word (non-contact please) to anyone else who might be interested in this. Maybe let me know in the comments below what your current thinking on this subject is. It'd be interesting to see how that might change along the way. No matter what, I hope it will be a fun ride!

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Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy

Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution

Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective

Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?

Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness

Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem

Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery

Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series

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