01.01-- Abstract No:848
The paper explores three related conjectures:
(C1) Inadequate grasp of the design issues involved in production of an organism or machine with human capabilities leads to deep confusions in both philosophical and empirical research on consciousness. Design issues include the requirements for functioning organisms or agents, and the range of possible design solutions.
(C2) The concepts we employ in most of our ordinary thinking about mental states and processes in ourselves and others have hidden depths connected with design issues, but when we reflect on our concepts: we notice only superficial aspects of their phenomenology. Deeper analysis requires identification of the design problems solved by phylogenetic and ontogenetic adaptation (e.g. evolution and learning) and relating those problems to classes of architectures for competent animals of various kinds,
(C3) By identifying ways in which those architectures can be abnormal or be damaged, we can extend and refine ordinary concepts so as to provide a powerful new set of concepts for use in empirical research, scientific theorising, and philosophical analysis.
Design considerations provide a framework for talking about all forms of consciousness to be found in nature (including other animals, human infants, and people with brain damage or disease) instead of focusing only on the tiny subset of phenomena noticed by a typical adult scientist or philosopher discussing consciousness.
Different sorts of consciousness are associated with architectural layers that evolved at different times, and which operate concurrently in humans in more or less integrated fashion. E.g.
(L1) A reactive layer supports primitive (e.g. insect-like) types of sentience, emotions focussed only on the present e.g. immediate 'alarm' reactions causing freezing, fleeing, aggression, etc., and simple learning (e.g. adjustment of weights within existing structures) but no 'what if' reasoning.
(L2) A deliberative (management) layer supports experiences (and qualia) using higher order concepts, emotions linked to what might happen (e.g. apprehension) or what might have happened (e.g. relief or regret) , constructive problem-solving and richer forms of learning and memory. It will inevitably be partly digital and to some extent serial and resource-limited.
(L3) A reflective (meta-management) architectural layer, using mechanisms of self-monitoring, self-evaluation and self-control can support experiences of self, including sensory and other qualia, emotions based on self-evaluation and partial loss of self control, and learning that extends self-categorization and forms of thinking and attentional control.
Forms of sentience in all three layers include a ''first-person'' aspect (how things are sensed or experienced or perceived, as opposed to how they are) . Only when L3 is present can the first-person aspect be explictly attended to by the organism.
Empirical evidence and engineering design considerations suggest that the layers are not related as a simple control hierarchy, since processes in each can drive or modify processes in the others (an example of 'circular causation') . E.g. control of attention and thought processes is always limited.
This also undermines the common assumption that consciousness is inherently bound up with rationality.
Each layer can go wrong in many different ways. Since their processing is concurrent, malfunctions in one can leave another more or less intact. Thus we can expect many combinations of ''disorders of consciousness'' (including blindsight, multiple personality disorder, autism, etc.) .
Different layers need not be mapped onto different physical mechanisms. E.g. if they use virtual machines distributed over physical mechanisms, this can undermine simple mental-physical correlationsm. (Compare hardware-software correlations.)
In both cases 'downward' causation is compatible with causal completeness at the physical level. (Cf. Haken on circular causation) .
This work is partly inspired by evolutionary considerations, partly by empirical research in psychology and brain science, partly by philosophical analysis of many familiar concepts, and partly by lessons learnt from work in AI on the design of various kinds of fragments of intelligent agents.
It's not yet clear precisely what sorts of functional capabilities are required in each layer to support a typically human repertoire of mental states and processes.
Neither is it clear whether computer-based mechanisms would suffice for conscious human-like robots, nor whether mechanisms of classical physics would suffice. It might turn out that physical constraints of weight, size, energy consumption, speed, information storage capacity, and reliable information persistence, require quantum mechanical mechanisms. Other reasons for bringing in quantum mechanics are usually not based on proper design considerations. (Often more on confused, wishful thinking about 'freedom', 'self', etc.)
Consequences of inadequate understanding of the 'design issues' include (a) proposing mechanisms of mind which fail to address requirements of real (animal and robot) minds, (b) arguments against classes of designs based on ignorance of the variety and depth covered by such classes, and (c) superficial theories about both the phenomenology and the mechanisms of consciousness.
A baby zombie designed with the right architecture would eventually develop the ability to wonder about the link between its qualia and its body. Just like baby humans.
For further elaboration follow the links from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
01.01-- Abstract No:858
In this essay, I call into question the attempt to interpret self-consciousness as a linguistic activity relative to consciousness. In Section I, I argue that even though it might seem reasonable to use a linguistic entity such as 'This sentence is false' as a paradigm for self-reference, such a sentence is hardly intrinsically self-referring. Rather than use a semantical analysis to call this hypothetical paradigm into question, I show that the brain events that give rise to an interpretation of 'This sentence is false' as being self-referring are disparately located in the brain and, therefore, the purported self-reference can only be accomplished by stipulation. Thus, if there is such a thing as intrinsic self-reference, then the best candidate for the role of paradigm is self-consciousness.
In Section II, I argue that the existence of self-consciousness (awareness2) does not exist at all points concurrently with consciousness (awareness1) . I also contend that an alleged infinite regress in respect to the postulation of awareness2 is hardly vicious because awareness2 does no explanatory work relative to awareness1. I also dismiss (some will say polemically and precipitously so) the necessity of engaging in a discussion of the semantical characteristics of 'I', the need for epistemic and doxastic criteria for the existence of awareness2, and the necessity of establishing either individualizing concepts or observational indices for the subject. The point to be made is that awareness2 is simply given to us experientially (phenomenologically) .
Finally in Section III, I argue against Daniel Dennett's apparent linguistic interpretation of awareness2 again by appealing to the phenomenological nature of awareness2. Awareness2 itself can be categorized in at least two ways, viz., spontaneous and purposeful. It should not be surprising that self-consciousness can be of different types inasmuch as awareness1 (first-order consciousness) can also be categorized in several different ways. Undoubtedly, some of these categories on both levels can be interpreted linguistically, but that is not to say awareness2 of the spontaneous type need be so interpreted.
01.01-- Abstract No:868
One of the things that distinguishes science from other endeavors is that a science has a precise formulation of its fundamental concepts. Physicists, for example, may disagree about the behavior of a particle in a field, but they have a precise and systematic formulation of the concepts of that field and that particle, and language involving the use of those concepts. In contrast, the field of consciousness studies has has nothing of the sort. If we are to have a science, we must have a formulation of the phenomenon that is sufficiently comprehensive, and yet is precise and systematically formulated enough. This paper presents such a formulation. Starting from P.G. Ossorio's formalization of the concept of world, we formulate consciousness as the state of affairs characterized by two facets, or parameters: The person's world, and the position within that world from which they observe the world and act in it. Thus, to say that a person is conscious is to refer to the fact that they have a world, which is to say that they act within a world from a position in it.
Experience and feelings are aspects of having a world: One's experience may be straightforwardly formulated as those aspects of a person's world directly observable only by the person whose world it is. This makes the concept of experience unmysterious, without doing injustice to its essential characteristics: it is private, it is real and observable to the person whose experience it is, and not observable by anyone else. Feelings, in turn, are the experience of appraisals. For example, the feeling of fear is the experience one has when one recognizes danger (the appraisal of a situation as calling tautologically for escape) . We thus have a formulation that systematically connects consciousness, experience, and feelings to other, public, precisely formulated concept of world and human action.
Not just any collection of things can constitute a world; to say that something is a world is to say that it coheres in specific, systematic ways. What distinguishes a person from a machine, or software, is that programs do not have worlds; they have collections of facts about objects, processes, etc., but these collections do not have the coherence and comprehensiveness that it takes to be a world. It is this coherence that is articulated in Ossorio's work, which is a formal elaboration of the concepts of state of affairs, objects, processes, and events and their interrelationships. In short, a computer is not conscious because computers do not have worlds. The formalism for representing elements of a world and their necessary connections, including both logical relationships and identity coordination, implies what it would take to have a conscious computer: To be conscious, a computer must have a world, and a position in that world from which is observes its world and acts, as does a person. Based on this formulation of worlds and consciousness, we indicate how such a research program might proceed.
01.01-- Abstract No:901
Block's example revisited: I am engaged in an intense conversation when I suddenly realize that there is a loud noise outside. I realize that I was speaking louder than usual. We need not only two (A- and P-consciousness) but four categories to explain this example : 1) unconscious basic content processing, -I speak louder without been aware of that (ground PR -gPR) ; 2) phenomenal field - the noisy ambience that gives our conversation its qualitative flavor (ground PH, gPH) ; 3) phenomenal focussing -at first, conversation, then, the noise (focus PH, fPH) ; 4) examining processing -first, the thoughts expressed, then, my speaking louder (focus PR, fPR) . No fPr without fPh, at least in the sensorial domain. Maybe I can change the syntax of my sentence when talking (fPR ?) while focussing on my thoughts (fPH) , but here fPR could also be reduced to gPR. No gPH (nor fPH and PR) without gPR. We can get gPH without fPH and fPR, when we just open our eyes and see the environment without noticing anything. We can get fPH without fPR, when we just gaze at some focussed place in our visual field without examining it. Subliminal priming, or blindsight, give examples of gPR without the three others PH and PR.
Consciousness seems to be needed for deictic continuity between gPH and fPH (or fPR) . «That noise » is the noise that was gPH perceived and the one that is now fPH perceived. Focussed consciousness implies the capacity to reelaborate some content while referring it to the context against which this reelaboration makes it salient. Ground processing of noise (gPR) , carried on during the conversation, causes my focussing on the noise. Consciousness implies referring the focussed content (fPH) to the ground field (gPH) from which it has been extracted and elaborated by gPR. Consciousness is not divided into fringes and nucleus (James) , it is the relation between them, giving sense to the deictic « that noise ». This referring does not consist in using so to speak an adress of a previous file. It is content adressing (using the content elaborated by gPR) . But how could gPH consciouness be such a relation, as gPR is unconscious ? Let us suppose that gPR brings about some patterns, that these patterns are stabilized and integrated together into some field (visual, auditive, phonetic, semantic one; cross-modal integration occurs too) . Now we explore patterns across this field. The field/pattern relation is an « horizontal» one: we do not make some pattern as salient, we just go from one pattern to another; we are sure that we can come back to previous patterns, so that the field gives us deictic capacities. Consciousness as gPH could be the activation of this horizontal field-pattern relation. Consciousness in its second stage (fPH and fPR) could be the activation of the depth-of-field relation between gPh and fPH. Introspection consists in processing the very patterns of these relations using the horizontal relation, and reflection processes them (fPH and fPR with gPH) using the depth relation.
01.01-- Abstract No:907
1. Introduction
Though there has been a huge resurgence of interest in consciousness in the past decade, little attention has been paid to what the philosopher Immanuel Kant and others call the unity of consciousness. The unity of consciousness takes different forms, as we will see, but the general idea is that each of us is aware of many things in the world at the same time, and often many of one's own mental states and of oneself as their single common subject, too.
Indeed, unities of consciousness are far from being the only mental unities. There are also unities on the 'input' side of consciousness and cognition, unities that consist of integration of motivating factors, cognitive capacities, etc. and unities on the 'output' side, unities that consist of integration of behaviour.
The purpose of this short sketch of some of the most important mental unities is to try to delineate the main kinds and say a bit about each of them.
2. Cognitive Unity
One of the more striking things about human beings as cognitive systems is that we can bring an extremely wide range of factors to bear on a cognitive situation, a situation in which we have to characterize something or reach a decision about what to do about something. Consider just how wide the range is. We can bring to bear: what we want; what we believe; our attitudes to self, situation, and context; input from each of our various senses; information about the situation, other people, others' beliefs, desires, attitudes, etc.; the resources of however many languages we have available to us; the various kinds of memory; bodily sensations; various problem-solving skills we have acquired; and so on.
Not only can we bring all these elements to bear, we can integrate them in a way that is highly structured and ingeniously appropriate to the situation before us and what we would like to achieve. Let us call this form of mental unity cognitive unity.
3. The Unities of Consciousness
In addition to cognitive unity, there are some unities specific to consciousness in its different forms. By 'consciousness' I will mean both sentience, awareness of one's environment and perhaps of one's body as an element of that environment, and two different forms of consciousness of self: consciousness of one's own psychological states, and consciousness of oneself as the thing whose states they are (for more on this terminology, see xx 1994, Ch. 3) .
These forms of consciousness display at least three distinct forms of unity. Let us call them unity of consciousness, unity of focus, and unified consciousness of self.
i. Unity of consciousness
Unity of consciousness starts from the intuitive idea that we are aware
of a great many things at once. Here is a better definition:
The unity of consciousness =df. (i) a representing in which (ii) a number of representations and/or objects of representation are combined in such a way that to be aware of any of these representations is also to be aware of other representations as connected to it and of the whole as a single complex representation.
ii. Unity of focus
We are able to focus on a number of considerations at the same time desires,
beliefs, alternatives, probabilities, etc. and apply them all together
to the available alternatives. We can then bring them together to choose
courses of action. We can then focus our behaviour and resources on carrying
out the choice, in the face of obstacles, conflicting desires, and so forth.
Unity of focus is something more than unified consciousness.
iii. Unified consciousness of self
Finally, each of us is aware of him- or herself throughout these unified
fields of representation and deliberation as the single subject and agent
of them all.
4. Unity of Behaviour
Finally, our behaviour displays a distinctive form of unity. In doing the actions we do, we coordinate our limbs, eyes, bodily attitude, etc., indeed in ways the precision and complexity of which would be difficult to exaggerate. Think, for example, of a concert pianist performing a complicated concerto.
These five forms of mental unity and others if any would be worthy objects of cognitive science's attention.
01.01-- Abstract No:955
Consciousness research is characterized by deep disagreements regarding what should be the object of study. Some complain that many would-be theories of consciousness actually "leave consciousness out", through some crucial failure to respect the "first person point of view". But just what constitutes a failure to recognize the reality of consciousness, and how lack of proper consideration to a first person approach might be involved in this, has sometimes been underspecified. Or this criticism may seem to depend on relatively controversial views regarding the accuracy of "introspective" knowledge, or the use of thought-experiments as evidence for strongly counterfactual possibilities. If we are very doubtful of these views, it may not be evident that those who are alleged to neglect consciousness actually do so. Study of blindsight subjects suggests a way for us to clarify what counts as realism and neglect where consciousness is concerned, while remaining comparatively uncommitted regarding the controversies mentioned.
It is proposed that we understand what is meant by 'conscious experience' via a first person approach that involves consideration of some (apparently) real and some merely hypothetical cases of blindsight. The approach is a "first person" one in two respects. (1) It relies on a type of knowledge one has of experience, in which the warrant for first person beliefs about experience differs in kind from the warrant available for beliefs about what experience others have. (2) It invites one to conceive of being someone who has and lacks certain kinds of conscious experience under certain conditions--and so to conceive of these scenarios "from the subject's point of view". Thus the use of the term 'conscious' is explained: by appeal to examples of experience that we know in this distinctively first person way to be conscious in the relevant sense; and by a contrast between these cases and blindsight cases in which certain kinds of conscious visual experience are missing, while various sorts of visual ability are still intact. Starting with the kind of blindsight that has been reported in actual subjects, one is then asked to conceive of being a blindsighter who has an ability to discriminate visual stimuli spontaneously as well as can be done with certain varieties of conscious vision (some of a poor, "legally blind" sort) , and finally, to conceive of being a blindsighter who is able spontaneously to discriminate his or her own visual discriminations.
On this basis, a standard for realism regarding consciousness is proposed. One recognizes the occurrence of conscious experience only if one affirms that experience is conscious in the sense illustrated, while leaving open the conceptual and metaphysical possibility of the forms of blindsight discussed. One's theory neglects consciousness, if its adoption leaves one with no reasonable alternative to holding that these forms of blindsight are either inconceivable or somehow metaphysically imposssible. It is argued that, by this standard, certain recent accounts of consciousness (those of Daniel Dennett, David Rosenthal, and Michael Tye) neglect consciousness in this ("phenomenal") sense. If their views are correct, a first person approach is profoundly misleading about what there is for a theory of consciousness to study. On the other hand, if these views are mistaken, they encourage us to deny the reality of an important aspect of our lives. Someone defending a denial of phenomenal consciousness will have to do much more than attack dubious "Cartesian" metaphors, or argue against especially bold claims about the accuracy of first person reports or about the range of possibilities we can conceive of. For realism about consciousness does not depend on these. Strategies for defending a denial of consciousness are considered and criticized briefly, and it is concluded that the charge of consciousness neglect is well-taken, and much more difficult to rebut than is often supposed.
01.01-- Abstract No:956
The study of consciousness is fragmented with diverse definitions, types and meanings. This paper addresses the question: what is the type, class or category to which the different claims about consciousness constitute specific "kinds of"? Cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, etymological and epistemological approaches are employed to characterize common characteristics of consciousness. A derivative model of conscious systems suggests the fundamental primitives and structures of systems with consciousness. Linguistic and etymological analyses indicates many meanings of consciousness are all concerned with an informational relationship of an organism with it's environment. An epistemological approach shows consciousness is, in essence, concerned with knowing, making consciousness the property of system relations and produced by the epistemic structures mediating interaction between knower and known.
A range of theories (e.g. Gennaro, Ellis, Baars, Winkelman, Natsoulas, Popper and Eccles, Kirk) characterize consciousness as involving the interacting components of a system. An synthesis of these approaches provides a model of the necessary components of systems manifesting consciousness. Consciousness depends upon an number of characteristics which constitute the fundamental characteristics of systems characterized by consciousness. These include: attention/awareness; phenomenal sensory and bodily experiences; action, including production of internal representations (mind) and storage of information (learning;) use of information to assess current situation (memory and evaluation) ; interpretation of information (meaning) ; assessment of multiple inputs to initiate goal directed behavior (intentional action) ; and systems of social relations which provide goals, meaning, motivation and reference for self. Consciousness modulates desires, attention, representation, memory, learning, planning and behavior, coupling the individual organism with their environment and social group to make decisions regarding changing situations. Relating to the environment in meaningful ways requires acquisition of information and its use in reference to previous experience to met motivations and goals. Goal orientation requires selection among options, based in memory and judgment, inseparable bases for all consciousness. Memory links sensations and perceptions, constituting the templates for sensations in entailing a judgment about the relationship of present stimuli to past experience. Consciousness and self are necessarily linked, with the relationship between knower and known requiring a knower with some sense of entity hood (self representation) . The variations within these different components are discussed and their principal variations are reviewed to illustrate how such a model can account for the divergent forms of consciousness. These include different forms of: attention (e.g. arousal, orienting, awareness) ; representation (e.g. iconic, symbolic, social, language) ; memory (instinctual, perceptual, motor, episodic, semantic) and learning (e.g. reflex, associational, conditioning, reversal) ; motivations/emotions (e.g. desire, questioning, attachment, various affects) ; and self (e.g. somatic, social, egoic/mental, reflexive) . Different forms and concepts of consciousness found in contemporary debates can be seen as representing different types and levels of consciousness, based in different ways of constructing knowing systems.
