Graziano with his ventriloquist puppet orangutan named Kevin. Consciousness studies sure do draw renegades.
In the last post, I noted that Dr. Ginger Campbell conducted one-on-one interviews with three prominent neuroscientists during the final episodes of her Brain Science podcast series on consciousness. We've already covered the first interview with Joseph LeDoux. Today, I'm going to go over the second interview with Michael Graziano about his book Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience. Graziano is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University where he has had a lab studying consciousness since 2010. Here are the highlights from his interview:
(Not So Brief) Brief Comments
When Graziano opened his interview talking about putting consciousness into an evolutionary context, he had me hooked. When he stated the field was coalescing around a growing standard model of consciousness that brought together Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and even some Illusionists, I got excited because those were the theories I most agreed with in the prior posts in this series. When Graziano said this core set of scientists think that we are machines and the brain is an information processing machine that thinks it has magic inside it because it builds somewhat imperfect models of the world inside it, this made a lot of sense. But when Graziano tried to offer his picture to integrate all of this, he finally lost me. To see why, let me go through some of his points one by one.
>>> "No claims can be put out by the brain without information upon which to base it."
This is an excellent place to start. I'll use this later in the series when making connections between the evolution of consciousness and evolutionary epistemology, which charts the way knowledge-gathering has grown incrementally over evolutionary history.
>>> "If the brain wants to control the arm, it needs a model of the arm. It needs an internal model, a simulation of what an arm is and where it is at any one time. This is an engineering perspective, which is useful for the study of consciousness. Similar to the moving arm, the brain is continually shifting its focus of attention. So, how do you control that? The same way as the arm. The brain needs a model or simulation of attention, of what it means to focus resources on something. ... By analogy, there must be a schema for attention—the brain's model for seeing information and processing it deeply."
I believe Graziano is making a poor analogy here. When an arm moves, it moves through space and time by contracting muscles that cannot see anything. When a focus of attention shifts, no such physical movement or navigation issues occur. I think it's a mistake to think of models being required to control both of these different things in the same kind of way.
>>> "Attention is at the root of intelligence. At the heart of intelligence is a very pragmatic problem: you only have so much energy and space for a brain, but you need to use it as efficiently as possible to process deeply and intelligently. How do you do that? Don’t occupy the brain with processing all of the million and a half things going on around you. Focus on one or two things at a time. Without that level of attention, any kind of intelligence is impossible."
This isn't the way evolution works. It doesn't start with information about "a million and a half things" and then pare back from that. Early nervous systems would have begun by sensing just one or a few things, with lots of trial and error going on about which few things. The most successful senses would have been naturally selected for, and then gone on to (blindly) experiment with adding a few new bits of information to sense and process. This evolution never stops, but it only gets as far as it needs to in order to remain alive and reproduce. As Michael Ruse wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, "Consider the much-discussed example of the frog, which snaps at anything suitably small, dark, and moving, regardless of whether it is frog food. A frog cannot discriminate between moving flies and small plastic pellets tossed in front of it no matter how many pass its way."
So, contrary to Graziano's claims, attention is NOT at the root of intelligence. And intelligence IS possible without attention. Intelligence can be very slowly built up by very narrow increments of additional information. Attention — the way that Graziano is using it — is really another word for choice, i.e. choosing which stimuli to "pay attention" to. But such choices do not need control; they can be made non-consciously by simply responding to the loudest signals, where evolutionary trials and errors shape what "loud signals" actually are. Think of the bees flying back from explorations for nectar and doing their wiggle dance to "convince" others to "listen" to them. It's just the most excited dances that "get paid attention to" by the rest of the hive. That doesn't require conscious choice. So, it's not obvious to me that attention is what consciousness is or is required for.
>>> "A body schema stands hierarchically above the body. It isn’t the same thing, and they can be dissociated (e.g. phantom limbs). Similarly, this is the relationship between attention and consciousness. Attention is literally what the brain is focusing its resources on. The Attention Schema is what the brain thinks it is focusing its resources on, what the brain thinks focusing is, and what the brain thinks the consequences of focusing are."
I think there is an excellent point here about body schemas and brain schemas both being separate from the actual bodies and brains. I just don't think attention is at the heart of it.
