Blog Posts

Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves

4/6/2020

Good thing that soul patch is only used in one of his specialties.

We're in the home stretch now for this series on consciousness. In the last three posts, I went over the summaries of books that Dr. Ginger Campbell provided in one of her Brain Science podcast episodes. That one episode was particularly useful, but it was just the first of a four-part series on consciousness. The next three episodes were one-on-one interviews with three more neuroscientists about their own studies of consciousness. Those interviews will provide the last three pieces of external research for my series.

The first interview was with Joseph LeDoux about his book The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. What a great evolutionary title! LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU who has spent the last thirty years studying the brain mechanisms of fear and emotional memory. He's also the guitarist and songwriter for a funky band called The Amygdaloids who gave us the hep-cat, jazzy, yet informative little number Fearing. (Pretty awesome.) For a more straightforward lesson about consciousness, however, here are the highlights from LeDoux's interview with Dr. Campbell:

Higher-order representations is the category LeDoux prefers from among the 20 different theories of consciousness.
How far back in evolution does the ability to detect and respond to danger go? Other nonhuman animals do this. Even bees. But it’s much older still. Protozoa like paramecia or amoeba do it. Even bacteria do. In fact, it goes all the way back to the beginning of life.
It's not just detecting danger either — incorporating nutrients, balancing fluids and ions, thermoregulation, reproduction for the species to survive — all of these behaviours exist in animals, but also in single-cell microbes. Value / valence / affect has also been present since the beginning of life (e.g. bacteria swim toward or away from things).
So, behaviour and even learning and memory do not require nervous systems.
When we do those things, we have subjective experiences about them, but those subjective experiences are not essential to the actions.
What is the relationship between behaviour and consciousness? We see behaviour in others so we attribute the same thoughts and feelings that we do. This makes sense for other human brains, but it is more and more dissimilar for other brains.
When we detect danger, we feel fear. But that may not always be the case. Split brain cases show one side getting a signal, the body acts, but then the other side can’t say why.
I hypothesised that emotional systems could generate non-conscious behaviours. I was able to trace the pathways through the amygdala to do this. Other research showed the amygdala is involved in implicit / non-conscious memories as opposed to conscious memories about detecting and responding to danger. I used this model for memories and applied it to emotions—i.e. implicit vs. explicit emotions. I thought of conscious explicit emotions as the product of cortical areas. Non-conscious emotions come out of the amygdala. The amygdala doesn’t experience fear; it just produces responses.
When stimuli are presented to patients, but masked so they can’t detect it consciously, the visual cortex and amygdala are activated and that’s it. When the stimulus is not masked, you get activation in the visual cortex, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex as well. ... In order to be conscious of an apple, it not only needs to be represented in your visual cortex, it needs to be re-represented, which involves the prefrontal cortex. ... So, the prefrontal cortex is emerging as an important area in the consolidation of our conscious experiences into what they are.
In other words, the ability to respond to and detect danger may be as old as life, but the feeling of fear may be a much more recent addition.
[Here's my 1st crazy idea.] What came first was cognition not emotion. I’m defining cognition as the ability to form internal representations of stimuli and to perform behaviours based on those representations. Cues are enough to stimulate the behaviour independent of the presence of the stimuli themselves. The representation alone is enough to guide the behaviour. That capacity exists in invertebrates, and on into all vertebrates, e.g. fish and reptiles. When you get to mammals, you have a much more complex form of cognitive representation, where it begins to look deliberative, i.e. the ability to form mental models that can be predictive of things not existing. It’s a much more complicated thing than having a static memory of what was there.
We assume that because mammals behave in much the same way that we do, they must be experiencing the same things. But the amygdala example of fear gives us some reason to be cautious about that. The short summary is that you should actually assume behaviour is unconscious unless proven otherwise.
In humans, we all know that we have these conscious experiences. In an experiment, we ask, “Can the response in this experiment be explained by a conscious state?” We have to rule out that the response is not coming from a non-conscious state. But we have a vast cognitive unconscious repository of information that allows us to get through the day without having to consciously evaluate everything we do (e.g. speaking grammatically, anticipating what we are looking at before we see it, completing patterns on the basis of limited information). To separate these conscious and non-conscious responses you can do experiments, and these have indeed happened.
The gold standard for whether a response is conscious or not is whether you can talk about it. This doesn’t mean language and consciousness are identical, just that you have access to the experience to think about it (and we use language to discuss that access with one another). In non-human animal research, that doesn’t exist. It would be good for animals to treat them as if they had conscious experiences, but it’s not a scientific demonstration to watch behaviour and say that they do.
Darwin, when faced with resistance about humans evolving from animals, responded not by saying that people have bestial qualities, but by saying that animals have human qualities. This set the debate on a track that has been difficult to get past. There was tremendous anthropomorphism in the late 19th century. That led to the radical behaviourist movement in psychology where all cognitive experience was eliminated from research. The cognitive revolution brought back the mind, but as an information processing system with inputs being conscious and unconscious. This gave us the “cognitive unconscious”, which is a middle ground between the choice the behaviourists gave us between conscious vs. reflex machines.
Anthropomorphism may be an important innate human quality, but that doesn’t mean it’s an accurate concept. And maybe we just can’t know either.
As a brief aside, usages of the limbic system, triune brain, and serial evolution of additive brain functions are all outdated now.
[Here's my 2nd crazy idea.] Emotions are not initially a product of natural selection. Emotions are conscious experiences constructed by cognitive processes. The possibility then exists that the cognitive abilities that are unique in the human brain might be responsible for those emotions. Maybe emotions came in with the early humans. Maybe they came in as byproducts, or what Stephen J. Gould called exaptations. If this cognitive model is correct, then emotions are based on mental schema (bodies of memories about certain categories of experiences), for example, a fear schema. When in danger, a template is activated. This has implications for medicine to treat emotions. For example, people taking medicine for social anxiety find it easy to go to parties (they are less timid), but they still feel anxious when there. ... Drugs alone won’t be enough to treat problems. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is required in the end.
A particular human experience is where you know the experience is happening to you. We can’t rule that out in other animals, but neurological evidence suggests that it’s not happening. This "autonoetic consciousness" represents the view of the self as the subject. It enables mental time-travel (i.e. you can review past experiences and possible future states). Other animals can learn from the past, but in a simple way. They can also have shifts in perspectives to those of others, but they don’t have this notion of the self that is part of these experiences. Non-conscious alternatives can always account for the behaviour in animals.
Every person has the same human brain. There are things in our prefrontal cortex, structures (“frontal pole”), and connections that are unique to humans. But mice have their own unique brain area. Other animals may also have their own unique ways of experience. We have to be subtle and not simply say conscious or nonconscious. Consciousness isn’t one thing. There's autonoetic consciousness. There's noetic consciousness (an awareness of facts and the world). Working memory, for example, is very similar in other primates but not other mammals. There's anoetic consciousness, which is a body awareness (i.e. Jaak Panksepp's core consciousness, which is a primitive, almost unconscious level of consciousness). Understanding brain structures and pathways might help us understand what forms of consciousness are possible, even if we can never measure it.