01.01-- Abstract No:1009
This essay examines a tripartite distinction that analyzes consciousness into: state-consciousness, transitive-consciousness, and creature-consciousness. This distinction is currently the best option for anyone trying to ground a higher-order thought theory of consciousness. Rosenthal, who advanced the terminology, and Dretske (who advances a competing "representational theory of consciousness") both propose theories of consciousness grounded in this distinction -- the divergent views based on a common distinction apparantly a testament to the value of the distinction. I claim that attempting to divide consciousness into a three part set and then explain it by means of those parts patently begs the question. This charge can only be avoided if the three terms refer to three actual psychological entities. Given the lack of evidence or arguments for the entities, given the origin of the terms from a linguistic pattern, and given that a tripartite consciousness structure was proposed to make sense of a tripartite linguistic pattern (rather than the other way around) the likelihood that the terms denote actual psychological entities appears, inductively, to be too coincidental. In addition (and deductively) the assumption that such entities are genuinely distinct spawns reductio ad absurdum arguments against the distinction. Further, a reasonable alternative exists, what I call the Unitary Thesis.
01.01-- Abstract No:1079
Classical and medieval writers had no term for consciousness in anything like the modern sense, and their philosophy seems not to have been troubled by the mind-body problem. Contemporary eliminativists find strong support in this for their claim that consciousness does not exist, or, at least, is not an appropriate scientific explanandum. They typically hold that contemporary conceptions of consciousness are artefacts of Descartes' (now outmoded) views about matter and his unrealistic craving for epistemological certainty. Essentially, our belief in consciousness is a residue of once pressing, but now irrelevant, intellectual tensions between religion and the rising new science of the Early Modern period. With the attempts of Descartes and his successors to resolve these tensions, Western thought began down a track toward the conceptual cul-de-sac of the "hard problem". Plausibly, the problem will only be (dis) solved, and the onward march of science assured, when we are able to shake off the pervasive influence of the Cartesian tradition in a way that goes far beyond the mere rejection of dualism. But when we do so, eliminativists contend, the distinctively Cartesian notion of consciousness will simply drop out of our world-picture, like phlogiston or the vital entelechy.
However, few of us find eliminativism toward consciousness plausible: our own conscious experience is just too vivid and immediate, and consciousness is a much more intuitive and generally accepted notion than phlogiston or entelechy ever were. I will argue that it really is not a Cartesian invention after all. Once we realize that many aspects of consciousness and the mind-body relation were discussed in former times, under the rubric of "*imagination*", we escape having to defend the absurd position that consciousness, though people always had it, was just never remarked upon by writers before the 17th century. We may also then find a place outside the Cartesian tradition, but still integrated into the Western world view as a whole, for our continuing investigation of the subject.
In Aristotelian, Hellenistic, and various Early Modern philosophies, and in Roman and Medieval neuroscience, imagination and the closely related technical notion of sensus communis played conceptual roles closely related to those played by consciousness today, and if a "hard problem" was not recognized, that was more because of pre-Cartesian conceptions of matter rather than anything missing from conceptions of mind.
Recovering this 'pre-history' of the development of the concept of consciousness will allow us to answer the historicist arguments for eliminativism, and recovering our sense of the kinship between consciousness and imagination should help us to improve our understanding of both of these deeply contested concepts, and to get a better sense of just what questions science can meaningfully ask about them. "The problem of consciousness" may be largely coextensive with that of understanding how imagination (in the old-fashioned sense) can work. This problem was not solved in pre-Cartesian times, but Cognitive Science has already made significant inroads on it.
01.01-- Abstract No:1117
The aim of this poster is to propose a reduction of the plurarity of typologies of the modes of consciousness which have been proposed in recent years withing the framework of cognitive psychology. Based on the three fundamental phenomenological categories of Charles S. Peirce, the authors present a new triadic typology of consciousness, arguing that all modes of consciousness distinguished so far are logically reducible to the three fundamental categories established by Peirce.
In particular, the authors deals with the typologies of consciousness elaborated by Daniel Dennett (1995) , P.S.Churchland (1995) , Fred Dretske (1995) , Guven Guzeldere (1996) , William G. Lycan (1996) , and David Chalmers (1996) .
By means of a hierarchical diagram of relations, the authors propose a dynamic framework for all other typologies of consciousness. The diagram follows the logical method of abstraction which Peirce has dubbed prescission (Coll. Papers 1.549) . This method, which constitutes the principle giving coherence to the system of categories, was tested by Peirce in many areas of research, the empirical sciences, phenomenology, logic (or semiotics, in his definition) , and even in metaphysics (Coll. Papers 1.299) . Sandra Rosenthal (1997) has described this methodology as "experimental pragmatic dynamics."
The three irreducible Peircean categories are called Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. It is presumed that these categories ("thought tacit structures, " as Bohm, 1987, called them) do not act independently. Each category is conceived as a necessary precondition of the others, the higher ones being more developed and more complex than the lower ones, from which those cannot be prescinded. This particular relationship establishes a syntax between the three categories.
By means of these three categories, the prevailing classifications based on folk psychology and approaches to consciousness which emphasize "causal relations between psychological states, behavior, ambiental circumstances" (P.M. Churchland, 1989) will be reinterpreted.
01.01-- Abstract No:1175
I argue that Kant offers an account of what it is to be a unified intelligence (thinking subject) and a unified agent (volitional subject) that secures the thinnest sort of self-ascriptions necessary for understanding and choice. First I explain how I understand the principle of the synthetic unity of apperception, in what sense it is rightly thought to be formal (Allison, Bermudez, Aquila, Guyer, etc.) , but also how a stronger self-awareness reading Kitcher, Henrich, Brook, Hatfield, etc.) emerges when we move beyond the epistemic concerns of the Transcendental Deduction. Much turns on what we take to be the function of a transcedental psychology. I conclude that the possibility of self-ascription that Kant secures is the sole particular form of knowledge necessary for molding ourselves into what we strive to be.
01.01-- Abstract No:1244
This paper offers a synthesis of neurophysiological, philosophophical, psychological and (a critique of) psychoanalytic approaches to the question of consciousness, arguing that all these disciplines have produced findings suggesting that there are two forms of consciousness. .
01.01-- Abstract No:1278
http://csf.colorado.edu/sustainable-justice
Our difficulties with "the mind-body problem" and with conceptualizing "consciousness" can be traced to the limitations inherent in the mechanistic conceptual language (paradigm) .
The particular concepts used to conceptualize reality tend to be those which serve our purposes. If my purpose in going into a forest is to select trees for lumber, concepts like oak, cedar, and spruce "come to mind." If I go into that same forest seeking picnic sites, then concepts like shade-area, level ground, etc. come to mind. In short, we commonly leave out what seems irrelevant to our purposes.
Understandably, the concepts which have dominated our conception of reality during the past several centuries are those designed for physical survival -- the products of natural selection along with other survival features. But, in thus being designed to serve a selective purpose they cannot yield a disinterested, and "objective" conception of reality as a whole.
It is also understandable, then, that we have now reached several seemingly impenetrable limitations within the mechanistic paradigm. Nor are these limitations confined to lacking a conceptual place for "consciousness, " for Descartes' "I", and for "qualia". They are evident within the physical paradigm itself -- in our attempts to "make sense" of quantum mechanics and to reconcile its "non-locality" with relativity theory. To transcend these limitations we must build on our most primitive, most intuitive concepts, the conceptual foundation for which is the experience of consciousness itself.
The experience of consciousness itself must be the first experience of the newborn, and of one's waking from unconsciousness of any kind. It serves as a kind of arena, or "space, " within which all subsequent experiences therefore become consciousness-plus experiences. Since it is these "plus" parts which are relevant to our purposes, it is understandable that we tend to "take for granted" the ever-present consciousness part.
The Space of Consciousness, therefore, is the most fundamental of all "spaces" available to us, with physical space one of perhaps many sub-spaces. All physical entities, therefore, in addition to being within physical space, have their more fundamental existence within "the space of conscioueness." So, George Berkeley was on the right track. But this doesn't reduce them to Berkeley-like mere subjective perceptions. Rather, physical entities retain their objectivity as perceivables, with an objective existence entirely apart from being perceived. In physical sub-space they are conceived not as immutable "matter, " however, but as a complexity of quantum-patterned forces, programmed by some sentient Source to serve the purposes of sentient participants in a cosmic community by constantly moving, in accordance with cosmic programming and in response to sentient choices, from Heisenberg-like potential-states to actualized-states. In this conception, no event "causes" any other event. All are "caused, " mostly via programming, by a sentient, cosmic Source. Thus, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics falls rationally into place and the conceptual conflict between quantum non-locality and relativity theory disappears.
01.02-- Abstract No:759
Incorporating David Chalmers' (1996) suggestion that consciousness must be nonphysical, and aspects of Gottfried Leibniz's (1714) monadology and David Griffin's (1997) theory of panexperientialist physicalism, and going a step beyond, we propose that nonphysical consciousness emerges along with physicality from a nonphysical informational base. Because the theory has many nonphysical agents consciously experiencing aspects of each other as physical, it is not dualistic or solipsistic and because the theory is nonphysically based, it is not physicalistic or panpsychistic.
The essence of the theory is the existence of a number of equivalent unique nonphysical agents, each of which is related to each, i.e. each of which is in an information state with regard to each, itself included. Each agent determines its state of access to each of its information states by either originating or not originating a state of denial of that particular information state. If an agent is not denying its information state with regard to a particular agent, the agent has access to information about that particular agent, to the information about other agents to which that particular agent has access due to its not denied information states, and so on, like sets of Russian dolls nested in the original agent's not denied information state. Each agent has two fundamental aspects, one which differs from agent to agent and one which is the same for all agents. Information about this pair of aspects of a given agent constitutes the information an agent can have about that given agent. Information about an aspect of an agent is called an 'information aspect'.
Consciousness is an agent's state resulting from the sameness of one or more of the information aspects in that agent's not denied information state or states with one or both of that agent's own aspects. The content of the agent's conscious state is whichever information aspect (s) is (are) the same as its own aspect (s) . If, as is usually the case, the pairs of information aspects are of agents other than the conscious agent itself, then only one aspect of each pair is the same as an aspect of the agent itself, and these are consciously experienced by that agent as the simplest physical existences (units of matter) .
Enough not denied information states exist to form a pattern of accessed information which is common to nearly all of the agents, producing consciousness of a common universe for each of those agents from its own place in the pattern. The physical relationships between the units of matter in that universe are determined by how the not denied information states of those agents are patterned. In the overall pattern are many sub-patterns which produce various specific conscious experiences (phenomena) such as time passing, micro and macro objects in motion through space, and objects with inertial mass.
This core of the information theory can be used to compute the physical constants if only two measurements of our Universe are used: one to compute the number of agents (N) and the other to compute the average number of not denied information states that each agent has (K) . Preliminary computations indicate that N is of the order of 10 to the 23 (any of many measurements can be used in this computation, e.g. the rest mass of the electron, the natural number e, the number 'pi') and K is about 12.7 (the square root of the inverse of the electromagnetic coupling constant alpha) .
An agent's ability to originate or not originate states of denial of its own information states gives each agent the power to influence the content both of its own consciousness and of the consciousnesses of the other agents in the same pattern. Thus all of the agents individually and together determine, for example, the values of the physical constants (as in K) and the molecular structures that form living bodies which agents can use to focus conscious experience on certain parts of the Universe and to 'cause' large-scale actions by making one or a few originations or not. The apparency of dynamic events is discussed, along with possible reasons the agents might have for originating some denial states and not others.
References
Chalmers, David J. (1996) , The Conscious Mind, (Oxford University Press) .
Griffin, David R. (1997) , 'Panexperientialist Physicalism and the mind-body problem', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4 (3) , pp.248-268.
Leibniz, Gottfried W. (1714) , 'Monadology' in Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, Translated by L. E. Loemker, second edition, (D. Reidel, Dordrecht-Holland) , 1969, (1956) .
01.02-- Abstract No:840
Early arguments against the existence of consciousness relied upon a reductionist methodology which attempted to interpret everything mental in terms of behavior. Later on as more and more was learned about cerebral functioning it was thought that mental states could be profitably reduced to brain states. Most recently, however, the concept of consciousness has been employed as a way of demonstrating the top down capability of an organism to control its own physiological and neurological functioning. What all of these approaches have in common, however, is the firm belief that the realm of the mental must be explained in terms of the physical.
Most arguments against the existence of consciousness as qualitatively different from physical reality actually boil down to an argument for the superiority of the physical sciences vis-a-vis the social sciences and the humanities. For example, it is often argued that scientific explanations always involve causal or nomological theories which only function well in the context of a materialist paradigm. I intend to show that even if the underlying argument regarding scientific method is valid there is no valid logical connection with the question regarding consciousness. That is because the superiority of the physical sciences lies in their theoretical refinement and their superiority in the area of prediction and that no extrapolation is possible regarding ontological matters except through a leap of faith.
Another argument that I will employ goes as follows. Even if physical science rejects the concept of consciousness as anything essentially distinct from physiological functioning, the humanities and parts of the social sciences rely upon the notion of intentionality which makes no sense unless there is a distinct realm of mental or conscious phenomena. On what basis does one reject vast areas of human cognitive endeavor in order to universalize the methodology of physical science? Usually this is done on the basis of a theory of meaning such as the verification theory of meaning. But 'meaning' seems to imply intentionality and consciousness! Hence, whether one accepts or rejects the methods of the humanities and some of the social sciences one is lead back to the notion of consciousness.
Finally, I will argue that a case can be made for the ontological superiority of consciousness over physical reality. Early proponents of quantum physics thought that it supported a subjectivistic notion of physical reality. While I do not accept that argument, I do think that quantum physics raises serious questions regarding the essential nature of matter. Therefore, skepticism regarding the ultimate nature of matter is feasible and perhaps justified but such skepticism regarding humanity may not be feasible at all and even those who refuse to define humanity in terms of any essential features usually do so on the basis of a theory of freedom and consciousness.
In order to flesh out my argument I will first introduce the concept of verstehen as employed by Dilthey, Weber and Jaspers and in particular I will employ Jaspers' concept of a psychology of meaningful connections. Although Weber and Jaspers both believed in the use of meaningful connections in the social sciences, they accepted to a certain extent the belief that such phenomena can not be said to cause behavior but only to be meaningfully related to it. I will then discuss MacIntyre's argument for the causal potentiality of meaningful connections because this argument (if accepted) would explode the notion that only physical events can fit into our normal concept of causality. Finally, I will discuss the 'world 3' concept of Popper (and Eccles) in order to find a way of synthesizing the aforementioned ideas.
01.02-- Abstract No:850
Phenomenal consciousness - the what its like feature of experience - can appear to be deeply mysterious. It is difficult to conceive of how the swirl of atoms in the void, the oscillation of field values, or anything physical can add up to the smells, tastes, feelings, and so forth that constitute our phenomenal experience. There are good reasons to think that the physical exhausts everything there is, so there is a strong case for consciousness being physical, or, at least, being physically realized. But conscious experiences don't seem physical at all. This puzzlement has occasionally moved philosophers to argue against physicalism. Philosophers in this tradition maintain that we can conceive of any physical or functional facts obtaining without there being any phenomenal experience at all. This claim does not have to do with our powers of imagination, or our psychological constitution in general, but rather with the nature of physical and phenomenal concepts. It is sometimes expressed by saying that zombies (i.e. beings that are our physical and functional duplicates but possess no phenomenal experiences) are a conceptual possibility.
This seems rather plausible: there isn't any contradiction, detectable a priori, in describing a possible world as being physically exactly like our world, yet containing no experiences. From this conceptual claim, however, it is further argued that the existence of zombies is a genuine metaphysical possibility. If this is correct, and if, as I will assume throughout this paper, there are phenomenal facts, then physicalism, as that doctrine is usually construed, is false. For it would mean that the totality of physical facts, including nomological and causal facts, obtaining in our world does not necessitate the phenomenal facts that obtain in our world.
On the face of it, the mere fact that we can conceive of an F existing without its being G does not entail that it is metaphysically possible for an F to exist without being G. After all, it seems that we can conceive of water existing without being composed in part of hydrogen even though being composed in part of hydrogen is necessary for being water. But, recently, Saul Kripke has clarified the relationship between conceptual possibility and metaphysical possibility to take such objections into account; and sophisticated conceivability arguments against physicalism have been developed by Nagel, Kripke, Jackson, Chalmers and others. Their arguments all rely on there being a link between conceivability and metaphysical possibility, but in the formulation of this link they now take into account that conceivability does not always imply possibility. The proponents of the new conceivability arguments claim that while the conceivability of water not being H2O does not imply that it is possible for water not to be H2O, the conceivability of a zombie-world does imply that a zombie-world is a genuine possibility.
I am going to argue that Frank Jackson's and David Chalmers' new conceivability argument fails. While these arguments are my particular focus, my criticisms extend to the other conceivability arguments as well, since I will be attacking the link between conceptual possibility and metaphysical possibility on which they all rely. I will proceed in two steps. First I lay out the arguments, and show that the crucial premiss in Chalmers' argument entails the crucial premiss in Jackson's. This will facilitate the discussion, since now, if I can show that Jackson's premiss is false, I will have thereby refuted Chalmers' premiss as well. Second, I will provide an argument that actually shows that the premiss is self-undermining, and so that the alleged link between conceivability and metaphysical possibility does not exist.
