You may have noticed a drop off in posts recently. It was due to my focusing on my first MA essay to meet the deadline for yesterday. The next one is due 20th April so I should have some more time for blogging for a while.
The topic was:
‘One essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will.’ Is this correct?
I can send out a copy of it to interested 4AoSers. All I ask is that you don't all email me at once, for you will surely jam my inbox. (David: I've just sent you your copy. Alan: you're next)
Here's a taster:
Libertarians argue free will requires that agents could have behaved differently, that they have access to genuine alternative possibilities. Frankfurt calls this the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), and rejects it. As a compatibilist, he argues that determinism is compatible with free will; a person enjoys freedom of the will when he has the freedom to will the will he wants. A person acting according to the will he wants is acting freely, and as such can be held responsible for his actions: “It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second order volitions, then, that a person exercises freedom of the will.”
Result in 2 weeks!
(If you don't see an announcement on 4AoS by 24th March, you can safely assume things didn't go well)
And ANOTHER thing about the Brain and the Mind is... ok I'm not really going down that route at the moment. Well not on the blog anyway. The subject of consciousness, the Mind Body problem, and all that, is still very much on my mind though (or Brain; take your pick) and I've just started my Masters on the subject (post coming soon). But I must share this from Nick's blog, biotechnorati.
Remember my diagrams laying out the main positions with regard to the connection between Brain and Mind? (previous post)
Are Mind and Brain 2 different things?
Or 2 words for the same thing?
Or perhaps Mind is an illusion:
It feels like our mind has control over the body:
but Neuroscience suggests the opposite is true; Mind, whatever it is or is not, arises from the brain:
The 5 diagrams seemed to me to be the exhaustive list on the subject, but the more I read the more I began to wonder if the 2 concepts could be intertwined in some other way, a way that suggested a deeper interconnectedness between the 2 concepts. The letters 'I' and 'N' are common to both words so I thought there must be a way to express this diagramatically, but I couldn't think of any way to do it. I mentioned it to Nick and then thought no more about it. But Nick, unlike me, has a habit of following things through to their ultimate conclusion, and he has come up with this. I think it's fantastic.
I've searched online and can't find anything like it. Nice job mate!
Regulars will remember that back in May I had a letter published in New Scientist on the subject of consciousness (previous post) and that I wrote another letter earlier this month (previous post) to complain about their cover story on animal minds:
well.... they've just published that one too!
I think it's high time they talked to me about a more official role within the magazine; 'the NS Mind and Brain correspondent' or some such title, I would suggest.
Here's the letter anyway. They chopped it a bit, which is annoying, and exactly the kind of editorial interference I won't put up with when I'm "staff."
I've just counted up all the posts on the blog relating to consciousness, and there are 21 so far (Alan; when I get to 100 I'll be releasing a boxed-set with outtakes and extras for 4AoSers,and you are top of the list)
Nick sent this in ages ago and I think even those not particularly obsessed with the Mind-Body problem will find this fascinating. For the first time we can observe the brain as it slips into unconsciousness.
See here for the video clip of it happening in real time, and for the full story:
I won't get into the philosophical implications of this here (next post Alan!) but I would say that this kind of thing can shed light on philosophical issues that have engaged thinkers for thousands of years.
I've just been accepted on the Masters in Philosophy!
It's a 3 year course and the A850 is the first year module. It's the 3rd year I'm really looking forward to because the whole year is based on a dissertation of your own choice.
When I read the title "Inside Animal Minds: "How other creatures see the world" on the cover of last week's New Scientist I was so happy to discover that the Mind-Body problem had been solved by those boffins over at NS.
Then I thought "Oh no, I've only just applied to do my Masters on the subject, and now there's no point! I wonder if there's still time to cancel my postal order?"
Turning to page 32 with trembling hands, I soon realised that my rollercoaster emotions were misplaced on both counts because - surprise surprise - scientists have no more idea as to what it's like to be an animal than philosophers or anyone else for that matter.
Try the opening paragraph:
SEE LIKE A BEE
When a bee flies into your garden, it doesn't see what you and I see. Flowers leap out from much darker-looking leafy backgrounds....
