Oh dear… 21 Sep 2009 Whenever a book is touted as a “paradigm shift”, it sends up a major warning flag: Put succinctly, what Alva Noë is offering in Out of Our Heads is nothing short of a paradigm shift, complete with an incisive criticism of the status quo of neurosciences and a suggestion for an alternative model. The scientific study of consciousness in general, and what Noë calls the establishment neuroscience in particular claims to have broken free from its philosophical foundations. Although Noë acknowledges that the problem of consciousness is a scientific problem, one for which a scientific answer should be expected, he challenges the scientific community’s contention that consciousness no longer remains a philosophical problem. Well, the consciousness problem remains a live one in the philosophical community alright, but this is not news, and it needs no ghost dualist to tell us that. I have not seen the book, but from the review, it looks like he is “locating” consciousness in the dynamic relations of the brain to the body and the world. This is roughly what F. H. Bradley said in the 1880s, so it’s a useful revival of the social and ecological aspects of consciousness. But please, don’t use the P-word. It has no sensible meaning. Book Metaphysics Philosophy
Philosophy A conversation about scientific evolution 14 Jul 2010 I recently had an interesting exchange with an anonymous poster called “Himself” on the talk.origins USENet group. I thought I’d put it up here with some links and the typos corrected. Since it’s visible on Google Groups, I’m not breaking any copyright here. Read More
Philosophy Mill on philosophical errors 13 Nov 2009 A fundamental error is seldom expelled from philosophy by a single victory. It retreats slowly, defends every inch of ground, and often, after it has been driven from the open country, retains a footing in some remote fastness. The essences of individuals were an unmeaning figment arising from a misapprehension… Read More
Epistemology Evolution Quotes: Twain on inference about the past 3 Apr 20123 Apr 2012 Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late… Read More
But please, don’t use the P-word. It has no sensible meaning. Paradigm:- an example of a conjugation or declension showing a word in all its inflectional forms.
Besides, didn’t Andy Clark and other emCog types already revive the social and ecological aspects of consciousness without all the dualism?
Alva Noë, at least to judge from his articles–I haven’t read the book–doesn’t strike me as either a dualist or a nonmaterialist. I think he’s operating with an interpretation of consciousness as Being-in-the-World, which is actually pretty prevalent approach among the AI types who favor the Heidegger without the liederhosen philosophy of mind. I know from personal experience that anybody who doesn’t think the of the mind as contained in the brain like Donovan in his jar will be accused of believing in disembodied spirits or, worse, libeled as a Christian even if their intention is to come up with an improved materialism.
From The Simpsons, season 8, “The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochy Show”: Krusty: So he’s proactive, huh? Network lady: Oh, God, yes. We’re talking about a totally outrageous paradigm. Writer: Excuse me, but “proactive” and “paradigm”? Aren’t those just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
I worked in an IBM AI lab for six years, and I used be one of those hotshots who thought he was going to be the first Noonian Sung to create the first artificially conscious Data. Ha! I just was a philosophical adolescent who had no grasp of what consciousness even meant (and there are still plenty of those types in the tech industry today – God bless them). But as I got into it, I realized how utterly outclassed I was. Consciousness is a vast hall of mirrors, and the subject can go as deep as you want to take it. I then began to believe that the whole subject was beyond science – that objective science simply didn’t have the tools to deal with it. But now, I’m somewhere in the middle. I still don’t think any solution is imminent, but do I believe that useful insights can be obtained from neuroscience. Who knows, perhaps some neural correlate will be discovered that points to a new area in physics. The problem is not perception or cognition, but how to explain basic subjective awareness in an objective physical model. There’s a ghost in the machine. And when I say “subjective awareness”, I mean awareness of anything at all, including the imaginary and the ineffable – it doesn’t necessarily have to be self-awareness, or awareness of one’s surroundings. Physical processes – even neurological ones, all have external, objective properties verifiable by many observers. But no physical process that we can understand has hidden subjective properties. That would add something new to physics. If processes could have subjective properties, then why shouldn’t the process of evolution itself be “aware” (there are feedback or recurrent processes in evolution). Perhaps that would even be someone’s conception of God. In exploring consciousness philosophically, you get into all kinds of wild, deep scenarios and paradoxes, that the best minds have pondered for centuries, if not longer. The subject is vast and complex, so I doubt very seriously that this book suddenly resolves everything. And yes, I think consciousness is correlated with a specific process – not a specific collection of matter (which would be one way to characterize “Russellian monism”). I would argue that Russellian monism is falsified by the constant influx and outflux of matter in the brain. All atoms in the brain are probably replaced every few months or so. If my subjectivity was associated with a specific set of atoms, I would have flushed my soul down the toilet a long time ago.
I think that “subjective” is not a natural kind: by which I mean that there are perspectival properties of a system (you experience things from here), and there are bandwidth properties (Mary can’t explain the sensation of “red” because the amount of data required to do so would take volumes of hard-to-process words, that’s all). And there’s nothing left after you account for these properties apart from a vague indication there must be something more to experience. That residuum is, I think, an artefact of language being intentional.
