Can we in principle ever deduce the mental from the physical?
Christopher Devlin Brown and David Papineau have a new paper out in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled: Illusionism and A Posteriori Physicalism; No Fact of the Matter. (Note: the link is to a free version.) As the title makes clear, the overall gist is that the difference between illusionism and a posteriori physicalism amounts to a definitional dispute.
A quick primer. Illusionism is the stance that consciousness exists, but only in the sense of functional capabilities such as modeling the self in its environment, attention, learning, episodic memory, self monitoring, etc. What’s thought to be illusory is phenomenal consciousness, the “what it’s like” nature of subjective experience, but particularly in the strong sense as something distinct from functional capabilities, and with properties, such as fundamental subjectivity, that imply it’s non-physical.
Reductive physicalism is the stance that the mental can be reduced to physics. However, there are different views on exactly what can be understood in that reduction. In one, we can find correlations between conscious states and physical ones that imply an identity relationship, but one that can only be discovered and understood empirically, not justified in a logical sense. This is the a posteriori physicalism of the type the authors discuss in their paper.
The other view is a priori physicalism. It argues that we can go further than just brute identities, and understand the logical relationships, in a way where, in principle, we could deduce the mental from the physical. A common example of this view is analytic functionalism, which describes mental states in functional terms, such as the experience of pain being a negative reaction to a perceived state that motivates a system to try to avoid or ameliorate it.
It’s long been acknowledged among illusionists that the distinction between illusionism and functionalism is definitional. Functionalists generally target functional capabilities for their explanation. If they speak about phenomenal consciousness, it’s usually in a weaker sense of being the inner perspective of a functional system without the non-physical attributes. (As a functionalist myself, this is certainly the sense I use it in older posts on this blog.)
This weaker sense is one that the authors seem to call for in their paper. They point out that it’s always a judgment call whether to eliminate or reconstruct the concept when it turns out not to have all the attributes we assumed in our pre-scientific understanding. (David Chalmers has a similar discussion in his book, Reality+, which I discussed a while back.) For example, we eliminated the concepts of ghosts and witches from our ontology after scientific investigation revealed too many of their properties didn’t exist. However, we retained planets and stars, holding reconstructed understandings very different from the medieval ones.
But I think this is the first time I’ve seen an argument that the differences between illusionism and a posteriori physicalism are definitional.
There is some resonance between illusionism and the phenomenal concept strategy, an argument often made by a posteriori identity theorists about why we tend to think phenomenal properties are distinct from physical ones. In short, our phenomenal concepts are thought to be isolated from our physical ones, making the relationship one we can’t bridge, leading to an epistemic gap, the notorious “hard problem”. This is similar to possibilities explored by some illusionists, such as François Kammerer, who see the illusion as deeply enmeshed in our cognition, something we can’t avoid, and so no explanation of consciousness, including of the illusion itself, will ever feel right.
But it seems like there are differences. For one, the phenomenal concepts strategy is often described as recognizing the conceivability of functional zombies, entities that are behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious being, but aren’t actually conscious. Most illusionists I’ve read see zombies as an unproductive concept.
And many illusionists take the illusion to be more of a theory error, a failure in philosophical reasoning more than something universally embedded. That’s the feel I get from Daniel Dennett’s writing, although in reality I suspect he would have rejected the distinction.
Still, most illusionists seem in the a priori camp, rejecting any notion of an unbridgeable divide. The phenomenal concept strategy, and a posteriori physicalism overall, seem to skirt mysterianism, a view generally rejected by the a priori camp. To be sure, most of this camp see empirical investigation necessary for progress in any practical sense, but the idea that we can’t have a theory explaining the identity relations is rejected.
Of course, a lot depends on just how much work we’re asking these identities to do. Often the identity relationship between H2O and water, genes and DNA sequences, or heat and molecular motion are given as examples of identities that, once established, we don’t need to explain any further. But these identities have 1:1 relationships, and the reduced concept can in principle be used anywhere the higher level version can in descriptions, making the concepts causally equivalent.
Much depends on what we mean by a conscious concept like “pain”. Is pain a relatively simple primitive like water above? As a phenomenal property, the painfulness of pain is often assumed to be that kind of primitive, which is how many end up thinking of it as something separate from the functionality.
Or is pain more a complex collection of processes, in a way similar to the concept of “democracy”? In principle we could find the physical identity relationship between the concept and a physical occurrence of democracy, although it would be extremely complex. But more broadly, democracy as a type encompasses too many physical instantiations with too many variations for this kind of identity primitive to be useful. We need intermediate abstraction layers, such the role people play in governance. Such roles are multi-realizable, which puts us in functionalist territory, where I think most illusionists live.
Ultimately the difference between the views seems to remain, although it doesn’t seem vast. I suppose it could come down to what is expected of an explanation. If it doesn’t feel right, does that mean we’ve failed to bridge the gap? Given scientific theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics, it doesn’t seem like we have any right to expect an explanation of mental states to necessarily feel right, but that’s a view from someone firmly in the functionalist camp.
