Is studying conscious experience different from studying behavior?
In a number of recent conversations I’ve had, the distinction between experience and behavior has come up. There’s a strong sentiment that we can study behavior scientifically, including all the intermediate mental states that enable it. But experience is seen as something distinct from that, something that is much more difficult to study.
This behavior / experience divide matches the distinction David Chalmers makes between the “easy” problems and the “hard” problem. The easy problems aren’t really easy, but they are scientifically tractable, mainly because they’re all about functionality, the functionality that enables behaviors such as self report, navigation, object recognition, etc. But the hard problem is the one of experience, which is hard mainly because it’s not supposed to be about functionality and behavior.
Of course, a lot here depends on what we mean by “experience”. There’s a grounded sense of the term, which is what we mean when someone has been through an activity or series of activities that allowed them to learn things. It’s what job recruiters mean when they advertise that a particular position needs X years of “experience”. In that sense, experience is about learning through behavior that enables and explains future behavior.
This doesn’t have to be something that’s stretched across years. If I walk to the mailbox, I have the sensorimotor experience of doing that, which will result in at least temporary memories of how sunny or cloudy a day it is, the temperature outside, whether it’s raining, whether the mail is running late today, etc, along with reviewing my preferences about these conditions. If I have the experience of a headache, or a tasty meal, we can talk about it in the same sense.
So this grounded sense of “experience”, which is structural, relational, and functional, seems to cover a lot of territory. The question is whether it covers all the territory, or if there’s a remaining aspect we’re leaving out.
Often philosophers will talk about “what it’s like”, the “raw feels”, the subjective character, the phenomenal properties, the qualities (qualia) of the experience. Of course, as with “experience”, there are grounded versions of what these phrases could be referring to. But that’s generally not what’s meant. Instead the sentiment is that this is something primal, indescribable, unanalyzable, and scientifically inaccessible, a brute fact of existence. It can’t be described, only referenced, with each of us accessing only our own private versions.
The view is that all the behaviors described above could, in principle, happen without this additional form of experience. The putative mystery is why we have these types of experiences at all. Thomas Nagel, a pioneer in discussing this sense of experience, beginning with asking what it’s like to be a bat, agrees with many of the critics that evolution can only work with behavior and what enables it, not this private ineffable essence. His conclusion then is that evolution can’t explain experience in this sense. It’s a line of reasoning that makes the idea of latent experience existing everywhere appealing.
But there is a logical consequence of this view. It means experience is completely acausal, epiphenomenal, something that makes no difference in the world. Note that this would include the behavior of talking about it. Some advocates of the view, such as early Frank Jackson, embrace this implication. There is sometimes talk in this camp of concepts like psychophysical harmony, the idea that the experiential and physical exist in separate but parallel causal frameworks. But outside of a theistic type framework, it doesn’t seem like a parsimonious view. Which is probably why most seem to resist this implication, although the arguments for avoiding it aren’t clear to me.
The question then is whether this type of experience exists at all. It seems like once we’ve reasoned ourselves into seeing something making no difference in the world, we’ve essentially concluded it doesn’t exist, but aren’t quite willing to let it go.
The illusionists, as we discussed in the last post, say it doesn’t exist, but concede that it’s natural, even unavoidable, for us to think it does. In this view, we go wrong by trusting too much in our introspective judgments. The right move is to doubt those judgments. I’m sympathetic to this stance, but increasingly reluctant to concede that we all have an innate disposition to believe in this kind of experience.
For me, it seems more about optional assumptions we make, rather than any unavoidable species wide instinct. For sure, we’re all born intuitive dualists, but this is usually of the old fashioned Cartesian sort, the type that relegates memory, imagination, and all thought to the non-physical, not the more limited property dualism under discussion. It seems more likely it results from remnants of those Cartesian intuitions. But maybe I’m just splitting hairs here.
I should note that denying this type of experience is not old school behaviorism. There’s no reason to deny internal mental states as the logical behaviorists did. Maybe in principle we could talk about everything in terms of behavioral dispositions, but it requires a lot of convoluted language. It’s much easier to just admit those internal states exist, as long as they’re causal ones. Which I think is the main reason analytic and empirical functionalism emerged as successors to behaviorism.
Someone could continue to believe in non-behavioral experience and just take the stance that the science is valid for the behavioral portions, but not addressing the aspects they’re interested in. This is the sense I get from someone like David Chalmers. Chalmers basically seems like a functionalist, but with an extra metaphysical assumption of something else that “coheres” with the functionality. It allows him to accept the possibility of conscious AI and simulated realities without going full physicalist. I see similar stances from some panpsychists.
Of course, that’s not universal. And holding on to the non-behavioral version seems to affect the types of scientific theories someone finds plausible. It’s why theories like integrated information theory are more popular among panpsychists than straight functional ones like global workspace, higher order thought, etc.
Overall, studying behavior, along with everything that enables it, seems like a productive enterprise. If there is an aspect of experience unrelated to behavior, then it seems like an unsolvable metaphysical problem, something we’ll only ever be able to speculate about. To me, it seems exceedingly vulnerable to Occam’s razor.
But maybe I’m missing something. Are there necessities to accepting non-behavioral experience I’m overlooking? Are there solid arguments that allow experience to be scientifically inaccessible yet not epiphenomenal? If it is epiphenomenal, is there any way for science to ever get at it? Or even philosophy in any conclusive manner?
SelfAwarePatterns 
To me, the hard problem is explaining first person perspective. Is that a scientific problem, or just a philosophical problem (like math is a philosophical problem)?
Consider a computer setup with a camera, pattern recognition software trained to recognize 1. Apples, 2. Oranges, and 3. Downward motion (so, falling objects), and nothing else. The visual umwelt of this system includes just apples, oranges, and downward motion. The system can combine the motion with something it recognizes, so can recognize a falling apple, but can only recognize a “falling(something)” if it’s a falling banana.
So what is the first person perspective of this system? Is that a scientific question or not?
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I’d say it’s a philosophical problem. How much of human or animal type cognition do we have to include before we accept it as having a first person perspective? My own take is, at minimum, it has to model / predict / recognize itself (at least its bodily self) in its environment. These can be crude models, but they feel necessary.
Another philosophical question. Does a first person perspective have to include being a moral subject? If so, then affects seem necessary, which I take to be the system having automatic energy consuming reactions, which it models / predicts / recognizes, and can use more energy to override based on predicted future reactions.
What science can address is how that functionality happens or can happen. But I’m not sure it can adjudicate which particular collection is necessary for the first person perspective.
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Hmmm. So you’re saying the system I described does not have a first person perspective? (You’re not getting hung up on the “person” part of that, right?) What you describe is certainly a human-like first person perspective, but does it need to be human-like to *be* a first person perspective? Doesn’t first person just depend on what that system knows about and cares about?
I’m trying to work out what *is* a first person perspective.
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I think that’s the philosophy part. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any strict fact of the matter, just a range of possible answers that various people might accept. I will admit that “person” did figure into my thinking.
