I think the problem of consciousness is primarily one of definition. The word “consciousness” can refer to a range of concepts. Some of the concepts are scientifically tractable, while others, once we clarify them, are metaphysical assumptions that we can either choose to hold or dismiss. This is one of the reasons I find exploring and delineating these different concepts productive.
One distinction that’s been around for a few decades is Ned Block’s between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Access consciousness is use of information for cognitive purposes, such as memory, attention, discrimination, self report, etc. Phenomenal consciousness is described as “raw experience”, the “what it’s like” aspect of consciousness, the character of the experience.
Access consciousness is the scientifically tractable version. But what about phenomenal consciousness? One of my concerns with the concept is it is itself ambiguous. In my view, “phenomenal consciousness” can refer to one of at least two concepts.
One is what I would call “manifest consciousness”, consciousness as it seems to us from the inside. Manifest consciousness seems irreducible, ineffable, and private. Indeed, strictly from a subjective perspective, it is irreducible. I can’t, from the inside, break down my experience of redness into any components. It’s just there. Describing it seems difficult. And it seems private to me. Yet I myself seem to have unfettered access to it.
Manifest consciousness is the seeming before any theoretical commitments. I think manifest consciousness is what Eric Schwitzgebel was aiming for when he developed his “innocent” definition of phenomenal consciousness. I do know it’s what I meant by the term on older posts prior to deciding that, without clarification, it’s a misleading use of it.
The problem is that most philosophers, both illusionists and phenomenal realists, seem to have a stronger meaning in mind. There are many theories about consciousness. One of the most straightforward is that the reality implied by the appearance is true, that manifest consciousness is a fundamental reality. Let’s call this “fundamental consciousness”.
Fundamental consciousness is the theory that consciousness not only seems irreducible, but is. That it’s not only difficult to describe, but impossible. That it’s not only difficult to observe from the outside, but fundamentally impossible. Which means that our first person access to it is privileged in some metaphysical manner.
I think manifest consciousness is what illusionists say is the illusion of fundamental consciousness. When they deny phenomenal consciousness, they aren’t denying manifest consciousness, but fundamental consciousness. But for weak phenomenal realists, phenomenal consciousness just is manifest consciousness.
On the other hand, strong phenomenal realists deny that there is any distinction between manifest and fundamental consciousness. For them, they are one and the same. So any denial of fundamental consciousness they take to be a denial of manifest consciousness, which seems incoherent.
This distinction can also be applied to synonymous concepts like qualia. When I argued for the existence of qualia some years ago, I was arguing for the manifest version, not the fundamental one. When I largely stopped using terms like “qualia” and “phenomenal” (except in replying to others using them), it was to avoid the confusion between these different versions.
Of course, as a reductionist, I think there are better theories than the fundamental one. In particular, we can see the concept of access consciousness itself as a meta-theory to explain manifest consciousness.
In any case, it seems like a lot of arguing past each other could be avoided if we acknowledged these distinct concepts. Most of the debate is about different theories of consciousness, not whether the manifest version exists.
But maybe I’m missing something? Are manifest and fundamental consciousness more difficult to separate than I’m thinking? Or are there additional distinctions we could use to further delineate the concept of phenomenal consciousness?
SelfAwarePatterns 
I think this could be an instructive distinction, but maybe not in the way you hope. What you’re proposing is that manifest consciousness might seem like consciousness, without actually being consciousness. That ontological privilege would be preserved for something called fundamental consciousness. One school insists they are the same, but another school wants to keep the distinction.
Why? Well, the problem with manifest consciousness — say, my manifest consciousness — is that we can’t both see it, and anything that cannot be seen by both of us is of suspect ontological status — for scientific purposes, at least. (or other purposes this ontological doubt doesn’t usually come up.
Practically speaking, we can both see manifest consciousness. It’s just that I can’t see yours, and you can’t see mine. This makes it a problem unlike any other. The issue becomes whether and how we can handle this special problem in the usual scientific way. One school insists we just can’t, and we should stop making fools of ourselves, accept our limitations, and move on. Another insists we can, and bless them, they keep trying. If you ask me, what they’re hoping to identify is “objective” consciousness as opposed to “subjective” consciousness.
Is there a school that insists these are the same? Well, dual-aspect monism, I guess.
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It seems to me that when you say that we can’t see someone else’s manifest consciousness, you’re importing assumptions from fundamental consciousness. All we can say about manifest consciousness is it’s historically been effectively impossible. We can debate about what contemporary brain scanning is able to accomplish, but ultimately it comes down to how optimistic or pessimistic we want to be about what that scanning technology will someday be able to accomplish.
There’s also the question of whether consciousness makes any difference in behavior. Most people want to say it does. But if it does, then we can study the causal chain between sensory stimuli and motor output, eventually being able to isolate why someone says, “I’m having conscious experience X.” The only way I can see to argue that that isn’t isolating consciousness is to take an epiphenomenal stance. At that point, we’re in the realm of untestable metaphysics.
The relationship between subjective experience and its objective reality, or whether there is such a relationship, seems like where the various theories of consciousness come in. Fundamental consciousness is one of them, but I think one that has to be defended, just like any of the others.
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Your proposal to define manifest consciousness as “the seeming before any theoretical commitments” might once have been a workable definition of phenomenal consciousness, but by now, alas, there are theoretical commitments. The thing is, they’re not one-sided.
When you distinguish manifest and fundamental consciousness, you’re clarifying the theoretical commitments for everyone. For the strong phenomenal realists, fundamental consciousness is really what they mean by “phenomenal consciousness.” For the weak phenomenal realists, manifest consciousness is really what they mean by it.
At this point it seems like the weak phenomenal realists can do without the notion of “fundamental consciousness” altogether, while the strong realists have been saddled with justifying it. Thus, a strong realist would have to “import notions from fundamental consciousness” to justify the claim that manifest consciousness is inherently inaccessible; while a weak realist would be free to maintain, without any additional “notions,” that it is accessible.
But here a theoretical commitment beyond the innocence of manifest consciousness has also been made. The weak realist assumes, without any real evidence, that access is a mere technological problem. This smuggles in some serious notions about the nature of consciousness, beyond the theoretical innocence of “manifest consciousness.”
The strategy is readily extended to “causal chains,” which seeks to place consciousness as a link in a chain presumed at the outset to consist of “physical” links, where “physical” has satisfyingly solid connotations. What actually happens when an electron influences another electron is called “physical” for convenience, but it remains a mystery, a black box, which we currently explain vaguely as “forces” or “fields.” This is somehow more satisfying to the physicalist than the black box of “intent” or “agency” encountered when considering how a person influences anything.
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On manifest consciousness being a workable definition of phenomenal consciousness, that’s actually the definition I held for years. I actually think it’s the definition most scientists who talk about phenomenal consciousness hold. It seems like the one held by higher order thought theorists as well as Michael Graziano with his attention schema theory. And of course some philosophers like Eric Schwitzgebel.
“The weak realist assumes, without any real evidence, that access is a mere technological problem.”
I’d say that the weak realist has the option that it’s a technological problem, an option not available to the strong realist. But I’ll admit that most weak realists hold their position because they discover they can dispense with the assumptions that prevent those kinds of options.
I’ll admit that accounting for the causal chains is exactly the kind of explanation I’m looking for. But my notion of physicalism pretty much amounts to everything following rules, or more fundamentally, being part of structural relations, many of which we can discover and incorporate in predictive theories.
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For the weak phenomenal realist, are there other options on the table besides the possibility of technological access? Could they hold that access is impossible? This would seem to move them into the strong phenomenal realist camp. Or could they hold that access is possible, but by non-technological means? That would put them in some kind of intersubjectivist camp — perhaps not logically incompatible with weak phenomenal realism, but not where you were going, I suspect. To say that technology is an option for them is to elide the fact that it’s their only practical option, unless I’m missing something.
Technology and predictive theory go hand in hand, relying as they do on tractable causal chains. Any fuzzy links in the causal chains — and in real life beyond the lab, they abound — are assumed to be resolvable in principle, using the lab methodologies that have already made the simpler links tractable. I just wonder if there are more appropriate ways of dealing with these fuzzy links. The lab technicians may find them frustratingly vague and unreliable, but to insist that they are therefore somehow ghostly and unreal seems like an unnecessary overreach.
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I’d say that any specific thing the weak realist holds to, such as technological access being possible, involve theoretical commitments, and is more about the theory of consciousness they find more probable (or class of theories) than manifest consciousness. Although I do have to admit that all observation is theory laden, and I suspect that would apply to our impressions of our own experience. So the dividing line between what is manifest to us and what theories we find more plausible is probably blurrier than I implied. But that only increases the caution we should use in making assumptions about what seems obvious to us.
I think fuzziness can be accounted for, the possible ranges mapped, and probabilistically predicted. That does imply that improvements are always possible, ones that might increase the accuracy of the probabilities predicted. Although I would think that there’s a point of diminishing return, where marginal improvements in accuracy may not be worth the additional cost and effort involved.
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If weak phenomenal realism stops at accepting manifest consciousness, with no further theoretical commitments, and strong phenomenal realism is the only other type of phenomenal realism, then strong phenomenal realism would encompass any phenomenal realism that adds a theoretical commitment. This could be the commitment that manifest consciousness is private, or it could be the commitment that it’s accessible. It looks like we need to distinguish at least two kinds of strong phenomenal realism (perhaps branching again at how it’s accessible).
I’m just exploring the logic of the categories, but it feels like weak phenomenal realism in your conception must be more than just the passive acknowledgment of manifest consciousness. It’s “weak” in the sense that it makes a theoretical commitment away from consciousness being fundamentally real, so that it may be explained in (and possibly reduced to) other terms.
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I’d say that the way “strong phenomenal realism” is used today, it means fundamental consciousness, the theory that manifest consciousness is more than just the manifestation, but the fundamental reality. “Weak phenomenal realism” acknowledges that manifest phenomenal properties exist, but holds back on committing to them being fundamental. Of course, a weak phenomenal realist does typically make their own commitments to one or more of a variety of other theories.
I do agree that virtually no one only commits to manifest consciousness. Eric Schwitzgebel makes a mighty try at it, but I’ve argued to him before that the slightest analytical pressure on his innocent conception forces theoretical choices.
My only point for this post is that manifest consciousness doesn’t necessarily entail fundamental consciousness. Fundamental consciousness is a theoretical choice.
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“My only point for this post is that manifest consciousness doesn’t necessarily entail fundamental consciousness. Fundamental consciousness is a theoretical choice.”
As I understand, this leaves room for the illlusionists to deny fundamental consciousness without denying manifest consciousness. They no longer have to risk the absurdity of denying that manifest consciousness is private, because now they can deny that fundamental consciousness is private. And theoretically, sure, why not? But the onus is on them to show that fundamental consciousness isn’t private, and I wish them luck. I doubt either of us will be around to see one person’s consciousness completely replaced by another’s (as opposed to preserved while witnessing another person’s experiences). In fact, to me the idea sounds incoherent.