I do think the authors are right that “consciousness” is a semantically indeterminate concept. Its meaning has varied too much over the centuries for anyone to claim a particular version is the one true definition. It can mean introspection, perception of the outside world, attention, sentience, imagination, a non-physical ineffable essence, and a host of other notions. Which means these definitional disputes are probably unavoidable.
What do you think? Are these views more similar than I’m seeing? Are all physicalists basically illusionists, even if only implicitly? Or does the ambiguity of the word “consciousness” render these kinds of distinction a hopeless muddle?
SelfAwarePatterns 
I’m an Idealist, so my views on both Physicalism and Illusionism should be obvious, but I do agree that the term ‘consciousness’ is a catch-all word that can mean anything depending on context. Do we encounter the same problems if we substitute the word ‘experience’, and does it do the same, or perhaps a better job, in different contexts?
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Good question. “Experience” seems like it can mean conscious events, or practical knowledge obtained while doing things. But as a synonym for conscious events, it seems to inherit its semantic indeterminancy.
Interestingly, Pete Mandik recently asked on X what “subjective” adds to the phrase “subjective experience”. The responses were interesting. I have no idea if X links work anymore, but just in case: https://x.com/petemandik/status/1825951573891260457
But maybe I should ask, what does “experience” mean for you, particularly as an idealist?
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Good questions. I’ve just recently left commercial social media and try to avoid it but happy to infiltrate for that X question. It could be argued that all experience is subjective. I’m not sure what would constitute an objective experience. Everyone sees the same world but with different ‘flavours.’ We highlight certain things and dismiss or ignore others. It’s debatable whether you could use ‘same’ in this context. Much easier to say all experience is subjective, perhaps. Experience, for me, means anything that I’m aware of occurring. I’m sure there would be gradations of experience, such as memories or emotional vividness, but anything occurring within my sphere of attention is ‘experience.’
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Thanks. Your point about it occurring within the sphere of attention is one I think resonates with my own understanding. Of course, the next question (which feel free to ignore unless you’re interested), is what does “subjective” mean?
My answer as a physicalist is a system taking in information from its perspective and in the manner allowed by its capabilities and evolutionary affordances, which maybe resonates with your different ‘flavours’ point.
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Almost impossible to ignore that question. 😀 I’d agree with your definition that it is digesting an environment according to one’s own conditioning, genetics and culture. But it did make me think that in the case of meta-consciousness, of being aware of experiencing, (could it also be meta-experience?) that it is objective for everyone, even though the contents of the meta-ing is a subjective experiencing.
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Ha! irresistible questions are what we’re all about here.
I’m wondering what you think would make meta-experiencing objective? Or do you mean once it’s been communicated to others?
The flip side of subjective is what we mean by “objective”. Usually mind independence is cited, but that implies the view from nowhere. My take is it’s a model developed in collaboration from many subjective takes, more a composite view from as many sources as possible.
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I’m not really sure how to ‘objectively’ distinguish meta- from phenomenal experiencing. You might be right that the distinction is kind of artificial, or another model, only that the meta-experience is qualitatively different from simply coasting through mundane experience. When I see it explained by people like Bernado Kastrup, it does seem to be ‘objective’, in that it is not personal, but para-personal. Transpersonal, perhaps. It has a clarity and distance that transcends the subjective.
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“Are all physicalists basically illusionists, even if only implicitly?”
I think so, though I like to think that, deep down, they really believe in dualism of some sort. Hell, deep down, I really believe in dualism of some sort. It’s perfectly compatible with getting on in day to day life. It takes a lot of chutzpah to fully own illusionism.
“Or does the ambiguity of the word “consciousness” render these kinds of distinction a hopeless muddle?”
I’m not so sure it’s the ambiguity of the word that makes for a hopeless muddle—the word is ambiguous (consider: he was knocked unconscious vs. he thinks all things are conscious), but that alone shouldn’t create insurmountable problems. It’s that different theories of mind define the word as they see fit to support their views. If I’m a certain kind of physicalist I might want to define consciousness as being what the brain does. If I’m an idealist—which is my preferred theory (and I see there’s another one here, which is amazing)—then I won’t be satisfied with the physicalist’s definition because it doesn’t even attempt to capture phenomenal experience as such; I can’t help but suspect they re-defined consciousness to fit their view. So we go ’round and ’round.
They think I’m some weird solipsist; I think they’re taking the philosophical position that science is the end-all of knowledge, and their attempts to extend science’s reach beyond its proper domain are misguided (though I have no problem with the reductionism that occurs within the sciences as a matter of doing science).
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It seems like we’re all intuitive dualists. I remember reading about experiments done with young children, demonstrating that even very young (3-4 IIRC), they had dualist intuitions. Even in science fiction, there’s often an implicit dualist assumption for stories where characters exchange bodies with each other (as happened on Star Trek:SNW last season). Of course, we also all start out as intuitive flat earthers, geocentrists, etc. It’s not our starting intuitions, but where we reason ourselves to, I think.