>>> "Global Workspace Theory is basically a theory about attention. How do you become conscious of an apple you are looking at? GWT says you attend to the signals. They become stronger from your visual system at the expense of other signals. At some point, the signals become so strong that they reach a state called “ignition” when they can then influence wide networks around the brain. Now attention has been reached, you can talk about it, you can move toward it, you can remember it later. The apple information reaches the global workspace and becomes available all around the brain systems. GWT says that is consciousness. The weakness of GWT is that it doesn’t explain why we claim to have a subjective experience. It doesn’t say why I have an inner experience of the apple."
>>> "The attention schema says great for GWT, but you need one more component—a system in the brain that says “Ah, I am attending to the apple. I have a global workspace that has taken in that apple information.” You need something in the brain that can model itself and build some kind of self-description. GWT is the attention. Attention Schema is the consciousness riding on top of that."
See. Graziano unwittingly contradicts himself here by describing GWT as the attention without the consciousness. All of the choices of attention can be made (through evolutionarily-learned ignition) without a schema sitting on top of it and controlling it. Again, I think he's right that a schema is needed, but it isn't about attention alone.
>>> To control something, you need a model of it. But an overly complicated one is wasteful. A “cartoonish” one is good enough.
I think this may be a big source of Graziano's errors on this. He is thinking like an engineer who is concerned with top-down "control" rather than thinking like an evolutionary biologist who sees bottom-up emergence. There is no top-down control or design in nature.
>>> "Why does it feel non-physical? This is one of the most successful points about the Attention Schema. The brain models itself, but it doesn’t need to include little physical details. It doesn’t need to know anything about the little implementation details. Efficiency dictates the models be as stripped down as possible."
This is more thinking like an engineer. Nature doesn't strip down; it builds up. And if more building provides an advantage, then that building up gets selected for. Why wouldn't an Attention Schema ever build up these little physical details? Graziano raises an excellent point, but I think there's a better answer just ahead.
>>> "The ability to attribute consciousness to others is important. In this evolutionary process, we start out evolving an ability to model and keep track of ourselves, which helps make predictions about ourselves and control our behaviour. At some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to use the same machinery to model others. This social use probably came in very early in evolution. There is a lot of sophistication in reptiles, birds, and mammals. We not only keep track of and model our own attention, but we keep track of and model others’ attention. That allows me to predict your behaviour."
Making models is vital, but I think Graziano has it backwards here. Life wouldn't have started with models of itself; it would have started with models of the outside world, with models of others. As we saw in my post about Antonio Damasio, "Valence / value evolved much earlier. Even bacteria can go toward food and away from danger." What is a model other than a set of if / then rules? What rules would a bacteria have in place about itself before it developed rules for going towards food and away from danger? I can't think of any.
Graziano says that "at some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to model others." But long before social interactions mattered, the predator / prey relationship would have dominated the natural selection of minds that could make models of others. And here is a big realisation. Those models....would not have had any physical inputs for them! To say it like a philosopher, I cannot know what it feels like to be a bat, but I may need to know how a bat might attack or elude me, so I will build a model in my head of that bat, even though I have no physical inputs into that model. In more philosophical jargon, the epistemic barrier created by living in a physical world where mental phenomena do not just leap across organisms is exactly the reason why our theories of minds have to feel non-physical.
[I feel like I hit on something big there.]
By the time our model-building of others could turn inwards, these models would have experienced a runaway arms race between predators and prey that shaped them into sophisticated, but non-physical, models. Such sophisticated external models would do just fine for understanding our internal selves, so there would be no need to develop a new model using all of the internal physical processes going on. In fact, there would likely be evolutionary harm to even try because the resources expended on such a project would be wasted with no chance to catch up to the existing model-making skill. (Note: even if the internal models were being built at the same time, the external ones would have faced much stiffer competition and developed more rapidly.)
>>> "With this Attention Schema, we don’t need another explanation for the philosopher’s qualia because there it is. Chalmers, after the Hard Problem, now talks about the Meta Problem. The Hard Problem is how do we get qualia, or that inner subjective feeling. The Meta Problem is why do we think there is a Hard Problem? The Attention Schema solves the Meta Problem. It explains why people think there is this magical non-physical thing inside us. It does an end run around the Hard Problem."
As we saw in my post about Chalmers, that's not an accurate description of the Hard and Meta problems. You can't make an "end run" around the Hard Problem. Chalmers doesn't consider the Meta Problem to be beyond it. (He called it another "easy" problem about behaviour.) I think my explanation works better as to why this magical thing inside of us feels non-physical. And it's an impossible question to ever answer all the whys behind the Hard Question.