In this paper I do not argue for physicalism, except indirectly; what I will show is that the argument on which non-physicalists most rely is ineffective. Though I agree with Jackson and Chalmers that there is something puzzling about consciousness, I do not think that the puzzle adds up to a refutation of physicalism.
01.02-- Abstract No:871
There is a growing consensus that an extension of present physics to involve phenomenology is required in order to proceed with the understanding of consciousness and cognition from a scientific view. Obviously, such approaches cannot replace double aspect views arising from the traditional dichotomy of the problems background by other double aspect views, such as 'intrinsic-extrinsic', 'implicate-explicate', 'sensation-perception', 'first-person -- third-person' or the 'phenomenal versus physical aspects' of information and time. Simply adding the phenomenal to traditional physicalism leads to a proven falsity of materialism (Chalmers, 1996) and gets caught in the trap of dualism (Steiner, 1894) . Here is where the 'true lie' comes in: a 'true-lie' (TL) does not actually 'feel' what it is but it is not uncommon as one might assume at first glance. In fact, we have learned to live with TLs quite nicely -- for example watching the film 'True Lies' on television we actually see the phosphor of a cathode ray tube illuminated by the electronic beam, but we 'get' Arnold Schwarzenegger. TLs expose the truth -T- (here the film) within a lie (here the beam, I do not need an 'L') . The argument is, traditional physics does not capture what is going on (to get a complete description of the underlaying electron-photonic interactions occuring during roughly 2 hours, using the most precise version of physics -- quantum electrodynamics -- the aerial cable of your satellite receiver must always be connected to the tuner of your tube) . There is something 'behind it' which is absolutely necessary but not subject to our study. This outline will focus on the causal dynamics between TL and T using the brain as a vehicle and discuss why the structured space of phenomenological truth makes itself 'felt' at (and not within) the level of the brains particular molecular organization. A TL is shown to be reflected by the brains 'entanglement' with the phenomenal -- naturally but not logically supervenient on T. As TL falls back (or 'coheres') to T (naturally and logically *) , the entangled TL stripes off the rest -- which reflects a process taking the superposed or entangled realization back to it's intrinsic or phenomenal property. This way of selecting T from a manifold of TL is equivalent to the syntactic notion of information in Shannon's sense and is close to the role of information that Chalmers has proposed for consciousness. I identify the process of reduction of TL to T as 'conscious experience'. The 'physical' is always TL (which is clearly reflected by the superposition rule of quantum mechanics) , studying the relational structure of TLs and their inference to T (my 'experience' of a point is always T, it's physical equivalence, a circle with zero diameter under the classical perspective and a circle with some 'extension' in quantum physics, is always TL) . However, physical inference is directionally bound from TL to T and not concerned with the way how the TL states (the electron-beam hinging on the action of the film) are realized (aerial transmission) from T (Arnold in action) -'physics is information from outside'. The 'place' for everything is provided by a phenomenal phase-space. This space carries protophenomenal architecture in a sense close but not identical with a Russellian view. It's ontological properties go back to the 'conceptual monistic' approaches provided by the early work of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. In the present context the notion of 'phase-space' should be seen as an aid or tool that is used to conceptualize the constraints of phenomenal dynamics into the realization that we actually observe. Phenomenal phase space does not only include what is realized but also what could be realized instead (e.g. Kauffman, 1995) . The properties of phenomenal phase-space instantiate 'concepts', as their 'intentional' attributes become centered at particular locations -- accounting for the necessary indexical or perspectival aspects for phenomenal 'differences' to qualify as concepts.
Where is the brain ? In the phase-space model everything in the universe including our brain can be seen as particular constraints of phenomenal phase-space. Some particular constraints allow for a 'phase-transition' explicating the phenomenal ('mental', T) into a 'neural phase' (TL) .There are various 'candidate structures' where this realization could be observed in the brain (e.g. Hameroff & Penrose, 1996; Bernroider, 1997) . Prior to transition, phenomenal properties (concepts) coexist in balance, in 'intrinsic coherence' ('propensity' in the sense of Popper, 'potentia' in the sense of Heisenberg, 'pre-established harmony' in the view of Pauli) . As the transition 'realizes' the conceptual property behind it, the initial phenomenal coherence is lost and 'parts' (:=indexical elements of phenomenal phase-space) become 'entangled' (:=an extension of the original coherence to involve the 'separated phase' ) . From the neuralistic view, this is when the brain makes an 'observation' about itself and it's 'environment' (interestingly, according to the Van Neumann's principle, the loss of coherence could be delayed until the next observation is made, the relevance of this to 'subjective time' and perception is discussed elsewhere) .
Where is the self ? The 'location' of brains within phenomenal phase-space ultimately points to the particular role for 'centers' of transitions. These centers gain their unique significance, in contrast to any other 'difference', as their intrinsic properties remain constant under phase-transitions. So, these 'unique locations' are characterized by a principle of transitional invariance with respect to phenomenal-phenophysical phase changes. With above stipulations and the principle of transitional invariance in mind, we can now gain an elegant concept of the self: an entangled TL-version of the self (the 'self-model' in Metzingers sense) -me-, and a corresponding coherent T-phenomenon, the 'self' -- I-. In other words: the 'self' appears as a phenomenal difference with the indexical property of transitional invariance -- the 'self-model' appears as the 'realized' phenomenal difference with the indexical property of transitional invariance. As before, the 'cohering' transition TL – T becomes 'conscious', at locations with transitional invariance it becomes 'self-conscious' (the experience of self-hood) . As this experience targets to T, it strips of the 'model-part' from the self. This is also reflected in Metzingers view of a 'self-referential opacity' at the representational level (the TL of self) -- but puts his interpretation of a 'naive-realistic self-misunderstanding' loosing the 'model-part' from the self under a different perspective: there is no other way, as with everything else, only the restitution of coherence in phenomenal phase-space, not it's physically-entangled counterpart gains conscious experience. The TL of self does not become conscious unless TL is used as a 'concept' -- then we arrive at a model of the self-model and 'loosing' one model leaves behind another (this in fact might happen as we consciously experience our own thinking) .
There are many more aspects (e.g. the ultimate and tight connection of consciousness and cognition) and quite a few questions (e.g. what makes the phase transition occur ? -- and is it restricted to brains or their functional isomorphs, or universal ?) . Some of these can be answered within the present outline- some must be postponed to proto-phenomenal reasoning -- all are beyond the scope of this short outline. Despite the shadow of Price's fear still hanging over us, that we should refrain from the hope that we will ever 'feel' that we understand consciousness, even if we did (Price, 1996) , this work may help to disclose some secrets behind consciousness. Most important, it shows that we all share the same phenomenal differences that make up 'concepts' -- but we all share them from the 'first person perspective' -- which is only delineated from a 'third person' as long as it is entangled with the physical. As it collapses back to phenomenal coherence, dualistic properties disappear (just like the dualistic properties of electrons disappear as we determine their proper value of location) -- this is what becomes 'conscious'. So, how it 'feels' is what it is -- 'red' is what it 'feels'. Because there is no ambiguity behind phenomenal space, we have every reason to assume that we all 'feel' the same 'red'. It is simple and beautiful.
(*) This gives an apparent contradiction to Chalmers view that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical. According to the present view, consciousness does not arise from a 'pure' physical but from a 'mixed' phenophysical state -- it alreadly includes the possibility of consciousness -- it needs only the 'cohering' transition TL -- T and consciousness follows logically. In addition, Chalmers Zombie as a frequently held argument for the lack of logical supervenience of consciousness on physical properties, might be possible as an organizational clone, but would lack physical idendity for perspectival reasons (both cannot occupy the same center in the world) , so David and his Zombie clone cannot exist naturally -- their logical supervenience is therefore irrelevant.
01.02-- Abstract No:910
For the past three decades, non-reductionism has become a dominant position in the philosophy of mind. In its standard formulations, this position implies that mental properties are not identical with physical properties. Many non-reductionists, however, still claim to be physicalists (materialists) which leads to the question: if mental properties are not physical properties, then how can physicalism be true?
-reductionists often pledge their allegiance to physicalism by claiming that mental properties supervene on physical properties. However, as even Kim admits, supervenience claims tell us that mental properties depend upon physical properties but they do not explain what grounds this dependency relation. As a result, supervenience theses allow for theories that are clearly unacceptable by physicalist standards (e.g. epiphenomenalism and even substance dualism) .
To satisfy our physicalist intuitions, the belief in supervenience must be coupled with some constraints on how mental properties are instantiated or realized. For a start, we must insist that mental properties are realized physically -- i.e. instantiated by physical events. Yet, I argue, even when combined with a supervenience claim, this minimal realization thesis does not secure physicalism. I also consider several variations on the minimal thesis (including those of Phillip Pettit and Helman & Thomspon before him) and show that none of them satisfy physicalist intuitions while remaining non-reductionist. I conclude that one cannot earn the title 'physicalist' without identifying mental properties with physical properties.
Non-reductive physicalism has been the target of criticism in the past (Kim being its most notable opponent) . These attacks, however, typically rest on controversial claims concerning the casual closure of the physical domain, the nature of causation itself, and what these imply regarding mental causation. My line of argument remains neutral on these issues and gets at what I take to be the most basic flaw with non-reductive physicalism.
REFERENCES
Baker, L. R. (1993) . Metaphysics and mental causation. In J. Heil and A. Mele (Eds.) , Mental causation (pp. 75-95) . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crane, T. and Mellor, A. (1990) . There is no question of physicalism. Mind, 99, 185-206.
Davidson, D. (1970) . Mental events. In L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (Eds.) , Experience and Theory (pp. 79-101) . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Fodor, J. (1974) . Special sciences, or the disunity of science as a working hypothesis. Synthese, 28, 97-115.
Hellman G. & Thompson F. (1975) . Physicalism: ontology, determination, and reduction. Journal of Philosophy, 72, 551-564.
Jack, A. (1994) . Materialism and supervenience. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 72, 426-444.
Kim, J. (1993a) . Supervenience and mind: selected philosophical essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kim, J. (1993b) . The non-reductionists troubles with mental causation. In J. Heil and A. Mele (Eds.) , Mental causation (pp.189-210) . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kim, J. (1989) . The myth of nonreductive materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 63, 31-47.
Kim, J. (1984a) . Epiphenomenal and supervenient causation. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 9, 257- 270.
Kim, J. (1984b) . Concepts of supervenience. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45, 153- 176.
Kripke, S. (1972) . Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
MacDonald, C. and G. (1986) . Mental causes and explanation of action. Philosophical Quarterly, 36, 145-158.
Menuge, A. (1993) . Supervenience, by chance? Reply to Crane and Mellor. Analysis, 53, 228-235.
Pettit, P. (1993) . A definition of physicalism. Analysis, 53, 213-223.
Putnam, H. (1967) . Psychological predicates. In W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (Eds.) , Art, mind, and religion (pp. 37-48) . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Putnam, H. (1975) . The meaning of "meaning." In K. Gunderson (Ed.) , Language, mind, and knowledge: Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, vol. 7 (pp. 131-193) . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Van Gulick, V. (1992) . Nonreductive materialism and the nature of intertheoretical constraint. In A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim (Eds.) , Emergence or reduction?: Essays on the prospects of nonreductive physicalism (pp. 157-178) . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Van Gulick, R. (1993) . Who's in charge here? And who's doing all the work? In J. Heil and A. Mele (Eds.) , Mental causation (pp. 233-256) . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
01.02-- Abstract No:929
Not since the first half of this century (see Beckermann et al., 1992, for details) has emergence, in one form or another, enjoyed so much critical attention in science and philosophy. There are now several competing accounts of both consciousness and cognition that go by the name of "emergence" (see for example Stapp 1993, Baas 1994, Penrose/hammeroff 1995, Silberstein 1995 and Scott 1995) . Indeed, there are now multiple accounts of emergence in general, from several different disciplines. P. W. Anderson has been claiming for quite some time (see 1972, 1994) that condensed matter theory provides evidence for a kind of emergence. Kim, a well known philosopher of mind, has claimed that non-reductive physicalism is a form of emergence (1993) . Several philosophers of physics (see Teller 1992, Healey 1992, Silberstein 1995 and Humphreys 1997) and physicists themselves (see Penrose 1995, Stapp 1993, Shimony 1992) have claimed that quantum mechanics and quantum field theory provide evidence for a kind of emergence. And there are even those who claim that both special and general relativity provide good reasons to accept a type of emergence (see Heller, 1997) . Theorists in non-linear dynamics, complexity and chaos theory (and their more formal manifestations such as cellular automata theory, Lambda-calculus, computability theory, etc.) have argued that these disciplines also provide support for the existence of some sort of emergence (see Prigogine 1985, Kauffman 1995, Wolfram 1994, Scott 1996, Baas 1994, etc. ) . It would seem that emergence is back with a vengeance. But we must ask, do all these different disciplines have the same thing in mind when they talk of "emergence"? It would seem, at first glance anyway, that the answer is "yes". All the foregoing accounts of emergence appear to be making similar claims. For example, they are all inclined to define emergence in one or more of the following ways:
1) The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
2) The coming into being of genuinely novel or new properties, entities or laws.
3) Properties/entities arising out of the properties and relations characterizing those of their simpler constituents.
4) Properties/entities/laws that are neither predictable from nor inferred from more basic properties/entities/laws.
Firstly, are all these claims equivalent to one another? And secondly, are the various advocates of emergence really making the same claim when they use these expressions? It will turn out that the answer to both these questions is "no". Indeed, it will turn out that some of these types of emergence are not logically compatible--they could not all be true of the same system at the same time. In order to establish this, we will compare and contrast each discipline's account of emergence; critically evaluating each in the process according to several different criteria. For example, it will turn out that some of the types of emergence under consideration have no ontological status whatsoever, or at least no consequences of importance for consciousness or cognition. Many of these so-called emergent properties are no more than artifacts of a particular model generated by macroscopic analysis, functional descriptions, etc. Once we get past the confusions generated by the uniquely colorful etymology of the term 'emergence' itself, we will be in a position to try and determine which of these types of emergence is most promising with respect to explaining various features of consciousness and/or cognition.
01.02-- Abstract No:998
The debate between epiphenomenalists and other 'friends of qualia' on the one hand and functionalists and materialists on the other has its base in two different conceptions of experience. Functionalist or materialist theories of mind and consciousness view experience as a broad process that involves environmental stimuli, neural processing, behavior, and subjective feeling. An extreme version of this account is Dennett's in which individuals cannot separate qualitative elements of their experience from their current expectations about their experience, current behaviors and tasks. This view of experience enables a functionalist or materialist account to discuss experience from an 'objective' (i.e. third person) standpoint by viewing it as not essentially subjective. Epiphenomenalists and advocates of subjective approaches to consciousness, however, view the qualitative elements of experience as isolable events or moments within a broader process of perception. This view of experience is consonant with the idea that there are qualia or experiential elements which are essentially subjective.
It might seem that these fundamentally different conceptions of experience and their concomitant starting points leave no space for resolution of the debate; the two sides will simply continue to beg the question against each other. However, I think there is an avenue open to a materialist which will allow the two participants to meet on an equal plain.
Subjectivist accounts are notorious for making appeals to intuition and experience; we are asked to imagine being a bat, or the computer program in a Chinese language program, or a color scientist who has never seen color. They typically make some assumptions about the phenomenology of experience in so doing. One way to avoid begging the question against these thought experiments, then, would be to meet them on their own ground, and show that the functionalist view of experience implies a phenomenology of experience which is more plausible than that proposed by subjectivists. Thus we would be able to argue that even on subjective grounds, the types of arguments which are supposed to motivate epiphenomenalism and the existence of qualia fail.
Giving this phenomenology in full would be beyond a single paper, but here are some of the claims which this functionalist phenomenology might make: 1) Experience is not separable from the expectations, current tasks, and behaviors (what phenomenologists call 'situatedness') in which it occurs; 2) experience is not a series of discrete events in discrete moments, but develops through body-world interactions through time; 3) experience is not an all or nothing affair, but 'shades' off into ambiguity. These claims would show how experience is not an isolable event but a thing thoroughly related to behavior, non-conscious aspects of our life, and generally inseparable from parts of our existence not thought to be covered by the term 'qualia.'
Such a phenomenology would not prove materialism to be true. However, it would offer a way of showing that functionalist characterizations of experience as a diffuse process fit with the actual structure of our experience from the first person point of view and thus is more plausible than subjectivist accounts.
01.02-- Abstract No:1039
According to the views of Chalmers and others, the physical world is causally closed. But this closure is taken as a weakness, for it is claimed that physical theory cannot account for conscious experience. We need, then, a further theory beyond physical theory to account for consciousness, a theory which will involve different tools and objects than physical theories and their ontologies can provide. I argue that this view ignores the facts: facts which were obvious to Leibniz over three centuries ago, and which are made clearer by modern representational theories of experience. We already have the tools and the objects to account for conscious experience. The tools are nomic and naturalistic and the objects are physical. The approach of Chalmers and others will be shown to multiply rules and entities needlessly. It is not easy to account for conscious experience. But it can be done with the tools on offer. Occam, for one, would be happy with the result.
01.02-- Abstract No:1108
The lure of dualism is very strong despite intuitions that a Cartesian version of dualism is false. On the other hand, many philosophers feel attracted to reductive materialism and the scientific enterprise associated with it, at the same time as they believe that physicalism leaves something out. This philosophical ambivalence, I will argue, is partly due to a simplified picture of what dualism and materialism are and what kind of metaphysics these positions entail.
Many philosophers and psychologists seem to be unaware that dualism is a middle stance between two originally incompatible metaphysical doctrines, i.e., materialism and phenomenalism (a brand of idealism) . The 'real' metaphysical opposition is not between materialism and dualism but between materialism and phenomenalism! However, there is a tendency among modern materialists to represent the problem as a choice between materialism and dualism. This is very misleading because a reductive materialist position doesn't guarantee that one escapes from the dualistic framework. Searle (1992) recognised this problem but he did not push the issue far enough.