You’re probably right that everyone chooses a conception of consciousness that fits their world view. I sometimes wonder what theory would have seemed more plausible to me if I’d read philosophy of mind when I was younger and still had religious beliefs, or at various stages as I grew away from it.
I thought about you when I read Tony’s comment. Glad you happened by and saw it!
My take on the boundaries of science is I always want science to try. Maybe, like in ethics, it’s doomed to failure, but we never know for sure until the attempt.
I do think the semantic issues in consciousness make it more of a philosophical issue than most people realize. Science can study structure and relations, but it’s largely a philosophical issue how that relates to consciousness. It’s one of the reasons I find the IIT vs GWT adversarial thing interesting but problematic; their philosophies about consciousness are too different.
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Hear hear! Except I’m probably reading as you saying something you didn’t mean – namely, that we reason ourselves into flat-earthism at a young age. I think we do.
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Honestly I have no memory of my flat-earth stage. I got interested in sci-fi and space very early, and Apollo was going on in my early years, so I might have been past it by kindergarten. But all of the ancient pre-Greek cosmologies I’ve seen were flat, often with an underworld literally below and a heaven literally above.
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The flat-earth hypothesis is the simplest explanation of the evidence immediately available to the typical ancient civilization member. At least until you, say, see a ship’s sail arriving over the horizon, and think really hard about it. Just like, to anyone today who hasn’t studied physics deeply, the idea that time itself is inherently directional is the simplest explanation of the arrow of time.
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Wow. This is a really useful post. I’ve been trying to get my head around exactly what I am and why, and now I think I know. (Wait for it …)
Papineau’s paper is, I think, extremely useful and well written. I find a lot of his stuff difficult because he tends speak to the academic philosopher audience, but this essentially lays out one proposition: that certain terms, scientific and/or philosophical,(or maybe conceptual terms in general), can be indeterminate as to a particular property, such as physicality, and that’s ok. When new information is gained (such as the property isn’t there when we thought it would be), we can eliminate the property and keep the term (keep “star” and eliminate “celestial sphere” property), or we can just eliminate the term , like “caloric”.
[The following is my restatement of the pertinent ideas in my terminology.]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems we can put all physicalists into one of 3 categories: 1. Illusionist/functionalist (who say eliminate “phenomenal consciousness”/qualia, and explain how the functions observed would lead you to posit “qualia”), 2. A posterior physicalist (like Papineau, who says, if I understand correctly, you can reduce qualia to a physical state, but you can’t determine what the qualia is before the fact), and 3. A priori physicalist, who says you can explain the qualia from the physics before the fact.
I now think I’m in group 3. And I think the problem that both groups 1 and 2 have is that they don’t use a complete understanding of the “physics”, because they leave out the role of information, specifically, mutual information. I see this especially when anyone, like Papineau, refers to “conscious states”. Any physical measurement of a physical state will not give you the mutual information associated with that state. Functionalists, on the other hand, tend to see consciousness as a process, but they only look at the output of the process, and they ignore the informational nature of the input to the process.
So have I misjudged functionalists?
*
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Thanks! Glad you found it useful.
I should have clarified in the post that the ontological equivalence between illusionism and functionalism isn’t accepted by most functionalists. (Just did a small edit to make that more clear.) If you look at the philosopher survey, the vast majority of functionalists don’t co-identify as eliminativist. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5010
A lot of this probably stems from most of them not understanding illusionism. But at least some portion of it is that they just disagree with describing things the way illusionists do. I’m sympathetic with that stance. While I don’t resist the illusionist label anymore, my preferred way of talking about it is functionalist, since it’s in terms of what I think mental states are rather than what they aren’t.
So most functionalists would consider themselves to be in your third category. For me, it depends on what you mean by “qualia”. If you mean the details of functional modeling, then I’m onboard. If you mean qualia in some irreducible sense, then I’m more eliminativist toward it.
Be careful not to confuse functionalists with behaviorists. Behaviorists only look at the output, the behavior. Functionalists could be seen as behaviorism that recognizes internal states. So functionalists look at the entire causal chain, input, processing and intermediate states, and output.
And I think they’re generally onboard with intentionality, which for a physicalist will involve mutual information.
Hopefully that clarifies rather than muddies things?
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Thanks for outlining these positions. To me they differ over the ontological status of consciousness, from non-existent except as the physical, to undemonstrably identical with the physical, to demonstrably identical with the physical. In all cases they refer it to the physical; that much they have in common. I see them all as reactionary with respect to Cartesian dualism, and as such, the other side of the coin.
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To my previous comment I’d add that the definition of consciousness then becomes a secondary concern. it can be understood generally as something that remains to be explained as matter. We never see scientists struggling to explain “water” as matter, or to explain “wind” as matter, or to explain “stars” as matter. Yet there are things in the world that we do still need to explain as matter: “sorrow” or “love,” for example. Consciousness represents a general case; exactly how to delimit it is a separate question. Whatever it is, on comparing it with water or stars, we notice that “explaining” certain kinds of things in material terms sounds absurd, because they are natively the same stuff. The important remaining project is to explain what at first appears to be some other kind of stuff. This is where Cartesian dualism lingers.