Brief Comments
LeDoux seems to draw a pretty narrow definition around consciousness, but then shows the clear evolutionary history of aspects of consciousness along the way, and really advocates for a more subtle use of the term. I'll present my own subjective labelling system for all this at the end of the series (because we sure could use another!), but hopefully the contents of facts within that system will be uncontroversial, and they will surely draw on LeDoux's work.

Like Damasio, whose strange inversion was that emotions preceded feelings, LeDoux's first crazy idea is his own inversion, where he says cognition preceded emotion. In one respect, these guys are actually saying the same thing, that the "subjective experience of moods" came last. But Damasio calls that "feelings" while LeDoux calls it "emotion". Clearly there is a split here between the chemical changes that cause behaviour, and the subjective experience of these changes, but it's frustrating that the field hasn't settled on consistent terminology yet of what's on each side of this divide, which makes discussing these ideas so much more difficult. (It's another good example of the value that philosophers of science can be to scientists.)

What I don't see from LeDoux in this crazy idea is any discussion of affect or value. The amygdala may be able to non-consciously produce behaviour in response to stimuli. It may even learn to do this differently throughout a lifetime. But it could only do so (successfully) by valuing some responses positively and others negatively. Since LeDoux does state that valence goes all the way back to the beginning of life, maybe he just lumps this in as part of "cognition", which then looks even more like Damasio's "emotions", which both men claim came first during evolution.

As for LeDoux's second crazy idea, it's hard for me to see how he can advocate for the need for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to regulate emotional feelings, but then suggest that these emotional feelings weren't initially a product of natural selection. Perhaps it comes down to how narrowly one defines "initially" but if CBT can improve one's life, then it sure seems plausible that the advent of emotional feelings would have provided an advantage that could have been selected for. Maybe I'm just being overly critical of anyone quoting Gould, though, since I'm of the opinion that he generally lost the Darwin Wars.