Here’s a question. Are you looking for an answer that you’ll accept, or one that most people will? Or are you still thinking there’s one true right answer? I fear you’ll be frustrated if it’s the last one, but the first two seem achievable.
For the second, here’s something to consider: what makes a video game a first person one vs a third person one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_(video_games)
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Here’s a question back at ya: if I hook up a computer to play that same first person video game, is there a first person perspective in there? Suppose we make it a driving game? [you know where this is going]
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My point with the reference to first person shooters was to highlight the common intuitions about first person perspectives. But a human playing those games models a self in an environment. I’d have to be convinced an AI was doing something like that. I’m not sure success for those AIs in playing those games requires it. But reality is far more complicated.
That said, on where you’re going, I do think self driving cars are on the right path. Unfortunately the crucial dependence on vast databases that mice get by without, and inability to deal with novel situations, weakens the intuition for the current systems.
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The reason I’m trying to work out what *is* a first person perspective is so that I can say something about it, but this only works if we’re talking about the *same* thing. Let’s try this:
Assume, for the sake of argument, that a first person perspective is the set of all patterns that a system can recognize. So for my toy system, that set is very small, whereas the set for a typical human is huge, involving a hierarchy of patterns(textures, edges) of patterns (objects) of patterns (foods) of patterns (recipes) of patterns (meals) of patterns (diets) etc.
So again, the first person perspective is the set of all patterns a system can recognize. Is that reasonable?
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That seems to imply that my laptop, when scanning my face to log me in, has a first person perspective. If I’m reading it right, I find that too liberal of a definition. I can’t say it’s objectively wrong, but it feels wrong for my intuitions.
But if you want to use it to make a further point, I’m happy to accept it as a definition for the JoS version of first person perspective.
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Progress! So now I can explain that there is no pattern recognition without behavior. That behavior can be simple, like setting a bit register to “1”, or it can be complex, like initiating a search for a plan to avoid a predator. The point is every pattern recognition will necessarily entail a physical (and physically measurable) change somewhere, and yet still be associated with a non-physical aspect: the pattern. And the new physical state also has a non-physically measurable association w/ that pattern, a correlation, aka mutual information.
So the next step, which you won’t take, is to say that experience just is pattern recognition. You can require that only certain pattern recognitions count as experience, say only higher order recognitions of patterns in prior pattern recognitions, or say, only pattern recognitions that occur in a certain part of the brain, or only pattern recognitions that occur in a certain region in France, etc.
My point is, if you want to understand the metaphysics of experience, understand the metaphysics of pattern recognition. And I appreciate this might not be intuitive, but I would just point you at quantum physics.
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I like the causal approach! As I noted above, if you’re good with facial recognition logons being conscious (which I suspect you are), then you’re good. But as you acknowledge, there’s more to the story in human and animal experience, and I’m as interested in understanding those architectural dynamics as anything. So for me, pattern completion is necessary, but not sufficient.
But as I’ve noted before, I don’t think there’s any strict fact of the matter on how much functionality we need for conscious experience, which I think is the main intuition we have to get over.
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I think when people talk about phenomenal experience being ‘acausal’, they’re thinking about experience from a 3rd person scientific point of view. From the point of view of science, yes, phenomenal experience is superfluous by virtue of lying outside its purview. But is experience really acausal? I don’t think so! It’s unthinkable that my intentions and desires don’t motivate me to act. I look at my finger. I say, “Bend!” Well I’ll be, it bends to my will! Is this view naive? Maybe it is. Yet the naive view is at the very least highly persuasive. We can put it to the side only for brief moments while theorizing, but notice that no matter what we believe, we can’t help but slip back into this attitude for the vast, vast, vast majority of our lives, which we spend in unquestioning involvement with intentions and desires.
As a side note, I’ve been hearing a lot about how dualism is natural or instinctive (It’s in the first paragraph of a book I’m reading), but I’m not sure it is, though I can understand why we might think it is, given the predominate worldview of our society. But are we naturally dualists? I’m just not sure.
Anyway, back to your main point. Many of the fashionable thought experiments seem to support a dualist outlook, which shouldn’t be surprising since many of these experiments come from Chalmers, a dualist. It seems to me a great deal of the debate has been shaped by his influence, but I find it easier to understand the basic issue from a more classical-historical perspective, which does seem to be more position-neutral about the mind-body problem. The classical version is just this: how do physical substances and non-physical ‘substances’ interact?
We don’t really need zombies and inverted colors and bats and Chinese rooms and whatnots—I don’t see that these have changed the main issue. Of course, we don’t talk about ‘substances’ anymore (maybe that’s a good thing.) But we do talk about ‘information’ being ‘realized’. Realized by what, exactly? What, exactly, makes a thing a realizer? Is there some whisper of ‘physical substance’ lurking in there? Another thing that’s changed: it used to be that a ‘substance’ could be either material or not. Then ‘substance’ came to be synonymous with material substances. Today it would be pretty weird if we spoke of consciousness as an ‘immaterial substance’; it’s rare to hear of ‘mind’ even. But we might, at least in a tongue in cheek sort of way, say ‘mind stuff’. So maybe what we’re actually thinking about isn’t altogether different?
Another aspect to consider aside from all the various theories of mind themselves is how they each view the status of science. Where does scientific realism as opposed to instrumentalism factor in? I think this is important in clarifying various positions, but I don’t hear that much direct discussion of this (except from you of course!)
Determinism applies within the theoretical framework of science, but what you make of that, whether it’s an axiom appropriate only to scientific investigation or whether it’s an ontological truth, can make a huge difference in how you position yourself in the mind-body debate. You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m on the side of instrumentalism. I think phenomenal causality is even more fundamental, though as an axiom scientific determinism works quite well for understanding the physical world. I don’t think it makes sense to apply a scientific axiom to that which science has long excluded from its range of study—mind.
By the way, I happen to think idealism and scientific realism are incompatible, or at least ill-suited to one another, but other idealists see these views as not necessarily incompatible. I don’t think I agree, but I just thought I’d put that out there since there are so few idealists in the world.
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I agree that experience is causal. But if it is, then it seems to me that puts it within the purview of science. When your finger moves, we understand the mechanics of how that happens, with nerve impulses coming through the peripheral nervous system and exciting the muscle fibers across the neuromuscular junction. The muscle fibers contract, and the finger moves. We can then follow the signal back to the spinal cord, and then to and into the brain. So the question is, if conscious volition is causal, when do things break down? At what point does science hit a wall and is unable to go any further? And even then, couldn’t we study the interactions that happen between what we can observe and the other side of that boundary?
(In some ways, that’s what old school behaviorism, at least in its more methodological form, was all about. Brain scanning technology didn’t exist yet, so they focused on what could be tested, which was behavior. Maybe their main failure was in failing to treat subject reports as a type of behavior.)
I think the idea of instinctive dualism comes from the observation that ghosts seem to be a near universal concept in human societies, and that psychological tests done on very young children show them having dualist intuitions.