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That’s a good summary. The question is how much difference there is between “non-existent except for the physical” and “demonstrably identical with the physical”. Seems like a glass half full / half empty type situation.
I think you’re right that much of this is in reaction to Cartesian dualist intuitions. Jonathan Birch characterized most scientific theories of consciousness as explaining away those intuitions. In a way, that’s also what panpsychism and idealism are doing, just from different directions. Consciousness is composed of the physical, it’s identical with the physical, or the physical is composed of consciousness.
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I rather see the alternatives as embracing or accepting these intuitions, rather than attempting to explain them away.
In my second comment above I mentioned water and stars, but I did not mention thunder. Explaining this in material terms is slightly more interesting, because we can avoid an explanation in terms of angry spirits or gods. Cartesian dualism held the promise of extending this approach almost indefinitely. It seemed possible to explain, say, the hiss of an angry cat in purely physical terms. From there it was tempting to explain the howls of an angry child.
But this is where the “almost” in “almost indefinitely” comes into play. No one has been an angry cat, but everyone has been an angry child, and if we are honest with ourselves there is an introspective quality to account for. Descartes recognized it in his cogito, and posited a mental substance. The problem for science then became explaining it in terms of material substance.
Idealism and panpsychism, on the other hand, are not obliged to explain it in those ontological terms. They are in a position to sidestep the Cartesian mental/physical split, and to consider reality from a different aspect, such as an active process of becoming.
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It seems like idealism denies the intuition of an external world independent of thought. And panpsychism denies the intuition that most entities aren’t conscious. Granted, this is more the intuition that formed in the wake of the success of the mechanical philosophy in the early 1600s. The older pre-Christian intuitions were animistic, which panpsychism has more resonance with.
My own thinking here is that Descartes could follow the implications of the mechanical philosophy through the natural world, including other living things. (He infamously thought animals didn’t feel pain, and so was okay with dissecting them alive.) But he blinked when it came to himself and others like him. Hence the dualism he bequeathed to us.
(It’s worth noting that given the social conditions during the counter-reformation, carving out the human mind probably made the mechanical philosophy more acceptable to religious authorities who could have given him trouble. (As they did for others who were less cautious.) But who knows what he really thought. All we can do is respond to his written reasoning.)
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We have intuitions, which vary by time and place, but of our selves, we have more than intuition. We enjoy the immediate experience itself, or rather we are. the experience. Moreover the enjoyment has a permanence about it that an intuition does not.
Descartes’ written reasoning is closely examined in The Flight to Objectivity, a book in my stack. It works with what i’m trying to say here, and I hope to review it some day.
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Looking forward to seeing that review!
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This will sound completely off topic, but bear with me — I think it is actually bang on-topic. Here’s a little poem. It has an interesting feature — see if you can spot it. 🙂
Janet was quite ill one day.Febrile trouble came her way.Martyr-like, she lay in bed;Aproned nurses softly sped.Maybe, said the leech judicialJunket would be beneficial.Juleps, too, though freely tried,Augured ill, for Janet died.Sepulchre was sadly made.Octaves pealed and prayers were said.Novices with ma’y a tearDecorated Janet’s bier.
Now the serious question… Is that feature real? And if so, in what exact sense?
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The pattern definitely seems real. And in this case it seems reasonable to assume it represents the calendar. Of course, if we found it in nature, we’d have to be careful about the assumptions we make from that pattern about what it means.
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But here’s the catch. The pattern is real only in the much wider context of the English language. Suppose (to use a traditional-style philosophical thought experiment) there were another language, not related to English, which (by an astonishing coincidence) allowed lossless translation from and to English. Would that pattern survive the poem being apparently losslessly translated into that other language? That would require another vast coincidence over and above the lossless translatability one.
Conflation between”real” and “relatively real” is what bedevils all of mind/body discussions. A priori physicalism (basically a new name for reductive physicalism) wants mental contents to be “real” patterns, whereas for a posteriori physicalism (which used to be called non-reductive physicalism) “relatively real patterns” would do just as well, without the need to have them manifested in any translation into some neuro-physical description. Relatively real patterns require a context, e.g. for acrostics, a rule for extracting them — hence I prefer to call them “virtual patterns”, which are there only if you know how to look for them.
As somebody working in IT probably understand that there is no necessary connection between the state of a running program and the physical state of the computer. The connection is contingent, depending on what has been going on before. What is more, if the OS is randomised on loading, giving it a logical table of the way it is spread across physical memory, and the loader then deleted (so the entry point is unknown and so is the location of that table), translatability between software and hardware states becomes impossible. One could say that this makes the OS into a self-describing dynamic virtual pattern, the description of which does not exist anywhere else.
