I’ve deleted the “definition” of consciousness. I probably should have known better than to call it that, because such definitions are always over-ambitious. Instead, I’ve re-written the Overview, which now, I hope, better indicates my position on subjectivity and objectivity.
It now seems sadly clear that I won’t be able to visit Budapest for TSC2007—my knee won’t let me (chronic pain syndrome is the problem).
So now I need to focus on the poster, which the kind TSC2007 people have said they’ll take care of for me if I send it to them. I like to use the LaTeX typesetting system (LaTeX@Wikipedia), and I’ve found a webpage called Using LaTeX to produce conference posters which does exactly what it says in the title. I’ll put the text up on this site once it’s finalised. It might be fun to put up the actual poster, in pdf format—we’ll see…
(All references are to Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.)
Pat says we don’t know that the “hard problem” is really any more hard than many others (p50-52), and “we don’t know how consciousness is produced in brains” (p51). I know that it’s a pseudo-problem, and that consciousness is not produced.
Paul says the brain working at a low level and psychology at a high level are “not two things embracing one another, they’re actually just one thing, looked at from two different points of view.” (p59)
So near and yet so far. . . If he’d just put this together with the fact that the brain is objective while consciousness is subjective, he’d have it. He might even be right that work on the “easy problems” will lead to this understanding, though I’d say it needn’t necessarily do so.
Pat: “. . . there really are these qualitative experiences. . . ” (p60)
But it depends what you mean by “really.” For years I insisted that consciousness was real, despite being subjective, and I’m still tempted sometimes to use that kind of language. But “really” really needs to be qualified. Naive realism just doesn’t cut it in such a subtle and complex context.
In Susan Blackmore’s Conversations on Consciousness [Bla05], Daniel Dennett says that a philosophical zombie “could cry at sad movies, be thrilled by joyous sunsets, enjoy ice cream. . . and yet not be conscious at all.” (p81)
This might seem a trivial point, but it’s a typical example of Dennett’s thinking, or at least his writing. To be thrilled, or to enjoy, of course, one has to be conscious. He should have said “appear to be thrilled” and “act as if enjoying.” These concepts are inter/subjective, even if Dennett thinks they should not be. Of course this is probably just a slip, but there are many other such slips in his writing, which some people, such as myself, find quite off-putting. If these are genuine mistakes, then they’re uncharacteristically sloppy, and if not, then this is the philosophical equivalent of sleight-of-hand, and intellectually dishonest.
Moving on to actual philosophical issues…
“Here is how it [the intentional stance] works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then. . . you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs.” [Den87, p17]
I believe what we usually do when trying to guess what someone else in a given situation might do is to say to ourselves “what would I do?” Rationality will often play a part in that, but projection of the self, identification with the other, is psychologically much more basic.
It could be argued that my story reduces to Dennett’s: that, with sufficient qualification in the way of beliefs, desires and context generally, we can all be treated as rational agents, and that is what we do with each other, in principle. The answer to that is that my view is more practical, on a more appropriate level, closer to the actual action, and has greater explanatory power.
Dennett’s zimbo “would think it was conscious, even if it wasn’t.” [Den91, p311] And Dennett thinks “Nobody is conscious—not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism!” [Den91, p406]
There’s a very easy way to circumnavigate all such difficulties: consider the consciousness of any entity to be entirely a matter of opinion. Of course we want to say, if others consider us not to be conscious, that they’re wrong, but why? Isn’t it just because they might thus fail to consider our feelings? That’s a legitimate concern, but they’d not be factually wrong—if that’s wrong, then it’s morally so. Inter/subjectively, people are conscious, and so is anything else to which we find it useful to attribute consciousness, i.e. with which we might identify. Objectively, the word has no meaning, therefore nor does the question as to whether any entity is conscious.
Some might want to put “or desirable” after “useful” in the previous paragraph, but I would argue that the attribution of consciousness is only legitimate where it is genuinely useful to do so—that the concept is “naturally” instrumental, so usefulness is validity, and desirability is insufficient. Thus, attribution is not merely subjective, but intersubjective, because, as it concerns identification, we only find it useful where there are genuine similarities between attributor and attributee. Some opinions are more useful (and more natural) than others. See Intersubjective panpsychism.
“It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.” [DH87] (emphasis in the original)
I do agree with this and in fact I think it’s quite easily achieved. The concept of physical information is now well established: it is the form or structure of matter, so every material thing is considered to embody its own description. So if we add what I call “the formal stance” to Dennett’s array of stances, in which we focus on form, i.e. information, rather than substance, i.e. rather than taking the physical stance, we get physical information. The common concept of information is intentional, being always about something, but it is always encoded in physical information, and what’s encoded is in the eye of the decoder, thus intentional information is inter/subjective. Meaning is basically intentional information. Mind is the user/processor/creator of intentional information. It could be considered a virtual processor, running on the hardware of the brain. More on this under Mind, matter, meaning, and information.
