fragments of consciousness

Online consciousness conference

The Online Consciousness Conference has been up and running for a few days now.  The conference, organized by Richard Brown, has a keynote paper by David Rosenthal and nine contributed papers, each followed by one or two commentaries, usually with both a video and a written version.  There are lively and high-quality discussions in the comment threads after each paper.  I'm a bit late to the party, having been out of town for the first few days of the conference.  But as it happens, six of the ten papers take my work as a primary target (Derek Ball on mysterianism, Kati Balog on the phenomenal concept strategy, Dave Beisecker also on the phenomenal concept strategy, Richard Brown on arguments for dualism, Barbara Montero on Russellian physicalism, Gualtiero Piccinini on first-person data), so I've posted comments in those six threads.  Other philosophers are encouraged to join in.

The problem of consciousness meets "Intelligent Design"

It had to happen eventually.  The "hard problem" of consciousness is being invoked in favor of anti-Darwinist ideas such as "Intelligent Design".  Here's a key quote from an already infamous New Scientist article:

"According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."

The reporter contacted me to ask for a comment when she was writing the article.  I told her that like many other scientists and philosophers (even people like Steven Pinker!), I have serious doubts about the possibility of a materialist explanation of consciousness, but that those doubts do little to support a religious agenda or intelligent design.  I declined to be quoted on the record, though, because of the danger of being taken out of context as supporting the movement.  Perhaps this was a mistake, as the article doesn't do a good job of separating the issues.  I'd hate to see the consciousness/materialism issue and the design/theism issue run together in the popular imagination.  As Peter Hankin says amusingly at Conscious Entities:

"Oh boy: if there was one thing the qualia debate didn't need, it was a large-scale theological intervention. Dan Dennett must be feeling rather the way Guy Crouchback felt when he heard about the Nazi-Soviet pact: the forces of darkness have drawn together and the enemy stands clear at last!"

Anyway, let's get things straight.  The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism.  In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length here and there.  But it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.

The simplest way to see this is to note that the "hard problem" does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn't lawfully depend on physical processes, at least in the sense that certain physical states are reliably associated with certain states of consciousness in our world.  Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness.  But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness.  If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects. And if epiphenomenalism (on which consciousness has no causal role) is true, consciousness can still arise by evolution as a byproduct.  Perhaps the thought that consciousness is a byproduct is unattractive, but if so the problem lies with epiphenomenalism, not with evolution.

So I think there is very little support for anti-Darwinist ideas to be found here. I think there's also not much support for theist ideas: of course traditional theism requires that materialism be false, but the falsity of materialism does little to positively suggest that theism is true.  As for intelligent design, I'm on the record as saying that I can't rule out the hypothesis that we're living in a computer simulation, so I suppose that it follows that I can't rule out the hypothesis that our world is designed.  But there's not much here to support traditional theism or to oppose Darwinism, and whatever support there is doesn't come from the problem of consciousness.  In any case, I hope that these issues remain firmly separated, as they should.

Consciousness in the news

The mind-body problem has been in the news lately.  A couple of weeks ago, Time magazine had a special issue on mind and brain, with a lead story by Steven Pinker on the mystery of consciousness, along with brief sidebar articles on consciousness by Bernard Baars, Dan Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Colin McGinn.  Now the New Yorker has just published a long article by Larissa MacFarquhar on Pat and Paul Churchland (not online, unfortunately), with a lot of nice biographical and sociological background and some philosophical discussion along the way.  I talked to Larissa for this article a year or two ago, when it was a general article on the problem of consciousness, and a fair amount of philosophical background on consciousness has survived into the final version.

Nida-Rumelin on grasping phenomenal properties

One of the most interesting papers in the Alter and Walter collection is Martine Nida-Rümelin's "Grasping Phenomenal Properties", which gives a new argument against the materialist thesis that phenomenal properties are physical properties. Nida-Rümelin's argument uses the two-dimensional apparatus at various points in an auxiliary role, but she argues that her argument requires weaker and less controversial assumptions than my two-dimensional argument.  Here I'll look into this a bit.  (It might be worth looking at these two papers first, if you're not familiar with the issues.)

Nida-Rümelin's argument runs roughly as follows.

(1) A person who grasps a property via two distinct concepts is in a position to rationally judge that those concepts are necessarily coextensive.

(2) Phenomenal properties are grasped via phenomenal concepts.

(3) Any physical property can be grasped via a physical concept, by someone with relevant physical background knowledge.

(4) No amount of physical background knowledge puts one in a position to rationally judge that a phenomenal concept and a physical concept are necessarily coextensive.
______________________

(5) No phenomenal property is a physical property.