It also leaves room for them to say that manifest consciousness is reducible to something else. But here there is a choice: it could be reducible to regular old physics, or to a new kind of physics that includes some element of proto-consciousness. This too involves theoretical commitments.
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Definitely there is a choice. Denial of fundamental consciousness doesn’t automatically lead to the options I favor. Of course, I think the ones I do favor are the best and have argued for them. In the end, if fundamental consciousness is true and makes any difference in the world, then every other theory will eventually be falsified. My suspicion is that fundamental consciousness will go the way of vitalism, but maybe history will show me wrong.
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I don’t think that positing fundamental consciousness in the sense of a proto-consciousness in all things would falsify other theories, exactly. It would put them in a different light, and clarify some of the puzzles that seem to plague them. I think physicalism as we usually understand it will go the way of Newtonian physics.
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Dual aspect monism comes in two flavours: property dualism and predicate dualism. The former is a dead end — nothing is gained by gluing two sides of substance dualism together, as Jaegwon Kim spelled out quite a while ago. Trouble is, he also treated predicate dualism as a version of property dualism and thought that his causal exclusion argument demolished the latter too. This seems to have stuck in many philosophically-minded minds, alas. But it ain’t so. Predicate dualism is not dead — just unfashionable for some reason.
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I think the discomfort is in predicating (at least) two effective ontologies, where the monistic intent is to end up with one.
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That’s a regrettably common misconception — exactly the one that apparently led Kim to think that the causal exclusion argument knocked down predicate dualism as well as property dialism.
However, predicate dualism does not posit two effective ontologies but two distinct conceptualisations (discourses, desriptions) of *one* effective ontology (“events in extension” for Davidson, “noumenon” for Kant, “world an sich” for Hegel…). Hence no discomfort. It is a truly monistic view with no ontological tensions.
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I think of ontologies as the vocabularies of discourses, rather than ultimate components of “the real.” There can be more than one ontology, and for that matter more than two. That said, the metaphor of depth perception and the two eyes continues to intrigue me. Rather than an unknowable monism, I look for the resolution of incompatible or incommensurate ontologies in what I might call, for the moment, knowable paradox: a discovered and immediately experienced depth that is the reconciliation of two perspectives, in a way suggested by stereopsis.
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Well that kind of “ontology” is what is properly called “ontological commitments of a discourse”. The unfortunate scientific usage of abbreviating that to “ontology” is understandable, but causes misunderstandings — as in this case.
But if that is what you mean, then I do not understand what makes you say “I think the discomfort is in predicating (at least) two effective ontologies, where the monistic intent is to end up with one.” Only eliminativists aim to be able to remove the vocabulary (and hence the ontological commitments) of the mentalist discourse — it is certainly not a mainstream stance.
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If “ontological commitments of a discourse” are not deep ontological commitments but ad hoc ones — if, for example, the discourse of recipes does not hold that a “teaspoonful” is a basic component of reality — then one may have as many ontologies as one likes. But if there is some discourse which uses the word “ontology” with more serious intent, and holds that “teaspoonfuls” are not real in a deep sense, then the number of acceptable ontologies becomes limited.
A monist ontology would have it that only one kind of thing is real in this deep sense. Thus, it might say of colours that they are “not real,” meaning that colours can be explained in other terms more firmly grounded in an ultimate reality. There are many today who would make such an assertion, and many more who would at least assert some kind of monist ontology. For such people, predicating both an ontology with colours as fundamental elements of existence, and an ontology in which they do not exist fundamentally, would be a contradiction that violates the basic conditions of their monism. This is all I mean by referring to their discomfort.
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As one of those, unlike you, who is not a reductionist and who is also unpersuaded that there is any real distinction between what you are labeling manifest and fundamental consciousness, there are a few questions I may wish to pose. However, I think it prudent to request a bit of clarification first. You say that fundamental consciousness is “not only difficult to observe from the outside, but fundamentally impossible. Which means that our first person access to it is privileged in some metaphysical manner.” Do you mean by the concept “metaphysical” something transcendent or from a reality beyond the physical realm that is perceptible to our senses? And do you mean that fundamental consciousness, as you describe it, necessarily is privileged in that sort of metaphysical manner?
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“Do you mean by the concept “metaphysical” something transcendent or from a reality beyond the physical realm that is perceptible to our senses?”
“that is perceptible to our senses” seems like it broadens the scope to include things like radio waves. I tend to think outright non-physicalism is implied by it. But I acknowledge a posteriori physicalists who say it isn’t, not to mention outright non-reductive physicalists. For them, the best we can do is isolate correlations between experience and physics, but can never establish the logical relations between them. My view is we can establish those relations, but only for manifest consciousness, not fundamental consciousness.
For fundamental consciousness to be absolutely ineffable and private, yet be accessible for the subject, it does seem like that access has to transcend physics. Again, I’ll acknowledge other physicalist views that try to stake out space in between.
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Mike, If I understand your clarification, “…fundamental consciousness to be absolutely ineffable and private, yet be accessible for the subject, it does seem like that access has to transcend physics.” Or as I read you as also saying: “outright non-physicalism is implied by [fundamental consciousness]. Am I following your argument correctly? I should add that if fundamental consciousness is understood that way, then for anyone who subscribes to a reductionist physicalist ontology, then that form of consciousness is a mere illusion. Is that your conclusion? Is that your position? Or am I way out in the weeds? There appear to be many dogs in this fight; I want to be absolutely sure which one is yours.
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Matti, I think fundamental consciousness does imply non-physicalism, or maybe some form of undiscovered physics, and I don’t think it exists. Of course, I think manifest consciousness is undeniable, but I think there are more promising theories to explain it.
Hope that’s answering your question.
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Mike, well, that does clarify your position. That helps a lot. Thanks. I, of course, respectfully disagree. I think consciousness certainly does exist. I say it that way—without a modifying adjective—because I have heard no persuasive argument that there is a distinction between a so-called manifest consciousness and a fundamental consciousness. That sounds like a hope rather than a plausible explanation. An alternative and reasonable explanation is that a first-person or subjective ontology exists—it’s what we experience—and it is a causal effect of objective and complex neurobiological mechanisms and processes.
Let me suggest a little homework that may help somewhat with the plausibly of such an alternative explanation. Head over to your nearby medical school library and pick up an introductory textbook on neurology. After reading a few chapters you will notice that the textbook discusses—without any metaphysical misgivings whatsoever—the proper diagnoses of patients’ various first-person or subjective mental pains, sensory disorders or abnormal conditions and then confidently relates such complaints to a list of specific underlying and physically objective neurobiological processes and structures that are the likely cause of those symptoms. A trained neurologist need not observe such first-person complaints from the outside in order believe they really exist in the real world and relate them to malfunctions in certain objective physical structures and processes.
I submit we live in but one physical reality with multiple non-reducible emergent properties resulting from multiple complex systems—this includes not only subjective consciousness but such mundane phenomena as economies. One must spend some time, however, understanding the science of complexity. Complex physical systems can and do create new order and new functionality through an evolutionary bottom to top process. There is nothing other-worldly or metaphysical about it. Such new orders and functionality create characteristics that are not true of the lower components and thus are not reducible
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Matti, it seems like your neurologist point more undermines the idea of fundamental consciousness than supports it. It’s exactly the fact that such issues can be mapped to physical conditions that renders the concept increasingly redundant. It’s why epiphenomenalism is a problem for this theory. It’s the only way to preserve it given this kind of evidence.
I think you might be misinterpreting what complexity theory tells us. Consider weather. No one doubts for a minute that weather reduces to various atmospheric conditions, which in turn reduce to thermodynamics, and so on. Yes, the complexity involved prevents us from having 100% accurate weather predictions. But complexity theory allows us to understand why and account for the variances and their affects. It’s why the weather report can tell us that there’s a 70% chance of rain tomorrow. Or can provide those of us on hurricane coasts relatively narrow cones of a storm’s path.
To say we are helpless to relate these higher level complex systems to their lower level components, I think, is to take the wrong lessons from complexity theory.
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I am deeply impressed with your ability to pivot in order to defend your basic argument. And I respectfully submit that we are talking past each other on the question of complexity.
I was hoping to perhaps step away from the debate on consciousness where most folks have deep loyalties to their pet theories and use modern economic theory as a safe example of emergent phenomena within a complex systems. However, I find myself ensnared in other work and, frankly, I’m feeling lazy. I will only say that since Adam Smith first clarified the basic rules of economic behavior the process was known and only separated for study as the separate science of complexity grew in the twentieth century. Broadly speaking we know that in an economy, for example, the whole creates outcomes from the bottom up that are novel, surprising, and irreducible to the lower level parts—the system has properties (e.g., economic bubbles, recessions and depressions) that the parts do not have. More than an analogy, many believe the same complex systems behavior applies to understanding consciousness.
As I ponder this interminable debate I again notice that our thoughts appear to be constrained once again within the confines of the old Cartesian-Lockean background assumptions. The main assumption being that we have only two choices, mind and/or body and we must choose. Since Locke and Descartes many still accept this limited vocabulary that contrasts the mental and the physical as separate entities and as the only way to pose the basic ontological question. This, as I have alluded to before, comes to us as old wine in new skins from W. V. O. Quine’s taste for an ontology of “desert landscapes” by way of folks like Dan Dennett. Thus, we are encouraged to pick a side and defend that choice. As I’ve also said a few times before, this old background assumption needs to be challenged. Emergence of novel phenomena—like economies and ecosystems—which defy reduction results from complex systems. That is an accepted scientific truth that challenges the old Cartesian-Lockean assumption applied to the study of consciousness by positing an ontology potentially more varied and interesting than Quine’s simple desert landscape.
I cut myself short here because I’m sensing that I’m getting into a redundant loop on your blog Mike—repeating myself ad nauseam. It may be time for me to move on and pester some other poor soul in the blogosphere.
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We may well be talking past each other. For example, I don’t disagree about the problems with the Cartesian legacy. Although I get the impression maybe that you think I’m caught up in that paradigm. I also find it puzzling to see Dennett characterized as being caught up in it, the guy who came up with the (admittedly derisive) phrase “Cartesian theater” to try to call attention to the Cartesian intuitions that pollute so much theorizing about the mind.
I have no issue with emergence, at least in the weak sense. But I’m not satisfied with it alone as an explanation. For example, we know thermodynamics emerge from particle physics, but we understand how that emergence happens. I also don’t see that us not being able to predict the emergent system with complete certainty as meaning we can’t know how the emergence happens.
Matti, these discussions should only happen to the extent you’re getting something out of them, even if it’s just us practicing and sharpening our arguments on each other. I will say that I would miss our discussions if you decide to move on.