I am proposing a distinction between false monism and proper monism for the purpose of a clearer conception of the traditional mind-body problem. I will show that monistic claims made by typical reductionists in fact rest on the acceptance of the very Cartesian model they want to reject. I will refer to this fallacy as the error of false monism.
There is another sense in which reductive materialism can be regarded as Cartesian. Almost all branches of materialism adopt the Cartesian cognitive/intentional notion of the mental, with only one reservation: the mental is regarded as a subset of the physical rather than as an independent immaterial substance. The concept of the mental has changed through the history and the mind-body problem with it; in current discussions the emphasis lies on the phenomenal-experiential aspect of consciousness rather than the cognitive/intentional. But Descartes' conception of matter has remained relatively unchallenged at least in the philosophical context. This, I think, gives an important clue how to approach the mind-body problem.
I will further argue that the mind-body problem is impossible to solve in its current 'hard' formulation. The so-called explanatory gap indicates that the damage is already done. In my interpretation the a priori impossibility of a solution is not due to certain epistemological limitations, as McGinn (1991) has argued. The problem is conceptual rather than epistemological. A real 'solution' requires a step that transcends the original dichotomy. I will try to describe what kind of ontological step we need to take in order to avoid dualism in its different guises. Following this I propose a position, 'proper monism', which does not force us to choose between two false alternatives. Finally, I make a suggestion how a naturalistic study of consciousness can be defended within the framework of proper monism.
01.02-- Abstract No:1137
Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the theory of the metaphysics of mental states that holds that mental state kinds are functional kinds. Functionalists argue that it is possible to give a functionalist account of conscious states; Anti-Functionalists argue that no such explanation possible because, for example, they claim non-functional, phenomenal consciousness is necessary for some capacity or other. The debate is important first because it concerns the nature of consciousness, and second because it concerns the causal efficacy of consciousness. Many philosophers worry that functionalism entails epiphenomenalism.
In this essay I characterize a feature of the debate between Functionalists and Anti-Functionalists that I call The Epiphenomenal Trap. I argue that the dialectic is a trap because neither side can resolve the central metaphysical issue as it has been put. That is because the debate typically trades in possible explanations. No merely possible explanation can settle questions about the nature of conscious states. So long as Functionalists and Anti-Functionalists continue to debate whether functionalist explanations are possible, the central metaphysical issue cannot be resolved.
I examine what it is about the structure of functionalism that has persuaded many philosophers on both sides to take seriously possible functionalist explanations. I argue that possible explanations come into the debate due to a confusion over the metaphysical commitments of various versions of functionalism. Specifically, each version of functionalism relies on a distinct notion of instantiation the instantiation relation.
It is in the interest of both sides to recognize and avoid The Epiphenomenal Trap, in order to address the metaphysical question. Thus, I urge that the debate between Functionalists and Anti-Functionalists be recast.
01.02-- Abstract No:1141
Although the irreduciblity of phenomenal consciousness to physical or functional properties is often taken to entail the nonphysical nature of consciousness (e.g in Chalmers 1996) , I argue that nonreductivism can be consistently and plausibly combined with a form of supervenience sufficiently robust to count as unqualifiedly physicalist. In particular, I argue that the irreducibilty of phenomenal consciousness should be understood as a fact about the incommensurablity of our respective schemes for thinking about and representing facts in the phenomenal and physical domains.
I show that nonreductionism, so understood, turns out to have no negative ontological entailments for physicalism. Moreover, various thought experiments and conceivability tests regularly used in defense of anti-physicalism are shown unable support their conclusions. The argument turns crucially on the notion of conceptual adequacy; criteria are offered regarding the adequacy of concepts for various applications, including those which involve hypothetical reasoning in support of metaphysical conclusions. The general theory is then used to show that the concepts used in the familiar consciousness thought-experiments are not adequate for supporting their alleged metaphysical conclusions. Favorable parallels are drawn to other comparable instances in the history of science.
01.02-- Abstract No:1159
A science of consciousness seems to be impossible, because the three familiar ways of including phenomenal properties in science seem to pose a trilemma of unacceptable alternatives. (1) To hold that science can infer to phenomenal properties as theoretical entities, as physics infers to electrons and quarks, would be to deny the causal completeness of physics, for it would mean there are efficient causes at work in nature that physics does not recognize. (2) To posit phenomenal properties as epiphenomena of physical properties by accepting private knowledge of them as true would be to give up the empirical method of science, because they are not detectable by observation. (3) And to argue that there are phenomenal properties because of a necessary connection they have to physical properties would be to do metaphysics instead of science, because any demonstration of such a necessary connection seems to require accepting rationalism in some form. None of these ways of knowing about consciousness can be accepted by empirical scientists.
After considering the foregoing trilemma, this paper argues that a science of consciousness is nevertheless possible. It shows there is an ontological explanation of the natural world that entails the existence of proto-phenomenal properties. That ontology is 'spatio-materialism, ' which postulates space as a substance on a par with matter and assumes that space contains all the bits of matter in the world. Spatio-materialism is shown to imply that material objects have intrinsic as well as extrinsic properties, thereby offering an ontological explanation of the relationship between physical and phenomenal properties. Though spatio-materialism implies that phenomenal properties are just epiphenomena of physical properties, it does not require science to give up the empirical method in order to know about them, for the ontology itself has an empirical justification. Spatio-materialism can be shown to be the best ontological explanation of what is observed in the natural world. Since that makes intrinsic properties a theoretical entity of empirical ontology, rather than of empirical physics, it does not deny the causal completeness of physics. Thus, it is possible for science to know about phenomenal properties without rejecting the empirical method by accepting the validity of either rationalism or private knowledge of phenomenal properties.
01.02-- Abstract No:1200
We are all familiar with a common science fiction scare tactic that has long been the basis of many famous classics, HAL from 2001, SkyNet from the Terminator series, to name just a few. In each of these films a technologically complex computer becomes self-aware and turns against humanity. Like most science fiction, this view is useful for drama, but is generally viewed as being far from reality. In my paper I'm going to talk about a philosophical view that actually illustrates just how plausible this scenario may be.
The notion of a very complex computer becoming self-aware is a notion that has incited much debate in the philosophy of mind. Alan Turing took the first steps of discovery in this journey, developing the Turing Machine. In his theory, Turing explains a mechanical system test for determining, by objective behavioristic observation, whether such a system can be indistinguishable from a human, and therefore said to be 'intelligent'. This view, especially in the computer science community, is often interpreted such that intelligence is on par with human consciousness. Various formulations and refinements based on Turing, and derived from physicalism, produced what is considered a 'Strong AI' view of the mind. On this view, the mind is a computer, and allowing for future advancement of technology, a computer can be a mind. There is nothing over and above in "our" consciousness that cannot be met by a sufficiently advanced computer program.
John Searle began the counter to this notion with his Chinese Room argument. He argues that a human being could be in the system, testing for understanding of Chinese. Although the performance of the system may satisfy the Turing test, Searle says, the person inside has no understanding of Chinese, and so neither does the corresponding computer being simulated, nor the system as a whole.
There have been many sets of replies to Searle's argument, and Searle has many counter responses, which I will touch on further in the paper. Searle proposes his own view that he thinks meets the challenge, called Biological Naturalism. This view, however, seems to imply something over and above the physicality of the computer which produces 'understanding' and a consciousness. The problem with this view is that it is so very close to some 'waffling' merge between Identity Theory and property dualism, which have their own problems for explaining the mind and consciousness. I find that Emergentism is the natural solution.
Emergentism is the view that the mind can be completely explained physicalistically, in a strong AI manner. Further, what is intuitively viewed as a requirement for self-consciousness is only some unknowable property that simply "emerges" from physical systems once they have reached a sufficiently advanced level of complexity. In this paper I am going to explain some of the various forms of emergentism, how such an emergent point might be pinpointed, and how such an emergent property might be explained. Further, I will explore in more detail the relation of science fiction themes to these emergent views, and how truly "accurate, " almost to a Jules Verne sense, these sci-fi views are.
01.02-- Abstract No:1254
This paper contends that consciousness in humans--and probably in all species capable of alternating between waking and sleeping--is essentially the waking state which fundamentally consists of neuronal processes of different kinds and intensities as its intergral compoents.
In contrast to the sleeping state which notoriously consists in cessation of regular neuronal reactions to the external and internal stimuli, consciousness is precisely the sum total of these reactions at least when they possess higher degrees of intensity due to their nature or to reinforcement by subsidiary stimuli. Instead of being a unitary mental activity or "awareness, " as often claimed, consciousness thus appears to be a highly differentiated physiological process comparable perhaps to sound waves arising from a given source and spreading longer or shorter distances before gradually subsiding.
The intensity of consciousness is thus seen to be directly proportional to the strength of the original or primary stimulus, to the appropriate reinforcement by related subsidiary stimuli, and to a higher or lower degree of receptivity on the part of the organism involved. And since our senses in the waking state are constantly under the impact of a larger or smaller number of different stimuli of varying intensity, it is only natural that we should experience composite forms of consciousness of various degrees of intensity. Each sense organ, in reacting to its specific stimuli, gives rise to specific forms of consciousness, with the domain of visual phenomena arguably exceeding many times in magnitude the domains of all other senses combined. All these neuronal processes and their systems constitute then the first and fundamental part of cognitive consciousness, which is usually called sense consciousness.
The other part of cognitive consciousness which goes beyond the starting point of sense consciousness is thought consciousness, which is the agreement or disagreement of any two continuing sense impressions or, more exactly, of neuronal processes. The "analyzing" and "synthesizing" neuronal processes thus constitute the great domain of thought consciousness usually called knowledge. this thought consciousness combined with the sense consciousness make up the realm of cognitive consciousness.
The other great division is the realm of emotive consciousness, which also, basically, consists of neuronal processes initiated, however, not by external or even internal stimuli providing the organism with information about its world, but by the internally experienced needs of that organism. Notoriously, these needs are self-preservation and life-enhancement as well as avoidance and mastery of destructive influences.
The paper concludes that consciousness is the totality of neuronal processes possessing a certain degree of intensity and, in case of emotions, involved also in other physiological processes which are capable of raising original processes to sometimes cataclysmic degrees of intensity.
01.02-- Abstract No:1260
Many take the 'mind-body problem' to be the problem of how mental phenomena can be physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the physical. But they have already gone hopelessly wrong: we have no good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena. The point is old (it is in Locke, Hume, Priestley, Kant, Russell, and Chomsky, among others), and is powerfully backed up by post-Newtonian science, but it is often forgotten. To be a genuine materialist it is necessary to have a vivid appreciation of this point - one that goes beyond theoretical endorsement of it.
01.02-- Abstract No:1299
What breathes fire into the equations? The explanatory gap is supposed to hold between the physical facts and the facts about consciousness, with the physical facts being foundational. This raises questions about the kind of facts that physical facts are, and whether or not they are suitable as the foundational facts for any world, much less our own. I will develop an analogy with the kinds of properties that exist in cellular automata, such as John Conway's world of *Life*. Using this analogy, I will argue that physical facts are not the kind of facts that can lie alone at the foundation of a world, ours or any other. The problem is that they only yield a schema that requires some further content to carry it. Also, if we assume we live in a world with real causal connections, the physical facts leave out certain facts regarding the causation in the world. I will suggest that filling in these causal cracks between the physical facts may be the crucial move needed to close the explanatory gap.
01.03-- Abstract No:843
Some physicalists propose the Ability Hypothesis as an attempt to rescue physicalism from Frank Jackson's now famous (or infamous) Knowledge Argument. Jackson claims that physicalism is false because it excludes information about what it is like to have an experience. In response, proponents of the Ability Hypothesis claim that knowing what an experience is like is nothing more than having the abilities to remember, recognize, and imagine it. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the Ability Hypothesis is an inadequate response to Jackson. This will be done in a manner quite independent of William Lycan's recent criticisms of the Ability Hypothesis; in fact, it is argued that all ten of his objections are indecisive. The fundamental flaw of the Ability Hypothesis it that it leaves unanalyzed what the experience is that we supposedly remember, recognize, and imagine. If experiences are physical events, as physicalism states, then the Ability Hypothesis is false, for one may be in possession of all the physical information about an experience but not know what the experience is like.
01.03-- Abstract No:889
This paper explores two hypotheses, with the goal of helping to demystify conscious experience. The first is that phenomenal consciousness is an activity, not a passive state undergone by a subject. Consciousness involves the experience of agency; only the agent could have a given experience, thus resolving the problem of empirical non-observability of consciousness (the knowledge argument) . Jeannerod (1994) presents evidence of motor images -- experiences of what it is like to perform an action -- representing the body as the generator of acting forces, rather than just the effect of these forces on the external world (p. 189) . Studies of cortico- thalamic loops show that perceptual consciousness cannot occur until the thalamus actively generates frontal activity for imaging and categorizing purposes (Posner and Rothbart 1991; Damasio 1994) . On this hypothesis, consciousness involves the experience of the subject as the generator of acting forces, since it involves the experience of perceptual (or imagistic) activity, not just passive responses to stimuli.
A puzzle remains, nevertheless. Other activities are coherently and objectively describable by the agent in a way that consciousness is not. E.g. I cannot convey what climbing a ladder is like, but I can describe those steps that I am aware of, and the outcomes, in objective terms (e.g. I flex certain muscles, my foot comes to rest on the bottom rung, and so forth) . With phenomenal consciousness, such a description seems impossible. E.g. a description of a red object must locate the color on the surface of the object, even when the subject is aware that color per se is a subjective phenomenon highly susceptible to variations in lighting, Gestalt contextualization, etc.
The second hypothesis proposes an explanation of this ineffability. I argue that consciousness is the generating of multimodal (including proprioceptive and sensorimotor) imagery for action planning and other purposes, and that when attempting to describe qualitative features of consciousness, the subject is describing the imagery resulting from the activity, rather than the activity itself. This imagery is a blend of elements that, while conceptually incompatible, nevertheless feel unified to the subject. Thus any logically coherent description given by the subject will leave out some essential aspect.
Conscious experience involves contradictions in several respects; e.g. the apparant blending, in one representation, of both subjective and objective aspects of a single entity. When we see a red object, the red seems pasted to the surface of the object, not a contribution of the subjects own sensory mechanisms. Conscious experience of objects in our environment includes both exteroceptive stimuli from those objects and interoceptive stimuli from our bodies, as they interact perceptually with the objects. Since we also perceive our bodies as physical objects, the experience represents our bodies and other physical objects both subjectively and objectively at the same time and in the same respect. Recent empirical proposals for such itermodal representational frameworks by Meltzoff and Gopnik (1993) and Barresi and Moore (1996) are discussed.
References
Akins, K (1996) , Of Sensory Systems and the Aboutness of Mental States.Journal of Philosophy 91, 337-372.
Barresi, J. and Moore, C., (1996) . Intentional Relations and Social Understanding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 91:1, 107-154.
Chalmers, D. (1995) , Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, 200-219.
Damasio, A (1994) , Descartes' Error. New York: Putnam and Sons.
Edelman, G. (1989) . The Remembered Present. New York: Basic Books.
Ellis, R. (1995) . Questioning Consciousness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hardin, C. L. (1988) , Color For Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett) .
Jeannerod, M. (1994) . The Representing Brain: Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17:2, 187-244.
Meltzoff, A. and Gopnik, A., 1993. The Role of Imitation in Understanding Persons and Developing Theories of Mind. In Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism.
Baron-Cohen, S., Tager-Flusberg, H., and Cohen, D. (eds) , 335-66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Newton, N. (1996) . Foundations of Understanding. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Posner, M. and Rothbart, M. (1992) . Attentional Mechanisms and Conscious Experience. in Milner, A.D. and Rugg., M.D., eds, The Neuropsychology of Consciousness. London: Academic Press.
01.03-- Abstract No:891
The thesis of this paper is that the ineffability (linguistic indescribability or inexpressibility) of elementary qualia (sensory experiences) can be given a reconstruction in austere materialist views of consciousness (even in identity theories) . At the same time this reconstruction does not give an explanation of the first person character of qualia involving a feeling or "what it is like" property, and thereby leaves open the logical possibility of zombies. Our conclusion is that though dualistic, causal product views of conscious experience might be true, making perfectly good sense of ineffability in the case of sensory experiences is insufficient to prove that they are true. Ineffability is not necessarily associated with a highly specific, perhaps fundamental ontological entity (accessible only from the first person perspective) like conscious experience in naturalistic dualist theories. Rather it is a representational property that can perfectly apply to computer programs, zombies, or other systems lacking consciouness.
Generally, ineffability comes from the fact that there are representationally atomic states in every representational system. Representationally atomic states have no representationally relevant internal structure. For instance, red is red: whatever internal state it is, it has no internal structure that would (i) depict any structure in the external environment; (ii) be accessible to the linguistic (or any other) representational system in the brain.
Representationally atomic states (like the dot marking London on the map of England) : (i) do not depict any external structure; just indicate the presence of an external condition; (ii) their internal structure is inaccessible to the rest of the system. Whatever structure these states have is sub- representational. (i) is the defining characteristic of functionally atomic states; (ii) is a reasonable or plausible property; what sense would it make for a representational system to access structures which are sub-representational, that is, do not depict anything in the outside environment? The argument: 1. We assume that the internal states which lead to color experiences and those coding linguistic contents occur in distinct representational systems in the brain (perceptual and linguistic) . 2. We accept the the knowledge argument, namely that no linguistic description can help Black and White Mary, congenitally blind or congenitally color-blind subjects to have color-experiences. No representation in the linguistic system can activate color-experiences (in the visual system) for the first time. The same is true if Black and white Mary has already had proper color experiences, but in strictly unlabelled form. (Strictly unlabelled: not associated with words or any other contingent features, e.g. shapes.) 3. In contrast to 2, linguistic descriptions can help to visually imagine complex scenes which one has never seen before. (Precondition: preliminary visual training; having basic forms of visual experience, and having them labelled.) 4. The relevant difference between cases 2 and 3 is that colors are representationally atomic states of our perceptual systems, whereas the perceptual representation of a complex scene is not atomic: it is a structural representation. 5. Transfer of information between the linguistic and perceptual system is one kind of intermodal transfer. Intermodal transfer can only deliver information about the structure of complex representations, not about the character of the elements (e.g. sensory experiences) . Through intermodal transfer, only structural representations (in one representational system) can facilitate the buildup of structural representations (in another representational system) . Atomic states of a representational system can only be reached from other representational systems through pre-established links of association (e.g. linguistic labelling) . Conclusion. Suppose Black and White Mary has already had unlabelled color- experiences. She knows what it is like to see red, blue, etc., but could not associate these experiences with any other perceptual feature or linguistic unit (e.g. she only saw colors appearing in random order, filling out the whole display surface of her computer monitor) . In this case whatever structural representation she has in her linguistic system, that linguistic description will be inadequate to pick out her unlabelled color-experiences. We cannot explain her which of the previously seen colors is called red, (unless we show her colors again, accompanied by names, but this would be labelling) . The reason for this is that colors are representationally atomic states, not that sensory experience has a peculiar ontological status. As colors (and other simple sensory experiences) are representationally atomic, they contain no representationally relevant structure which could be matched (through intermodal transfer) to the structure conveyed by a linguistic description.