And this:
All this is seen through the pixellated window of mosaic vision... It's a world of vision that it is difficult to imagine.
or:
...false colour photographs, in which red has been filtered out and UV has been added in a colour visible to human eyes, gives us a close approximation of the patterns a bee sees.
and:
...some insects have four, five or even six colour receptors, allowing them to perceive colours that it is impossible for us to experience or even imagine. For them, the three-colour world of human vision would be as dull as greyscale.
There's five pages of this nonsense; how a turtle "feels" the Earth's magnetism, what's it's like to be a bat, what a snake "sees", etc.
The title of the article should have been "Inside Animals BRAINS: some wild speculations as to what it might or might not be like to be another creature" because, of course, we cannot make the leap from examining a creatures sensory equipment to knowing what another creaure experiences subjectively.
I don't expect heavy philosophical investigations from a magazine on popular science but the level of woolly thinking on this occasion is truly breathtaking. If a philosophy magazine printed a simplistic and innacurate article on a scientific issue, there would rightly be uproar. Shame on you NS! I've written to them to complain in the strongest terms of course.
To my shame, 4AoS made a similar mistake back in May 2008 by posting this image of what a bee sees.
(I was young and impetuous, and even at the time, on some level I knew what I was doing was wrong)
Image Credit: Andrew Giger.
Just because a bee has 70,000 eyes doesn't mean it sees 70,000 pixellated images. I have 2 eyes but I only see 1 image because I have a unified sense of consciousness. I just picked up a cup of coffee which was far too hot. I didn't feel 5 separate pains, one for each finger, I felt a single pain. Maybe a bee has a similar unified sensory experience, maybe not. Or maybe it makes no sense to talk about the subjective experience of a different form of life. Or perhaps there is nothing at all like being a bee; perhaps it has no consciousness at all and lives entirely "in the dark."
After reading some of the comments following my last philosophy post ("Can't we get back to birds and butterflies?" and "Don't start again!") I became worried that not all 4AoSers were as engaged in the debate as I’d have hoped so I thought I’d give up on it. Then I thought, no what they really need is some diagrams to clearly address the key issues; that’ll draw in the crowds, and here’s the result of my Photoshop efforts: the Mind-Body problem with diagrams.
You have a brain and you have a mind. If you haven’t thought much about it before, you probably have a vague sense that your mind - the consciousness part of yourself that you identify as “me” -somehow lives in your head and “drives” your body. You make a decision and your body generally follows the orders you give it.
‘I fancy a cup of tea,’ you think, so you get up and make a cup of tea. You know that you are made of meat, so to speak, but you feel the ‘real’ you is something more than the meat of your brain and body, and that the actions you take are in large part due to the decisions you (your mind) makes.
This is basically the position of Descartes (he of “ I think, therefore I am” fame) and it's the common sense view of the Mind Body Problem.
This common sense idea that we are made of two different kinds of stuff - the physical body and brain stuff, and the non-physical, spiritual mind stuff - is called Cartesian dualism, and it has set the debate for centuries.
Diagram 1. Dualism
(When I talk about Mind here, I'm talking about phenomenological consciousness, the subjective sense of awareness and your experience of sensory data such as colours, sounds and bodily sensations, hence the green rectangle.)
The problem with Cartesian Dualism is that – as (almost) all philosophers and scientists agree - it is completely wrong! If your non-material mind does the ‘work’ and the material body does what the mind tells it to, how can they interact? How can the ‘ghost’ of mind interact with the ‘machine’ of the body?
And how can there be two different ‘substances’; one physical substance obeying strict ‘clockwork’ laws, and the other non-material substance telling the machine what to do? The simple answer seems to be that it can’t, and as such Cartesian dualism is not a coherent description of mind and body.
As a side note, I’ve suggested previously that unlike many philosophical issues, the Mind-Body Problem really matters.
This from Wikipedia: “[Descartes] believed that only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and [his] practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals) became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment.”
The 20th Century model for how the Brain and the Mind work was informed by Functionalism. Very simply put; what was considered important was the scientific study of the brain and body, as realised through behaviour. The mind was an unimportant ‘add-on’ or in extreme form of behaviourism, did not exist at all. This led to the idea that the study of consciousness was ‘unscientific’ and until very recently (arguably the 80s) any mention of consciousness was unacceptable in respectable scientific circles, and a desire to study it could seriously limit your career opportunities. The ultimate expression of the behaviourist model is Eliminative Materialism; Mind is an illusion.