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Mike, my understanding is that Dennett’s critique of a Cartesian theater refers to a lingering (and erroneous) dualism in the philosophy of mind. That is, once we reject dualism in favor of materialism there remains for some a sort of private theater of consciousness which simply amounts to a distinction without a difference—it’s still dualism. Dennett is right about that! And, Yes, I submit that Dennett was caught up in Descartes’ Paradigm—a different one—the Cartesian-Lockean paradigm or background assumption that there are only two choices in our ontology—mind or matter. The set up of the issue that way bias the analysis.
Mike, I would hate to abandon my reading of your delightful blog. Perhaps you are right. I can try to sharpen my thinking rather than just recycle.
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Thanks Matti. Relieved to hear that.
I tend to think just saying “matter” doesn’t cover it, we have to include matter in motion, energy, processes, and structural organization. But this might be what you’re referring to with emergent phenomena?
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Two brief comments…
“I can’t, from the inside, break down my experience of redness into any components. It’s just there.” I suggest that a lot of confusion is caused by the very expression “experience of redness” — it implies that redness is a something that we experience. No, “redness” *is* our experience of any conditions which result in us having an experience so labelled. I am sure that’s what you mean, but that’s not necessarily how it is read.
Consciousness being irreducible in the sense of not being (fully) amenable to a physicalist description does not automatically imply anything metaphysical. People tend to pat me on the head and murmur “There, there…” when I respond to such assertions by shouting “Davidson!” and “Predicate dualism!”, but heck, I can’t help the fact that Davidson’s contribution in this area seems to have been forgotten. Minds may or may not be actually reducible to physics, but a physicalist take on minds does not commit one to reducibility of minds. There’s nothing metaphysical involved.
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On redness, I think I catch your point. Although I’m not sure how else to reword it to avoid that implication. Maybe I could have said “the experience that is redness”, or maybe “the redness experience”? Or just talked about redness without the “experience” word? It seems like any of those would have called attention to their oddness.
On predicate dualism, right. I noted to someone else in this thread that there are non-reductive physicalists. But if it doesn’t imply anything non-physical, or at least exotic, then what is the explanation for the putative inability to reduce mental predicates to physical ones? We might say the mapping is really complex, and I’d be on board with that. But it seems like we have the ability to relate other complex phenomena, like democracy to physics, without encountering any impassable epistemic divides.
I tend to think we’re only tempted to think we are because we’re conflating manifest and fundamental consciousness. But maybe I’m missing something?
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On redness… “Redness experience” works for me, though my preferred formulation is “experience commonly labelled (called, referred to as) redness”, which allows for variations in the visual perception apparatus.
On reductionism… You say “But it seems like we have the ability to relate other complex phenomena, like democracy to physics, without encountering any impassable epistemic divides.” “Relate” is a pretty vague term, involving a lot of hand waving. What’s a “vote”? (Remember “hanging chads”?) What’s a voter? In Athens, just non-enslaved males. Until recently, just males. These days we include women too. In the future… Well, I am sure you have read Asimov’s robot stories. What physical (!) processes account for this evolution of “voter”? And at what age does one become a voter? Relating democracy to physics offers no answers. I doubt any philosophers would accept a similarly weak “relating” of minds to physics as any sort of reductionist stance.
How does predicate dualism avoid metaphysics creeping in? By not multiplying ontologies. Very tersly…
a) To a true monist, both the mentalist and the physicalist take on minds must amount to no more than distinct discourses dealing with the same monist reality.
b) Reduction of either of these discourses to the other would require a law-like translatability — an ability to reliably read one off the other.
c) Because discourses necessarily require and operate on conceptualisations (as opposed to ostentations) such law-like translatability cannot be guaranteed.
To which I add
d) There are simple computational models which, being Turing-complete, provably exhibit a lack of such translatability, making the conjecture of non-reductive physicalism quite plausible.
So, no metaphysics involved.
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Good point on “relate”. I was trying to avoid “reduce” which I suspect would have gotten us into a discussion of prediction and that law-like translatability. I would note that the reason this would be a challenge for democracy is because it’s more a category of activities, a pretty hazy one as you note, rather than one discrete activity. Which means for those translatability laws, we have to be much more specific about which democracy we’re talking about in which historical period, maybe even which election.
As it turns out, I think the same is true for “consciousness”, that it’s more a hazy and context sensitive category of capabilities than a discrete process or contiguous physical system. That also means for its laws of translatability, we have to narrow things down to particular conceptions. But if we’re talking about a monistic ontology, it should be possible, at least in principle. As I noted in the post, I think the biggest issue with consciousness is this conceptual analysis. (Which is why analytic functionalism may be the most accurate label for me.)
The problem of course, is that people can always say that whichever version we choose is not what they mean by “consciousness”. This is often coupled with a resistance to clarifying exactly what they do mean, and/or implying that clarification is misguided. It seems like we encounter similar issues with “love”, “religion”, and “life”.
But maybe I’m overlooking roadblocks. What would be an example of d)? Are we talking about ANNs, or something more basic?
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I think you are missing the real problem. Talking about a very specific instance of democracy does not help, because determination of what is a vote and who is a voter is down to collective human decisions — i.e. to minds. And how those decisions change is also down to minds. Which is why the concept of democracy is completely intractable from a physicalist PoV, unless it has already resolved (solved, dissolved or whatever) the mind/body problem. Which is not the case.
But take an individual mind for simplicity (ha!). I have no doubt that given a complete (!) description of a very specific embodied human neural system briefly exposed to some stimulus which it should experience as painful, in principle it could be possible to decided whether it would respond with an “Ouch!” or a “Fuck!” or something else (preferably before the sun goes nova). But to decide on a response to the same stimulus on some other occasion, you would have to start again with a complete description of the system at that other time. That’s not reduction. That’s a joke. Imagine Newton’s law of gravity operating in the same manner: you can work out the attraction force between two bodies only of you know the complete internal structure at the time of each body down to (say) the atomic level. Not useful.
If that’s all you are after, then I am sorry to have to tell you: philosophically you are a not reductive physicalist. Live with that. 🙂
As for (d) — no not ANNs. When I say simple, I mean computationally trivial. I had already previously mentioned the two I know (I understand there may be more): Game of Life and Langton’s Ant. Both are known to be Turing-complete (as manifestly human minds must be). Consequently it is in principle impossible to predict whether a particular configuration A will, at some future time, evolve into a particular configuration B. Specifically, in GoL this means that there is no way to decide whether a given pattern is a “spaceship” (i.e. replicates itself elsewhere after some specific time) or not. Hence the set of patterns easily described by us as spaceships cannot be characterised within the language of GoL rules at all. Spaceships have to be discovered empirically – there is no other way. And yet each individual spaceship manifestly and trivially operates strictly by those same GoL rules and the complete description of the configuration is always available. Thus there is not and cannot be a law-like translation of the generic concept of “spaceship” into GoL rules. No metaphysics involved.
That strikes me as a good model of the predicate dualism’s take on the mind/body relationship.
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On democracy and minds, we could switch to tracking the behavior of hurricanes instead. Due to complexity dynamics, their behavior cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy, yet I live in the southern US on the gulf cost, where the hurricane predictions, within the range of uncertainty they project, are more right than wrong, right enough to be vitally useful. Does the lack of complete certitude mean we can’t consider hurricanes to reduce to physics?
I’m after understanding how the mind works. I’m not particularly worried about predicting what a particular mind will do. I suspect minds, similar to the Game of Life and Langton’s Ant, are systems where the only way to find out for sure what they will do is to run them. (In the case of Langton’s Ant, its use of pseudorandom numbers guarantees that.) Yet it seems strange to me to say that Game of Life and Langton’s Ant can’t be reduced to their computational dynamics, when they run on engineered systems designed to be deterministic. I think what you’re really saying is that their results can’t be predicted with systems simpler than they are.
In the case of minds, of course, we predict what they’re going to do all the time, often more or less accurately. It’s just that the predictions are probabilistic rather than 100% deterministic, so there’s always a chance of being wrong, a chance that is higher if we don’t know the particular mind well. Similar to the hurricanes, I don’t see that as meaning they can’t be reduced to non-mental phenomena.
Maybe another way of saying this is, my criteria for saying a system can be reduced seem less stringent than yours. I would note that mine are more stringent than many a posteriori physicalists who consider themselves reductionists. I do think we have to have those translation laws, but I allow that they can be pragmatically stochastic, as long as the resulting probabilities are accurate enough to be useful.
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Sorry, for the pause. The below is not as well organised as I’d like, but it’s a complex subject and I am not submitting an academic paper. 🙂
One minor detail… Lanton’s Ant is a deterministic system – no randomness, pseudo or otherwise, involved. I think you misconstrued Wikipedia’s entry which notes that the Ant’s *output* is effectively pseudo-random (until it isn’t).
And yes, hurricanes are often invoked as an example of something an emergent system, but the analogy with minds doesn’t work for me nonetheless. With hurricanes and similar you *start* with a physical 3rd person PoV and proceed to deepen that by stepping down (and up) the levels of emergent physical descriptions. There is no other non-3rd person POV description/discourse involved. With minds, the situation is distinctly different. There we directly experience a 1st person PoV discourse and by collective efforts we have constructed a 3rd person PoV description of the world. The problem is relating the two — which is not a problem with hurricanes.
As an aside, for physical systems where deterministic chaos makes predictions deviate from actual behaviour sooner or later, the problem is not computing a chaotic system. The problem is to compute a *given* physical system. Thus a physical double pendulum is unpredictable, but I have one running as my screen saver. There is no translation between independent discourses involved.
Now, to understand how minds work, you *do* need to be able to relate the mentalist discourse of pains, wants, emotions etc… to the physicalist discourse. Behavourists attempted to ignore the need to do so, and it didn’t get them very far. Davidson’s argument shows that there is no guarantee the two discourses can be usefully related, except in trivial cases. In which case we are stuck with Dennett’s intentional stance when judging mindedness. (Remember those two birds arguing the point in Tchaikovsky’s Children_of_Memory? :-))
As I am sure you are aware, even in our current computers there is no necessary connection between physical machine state and what is happening on the software level — the connection is contingent, depending not just on implementational details, but also on past history of machine activity. This does not prove that the same is true for minds, but disrupting any necessary connection would be a good defence against a parasite taking over one’s behaviour for its own purposes — the fact evolution is unlikely to miss.
Finally, the GoL problem I keep pointing out, explicitly depends on GoL’s Turing completeness, which makes it subject to the halting problem difficulty. (Penrose is right in pointing the problem’s relevance to minds, though I think his conclusion is flawed.)
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No worries on pauses or organization. It’s all friendly discussion here.
Thanks on the Langton’s Ant randomness thing. Have to admit I quickly skimmed the article and didn’t catch the the pseudorandomness was in the output.
I’ve never felt the pull of the 1st person vs 3rd person dichotomy. All POVs have limitations and blind spots. We overcome them by taking alternate POVs. To me, the 1st person one is just another perspective, one with its own blind spots. I think we’re tempted to privilege that POV due to lingering Cartesian intuitions. (I’m calling them “Cartesian” but they’re much older than Descartes, and so very hard to look around.) It’s why fundamental consciousness feels natural to so many people
But once we accept that the 1st person POV is just as fallible as any other, then I think the idea of an uncrossable divide is dissolved. But maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe I should ask, what about the 1st person POV makes it irreconcilable with other POVs? What would it have to look like if it were reconcilable?