Now, would a pre-scientific society call it “dualism”? I wouldn’t think so. I think the notion of dualism itself requires a mechanical philosophy like the one developing in Descartes’ time, and the idea of exempting a mind from it. I don’t know that a hunter gatherer would conceive of the ghosts of dead relatives being non-physical. It doesn’t seem like they’d have that distinction yet. But they do seem to have the concept of the essence of the person being separate from the body. They might just think it’s in the person’s breath. (The ancient Greek word for “soul” evolved from the word for breath.)
Of course, western anthropologists are notorious for inadvertently projecting western ideas on other cultures. So maybe ghosts aren’t as pervasive as they think. But they also love pointing out when others in their field have done it, and I haven’t seen that point being made (yet).
Chalmers did popularize the zombie thought experiment. But the knowledge argument comes from Frank Jackson, and the inverted spectrum one is pretty old. Definitely most of these thought experiments were constructed by dualists.
When it comes to scientific realism, I actually think the real issue is the scope of scientific theories. The debate about whether wave functions are real, for example, are really about how far we can follow their predictions. All we can say for sure is where the theory predictions have been tested. Assuming their scope is broader has sometimes led to productive new theories, but not always. Sometimes it’s the opposite in fact. Although assuming the broader scope does seem to do better at inspiring experimental work.
It seems like idealism and metaphysical realism are incompatible by definition. The question might be, is there any distinction between metaphysical realism and scientific realism? Maybe it depends on your metaphysics.
Idealism is a minority position today, but hey, you never know when the winds might shift. When I have a minority position, I periodically run through my reasons for holding it, and if they still seem solid, just comfort myself that I’ll eventually be vindicated.
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Well, we can explain the third person observable experience scientifically, but that’s not explaining experience itself. You can tell me about the mechanics of nerve impulses, but that says nothing about motivation or desire or perception as it is from the inside, from the point of view of the experiencer. That’s what I mean by the word ‘experience’. You can experience watching an MRI scan of my brain, for instance, but that’s not the same as my experience of wanting an ice cream cone or whatever.
So where do we hit the brick wall? That’s a good question. I suspect mind will always prove evasive for a method that seeks only mind-independent knowledge.
“couldn’t we study the interactions that happen between what we can observe and the other side of that boundary?”
By “other side of that boundary” I assume you mean phenomenal experience? If so, sure, in a sense. But it’s my understanding that introspective reports are too unreliable to be considered scientific. If that’s the case, then you’d need to have direct access to experience. But then again, I’m not sure what would make that access any more reliable. (I’m actually in the midst of working on a blog post about this). Skepticism towards introspection really puzzles me. It seems to me introspection is the only access we have to conscious experiences; without it, not even solipsism is left standing. What science has access to are reports about introspected experience, so it’s even further removed from the thing it wants to study.
“I don’t know that a hunter gatherer would conceive of the ghosts of dead relatives being non-physical.”
That’s a good point. And consider the Egyptians and other ancient cultures with their rather materialistic and often elaborate burial rituals and ancestor worship. Just imagine believing that your dead relatives will need all these material goods in the afterlife. It seems on the face of it they didn’t draw a clear line between souls and matter. And when you think about it, these traditions carry on to this day. I could go to the Asian market tomorrow morning and pick up some fake paper money (joss paper) to burn for my dead relatives. They even make joss paper iPhones, Gucci purses, tablets, laptops. Not kidding. So the idea is, I guess, that a Gucci purse ‘spirit’ goes up in smoke to your relative to give that person a luxurious afterlife. Usually, though, you’ll just find paper money. I have to admit, I do kind of like the idea. Better than an open casket. Far better than burning actual money.
Anyway, I think most non-philosophers tend to be confused about where to draw the line between the physical world and the spiritual (or mental) world. I think we by and large live in both without worrying about it, and even when we do face it directly, it takes some philosophical training to think about the dividing line in a way that’s consistent. Of course, once you have that training, it’s hard to think in any other way.
What you say about scientific theories makes me think you’re an instrumentalist.
“It seems like idealism and metaphysical realism are incompatible by definition.”
I would say so. Idealism says reality is mind-dependent. Not my mind-dependent. There are variations of this, of course, and different theories about what ‘mind’ is. Not all idealisms depend on God.
“The question might be, is there any distinction between metaphysical realism and scientific realism? Maybe it depends on your metaphysics.”
Again, I think you’re right.
Thanks for your encouraging words on idealism. I read recently it’s less popular than theism amongst academic philosophers, which is really saying something. I’m getting the feeling panpsychism is up next, and I’m actually okay with that. It’s taken me a while to realize someone like Leibniz counts as panpsychist, and I adore his philosophy. We never used this term in school!
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I think it helps to make a distinction between having an experience and learning about it. Consider that my laptop can never be in the same informational state as my phone. It can store the entire informational state of the phone, and maybe even simulate its operations. But it can never be the phone performing those operations.
Similarly, no one can ever have your experience. No one can have your perspective, at least without turning themselves into you, thereby destroying their original perspective. But that doesn’t mean they can’t learn about your perspective, at least to ever closer approximations.
Granted, it will all be from a third person perspective. But if we progress to the point where we can examine your state and know what you would say your experience is, or what action you might take, or physiological reactions you might have, I’m not sure we’re missing anything essential. But of course this is exactly the question.
Depending on individual self reports is problematic. But a substantial group of them in response to the same stimuli can be statistically analyzed, with any single issues compensated for.
But yeah, introspection itself isn’t particularly reliable, at least not any more than any other type of perception. The field of psychology is full of tests demonstrating that people frequently don’t understand their own beliefs, motivations, or memory. So when the only source we have for something is introspective judgment, it seems like we should keep in mind the limitations of that source.
That said, as I noted in this and the last post, I’m actually skeptical this all comes down to unavoidable introspective error. Introspectively, we can’t reduce experiences. The mistake is in assuming that because introspection can’t do it, that it can’t be done at all. It might be a natural assumption to make, but it still strikes me as an assumption, particularly once other possibilities have been raised.
I’m not sure I’d ever heard of joss paper before. Interesting. The burning rituals do seem to demonstrate some pre-scientific intuitions about spirit being in breath, and that we can burn things to transfer them into the spirit world. Seeing breath as the animating force of life would have been a natural inclination, since only living things breathed. The lineage of dualism?
I’ve been an instrumentalist before, but I’m more a structural realist now, specifically an ontic structural realist. It’s a cautious type of realism. I think the structures and relations in our scientific theories are real, but not necessarily the stories we add on to them. That still leaves open the question of what the scope of those structures might be. Although these distinctions probably matter less the further we get away from fundamental physics.
In the 2020 philosopher survey, the number that are idealists are at around 5-7%, which is actually about the same number that are panpsychists. Both are higher than the eliminativists. (So as a functionalist, I’m in the most popular stance, but as someone who admits that involves a certain form of eliminativism, I’m also in one of the least popular.) The idealism question is separate from the consciousness one, probably because the idealism one was on the earlier survey, but I wonder why they didn’t include idealism as an option on the consciousness one. I’m guessing the idealists mostly mapped to the “Alternative View” option.