So, by analogy, to quote the conclusion of my talk to Oxord Philsoc back in 2014 (https://mipmip.org/polemics/CanComputersThink.html): “Perhaps our difficulties with the mind/body relationship lie in our looking for physical patterning of the mind, rather than allowing for self-describing virtual patterning.”
In short, I enthusiastically support the argument between illusionists and non-reductive physicalists is definitional.
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This is a quibble, but it reminds me of the zombie debate so I think worth making. Can we have a lossless translation of language without the semantic relations of that language? Otherwise what exactly is getting translated? Language doesn’t have an intrinsic meaning shorn of its broader social context, much in the same way that perceptual primitives also don’t.
Of course, we could just posit a random pattern in nature that just so happens to match language that we can interpret as meaningful, and there your point holds. And it resonates with mine that if we found the pattern in nature, we’d have to be careful with our inferences.
I actually have no issue with relative real. If we’re in a simulation, the virtual rock coming at my virtual head may not be real to the simulation owner, but it’s very real to me. And a virtual server that provides me with services is just as real for me as a bare metal one.
On the software hardware relation, I’d say there’s no necessary connection for the software on the hardware it’s currently running on. But for anyone outside of the system, we could in principle observe the causal relations in the software and map them to the causal relations of the hardware. We could also provide hardware feedback systems to the software so it could indirectly take into account its actual hardware state.
Which of course is a situation similar to what we face in studying the mind brain connection. Our internal access is limited, cloudy, and gappy. There are limits to how much a system can model itself. But it can be accomplished through the use of external systems, much as we can never look upon our own face, only at a mirror or captured image of it.
But as I noted in the post, it may only depend on our definition of success, which matches your conclusion.
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Sure, lossless translatability need complete alignment of all concepts. However, that poem does not rely on semantics but on orthography and culture. E.g. there is no reason why semantic alignment should entail existence of a person name beginning with the first letters of the name of the first month.
Re computers… I think you are drastically underestimate the dynamic, contingent complexity of what is going on below the level visible to the application level — which is what I had been dealing with for 30 years. And I am sure that I in turn greatly underestimate the complexity below the operating system level, what with hardware look-aheads, multi-threaded speculative execution, and such like. And that’s not touching on the problem that any task can be accomplished in many different ways.
That last point applies to human minds too. Do you know that story told by Feynman of discovering that he and Freeman Dyson (I think) were performing an apparently the same mental task (estimating the duration of one minute) in completely unrelated ways, clearly utilising different parts of the brain? With hind-sight, for me that tale was probably the last nail in the coffin of reductive physicalism.
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On computers, remember I have a background there myself, having done programming from the assembly level all the way to web apps. (Although increasingly in the past, so don’t push me too hard on current tech.) I do acknowledge it is profoundly complex. So complex that it would be easy for someone who found a working robot in the wild, and tried to understand the operations of its control systems, it might well look insurmountable, and come to a conclusion it’s a hard problem. Evolution has billions of years head start on us for the organic versions, so it’s even more complex. It’s definitely not easy, but I think it is ultimately something we’ll be able to do. Only time will tell.
The Dyson example strikes me as a case of multi-realizability. There are always many ways to skin a cat. I see it as similar to the democracy example I used in the post. We need intermediate functional abstraction layers for our primate brains to get a handle on it. Which of course is what we depend heavily on in computing technology.
But again, it depends on how we measure success. It may turn out that the explanations are so counter-intuitive, that they will never feel right. Does that count as failure? I think of the fact that many today still can’t accept natural selection, quantum mechanics, and many other scientific theories. It wouldn’t surprise me if a successful theory of mind is a far worse case of that.
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The brain does not work that way. The feature is not spread across the brain in a logical way as a memory. Bits are stored in different places and only become a pattern/feature/memory when bits come from different places due to association with each other and recognized/organized/ /put together by the conscious/awareness/yet undiscovered part of the brain. We do not yet know how that works , the process, or what part if the brain dies that/performs that function. And probably never will.
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You seem to be referring to what’s known as “the binding problem” here Ernest. Many here don’t consider it to be a concern, but I sure do. Here’s a recent post on the matter by Suzi Travis that you might like. https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/the-unity-of-consciousness-and-the
Anyway consider the thought that we may not need any location of the brain to exist as what puts consciousness all together, but rather that it all comes together as a unified brain produced electromagnetic field. Couldn’t consciousness exist as the right sort of brain produced energy field?
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I liked reading that post very much. An excellent post. A lot of research is being done on how the brain interprets the world, and how the it remembers and reconstructs past events. I do not believe any two people ever see/experience/perceive the same events the same way. They also do not reconstruct them the same way. In fact the same person will not reconstruct/remember the same event the same way each time they think of it. Stories recalling past events change over time. When asked to describe a past event, the brain will try to reconstruct it in a sensible construct. But when there are missing bits information, the brain will add nee information known as false memories to make a coherent pattern. That is why eye witnesses differ in their testimony and are not reliable, and why grandad’s stories keeping changing and evolving over time.