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Sorry, I somehow lost the relevant email and the stupid web interface does not allow me to comment beyond a certain depth of nested responses. This is in fact a reply to your latest in our exchange on this topic.
Rev PoV1 and Pov3 — we are at cross purposes. You are talking about semantics of relevant discourses (their fallibility). I am talking about their grammar, which is a prerequisite for any semantic content whatsoever. If grammars of the two discourses cannot be sufficiently aligned, translation is not possible regardless of the semantic payload.
Can they be aligned? Davidson’s predicate dualism argument does not exclude the possibility. What it does is to establish that a lack of sufficient alignment does not entail retreat from physicalism.
The real problem, as I see it, is that we have absolutely no reason to expect such an alignment. If it is possible — hooray! But let’s not fool ourselves by assuming that it is bound to be possible. Why should it be? The same landscape can be depicted by a poet and a painter. Can you recover the painting from the poem? Or vice versa? The expressive vocabularies of the painter and the poet do not sufficiently align — surprise!
The same can happen with human languages. Hence the old AI joke about a translation algorithm asked to translate “out of sight – out pf mind” into Chinese and than back into English, spitting out “invisible idiot”.
More generally, IMHO the distinction between PoV1 and PoV3 discourses is crucial. A lot of philosophical muddle concerning minds and bodies arises from mixing the two. Such as the classic I keep coming across: “if determinism is true, then nobody actually does anything – it all just happens!”. Or the startling argument by Raymond Tallis in Neuromania that if one’s consciousness of a “redness” were a brain state, then the neurons themselves would have to be red.
Think of it as a generalisation of Einstein’s injunction to mind one’s frameworks of reference.
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Yeah, that WordPress reply limitation is a long running frustration. It’s stupid since it only applies to the web version. Someone replying in the WP reader or admin UI isn’t constrained by it, and the reply link from the notification emails get you around it. The way you did it has it showing in the right spot. Sorry for the headache.
I haven’t read Davidson directly, so this might be overlooking some crucial steps in his reasoning. But going by Howard Robinson’s quick SEP summation ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#PreDua ) it looks like Davidson’s chief issue is that the mental can’t be directly mapped to the physical. This is because the mental is about what happens, not a physical constitution, and what happens is multiply realizable. As a functionalist, I’m completely onboard with this. I just don’t see a need to call this “dualism”.
If this is right, then maybe the differences between us here is preferred terminology?
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Access consciousness is a scientifically tractable version. But so is manifest consciousness.
Moreover – and I think I’m taking a page from Schwitzgebel here, but he should not be held responsible for mistakes I make – “manifest consciousness” is practically redundant. It’s the manifest-ness, not the (supposed) fundamentality, that inspires us to come up with the word “consciousness” in the first place.
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I agree. Although it’s worth noting that the word “consciousness” is relatively recent (1600s). We have to make assumptions to take any of the ancient writers, or those in other cultures, to be talking about it.
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I appreciated that post by Eric S. that you linked to. In it he says: “Paul Feyerabend (1963) denies that mental processes exist. He does so on the grounds that “mental processes”, understood in the ordinary sense, are necessarily nonmaterial, and only material things exist.” Yes. This is precisely how such arguments come across to me—they merely reiterate the materialist-turned-physicalist assumptions that I don’t agree with.
But there are problems on both sides. Eric points out: “Unfortunately, enthusiasts about consciousness tend to set themselves up for objections of this sort. Consciousness enthusiasts tend to want to do two things simultaneously: want to use the word “consciousness” (or “phenomenology” or “qualia” or “what it’s like” or whatever) to refer to that undeniable stream of experience that we all have.”
Yes. In reading these consciousness-enthusiast accounts I simply disregarded the suspicions I had concerning qualia and took the various authors to mean something like experience in general, or the stream of experience. It didn’t seem to me the issues they discussed were about the precise characterization of experience, but about justifying its existence, so I didn’t even notice these inaccuracies in their descriptions. Perhaps I was overly generous. I simply substituted a pre-theoretical version of experience as I held it in my mind wherever I saw the word ‘qualia’, and I did so without realizing it. Then, coming upon Dennett, I saw him as knocking down a straw man because I had forgotten the dubious manner in which so many had characterized experience. Though I don’t think I agree with his argument for the non-existence of qualia, which seems to me to be nothing more than “if it’s not material then it doesn’t exist”.
—”Manifest consciousness seems irreducible, ineffable, and private. Indeed, strictly from a subjective perspective, it is irreducible. I can’t, from the inside, break down my experience of redness into any components. It’s just there. Describing it seems difficult. And it seems private to me. Yet I myself seem to have unfettered access to it.”
Not to me it doesn’t. Look, here I am talking to you, someone I have never seen in person, and I have no doubt in my mind that you exist and that you can understand what I’m talking about when I say “I stubbed my toe the other day and it fucking hurt” or “I ate a red apple.” That language is terribly imprecise, yet I believe you know ‘what it’s like’ because I’m referring to experiences I think you’ve had too. I think we could get much more detailed in our discussion. The world of experience bears this out for me.
I take experience to fundamentally integrated with the world and with others. The vast majority of my experience operates on the assumption that I am not fundamentally separate from it. On reflection I see that I wouldn’t be able to think about much at all, much less about my own existence, and certainly not with language, if I didn’t exist in a community of others basically like me. To get to the notion that my experience is private, I have to rip myself from the very community that I take for granted damn near all the time. I take this lonely philosopher in a stove-heated room stuff as just another philosophical abstraction, not an authentic understanding of experience. Not even a good attempt at such an understanding. But Descartes acknowledges as much.
The primacy of qualia in the minds of certain philosophers is, I think, a remnant of the days of empiricism when sensory data were taken to give us knowledge of the world, as against rationalism’s a priori ideas. But we’re supposed to be beyond the primary and secondary qualities distinction by now, so why are we still going on about qualia? Perhaps it’s because analysis and reduction is taken to be the only mode of understanding anything. Experience must be analyzed and broken down into fundamental bits of phenomenal stuff which we can then use as building blocks. Pfft.
Block’s distinction seems to me to be a reiteration of this old school empiricist bias where raw phenomena are taken to be ‘atomic’ bits of experience. It’s the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ stuff again. The assumption is that experience is mere representation, and I don’t agree with that.
To describe experience as ‘ineffable’ just baffles me. Maybe what’s meant here is that we can’t describe what we experience to someone who is incapable of having such experiences? I don’t get how this get to the heart of experience. I see no reason why we should assume we can’t talk about experience in a pre-theoretical way too, at least to some degree. Both sides of the discussion on consciousness close the door on that possibility from the start.
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It took me a minute to realize you meant the Eric S post linked to in one of the Related posts (which WordPress automatically supplies), his Inflate and Explode one, which is closely related to his “innocent” conception of phenomenal consciousness. As you note, in that initial post at least, he acknowledges that many phenomenal realists set the stage for the inflating he criticizes. But he states that they would be more willing to abandon the dubious claims than the whole concept. In reality, I find them to be inconsistent. They do seem to abandon those claims when challenged, but tend to invoke them again with different language, apparently without realize they’re doing it.
I think you’re far from alone in substituting your own conception when writers talk about qualia or what-it’s-like-ness. Whenever I’ve criticized that language, I’ve always gotten back a variety of conceptions about what the language means. (At least from those brave enough to try.) That’s the problem with it. Everyone nods in agreement while privately holding a number of different versions. It takes probing for the differences to come out.
I agree with you on experience being unavoidably integrated with our environment. But in my case it comes from a causal role / structural relationship view, which I suspect is different from your approach.
The ineffable part, I think, arises because many experiences are genuinely difficult to describe. Imagine trying to explain orange to someone born blind. Still, it can be done by discussing the upstream causes and downstream effects, such as both red and yellow being highly distinct, each with their own associations, but also high salience, and orange being a blend of the two, with its own set of associations. Dennett in Quining Qualia uses the cry of an osprey as an example of something that can be described, but only with an enormous amount of information, which makes it effectively ineffable in a “picture is worth a thousand words” sense.
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Sorry about that, I should have been clearer in pointing out what post I was referring to. I didn’t realize it was a post supplied by WordPress. I guess I’ve been out of the WP loop and no longer know what’s going on anymore.
Yeah, I suspect our agreement may end there if the causal relationships must be reductionist.
Thanks for the explanation of ‘ineffable’. The part that’s most helpful: “Imagine trying to explain orange to someone born blind”. The “to someone born blind” is the part that sometimes gets left out, and I’m left wondering why there’s a problem, why we can’t just say “orange” and be done with it. Even so, I still don’t get why conscious experience should be characterized as private or ineffable based on some presumed inability to communicate so as to make someone experience what they are incapable of experiencing. That seems like it’s got things backwards. We can communicate because we share experiences—all that stuff in Truth and Generosity. Surely there’s some sort of continuum between utterly private and shared, between incommunicable and communicable. This isn’t really speaking to the issue of whether experience can be completely understood scientifically or reductively, and I think it can’t, but the argument about the privacy of qualia undermines what I take to be a fundamental truth about our experience—that it’s to some degree shared.
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No worries on the Related thing. It’s a setting somewhere that I set many years ago, one you may never have come across. It’s been there for so long that I rarely notice or think about it, which is why it took me a few minutes to figure it out.
I’m with you on the difficulties involved with ineffability and privacy. But if those aren’t the attributes that make experience not able to be understood scientifically, what about it would you say does make it so?
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I think it’s not so much the attributes of experience that make it incapable of being fully explained scientifically, but the attributes of science, which reduces the qualities that it takes for granted to the quantitative.
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But what is it about the qualities that are being overlooked? If the characteristics of the qualities are what is being quantified, like how many yellow M&Ms are in a batch, what about yellow M&M-ness is not being accounted for?
To save a long Socratic dialog, I think what you have to be guard against is incorporating the problematic attributes under different labels. For example, one answer is that there are intrinsic properties of the qualities, which can’t be measured or recorded because they’re ineffable and private.
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I have no intention of saying qualities are ineffable or private.
Yellow M&M-ness is what science takes for granted in its quantification—kind of hard to count yellow M&Ms without knowing what an M&M is and what the color yellow looks like, right?—but colors don’t objectively exist according to the scientific view. So in this case, the yellowness and M&M-ness that made the yellow M&M counting possible in the first place are then discounted; those qualities don’t really exist. In the case of yellow, that’s merely a subjective phenomenon that does not belong to the real state of affairs we call the world itself. Neither does M&M-ness for that matter. Yellow candy-coated chocolates that ‘melt in your mouth, not in your hand’ are merely the experiences that subjects such as ourselves have when encountering some unknowable thing out there that causes said experiences in us. Yellow M&Ms as such are representations of a mere something ‘out there’. So yellowness and M&M-ness as such have not been explained; they have been explained away by being reduced to mere quantities, quantities which are themselves representative of some unknown really real reality. Never mind that the qualities made the counting possible.