Dennett changes his mind

A recent issue of Minds and Machines is devoted to the philosophy of Daniel Dennett.  It includes an interview with Dennett (subscription required), which is by and large pretty interesting, but which includes along the way the following remarkable passage:

David Chalmers and I have discussed this for what seems an indeterminable number of years, and he candidly grants that he has no arguments in favor of qualia that I haven't rebutted to his satisfaction, he just can't let go of the belief in them.

Needless to say, I've never granted any such thing.  I don't think that Dennett's responses are at all satisfactory -- see section 2 of "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness" for details.  Of course it may be neither of us has arguments that the other hasn't rebutted to his own satisfaction -- that's very common in philosophy, and is a very different claim.  I suspect that Dan has started from the memory of something I've said to that effect (for my view on the dialectical situation here, see especially the middle of section 2.2 in the paper cited above), and that the memory has gradually evolved in a satisfying way.  A nice demonstration of the power of topdown memory biases!

In any case, I'm pleased to report that in private e-mail, Dan not only retracted the attribution, but candidly acknowledged that he now thinks that the arguments for his view are all unsound, and that he now privately favors Cartesian dualism.

(OK, not really.)

Papineau on phenomenal concepts

David Papineau has put online his paper "Phenomenal and Perceptual Concepts", forthcoming next year in the Alter/Walter collection Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism.  In the paper he extends and elaborates the "quotational concepts" view he put forward in his 2002 book Thinking about Consciousness, and uses it to answer various anti-materialist challenges.  In the last section of the paper, he tries to use the account to answer the challenge I put forward in "Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap", posted here earlier this year, and forthcoming in the same volume.

In that paper, I argued that accounts of phenomenal concepts that attempt to explain away the explanatory gap face a dilemma: either there is an epistemic gap between P (physical processes) and C (the relevant features of phenomenal concepts), or there's not.  If the former, then the relevant features of phenomenal concepts can't be physically explained.  If the latter, then there's an epistemic gap between C and E (the epistemic feature we face with regard to consciousness), so that C can't be used to explain our epistemic situation.  In his paper, Papineau claims to embrace both horns (!) of the dilemma.  A response (adapted from recent correspondence with Papineau) is after the fold.

The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism

I've put a new paper online: "The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism".  An abridged version is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Mind (edited by Brian McLaughlin), and the whole thing is forthcoming in my book The Character of Consciousness, to be published next year by Oxford University Press.  A fair amount of the material is recycled from my other papers in this vicinity in the last few years, but some of it is new.  This paper is intended to be the definitive version of the two-dimensional argument, being maximally explicit about details and replying to many of the objections that have been raised in the literature in the last ten years or so.  This version is a draft (I have to submit it fairly soon), and there are probably mistakes here and there. Any comments would be appreciated.

Representationalism showdown

I see that Alex Byrne and Michael Tye have just posted their reply, "Qualia Ain't in the Head", to Adam Pautz's paper "Sensory Awareness is not a Wide Physical Relation".  Both papers are forthcoming in Nous.  Pautz argues against externalist representationalism about sensory experience, and Byrne and Tye defend it.  The centerpiece of Pautz's case is the scenario of Twin Maxwell.  Maxwell is an ordinary perceiver of orange who represents it as a mixed hue, via activation of dual opponent-processing channels.  Twin Maxwell is a counterfactual perceiver in a different environment, who normally responds to (what we call) orange things with activation of a single channel, the sort of activation that normally goes along with representing a color as a unique hue.  Pautz argues that (1) Maxwell and Twin Maxwell have different experiences when looking at an orange in typical circumstances: Maxwell has a "mixed hue" experience, Twin Maxwell has a "unique hue" experience.  He also argues that (2) wide representationalism (at least of the Dretske/Tye variety, where states represent those properties that they causally covary with under normal conditions) is committed to saying that Maxwell and Twin Maxwell have the same sort of experience: both are in an internal state that is caused by the same external physical property P in optimal conditions, so both states will represent P, so both states will have the same phenomenal character. So externalist representationalism is false.

Byrne and Tye say various things in reply, questioning (1) in some cases, and also noting that externalist representationalism is not committed to Dretske/Tye representationalism.  But the core of their reply, toward the end of their paper, is to deny (2), holding that even Dretske/Tye representationalism is consistent with Maxwell and Twin Maxwell having different experiences.  (Or at least, that it is consistent with there being different experiences in all the cases where (1) is plausible.)  Their key point is that when Twin Maxwell looks at an orange thing, and assuming he has an experience as of unique red or some other unique hue here, then he is not perceiving under optimal conditions, precisely because he is perceiving the orange object as red (or as having some other unique hue), and such an experience will be nonveridical.  If so, the state does not causally covary with P under optimal conditions, so it does not represent P, so it need not have the same phenomenal character as Maxwell's experience.