I have not heard the energy theory before. That could be possible. The image is certainly energy. The question is how is it created and put together and where does it appear.
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Yes Suzi’s great. She’s been doing weekly post since the beginning of 2024 and everyone seems to love them. I’m going to present a rough model which might account for what you’re talking about. Technically this is the theory of a UK professor by the name of Johnjoe McFadden.
We know that when light enters your eyes, that this interacts in such a way that associated potential information gets sent to your brain about the event. Furthermore this potential information should become actual information when it’s algorithmically converted into new potential information. Here’s where many say that you would see this light given that the first information gets converted into the second information. But I say that the second information will not actually exist as such until it also informs something appropriate to thus exist as you the experiencer of that light. Furthermore I have reason to believe that this new information will exist as such by inciting a synchrony in neural firing that sets up an electromagnetic field which itself resides as you the experiencer of that light. Theoretically all elements of your consciousness exist by means of a unified electromagnetic field set up by the right sort of synchronous neuron firing from various parts of your brain.
Let’s say you close your eyes and so stop experiencing this visual information. This should be because your brain stops creating that specific element of your EMF consciousness. But you should still be conscious since other neurons synchronously firing to create those elements of you. And how might you somewhat remember what you had seen? This might be because when you as that EM field think about what you had seen, this incites just enough of the former synchronous neuron firing to give you a sense of what you had seen, or a short term memory reconstruction.
To me the best part of the model however is where you decide to actually do something and so the field must instruct your muscles to that end. Under the heading of “ephaptic coupling” theoretically an electromagnetic field can alter neuron firing, so that’s what’s suppose to happen. If you have any questions though I’ll do my best on them when I get the chance.
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One should only use the word “illusion” (or “illusionism”) to describe a perception gone wrong, not a thought. A thought gone wrong is just a mistake. Sure, the perception/belief boundary is fuzzy, but most cases lie away from the borderlands. Take the bent-stick-in-water illusion. It’s easy to identify the perceptions that make one commit the mistake. The above-water portion of the stick looks like it’s at a large angle, while the submerged portion seems to be more nearly vertical.
Where is the supposed “illusion” that subjective feelings are non-physical? In particular, where is the perception that the feeling is not in my brain? I can’t see the physical details of what my brain is doing, so how on earth can I make a perceptual comparison?
Now some philosophers, who may include Dennett, have thought that the perception/thought distinction is too fuzzy to bother with. Perhaps they think that one cannot even draw a spectrum from percept-like to thought-like, or that while one can, the distribution is a Bell curve with the peak density in the middle. In that case, maybe I would overlook the use of “illusion” and focus on disputing the psychology of perception instead.
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That was long my hangup with illusionism. “Illusion” just didn’t seem like the right world. Susan Blackmore came up with “delusionism” but uses it for a different concept. (She’s actually onboard with Dennett’s views but leery of the Frankish version, even though Dennett considered them equivalent.) Keith Frankish once asked for suggestions for a better name. I wondered if “abstractionism” wouldn’t have been better, but learned that term is already taken for another concept, and it could cause a different set of misconceptions anyway.
And there are illusionists who do lean heavily into the misperception version. I mentioned Kammerer in the post, but Frankish himself often emphasizes how it’s an unavoidable introspective misperception. So for them, “illusion” might be the right word.
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Well, that’s good, in a way. Now they just need to back it up by pointing to the alleged percepts!
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Dennett’s answer was that the illusion is the Cartesian Theater, the idea that there’s a presentation, where the order of arrival is the order in episodic memory. And I have to admit to haven fallen for this one, even years after reading his arguments. Most people denounce the CT as a strawman, but don’t recognize that it’s just a different name for phenomenal consciousness. (Dennett’s name precedes Block’s by a few years.)
That said, I wonder if anyone from a non-western society, without a deep history of theater, would conceive of their mind that way. I don’t think Julian Jaynes was right, but he had a point in observing that the earliest literature didn’t seem to have the concept. Maybe it was because stuff like the Iliad came before the invention of theater.
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Maybe we should call it Aeschylus’s Theater! 🙂
Maybe I should get my hands on Consciousness Explained and read more of it this time around. But I’m having a hard time identifying any widely shared perception that could be called illusory here. People take themselves to have experiences in a temporal order, and believe that it’s the same order as given in episodic memory? Higher-Order-Representation theories predict exactly those experiences, and HOR is not illusionism.
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Consciousness Explained can be pretty long winded, often excessively polemic, and you have to make some allowances for a thirty year old book, but he does a good job laying out the reason why we shouldn’t trust our intuitive understanding of what’s happening, why in fact it can’t be reality.