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Here’s my take. Behaviour is running control rules that determine our actions based on our internal and external senses, and measures of what good looks like. Experience is having access to which control rules we currently have in play, and of those, which are currently triggered. The loop that confounds then comes out of what we do with that experiential access: We feed it back in through control rules, as though is was sensed data…and the actions that those control rules can take are both physical and mental, the latter being changes to the control rules we currently have in play. Architecturally, this is like a Klein bottle.
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Sounds like a functionalist take on experience, which I’m onboard with. Although I’m wondering what “control rules” mean in this context. Sounds like I might need to do some reading on Klein bottles.
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I’ve only ever seen the question of what conscious experience is for examined in depth in a sci-fi novel. Blindsight by Peter Watts. I did a review for it on my site. Consciousness is not his scientific wheelhouse (I think he’s in the ecology field) but he is the hardest of hard SF writers and even includes citations in his novels. He’s done several interviews on the question and blogged about it and he found no answer as to what function consciousness/experience fulfils. In the end he found himself flirting with panpsychism and Idealism, although he is sceptical of both.
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I read Blindsight several years ago. I found it a bit of a tough read. I was often confused about exactly what was happening. Although the speculation about consciousness was pretty interesting. I have the sequel and have always meant to get around to it, but it’s languished in my Kindle for years.
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I don’t think I would read any more of his but was interested in what he said about his research in interviews. Links to some of these and his blog posts on my site What is consciousness for? The Blindsight Existential review – Fantastical Fiction (wordpress.com)
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It’s all data. Some of it gets logged and can be studied, a la behavior. Some of it is internally stored and referenced within our own private inner loops. The latter are what we call those ineffable “feels”. It’s just our minds being constantly immersed in our own data. “Oh, it’s raining. I remember getting the mail when I was ten when a lightning strike hit the mailbox up the street. Oh, there’s the mail truck, looks like it needs another tune-up. Those sure are some gray skies. I should have brought an umbrella. I wonder if the mail will be nothing but propaganda.”
Data, stored, rehashed and reinterpreted in lieu of recent and current input.
What we ascribe to be indescribable is nothing more than a massively interconnected set of feedback loops.
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I’m onboard with the general sentiment. If we see “ineffable” as merely very difficult to describe rather than impossible, and “private” as difficult to objectively measure rather than impossible, it’s a system we can explore and start to understand, although it will be a long slog.
But not everyone agrees with us.
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Isn’t “experience” what Hume called “impressions and ideas”?
David Hume (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Could be. I haven’t read Hume at length, so I don’t know if there are any variances. But then it’s not like there’s a full consensus on “experience”, so I suspect you could see it that way.
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I don’t think it’s necessary to say that this kind of phenomenal experience is entirely acausal. I’d suggest we can instead see it as the difference between the first person and third person perspectives. Our descriptions of brain activity, behaviour etc are third person accounts, while our phenomenological descriptions are first person accounts. Iirc this approach is suggested by Mark Solms in ‘The Hidden Spring’. I think this better reflects the driving force behind a lot of thinking about consciousness – we feel a need to explain the fact that we have first person experiences.
The hard problem is then seen as the question of why we have a first person perspective at all. But then, why shouldn’t we? It’s bizarre to me that we take the third person perspective as so much more natural, when we can have absolutely no experience of it, and when it seems to require a kind of disembodied omniscient observer; a “view from nowhere” of the “thing-in-itself”. A first person perspective of beings that are actually causally involved with the world makes much more sense to me.
This grants us a picture of consciousness that is inaccessible to science, since the first person perspective cannot in principle be reduced to a third person perspective, and yet that is not causally inert, inaccessible, or epiphenomenal.
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I’m onboard with phenomenal consciousness being the perspective of an access conscious system. It’s the insistence that they’re ontologically separate which seems to cause trouble.
And definitely, any system that collects and uses information has to do so from some vantage point. Why not its own? And it has to do so with whatever sensory systems it has, and in light of its innate and learned goals. In that sense, the first person perspective doesn’t seem mysterious. Again, it’s only when we insist that it must take place in a separate inaccessible subjective realm that we get trouble.
But I feel like I missed something when I get to your “This grant us” paragraph. Where did we lose scientific accessibility? If I recall correctly, this isn’t Solms’ view. He thought Chalmers made a mistake by not including affects in his analysis, and thought he might have seen the problem as less intractable if he had.
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“It’s the insistence that they’re ontologically separate which seems to cause trouble.”
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I’m not sure I follow.
“But I feel like I missed something when I get to your “This grant us” paragraph. Where did we lose scientific accessibility?”
There’s a lot of scope for science to understand various aspects of consciousness, but it seems to me that science must take a third person perspective, and I can’t see a way to even begin to create a third person account of a first person perspective. It’s just not possible to reduce the first person viewpoint to the third person. The 1st person perspective is intrinsically private.
I’m afraid I can’t remember Solms’ exact views, but I remember him making the point about 1st vs 3rd person perspectives, and particularly saying that when we view a brain experiencing things and when we experience things as brains, these are both experiences, comparing the two to thunder and lightning, being two experiences of the same thing. I wouldn’t disagree with affects making the problem seem less intractable.
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“Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I’m not sure I follow.”
Sure. If phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness are the same thing, then the explanation for what makes content phenomenal may be it being accessed by the overall cognitive system. However if it’s phenomenal prior to the access, then what makes it phenomenal becomes very mysterious, maybe metaphysically mysterious. But would it be so mysterious if we didn’t exclude the most likely solutions?
“It’s just not possible to reduce the first person viewpoint to the third person. The 1st person perspective is intrinsically private.”
What brings you to these conclusions?
Certainly we can’t reduce the first person viewpoint from within that viewpoint, but that seems like a limitation of the viewpoint, rather than any reality level constraint. Software, in its operations, can’t reduce a bit, but physically a bit is a transistor, vacuum tube, mechanical switch, or something else designed to give binary outputs. The inability to reduce it from the software perspective doesn’t preclude reduction from the hardware one.
If the first person viewpoint is intrinsically private, then how can it also be causal? If it is causal, what prevents us from studying it by interacting with it, or at least studying its interactions?
That’s my issue with the causal aspect. It doesn’t seem like we can have it both ways. Either it is causal, and so can be studied by science, or it isn’t, but then has no effects in the world. Am I overlooking some way to have both options?
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“If phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness are the same thing, then the explanation for what makes content phenomenal may be it being accessed by the overall cognitive system. However if it’s phenomenal prior to the access, then what makes it phenomenal becomes very mysterious, maybe metaphysically mysterious.”