I think the state of play favors Pautz here.  It seems illegitimate to appeal to nonveridicality in explaining why conditions are not optimal.  For an experience to be nonveridical is for it to have a false content; and on the Dretske/Tye account, the content of an experience is to be explained partly in terms of the notion of optimality.  If optimality is then explained partly in terms of veridicality, this account will be circular.  So a noncircular account requires that optimality be explained without invoking notions such as veridicality and content, perhaps instead using notions such as normality, fitness, and so on.  So to make their case, Byrne and Tye need to show that Twin Maxwell's conditions are suboptimal in some such independent sense.  But they have not done this, and it is not easy to see how this could be done, since Maxwell and Twin Maxwell's circumstances seem to be symmetrical with respect to the natural candidates for the relevant independent features.  (A version of this point is made by Pautz in his reply to the second objection [pp. 27-30] in the long version of his paper on the web, and, I gather, in a footnote in the abridged version that will appear in Nous.)  Perhaps there is some independent grounding for suboptimality that could be found, but this is far from obvious. 

Of course there are other replies available.  If the externalist abandons the Dretske/Tye account of content, other options will be available.  But it looks like the symmetry considerations generalize to many other accounts, so it would at least be interesting to see some other options spelled out.  Personally I think the best reply for the externalist representationalist is Pautz's "third objection" [pp. 30-31 of the web version]: the appeal to compositional representation of distinct but necessarily coextensive complex properties.  Maxwell might represent the property <R to degree 0.5 and Y to degree .5>, while Twin Maxwell might represent the coextensive property <R' to degree 1 and Y' to degree 0>, where R' and Y' are the properties tracked by Twin Maxwell's opponent-process channels corresponding to our R and Y channels. Pautz suggests in response that even the states of the single channels in Twin Maxwell (activation 1 on the first channel, activation 0 on the second channel) will track <R to degree 0.5> and <Y to degree 0.5> respectively.   But the externalist can easily handle this by holding that the different states of a single channel are constrained to represent different degrees of a single quantifiable property R', which must differ from R, and that <R' to degree 1> and <R to degree 0.5> are distinct properties.  As Pautz notes, this reply doesn't generalize to other inversion cases involving noncompositional representation in cases involving pain and taste.  But the externalist might reply that the real power of Maxwell case comes from the compositionality, and that in these other cases it is easier for them to deny that the relevant subjects have different experiences.

Of course there's a lot more to be said.  It will be interesting to see where things go from here.  It's interesting in any case to see the recent groundswell of support for internalist versions of representationalism, in the work of people like Tim Crane, Terry Horgan and John Tienson, Joe Levine, Georges Rey, Sydney Shoemaker, Charles Siewert, and Brad Thompson, as well as Pautz and yours truly.  Clearly this is the wave of the future!

Phenomenological disputes

I've just returned from a quick hop to Syracuse for the SPAWN conference on consciousness, organized by Bob van Gulick.  (Visuals: My photos are now online, and Murat Aydede has put together a photo-movie.  Uriah Kriegel has a conference report, including a summary of the papers.)  This is the first of a series of conferences aimed at highlighting new work by up-and-coming researchers in a given field of philosophy, with papers supplied in advance by relatively junior researchers, commentaries on these papers by relatively senior researchers, and a number of overview sessions to pull things together.  (Here's the program.)  It's a great model for a conference, and the conference was memorable in a number of respects.  Here I'll mention a few themes that came up along the way, especially in the overview sessions.

The first overview session mostly involved a look back at the last 15 years.  Most entertaining was Alex Byrne's division of researchers in the field into advocates of the "inner" perspective and the "outer" perspective on consciousness.  "Innies" and "outies", as they came to be known, were given different pithy one-line views on a number of the main issues in the field.  The conference attendees seemed fairly evenly divided between innies and outies: by my count, the nine senior commentators were divided 4-5 (in favor of outies) and the junior paper-givers were divided 6-3 (in favor of innies).  Also memorable in this session was a leading senior researcher's heartfelt declaration that there's a serious danger of the field becoming too driven by the latest empirical discoveries and losing touch with enduring philosophical issues.  Needless to say, this view wasn't shared by everyone.