Diagram 2 Eliminative Materialism
Hard to believe (ok, hard for me to believe) but this model, or versions of it, is still very popular, and is either expressed explicitly by the likes of Dennett or implicitly by many others. You can imagine how annoyed I was to get to the end of Dennett’s seminal work on the subject “Consciousness Explained” to discover that the solution to the Mind Body Problem is that there is no mind at all!
Despite this model being the dominant paradigm it left many people feeling deeply unsatisfied and it hopefully leaves you feeling unsatisfied too, not least because if you are anything like me, you have a subjective experience of phenomenological consciousness every moment of your waking day, including qualia, the sensations of colour and sound etc. and you are not prepared to see consciousness simply explained away.
The dominant paradigm now is that Mind DOES exist (you don’t say!) but that it exists as something arising from the Brain. For every Brain state there is an associated Mind state. Or to put it another way, every Mind state correlates with a Brain state.
Diagram 3. Mind arises from Brain
This is basically a Materialist model. Materialism is the theory that the only thing that exists in the universe is matter (and energy) and all phenomena, including Mind, are the result of material interactions. The power of this model is that it includes Mind and Brain, and it fits very well with experimental evidence: when we take scans of brains, we can see activity associated with thoughts and feelings.
This seems to me to be the best model of the relationship between Mind and Body that we have, however notice that although Mind is incorporated into the model, Mind remains a complete mystery. We have not explained Mind at all, we have only found its correlates (for many, this is enough; see below) but why does something like a Mind arise at all? Why does a subjective experience of Green arise from a pulsing pattern of neurons? And why does our subjective experience have this particular character?
There is an even bigger problem with Diagram 3. Notice the arrow goes upwards. Mind arises from Brain. Brain does all the work and mind somehow arises as something “extra.” The problem with Descartes' model was to understand how something non-material could influence something material. Now we have got rid of this problem because we now say that the material brain creates the mind. There is no non-material “spirit” that needs to interact with the physical body and brain, because we can explain everything (in principle at least) by reference to the flashing neurons.
Nothing happens in the brain that does not have a physical correlate. The brain is made of physical stuff, and that stuff obey strict laws (“strict” here covers both deterministic and probabilistic laws) so we have a causal chain which explains everything. In principle at least, we can observe the chain of events leading from, say, a finger’s exposure to heat, the warning signal passing up the arm to the brain, the firing of the appropriate C-fibres and the electrochemical signal instructing the hand to move. All explanations can be reduced to physical explanations because we live in a physical Universe. In fact it’s not just that we don’t need non-physical explanations, there is no room for non-physical explanations. The account given here not only does not include your subjective experience of pain in the equation, pain can play no part in the explanation because we have explained everything already. Our account is causally closed. We haven't Wexplained away" consciousness but we have ended up with an explanation which included consciousness but one which leaves no room for consciousness to do any work.
What the Materialism argument cannot allow is any downward causation; if the mind arises from the brain, the mind cannot dictate anything to the brain. The mind is as epiphenomenon. The cine projector causes the image to appear on the screen, the image is an epiphenomenon, a secondary effect which does no "work" and does not control the projector in any way. In the same way, Mind cannot dictate anything to brain. There can be no downward arrow because there can be no downward causation.
Diagram 4. Downward Causation
If we allow a non-physical thing to have an effect on a physical thing, we are back to Dualism so we cannot give any efficacy to Mind as this would contradict our materialist model. By definition, no part of Mind can play any part in the causal chain of how brain does its job. You subjective experience of a colour or a pain can play no part in what causes me to act, because the scientific materialist account leaves no room for downward causation; all explanation can be reduced to an explanation on a lower level.
I don’t personally believe this, by the way, but this seems to me to be a fair outline of the situation. The materialist can’t have it both ways; either the arrow always goes upwards or it doesn’t; either all high level explanations can be reduced to explanations based on their physical realisers or they can’t. And even if it turns out that the mind is some kind of illusion, it falls to the Materialist to explain where this thing we label as Mind comes from and why it exists at all, especially if it can play no play in the causal chain.
There are many ways for the materialist to deal with the problem of Mind. One way is to say that Mind and Brain are two different words for the same thing. There is no Mind Body Problem because Mind and Brain are the same. It is so clear to me that Green is not the same thing as a particular pulsing pattern of neurons that I find it difficult to argue why they are not the same because well they are clearly not….