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Mike, good post! Speaking of definitional understanding, should I understand the use of “deduce” and “reduce” in this essay as interchangeable terms? Or, rather, that “deduce” means to reason to a deduction and “reduce” is to convert to an equivalent and causal property? That might help my understanding of the essay. These discussions confuse me greatly—although I keep trying to expand my thinking. Sorry, but I keep falling back and thinking such discussions are within an artificial setting or mise-en-scène. More to the point, is a “bipolar” or mind/matter ontological conundrum a real problem needing a solution—or is it merely a leftover and outdated Cartesian dilemma? I certainly have my doubts. And I fail to see it as necessary to make further progress in understanding consciousness. I have said in this forum a long time ago that I see it as perhaps an unnecessary debate. That is, I fail to see the necessity of resolving our understanding of reality as having to be reduced to a foundational property. The relatively new science of complexity has demonstrated that complex systems may exhibit emergent phenomena—factually caused by the complex system of components—but irreducible in any realistic and satisfactory analysis to those components. Modern economic systems, for example, somewhat exhibit such phenomena. This expands our potential ontology beyond a foundational property and even mere dualism and (to me) appears to moot many of these debates. But what do I know? Maybe that’s why I’ve spent most of my philosophical endeavors elsewhere. Or maybe I just hate getting out of my intellectual comfort zone and exhibit my lack of understanding.
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Thanks Matti!
By “deduce” I do mean logically deducing a conclusion from what is known, in this case using physical processes to deduce conscious experience. “Reduce” here means understanding a higher level concept in terms of its lower level components, in this case conscious experience in terms of the physical processes that compose it. So “deduce” and “reduce” are going in opposite directions.
Of course, reducing conscious experience to physics and deducing experience from physics is controversial, something many philosophers say can’t be done, even in principle, which is where the a priori vs a posteriori physicalism dispute comes into play.
There’s no doubt that there are emergent systems. But I’m reflexively skeptical of claims about what we can never know. The history of science hasn’t been kind to those kinds of stances. Everyone’s first example of emergence is temperature emerging from particle kinetics, an emergence in a weak sense that we understand. Not that it would be productive to try to predict thermodynamics with particle physics.
Complexity theory does describe the limitations of trying to predict the actions of a complex system, but what is less frequently discussed, is it also puts limits on how well that system can control itself. The solution in both cases is to work stochastically in a manner that never provides perfect prediction or control, but close enough for many purposes.
I have to admit to not being as interested in consciousness in recent years. Some of it is that there hasn’t been as much news. But part of it is I rarely encounter a truly new argument anymore. Maybe I’m just thoroughly saturated at this point. But it still seems to generate more interesting conversations than anything else I post on.
On going outside our comfort zone, hey, no worries. There are all kinds of topics outside of mine. There’s a reason you don’t see many posts here on sports, music, or the middle east situation.
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Thanks mike. You are kind and remarkably patient with skeptics like me. Your site remains one of the best (and friendliest) places for me to venture into unfamiliar philosophical territory. Yet despite your patient explication I remain unpersuaded that there is a problem there that needs solving. Simply put, I have no problem with a greater evolving complexity producing a plurality of irreducible entities among the furniture in our universe—no problem with the complexity of a brain that causes a mind. Nor with a plurality of irreducible parts of reality that are understood only by explaining their complex systems as a whole. That doesn’t mean we can’t know them. We just have to know them differently. I actually would prefer to comprehend ontology that way. It fits together nicely with that recently discovered concept of evolution. I think reality includes brain “and” mind as well as other complex systems including languages’ evolving complexity that causes culture and civilization. I don’t see what the upside is in distilling it all down—which I submit so far seems quite impossible. Besides I seem to always have bigger fish to fry—like the ever complex human condition including that Middle East situation. But I always remain an avid reader!
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Thanks again Matti. I love having conversations, and the most interesting ones are always with people I disagree with. Not everyone can have those conversations and remain civil, so I’m always appreciative of those who can.
It sounds like you come down on team a posteriori. Although they actually still consider themselves reductive, just with brute identities as part of that reduction. (I’m actually not sure I’d call that reductive, but as I noted in the post, it depends on how much work we’re asking of those identity relations.)
There’s actually a different camp that considers themselves outright non-reductive physicalists. Suzi Travis recently did a post on them you might find interesting: https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/non-reductive-materialism (It’s part of a series she’s been doing on physicalism.)
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Yes, Indeed. To disagree without being disagreeable is, in my opinion, one of the essential virtues of a civilized person. (Many running for political office nowadays seem not to have gotten that memo! Alexander Hamilton’s gloomy pessimism may be well justified.) Anyway I have no idea what team I’d be on or whether any team that you have mentioned would even have me. I’d say I’m more persuaded by some of the work in metaphysics and ontology done by philosopher Lawrence Cahoon (Orders of Nature) who in turn was strongly influenced by philosopher of science, William Wimsatt (Re-Engineering Philosophy For Limited Beings). I could name a few others but I believe that is most likely the direct lineage of my latest remarks. I’m still working—or reworking that is—with Cahoon’s book and I admit I have as yet to tackle Wimsatt.
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Interesting. I hadn’t heard of those philosophers before. Have you ever considered doing a write up on their views somewhere?
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Mike, that’s a sensible suggestion, generally—for a few good reasons. Thanks.