Well, my current thinking is that absolutely everything possesses phenomenal consciousness, although it’s hardly worthy of the word “consciousness” until it has some degree of self reflection (although maybe that’s more common than we commonly think too). Basically, I think that consciousness is the same thing as “being”, which I think is a matter of relations between things. And because things exist as relations, they can only exist relative to each other (there is no absolute view, or thing-in-itself, or view from nowhere ie no 3rd person perspective that is not a 1st person perspective). It’s this relative existence that is consciousness. (This is a bit fresh, so I probably need to write a post to properly work it all out)
“But would it be so mysterious if we didn’t exclude the most likely solutions?”
What do you consider the most likely solutions?
I’m brought to the conclusion that the 1st person perspective is intrinsically private by the concept of a 1st person perspective itself. If it were public, it would not be a 1st person perspective. You cannot share another person’s perspective except to the extent that you identify with them, and cease being separate persons. That may be possible (I won’t lie, I quite like non-dualism in various forms), but that wouldn’t be scientific knowledge, or what I’m calling 3rd person knowledge.
“If the first person viewpoint is intrinsically private, then how can it also be causal? If it is causal, what prevents us from studying it by interacting with it, or at least studying its interactions?”
I think the trouble is that you are reifying what we’re calling the 1st person viewpoint into a separate thing, when the point is for it to not be a separate thing at all, but the same thing as viewed from another perspective. If I looked at your brain I would experience as neural signals what you experience as, say, thinking of a sunset. Is it neural signals or thinking of a sunset? It’s both, and neither of us are more objectively correct than the other. The sunset and the neural signals are the same thing, and so have the same causal effects. But no matter how I look at your neural signals, I will never experience them as a sunset, for the simple reason that they are your neural signals and not mine.
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Sounds like you’re leaning panpsychist, or maybe panprotopsychist, although maybe with more of a naturalist bent?
I think that what we call third person perspectives exist. It’s just our perspectives on others. But I suspect you’re really talking about the objective perspective. That, I think, is best thought of as a construction, a model built by taking into account numerous individual perspectives, one which can compensate for the limitations of any one of those perspectives, although not necessarily for the limitations of the views of our current culture or species. It’s a theory, constantly under review and revision.
“What do you consider the most likely solutions?”
There are many candidates, such as global workspace / fame in the brain, attention schema theory, higher order theories, predictive coding theories, etc. I don’t think any of them is the one true solution, although it seems like most do describe some form of neural activity, so they’re addressing different aspects of the overall problem. In the end, I think our understanding of experience is actually going to be a vast collection of theories, similar to how there’s no one theory of life, just a large collection of interlocking theories that all contribute to understanding something vastly complex.
“I think the trouble is that you are reifying what we’re calling the 1st person viewpoint into a separate thing”
Actually I’m not. You might reread my statements above about phenomenal and access consciousness. I’m fully onboard with most of what you describe next, except that I don’t see any reason science can’t study it. It’s the reificiation of that viewpoint as something separate from the functionality, which I agree with Gilbert Ryle is a category mistake, that causes the confusion. Give up that attempted reification, and it seems like we have a system we can study.
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There’s a temptation to think that if science can’t answer something, it can’t be a question. Given the extraordinary success of the physical sciences, this is not surprising. What is surprising, to me at least, is how willing we are to disregard other modes of thought, concerning any and all subjects, in favour of whatever account can be assembled by science.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how her interest in nature led her to study science, and how the study of science disappointed her. As I wrote in my review, ” she recounts her early academic experiences with a science that she found was not about the poetry of nature, but only its mechanics.” Her book offers a meditation on the kind of questions science asks, the kind of answers to which it is predisposed, and the kind of thinking it leaves out. It may seem a bit “new-age” in places, but for this topic I suggest it as a recommended read: a book written by a scientist, but one that helps to shake up our understanding of what it is to do science.
My view is that physical science undoubtedly has something cogent to say about the sense of “what it’s like,” based on behaviourist enquiries into how things work, but I don’t expect this to be an exhaustive account. I’m willing to leave room for other modes of thought, or other ways of seeing, that are more friendly to the ontology of “what it’s like.” If science comes up short in its views of the everyday experience we all take for granted, I’m more inclined to blame its limitations than to follow it faithfully into a void.
I can’t agree with the idea that experience is “not supposed to be about functionality and behaviour.” Obviously it is; just not in the terms proposed by traditional science. If science can’t make sense of the very useful concept of free will, for example, then I prefer to conclude that there are times when science is not that useful. But I hasten to add, as would Kimmerer, that it is a particular conception of science that is not useful. There are ways to broaden the reach of science, but only through broadening its mode of conception. Our studies of ecology and symbiosis are leading the way, at a time when the ontology of atoms seems to be exhausted.
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Science definitely can’t provide answers for everything. I think attempts to make a science of morality, for instance, are misguided at best. And it can’t tell us what we should find beautiful, or disgusting, although it can help to know when we should override those impulses. But it’s easy to understand the reasons why it can’t address those subjects, such as the fact / value distinction.
I haven’t heard of Kimmerer, but the assumption that mechanics and poetry are necessarily exclusive sounds like someone who just doesn’t like mechanisms. I think of Sean Carroll’s poetic naturalism. Today I listened to the free part of an interview of Richard Dawkins, someone most people don’t think of a poetic. But in his description of things like evolution and genetics, he seems able to find a wonder in subjects many can only see as dry.
I do think there are aspects of consciousness science can’t adjudicate. To be clear, I see conscious experience as completely functional, but exactly which collection of functionality is more of a philosophical question than a scientific one. Science can explain the functional capabilities, but it will be up to philosophers, or at least philosophy minded people, to decide what we need to account for our experiences. I think the unwillingness to clarify terminology is a serious barrier here, but not necessarily one for science.
In the end, science is going to find what it finds, using the most reliable methods that can be established. It’s up to the rest of us to decide how those findings fit in or change our worldviews.
Regarding your free will example, we can take the scientific view of the world as saying it doesn’t exist. But that comes from holding to a version of free will constructed long ago. If we want to avoid fatalism, there are reconstructed compatibilist frameworks, such as seeing free will as the capacity to act with forethought, that I think preserve social responsibility, and give us freedom worth having.
But it requires some flexibility in our concepts. Holding rigidly to pre-scientific concepts seems to leave us with a fragile notion of reality, one that makes it vulnerable to Cartesian type skepticisms. A more flexible stance seems to provide a more robust version of reality.
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I’m glad you agree that science has limits. Not everyone would. There are those who would explain morality or aesthetics scientifically. One popular tack is to explain them in terms of evolutionary pressures. This is what I would think of as a “science of morality,” and actually I’d be surprised if you disagreed with it in general outline. I think your concerns have more to do with extracting a reliable practical system from the scientific explanation. Based on your views of consciousness, I’d hazard that your problem with the science of morality is not, as with more traditional objections, that it leaves no role for what we used to call “conscience,” and to this extent dehumanizes us. In the view I perhaps mistakenly attributing to you, conscience can be explained in evolutionary terms. If we have such feelings, they can be understood, like consciousness itself, as secondary to the objective account to be provided by science.