>>> "We seem to model attention as if it were a fluid flowing out of their eyes, which explains all kinds of folk beliefs about feeling eyes on the back of the neck, telekinesis, the Force in Star Wars, the evil eye, etc., etc."
I think Graziano is mixing up the possible uses of attention here. His Attention Schema is about choosing to pay attention to *some* senses rather than others. Modelling the attention of another being is about modelling *everything* that that being can see. We model the fluid as if it were on all the time, not as if it were being paid attention to only occasionally. My idea — lets call it an ExteroSchema for now — may still build its model of vision as a fluid flowing out of others' eyes. That might be the easiest way to do it and it's a cool explanation of that range of folk beliefs.
>>> "IIT is a fundamentally magical theory."
Finally, Graziano finishes with a critique of Integrated Information Theory that sounds pretty dismissive. Our next post will be all about IIT though, so I look forward to diving into it and seeing how it is presented by a strong proponent.
What do you think? Do you agree with me that Graziano has some evolutionary ideas backwards? Does my explanation of modelling others first make more sense? I'd love to hear what you think of this in the comments below.
--------------------------------------------
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
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
- In 10 years of lab work, I have worked to put my ideas into an evolutionary context (i.e. how they developed), in order to give us an idea of the components that go into this thing we call consciousness.
- More and more, people in the science of consciousness are beginning to coalesce around a coherent set of ideas. My work fits into this growing standard model of consciousness. This core set of scientists realise that we are machines and the brain is an information processing machine that thinks it has magic inside it because it builds somewhat imperfect models of the world inside it. This includes Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and even some Illusionists who talk of consciousness as an illusion. My theory is not a rival to these. We are moving past rivalry and towards an integrating picture of it all.
- The realisation is coming that everything you think derives from information. No claims can be put out by the brain without information upon which to base it. This is just basic logic. The question then is how and why did the brain construct a particular piece of information? The brain can construct all sorts of seemingly crazy ideas (e.g. “I have a squirrel in my head instead of a brain.”)
- I study movement control, which requires a whole model. If the brain wants to control the arm, it needs a model of the arm. It needs an internal model, a simulation of what an arm is and where it is at any one time. This is an engineering perspective, which is useful for the study of consciousness. Similar to the moving arm, the brain is continually shifting its focus of attention. So, how do you control that? The same way as the arm. The brain needs a model or simulation of attention, of what it means to focus resources on something.
- This is called “attention schema theory”, which follows the “body schema” developed 100 years ago. Phantom limbs are good examples of “body schema”. By analogy, there must be a schema for attention—the brain's model for seeing information and processing it deeply.
- Like all complex traits, you can go back very, very far and see this gradual transition where it becomes impossible to draw a line and say “the trait exists after this but not before this.” For example, you couldn't draw clear lines in evolution for hands, feet, and flippers. Consciousness is the same.
- I start with attention—a basic ability of a nervous system to focus on a few things at a time and process them deeply. Some forms of this attention go back possibly all the way to the beginnings of nervous systems. Attention is at the root of intelligence. At the heart of intelligence is a very pragmatic problem: you only have so much energy and space for a brain, but you need to use it as efficiently as possible to process deeply and intelligently. How do you do that? Don’t occupy the brain with processing all of the million and a half things going on around you. Focus on one or two things at a time. Without that level of attention, any kind of intelligence is impossible.
- Attention comes in very early in evolution, and over time it becomes more and more complex. There’s central attention, sensory attention, more cognitive kinds of attention, and they emerge gradually over this sweep of history from about half a billion years ago up to the present. Piggybacking off of this, what people call consciousness also emerged, and also as a gradual process.
- Attention can be separable from consciousness. At what point might it be consciousness?
- Bodies have been involved from the beginning. Schemas only came once nervous systems were capable of building models of these bodies. A body schema stands hierarchically above the body. It isn’t the same thing, and they can be dissociated (e.g. phantom limbs). Similarly, this is the relationship between attention and consciousness. Attention is literally what the brain is focusing its resources on. The Attention Schema is what the brain thinks it is focusing its resources on, what the brain thinks focusing is, and what the brain thinks the consequences of focusing are. And those are dissociable too. Typically, they don’t. Typically, they track quite well (like the body schema), but you can trick them and get them to peel off from one another.