Finally, as an evolutionary thinker, I note that LeDoux offers a really good critique of anthropomorphism and the role that Darwin may have played in going down that path. Such attributions to non-human animals can obviously be taken too far. But so can anthropodenial (as Franz de Waal has coined it) for the people who go in the other direction and tout human exceptionalism. I really appreciate LeDoux's openness about this and his search for hard evidence. I also like his recognition that it would be better for us to treat animals as if they had valuable internal experiences, since we are currently faced with the barrier that we may never know about that. So, one form of human exceptionalism that exists may just be that we are profoundly ignorant of life....except for what we can know about ourselves. Perhaps it would be better to pay attention sometimes to that wide ignorance rather than any narrow knowledge.

What do you think? Are LeDoux's two crazy ideas really that crazy? What else jumped out at you from his deep history of ourselves?

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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
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism

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Consciousness 11 —Neurobiological Naturalism

4/4/2020

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Two books that look pretty applicable to this series...

In the last post, I mentioned that Dr. Ginger Campbell reviewed three books about consciousness in her magnificent Brain Science podcast that were written by neuroscientists. The first two were written by Stanislas Dehaene and Antonio Damasio, which I covered in the last two posts. Now, we get to a book written by Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt called Consciousness Demystified. This is their most recent book, published in 2018, so that's the one Campbell covered in depth. However, since this is a refined and perhaps popularised version of the book they published in 2016 called The Ancient Origins of Consciousness (which sure sounds appropriate for this series), I thought I should pull a couple of summary points from that book too. Here, then, are the most important items I found:

Feinberg and Mallatt use a much broader view of consciousness than Dehaene or Damasio.
They use the term "neurobiological naturalism" to address the hard problem, which is an elaboration of John Searle’s biological naturalism.
F&M's goal is to bridge the gap between what the brain does and subjective experience.
Neurobiological naturalism rests on three principles: 1) Life. F&M say consciousness is grounded in the unique features of life. 2) Neural features. This consciousness correlates with neural activity. 3) Naturalistic manner. Nothing supernatural is needed.
Primary consciousness is broken down into three elements: 1) Exteroceptive—Damasio’s mapping of the outer world. 2) Interoceptive—signals from inside the body. 3) Affective—the experience of feeling, emotion, or mood.
The intercommunicating axons of affective pathways branch a lot more than in the exteroceptive pathways, sending signals to many different parts of the system. Another difference is that affective circuits communicate less through short-distance neurotransmitter chemicals and more through far-diffusing neuromodulator chemicals than do exteroceptive circuits.
Four problems arise then: 1) Referral—we don’t experience anything inside our brain. It’s all referred to from the outside world or from our bodies. 2) Mental unity—how is it all put together into a single experience. 3) Mental causation—how do thoughts cause action. 4) The perceived qualia of objects.
Breaking the hard problem into four smaller problems makes things more manageable.
E.g. mental unity is a process, not locatable to a single brain region. It requires synchronised oscillations to unify multiple networks.
There is evidence that all vertebrates and some invertebrates enjoy consciousness. This is from a combination of anatomical and behavioural evidence, including operant learning.
F&M see qualia (subjective experience) as having two unique features: 1) a unique neurobiology; and 2) the fact that it is exclusively first-person. So, therefore, we need two answers. They argue that the first person subjectivity comes from 1) the life process, combined with 2) the neurobiological pathways.
Responding to Chalmers' famous question "Why is experience one way rather than another?" they write: "Our theory of neurobiological naturalism argues that animal experience is fundamentally and inextricably built on the foundation of life. Therefore, we must distinguish purely computational mechanisms, for example computers and any other known non-living computational device, as well as cognitive theories of consciousness that likewise centre on information processing, from the theories that invoke the biological and neural properties of a living brain. We hypothesise that experience and qualia are living processes that cannot be explained solely by non-biological computation. Our view of the hard problem begins and rests on the essential role that biology plays in making animal experience and qualia possible."
There are several keys to the mystery of consciousness and subjective experience. One is that consciousness is incredibly diverse, coming from a multi-factorial combination of life and various unique neurobiological structures and processes. They also argue that qualia should not be treated as a single thing and that subjective experiences emerge when a sufficient level of neural complexity evolves. They argue repeatedly that the neurobiological problems should NOT be conflated with the philosophical problem.