[Bla05] Susan Blackmore. Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.
[Den87] Daniel C. Dennett. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.
[Den91] Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Allen Lane, London, 1991.
[DH87] Daniel C. Dennett and John Haugeland. Intentionality. In Gregory [Gre87].
[Gre87] Richard L. Gregory, editor. The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Here’s a good idea, a philosophical blogroll with valuable added information (even if it doesn’t display quite perfectly in IE6@1024×768): A brood comb power-blogroll.
My paper Mind, Matter, Meaning and Information has been accepted as a poster at Toward a Science of Consciousness 2007! Not yet sure whether I’ll actually get there myself, given my knee problem (currently believed to be “chronic pain syndrome”), but it would certainly be something to look forward to! Better get down to writing it, though…
I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s new book I Am A Strange Loop just now, and just ran into my first significant disagreement with him (in this book, that is). On page 76, after describing a walk along an airport concourse during which various scents evoke numerous associations, he writes (emphases in the original):
Each of these examples of symbol-triggering constitutes an act of perception, as opposed to the mere reception of a gigantic number of microscopic signals arriving from some source, like a million raindrops landing on a roof.
So it’s meaning that matters. Which, of course, denies the possibility, or at least the significance, of “raw feels”. But I’m quite convinced that I sometimes perceive sights, sounds, smells and other signals without recognising their source. I don’t mean when I mistake something for something else, but when I’m quite mystified, and have no idea what a particular sound or sight signifies. Some people say that there are no raw feels, because there is always some interpretation, however minimal, but I say, if so, sometimes it’s so minimal as to make no difference, in this context anyway.
In the preceding pages Hofstadter writes quite a lot about video, and especially about video feedback, which he says will serve well in the following discussions of perception and other mental phenomena, so what he’s comparing the sense of smell with, in that passage, is the signals transmitted from a video camera to a television (”receiver”) to which it’s directly connected. Also implicit is the fact that scents are carried through the air by molecules of the substances concerned, so his “million raindrops” stands for millions of molecules, and there’s the matter of levels of explanation too, because these might trigger just one symbol.
My theory of consciousness copes very well with the problem of “meaningless perception”. The crucial point is whether we’re willing or able to identify with the receiver/perceiver. It might be an extremely sophisticated chemical sensor connected to a powerful computer programmed so that it can identify smells just as well as you or I, but unless you imagine yourself as that computer (or software, whatever), “smelling” what it “smells”, it’s still just a piece of automatic equipment to you. To attribute consciousness is to identify with the attributee. That’s what it’s all about.
Later: I just realised, this fits in very well with something Hofstadter wrote earlier, on page 17, which struck me at the time as not quite right:
Some of us (myself included) believe that the late President Reagan was essentially “all gone” many years before his body gave up the ghost, and more generally we believe that people in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease are essentially all gone.
When I read that I made a note: “Does that mean it’s OK to abuse them?” He goes on to say that these peoples’ souls have departed (contradicting “before his body gave up the ghost”), though of course he emphasises throughout that he uses that word “poetically”, not religiously. But then most or all animals lack the higher cognitive faculties, and animals are generally denied souls, so maybe that makes some sort of sense. But like people with Alzheimer’s, they can suffer. Doesn’t that matter?
This is from an article at TimesOnline (quoted without permission):
A study commissioned by the Government that suggests robots could one day have rights was attacked by leading scientists yesterday as a red herring that has diverted attention from more pressing ethical issues.
Researchers studying robotics said that the Robo-rights document, published in December and sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry, amounted to pointless philosophical speculation founded on poor science.
While there are important questions to be asked about the direction of robot technology, these have been obscured by considering “robot rights” that no scientists take seriously, the experts said…
Noel Sharkey, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, said: “The idea of machine consciousness is a bit of a fairytale. I’m not certain it won’t happen, in the same way as when I was seven I wasn’t certain about Santa Claus not existing, but I was fairly sure.”
Machine consciousness “a bit of a fairytale”, eh? God, I could be so scathing about that, if only I had strong views one way or the other.
Actually, I do have strong, or at least deeply-rooted views, but unfortunately, they’re right down the middle. It’s a matter of opinion, people! Whether anything other than an actual human being is conscious, that is.1 The question is whether any robot or other machine will ever be consistently treated as conscious by anyone. Though there’s also another question: whether anyone will ever invest what it would cost to design and build a machine that could tempt someone consistently to treat it as conscious.
I’m really going to have to write something substantial on this soon.
Note 1: Technically, it’s a matter of opinion whether a human being is conscious too, but to view humans as not conscious is highly unnatural, impractical, and will lead to anti-social consequences, so it’s an opinion that’s not factually wrong, but is wrong even so.
This is just to mark the fact that I’ve decided to rationalize my personal and philosophy websites and unite them here at robinfaichney.org, which becomes a blog. Still not entirely sure the blog format is the way to go, but there’s one way to find out…