Now science itself may not be the appropriate object of my criticism. The view I’ve just described is a scientific outlook, one that takes science as metaphysics. Science itself may simply pass over this issue of qualities in silence, which is to say it isn’t in the business of dealing with them, and that’s fine. The exception here is color; philosophers go on and on about colors precisely because science itself does take a stance on them. I don’t think science takes a stance on M&M-ness, though. I hope not. I kind of like the ones with peanuts inside them. I’d hate to find out they’re not really real.
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Right, understood on ineffability and privacy. The question is, if qualities aren’t ineffable or private, what prevents them from being examined and analyzed quantitatively?
I think in the case of the M&M, we might well bracket consideration of the M&M itself if our current purpose is to study the population. But in a different effort, the M&M itself could be studied, its mass, composition, shape, etc. Given that it’s a uniformly produced product with standard dimensions and ingredients, it seems like M&M people (Mars, Inc.) have to have the details down to a science.
Maybe a good way to think of qualities is quantities, structures and relationships that we’re bracketing for current purposes, either because the details don’t currently matter, or we don’t yet understand them. It does raise the question of whether we’ll eventually hit a brute layer of qualities that can’t be further reduced. My suspicion is it’s more likely we hit a layer where the energies to probe further just become infeasible. But studying the history of science makes me very reluctant to rule out the cleverness of future theorists and experimenters.
I don’t think science’s stance is that colors don’t exist, although it’s frequently stated that they don’t exist “in the world”. Myself, I think the right way to understand them is a relationship between objective patterns in the world (wavelengths of light reflected off surfaces) and our evolutionary affordances. We see red and green instead of just shades of yellow because it was adaptive for our ancestors to detect ripe fruits, among other things.
The purity of the M&Ms should not be sullied with peanuts!!! I can confirm they’re definitely real when my taste buds are disturbed by their presence.
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“The question is, if qualities aren’t ineffable or private, what prevents them from being examined and analyzed quantitatively?”
Nothing. The problem comes from assuming that the quantitative analysis is the full story. I think it’s a different kind of story, an account that’s suitable for certain questions. The distinction is between science and scientism.
“I think in the case of the M&M, we might well bracket consideration of the M&M itself if our current purpose is to study the population.”
I agree. It would be absurd to go full hog with Aristotle’s four causes when all you want to do is count yellow M&Ms. The method of inquiry should be suited to the question. I just think we can have a broader range of methods, not all of which are quantitative, in order to answer different questions appropriately. To me the question of what conscious experience is can’t be satisfactorily answered by purely quantitative reductive accounts. If I ask you why you’re going to the store, and you hand me this and say, “Well this should cover it”:
I’m not going to be satisfied.
“it seems like M&M people (Mars, Inc.) have to have the details down to a science”
Definitely. But there’s something that gets left out of the story about scientific accounts: What matters for Mars, Inc. is to make as much money as possible, which Mars, Inc. thinks they can do by making a product that is as appealing as possible to as many people as possible. Tasting good for the masses is the raison d’etre for the scientifically-formulated recipe. This at bottom requires taste testers reflecting on their own experiences and evaluating them. This sort of teleological account would be ridiculous to include in every scientific paper, of course. The problem comes when we won’t acknowledge that, in general, there’s a great deal of qualitative stuff that gets taken for granted, a teleological account in our minds that “goes without saying”, and which we rely on for our quantitative inquiry. Not acknowledging this qualitative foundation is what I take to be happening when experience is deemed an illusory byproduct of the brain.
“I don’t think science’s stance is that colors don’t exist, although it’s frequently stated that they don’t exist “in the world”.”
Yeah, I meant colors don’t objectively exist, but that’s all that science as such acknowledges.
I’m not sure I follow this:
“…It does raise the question of whether we’ll eventually hit a brute layer of qualities that can’t be further reduced.”
I’m not sure I know what you mean by qualities here.
“My suspicion is it’s more likely we hit a layer where the energies to probe further just become infeasible.”
It does feel like we’ve hit some sort of bedrock when the observer has to be taken into account. I can’t help but think Berkeley has been vindicated, at least when it comes to his criticisms of Matter. On the other hand, as Erik Hoel pointed out in a recent post, maybe 100 years from now Einstein’s vision of the universe when he said “God does not play dice” will turn out to be true after all. I prefer the version where Berkeley gets to be right. He deserves it after being the underdog for hundreds of years.
What? The peanuts are the point, the prize in the middle! The rest is just sugar and food coloring with a few flecks of cocoa powder which they call chocolate.
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Definitely if I barf up quantum field theory and spacetime metrics to your question about why I’m going to the store, you shouldn’t be satisfied, not because I’ve given a quantitative answer, but because I’ve given one at the wrong level of description. If instead I say I’m out of milk or batteries (a mix of quantitative and qualitative information at a much higher level) hopefully you would be more satisfied.
On quantities and a conceivable brute layer, I was referring to the fact that qualities can, at least generally, be reduced to quantities, but quantities of lower level qualities. If we reduce those, we get another layers of quantities of qualities. The question is whether we ever get to a purely qualitative (non-quantitative) layer.
There’s an interpretation of QM for every philosophy. Have you read Bernardo Kastrup? He’s pretty obnoxious but has written a lot about QM and idealism.
The sugar and chocolate is the prize! The peanut just gets in the way. (I like peanuts, just not in my M&Ms.)
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“…because I’ve given one at the wrong level of description.”
Right. And to accept different levels of description it seems to me all those levels must contain real things. The question then becomes a matter of deciding what sort of thing these real things are, which is where I think we run into conflicts.
Thanks for the ‘quantities of qualities’ description. I’m curious about what you take a quality to be. Would a particle be a quality?
You know, I haven’t read Kastrup but he appears to be immensely popular. His views seem like some sort of neoKantianism so far as I can tell—he talks about experience as a ‘dashboard’ (phenomena) with reality on the other side (noumena)—which seems strange to me. It’s like he’s giving up on the benefits of idealism while taking all the crap that comes from the label. Why would anyone want to do that? But I admit I only got that impression from watching a few YouTube videos, so I don’t really know what he’s getting at. Based on a fleeting impression, I wasn’t very interested. Apparently he has a scientific bent, though, which I imagine contributes to his popularity. But you know, I like my idealism neat, not diluted with quantum mechanics or anything like that. 🙂 Still, I’d be willing to give it another go. What is it you find obnoxious about him? Or is it just the idealism?
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“I’m curious about what you take a quality to be. Would a particle be a quality?”
Nothing rigorous, just non-quantitative information, distinctions, properties, etc. I’m thinking whether a particle is spin up or spin down might be a quality. Or whether it’s a photon, electron, or a quark. Is that too deflated? If so, what’s missing?
“What is it you find obnoxious about him? Or is it just the idealism?”
I have no issue with thoughtful idealists making their case. I find Kastrup obnoxious because, based on the podcast debates I’ve seen him in, along with some of his articles, his attitude toward any views he disagrees with is caustic. I didn’t realize he still posited a non-mental reality. He calls his view “analytic idealism”, so I just took it as some form of ontic idealism.
I only mentioned him due to your comment about liking a QM that is observer centered. Another view along these lines is the QBism interpretation, although I’ve never been able to tell whether the advocates are idealists, instrumentalists, or some combination.
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“Is that too deflated? If so, what’s missing?”
It’s a little different is all. 🙂 I was just curious what you meant.
I got that impression from Kastrup too, though that seems to be the case with discourse on podcasts and YouTube and the like. The comments sections are ugly stuff. Anyway, take what I said about him with a huge grain of salt because like I said, I only have the most fleeting impression of him. My introduction to him comes from this video:
I actually commented on this video—something I rarely do.
Later on there are follow-up videos with Kastrup, but I haven’t had a chance to watch them in full. The comments section on those later videos make it seem like Kastrup normally gets involved in heated debates with those who interview him. But yeah, I wouldn’t know. I prefer reading my philosophy than listening to conversations. That said, Nathan at Absolute Philosophy does some great explainer videos that get to the point real fast, so I watch his from time to time. I might have shared one with you a while back, actually, or maybe it was someone else… Anyway, Nathan covers the sort of idealism I know nothing about, since he comes from the analytic tradition. It’s very weird for me coming from that direction, all that talk of truth bearers, etc. A lot of idealisms out there!
As for the QBism interpretation, I couldn’t possibly take a stance on it as a scientific theory. I assume you have to know the math, and I wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot pole. I only brought up quantum mechanics in my recent post to question whether scientific theories (or interpretations) are meant to be taken as literal descriptions of reality.
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“It’s a little different is all.”
I was referring to qualities outside of conscious experience, which I could see some saying isn’t what the mean by “quality”. But as always, that raises the question of what they do mean.
You did share a Nathan video with me a while back. I think it was on ontic vs epistemic idealism, which I found very interesting. It clarified for me why Kant’s view is called “transcendental idealism”. Thanks for sharing this one! I’ll have to watch it when I get a chance.
I rarely comment on Youtube myself, mostly because, except on very small channels, it feels like talking into the void. And those comment sections can definitely be nasty.
QBism doesn’t really add anything to the mathematics, just the assumption that what the math is modeling is more our expectations than anything objective (at least as I understand it). My struggle with these kinds of epistemic views is quantum computing, which seems like a lot to tuck into just our knowledge or expectations. But if we do, the view seems increasingly idealist, although it could be more Kantian or neo-Kantian.
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“I was referring to qualities outside of conscious experience, which I could see some saying isn’t what the mean by “quality”. But as always, that raises the question of what they do mean.”
Well I would object that both qualities and quantities are experienced and that’s how they are known. They’re just different kinds of experience. Whatever differentiates qualities from quantities and makes the latter seem more ‘objective’ than the former is also within experience.
I’m certainly not against QBism, and from the descriptions it sounds like the interpretation I would like most, I just wouldn’t want to mix it with metaphysics or use it as a justification for some sort of idealism. I know that would make idealism more popular, but that mixing can be confusing too. The current scientific way of thinking seems very Kantian to me. That’s not amenable to describing idealism to people who have a hard time getting out of that Kantian—or even Cartesian—mode of thinking. I think this is my problem with Kastrup’s ‘dashboard’ description. It’s too Kantian. It seems like… not idealism at all. Just more phenomena on one side with noumena on the other, forever out of reach.
“My struggle with these kinds of epistemic views is quantum computing, which seems like a lot to tuck into just our knowledge or expectations.”
Why? What makes quantum computing especially….mind independent, if you will?
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“Whatever differentiates qualities from quantities and makes the latter seem more ‘objective’ than the former is also within experience.”