- Global Workspace Theory is basically a theory about attention. How do you become conscious of an apple you are looking at? GWT says you attend to the signals. They become stronger from your visual system at the expense of other signals. At some point, the signals become so strong that they reach a state called “ignition” when they can then influence wide networks around the brain. Now attention has been reached, you can talk about it, you can move toward it, you can remember it later. The apple information reaches the global workspace and becomes available all around the brain systems. GWT says that is consciousness. The weakness of GWT is that it doesn’t explain why we claim to have a subjective experience. It doesn’t say why I have an inner experience of the apple.
- The attention schema says great for GWT, but you need one more component—a system in the brain that says “Ah, I am attending to the apple. I have a global workspace that has taken in that apple information.” You need something in the brain that can model itself and build some kind of self-description. GWT is the attention. Attention Schema is the consciousness riding on top of that.
- To control something, you need a model of it. But an overly complicated one is wasteful. A “cartoonish” one is good enough.
- Why does it feel non-physical? This is one of the most successful points about the Attention Schema. The brain models itself, but it doesn’t need to include little physical details. It doesn’t need to know anything about the little implementation details. Therefore, the brain’s self-models depict something that has no physical components. It depicts a vague non-physical thing that has a kind of location within us, but that’s the only physical property it has. Efficiency dictates the models be as stripped down as possible. This is why introspection, informed by internal models, tells us there is something inside us but it feels like a non-physical essence.
- With this Attention Schema, we don’t need another explanation for the philosopher’s qualia because there it is. Chalmers, after the Hard Problem, now talks about the Meta Problem. The Hard Problem is how do we get qualia, or that inner subjective feeling. The Meta Problem is why do we think there is a Hard Problem? The Attention Schema solves the Meta Problem. It explains why people think there is this magical non-physical thing inside us. It does an end run around the Hard Problem.
- The ability to attribute consciousness to others is important. In this evolutionary process, we start out evolving an ability to model and keep track of ourselves, which helps make predictions about ourselves and control our behaviour. At some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to use the same machinery to model others. This social use probably came in very early in evolution. There is a lot of sophistication in reptiles, birds, and mammals. We not only keep track of and model our own attention, but we keep track of and model others’ attention. That allows me to predict your behaviour.
- Ventriloquist dummies are great examples of our souped-up drive to model conscious minds in the world around us.
- We seem to model attention as if it were a fluid flowing out of their eyes, which explains all kinds of folk beliefs about feeling eyes on the back of the neck, telekinesis, the Force in Star Wars, the evil eye, etc., etc.
- Integrated Information Theory is kind of the opposite of this. IIT belongs to theories where you start with an axiomatic assumption. IIT starts with “consciousness exists” stating there is this non-physical feely thing inside us. The magical thing is there, so how does it emerge and under what conditions? So right from the outset there is a divergence. On my end, the starting point is that the brain cannot put out a claim unless there is information for that claim on which it is based. There is no reason to assume this information is accurate. When people feel they have magic, the job of scientists isn’t to find out how the brain produces magic; it’s to find out why the brain builds that model to describe itself. IIT is a fundamentally magical theory.
- According to IIT, consciousness arises from information and everything in the universe has some information in it. So, you end up with panpsychism that consciousness exists in everything and everywhere. That seems like you’ve used faulty logic to paint yourself into a corner. If everything is conscious, what does consciousness even mean anymore?
(Not So Brief) Brief Comments
When Graziano opened his interview talking about putting consciousness into an evolutionary context, he had me hooked. When he stated the field was coalescing around a growing standard model of consciousness that brought together Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and even some Illusionists, I got excited because those were the theories I most agreed with in the prior posts in this series. When Graziano said this core set of scientists think that we are machines and the brain is an information processing machine that thinks it has magic inside it because it builds somewhat imperfect models of the world inside it, this made a lot of sense. But when Graziano tried to offer his picture to integrate all of this, he finally lost me. To see why, let me go through some of his points one by one.
>>> "No claims can be put out by the brain without information upon which to base it."
This is an excellent place to start. I'll use this later in the series when making connections between the evolution of consciousness and evolutionary epistemology, which charts the way knowledge-gathering has grown incrementally over evolutionary history.