This theory would be refuted if it turned out that there exist linguistic descriptions which can teach retinal achromats what colors are like and help BW Mary to identify her unlabelled color experiences.
01.03-- Abstract No:1144
Lycan embraces the idea that there is phenomenal information about the mind; information that can be gleaned only from a "first-person perspective." At the same time, in line with his materialist metaphysics, he denies that this has any ontological implications. There is nothing about the mind that has a subjective, first-person existence. The source of "the subjectivity of the mental" can be traced to our introspective access to our own mental states. Lycan argues that introspection is a matter of forming higher-order mental representations that carry information about first-order mental representations. He identifies two kinds of information that mental representations can carry: 'coarse-factual, ' which is roughly equivalent to extensional content, and 'computational, ' which incorporates a representation's functional or computational role along with its extensional content. The notion of computational information is supposed to capture the idea of a referent's being presented 'under a mode of presentation.' Lycan suggests that the computational information expressed by the lexical primitives of "introspectorese" cannot be expressed by any terms of public language, not by the first-order mental representations of any observer. This is largely due to the special indexical functional roles of the lexical primitives of 'introspectorese.' The result is a form of subjective information about the mind that is only accessible from the first-person perspective.
The beauty of Lycan's account is that it takes seriously the compelling intuition that there are features of a person's mental life that can be known only by taking up the perspective of the subject herself. It is this intuition that has proven to be so recalcitrant in the face of materialist accounts of the mind. I argue that it proves to be no less recalcitrant for Lycan's account. Even if we grant his point that knowledge is 'hyperintensional' it still turns out on his view that subjective information is accessible to observers who adopt an objective perspective. Observers are capable of expressing in objective terms the 'very same' information about my mental states that I can via my introspective concepts. The difference lies not in the content of the information, but in the manner in which it is expressed. The information about my mental states carried 'directly' by my higher-order introspective mental representations can be expressed 'indirectly' by an observer's nonintropsective mental rerpesentations. The reason for this is that the subjectivity of introspective awareness is held to turn on special features of the functional or computational roles of introspective concepts, and facts about functional or computational role can be expressed in perfectly objective terms, hence in terms accessible from a third-person point of view. Unfortunately, none of this squares with the intuition that there are features of one's mental life that are essentially private; features that lie outside the purview of observers who fail to take up the perspective of the subject of those states.
The upshot is that Lycan simply can't explicate these intuitions within his representationalist account of the mind. If materialism is too dear to give up, then we need to understand the mistake underlying these "Cartesian" intuitions.
01.03-- Abstract No:1170
Echo location: consciousness from a different perspective
If we stand at night on Echo Point and yell we will hear something off in the distance. If we flash our flashlight we will see something off in the distance. In both cases a similar thing has happened. in the first Case, sound from our mouth reflects off the canyon wall and into our ears. In the second case, light from our flashlight reflects off the canyon wall and into our eyes. Two parallel things are happening. Consequently, if we see a canyon wall then we hear a canyon wall, and if we do not see a canyon wall then we do not hear a canyon wall.
This leads directly to the conclusion that we can use both the words "see" and "hear" in two different senses. In one sense we see (2) and hear (2) the same thing -- a canyon wall, but in the other sense we hear (1) an echo and see (1) (say) an X neither of which is a canyon wall.
Given what we know about animals that echo locate like bats and dolphins it is reasonable to believe that talking human-like creatures coold echo locate like them. In that case they would live in an echo world, so to speak. (Reasonably, if they were to turn up the power of their yell there would be more detail in their echo just as there would be more detail in our X if we turned up the power of our flashlight.) So, if they hear (1) the echo then where is the canyon wall that they hear (2) , just under the echo? And where is our canyon wall, just under the X.
Something- very enlightening about mind, matter, and consciousness is being revealed here. Either the "sonar people" are dealing with two dIfferent things, the echo and the canyon wall, or they are only dealing with one, the echo. If their philosophers do not have a grip on this then they cannot understand either mind, matter, or consciousness because what is true of canyon walls is true of everything including bodies and their brains. Their materialists would think the echoes were material objects and that there was nothing but matter. Their Buddhists would think that the echoes were "material" objects too but also an integral part of their winds and so with all material objects, not just the ones they hear (2) .
My argument is: what is true of echoes and sonar people is true of X and humans. What is and where is X? To argue that X is light is untenable for that entails arguing that what we had thought was a material object is not but it is material light. We cannot get from there to here.
My paper expands on all of these things in considerable detail using, in part, sonar people to elucidate the situation. It has nothing to do with knowing what it is like to be a bat and everything to do with knowing what it is like to be a human hearing an echo.
01.04-- Abstract No:818
A thought experiment focuses attention on the kinds of commonalities and differences to be found in two small parts of visual cortical areas during responses to stimuli that are either identical in quality, but different in (retinal) location, or identical in location and different only in the one visible property of color. Reflection on this thought experiment leads to the view that patterns of neural activation are the best candidates for causes of qualitatively conscious events (qualia) . This view faces a strong objection, namely, that patterns can be realized in many media, and thus candidates for patterns that cause qualia might be realized in ways that would not plausibly result in consciousness. It is argued that this objection can be overcome if qualia-causing patterns of events must be realized within small spatial and temporal regions. Much more importantly, it is argued that this restriction on region size need not be ad hoc. The key concept needed to establish this important point is 'natural salience', i.e. distinction from background noise that does not depend on application of a criterion of selection. It is explained how natural salience could figure in an empirically-based theory that would entail size restrictions for qualia-causing neural activation patterns.
The question is then raised as to how the resulting view diverges from Chalmers' (1996) account, which relies on the Principle of Organizational Invariance. A second thought experiment envisages replacement of neurons by computer chips with synaptic interfaces. Reflection on this thought experiment enables us to conceptually, and possibly empirically, separate the two views. An argument for preferring the patterns-as-causes (of qualia) view is given. Because natural salience does not plausibly produce strictly discontinuous boundaries between pattern and noise, questions naturally arise as to the relation of the patterns-as-causes view (as developed here) to panpsychism and to 'emergence'. The patterns-as-causes view is distinguished from panpsychism, and it is explained how the former avoids what Seager (1995) has called 'the combination problem', and is thus preferable to panpsychism. The relation of the patterns-as- causes view to 'emergence' is explained. The conclusion of the paper is that the patterns-as-causes view is a philosophically defensible and potentially scientifically fruitful view that offers qualia realists the best hypothesis concerning the neural causes of qualia.
References
Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press) .
Seager, W. (1995) 'Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2:272-288.
01.04-- Abstract No:831
I define 'qualia space' Q as the space of all possible perceptual experience. Other kinds of experience could also be considered, but for simplicity I consider here only perceptual experience. The question as to where perceptual experience is located thus has a trivial tautological answer, viz., in qualia space. Despite this sweeping of everything significant under the rug, it is still interesting to speculate on the structure of qualia space. Such speculation may even be related to the 'hard problem' of understanding consciousness, since a respectable theory of consciousness should incorporate a description of Q.
I will argue that Q is a closed pointed cone in an infinite-dimensional separable topological vector space. This quite technical structure can be explained for the most part in a simple, intuitive way. The structure of qualia space allows us to consider and even answer in a precise way such quesions as: Is there a continuous path from the sensation of blue to the sensation of pain? Once we fix a desired accuracy of approximation, do there exist finitely many perceptual experiences such that *any* possible perceptual experience is approximately equal to one of them? Are there fundamental units of perceptual experience? What should be meant by 'fundamentally different' perceptual experiences?
Many of the above questions, or quite similar ones, have been considered before in the context of a single (human, animal, or alien) brain. The novelty of our approach is that we are looking at *all* possible perceptual experiences. In other words, for any point p in qualia space there is some 'brain' that can experience it, but no single brain can apprehend every point of Q. Therefore qualia space should be regarded as a highly idealized structure that unifies the perceptual experience of all possible brains.
01.04-- Abstract No:963
Objects and processes from the external world cannot be internalized as such, because no form of energy enters the brain without previous transformation into nerve signals, the only kind of signal that the brain can process. This transformation is obligatory because the language of the machine has to match the nature of the machine, not that of the original stimulus. Therefore, there are no air vibrations, flashes of light or odor-generating molecules inside our heads. Since sensory nerve signals cannot be translated back into any of the original forms of energy, they are converted into complex physicochemical processes, some of which are experienced as qualia. They are ineffable because they are experiences of internal processes, not of the external reality. Qualia are informational substitutions in which some of the quantitative characteristics of the stimuli (wavelength, frequency) are transformed into qualitative differences (colors, pitch) . Qualia are biologically efficient cognitive processes that allow animals to react rapidly and to deal efficiently with their environment. If we had to analyze and precisely quantitate the complex air vibrations produced by a lion's roar before we could decide what to do, we would not have survived natural selection. Even though the assignment of qualities to quantitatively different phenomena misrepresents reality, it has high survival value. Qualia are efficient ways to encode, identify and act upon complex stimuli.
The misrepresentation of the external world mediated by sensory qualia (exoqualia) , cast serious doubts on the reliability of the internally generated qualia (endoqualia) , such as those of emotions, feelings, appetites, experiences of moral and intellectual certainty, etc. Endoqualia are presumably generated by specific neuronal states that prompt biologically advantageous responses. From a subjective perspective, we have no way to know whether our internally generated experiences, such as impressions, emotions, or feelings are appropriate to the circumstances. This is because the underlying causes of endoqualia are not internally accessible. A tentative list of inappropriate endoqualia could include: distrust, suspicion, paranoia, elation, prejudices, superstitious beliefs, etc. These are usually swift experiences, that could be corrected only by gathering more information from objective sources. The possibility remains, however, that there are internally generated experiences that are incorrigible. Such could be the case of free will, the beauty of the opposite sex, self-righteousness, etc.
One of the important endoqualia is that of self-identity, illustrated by Nagel's question, What is it like to be a bat? The what-it-is-like feature of being something is ineffable because it is generated by physical internal states that as such, are non-transferable. The first-person has no way to make an independent reality check either on the nature or on the biological relevance of endoqualia. The phenomenological, first-person view is a dead-end road, that can only be opened by the empirical third-person approach. Even so, the underlying physiological bases that generate most endoqualia are still unknown.
01.04-- Abstract No:996
I attempt to rigorously prove that (sensory) qualia are distinct from properties of external material objects. That is, the qualia associated with sensation in human beings (experiential greenness, loudness, smelliness, etc.) are not properties of the external perceived objects (trees, trumpets, rotten eggs) ; they must therefore be properties of some other class of individual instead -- most plausibly, states of the human nervous system. To put it at its most brazen, brain states sometimes have the property of being experientially green or experientially painful. This basic claim is denied or ignored by influential thinkers like Armstrong, Dennett and Dretske.
My argument is a revamped version of the venerable argument from illusion, rumours of whose death, I show, are greatly exaggerated. The argument from illusion has often been thought to appeal mainly to the 'indiscernibility' of veridical and illusory perception; however it is best formulated as resting upon the impossibility of 'unowned property instances.'
1) A physical object x may appear to have at the same time two incompatible qualitative properties F and G to two different observers y and z.
2) Since F and G are incompatible, x is not both F and G.
3) If x is F but not G, then one of the perceivers is perceptually experiencing a property which is not a property of x. Likewise, if x is G but not F, then one of the perceivers is perceptually experiencing a property which is not a property of x. If x is neither F nor G, then both of the perceivers are perceptually experiencing a property which is not a property of x.
4) Therefore someone perceptually experiences at least one property which is not a property of x.
5) If someone perceptually experiences a property, then that experiential property is instantiated: for example, if someone senses a red ball, then somewhere there is experiential redness 'going on.'
6) Every property instantiation is a property of some individual -- there are no unowned properties.
7) Therefore, either F or G must be properties of some individual whichis not the external perceptual object x. The only halfway plausible objection to this valid argument is to premise 5) , but I show that the denial of this claim entails such reductios as that perception involves qualia while misperception does not.
01.04-- Abstract No:1143
The use of the term "quale/qualia" has undergone a disorienting transformation. It was introduced to stand for the features of experience that engulf you when you are alert and enjoying the experience. Qualia are the features of these paradigmatic experiences; they are the colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc., that make up what it is like to be you at that moment.
But a new usage of the term "quale/qualia" has established itself. Now one can say that someone exemplifies intense pain qualia without feeling a thing. Or one can ask whether a blindsighted person has intact visual qualia. Qualia are no longer understood as features or aspects of the glorious end-state of a fully consummated experience. Now they are understood as features of inner states or of intentional objects, features that may or may not play a role in what it is like to be you at the time. Only if a quale is subject to higher-order representation will it contribute to what it is like to be you. The quale, all by itself, is not a constitutive element of lived experience. Unrepresented qualia pass through the mind unfelt.
The new qualia have one enormous advantage. They are naturalistically well-behaved properties that brains and external objects can easily instantiate. But this advantage is offset by two difficulties one encounters when relying on these naturalistically domesticated qualia to explain consciousness.
First, relying on the new qualia makes it is difficult to account for the striking features of qualitative consciousness. The distance between the very plain new qualia and the extravagant features of lived experience is large and an enormous burden is placed on the machinery that transforms these qualia into conscious experience. On everybody's reckoning the machinery that is supposed to accomplish this task is the mechanism of representation. Whether representation is up to this task is questionable.
Second, someone who starts to represent a quale she previously instantiated undergoes a striking experiential change. Now she feels the pain that was there all along. This change seems to be a matter of one's instantiating further properties in addition to the qualia instantiated throughout. These further properties that make up what it is like to feel pain look like traditional qualia. But a commitment to new qualia rules this analysis out. So the question arises how to explain the salient augmentation of experience that sets in when one notices the qualia one instantiated all along. This problem is often "solved" with an appeal to illusion. The person noticing her pain quale does not experience a further property. In representing her quale she grasps it imperfectly, thereby introducing certain illusory factors. The experienced change is not due to the instantiation of a traditional quale. The experiential change is due to an illusion created by the poor grasp of an ordinary quale.
In this paper I argue that the appeal to illusion cannot solve the problems occasioned by the switch to the new qualia.
01.04-- Abstract No:1253
In both the philosophical as well as the neurophysiological literature, pain is often regarded as either a sensation or a perception. This claim is then, in turn, used to support the argument that pain is incorrigible, and therefore, it is impossible for a patient to be in doubt about his own "pain status". However, both clinical and research evidence fails to support the claim that pain is incorrigible and suggests instead that pain is a highly complicated and complex cognition open to errors of judgment and misidentification.
I shall argue in this paper that pain is a cognitive process involving both memory and integrative synthesis, drawing upon research from clinical case studies as well as research on scopolamine, ketamine, and similar anesthetic agents. I will argue that it is quite possible to be mistaken about the nature of pain and that patients frequently misidentify both the quality and quantity of their pain/suffering thresholds (as the McGill-Melzak Pain Inventory clearly demonstrates) and that pain errors are sufficiently frequent to invalidate the thesis of pain incorrigibility.
01.05-- Abstract No:777
A difference in definitions had led to John R. Searle and Daniel C. Dennett arguing past one another in their debate concerning the Chinese Room thought experiment. First, Searle refers to intrinsic intentionality, while Dennett states that only derived intentionality can be ascribed to a computer program. Second, Searle suggests that to understand requires intrinsic intentionality, while Dennett argues we must use 'derived' intentionality in ascribing understanding to any system which behaves in a rational way, given the context.
01.05-- Abstract No:780
Problem
Issues of importance have a long history that furnishes the matrix in which we think our best thoughts. Yet, it gets increasingly harder to keep up with one's own field of scholarship, let alone with the 'big questions' in other fields. For students, educators, and researchers in an interdisciplinary field like consciousness studies, the problem becomes much more complex.
Students find it difficult to synthesize highly specialized subject matter, to identify disagreements and differing points of view, and to make sense of divergent uses of terminology in interdisciplinary fields like consciousness studies. Larger class sizes and teaching loads, along with the intrinsic difficulty of interdisciplinary instruction, make it harder for educators to engage students in debate and to lead them through the thicket of the classic debates in a field characterized by competing schools of thought. The special charge of the interdisciplinary scholar is to describe and study the context of and make the connections between large and complex issues. Such scholars are typically dealing with messy, ill-structured problems that require attention from a range of disciplines. However, disciplinary lines are as yet crossed with great effort, and interdisciplinary researchers often find that major social and scholarly issues are slow to be addressed with sufficient attention from people in relevant specialized fields. Without research and communication aids, lost opportunities for crossfertilization abound.
Until now, there has been no place to get -- even with persistence and resources -- a map and an up-to-date briefing of the major issues. It has been even harder to obtain all the obscure journals in which a debate is actually taking place, so that specific positions can be inspected in depth. There has been no easy way to link positions to rebuttals (so that proposed refutations of data and positions can be easily prepared) . Finally, there has been no easy way to navigate easily through a debate -- no way to visually inspect its structure and direction.