I agree with this, which is why I’ve always found the idea of qualities somehow trumping standard scientific approaches puzzling.
“What makes quantum computing especially….mind independent, if you will?”
My remark is mostly aimed at people who pick and choose what they’re going to consider real vs just epistemic. It seems like quantum computing stress tests the quantum formalism much more thoroughly than any of the experiments that came before, depending heavily on entanglement and interference to work as modeled throughout the evolution of the wave function. It seems to leave little leeway to believe that it’s just a mathematical convenience. Of course, people do anyway, so not everyone sees it that way. But QC is what moved me from being agnostic on wave function realism to the realist side, at least to some degree.
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I can’t speak for anyone but myself here, but for me, it’s not that qualities trump standard science. The way I see it is, science as such picks out quantities over qualities without acknowledging the qualities it relies on. As a matter of method, there’s no problem here. It’s not a problem that science entails the sort of description that removes qualitative descriptions from its account. The problem comes from people, not science as such. The problem comes from people who don’t see that science’s picking out quantity over quality is ontologically arbitrary; it’s a quantitative method that makes sense in certain contexts, such as when you just want to know how many green M&Ms are in a jar. In other words, the problem comes if we take the scientific method to be the only means of accounting for reality rather than a type of account amongst others. Those who believe science is the only way of accounting for reality then have to assume that qualities (colors, for example) don’t exist in objective reality. For them, qualities can only be illusory. But that’s a problematic ontology because they then have to explain how science arrives at its quantifications without presupposing qualities. But that’s not possible. Without qualities, there would be nothing to count, nothing to quantify! Scientism rests on the shaky assumption that qualities aren’t real because science doesn’t acknowledge them in its final analysis—an that assumption that ignores that science relies on qualities before not acknowledging them—which leaves those who hold scientism (science as ontology) in the baffling predicament of explaining what quantities are quantities of.
The point is, I don’t think I privilege qualities over quantities except maybe in the normal sense that I hate doing math and quantities don’t factor much into my everyday life, except in baking and cooking. On the whole I see the split as fairly neutral and arbitrary. It might make sense to privilege one over another, but that just depends on what the question is.
As for quantum computing…I don’t compute ordinary computing, so I’m just going to have to take your word for it!
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We talked above about how any particular scientific analysis usually works in terms of quantities at a particular level of description. That involves bracketing some phenomena, essentially accepting them as qualities. But that doesn’t mean some other scientific investigations don’t drill down into those phenomena.
I guess the question I would ask here (feel free to take rhetorically) is, when that is done, when a quality is reduced to its component structures and relations, structures and relations of lower level qualities, is there something that’s being missed from not just working with it qualitatively at the higher level? What would it look like to do that? Or are we just talking about efforts outside of science, such as the arts?
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“Or are we just talking about efforts outside of science”
Yep, that’s what I was thinking.
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My redness experience may not be your redness experience, but, given our shared culture, language, traditions and ultimately our memories “redness” can only be the product of memory or genetic programming. No memories of red no redness. Color blind–no redness. Not a red-assed baboon or a seagull chick seeking that red spot on your parent’s beak–no redness (barring any memory of red).
A newborn human, locked in a blood red room would experience what kind of “redness”? The first time there would be no redness. The second time however, depending on the good or bad conditions of the first time, well, then it would have an experience, due to comparative thought re: its memory.
Humans think they are special. They really are not.
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Hmmm. I’d agree that an infant’s first experience of redness is probably very different from ours, for a variety of reasons (we lose photoreceptors as we get older, but also have a lifetime of associations, etc), but it seems strange to say they have no red experience. Although I could see an argument that their first exposure is pre-experiential. By the time they start actually having experiences, the stimuli is in memory.
A newborn in a red room would have their L-cone cells stimulated far more than their M or S ones. Although assuming there would be times when the lighting was low and only their rod cones stimulated, they’d have a more monochrome experience, which could be distinguished from the red one when the lights were on.
But I’m onboard with what I think is your broader point, that colors are about contrast and salience. And I’m completely onboard with your final point.
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I like that you now seem to be good with Eric Schwitzgebel’s innocent conception of consciousness Mike. But maybe that’s been the case for a while?
To me much of the philosophical discussion regarding consciousness essentially just plays around the edges of the real concern without directly naming that concern. So I’d like to name that real concern to perhaps help straighten some things out. As I see it the real concern is causality. Are we talking about a natural or rather a supernatural conception of consciousness?
The illusionists seem to be the greatest offenders here. They essentially wait for someone to say that consciousness is “ineffable” or some other ultimately spooky idea, and then without explanation simply assert that they consider such consciousness to be an illusion that doesn’t actually exist. I wish they’d be more direct and just say that they object to things like “ontological privacy” for violating systemic causality. This creates tremendous confusion.
This brings up something else. Philosophers often fail to distinguish between “ontological” versus “epistemological” statements. There’s an undeniable “hard problem of consciousness” in terms of epistemology. If this problem happens to be ontological however, then that would mandate supernatural consciousness.
Furthermore as I understand it, standard illusionists tend to believe that our brains create consciousness by means of information processing in itself. To me this seems spooky because I think information should only be said to exist in respect to what it informs. Recently Pete Mandik asked me about my argument that Dan Dennett carried such a spooky belief. In the end he suggested that neither Dennett nor functionalists and computationalists in general believe in the intrinsic existence of information. To make this stick however, I’ll need some evidence that they are indeed aligned with me here. https://substack.com/@philosophereric/note/c-82264998?r=2xwlat&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
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Eric, I’d say my stance toward Eric S’s innocent conception of phenomenal consciousness is about the same. I recognize what he’s trying to do, but I think the way he presents it gives aid and comfort to those who hide behind the conflation of manifest and fundamental consciousness. As Keith Frankish notes in his response, Eric S’s concept is so innocent, it’s compatible with illusionism.
I’m with you on causality, which is why I’m a functionalist and structural realist.
“and then without explanation simply assert that they consider such consciousness to be an illusion that doesn’t actually exist”
From Dennett’s 1988 Quining Qualia paper (emphasis added):
As I noted in the post, I think illusionists are denying fundamental consciousness, not manifest consciousness. It’s worth noting that Keith F lately has been saying what he denies is irreducible subjectivity, which I think is another name for what I’m calling fundamental consciousness.
I agree that philosophers often fail to make clear whether they’re talking epistemically or ontologically. But I see it as a broader issue of not being clear about definitions. Although in the case of the hard problem, I deny both an ontological or uncrossable epistemic gap. There is an uncrossable gap between fundamental consciousness and causal mechanisms, which is why I don’t see the theory of fundamental consciousness as compelling.
I’d say that illusionist don’t believe that our brains create consciousness by information processing, they believe that consciousness is information processing. The idea of consciousness being created implies something in addition to the processing. I think your concerns with this view may be related to this conceptual blindspot.
Interesting that Pete decided to ask you about that. His criticisms are pretty similar to the ones I’ve made. I think these are issues you still need to contend with if you hope to convince people they’re wrong.
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Mike, I take Pete at his word that he responded because he’s “a quality argument enjoyer”. I doubt he thought I might actually present a quality argument that Dennett had a spooky perspective on consciousness. You’re a skilled discussion partner, though I don’t recall you ever attacking my arguments in the way that he attempted to. Let’s review.
Of course my general observation is that information can only exist as such to the extent that it informs something that’s causally appropriate to be informed by it. Furthermore computationalists seem to violate this maxim by saying that consciousness exists as the processing of information in itself rather than processed information that informs something appropriate. Initially he tried to get me to assert that I had some sort of non-circular way of defining “appropriate”, and knowing that he could then dismantle that position. I avoided this by claiming that in an epistemic sense, “appropriate” would always be up for empirical exploration. Furthermore I said that if computationalists claim processed information needn’t inform anything for consciousness to exist, then there’d be no need to determine “appropriateness” for my challenge to potentially succeed. Then he wanted me to assert that information can only exist as such to the extent that it informs something causal. I saw the error in that as well however and amended his statement to read “causally appropriate to be informed by it”. Then he hoped I’d assert that information can only exist if it informs something conscious. I of course denied that. Then he essentially ended by giving me the option between that idealistic position on information and my actual position, which he also mentioned was plausible. Then finally he asserted that even if I do hold the plausible option, that this still wouldn’t put Dennett and functionalists/computationalists in supernatural territory. Of course no explanation was provided on how they’d escape my argument. But this permitted me to both let him off the hook by saying that perhaps I’d been misinformed about the position of my opposition, and to show him exactly what my hook happens to be by means of my concise thumb pain thought experiment.
Pete and Lance are radicals in the way that I’m a radical, though perhaps neither have yet considered the extremity of my own potential remedies. Yes they could continue on as extreme moral antirealists. A next step however should be to directly forsake talk of morality to open discussion up to the far more fundamental idea of the goodness to badness of existing itself. Yes they could continue to criticize philosophy for its general ineffectiveness. A next step however should be to observe that without a community of respected professionals which is able to provide science with various accepted principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology, science should continue to suffer. Thus they might not only become advocates for this community, but directly attempt to build such a community. But hopefully I haven’t already poisoned them on me by giving them the impression that all I want to do is destroy Dennett’s legacy. Unfortunately Alan Turing (and perhaps others) accidentally got many naturalists in academia to think about consciousness in a spooky way.
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Eric, Pete focused on your concept of information, something we’ve debated many times. And his point that it doesn’t change anything for the illusionist / functionalist / computationalist view matches what I’ve said before.
Recall my point that even if we define information exactly as you argue for, in the theory descriptions, we just end up substituting “potential-information” everywhere “information” was used before, and we’re right back where we started. This is because we’re basically just talking about causal mechanisms.
If you feel sure that the information issue is the problem you think it is, it’s probably worth reviewing how you’re communicating it. Has anyone else grasped your point?
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Pete tried to reduce my argument into something that he could dismiss. He wasn’t able to however. Furthermore he essentially agreed that information should not exist intrinsically but rather only in respect to what consumes that information. This position lies in opposition with the position that consciousness arises by means of the right processed information in itself, and because the resulting information wouldn’t go on to inform anything causally appropriate. To me it seems spooky to posit consciousness as something which can validly violate this maxim when nothing else seems to. To be clear, here “potential information” can only potentially become information, and specifically by informing something causally appropriate. So you can’t get right with my information maxim simply by adding a term like “potential”.
Pete has not yet bitten the bullet to claim that if the right marks on paper were algorithmically processed to create the right other marks on paper, then something here must experience what he does when his thumb gets whacked. This might seem spooky to him right now, and specifically because causality mandates that the resulting marked paper would not be informational until it informs something appropriate. Of course he did assert that computationalism does not violate my information maxim, though as a naked assertion rather than as an argument. If he’s right about this then you’d be wrong about computationalism. Or you might be right with him wrong, though I suspect that you’re the one that’s right. Thus it should be correct to say that computationalism mandates the spookiness of “intrinsic information”.