It’s the same with poetry. May I suggest that the idea of a scientist without a poetic bone in his or her body is something of a straw man? Of course Dawkins appreciates beauty; he is human, after all. We can say the same of Carlo Rovelli, who in his popular science books waxes poetic at seemingly every opportunity. The difference between these thinkers and someone like Robin Wall Kimmerer is not that they like mechanisms and she doesn’t. Kimmerer is a scientist; like all scientists, of course she appreciates the beauty and wonder to be found in her chosen vocation. The difference is that for her, the poetry is not secondary. It has as much right as the mechanics to be incorporated in the explanation.
This is where the going gets difficult for the classic scientific temperament. The scientific approach by nature pretends to completeness. It expects to explain everything, leaving no gaps, and this as a matter of principle. If there are apparent gaps, by definition they are illusory; they can and must be filled in, given time and patience. Of course we all appreciate poetry, even if we don’t fully understand why; but a true and complete scientific explanation of poetry, and our love of it, is just around the corner.
So it is with consciousness. Having it is one thing; explaining it scientifically is better. The question is, what does one say to move people beyond this faith in the completeness of science, to the point that they are prepared to question even their own consciousness? How can we make consciousness, or beauty, or poetry, a true part of our account of the world, rather than a lovely but otherwise useless appendage to the mechanical story?
The answer begins with noticing the difference, which is why in some desperation I recommended Kimmerer’s take on science—although it feels a bit like the famous quote from Louis Armstrong: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”
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On morality, it might help to remember I’m not a moral realist, so ultimately I don’t think there’s any fact of the matter for science to get a hold of. I do have to admit I once tried to ground morality in evolutionary instincts, but it always seemed to underdetermine things. I also looked into game theory, which might get the closest, although capturing all the constantly shifting factors probably isn’t practical. But ultimately every society requires that we override at least some of our instinctive impulses and our own self interests.
These days, I’d say “moral constructivist” might be the best description for my stance. Morality seems like a social tool which we inherit and constantly revise together.
There are people who take the attitude that science can answer everything. But I think that is a philosophical attitude, one not really supported by, ironically, science. Personally, I’m all for someone trying to bring science into a new area. I always tell people who want to have something like a science of morality, “Great, do do it.” But all we get is lots of books and articles arguing that there should be such a science. It seems to me that the people who succeed in starting new scientific fields do so by actually doing it, by demonstrating that empirical work is possible in that area.
That jazz quote has always been a turn off for me, a refusal to examine something, to clarify it. Assuming he actually said it, or said it that way (you never know with these quotes), he might have been more honest if he’d just admitted he didn’t know how to define it, only how to live it.
On questioning our own consciousness, sorry if this exasperates you, but I think we should be willing to question everything, particularly with problems so many people are convinced are insoluble. Maybe the problem isn’t what we think it is. And as I noted in the last post, I really don’t think we have to call into question that much, really more about adding some nuance into our assumptions about experience, than experience itself.
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Here’s a simple reason to think that studying conscious experience needn’t be exactly the same as studying behavior. What if you’re “locked in”? Let’s say you’re sitting there, caused to feel horrible pain, but for whatever the reason have absolutely no ability to react to this pain whatsoever. No flinching or anything else given your particular neurological circumstances. Thus there would be no behavioral sign whatsoever that you’re in pain, and yet the pain would exist.
Of course Mike, you believe that pain can exist by means of the right input information to the brain that’s processed into the right other information. Then I consider this spooky because I don’t think processed information can exist as such unless it informs something appropriate to exists as that experiencer. Either way there needn’t be any behavior for the physics of that pain to exist. Thus scientists could study pain as something different than behavior, and whether from your “processed information alone” or my “processed information that informs something appropriate”.
Theoretically pain exists as an input to the conscious mind. Then beyond non-conscious output mechanisms, a person might consciously decide what to do to potentially alleviate such punishment and so react appropriately. Yes in the mentioned case the pain would be epiphenomenal, though by means of faulty causal circumstances rather than non-existent evolved responses. Thus an apparent flaw in the functionalism perspective.
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Hey Eric,
When considering this, I think we have to think in terms of what pain means in a typical member of a species. An individual that is injured or constrained could certainly feel pain and show no outward signs of it, have no behavioral consequences. But their circumstances, aside from being tragic, would be unusual.
However, that’s not the circumstances that the pain mechanisms would have evolved under. For evolution to have sunk as much resources into the pain mechanisms as it did, those mechanisms had to provide some form of survival advantages that increased the chances of the responsible genes making it into future generations. And natural selection can only work on the organisms behavior and other relations to the environment, like how much energy it needs.
So I don’t think special cases invalidate the overall premise. If we want to understand pain, our best bet is understanding its role in the causal chain that leads to behavior.
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Okay Mike, if you’ll concede to me that in a causal world qualia technically ought to exist apart from behavior, then I’ll concede to you that in general today behavior ought to be our best evidence that qualia exist at all. Then each of us should look for science to determine if your “processed information in itself” path to the creation of qualia is sufficient, or if I’m correct that processed information can only exist as such to the extent that something appropriate becomes informed by it, and so we should be trying to discover what consciousness is effectively made of.
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It seems like any causal system can be damaged in such a way that the inbound portions of it work while the outbound ones don’t. My phone’s screen could go out while it is still able to receive information over the network and process it. It would basically be “locked in” in that case. So definitely the same thing can happen with humans, unfortunately. But if we want to understand why that functionality was engineered in phones, or why experience evolved in animals, we need to look at more functionally complete cases.
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I’ll concede that. If we want to study the way that an organism can move, we wouldn’t choose to study a paralyzed subject.
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Yes, I’d definitely say I lean towards a kind of panpsychism. I would say I see it all as natural, and as pretty grounded.
You’re right, I was being a bit sloppy between talking about 3rd person perspectives (obviously real) and the objective perspective (not so obviously real).
Could you clarify what you mean by “studying consciousness”? I wonder if that might be the source of our disagreement.
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For “studying consciousness” above, I meant exploring the causal mechanisms involved.
Of course, there are many difficulties. One is figuring out which notions of “conscious” we’re going to explore. That’s a definitional issue, one that is made more difficult by resistance to clarifying terms like “phenomenal”, “qualia”, etc.
The other is the refrigerator light dilemma, the difficulty a child faces when trying to figure out if the interior light stays on when the door is closed, since opening the door may affect the state. If someone says that experience is unrelated to behavior, it becomes very difficult to test that proposition, since ultimately we have to work through some type of behavior, such as self report. Even no-report paradigms require first establishing markers through behavior, and assuming that things don’t change when we remove report.
The one thing that makes this more hopeful than it might seem is that for consciousness to have evolved, it must make some kind of difference. Otherwise natural selection wouldn’t have had anything to select against. Of course, if you think experience is everywhere, then that argument carries no weight. But it also brings us back to epiphenomenalism.
Overall, every scientific theory of consciousness is both a philosophy about what consciousness is, and predictions about what we’ll find when observing neural activity and behavior. Reject the philosophy and any empirical data become meaningless. It’s why I think consciousness is first and foremost a philosophical problem, albeit one that science can inform.