>>> "If the brain wants to control the arm, it needs a model of the arm. It needs an internal model, a simulation of what an arm is and where it is at any one time. This is an engineering perspective, which is useful for the study of consciousness. Similar to the moving arm, the brain is continually shifting its focus of attention. So, how do you control that? The same way as the arm. The brain needs a model or simulation of attention, of what it means to focus resources on something. ... By analogy, there must be a schema for attention—the brain's model for seeing information and processing it deeply."
I believe Graziano is making a poor analogy here. When an arm moves, it moves through space and time by contracting muscles that cannot see anything. When a focus of attention shifts, no such physical movement or navigation issues occur. I think it's a mistake to think of models being required to control both of these different things in the same kind of way.
>>> "Attention is at the root of intelligence. At the heart of intelligence is a very pragmatic problem: you only have so much energy and space for a brain, but you need to use it as efficiently as possible to process deeply and intelligently. How do you do that? Don’t occupy the brain with processing all of the million and a half things going on around you. Focus on one or two things at a time. Without that level of attention, any kind of intelligence is impossible."
This isn't the way evolution works. It doesn't start with information about "a million and a half things" and then pare back from that. Early nervous systems would have begun by sensing just one or a few things, with lots of trial and error going on about which few things. The most successful senses would have been naturally selected for, and then gone on to (blindly) experiment with adding a few new bits of information to sense and process. This evolution never stops, but it only gets as far as it needs to in order to remain alive and reproduce. As Michael Ruse wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, "Consider the much-discussed example of the frog, which snaps at anything suitably small, dark, and moving, regardless of whether it is frog food. A frog cannot discriminate between moving flies and small plastic pellets tossed in front of it no matter how many pass its way."
So, contrary to Graziano's claims, attention is NOT at the root of intelligence. And intelligence IS possible without attention. Intelligence can be very slowly built up by very narrow increments of additional information. Attention — the way that Graziano is using it — is really another word for choice, i.e. choosing which stimuli to "pay attention" to. But such choices do not need control; they can be made non-consciously by simply responding to the loudest signals, where evolutionary trials and errors shape what "loud signals" actually are. Think of the bees flying back from explorations for nectar and doing their wiggle dance to "convince" others to "listen" to them. It's just the most excited dances that "get paid attention to" by the rest of the hive. That doesn't require conscious choice. So, it's not obvious to me that attention is what consciousness is or is required for.
>>> "A body schema stands hierarchically above the body. It isn’t the same thing, and they can be dissociated (e.g. phantom limbs). Similarly, this is the relationship between attention and consciousness. Attention is literally what the brain is focusing its resources on. The Attention Schema is what the brain thinks it is focusing its resources on, what the brain thinks focusing is, and what the brain thinks the consequences of focusing are."
I think there is an excellent point here about body schemas and brain schemas both being separate from the actual bodies and brains. I just don't think attention is at the heart of it.
>>> "Global Workspace Theory is basically a theory about attention. How do you become conscious of an apple you are looking at? GWT says you attend to the signals. They become stronger from your visual system at the expense of other signals. At some point, the signals become so strong that they reach a state called “ignition” when they can then influence wide networks around the brain. Now attention has been reached, you can talk about it, you can move toward it, you can remember it later. The apple information reaches the global workspace and becomes available all around the brain systems. GWT says that is consciousness. The weakness of GWT is that it doesn’t explain why we claim to have a subjective experience. It doesn’t say why I have an inner experience of the apple."
>>> "The attention schema says great for GWT, but you need one more component—a system in the brain that says “Ah, I am attending to the apple. I have a global workspace that has taken in that apple information.” You need something in the brain that can model itself and build some kind of self-description. GWT is the attention. Attention Schema is the consciousness riding on top of that."
See. Graziano unwittingly contradicts himself here by describing GWT as the attention without the consciousness. All of the choices of attention can be made (through evolutionarily-learned ignition) without a schema sitting on top of it and controlling it. Again, I think he's right that a schema is needed, but it isn't about attention alone.
>>> To control something, you need a model of it. But an overly complicated one is wasteful. A “cartoonish” one is good enough.
I think this may be a big source of Graziano's errors on this. He is thinking like an engineer who is concerned with top-down "control" rather than thinking like an evolutionary biologist who sees bottom-up emergence. There is no top-down control or design in nature.