I do think Suzi Travis grasps my points here, as well as agrees. I’d rather not nail her down on this however since she needs to appear open to lots of perspectives. Furthermore it seems to me that you at least grasp my point, and this is given that you also bite the bullet on my thought experiment. Your education however tells you that there’s nothing non-causal about consciousness by means of processed information that doesn’t go on to inform anything. My education tells me the opposite.
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We’re obviously taking different things away from Pete’s remarks. Since you linked to the thread above, anyone who wants to can follow it and decide for themselves. I will note that I’ve read him at length and see our views as mostly aligned, at least on the mind.
Sorry, I honestly don’t think I grasp your point, despite trying repeatedly over the years. And I almost never recognize my view in your description of it. Maybe someday we’ll succeed in getting our views across to each other.
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Okay Mike, I’ve though about it and now agree that you don’t understand my position, or at least not why I assert that processed brain information should only exist as such to the extent that it informs something appropriate. It’s a little more difficult to say that I don’t understand your position however, since each of us state it as “Consciousness exists as the right sort of information processing in itself”. Furthermore we agree this mandates that consciousness would result if the right marks on paper were processed to create the right other marks on paper. But I can still see how you wouldn’t recognize your position when I assert that it’s spooky for leaving out anything for processed information to inform. As each of us have said before, you should only agree with me through expert consensus given solid empirical evidence (not that you currently understand what you’d be agreeing to, though you’d of course figure that out if such expert consensus were to emerge).
Also I now suspect you’re right that Pete is probably extremely aligned with you in terms of consciousness. So it might be best for me not to discuss this with him again. Perhaps it’s the same for Lance Bush too so I’ll try to watch myself there as well. I do realize that you’re far more easy going than most.
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Thanks Eric. I wouldn’t want to discourage you from discussing things with Pete and Lance Bush. Although it is worth remembering that they can both at times get pretty scathing with arguments they consider poor.
“Furthermore we agree this mandates that consciousness would result if the right marks on paper were processed to create the right other marks on paper.”
I have to remind you here that my agreement with this comes with stipulations about the ongoing process being more important than the static marks. To me, the marks are just snapshots of the processes at particular points. It’s not clear to me you understand how important these stipulations are to my agreement.
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Duly noted on the ongoing process being more important than the static marks. I guess such emergence seems more plausible to you since it’s a putative machine that creates consciousness here rather than attributed to simple marks on paper. Because I don’t consider the output marked paper to intrinsically be informational however, to me this does still seem like a ghostly explanation.
There’s one thing more that I’ll mention here since you brought this up earlier. Apparently you believe that once scientists figure out how computers and their processing works to a sufficient degree, it will become obvious to sufficiently educated people in general that the algorithmic processing of certain specific marks on paper into other specific marks on paper, must result in the creation of an experiencer of thumb pain. It blows my mind that you think this scenario would build a bridge of “consciousness causality understanding”. Care to explain?
On Pete and Lance potentially disliking me for credibly positing a spookiness to computationalism, there’s probably no hiding my conviction here. Currently it would seem that I not only have a more radical stance on value, as well as my perception of the relationship between philosophy and science, but I may have avoided a spooky position regarding consciousness that’s ensnared them. Though all of this sounds like great fun to potentially figure out, I also realize how invested we all become in our various convictions. Either these are normal people who are thus angered by credible challenges to deeply held convictions, or rather they’re extraordinary people who are thus able to remain rational.
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“Care to explain?”
A big part of this is what we think the target is to be explained. I think experience is functionality, causal mechanisms. The mechanisms of a system modeling itself in its world in simulations to decide which of its automatic reactions to indulge or inhibit, simulations that include learning from past decisions, model based learning. Of course, if you think experience is fundamental, then that’s wrong by definition. If you agree that it is causal, then what about those causal mechanisms do you think a computational system can’t perform?
If you say “generate an experiencer”, then I’d ask you to define what you mean by “experiencer”. Given our past discussions about your dual systems, I suspect my answer remains that I’m not convinced that hypothesis is needed, in other words, that “the experiencer” in the sense you’re using it, exists.
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“I think experience is functionality, causal mechanisms.”
In the past when you’ve maybe toyed with the panpsychist label, I’ve always passed this off as being nice to someone who actually is a panpsychist. The statement above however seems like pure panpsychism. Rocks function by means of causal mechanisms, though I don’t think you meant to imply that this sort of functionality creates “experience”. So maybe you could narrow your statement down to something more specific? But then I already know your specific answer. You believe that a given experience exists as the processing of the right information into the right other information. Furthermore I do agree that this is required, except add that the output information must go on inform something that’s causally appropriate to exist as that experience.
The only thing that I consider fundamental, is causality itself. This is to say that I believe gravity, consciousness, computers, and all else emerge from causality. It’s of course panpsychists that consider experience fundamental, not you or me. In any case even if you’re right that consciousness exists as the right sort of processing of information in itself, I don’t think anyone will ever make an effective argument that this makes sense. Apparently in the end, causality just is what it is.
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Obviously when I say experience is causal mechanisms I’m not saying that all causal mechanisms are experience, anymore than to say that a storm is atmospheric physics means all atmospheric physics are storms.
I actually don’t consider causality fundamental. Cause-effect sequences are emergent due to the second law of thermodynamics from symmetric interactions, or perhaps even more fundamentally, structural relations. But the history of science makes me leery of declaring anything absolutely fundamental. It seems like all we can do is talk about what is most fundamental with our current knowledge.
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Okay Mike, but I never meant to imply that you believe everything is conscious. Instead I directly amended your answer to what your beliefs seem to be, or “consciousness resides as the processing by which the right information is algorithmically converted into the right other information”. The question is, why do you believe, for example, that if we were to sufficiently explore the processing by which certain marks on paper were algorithmically converted into the correct other marks on paper, it would then become causally clear to us that an experiencer of thumb pain should result (rather than something else, or nothing at all)? Do you have anything more than faith that future understandings should be sufficient here? Or if it’s more than faith then what reasoning do you have to believe that such resulting consciousness would make sense?
I take your conception one step further to say that the processed information on paper would need to go on to inform something appropriate that itself would exist as an experiencer of thumb pain. And as you know, I suspect the right sort of electromagnetic field. Here there’s a larger domain to potentially explore since we could also examine the specific fields (or whatever) that would thus exist as consciousness. But I don’t pretend that exploring the nature of something like an electromagnetic field would make it clear to us that they ought to causally exist as consciousness. To me the more epistemically responsible position seems to be a plea of ignorance.
It’s interesting however that you’ve also implied that I wasn’t being epistemically responsible for presuming that everything functions causally. That is a fair point as far as it goes, though in that specific case I wasn’t actually speaking epistemically but rather metaphysically. I believe mainstream scientists ought to presume that causality never fails, and even if does sometimes fail. Because science should inherently go obsolete to the extent that causality fails, I think we should begin from the stance that it never does simply to preserve the potential integrity of science. Here we’d leave non-mainstream science to theorize any gaps in causality. This should leave standard scientists less hindered by such speculation.
Lance seems to be showing a bit of interest, and even left me a comment on a matter that I’d most like him to consider. He didn’t quite address the important element of it however, and failed to reply when I directly asked. https://substack.com/@philosophereric/note/c-83469530?r=2xwlat&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
I wonder if you have thoughts on this? Lance currently doesn’t seem to see a problem with philosophy leaving value exclusively to moral realism versus antirealism. Hopefully it just hasn’t occurred to him that this leaves out something far more basic. But am I in error for theorizing that there’s something more fundamental than “rightness to wrongness”? I hope we all acknowledge that there’s a goodness to badness of existing that goes well beyond our various moral judgements. But does anyone in academia theorize what constitutes the goodness to badness of existing? Not that I know of. So shouldn’t such missing theory impede our mental and behavioral forms of science?
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“Do you have anything more than faith that future understandings should be sufficient here?”
Eric, it seems like I already answered this above. Was there something about that answer that you still have questions on?
For reference: https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/12/29/manifest-and-fundamental-consciousness/comment-page-1/#comment-175324
On value, I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. For a moral anti-realist (which I am), there’s no such thing as good or bad in any absolute sense. There is just good or bad for particular goals. But which goals should be pursued and which shouldn’t, that is, which should be valued? Again, that’s ultimately not anything we can adjudicate with science. We can adjudicate what is good or bad for survival, or maybe what indulges our evolved instincts, but that leaves a wider range of options than just about anyone is comfortable with. We can narrow it down to what is good or bad for wellbeing, but now we have to define “wellbeing”, which puts us right back in the definition circle.
Of course, as soon as we do talk in terms of particular goals, such as reducing the chances of getting cancer, then we can talk about scientific evidence for the good or bad of smoking, or of alcohol. But I don’t perceive that’s what you’re asking about.
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Regarding “the hard problem of consciousness”, I guess I should clarify that I only consider it to be epistemological rather than ontological. Can you go that far? Even if science were to demonstrate that the processing of certain marks into other marks will create consciousness, do you think we’d also be smart enough to grasp why this results? Or as I suspect, might we need to leave this to “Because that’s how causality works”?
Then on value, let’s see if some simplifications can be made. Here a subject could be defined as anything that exists. Then an ultimate goal for anything that exists could be defined to be the same ultimate goal that I perceive each of us to have — to feel good rather than bad. So I’m saying that for anything that exists, feeling bad will be inherently punishing in terms of its own existence in that sense, and feeling good will be inherently rewarding in terms of its own existence in that sense. Why this answer? Because I think that’s how reality works. While above you implied that there’s “an epistemic hard problem of value”, I see no reason this matter shouldn’t be tractable.
From here we can go on to the mechanics of value. You believe this is created by means of the right sort of information processing in itself. I agree that this is a start, except believe that processed information must go on to inform something causally appropriate, and in this case probably the right sort of electromagnetic field. Regardless however it seems to me that good/bad in terms of existence in itself could be defined this way quite effectively. It’s not an “absolute” conception of value, but rather a specifically defined conception for anything that exists. Furthermore if the human happens to be value driven, shouldn’t we try to find certain useful conceptions of value in order to effectively study it?
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I don’t think there is a hard problem of consciousness, epistemic or ontic. I do think there’s a hard problem of fundamental consciousness, since it’s not reconcilable to causal mechanisms. The solution to me is obvious, reject the theory of fundamental consciousness. Find another explanation for manifest consciousness. If we reject fundamental consciousness, the idea that consciousness is simple, irreducible, and metaphysically private, then what special epistemic mystery is left? (There are of course the questions about how the brain implements functionality, but those are scientifically tractable, aka Chalmers’ “easy problems”.)
I also don’t think there’s a “hard problem of value”, so much as that’s it’s a mistaken view of reality to view hedonistic value as objective. It arises from a combination of evolved instincts and socially ingrained dispositions, both of which seem to vary by individual. Of course, there’s enough overlap between most people for societies to work, but it seems like an ever shifting consensus. Even if it wasn’t, by what objective standard should we regard human values as trumping tiger ones, such as the instinct a new alpha male has to kill all the cubs in a pride when he takes over?