Diagram 5. Brain and Mind are 2 words for the same thing
However, a large number of philosophers do argue for this model and it’s something I’m doing a lot of study on at the moment. In fact I’ve just ploughed through about 100 pages of the text book Mind and Cognition, which has a number of top thinkers trying to prove that very thing. Some of the arguments are very clever, but so far I’ve been totally unconvinced that the apparent difference between Mind and Brian can be dissolved away as a linguistic error.
Try this for size:
His table is a large packing case.
There is something odd about this sentence because a table is not a packing case and they are clearly different things but in this sentence they are the same thing. The confusion lies with the word ‘is.’ Many philosophers feel that the same confusion lies at the heart of the Mind-Body debate. While I agree discussions like this may help us to define exactly what we are talking about, I believe the problem is not to be dissolved so easily.
Notice that even if we accept the model in Diagram 5, we haven’t addressed the issue of efficacy. Even if Mind is another word for Brain, our descriptions of cause and effect must ultimately be reducible to their physical realisers; even if mind is ‘really’ another word for brain, it is the brain which does all the work because the brain is physical and in our modern scientific understanding of the world there is no room for non-physical causes. There are no demons, no ghosts and spirits, and no devils at work, it’s all about atoms and energy, which ultimately means it’s all about physics.
To end where we started; you think you got up to make a cup of tea because you wanted one. You think you are your own cause, whereas, according to the prevailing scientific model, your getting up to make the tea is simply the effect of preceding causes, and your feeling of conscious efficacy in the process is an illusion. There is no freewill and even if consciousness exists it is mere epiphenomena; something which arises from its lower level substrate but which has no effect on anything.
This, I think, is the only conclusion available to the materialist. I don't accept this conclusion of course and I'll be discussing alternatives in future posts.
I took 2 books to Venezuela, both almost 1000 pages long and both weighing in at nearly 2 kilos each. The second one was the standard textbook on hte Philosophy of Mind so for those who thought I'd given up posting about philosophical issues; FEAR NOT!
I started these posts under the Freewill & Determinism Category so I'll carry on, but as I read more widely I'm realising that I have a lot of work to do on the philosophy of mind first so the posts will probably wander off in other directions. Also, I'll be exploring different ideas rather than putting forward a well-thought out argument.
Ok, excuses over. In the previous post (Part 15c) we looked at the idea of Supervenience. This is a key concept in the philosophy of mind. Something Logically Supervenes if it follows as a matter of necessity from a lower level, eg. rainbows MUST follow from rain and sun and an observer in the right place, therefore rainbows logically supervene on rain and sun.
What about consciousness? Is is something "special" which cannot be explained by reference to the material it appears to spring from, namely the brain?
I asked in the previous post:
Does consciousness logically supervene on the physical facts of the world?
To test if something logically supervenes on given facts, you simply imagine a world where all the other relevant facts are in place. Then you imagine if such a world must contain that thing. The philosopher D.J Chalmers says consciousness does not logically supervene, in other words it is something requiring an explanation above and beyond the physical facts, and I was very persuaded by his argument when I first read about it, now I'm not so sure.
Let's talk Zombies. Can we imagine a world where everything else is the same as this world but in one world people have consciousness whereas is the other world they do not? Can you, in other words, imagine having a Zombie Twin. Your Zombie Twin would act and react like you but would not have any phenomenological consciousness; he or she would live "in the dark" so to speak, without any qualia (subjective sensations of colour, sound, emotions, pain etc) If you can imagine such a thing, you believe that consciousness is something "extra" beyond the physical facts of the world. If you believe that a Zombie Twin is a logical impossibility, even as a concept, then you believe that consciousness follows naturally from the physical facts, like rainbows do.
This Zombie Twin talk sounds like exactly the sort of annoying nonsense that gives philosophy a bad name, but think about it for a moment. You know that you have subjective experience of things but how do you know other people do? How do you know other people are conscious at all? This is the problem of other minds, and it's a BIG problem. Scientists can now probe a person's brain and can measure firing neurons but how could they ever prove whether that person experienced phenomenological consciousness too? How would we ever be able to know if someone is truly aware?