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Are non-reporting paradigms behavioral or experiential?
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As I understand it, no-report paradigms require that the markers they’re looking for first be established through behavior (report). So I’d say they’re behavioral, or maybe “behavior derived” would be a better phrase.
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That may be true in some cases, but I don’t see how it would be necessary in all cases. We can monitor brain activity before, during, and after displaying an image, for example, and note the differences without asking the subject (possibly an animal) to report anything about the image. Obviously more sophisticated experiment than this could be devised.
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The question is, how do we know what the subject is actually conscious of?
I should have noted that it’s also sometimes done where the stimuli happens, and the subject is asked shortly afterward what they remember.
But the issue I have overall, is all of it seems subject to the refrigerator door-light dilemma. We never know for sure without the report, immediate or delayed. Even the delayed version raises the question of how conscious they were of the stimuli before being prompted to report.
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On another topic, how do you explain placebos if consciousness is epiphenomenal? Are there examples of placebos working where a person is not aware of receiving anything, not even the placebo itself? For example, we tell a person she is going to receive a powerful analgesic for pain but inject a saline solution. The placebo effect will likely produce a report of reduced pain. But what if we just inject the saline solution without telling the patient anything? Probably no pain relieving effect. Awareness of the placebo would seem to be critical to the effect of the placebo.
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I’m not on team epiphenomenal, but I could see them arguing that the placebo’s effects happen outside of experience.
But along the same lines of your argument, why do we experience the pain of a burnt hand after it’s pulled away from the stove if it doesn’t have some effect on later behavior?
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The pain relief from the placebo would be something experienced; otherwise, we would say the placebo didn’t work. The brain circuits that directly produced the effect wouldn’t have to be conscious, but it seems consciousness had to be involved in the causal chain because a placebo of which the subject was unaware would definitely not work.
A- administration of a placebo pain reliever to a person in severe pain
B – brain activity that represents understanding of A
PR- pain relief brain circuits triggered by B
C – conscious perception of understanding A
If A causes B which causes PR, then where does C fit into the picture?
The simplest explanation would be either B and C are the same or that C is a necessary part, attribute, or quality of B. That would put C in the causal chain.
For C to be truly epiphenomenal, then either A and/or B would have to generate additional brain activity that produces C. Or, C simply appears uncaused by anything happening in the brain. The first would seem to be an evolutionary waste of energy and brain circuits. The second puts the argument in the supernatural category.
BTW, I saw some research recently that claimed to identify an actual PR in circuits from the frontal lobe to the amygdala
I don’t see the pain of the hot stove to be related directly to my argument. It would argue for a role for consciousness in learning, although it could also trigger self-care, whereas the placebo effect seems to rely for on previous learning about the effects of pain relievers.
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I like that analysis James! I’m onboard. Of course, the supernatural option is exactly where people with the epiphenomenal view go (or non-physical, expanded physics, etc.). It’s where a lot of people go regardless, but without accepting epiphenomenalism, they’re faced with accounting for interaction between physics and the rest.
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Here’s a hypothesis that would explain Eric Borg’s “locked-in” example, as well as having many other interesting consequences. What if experience is a body * environment interaction? “Experience” here including even the most private feelings and percepts of the most pokerfaced card player.
A first consequence is that for all practical purposes, experiences have a high degree of privacy. The body includes the brain, an absurdly complex organ whose activity is only selectively and crudely reflected in macroscopic, outward behavior. This would explain the widespread belief that feelings and thoughts are private – for all practical purposes, it’s true. That doesn’t mean that you can’t put someone in an fMRI machine (after first running a whole lot of other fMRI tests on that same person) and, to some extent, read their mind.
A second consequence is that behavior (or behavior plus stimuli) doesn’t suffice to define experience. That information gives you environment – which is only half of the body * environment interaction.
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As I noted in the last post, I’m definitely onboard with experience being private in practice, which as you note, has no metaphysical implications. And I certainly agree there isn’t a one to one correspondence between behavior and experience. Old school behaviorism isn’t true. There are just too many internal paths, conflicting impulses, and varied histories that could lead to the same behavior or lack of behavior.
On the other hand, I do think we have to keep in mind that, if we think experience evolved, then its primary role is to affect behavior. Certainly there are cases where damage or illness can break that association. An injured primate can see red and have no response. But if we want to understand why primates in general experience redness, we have to look at what it typically enables, such as finding ripe fruit.
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Sure. I’m just trying to highlight the body in the body * environment interaction. This relates to my metaphor of percepts (redness, pain) being like the kind of engine your car has, rather than like “driving” in general.
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Hi Mike,
I am probably the person who fits into the camp of being a dualist—if that is the only alternative to not being a convinced physicalist. I don’t know what I am, to be honest, because I don’t feel I understand how things really work. What I know is that I have inclinations to vouchsafe as “real” those “experiences” that do not fit easily into a physicalist paradigm—almost certainly not as it is presently defined. That said, I find physicalism, like pretty much every vantage, dissolves into the unknown and slips through our fingers at some point. That may be just a restatement of my proclivities and not a logical point; it’s not easy to know. If I was to request to be envisioned on terms of my own choosing, they would be that I’m curious, that I discount as invalid relatively few (if any) perspectives, and that I know there is much I don’t know.
I think for now I want to focus on definitions of what is “real” because that is ultimately the question none of us can answer with certainty, and what this is ultimately about. If I understand your stance on this correctly, it is that to be real, to “exist”, a phenomenon must be part of the dynamic chain of causation that is perpetually occurring (whether we apprehend it or not) and of which we are a part. I could say, alternately perhaps, that it must be a phenomenon that is part of the dynamic chain of causation—that we must perceive its causal influence—while at the same time acknowledging that our perception or observation of such is not a necessary element of its being.
External perceptions can be just as erroneous as introspection, in my opinion, and I think they are probably ultimately the very same mechanism at work. The mistake may be to view them differently. In either case: we have an “experience” of data and we interpret it within the framework of what we know and believe. But the thing about external—third-person—perceptions is that we can validate them. The safeguard against misinterpretation of our perceptions is that third-party, so-called objective observations offer the relative advantage of consensus. So, while not stated, I think the definition of what exists that you are arguing in favor of is one that requires elements of reality to be “objectively causal.”
Despite the efforts to make this as “objective” as possible, I personally do not think it is reasonable to deny that our perceptions and the interpretations of our perceptions are determined by the collective “knowledge” of a time and place. Certainly, personal knowledge is relevant. But I also think the wider environment and framework of knowledge / understanding in which perceptions and the interpretations of our perceptions—which I would probably use as my working definition of experience—occurs, have an influence. These deeply embedded frameworks of understanding are not directly observable but they are causal in the sense that they color every experience we have. In a sense, they are the underlying “perceptual laws” that operate on the data we intake to produce an “experience.”