In The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, Feinberg and Mallatt conted that consciousness is about creating image maps of the environment and oneself. But systems that do it with orders of magnitude less sophistication than humans can still trigger our intuition of a fellow conscious being.
After assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem responsible for consciousness, and considering the fossil record of evolution, Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed. About 520 to 560 million years ago, they explain, the great “Cambrian explosion” of animal diversity produced the first complex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of consciousness. Simple reflexive behaviours evolved into a unified inner world of subjective experiences. From this they deduce that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and bird. Considering invertebrates, they find that arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and cephalopods (including the octopus) meet many of the criteria for consciousness. The obvious and conventional wisdom–shattering implication is that consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago.
To Feinberg and Mallatt, real consciousness is indicated by the optic tectum making a multi-sensory map of the world, attending to the most important object in this map, and then signalling behaviours based on the map.
Isomorphic maps are the cornerstone of image-based sensory consciousness. These maps evolved in early vertebrates more than 520 million years ago, and this process was the natural result of the extraordinary innovations of the camera eye, neural crest, and placodes. These events led to the mental images that mark the creation of the mysterious explanatory gaps and the subjective features of consciousness.
The Defining Features of Consciousness are: Level 1) General Biological Features: life, embodiment, processes, self-organising systems, emergence, teleonomy, and adaption. Level 2) Reflexes of animals with nervous systems. Level 3) Special Neurobiological Features: complex hierarchy (of networks); nested and non-nested processes, aka recursive; isomorphic representations and mental images; affective states; attention; and memory.
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness does not address higher levels of consciousness: full-blown self-awareness, meta-awareness, recognition of the self in mirrors, theory of mind, access to verbal self-reporting.

Brief Comments
These books are apparently rammed full of good details about the internal brain structures involved with lots of discretely-named aspects of consciousness, and the evolutionary history of these anatomical features. That's certainly helpful for my project. However, the philosopher in me can't also help agreeing with the top Amazon review for Consciousness Demystified, which called it a disappointing bait and switch. The reviewer said, "In other words, in spite of their stated 'main goal' to address the explanatory gap between a third-person, objective description of how the brain works and the mystery of why that gives rise to (or amounts to) subjective, conscious experience, in fact they finally conclude that this explanatory gap is only a 'philosophical problem' instead of a 'neurobiological problem' and thus not really what their book was ever intended to explain anyway."

I have already gone over how the "philosophical problem" raised by Chalmers is actually an impossible problem so it doesn't bother me that Feinberg and Mallatt didn't tackle it. But by naming their books as they have, and promising early on to clear up the so-called hard problem, Feinberg and Mallat have disappointed more than a few readers. Then, by merely asserting that consciousness only arises from natural living processes, they lose credibility by failing to acknowledge (as Searle did) the possibility that alternate arrangements of matter, other than biological brains, could bring forth consciousness. While I'd still put money on the uniqueness of biology leading to the uniqueness of the consciousness that we recognise (think about how that consciousness changes for tiny changes in the biology), I don't pretend that this is a sure bet.

Feinberg and Mallat's addition of "affect" to the mix of "exteroception" (what Damasio calls mind) and "interoception" (what Damasio calls self) is interesting, but probably due to their expanded conception of consciousness. I agree with them it is certainly something that is a part of this full range of experiences that can get lumped into "consciousness", but the note about how the affective circuits communicate "through far-diffusing neuromodulator chemicals" reminds me of the brain being awash in an emotion, which presumably Damasio would say can occur in a non-conscious fashion, which is why it is not a part of his more limited definition of consciousness.

What do you think? Did anything else in Feinberg and Mallatt's research or hypotheses add to your thinking about consciousness? As always, 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
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self

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Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self

4/2/2020

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Photo by Alberto Gamazo (https://is.gd/KVwanB)

In the last post, I noted that I was going to be relying on Dr. Ginger Campbell's Brain Science podcast for summaries of the latest work on consciousness by neuroscientists. She kicked off her recent four-part series on consciousness with an episode called What is Consciousness? where she gave summaries of some of the latest and best books on this subject. Three of the five books she covered were written by neuroscientists. (The other two were by Sean Carroll and Dan Dennett who I've already covered.) The first of those was by Stanislas Dehaene, which I discussed in the last post. Next up, is Antonio Damasio's book The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Here are the most important points from that:

Damasio defines consciousness as: mind + self.
A mind emerges from the brain when an animal is able to create images and to map the world and its body.
Consciousness requires the addition of self-awareness. This begins at the level of the brain stem, with “primordial feelings.” The self is built up in stages starting with the proto self made up of primordial feelings, affect alone, and feeling alive. Then the core self is developed when the proto self is interacting with objects and images such that they are modified and there is a narrative sequence. Finally comes the autobiographical self, which is built from the lived past and the anticipated future.
Mind precedes consciousness.
Consciousness includes wakefulness, mind, and self.
Consciousness is the feeling that my body exists independent of other objects.
Affect or feelings came first. Long before consciousness. (A la Panksepp.) Feelings evolve from homeostatic signals and so affect evolved very early. Damasio called this “the strange order of things” because it’s the opposite of what many scientists assume.
Damasio stresses the importance of embodiment because homeostasis is the primary mechanism driving life. Feelings are mental experiences that are conscious by definition. The emotive response triggered by sensory stimuli are the qualia of philosophical tradition. This subjectivity is the critical enabler of consciousness.
Emotions are chemical reactions. Feelings are the conscious experience of emotions. (This can be slightly confusing as it is not always used consistently in Damasio's work.)
Early life was regulated without feelings and there was no mind or consciousness. Then, during the Cambrian explosion, vertebrates appeared and all vertebrates have feelings.
Valence / value evolved much earlier. Even bacteria can go toward food and away from danger.
Feelings are not neural events alone. They are interpretations of body signals (such as a fast heartbeat). Feelings are, through-and-through, simultaneously, and interestingly, phenomena of both bodies and nervous systems.

For just a bit more on this, Antonio Damasio gave a TED talk in 2011 called, The quest to understand consciousness. Here are a few extra details from slides he used during this talk:

Three levels of self to consider: proto self, core self, and autobiographical self.
Autobiographical self has prompted: extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity, and language.
Out of these came the instruments of culture: religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, and technology.

Brief Comments
I may be jumping the gun here, but Damasio's distinction between the mind and the self appear to me to map neatly onto the two brain networks scientists just proved are key to consciousness. The DAT (dorsal attention network) sounds like it produces the streaming images of the outside world, which Damasio calls mind. And the DMN (default mode network) monitors the internal states of our bodies, generating the sense of a relatively stable but historically changing identity, which Damasio calls the self. As the article I linked to says, consciousness is reported when the DAT and DMN are both activated. In other words, when both mind and self are active. This is something to consider as we go forward. (And, by the way, default mode networks have been detected in macaques, chimpanzees, and even rats.)

I also like Damasio's distinctions between emotions, feelings, and valences. This fits very well with my own system for mapping cognitive appraisals (i.e. judging if something is good, bad, or unknown, aka valenced) onto different events in the past, present, or future, in order to generate the things we typically call emotions (but which Damasio would distinguish as feelings). I can certainly get behind his distinction here. I could also adopt his labelling. And I think he's got "the strange order of things" right by saying the chemical emotional responses would have come first before the feelings in our self became able to identify them. This would clearly be the order of things in a material universe where physics led to chemistry, biology, and then psychology. This is another thing to consider as we put together the evolutionary story of consciousness.

Finally, I'll just explain the brief reference Damasio made to Panksepp. In my first peer-reviewed philosophy paper about Bridging the Is-Ought Divide, I mentioned Panksepp's work when I said: "Evolutionary neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University has identified seven emotional systems in humans that originated deeper in our evolutionary past than the Pleistocene era. The emotional systems that Panskepp terms Care (tenderness for others), Panic (from loneliness), and Play (social joy) date back to early primate evolutionary history, whereas the systems of Fear, Rage, Seeking, and Lust, which govern survival instincts for the individual, have even earlier, premammalian origins." I cited this work as potential evidence for the evolution of morality from care of the self to care for others, but of course it is also evidence of the development of the concept of the self too.

What do you think? Do Damasio's distinctions make sense to you? Do they map onto concepts you find helpful or not? Let me know what you think of this 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
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

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Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

3/31/2020

8 Comments

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 behaviourism).
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 behaviour.
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 Beysian 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 web 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 neurones 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

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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 realising 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

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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 Behaviour 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 behavioural system?"

It seems obvious (to me anyway) that we can say the same thing about our behaviour—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

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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. Coloured things aren’t made of coloured 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?

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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

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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 how's 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