This is not a problem that concerns us in everyday life; we just assume that others have the same, or at least a similar, subjective sense of self as we do. This seems completely reasonable; I may not understand how consciousness arises from the brain, but I have direct knowledge that it arises from my brain and I have no reason to suspect it does not arise from yours too. But it has a lot of relevance for the Supervenience argument. Is Mind the same as Rainbows or not? If it naturally and logically follows from Brain then it supervenes, if not, then it cannot be explained by reference to lower levels. D.J Chalmers' argument (it seems to me) is that because we can imagine zombies, consciousness is something above and beyond the physical facts, and requires a different kind of explanation. In other words, explanations of phenomenological consciousness cannot be reduced to lower level explanations.
He gives another example of non-supervienence: the laws of physics. They cannot, he says, be explained by reference to lower level phenomena, they simply ARE. In the same way, he argues for non-reductive laws of consciousness.
I'm now having serious doubts about this argument. What if our ability to imagine our zombie twin is based on our ignorance of what consciousness is? Primitive man CAN imagine a world without rainbows because he doesn't understand the mechanism of rainbows (hence the biblical reference to God placing them in the sky following the flood) ditto the laws of the universe. Perhaps string theory will show why the laws must be as they are. So Chalmers position rests on a fallacy I think. He seems to be saying "if we can't see how something could come about, we'll call it a fundamental property and say it doesn't logically supervene."
Unless I've misunderstood him, which is entirely possible, I don't see that his argument stands. This does not mean that consciousness CAN be explained reductively, in fact I believe it cannot, (future posts) but I don't think the Chalmers' argument for non-reducibility holds. Since we don't why there is phenomenological consciousness at all, we cannot say whether it logically supervenes or not. Or in plain language: since we have no idea why Mind exists at all, we cannot say if its existence is something "special" requiring "special" laws and explanations, or whether it is just another feature of the world, explicable by reference to lower levels, ie, the firing of neurons.
Why does all this matter? As we can all probably agree, it's obvious that other people have minds ("mind" in these posts will generally be shorthand for "phenomenological consciousness") and even if it's not obvious, we act and react towards people as if they do have a mind anyway. It matters to me because I believe the debate has great relevance for the Freewill and Determinism debate, but it matters to you too, even if you have no interest in the philosophical debate. And it matters to you because you care about suffering, and you care about animal suffering.
Do animals have minds? Monkeys? cows? dogs? frogs? Do insects have minds? How about bacteria?
Do they suffer?
As I write this, a large bluebottle has just fallen into the glass of wine I left out last night. It is struggling to get out and now I notice that its struggling is getting less frantic as it slowly drowns in wine. It's a Costieres De Nimes, and £11 a bottle before discount in Asda, so not a bad way to go, you might think. But does it FEEL anything. Is there anything like "being" a fly? Does it have phenomenological consciousness or is it just a complex biological machine which just LOOKS like it's suffering.
You probably have an answer to this question. Most people do. But that answer, you must admit, is based on a gut-feeling rather than any evidence. If a neuroscientist can't prove that YOU have a mind, how can we hope to know whether a fly has a mind?
I just set the fly free, by the way, which I suppose means I suspect it has some kind of mind. I suspect, in other words, that it is not a zombie.
This brings me to Zombie Protozoa.
In the 19th century, Mind was generally considered by most philosphers to be the most important aspect of the universe; matter was thought of as secondary, or even non-existent. In the early 20th Century, Functionalism came to the fore. That which could be objectively measured was the only thing worth studying, and this vague, ghostly, unquantifiable thing called consciousness was either an illusion or at the very least, unimportant to understanding the world. For many philosophers and scientists (and many to this day) mind does not exist at all.
But consciousness wouldn't go away, it could not be dismissed as some unimportant "add on" and eventually a new paradigm emerged: We have Brains and we have Minds. Neural activity is the correlate to Mind. In some way not understood, Minds emerge from Brains, and every mental event has a physical event attached to it. In a sense, a pattern of neural activity IS a pain state or a colour.
This is the new Materialism, designed to solve the old problems, but it brings with it many problems of its own, many of which we've looked at in previous posts, in particular how and why does Mind emerge from Brain? How can we make sense of the fact that a particular firing pattern of neurons gives rise to this particular experience of the colour green? And why is there ANY associated subjective feeling anyway? If all the "work" is done by the brain, explanations are "causally closed" in other words there is no work left for the subjective experience to do.