The Project
Our argumentation mapping project specifically addresses the problems set forth in the previous section. Argumentation charts are large visual diagrams that summarize all major, published claims in a specific debate. The charts visually and logically link each claim and counterclaim so that the reader can easily keep track of specific lines of argument as well as of the history and current status of the debate as a whole.
Our team -- two graduate students, an instructor, and a principal investigator -- is currently completing the first argumentation mapping publication: a set of seven charts on the topic, 'Can computers think?' The debate consists of more than 700 'moves' from more than 300 authors since Alan Turing's provocative article, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence, ' appeared in Mind in 1950. Over a four-year period our team has been devoted to developing the methodology and substance of these charts, which map a focal question in cognitive science, consciousness studies, and philosophy.
One of the seven charts addresses the subissue of whether computers need to be conscious in order to think. The map includes regions of the debate such as consciousness is irrelevant, the solipsism arguments, functionalism, computationalism, and the higher-order representation arguments.
Our vision is to develop and perfect a general methodology, based on the argumentation analysis methodology of Stephen Toulmin (1958) , that will make available a new generation of teaching and learning materials to educators, students, researchers and scholars in interdisciplinary fields.
Results: A New Tool for Teaching and Learning
The 'mapping' approach described has wide applicability and is capable of handling complex argumentation. Such a detailed mapping of the major issues in a key debate of our times provides students, educators, and researchers with an invaluable teaching and learning tool.
The charts aid new students' understanding of the history of the debate by revealing its primary themes and threads, encourage them to examine the current frontiers for places they can contribute, and suggest approaches to the writing of more focused papers and dissertations. The maps provide educators with a tool that helps them provide students with contextualized knowledge as opposed to fragmented information. The charts orient researchers and students to the major issues and available resources, guide research directions, reduce participants' cross-purpose discussions, identify new research questions, reveal whether and in which arenas an adjacent field may need to become involved, and enable researchers to track fast-growing subfields and evaluate competing priorities to allocate scarce resources. A final auxiliary benefit of the project will be to further develop the methodology of argumentation mapping and its effectiveness in resolving the problems that arise for students, educators, and scholars confronted with the nature of modern knowledge-complexity, fragmentation, elusive context, and narrow specialization.
Our project team continues to be inspired by Lewis Thomas's observations: 'College students, and for that matter, high school students, should be exposed very early, perhaps at the outset, to the big arguments currently going on among scientists. Big arguments stimulate their interest, and with luck engage their absorbed attention. Few things in life are as engrossing as a good fight between highly trained and skilled adversaries. But the young students are told very little about the major disagreements of the day; they may be taught something about the arguments between Darwinians and their opponents a century ago, but they do not realize that similar disputes about other matters, many of them touching profound issues for our understanding of nature, are still going on, and, indeed, are an essential feature of the scientific process' (p. 49) .
References
Thomas, L. 1981. Debating the unknowable. Atlantic Monthly, July, pp. 49-50.
Toulmin, S. 1958. The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
01.05-- Abstract No:1164
The subject of my study is the question of the conceivability or possibility of "speaking machines" and of a concept of "full language" or, to put it more precisely, the role of the current philosophical contributions to that subject
I want to criticise these contributions by saying that the philosophers do neither contribute to a solution nor do they elucidate the question although it would he up to them to provide a clear conceptual framework for the results of the empirical sciences. My critique is a critique of the conceptual foundations of "full language (capacity) ", "understanding"., and "consciousness". To do so, I will start from the following two points: 1) Descartes' thesis -- at the "foundation" of dualism -- that there can not be a speaking machine, i.e. that speaking machines are not conceivable because "full language"/"vera loquela" is a specific feature of the human mind -- and the only reliable symptom for consciousness; 2) the result of Hubert Schleichert's analysis of the concept of "consciousness", which is that "consciousness" is identical with "full language capability", but without specifying the latter.
My thesis is as follows:
The discussion, no matter whether carried on "full language (capacity) ", "understanding", "intentionality", "machine consciousness", or "speaking machines", always takes a circular course as a petitio principii.
The, probably intuitive, ideological pre-decision "fully speaking/understanding/conscious/intentional machines are/are not conceivable" determines, more or less evidently, the result a priori by the construction of the predication rule for "able to speak" /"conscious" /"understanding".
By the paradigms of some typical authors on the axis Searle (speaking machines, in the sense of speaking computers, are not conceivable) - Churchland (we can not say that it is not conceivable) - Minsky (of course they are conceivable at some time or other) I want to show how the predecision is immunised by the definition of the conditions of fulfillment for the concepts in question.
An analysis of these concepts shows the specific necessary and sufficient conditions for ascribing the predicate "fully able to speak", "conscious", "understanding", and "intentional" and the circular mutual definition of these concepts - with a special focus on the role of language tests (especially the Turing Test) in the relevant conception. And it also makes clear a symptomatic choice when defining tlie criteria of "full language (capacity) " and of "understanding": this definition is sometimes based on structure, sometimes on performance and sometimes on the substrate or "the bearer". Thus, these authors are not really interested in a common level of discussion.
By this analysis it can be brought to evidence that all typical positions argue a priori and that on tlie philosophers' side the structure of their arguments is not very different from Descartes'.
01.05-- Abstract No:1268
In this paper we discuss the role of the concept of consciousness in context of the recent developments in AI. The paper opens with a review of the early works in the field. Then, that is in the beginnings, consciousness was rarely explicitly mentioned in explaining intelligence, as opposed to terms like memory, learning, adaptation, etc., and epiphenomenalism was the official doctrine. Surprisingly enough, the implicit assumption was that the objects from our introspective phenomenology ought to be present as components of artifact's representations (e.g. if artifact inhabits some environment populated with cubes, pyramids, and balls, one finds labels for these objects: "cube", "pyramid", "ball" in artifact's representation of the environment) . Classical problems that emerged within this approach (e.g. frame-problem, symbol grounding problem, and the like) initiated a kind of behaviourist turn in the mid 80s. Here, the need for any type representation of the environment was denied. Rather, the world is seen as it's best model (representation) and one has only to define the reactions of the artifact to different stimuli (i.e. sensory readings) . These architectures reached their limits as well (limited behavioral capabilities, scaling problems, etc.) and we are witnessing now a kind of cognitive turn in AI. This new branch makes explicit appeal to various psychological theories in the process of artificial agents design. In this framework we present our simulated intelligent agent architecture and discuss its components in the light of Dennett's Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness. Adopting an essentially functionalist approach it is argued that consciousness emerges in groups of agents as a faculty that helps group's survival and adaptation. Also, we offer a general discussion regarding the types of advantages and constraints the "consciousness faculty" provides and imposes on the agent-design process.
01.05-- Abstract No:1202
AI has had an interesting history, with successes and failures that are not always what they seem, and certainly not what the media makes of them. Recently we had an `AI Winter’ (failure of many AI companies and a loss of prestige in academe); now we have the win of Deep Blue; previously we had a rather deep debate about the nature, goals, definition, potential, etc. of AI, led by philosophers like Dreyfus and Searle. Logical representations are out, neural nets are in, Artificial Life is hot, and robots are multiplying faster than humans.
I think we can see two forces at work: mankind's vision of itself as reflected in AI's vision of how to replicate human intelligence; and on the other hand, practical engineering considerations about what really works. The vision of humans as disembodied autonomous rational agents perfectly matches the idea of computers manipulating logical representations of reality; this is the recent Western notion of `intelligence’. But it does not work so very well on the factory floor, and it has dubious ethical and social overtones. Moreover, a new vision is emerging that takes account of bodies and societies, not just disembodied `intelligence’.
The West's vision of itself has been reflected in its vision of robots and related machines for centuries (cf. golem, homulculi, cybernetics, etc.), and that vision is now changing rapidly, largely in response to the actual deployment of robots in factories. The latest developments bring in bodies, communication, and modelling in a much more serious way; these include neural nets, robotic vision, robots in factories, artificial life, virtual reality, the internet, and even evolution and societies of robots.
Among questions to be discussed are the following: Was Deep Blue really a triumph of AI? Or was it just a consequence of the ongoing evolution of computer hardware and software? Then why did the media play it the other way? Are neural nets and artificial life as biological as they sound? What can we learn from recent rapid advances in computer vision? What about virtual reality? What about agents on the internet? Are AI, VR and the myth of cyberspace ways to escape physical reality? Perhaps a kind of secular mysticism? How does the vision of AL differ from that of AI? And what might we expect for the future?
01.06-- Abstract No:796
In recent publications, Block addresses two concepts of consciousness, access or A-consciousness and phenomenal or P-consciousness. He says that phenomenal consciousness is experience, while access consciousness is 'availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action.' He argues that these concepts are often conflated, that there is a fallacy involved in arguments pertaining to them. Phenomenal consciousness is defined by Block as non-intentional. It is distinct from cognitive and functional properties, those definable in terms of computer programs. Only access consciousness is intentional.
Though Block sets about to define and demarcate the scope of two kinds of consciousness while exposing what he claims are fallacies in reason about them, his effort reveals confusions regarding very complex ontological, epistemological, computational cum logico-mathematical assumptions and issues underlying the very problem (s) he addresses. Indeed, given the nominalism apparent in his view, he may not acknowledge an ontological dimension to the problems at all. Though I believe Block is correct that there is much conflating of different senses of 'consciousness', I believe hehas himself conflated as well as confused ('fused together') a number of concepts which must be clearly distinguished in order to obtain a clearer and more fundamental conceptualization of the very problemsof concern to him, let alone their solutions. In sum, I do not believe Block has succeeded in distinguishing between what he calls phenomenal and access consciousness, nor has he adequately conceptualized the nature of either.
This failure is particularly evident for that kind of consciousness which Block calls phenomenal, [and referred to by others as experience or 'what it is like'] because, in addition to ad hoc distinctions, the effort adheres to pervasive and often unstated nominalist myths about the nature of human cognition. These myths include the following:
(1) The view that all cognition must be representational, having 'contents' representable or reportable in that clauses, in order to be 'accessible' to reasoning. I arguethat this is an extremely truncated and narrow construal of cognition contradicted by empirical facts, especially facts about the somatosensory cum motor system.
(2) A central myth is the implied twin reductions of a symbol or code of something with the thing symbolized or encoded, and a reduction of knowing how to knowledge that. These reductions entail larger problems such as a bifurcation between reason and [rational] action or behavior, and our Western bias toward identifying intelligence with mental 'contents' [e.g. propositions]. These larger problems, I believe, undercut most efforts to get at the fundamental nature of consciousness because they have blinded us to a broader concept of intelligence which includes things we knowhow to do.
(3) Finally, a rather prevalent myth tied to the others is the explicit or implied claim that there is no such thing as immediate awareness, or if there is, it is somehow equivalent to some physical functional mechanism. Contrary to virtually the entire history of this concept, it is now treated not only as not a kind of consciousness, it is no longer regarded as the most fundamental and primitive kind. Today's nominalist-inclined philosophers treat the concept awareness, particularly immediate awareness, as a bastard child. They do not quite know what to do with it other than try to ignore or explain ('stipulate') it away, as Chalmers has done.
I intend to address each of these myths in the interest of laying a more sound logical and conceptual foundation for a theory of consciousness.
01.06-- Abstract No:834
Evidence gathered in the past thirty years about anomalies in the operation of consciousness (Libet, Gazzaniga & Le Doux, Damasio & Damasio, McGaugh & Cahill) have undermined the 'folk psychological' or functional model of consciousness, i.e. consciousness produces intentions (the materialization of desires according to held beliefs) , intentions are realized as acts.
four alternative hypotheses are consistent with the observations :
1. consciousness has no material grounding and operates along non-physical principles (dualism)
2. consciousness is materially grounded but operates backwards in time (Libet I 'extreme') .
3. consciousness is associated with a physical force field (similar to electromagnetism) but this 'associated force field is not directly accessible to any objective, physical measuring device' (Libet II [1997])
4. consciousness has none of the causal powers assigned to it by the 'folk psychological' model. Consciousness is not illusory but occurs at a locus where information is simply registered, not a locus for decision-making and triggering of motor acts (Libet I 'moderate' ; also suggested by Dennett but dismissed by him as 'incoherent') .
Hypothesis 4 is sole compatible with the scientific pursuit. It opens three additional questions :
1. why does consciousness seem to have causal powers ? Because of the effect called 'backward referral' by Libet. 'Backward referral' ensures that every percept is evoked and 'time stamped' at the time the event takes place in the world rather than at the (later) time when the percept is registered in the cortex. This ensures that awareness seems to coincide with the performance of the act (and can accordingly be reconstructed as having been the 'intention' which materialized into the act) .
2. what is the etiology of consciousness? 'Backward referral' probably operates the same way for every sense and thus for each type of percept. This makes it possible to hold in working memory - and ultimately to record in long term memory -- simultaneous percepts (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.) in a 'complex' where they are associated with the emotional response they evoke.
3. what is the actual function of consciousness ? An emotional mood is the manifestation within consciousness of the hormonal signals triggering motor acts. The capacity for recording memories of truly contemporary percepts isclearly adaptive as signals from the outer world or from the inner world will spur appropriate behavior. If it is established (Libet) that consciousness requires a 500 milliseconds delay before it gets access to full information originating from all five senses, it ensues that consciousness has no part in decision making and triggering of action as response time is in every known case much shorter ('behavioral responses to sensory signals or images can be made within as little as 100 msec.' Libet 1992) . This means that all decision making and triggering of action is unconscious and every elaboration from consciousness, post hoc.
Signifiers, the acoustic imprint of the spoken word and the visual imprint (tactile with Braille) of the written word can be part of memories - as any other percepts, i.e. stored as memory traces associated with other percepts and affect values, and can be later recollected accordingly
'Backward referral' would operate in a similar manner with speech and the inner dialogue typical of some thought processes, inducing a feedback loop allowing the 'affective' dynamics underlying signifiers stored as memory traces to self-fuel until full relaxation takes place through sentence generation.
01.06-- Abstract No:837
For human beings and other animals 'high' on the evolutionary tree, perceptions largely consist of knowledge stored from the past. They also carry predictions for planning the immediate future. Essential for survival is the present moment. The present must not be confused with past or future.
The present is signalled by afferent inputs from the senses. So there is no problem for 'primitive' organisms, controlled straighforwardly from input signals. But there is a very real problem for highly cognitive organisms -- for which real-time afferent inputs are a small part of perception. They have a problem identifying the present.
I suggest that qualia flag the present.
If one looks at the scene in front of one, then closes one's eyes, it is remarkable how the vivid qualia of vision immediately disappear. Conversely, imagining the scene with the eyes shut -- upon opening them there is a vivid flood of qualia, not present in the imagination. This suggests that indeed qualia are closely linked to afferent inputs, and so may flag the present.
There are exceptions. The case of 'Mr. S', described by Alexandre Luria, had such vivid memory and imagination that he did confuse the present with memories -- making crossing the road dangerous. There are vivid qualia in dreams, in schizophrenia and elicited by hallucenogenic drugs. Evidently this normally survival-important system breaks down in these conditions.
Most suggestive, memories of embarrassment, eliciting blushing, do have vivid qualia at the time of remembering. This could be because the memory triggers afferent inputs from bodily changes such as blushing, associated with embarrassment as for the James-Lange theory, that emotions are sensing such bodily changes.
The need to separate the present from remembered past and anticipated future, must apply to cognitive robots. Whether they will need and have qualia, is a question for the future of Artificial Intelligence.
01.06-- Abstract No:876
The specific function of consciousness is to help a person (or animal) deal with non-routine situations. To say that a situation is non-routine for someone to deal with is to say that it is not straightforward for them to apply knowledge derived from past experience to help decide how to understand or respond to that situation. This may be because the situation is significantly different from any past situation, or because it is such that a wrong decision would have major consequences. Consciousness modulates information processing in the brain to take account of the degree of non-routineness in the current situation. Conscious information processing involves the following major steps -- 1) measure how non- routine the situation is, 2) if it is non-routine, provoke a best guess response, but do not fully activate it, 3) consider this putative response, especially checking for serious objections, 4) if the putative response is judged to be appropriate, put it into action. The subjective experience of consciousness corresponds most directly to steps 3) and 4) . Qualia are perceptions whose significance is independent of context or very easy to determine from context, thus they are perceptions that are more likely to be useful in non-routine situations in helping to judge the appropriateness of putative responses. Possible neural correlates of some parts of this process are 1) the locus coeruleus detects non-routinesness and signals it to the rest of the brain, 2) serotonin is involved in considering and over-riding objections, 3) dopamine projections onto the striatum correspond to final confirmation of putative responses. Rewards and punishments act on the general strategies that make the confirm/no confirm decisions, but they constrain these strategies more in the long term than in the short term. This long term constrained/short term unconstrained system corresponds to the subjective phenomenon of "free will". A good metaphor for a system constrained only in the long term is a business which is constrained to make more profit than loss. The business can make more loss than profit for a little while, but repeated losses that exceed profits will eventually lead to bankruptcy and cessation of operations.
01.06-- Abstract No:1003
In the paper, an attempt is made to identify and define consciousness. Consciousness is examined in a bifocal view, of 'evolution' and 'function', that is commonly used to describe other, more ostensible, human perceptions. In doing this, the reasons for the difficulties and conflicts arising as a result of this view, are analyzed by identifying that consciousness exists only as a 'concept'. It is a product of higher level perceptual integration, a term coined to stand for a multi-functional integrand, available almost in the form of an instantaneous, perception-like ability which has no distinct ontology. It is hypothesized that it is this closeness in nature to lower level perceptions that misleads one to look for local ontological entities (mind stuff, neuronal impulses, qualia etc.) for consciousness whereas none is required.
Even if each of the senses themselves can be potential ontological entities to describe the nature of consciousness, it is argued that they would not form a sufficient set of ontologies since the functions of consciousness do not arise from summing the piecewise functional descriptions of each of the sense organs. The process of integration of the senses is an information-producing process that makes the final product much more powerful than each of the constituents that were used. Also, the interchangeability of the sense organs to produce the same functional effect is another evidence towards believing that this process of integration itself is a more complete ontology to describe consciousness. But since I define consciousness as the product of this integration itself, this leads to the conclusion that no ontology is needed.