For the second evening, I was commissioned to give an after-dinner talk on challenges for the philosophy and the science of consciousness in the next 15 years.  Fortunately I was helped in this by President Bush's announcement earlier that day of a major 15-year research project aimed at building a consciousness meter (motivated inter alia by the Terri Schiavo case and by the need to deal with uncooperative foreign prisoners).  After the president's proposed "Putin method" was rejected ("I looked into his eyes and saw his soul"), it was decreed that the project would need both neuroscientists and physicists to design a perfect brain scanner, and philosophers to interpret the results.  The latter part involved a number of key subprojects, each aided by a key advisor of the president.  The project on analyzing criteria for the ascription of consciousness was to be headed by Bill Frist; the project on verbal reports by Karl Rove; the project on the epistemology of consciousness by Donald Rumsfeld (well-known advocate of the KK thesis); the project on the relation between phenomenal states and intentional states by Condoleeza Rice (the Secretary of States); and, of course, the project on central executive function was headed by Dick Cheney. (This last project led to a familiar-sounding debate about whether George Bush is epiphenomenal, or plays an as yet unknown causal role, or is just wheeled out occasionally for press conferences, as on Dan Dennett's old theory.  Some advocated eliminativism about the concept of the presidency, some advocated analytic functionalism, but most seemed to favor adopting Ned Block's distinction between the phenomenal president, who is mostly for show, and the access president, who does all the work.)  There was also discussion of the CIA's proposal for a zombie army, of inattentional blindness (explaining nuclear weapons in North Korea?) and change blindness (explaining why no WMDs have yet been found in Iraq -- they're moved every time we saccade), of the development of new language (cf. "misunderestimate" and "strategery") for formalizing conscious states, and of many other crucial topics.

Arizona consciousness webcourse

The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona is running a webcourse on consciousness, directed by Bernard Baars and Katharine McGovern, from June 12 to September 25 this year.    It should give an excellent background in the field (especially on the cognitive science side) for people who don't have courses like this at their own university, or who are outside the academic system.  The rates are pretty reasonable, especially if you register by May 25.

Plans are also well underway for the next Tucson conference on Toward a Science of Consciousness, to be held April 4-8, 2006.  Speakers will include Antonio Damasio, Paul Davies, Walter Freeman, Douglas Hofstadter, David Rosenthal, Oliver Sacks, John Searle, and many others.

Hey Joe

While poking through Powerpoint files on my laptop, I came across "Hey Joe", my comments on Joe Levine's book Purple Haze for the Pacific APA last year.  As I probably won't be doing anything further with these comments, I've posted the Powerpoint file online.  Explanatory gap aficionados can check out the arguments, and Jimi Hendrix aficionados can check out the album covers.

Major figures in the study of consciousness

Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans, and Patrick Wilken are editing the Oxford Companion to Consciousness, an encyclopedia-style reference work with entries on all sorts of topics.  As part of the book, they want to include 20-25 biographies of major contributors to the study of consciousness.  Tim suggested that I post a note here in order to encourage suggestions about who should be included in such a list.  Note that the book is interdisciplinary, so relevant figures include philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and others (though the topic is consciousness specifically, rather than all of cognitive science).  The list is restricted to people who are no longer living.

I'll kick things off with ten names that come quickly to mind: René Descartes, Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, William James, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Wilder Penfield, Roger Sperry, Francis Crick.  Of course more names come to mind, but I won't spoil the fun by trying to enumerate them all.  Your suggestions are welcome.

A Place for Consciousness

Gregg Rosenberg's book A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World was published a few months ago by Oxford University Press.  Even before publication this book had a sort of cult following among people interested in "radical" approaches to the metaphysics of consciousness.  Broadly speaking, Rosenberg defends a Russell-style metaphysics on which consciousness is grounded in the intrinsic categorical properies of certain physical processes, and in particular is closely tied to the intrinsic nature of causation itself.  This is by far the most detailed development of a Russell-style metaphysics of consciousness that I know of.  He also has a chapter with a novel anti-physicalist argument, a chapter responding to philosophical critics of anti-physicalist arguments, chapters on the "boundaries" of consciousness and on panpsychism, and a lot of material on understanding causation in its own right.  I don't agree with everything here (and I'm still trying to understand all the details of the positive theory), but it's well worth reading.

There's already some discussion of the book on the web.  Apart from Rosenberg's own website and an Amazon page, Steve Esser's weblog "Guide to Reality" has a summary and an evaluation.  The Physics Forum website has threads discussing the book here and here.  Much of this discussion is by philosophically-interested nonphilosophers, who are often less conservative than professional philosophers where radical views of consciousness are concerned.  But there is a lot of meaty analytic philosophy in Rosenberg's book (like my own book on consciousness, Rosenberg's book is a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis from Indiana University), and I'd encourage interested philosophers to come to grips with it.