So when a cohort of people in a given time and place, operating within a particular paradigm or framework of knowledge, act upon “data” that are received by forming an interpretation of it, they often do so in a common way and call the resulting interpretations of phenomena “objective.” And one of the ways these frameworks act is by filtering the data itself. Deeper than what many call “experience” and deeper than what is termed “the hard problem” there is a causal framework of knowledge within each perceiver that continuously acts upon the data received to, among other things, reinforce its premises. I submit that these frameworks are profoundly causal without always manifesting observable behaviors, though I have zero problem with the assertion that observable linkages to macroscopic actions do often and maybe always exist and are observable.
Lastly, I do not think that what we call “the conscious mind” is generally able to modulate this underlying framework of knowledge. Rather, the conscious mind is a result of this underlying framework. There are certainly feedback mechanisms in my opinion. But my experience is that conscious reasoning doesn’t easily or quickly change the underlying perceptual framework. It can build another, contrive one over it, attempt a controlled override. But it cannot easily rewrite the fundamental framework through which we perceive the world.
We would like to think we are independent actors, able to apply reason and logic to make choices, and related, we may be equally content to understand that our instincts and gut feelings are the result of mechanisms embedded within our very architectures that are informed by eons of action, reaction and feedback, and “learning” that has become embodied in the forms that we are, and in that manner not easily overridden by logic and reason. Either way, none of us are particularly enamored of considering that we are simply spouting the truths embedded within the underlying framework of knowledge active within us, and that we are not discovering much more than ourselves through our rhetorical efforts.
I’m willing to concede I’m a mouthpiece for causal conditions at work within the complex of interwoven causal networks that appear to be “me” that are not entirely, or at all, within my conscious control. And I’m willing to admit this because I think maybe it can free me from the need to be right about things—not that it has yet, entirely—and the illusion that there is something to figure out. There may not be anything to ultimately figure out. No end to inquiry itself.
The conclusion to all this is that we each manifest a deeply embedded and self-referential framework of knowledge. And if we understand this, it means multiple perspectives can be entirely and objectively correct—where objectivity is described as the perceptual interpretation, or “experience”, that is “common” to all perceivers filtering data through a similar framework of knowledge. Objectivity, in other words, is not context independent.
What then, would “truth” be in this context? It would be impossible for me to say. But I would argue that it may behoove us all to take both our internal and external “experiences” with a grain of salt. In doing so, we arrive inevitably at the unknown, which all of us love to engage in ways that are perhaps unique to each of us, and which is intriguing because it is a personal “experience” (it seems to me) and not precisely a causal act that is externally valid. Only we, ourselves, can have the “experience” of encountering and grappling with the unknown, and the results of doing so are as unique as each of us is. Freed of the notion that one particular relationship formed to the unknown is “correct”, we can appreciate the amazing diversity of discoveries that are made, by individual persons, being who they are, even if they have no idea who that is.
Michael
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Hi Michael,
There are other camps outside of physicalism aside from dualism. Panpsychists usually consider their view distinct from dualists, as do idealists. And there are variants of dualism, such as the classic Cartesian substance dualism, and the more limited property dualism of the type that David Chalmers ascribes to. I actually tend to think of most panpsychists as property dualists who just see the relevant properties being everywhere. (There’s also predicate dualism, which I don’t really understand.)
Based on previous conversations, and remarks you make here, I wonder if you’re not more in the idealist camp. Although I’m not sure which sub-camp. There are people who think the primary reality is mental, with everything else derived from it. There are others who are more epistemic idealists in the Kantian tradition: objective reality exists, but our knowledge of it is limited. Both of them might accord with the view you’re describing. In the physics community, there are also what I’d call semi-idealists, like the QBists who see reality as having a participatory aspect.
But I understand the difficulty in just accepting one of these labels. We want them to be a description of the center of gravity of our conclusions, not ideologies we sign up for. I often point out that “physicalist” is a decent approximation of mine. But “mechanist” might be closer. So some things many physicalists are comfortable with, like fundamental randomness, I’m not. And even if an explanation of something had to go into realms we currently consider non-physical, I’d be okay with it, as long as the causal relations could be established. Ultimately this could come down by what we mean by “physical”.
On accepting as real experiences that don’t fit with the physicalist view, I always want to ask what people see as examples. My impression is I can accept the full range of experiences as physical, as long as I don’t make certain assumptions, or hold a more nuanced understanding of them than the common ones. It seems like aspects of experience can be practically ineffable and private without being absolutely ineffable and private, and so fit into the physical framework. But I’m open to the possibility that I’m missing something with this.
On what is real, your description of my view is pretty accurate. I don’t rule out the possibility that there may exist things that have no causal relations with us, but if they do, I can’t see how we can say anything about them. They don’t seem to exist for us in any meaningful sense.
But for our shared reality, it does seem to me that there are propositions we can establish with more reliability than others. Although that’s typically far less than what we might intuitively assume. Catching ourselves when we’re making those assumptions is the hard part, particularly when a whole culture, or our entire species, is making them. A big part of science, it seems to me, is finding ways to pierce through those assumptions.
Definitely external perception can be just as problematic as introspection. In recent years, I’ve actually started being more careful when I talk about the limitations of introspection, saying it’s just as fallible as any other kind of perception. It’s not that introspection is uniquely unreliable. It’s just that, as you discuss, we often don’t have easy ways to verify it as we can with the other varieties. Or maybe more accurately, we seem to be more likely to conclude we’re missing some aspect of reality when contradicted by other observations.
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What if we focus only on what could be seen by other beings (our behavior) and put aside what is our internal (our experience)? If we do that, there would be no distinction between people and AI.
“We administer a Turing test to AI chatbots. We examine how chatbots behave in a suite of classic behavioral games that are designed to elicit characteristics such as trust, fairness, risk-aversion, cooperation, etc., as well as how they respond to a traditional Big 5 psychological survey that measures personality traits. ChatGPT-4 exhibits behavioral and personality traits that are statistically indistinguishable from a random human from tens of thousands of human subjects from more than 50 countries. Chatbots also modify their behavior based on previous experience and contexts “as if” they were learning from the interactions and change their behavior in response to different framings of the same strategic situation. Their behaviors are often distinct from average and modal human behaviors, in which case they tend to behave on the more altruistic and cooperative end of the distribution. We estimate that they act as if they are maximizing an average of their own and partner’s payoffs.” (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2313925121)
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I’ve seen the claim, although other AI researchers have questioned their results. But I’ve never really thought the five minute test was sufficient. It was based on a throwaway remark Turing made in his 1950 paper. And I know every version I’ve interacted with, it hasn’t taken much to flush them out. Given enough time, there’s still a behavioral difference.
Eventually though, there won’t be. And when that happens, I don’t know. People may increasingly see them as fellow beings. Although this is a matter of intuition, and intuitions shift depending on what we know. So who knows? Maybe people will insist they need to see and interact to believe it’s a person.
But when that no longer works ala Westworld? At that point, we can tell people whatever we want, but their sense of a fellow being may just be too strong.
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