If pain can be "explained away" as a response to a stimulus leading to a firing of C fibres leading to an electrochemical output leading to a removal of the body part from the source of the pain, what part does the feeling of pain play in the chain of events? None at all, it would seem. So why is the qualia of pain there? And how can something which clearly is there, have absolutely no effect on anything at all?
And there are other problems: if we are going to define pain AS a particular firing of C-fibres, what about an alien life-form that doesn't have C-fibres? Do we say he/she/it has no pain or not? Because we don't understand what pain is (phenomenologically speaking) how do we know when to attribute pain to other beings? This is the issue of Liberalism and Chauvinism. Liberalism, in its extreme from, means attributing pain to everything, extreme Chauvinism on the other hand, would mean only attributing it to creatures exactly like us, in other words only human beings.
Your opinion as to who is Liberal or Chauvinistic will depend of course on where you yourself stand on the issue.
"Of course dogs are conscious!" some will say, "But not flies. Don't be ridiculous!"
"Everything living thing is conscious!" another will say, "but not computers. A computer could never feel anything. Don't be ridiculous!"
"When a computer reaches a certain level of complexity it will be conscious of course!"
And on and on. The point is that whatever your position on this is, it is not based on any objective knowledge, since nobody knows the answer to the problem of minds. The best that science can do is say "we will understand it, and one day soon." But again, this optimism is not based on any facts, since as yet nobody has come up with the slightest suggestion as to how and why Minds arise from Brains. (I'm ignoring the Eliminativist position of Dennett et al who simply say there IS no such thing as mind and therefore there is nothing to explain: `We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious' (Dennett 1991, p. 406))
So where do Zombie Protozoa fit into all this? When I first started watching protozoa through the microscope I was stuck by how much they seemed to have (in philosopher-speak) intentions. They zip about looking for food, avoiding predators etc. Here's one from a previous post:
To view these single-celled organisms you put a drop of water on a slide then add a thin cover which presses down on the drop of water. The microscope light heats the water and very soon the protozoa shows signs of distress. If you are not careful you end up boiling the little beasts alive so after a short time I would have to change the water. I also felt quite sick knowing I was basically torturing living things.
But wait. A protozoa has no nervous system and no brain. How could it feel ANYthing? It's "just" a bag of chemicals so what was I worrying about? And hold on, if it's just a bag of chemicals, why does it appear to have intentions?
Nick pointed me in the direction of the fantastic book Wetware, which attempts to answer this question
"How does a single-cell creature, such as an amoeba, lead such a sophisticated life? How does it hunt living prey, respond to lights, sounds, and smells, and display complex sequences of movements without the benefit of a nervous system? This book offers a startling and original answer."
The simple answer is that a protozoan acts like a computer. The complex proteins work like biological transistors.
So, we have an explanation as to how a single-celled creature can have the equivalent feature of a brain, without having a brain or a nervous system. Does it also have the equivalent of a mind? Do protozoa suffer or are they zombies?
It seems to me that we could never know the answer to this question, since we could never know another form of life's subjective experience. My own answer to the problem of protozoa minds, is that I avoid boiling the little critters just to be on the safe side, which means I must believe that on some level they are capable of suffering and have some kind of "mind." I am guilty of Liberalism or Chauvinism? Who can say?
(For Part 15b, see here. and for previous posts see Freewill vrs Determinism Catergory in Left hand sidebar)
Why is it that so much nonsense is written on the subject of consciousness?
(Not here of course, you only get the good stuff here ;-)
How is it for example that one of the top thinkers in the field, Daniel Dennett, can say:
`We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious' (Dennett 1991, p. 406)
And how is it that Christof Koch, a very clever man, and a leading researcher into the neuroscience of consciousness, can make such a fundamental error as to suggest that the proof of consciousness is to be able to identify something odd about a photograph? (previous post)
Here's my answer in a nutshell:
1) From a reductive point of view (see below) there is simply no room for consciousness in the world, therefore
2)it shouldn't exist, but
3)I know it exists because I'm experiencing it now, therefore
4) there is something very odd going on.
5) Most scientists and philosophers can't handle the idea that there's something odd about the world
6) therefore they work very hard to fit consciousness into whatever their world view is, but because it won't fit in...
