The main development yesterday was my realisation of the link between the MSc dissertation and what is now my main aim for a PhD project. So here’s my favourite expression of what I very much hope to do a PhD on:

It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory. Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland.

My thing always used to be consciousness, but having a much clearer view of the state of the art since starting the MSc course, I don’t believe there’s very much left to do there. Information is something else, and I have some very definite ideas, which remain intact even after studying Dretske and others last semester, and spending much of this week looking at philosophy of info on the web.

The link between the MSc dissertation (see the proposal) and the proposed PhD project is memes, as items of information. I’m now thinking that it might be possible to explain the difference between Blackmore’s and Dennett’s concepts of consciousness largely in memetic terms. That’s basically because Blackmore, unlike Dennett, provides a convincing account of how memes get going in the first place (though she didn’t make the link between that story and consciousness). That unfortunately reduces the emphasis on meditation (probably, I think), but you can’t study everything!

If that works out as I hope and expect it will, it’ll make a great jumping off point for the PhD project. The timing isn’t so great, though, because as yet I’ve no idea who might be willing and able to supervise it, so I’ll probably have to take a year out, and start the PhD in September 2011, which seems a long, long way away! But of course I don’t have to wait until then to get working on it…

[Later: I should maybe make it clear that my commitment to this plan isn't absolute, but any alternative would have to be very good to compete. Short of sheer fantasy, I can hardly think of anything better!]

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.