The narration of 'evolution' is a metaphysical story that justifies the nature of consciousness in terms of the nature of our existence. On the other hand, the description of 'function' although closely metaphysical is a lot more epistemological since it entails a certain amount of volition or exercising by the possessor of consciousness. For example, a sharp kitchen knife is better than a blunt one because of the metaphysical imposition that sharp knives slice better than blunt ones. No one controls the nature of this feasibility; it is imposed by the nature of existence. In a world where blunt things slice better than sharp ones (hypothetically) the feasibility would be reversed but would still remain an imposition beyond being controlled or defined by a part or being of the existence. On the other hand, the manner in which one uses the knife is entirely in the hands of the wielder. There is no confusion about the necessity to have a sharp knife. This is imposed by the nature of the existence. However, the manner in which the knife is used is not imposed in any manner. It lies entirely within the user's discretion, one may try to use the blunt edge, one may hold it by the blade or one may even refuse to believe that one holds a knife at all. Each action leads to a different, unique consequence. However, only one achieves the function with the most efficiency. In short, the nature of consciousness is autonomously derived from the nature of the senses beyond the control of the sensor; however, the use of consciousness to satisfy epistemological goals depends on the volition of the sensor.
01.06-- Abstract No:1060
The fallacy of functional exclusion is not a subtle error; it is all too obvious once it is pointed out. Nevertheless, it continues to deform thinking about the function (s) of consciousness, and it needs to be eradicated. Yet in one sense the fallacy is useful, since we can work backward from it, and identify some of the deeper assumptions that make it seem plausible. Some of these assumptions are probably more pernicious for consciousness research than the fallacy itself, insofar as our goal is to understand consciousness as a natural phenomenon.
(1) Assume we know that cognitive function X can occur in the absence of conscious experience. It is a gross error to conclude from this that consciousness does NOT perform function X. This is because we can never know, a priori, that only one system in an organism executes a given function. The cones in the eye are photosensitive, but this hardly means that the rods are therefore not photosensitive. Biological systems often overlap, enjoy complex auxiliary and backup capacities, and otherwise allow an organism to accomplish a given end in more than one way.
(2) Because it ignores the logic of biological systems, the study of consciousness is now hobbled by a number of confusions. The literature on tacit cognition, for example, tells us a good deal less about the function (s) of consciousness than is usually supposed. The most well known theory of consciousness based on this literature is probably that of Max Velmans. But this theory is fatally undercut by the functional exclusion fallacy. More generally, the fallacy supports what is probably the most misleading set of questions in consciousness research: e.g. "Why is consciousness necessary?" "What unique function does consciousness execute?" The mistake here is to think that we must find a logically NECESSARY role for consciousness; or that, failing this, consciousness research would be compromised.
(3) People are seldom fooled by the fallacy of functional exclusion in a biological context. The degree to which the fallacy has infected consciousness research implies that most people still do not really think of consciousness in biological terms. Further evidence of this if found in cases where inference principles like functional exclusion ARE legitimate. These turn out to be research areas that make artificial, brittle and extremely formalized assumptions about the world, e.g. classical AI information processing models of cognition. Current English-speaking ("analytic") philosophy makes similar logical assumptions. Temperamentally, at least, most philosophy today works against viewing consciousness as a biological system.
01.06-- Abstract No:1174
Little is know about the functional significance of consciousness. In this study, I investigated whether having a conscious representation exerts any influences on ongoing behavior. As a means to impair stimulus visibility backward masking technique was used. In the previous conference (Tucson II) , I demonstrated that with practice subjects could respond to stimuli even when they could hardly see the target just in the way they do so when given a normal choice RT task (i.e., with highly visible stimuli) . Under the latter situation, it is known that if subjects make an error they become more cautious in the following trial with the result that their RTs are delayed relative to those after correct responses. The purpose of this study is to test whether such a delay also occurs when subjects make speeded discrimination to severely masked, barely visible targets.
In Experiment 1, six subjects were trained to make speeded identification of digits appearing randomly either in the left or right visual field. The digits were followed by two array of masking stimuli ("###") with randomly varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) . Subjects' RTs of correct responses were classified according to whether or not they had made an error in the immediately preceding trial and to the SOAs of both preceding and current trials. When target visibility was low in the preceding trial (SOAs were 20 and 30 msec) , there was no aftereffect of response correctness. However, when SOA of the preceding trial was 40 msec, having committed an error modulated RTs in the following trials. When target in the current trial was clearly recognizable (SOA of 80 msec) , RTs were delayed after error trials relative to those after correct ones. Having made an error in the preceding trial facilitated RTs when SOA of current trials was either 40 or 60 msec. Thus, a significant interaction between SOAs of current trials and the error condition obtained.
In Experiment 2, the possibility was explored whether an external feedback message could surrogate an endogenous error signal. Another six subjects were trained to make speeded discrimination of the digits under the same backward masking condition. They were given immediately after response a feedback message indicating whether their response was correct or not. Although the feedback message was effective in generally facilitating RTs when compared to those of the Experiment 1, it had no influence on the performance. That is, unlike the Experiment 1, whether or not the subjects had made an error in the preceding trial had no effect on the RTs of the next trial.
The findings indicate that when target is consciously represented, subjects can utilize that representation to monitor their current behavior and to modulate their future one. Without conscious representation generated by stimuli, current performance is immune to the past history even if it is supplemented by exogenous information. One implication of these results is that a functional role of consciousness may not be found in its effect on ongoing activities, but on those of the immediate future.
01.06-- Abstract No:1221
The recent neuropsychological findings about blindsight have stirred up a great deal of interest among philosophers and psychologist regarding the function of consciousness. At present, two unsolved problems stand out: the empirical problem of to how account for the surprising behavioral profile of blindsight patients, and the philosophical problem of what conclusions to draw with regard to the nature of phenomenal consciousness.
In this talk, after briefly presenting two competing answers for the empirical question (the "island hypothesis" of Gazzaniga et. al. versus the "secondary mechanism hypothesis" of Weiskrantz et. al.) , I will argue that while the answer to the philosophical problem does not depend on which of the two competing neuropsychological hypotheses win out, it does nevertheless have a reading more plausible than others based on empirical findings.
I will then flesh out the details of this answer to the philosophical question, and substantiate the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does have a crucial function in the human mental life, and that the most plausible reading of the empirical facts from blindsight research supports this thesis. In particular, I will base my thesis on a distinction between conscious and unconscious awareness located in a continuum, and maintain that blindsight patients demonstrate for us the limits of unconscious awareness, i.e., what can and cannot be done by solely unconsciously-aware persons, thereby indirectly revealing the function of consciousness.
01.07-- Abstract No:755
The hard problem of consciousness can, it is suggested, be broken down into a number of components. When these are examined it is evident that most of them relate to questions concerning perception, and it is deduced from this that the solution to the hard problem must lie in this field.
The paper proceeds to argue that the hard problem is an artefact of prevailing theories of perception. Such theories typically rely on the supposed existence of a mental representation to explain human perceiving. By way of contrast, it is shown that Direct Realist theories of perception would leave little that is 'hard' to any problems of consciousness.
There are of course many sound arguments against Direct Realism, but a new 'relational' form of the theory seems to be able to counter them. 'Relational Direct Realism' has two features which distinguish it from other forms of Direct Realism, and which together enable it to overcome the battery of arguments traditionally levelled against Direct Realism. Firstly, it embodies the idea that sensory qualities are relational properties of the external world. It is pointed out that when humans experience secondary qualities they do not seem to be just 'patches' of quality but to possess a relational aspect. It is then argued that secondary qualities are indeed relational, and it is shown how this concept overcomes many of the arguments against Direct Realism.
The remaining objections to Direct Realism stem from science-based considerations. It is suggested that the Time Lag argument forces onto any form of Direct Realism the adoption of an idea originally proposed by A.N.Whitehead, that secondary qualities are properties of space rather than matter. It is shown that this idea, when combined with the relational concepts outlined earlier, produces a fully viable theory of perception which can counter all of the principal classes of objection to Direct Realism.
The component elements of the hard problem are then re-examined in the light of Relational Direct Realism. It is demonstrated that the theory resolves all of them, while at the same time offering an entirely physicalist and non-reductionist explanation of the world.
The conclusion is drawn that the hard problem of consciousness is an artificial one, brought about largely by the nature of currently popular theories of perception.
01.07-- Abstract No:784
An advanced theory of consciousness should presumably reveal links between phenomenology and physiology -- showing why neurophysiological events in our brains result in our experiences having the properties they do. Examples of phenomenology which could be 'explained' by such a theory include the narrowness of attention, the impact of masking effects on experiences, and exceptional cases like synaesthesia, blindsight, and anosognosia.
In fact, everyday experience has a feature which it is plausible to suggest already shows such a link between phenomenology and physiology. I call it seeing-in-the-dark (SID) . In a totally dark room, look around. A fair bit of visual experience is still occurring, albeit different from normal seeing. Patterns travel across the visual field, similar in a way to after-images although less obvious. Also, countless tiny dots of 'light' -- or at least visual experience -- constantly appear and disappear. I believe the explanation for these phenomena is that the brain's visual centres do not close down when no light is coming in. Random neural firings continue to occur, involving both large, complex neuronal assemblies (experienced as patterns) and much smaller elements (the dots) . The dots may even be individual neurons firing. If this is so, SID is a case where the properties of the brain's components are directly reflected in our phenomenology. If an experience occurs in virtue of vast numbers of tiny elements, rapidly firing and forming assemblies, what would we expect it to be like? Exactly like SID!
Does SID therefore give support to those who believe that David Chalmers' Hard Problem can be solved by conventional reductive materialism? Surely, if we can see why the phenomenological character of an event stems naturally from its physiological nature, have we not explained the seemingly miraculous nature of the link between the two? Have we not turned Colin McGinn's 'water of the brain' into the 'wine of the mind'?
Unfortunately not. The Hard Problem is the question of the sheer brute fact of awareness: how could anything like phenomenology emerge from physiology? I do not believe SID addresses this hard problem at all. That is because in SID, the reason we feel inclined to accept that phenomenology has been 'accounted for' by physiology is that the two share the same structure. The character of the phenomenology may be 'explained by' the physiology, because of organisational/relational features the two have in common. But these structural features do not bear at all on what seeing is, on what it is to undergo a visual experience per se. Certainly, the features shared between physiology and phenomenology shed light on the link between the two -- but not why there are two things that are to be linked in the first place!
If an apparently excellent instance of an 'explanation' of consciousness, where phenomenology is 'accounted' for by physiology, is still not good enough to get anywhere at all in tackling the brute fact of awareness, is there something wrong with this whole approach to 'explaining consciousness'? The rest of the poster speculates on an answer.
01.07-- Abstract No:800
Philosophers have distinguished between three sorts of mental phenomena with which a naturalistic account of mind must deal: consciousness, intentionality, and rationality. Of these, the latter two phenomena are widely thought to be fully explicable in naturalistic terms. But the first phenomenon, that of consciousness, is thought to be a problem for naturalism, and indeed is now typically referred to by researchers as the 'hard problem.' An explanation of consciousness, particularly those features of it known as sensory qualities or qualia, is something many believe we are not even close to, and is even thought by some to be impossible in principle. This, at any rate, is the conventional wisdom. But the work of F.A. Hayek, particularly as represented by his neglected 1952 book on theoretical psychology, The Sensory Order, suggests that the conventional wisdom has things precisely backwards. For that work offers us a complete solution to the so-called 'hard problem' of consciousness, the problem of qualia; but at the same time suggests that the mind as a whole, particularly in respect of its intentional and rational properties, is something we can in principle never completely understand. His solution to the problem of consciousness rests on a general approach to the mind-body problem represented by Bertrand Russell and, most recently, Michael Lockwood, according to which we have no knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the material world external to the mind; all our knowledge of it is indirect, and is knowledge merely of its causal structure. What we do have direct knowledge of are our own mental events, which are identical to events in our brains. To this general approach to the mind-body problem, Hayek adds an account of sensory qualities or qualia as nothing more than classificatory or discriminatory states of the nervous system, the character of which is determined entirely by their place in the network of neural connections making up that system. Our knowledge of mental events too, then, is knowledge merely of structure, the structure of a system of relations, i.e. relations between events in the nervous system. All our knowledge thus turns out to be knowledge, not of intrinsic properties, but merely of structure, i.e. the structure of the external material world and of the classificatory mechanism which organizes that world in experience; and we thus lack any basis on which to judge that that mechanism cannot be a subsystem within the larger material world. That is, we lack any basis for denying an identification of conscious states and material ones. The problem of accounting for the place of qualia in the natural world thus disappears. But since, as Hayek argues, an apparatus of classification must always be of greater complexity than that which it classifies, the mind can nevertheless never fully understand itself. In particular, we can never uncover all the rules that determine the intentional content of our conscious experiences and that govern our reasoning on the basis of them.
01.07-- Abstract No:806
A number of recent and current publications (Gallagher 1997; Thompson, Noë & Pessoa, In Press; Varela 1997) criticize long-standing attempts to develop explanations on the basis of possible isomorphisms which may or may not exist between structures/processes of consciousness and structures/processes of the brain. This paper explores the question of whether certain kinds of isomorphisms can stand as (partial) explanations of experience. Specifically, neural maps or representations of the body e.g., in the somatosensory cortex) seem to reflect certain topographic-isomorphic relations to bodily experience. What is the precise nature of this isomorphism? Do such isomorphic relations help to constitute in any way an explanation of bodily experiences? By exploring phenomena such as phantom limb (Ramachandran et al. 1992; Gallagher et al. under review) , unilateral neglect (e.g. Manly, Robertson, & Verity, In press) , and the loss of proprioception (Cole 1995; Gallagher and Cole 1995) I suggest that explanations which depend on such isomorphisms can be misleading.
References
Cole, J. D. 1995. Pride and a daily marathon. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; originally London: Duckworth, 1991.
Gallagher, S. 1997. Mutual Enlightenment: Recent Phenomenology in Cognitive Science, Journal of Consciousness Studies 4. #3: 195-214.
Gallagher, S., Butterworth, G., Lew, A. & Cole, J. Under Review. Hand-Mouth Coordination, Congenital Absence of Limb, and Evidence for Innate Body Schemas.
Gallagher, S. & Cole, J. 1995. Body Schema and Body Image in a Deafferented Subject, Journal of Mind and Behavior 16 (1995) , 369-390.
Manly, T., Robertson, I. H., & Verity, C. (In press) . Developmental unilateral neglect: A single case study. Neurocase
Ramachandran, V. S., D. Rogers-Ramachandran, & M. Stewart. 1992. Perceptual correlates of massive cortical reorganization, Science, 258, pp. 1159-1160.
Thompson, E., Noë, A. & Pessoa, L. In Press. Perceptual completion: A case study in phenomenology and cognitive science. In Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford University Press)
Varela, F. 1997. The naturalization of phenomenology as the transcendence of nature. Alter, Revue de Phénoménologie (Paris) 5.
01.07-- Abstract No:826
A physical theory, a hierarchical system of information processing, is proposed as an answer to the `hard problem’ of consciousness. In Support of this approach, the December 1995, Scientific American article `The Puzzle of Conscious Experience’ by David Chalmers is cited. Of special relevance is his suggestion that consciousness might be explained by new fundamental laws, and that the concept of information may play a part. Informationalism it presented as a convenient and practical geometry with its own (process) version of one, two three, etc. dimensions or levels of complexity. Using examples from simple manufacturing, sculptural and perceptual processes, an examination of the lowest levels of forming processes reveal how and why information can be created, destroyed, changed in size, taken as something other than the matter-energy, space-time, or field of physical systems -- and still be grounded in ordinary physical processes. There is a short discussion of the simple patterns, perceptions and other processes which emerge at the middle levels. Finally, there is a discussion of the very complex levels of communications, feedback and conscious systems--all conforming to the basic model. Shannon and Weaver's Theory of Communication, being the application of mathematics to the communication of ALREADY EXISTING messages, is presented by the model as the transmission and noise (degradation thermodynamics) of EXISTING information. It Is suggested that the mathematical power of Communications Theory may have placed inadvertent roadblocks in the path of thinking about the actual processes involved in the making and evolution of information. Informationalism doesn't need to jump the `hard problem’ gap between nonliving communication systems, brain processes and consciousness. It smoothly includes the concepts of `consciousness' and `experience' -- especially with the use of a conceptual model proposed by William James in his essay `Does Consciousness Exist?’ Selections from his other essays in Radical Empiricism are then referenced in support of consciousness as an information process. Taking Informationalism to a time before the home computer industry allowed us to LEGALLY say that information itself is a copyrighted, manufactured, commodity on the market, an earlier attempt was made to explore the physical and philosophical grounding of information processes. The presenter's (Wittgensteinian styled) book `The Nature of Form in Process,’ published in 1969, was the result. Informationalism gives evidence for extending that formism to this newer model of conscious experience.
01.07-- Abstract No:867
In the study of consciousness, it is fashionable to distinguish between the so-called 'hard problems' and 'easy problems' of consciousness. As David Chalmers frames the distinction, the hard problems of consciousness question 'how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience.' In contrast, the easy problems of consciousness include: 'How can a human subject discriminate sensory stimuli and react to them appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from many different sources and use this information to control behavior?' The essential difference between the two is that answers to the easy problems 'all concern the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system', whereas, presumably, answers to the hard problems do not. Acceptance of this distinction, together with the assumption that the hard problems cannot be answered, has led some to claim that the full story of consciousness can never be told.