7) ...they end up defending bizarre statements such as Dennett's "nobody is conscious."
I counted over 200 distinct positions on the subject of consciousness, ranging from Eliminativism (nothing is conscious) to Panpsychism (everything is conscious) then I gave up because there are lots more.
None of these positions can be proved wrong and yet all of them are mutually exclusive. How can this be?
Answering this question takes us to the heart of the issue.
When I was in church at the age of 11 the vicar told us that God invented rainbows as a sign to remind Noah that he would never again destroy the world with a flood. (Actually, in Genesis, God says he invents the rainbow not so that Noah would remember God's promise, but to remind himself, God, of what he has promised: "When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." Gen 9:16. When I see this being seriously discussed on websites such as this one here I find myself fighting the urge to self-mutilate...)
Now, even as an 11 year old I knew there was something very wrong with this. I knew, as every schoolchild does, that rainbows are caused by sunlight reflecting off raindrops. If you have sunlight and rain and the existing laws of nature and observers in the right place you will have rainbows. There is no imaginable world which has sun, rain and observers in which rainbows don't exist. In the language of philosophy, rainbows logically supervene. Not only does God not have to do any extra work to create rainbows, even he can't imagine a world where the prerequisites for rainbows exist but where rainbows don't actually exist. The best he could do, I suppose, is to put in place some kind of illusion so that people don't notice them.
Ah how I wish I'd had the knowledge and confidence to tell the vicar "Given the logical supervience of rainbows I am reluctantly forced to conclude that either God is very easily confused on the matter or that Genesis is not a true and accurate representation of God's opinion on rainbows."
Anyway, back to consciousness. Here's the big question:
Does consciousness logically supervene on the physical facts of the world?
I say no.
How do I justify this?
Well, to test if something logically supervenes on given facts, you simply imagine a world where all the other relevant facts are in place. Then you imagine if such a world must contain that thing.
As we've seen, all alternative worlds with the same physical facts as this rainbow world must contain rainbows, therefore rainbows are an example of supervenience. We can't even imagine a world where this would not be so.
What else in our world does not logically supervene on the facts?
Not much. One thing that doesn't logically supervene on the facts is the laws of the universe. We can imagine a world or alternative universe where the laws of physics are complelely different. It does not mean that such a world or universe exists of course, but we can imagine it, and God could easily make it. Actually, thinking about it, the currently popular theory of the Multiverse does encompass this idea already, so maybe it's not so "out there" after all. I think M-theory also allows for this. Anyway, the important thing to establish logical supervenience is not whether such a thing exists or not but whether or not it must always exist in every case.
Can we imagine a world where everything looks the same as it does now but there is no consciousness apart from our own? Yes we can. In fact, how do you know you are not living in that world already? And if this is the case, consciousness and rainbows belong to fundamentally different categories. Rainbows supervene on the facts, consciousness does not. We'll be exploring this idea in Part d, but just to be clear; I won't be suggesting that you do actually live in a world of unconscious beings, just that the fact you don't know whether you do or not has serious implications for the concept of consciousness.
Before we tackle this idea in more detail, let's look at the idea of Levels of Explanation. Ironically, it was David who first introduced me to the concept when we were at school er 33 years ago.
Take my car. You can describe it in high level terms as a Ford Fiesta FX, or a mode of transport, or a nice little run-around that my parents kindly gave me 4 years ago.
You could also descibe it on a lower level of meaning, for example you could describe it mechanically; prop shafts and spark plugs and wing nuts etc.
You could go lower and describe it through its material construction; metal, plastic rubber etc.
Or you could reduce your explanation of my car to a molecular level; my car is "10 to the whatever" atomic particles.
All these descriptions would be true and each level logically supervenes on higher levels. My car IS both a piece of metal and plastic AND a mode of transport. If you arrange "10 to the whatever" molecules in exactly the same position as my car, you will have a Ford Fiesta LX.
We can choose whichever level of explanation is useful to us at the time. A mechanic will talk in mechanical terms and a chemist will talk in terms of chemistry etc. And neither of them will have any problem with the other.
Now have a go with this sentence: "My love for you is a neural patten firing at 40hz."
If you are very uneasy about this sentence, welcome to the club. You are uneasy because you feel that subjective experience is not merely a higher level explanation of brain activity but is something distinct from it. The objective description does not encompass the subjective experience. They are not higher and lower levels of description of the same thing, they are different things.