By “absolute value”, I just meant value that is objective in some manner beyond individual psychology, cultural conventions, or legal strictures, similar to the objective nature of inertia, gravity, electromagnetism, etc. I don’t think values can be established as objective in that manner. Although I’m always open to evidence or a good argument that it can.
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On the natural hard problem of consciousness, “human ignorance” is the special epistemic mystery that should remain. Why should certain experimentally conclusive dynamics create consciousness? (For you this should be the correct processing of information and me the correct electromagnetic fields.). In the end I think a naturalist should need to leave such explanations with “Because that’s how causality works”. I don’t expect you to acknowledge that such human ignorance should remain in the end, but that is the way I see it.
On value Mike, your tiger situation drifted back to the less fundamental idea of morality. A red flag was when you used the plural form of “value”. There are no “values” here but rather just an overriding value potential regarding anything that exists. This is to say that existence can be good/bad for a tiger or anything sentient, and always hedonistically based. So in the end, is this value dynamic objective in the sense that inertia, gravity, or electromagnetism happen to be? Yes I’ll make this claim. I call it “subjective” for an individual merely because such a subject will be what experiences it. And as a causalist I also believe that in theory this element of reality must be no less measurable than gravity.
The difficult spot that you seem to be in for denying an objective causal element of reality that constitutes the value of existing, is making sense of an arbitrary position. If arbitrary, how might it be said to causally exist at all? I wouldn’t think we could usefully say that value does ultimately exist in that case. And yet you also know that value does exist because you’ve experienced it. The only logical escape from this conundrum that I know of, would be to not only endorse moral antirealism, but value realism.
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Eric, I’m not following your final paragraph. I don’t perceive myself to be in a difficult spot, or know what you’re using “arbitrary” in reference to. It seems to me that the best that could be done would be to establish that individual A values X at time T (whether ethically, financially, aesthetically, in terms of sensation, or in some other sense). But individual B might not, although they might come to value it later (T+10) if they have the right experiences, but maybe individual C doesn’t value X and never does. What then is the objective value of X?
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What you have termed “manifest consciousness” refers to what is immediately given to us, the continuous, subjective stream of consciousness that each of us experiences every day – our sensations, our sensory impressions, our stream of consciousness, e.g. seeing the screen of my laptop in front of me here and now – which seems to be the ultimate factum brutum of our very existence. Nobody seriously denies that it exists, not even Daniel Dennett. It essentially encompasses the phenomenal consciousness that produces the subjective quality of experience, what philosophers call ‘qualia’, or what underlies what it is like to feel something.
What you refer to as ‘fundamental consciousness’ is the thesis that consciousness is that ‘manifest consciousness’ is a fundamental reality, which is to say that it is irreducible.
I think it’s hard to dispute that our conscious states have very specific irreducible phenomenological properties. What you call “manifest consciousness” is the fundamental reality of our existence. And our first-person access to it is indeed privileged; for example, it is impossible to describe to a colour-blind person what it is like to see the colour red. So I remain sceptical about attributing phenomenological properties completely to access consciousness.
In his book ‘The Border between Seeing and Thinking’ (of which I have skimmed a few chapters, but it is a challenging read), Ned Block claims that infants between 6 and 11 months old have phenomenal consciousness of colour without access consciousness, which in his opinion provides evidence against cognitive theories of consciousness. Rather, he argues that phenomenal consciousness is reducible to its biological basis. This appears to me at least more plausible than functionalist accounts.
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“I think it’s hard to dispute that our conscious states have very specific irreducible phenomenological properties.”
Obviously I remain unconvinced, and of the claims you make in the following sentences. For me, this is simply asserting that the theory of fundamental consciousness is the truth. I think that assertion has to be justified, like any other theory of consciousness. But from what I can see, it’s just taken by many as obviously true. All I’m trying to do with this post is raise awareness that it is a choice, an assumption.
I just learned that Block’s book is open access. Block is a physicalist, but one who still sees phenomenal consciousness as separate from access consciousness. I’m interested to understand how he reconciles this. Based on the interview I listened to today (Robinson’s Podcast) he sounds like a type-B / a posteriori physicalist. People in this camp tend to talk about conceptual vs non-conceptual content. I don’t buy it, at least not yet. I think it’s concepts all the way down. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
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The book is open access, I downloaded it from his website, but that no longer works, but there is still this download link <a href=”https://philarchive.org/archive/BLOTBB“>philarchive.org </a>.
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Thanks. Block himself suggested getting it from the publisher’s site.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-border-between-seeing-and-thinking-9780197622223?cc=us&lang=en&
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Nice post. I think these kinds of distinctions are important in relation to clarifying different positions, but probably not so helpful for actual investigation. The reason I say that is that the different positions will not be using any of them univocally.
I’ll also suggest we can cut through a lot of difficulty if we suppose that “fundamental consciousness” is (more or less) simply information, in which case it’s not necessarily “conscious” (as in self reflective), and access consciousness and manifest consciousness are the same thing – reflective information. I think the apparent difficulty with this is that we tend to think of information as merely the code that carries it, rather than the semantic value that is carried by it.
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Thanks. Given how much ambiguity there is with most consciousness writing, I think there’s considerable value in clarifying the different positions. It seems like a significant portion of the arguments, maybe the lion share, is people talking past each other with different definitions.
I agree on manifest and access consciousness being the same thing. Manifest consciousness is access consciousness from the inside, and access consciousness is manifest consciousness from the outside. The impulse to see manifest consciousness as something separate, simple, and irreducible in principle, is how we end up with fundamental consciousness, but my point is that’s a theoretical choice.
Information is a difficult concept. I’ve come to think of it as causation, but to your point, not just the immediate causation of the pattern, but the light cone which converges on it. It’s semantic role, I think, is the relation between its past and future light cones. An agent’s awareness of that past light cone is what enables it to enact the future light cone.
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You’re right about the value of clarifying the different positions. I think I get a bit frustrated with it because I tend to do a lot of my thinking in isolation, where they are not so needed, but when you’re engaging with others (which is the ideal) these kinds of distinctions are an absolute necessity.
What you say about information is very interesting, although I’m not sure I grasp it. Have you elaborated on it anywhere?
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Thanks.
I’ve wrestled with information in several posts. Probably the best one to start with is this one…
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2020/05/26/pain-is-information-but-what-is-information/
…and then for a more up to date view…
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/07/28/entropy-transformers/
But the difficulty in finding one particular post is making me think I probably should do one just on information.
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I’m not sure the distinctions (fundamental/manifest, access/phenomenal) add any value to discussions outside of the purely philosophical. It is somewhat like different people seeing the same sculpture from above, below, and all four sides and describing something different. None of it is really measurable to any significant extent that I can see. Or, do you think something about them can be measured?
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I think access consciousness can be measured through behavioral capabilities and brain scans. Manifest consciousness can be measured through subject reports (a narrower slice of behavior). It seems like that’s most of what the scientific studies on consciousness we’ve discussed over the years are doing.
But fundamental consciousness seems like a different story. It’s conceivable it could turn out to be something like a field, but in the absence of that, distinct from the others, it seems unmeasurable by definition. (Something many of its advocates (Chalmers, Goff, Nagel, etc.) readily admit.)
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How do you do a subject report of manifest consciousness without accessing it? Does that make “manifest,” “access,” and “phenomenal” consciousness the same? They really seem like they’re getting at the same thing but simply emphasizing different aspects.
“Fundamental” evokes something different, but whether you believe it exists might be a question of whether words like “intrinsic” and “mystery” in reference to consciousness have meaning for you. That might be simply a matter of how many connections you have between the neurons of “fundamental” and the neurons of “mystery.”
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Good point. We only access manifest consciousness through access. (Various no-report paradigms try to minimize this, but they never eliminate it.) The question is what makes it manifest? Is there something there prior to the access? Or does the access itself make it manifest? A believer in fundamental consciousness will say there is something there pre-access.
Yeah, the words “intrinsic” and “mystery” are a lot more likely to be associated with fundamental consciousness than the others. I’ve actually called it “mystery consciousness” before myself. Which fits, because fundamental consciousness is the version that doesn’t reconcile with what we know about the rest of reality.
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I don’t see access consciousness as more than a different form of raw experience. It’s all produced by the complex communications between neurons which work in similar fashion throughout the cortex. The different forms are simply different neurons working on different inputs.
Are the “access” neurons working in a fundamentally different manner than the neurons of the visual cortex? Probably not. Do they lack dendrites or axons? Do they use different neurotransmitters? No.
There may be differences but structurally the layered , pyramidal, columnar structures across the cortex are similar everywhere. Even down to the hippocampus there are the layered structures (with notably fewer layers than elsewhere in the neocortex). Consciousness might have many nuances and forms, but if the cortex is primarily what is producing it, then the various forms likely are built from a common foundation.
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I’ve read there are differences in the hippocampus from the cortex (among them a much higher degree of plasticity). And the IIT people claim the posterior cortices have a different organization than the frontal ones, although the aspects you mention are there throughout the cortex.
But I don’t think there are conscious neurons vs unconscious ones, just ones participating in the current conscious moment and ones that aren’t. Access consciousness (whichever specific theory we follow) is a complex dynamic involving large numbers of regions. It’s the dynamic, the processing, not the particular neurons.
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“Access consciousness (whichever specific theory we follow) is a complex dynamic involving large numbers of regions. It’s the dynamic, the processing, not the particular neurons.”
Or, you just omit the word “access” from the sentence and still be correct. Which is my point. It isn’t fundamentally different from “phenomenal” or “manifest” unless you can point to something specific in the particular processing and circuits that is physically different.
I suspect in part what is happening is a kind of bias towards reason. We want to associate consciousness with the “higher” functions, but there are no real higher or lower functions in the brain. There are just neurons receiving inputs, generating outputs, and storing memories.
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“Higher” in neuroscience usually refers to being later in the stream from sensory stimuli to motor output. Which usually involves being more in the frontal lobe region rather than posterior sensory ones. But to your point, there isn’t any one stream, but a vast multitude operating in parallel, with constant interaction between them, not to mention recurrent looping.
I do think we can make a perspectival distinction between access and manifest consciousness. One is a third person view of what’s happening, the other a first person one. But I agree it’s all of the same system.
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Sounds like we are in basic agreement about the same system.
“the stream from sensory stimuli to motor output”
Yeah, the typical input-output device that so many think the brain to be. Sensory information comes in. the little machine inside churns away, and something moves. If I’m in my chair and shut my eyes and imagine I am taking a walk at the lake, is that access or manifest, third or first person?
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I’d say that there’s your first person perspective of it, the manifest one, and a third person model of it, the access one. But I’m a reductionist. People who believe in fundamental consciousness will say that the manifestation of your experience of the imaginary walk is fundamental and ontologically distinct from the scenario simulation happening in your brain.
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