>>> "Why does it feel non-physical? This is one of the most successful points about the Attention Schema. The brain models itself, but it doesn’t need to include little physical details. It doesn’t need to know anything about the little implementation details. Efficiency dictates the models be as stripped down as possible."
This is more thinking like an engineer. Nature doesn't strip down; it builds up. And if more building provides an advantage, then that building up gets selected for. Why wouldn't an Attention Schema ever build up these little physical details? Graziano raises an excellent point, but I think there's a better answer just ahead.
>>> "The ability to attribute consciousness to others is important. In this evolutionary process, we start out evolving an ability to model and keep track of ourselves, which helps make predictions about ourselves and control our behaviour. At some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to use the same machinery to model others. This social use probably came in very early in evolution. There is a lot of sophistication in reptiles, birds, and mammals. We not only keep track of and model our own attention, but we keep track of and model others’ attention. That allows me to predict your behaviour."
Making models is vital, but I think Graziano has it backwards here. Life wouldn't have started with models of itself; it would have started with models of the outside world, with models of others. As we saw in my post about Antonio Damasio, "Valence / value evolved much earlier. Even bacteria can go toward food and away from danger." What is a model other than a set of if / then rules? What rules would a bacteria have in place about itself before it developed rules for going towards food and away from danger? I can't think of any.
Graziano says that "at some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to model others." But long before social interactions mattered, the predator / prey relationship would have dominated the natural selection of minds that could make models of others. And here is a big realisation. Those models....would not have had any physical inputs for them! To say it like a philosopher, I cannot know what it feels like to be a bat, but I may need to know how a bat might attack or elude me, so I will build a model in my head of that bat, even though I have no physical inputs into that model. In more philosophical jargon, the epistemic barrier created by living in a physical world where mental phenomena do not just leap across organisms is exactly the reason why our theories of minds have to feel non-physical.
[I feel like I hit on something big there.]
By the time our model-building of others could turn inwards, these models would have experienced a runaway arms race between predators and prey that shaped them into sophisticated, but non-physical, models. Such sophisticated external models would do just fine for understanding our internal selves, so there would be no need to develop a new model using all of the internal physical processes going on. In fact, there would likely be evolutionary harm to even try because the resources expended on such a project would be wasted with no chance to catch up to the existing model-making skill. (Note: even if the internal models were being built at the same time, the external ones would have faced much stiffer competition and developed more rapidly.)
>>> "With this Attention Schema, we don’t need another explanation for the philosopher’s qualia because there it is. Chalmers, after the Hard Problem, now talks about the Meta Problem. The Hard Problem is how do we get qualia, or that inner subjective feeling. The Meta Problem is why do we think there is a Hard Problem? The Attention Schema solves the Meta Problem. It explains why people think there is this magical non-physical thing inside us. It does an end run around the Hard Problem."
As we saw in my post about Chalmers, that's not an accurate description of the Hard and Meta problems. You can't make an "end run" around the Hard Problem. Chalmers doesn't consider the Meta Problem to be beyond it. (He called it another "easy" problem about behaviour.) I think my explanation works better as to why this magical thing inside of us feels non-physical. And it's an impossible question to ever answer all the whys behind the Hard Question.
>>> "We seem to model attention as if it were a fluid flowing out of their eyes, which explains all kinds of folk beliefs about feeling eyes on the back of the neck, telekinesis, the Force in Star Wars, the evil eye, etc., etc."
I think Graziano is mixing up the possible uses of attention here. His Attention Schema is about choosing to pay attention to *some* senses rather than others. Modelling the attention of another being is about modelling *everything* that that being can see. We model the fluid as if it were on all the time, not as if it were being paid attention to only occasionally. My idea — lets call it an ExteroSchema for now — may still build its model of vision as a fluid flowing out of others' eyes. That might be the easiest way to do it and it's a cool explanation of that range of folk beliefs.
>>> "IIT is a fundamentally magical theory."
Finally, Graziano finishes with a critique of Integrated Information Theory that sounds pretty dismissive. Our next post will be all about IIT though, so I look forward to diving into it and seeing how it is presented by a strong proponent.
What do you think? Do you agree with me that Graziano has some evolutionary ideas backwards? Does my explanation of modelling others first make more sense? I'd love to hear what you think of this in the comments below.
--------------------------------------------
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
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
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