The experience of green comes from neurons but is NOT neurons. It is an extra phenomena requiring explanation. The problem is that a physical explanation is causally closed. We can describe everything without the need to bring consciousness into it at all. This is what I mean when I say there is no room for consciousness in the world and this is why we can explain everything about neurons but stil leave the phenomenological experience of green untouched. "My car is molecules" is a different kind of statement to "my sadness is molecules."
Which brings us back to Francis Crick:
"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."
(1994)
This is the reductive materialist argument, the idea that all all processes and realities observed in the universe can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components. Crick is saying that because explanations of joy and sorrow can be reduced to the level of neurons there is nothing MORE to be said about joy and sorrow.
His error surely is in the phrase "nothing but" neurons. Why not reduce it even further and say a person is nothing but a pack of molecules? A person is made of molecules but to say that a person is nothing but a pack of molecules is the kind of thing only a clever philosopher would be stupid enough to say.
The Battle of Waterloo involved a lot of molecules moving about but to say the Battle of Waterloo was nothing but a pack of molecules moving about, is clearly nonsensical.
What can the materialist do about consciousness? They can say it doesn't exist at all, or they can say it is just some epiphenomenon, an ugly "bolted on" thing which has no effect on the world itself but just arises for no apparent reason and is irrelevant to the workings of the world.
And why does it feel something like this to be me? And why does it feel this way and not that way? And why does a neural pattern create this experience of green and not that? And - most importantly - why does it feel like anything to be me rather than nothing at all?
These are things the materialist must remain silent on, or they must take up the position which D J Chalmers calls Don't-have-a-clue materialism:
"I don't have a clue about consciousness...but it must be physical, as materialism must be true."
David suggested recently that we only need philosophy until science comes along to tell us the answers
( "philosophy is what you do until science comes along. Good news: science is here, you can stop philosophizing now.;-)
I suggest that science is just as rooted in philosophy as in any other area of life, and that the conviction that materialism will provide all the answers at some unspecified time in the future is an unjustifiable claim, and that in any case, the claim is a philosophical one rather than a scientific one.
Where does all this take us? It takes us to Zombie Protozoa, coming soon!
I've just read the most annoying article I've seen in quite some time. It's in the June issue of Scientific America, and it's entitled "A Test for Consciousness - How will we know when we've built a sentient computer? By making it solve a simple puzzle"
Leaving aside the question of conscious computers - something I'll be returning to it the eagerly awaited Freewill and Determinism debate , Part 15c - what is so annoying is the casual way in which the term Consciousness is banded about. In this article, the writers state that if a computer can identify that there is something "weird" about a photograph, such as this one, unless it has been specifically programmed for this particular image, it provided proof that the computer is truly conscious and has internal phenomenological states and is a fully conscious sentient being!
(Image: Scientific American, June 2011)
It's not even possible to prove that the person sitting next to you on the bus is conscious (see the Zombie Twin argument, also coming soon) so how can they make such claims??
I've written the following letter to the journal and it is certain to be published, but I thought I'd give 4AoSers an advance peek at it:
In ‘A Test for Consciousness,’ Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi suggest that “…only a conscious machine can demonstrate a subjective understanding of whether a scene depicted in some ordinary photograph is “right” or “wrong.”
I agree that if a computer could perform such a task it would indeed represent a huge leap forward in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I would also agree that to be conscious “…you need to be a single integrated entity with a large repertoire of distinguishable states.”
What I cannot follow, however, is their further argument that a machine capable of passing the tests they describe in the article would allow us to make the claim that these machines “…share with us the gift of consciousness.”
The Mind-Body problem is not to be solved by the setting of a simple puzzle. If I met Messers Koch and Tononi I would extend to them the courtesy of treating them as sentient beings, and I hope they would do the same to me, but I would do so on the basis of the unfounded supposition that their subjective experience of the world is something like mine. There is no test I could set them which could give me any knowledge of their subjective phenomenal experiential states, and there is no objective test they could set which would give them knowledge of my subjective states either.
I suspect the time when we start treating machines as truly conscious will come when a computer first begs not to be turned off at the end of the day, not when it can identify that there is something “wrong” with an elephant on top of the Eiffel Tower.
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