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I have always been annoyed by the a priori and a posteriori across all of philosophy. But I particularly do not understand it here. I will leave that for another day. For the record, I will just claim a priori physicalism/illusionism/reductionism.
I struggle with this because I almost see the illusionist camp as working within this narrow philosophical confusion (say) of the misinterpretation of “mind” presentation that we are arguing about today. Will there be illusionists in 200 years time? I am likely to say “no.” We may disabuse the notion of phenomenality from the get go.
Maybe in the future we are interacting with self-aware AI from an early age that are explaining brain to mind relationships to us. The argument over illusionism versus dualism will be quickly discarded like your thoughts about flat earth. The phenomenological presentation will be quickly dissolved in young minds. The notion that we are ever drawn to dualistic misinterpretation will just not be a problem.
Philosophy, whatever it looks like in the future, will not argue over such things. It will be as simple of an explanation as the sun going across the sky does not mean we believe in geocentrism. Just like with geocentrism, we may understand the relationship and why previous thinkers got things wrong, but in the end we shrug and tell the physicalist/functionalist understanding.
The identity problem of multiple realizability, again, is just an interpretation problem. We have these kinds of relationships elsewhere in the world, especially cultural creations, but they just were not attached to the befuddling problem of brain/mind identity and the qualia interpretations that philosophy let run amok. Multiple realizability should not demand that we carve the world into a posteriori versus a priori, from my telling. I mean we can, but it just feels like an unnecessary claim. We can describe the functioning and structures of the system, even if from certain standpoints there is indeterminacy, underdeterminacy, or whatever. In the end, a good physicalist explanation should fully explain all the functioning and structures of the whole system, including those various narrow standpoints and presentations.
I may dislike the a priori versus a posteriori because I want us eliminating the idea of epistemology as distinct from ontology.
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I get you on the whole Latin phrases thing. It doesn’t help that “a priori” is often also used colloquially to refer an idea of innate knowledge. I actually thought about writing the post without them, or quickly relabeling them, as David Chalmers does with his “Type-A materialism” and “Type-B materialism”. But the authors put the “a posteriori” phrase in their paper title, and I didn’t want to burn a paragraph just to map them to other labels.
Right, Many positions are relative to the current controversies. No one today bothers to call themselves a heliocentrist, abolitionist, or atomist, because those are all relative to old debates. Once it becomes settled, the old controversies are interesting, often amusing, but part of the background. I actually wonder if consciousness as a concept overall will still be around in the far future. It takes some interpretation to see writings prior to Descartes as talking about it. It might be more culturally specific than we think.
I do think there’s some value in the a priori vs a posteriori distinction, although more contemporary language might just talk about how causally complete our theories are, whether some of their variables represent brute empirical correlations.
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Thought of you when I was reading Paul Feyerabend over the past few days. Perhaps one day you too will change your mind!
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I do change my mind from time to time, and maintain that if you’re not changing at least occasionally, you’re not questioning your views enough. So who knows?
Anything in particular about Feyerabend inspire this thought?
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Yes, as you can imagine I loved the period towards the end of his life when he went back on so much of what he had maintained earlier. “Rationalists — and that includes many scientists and philosophers– like to nail things down. They are confused by change and cannot tolerate ambiguity. But poets, painters, musicians cherish ambiguous words, puzzling designs, nonsensical movements, all instruments which are needed to dissolve the apparently so rigid and objective nature of scientists, to replace it by useful and changing appearances or artifacts and in this way to give us a feeling for the enormous and largely unfathomable powers that surround us.”
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Thanks. I have to admit to not knowing much about Feyerabend. I know he was in the philosophy of science, and many philosophers cite him as improving on Popper’s falsifiability criteria. I probably should learn more at some point.
I think scientists and philosophers have different goals from artists. Artists are out to create a satisfying emotional reaction in their audience. For that, ambiguity can be a powerful tool, since it can allow the observer to project their own views and get something out of the art specific to them.
But it seems like a virtue in art becomes a vice when the goal is understanding. Although I imagine that’s what you’re hoping I’ll change my mind about.
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“to give us a feeling for the enormous and largely unfathomable powers that surround us”
He realised that we have hardly begun to see what is out there. And that perhaps we will never be able to perceive the “Ding an sich“.
I think science has become to circumscribed, too limited in its outlook. Too keen on measuring but perhaps, in a sense, failing loo look. Closing too many doors.
But there you go, a mere personal perspective and one which will not surprise you!
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I think one of the values of philosophy is it can go places science can’t. Of course, that means it can be much more wrong. At its worst, it’s little more than rationalizations for appearance saving. But at its best, it helps in interpreting what scientific results mean, and what should be explored next.
Regarding art, as I write this, the 1990 version of Total Recall is playing on TV. Talk about ambiguity! Are the events in the story real? Or just a Rekall vacation? Philip K. Dick was a master at exploring the limits on what we can really know. We call it science fiction, but the best of it is really philosophical fiction.
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