Let’s say you’re standing next to some guy at a bus stop – could even be John Wilkins or PZ Miers (but hopefully not Larry Moran). You observe this guy, a typical slovenly academic who thinks he knows everything (and probably does). But… being the strange, curious person that you are, you wonder why reality being experienced from your perspective instead of his, just a meter away – here we have an asymmetry with no explanation. You say this is not a natural kind, yet the asymmetry of an atom being where it is verses where it is not, is a natural kind. What’s so special about your motley collection of atoms? Why are you the observer or the subject? Why not him, or perhaps some equally dreadful alien five billion light years from here, waiting for the equivalent of a bus? Why you, and why here on earth? Taking this to its logical conclusion: why is reality being experienced from any specific perspective at all? Sorry, but that just makes no sense in a purely objective universe that has no preferred locations (or times, but that’s a more complicated, related mystery). In a purely objective universe, shouldn’t we all be unaware automatons? Shouldn’t the universe be one big homogeneous machine? How can this subjective awareness exist at all? Since it obviously does exist (to deny it, would be to deny a basic observation on your part – not very scientific), it strongly suggests that any objective model of the universe must be incomplete.
First of all, Larry Moran is an affable, well dressed and pleasant man with not a hint of arrogance or BO, and I would therefore greatly recommend standing next to him and not me. But let’s ask the following question: if some system is capable of recording its environs, what environs will it record? Why, the environs it is situated in. It simply cannot record environs in which it is not located, any more than I can take a perspective on the moons of Arcturus IV from that primary planet. So it makes no sense to ask why I see the world from here; if I am located here, that is the part of the world I see. I am a sensory system, so I sense what is perspectivally sensible from my location. If I had a part that was also on Arcturus IV, then I might have a “subjective” perspective on that part of the universe too. Why here? Well, my forebears, from whom I spring, evolved on earth, and I was born and raised here. Where else would I be? Now atoms, that’s another question. Maybe they do not have a perspective (although I bet they interact causally with local atoms and not those on Arcturus IV, unless that’s where they happen to be). Given that reality is physically differentiated in space and time, any system made from physical stuff will have a perspective, and that is easily explained in objective terms.
Just kidding about Larry, of course. I’m sure he smells great. One should not pay any attention to rumors. if some system is capable of recording its environs, what environs will it record? Why, the environs it is situated in. Sure a machine cannot help but help record its environs, but that’s not the issue. The whole issue is if it is “aware” of doing so, or is it just unconsciously going about its business, as most of us assume machines do. That is the difference between a “being” and an objective machine. So it makes no sense to ask why I see the world from here; if I am located here, that is the part of the world I see. Yes, it makes no sense to ask why your objective body is here, but that’s not the issue – the issue is why awareness is associated with this particular body instead of another, or even more basic: why awareness exists at all. Why are you “aware” of your location and your existence, and why is this awareness associated with your particular body instead of another? You can argue that a machine appears to be aware of its context, but if it has no internal subjective awareness of that fact, then I would say it is not really aware of anything at all. It is simply a bundle of objective processes – an automaton or a zombie (hate to use that loaded word). Given that reality is physically differentiated in space and time, any system made from physical stuff will have a perspective, and that is easily explained in objective terms. Absolutely, but again: is the system aware of that perspective? If it is, then it naturally follows that the system will ask why this awareness is associated with this system instead of another. An unconscious machine could never “understand” that, because it simply is not aware and has no symbolic or objective way of referencing awareness. Subjectivity cannot be described objectively. No experience at all can be attributed to something that is not conscious or subjectively aware. In fact, one could argue that no reality at all can be ascribed to a purely objective system (since it requires something else to be subjectively aware of its objectivity). If this universe was only populated with biological machines carrying out objective processes, then the universe might as well not exist at all, since nothing would be aware of it. But, I am aware of it, and I assume that others are as well (although, that is an unscientific assumption based on a sample size of one). So… it exists.
Whatever became of Penrose’s rather long winded speculations about consciousness physically residing somewhere on the classical-quantum transition border?
Abandoned by pretty well everyone, especially since actual calculations show that the effects of within tubule quantum effects are too small to make any gross difference in the overall behaviour of the neural system. And it’s special pleading.
Noë’s latest book is very worthy and interesting of being read (for instance, the discussions on the presuppositions of fMRI analysis, urban roads being frozen human tracks, mother-baby experiential coupling and a dozen problems the standard internalist computational vision approaches) but it is a pop science/pop philosophy book willing to introduce a general professional and amateur audience with the latest results and insights of the thesis of active externalism and embodiment of mental content and distributed cognition. Andy Clark and Teed Rockwell are other philosophers with a lot ammunition against the neurocentric, intercranial scientific orthodoxy.