What I will suggest is that this distinction is, in important respects, misleading. The so-called easy problems are, it seems to me, legitimate problems; problems to which we ought to look to neuroscience, biochemistry, and the like to answer. In and of themselves, these are not philosophical problems. (Though there are interesting meta-methodological issues that do have philosophic import) However, when we turn to the 'hard problems', it seems to me that a distinction needs to be drawn. On the one hand there is the question of what neural correlates are associated with consciousness (or, more precisely, states of consciousness) . This is the question with which Francis Crick and Christof Koch wrestle. But is this one of the 'hard problems'? I will argue that the answer to this question is 'no'. Appearances notwithstanding, this falls within the purview of the 'easy questions' of consciousness. The hard problem is, instead, the description of consciousness in such a way as to make it amenable as a subject of study and as something for which neural correlates can be discovered. What makes the problem 'hard' is that it seems that in describing the conscious states, we objectify them, and so lose what it is that makes them conscious (and so objective) . Here, it seems to me, is where the distinction between hard and easy problems goes wrong. Rather, I will argue that we should instead focus on the 'not so easy' question of what warrants attribution of consciousness (conscious states) . Here we do not describe the states themselves, we give conditions of warranted assertability for such states. Given this shift from what seems to be the intractable problem of 'subjectivity' to the tractable problem of warranted attributions of conscious states, much of the 'mysteriousness' of consciousness disappears. This is not to suggest that everything now becomes clear, only that once the discussion moves away from the problem of trying to describe consciousness (in effect, to 'objectify the subjective' or objectively describe qualia) , there is no reason to suppose that all the answers we could want about consciousness cannot be discovered.
01.07-- Abstract No:881
There are a number of characteristics and behaviours by which we show that we are conscious. For example we act independenly and initiate processes; we do things, such as gathering information for ourselves; we receive, store and reflect on perceptual input; we report upon the contents of our minds; we do things which we initiate voluntarily for others; we interact with others in general and most importantly we show generativity, creativity and the capacity to construct objects and ideas. We do all of this with a physical brain in a physical body, but these activities are all a function of what might most simply be called "subjectivity"
The question of Consciousness seems to revolve around this matter of subjectivity, how it is that I feel the way I do about things or how I know, for example, the colour red. Is subjectivity, our phenomenology, a separate 'thing' or is it some consequence of the physiology? We use the phenomenological representation in describing what we are conscious of, but there is a physiological substrate in which that subjectivity operates. This has a particular organised structure which shows certain characteristics of a dynamic system.
A particular large scale structure of the brain (described by Newman and others) , the thalamo-cortical loop structure, provides a self-organising and self-regulating feedback-driven process of the brain in which the cortex controls what it knows about the world and how it interacts with the world. The very intricate and highly organised connectionism of this structure and the role of feedback processes, propagation delays, resonant systems and Llinas' and others' 40Hz oscillations provide a way of locking together the phenomenal, subjective world and the physiological substrate on which consciousness runs. This physiological process is necessarily coupled with the history of its relations with the world, shaping the neural connectivity, inducing memory traces which are the contents of the mind.
I take the view that because culture has a role in forming brains and consciousnesses, consciousness is a conflated physiological/social system-in-the-world. That is, the mind can be seen as a physiologically embodied, meme-driven resonant circuit. The buzz of representations and productions in the brain are us and we represent them phenomenologically and investigate their physiology and their physics. We are inside this resonance, we live it, we are it.
This hypothesis then does away with the need for a new physics or other dualistic description of consciousness as something imposed from outside the world. There is no "Hard Problem", the phenomenal and physiological representations are two sides of the same coin.
01.07-- Abstract No:882
This paper aims to resolve several key issues regarding the origin of consciousness in the physical brain (the "hard" problem) , through 3 postulates: (1) Consciousness (qualia, experience) is equated with information, where "information" is used in the non-Shannon sense of "meaning." (2) There is no such entity as an intrinsically unconscious mind. What we characteristically call "unconscious" is consciousness that is not reportable to the outside world, just as Jonah-in-the-whale could not communicate with the whale or the outside world. Such Jonah-mind consciousness can exist at all levels of complexity. (3) Meaning, in order to be established, does not necessarily require the presence of an intelligent observer. With these three postulates, the issue of the difference between "conscious" and "unconscious" brain areas is resolved, since the only difference is one of reportability. The issue of how complex neural activity has to be for consciousness to arise is resolved, since consciousness exists to some degree at all levels of complexity. The binding problem is resolved, since binding occurs through meaning, which is seen as the emergent quality of data. Meaning is viewed as being inherent in pure mathematical relationships, as an emergent construct of noumenal space and time, allowing one to equate consciousness directly (logical supervenience) with the mathematical relationships inherent in brain activity. Consciousness, then, is not just "associated" with information, but is equivalent to information, without requiring any new bridging principles to link the two.
01.07-- Abstract No:895
While a philosopher's zombie, (an android without consciousness) , could accomplish any task useful for human survival, a member of a species of mammal which recently evolved speech, would inherently report the common attributes of consciousness, including qualia, a sense of "self", free will, certain altered states (ASCs) , identification with groups, an interest in abstract truth, and a potential to perceive the supernatural. I theorize (and present here, for the first time!) that the combination of a computational Verbal Process, (VP) , running simultaneously in the brain with an older, representational, model of the environment, would produce the phenomena mentioned, and would thereby create the illusion of consciousness.
If an individual's fitness increases by understanding speech, words must at times be modifying her behavior, and hence must be modifying her mental model of the world. Since not all speech is reliable, she must be judging what to believe. Her acceptance or rejection of words and perceptions in opposition creates the familiar subject-object division. Her choices and methods of judgement alone are sufficent to account for many of these effects. Thus, a quale appears as the force to believe a perception; the surpernatural arises as the ability to override perception; group identities establish trusted sources of information; truth seeking surmounts dependence on group identity. Unconscious mammalian behavior combines with VP effects to explain more phenomena identified with consciousness.
Computer science and neuroscience support the liklihood of an independant VP. Servo-control-system theory proves the necessity of a world model in a pre-conscious mind. A Hebbian organization of cerebral cortex and associative memory implies parallel processing of this model. By contrast, standard compiler parsing techniques applied to a rule-based description of language (such as that proposed by Noam Chomsky) , require a stack-like, sequential VP. This difference indicates the processes are separate. Speech is generally confined to one cerebral hemisphere, implying it may surplant other functions. Lesion and imaging studies suggest possible neuroanatomy of the VP components.
Presenting consciousness as an illusion within a computational model of reality compliments the Hindu view of reality as the illusion of maya, and the Buddhist view of the self as illusion. It cuts through the "hard problem" like the proverbial Gordian Knot. The VP concept sheds light on magic, totemism, grave goods, ASCs, brain-washing, tribal dancing, mythologies, meditational practices, and some observations of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
01.07-- Abstract No:909
A synthesis is proposed of the "hard problem" of consciousness and the observer-problem of quantum physics, i.e. it is suggested that they can be reduced to a single problem. In order to accomplish this, it is first shown that the hard problem is isomorphic to the Kantian dichotomy of noumenon and phenomenon. Secondly, it is argued that quantum physics provides for a plausible mathematical model of a total reality consisting of noumenon and phenomenon. And third, it is shown that, if these proposals are correct, our conscious existence has to necessarily consist of an external reality which is observed and the internal ("qualitative") experience of consciousness. Thus, on this view the "hard problem of consiousness" and the "observer problem" of quantum physics are derivatives of the same, more fundamental problem: the essentially dual nature of reality.
01.07-- Abstract No:930
Neither physicalism (including both reductive physicalism such as that advocated by Smart, Dennett and the Churchlands and non-reductive physicalism such as that advocated by Kim and Davidson ) nor standard forms of dualism (what I will call fundamentalism -- such as Chalmers, Penrose and Hammeroff propose) can resolve the hard problem of consciousness -- neither account can explain the existence of qualia, conscious experience and the like. I will argue that physicalism and fundamentalism fail to explain consciousness because they both share the same ill conceived perspective on explanation. I will call this perspective nomological reductionism. In addition to their lack of explanatory power, both physicalism and fundamentalism have well known absurd and troubling metaphysical consequences. The counter-intuitive consequences of physicalism stem primarily from its attempt to subjugate what is essential about consciousness to the ontological categories of the physical sciences. While the counter-intuitive consequences of fundamentalism stem mostly from its attempt to add another fundamental ingredient to the universe, namely, qualia. I will advocate a third, alternative position I call emergentism. Emergentism is monistic in the spirit of physicalism but like fundamentalism, it acknowledges that mental properties are not reducible to nor strictly determined by neuro-physical properties. For these reasons, it will turn out that it is not emergentism that has problems with causal closure, epiphenomenalism, essentialism and the like, but rather it is physicalism and fundamentalism that has these worries. In short, I will show that emergentism provides a viable alternative for explaining consciousness -- an alternative that has none of the absurd or troubling metaphysical consequences of either physicalism or fundamentalism. If emergentism is true, then it is a perfectly natural phenomena in principle explainable by the sciences -- there are no philosophical or conceptual problems left to solve.
01.07-- Abstract No:959
This paper provides the conceptual basis for solving the Hard Problem (HP) (Chalmers, 1995, 1996, 1997) . The Hard Problem (HP) is that of understanding how physical processes can give rise to conscious experience. We contend that the HP cannot be solved using the conceptual structure of contemporary Physics. The existence of ego is the most fundamental and most obvious observation of our world, but historically Physics was formulated in a manner which ignores this fact, due to its emphasis on objectivity. Because Physics does not properly include subjectivity, Physics cannot form the basis for a solution of the HP.
In order to understand the HP properly, the context of the problem must be expanded to include the fact that Physics is incomplete, in the sense that it contains several irreducible concepts (such as charge) for which physicists have been unable to find underlying meaning. That Physics employs such non- intuitive irreducible concepts at all implies that it is in those respects only a formal descriptional system that is left open to interpretation. Moreover, even those concepts which are more closely relatable to ordinary experience may still be reinterpreted so long as the quantitative relations among them are retained. This very considerable degree of semantical conventionality which characterizes Physics is perhaps not widely recognized, but it constitutes a significant opportunity for those who would understand the HP.
Knowing that Physics can be differently interpreted, we can attempt to do so in such a way that it can be smoothly interfaced with conscious experience, thereby making the solution of the HP possible. The simplest approach to this problem is to regard all of the identities in nature as minds and their properties as communications of those minds. With this simple conceptual structure, Physics can be understood intuitively as a hierarchy of consciousness, and nature then consists of nothing but conscious experience. The main contribution of this paper is our proposal of a new world view, which we call Egon Theory, which incorporates these ideas. Within Egon Theory, objectivity and physical law derive from a common history shared by all subjective entities (minds, or egons) . Contemporary Physics, when interpreted in this manner, will be seen as representing a common language, a consensual subset of a more complex and essentially subjective world.
We will introduce many new concepts as part of an integrated theory. These include the egon, the innate ability to create action, the perceptual sphere, reduction in Physics as the consequence of evolution, cosmology as a subjective viewpoint, holistic states and non-locality as memory of a common history, space as defined by egon communications, velocity as an emergent form of communication, contradiction as the requirement for the existence of free will, and mind as the source of quantization, truncation and evolution in Nature.
Albert Einstein once said "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility" (Pais, 1982) . Egon Theory solves this mystery by conceiving the universe as being constituted solely by identities who seek understanding and who achieve it in varying degrees.
01.07-- Abstract No:960
The philosophical mind-body problem, which Chalmers has named the 'Hard Problem', addresses the nature of the mind and the body. Physicalist approaches have been explored intensively in recent years but have delivered no consensual solution. Dualistic approaches have also been scrutinised since Descartes, but again without consensual success. Mentalism has received little attention, yet it offers an elegantly simple solution to the hard problem.
This paper revisits Berkeley's theory, historically known as 'subjective idealism' ("A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge", 1710) . It is re-interpreted from the perspective of modern linguistic philosophy. On this view, the physical world is considered as a convenient fiction, embodied in a language-game which contains the discourses of the physical sciences.
The central objection to mentalism is the tension between asserting that reality is mental, and respecting the predictive and explanatory success of the physical sciences. There are two strands to this tension. First, there is a feeling that science has explained almost everything, and needs only to tidy up some loose ends. Although the domain of physical investigation is certainly boundless, there is also an infinitely rich realm where physical science has no grip: that of qualitative experience. It is mere rhetoric to say that the domain of the physical sciences is 'bigger' than the realm of subjective experiences. The second strand of tension is a concern that the basic tenets of mentalism flatly contradict established facts of both science and everyday life. That concern can be addressed by separating clearly the different language-games that are employed in scientific discourse, everyday speech, and philosophy. This is a solution that Berkeley hinted at but did not develop. You can hold statements to be true within any given discourse, without being committed to the ontological status of what is denoted by the statement. Thus physical facts can be accepted without contradicting mentalism, because those statements are contained within a language-game that is carried on as if the physical world were real.
Solving Chalmers' Hard Problem is the primary gain of mentalism. Paradoxically, however, it is not the feature most likely to attract serious interest. This is because faith in promissory physicalism is so strong that mere philosophical arguments are powerless to win support for mentalism. A secondary gain, which has more leverage, is the possibility of founding a theory for paranormal phenomena such as telepathy.
The paper concludes with comments on the politics of ontology'. Academic studies take place in a real world, where certain approaches and positions are deemed unworthy of serious, funded research. Mentalism is seen as being beyond the fringes of philosophy, and reports of paranormal events are, in Charles Fort's celebrated expression, the "damned data of science". Yet, in the space of possible theories, mentalism is close to such ideas as pan-experientialism in mainstream philosophy of consciousness and paranormal phenomena are really no weirder than the predictions of exotic physics. So, what puts people off mentalism?
01.07-- Abstract No:1000
Recent debate has focused on the 'hard problem of consciousness' which has galvanized a significant amount of discussion around the nature of consciousness. However, one could also observe that the discussions have often lacked focus and speculation about purported neural correlates of consciousness are often accompanied by poor rationales or the rationale is altogether missing. In fact, one model for the neural correlate of consciousness appears to have as much plausibility or implausibility as the next. It is difficult to determine the merits of these proposals and the ensuing discussion appears to be muddying the waters in this debate making the issues more and more undecipherable. Is this the most productive direction for the research on consciousness? This is the question addressed in the present paper and the argument is made for centering the debate around more empirically based aspects of cognition, more specifically pattern recognition (PR) . Any attempt to define the fundamentals of consciousness must also include an exposition of the mechanisms underlying PR. One would presume that PR must precede consciousness or at least be necessary for the articulation of that consciousness in a physical environment. Therefore, attempts to understand PR might yield more tangible results given the fact that we can and we are presently modelling PR mechanisms via the artificial intelligence platform. Whereas, the prospects of modelling consciousness at the present time using the same platform appear quite remote.
The paper argues that the successes and failures of the current PR programs provides a rich field of empirical data to test the merits of both reductionistic and non-reductionistic models of consciousness, as well as PR. An argument is presented for a non-reductionistic model of PR where the PR process does not involve the de-composing of the stimulus pattern, but instead involves detecting invariant relational structures embodied in the physical stimulus.
01.07-- Abstract No:1006
McGinn has famously argued that we are incapable of understanding consciousness, because we are incapable of grasping property P, the property which makes consciousness intelligible. A number of commentators have taken issue with him on this point, by arguing that his requirements for intelligibility are both obscure, and, to the extent they can be understood, unduly high. For example, Flanagan interprets McGinn as (unreasonably) requiring that the relationship between mental and physical properties have the status of logic or arithmetical truths. Similarly, Andre Kukla provides two possible interpretations for McGinn's notion of "intelligibility." On the first, intelligibility of a theory requires merely that there be some appropriate formalism. Quantum mechanics is intelligible on this interpretation, and there's no reason to expect that consciousness won't be as well. On the second interpretation, intelligibility requires something like "picturability" or "imaginability". But we can't decide whether or not a theory of consciousness can pass this test, because this test is itself too unclear. Other commentators have made similar complaints.
I argue that these commentators have fundamentally misconceived McGinn's argument. Insight into his argument can be obtained by considering the views of the British emergentists. They argued that the classic, Nagelian, conception of reduction was insufficient because it allows the 'bridge laws' themselves to remain unexplained. That is, a set of bridge laws might tell us that certain microstructures are correlated with certain higher order properties, but provide no explanation of just why those microstructures are connected with those higher level properties, nor any corresponding ability to predict which microstructures might be correlated with which higher level properties. For example, prior to the advent of quantum mechanics, there was no good explanation for why chemical elements should have their particular 'bonding properties', i.e., the ability to bond with certain other elements in certain proportions. Chemists of course knew (some of) the laws about which elements would combine with which, but there was no explanation of why a particular element with a particular microstructure should have one bonding property as opposed to another. Nor could the 'bonding properties' of a newly discovered element be predicted on the basis of its microstructure -- rather, its bonding properties would have to be discovered by experiment. The advent of quantum mechanics changed all this. Once the quantum mechanical structure of the atom was understood, scientists could explain and predict why a particular microstructure should be correlated with a particular 'bonding property.'
I argue that McGinn's claims about intelligibility can best be understood in this light, and that, so interpreted, they are not unreasonable. McGinn fully recognizes that we will be able to arrive at "bridge" laws connecting phenomenological and physical predicates. But intelligibility requires that we be able to explain and predict these bridge laws, just as quantum mechanics allows us to explain and predict the bonding properties of elements. The correlations themselves do not provide this kind of intelligibility. It is this explanatory role which property P is supposed to play (or would, if we could discover it) .
01.07-- Abstract No:1019
In recent years, researchers have made great progress toward identifying physical activities in the brain that correlate with conscious experiences such as thoughts and other mental activities. But, even if every known function of consciousness can be paired with parallel matter-energy transfers in the brain, and those events detailed down to the level of quantum processes, as scientists like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff are attempting to do, will we really have explained consciousness? This paper questions whether the results of such research can lead to a definitive explanation of consciousness, and proposes an alternative approach as a complement to these efforts. While acknowledging that research into the details of neurological processes and quantum brain dynamics is very worthwhile indeed, and may lead to an understanding of the way consciousness interacts with matter, the author contends that the parallel functions approach is an attempt to explain consciousness in terms of matter and energy and that consciousness will never be explained in this way. This argument is supported with evidence that consciousness is the ground of all phenomena, rather than an abstract epiphenomenon of matter, and by showing that any attempt to identify consciousness with specific physical structures leads to an infinite descent that ends in logical contradiction.
The author proposes that instead of trying to explain consciousness in terms of matter and energy, we should be trying to explain matter and energy in terms of consciousness. Evidence and arguments presented to support this point of view include interpretation of Bell's theorem, the results of the Aspect experiment, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The thesis of this paper is that by approaching the problem in this way, we will be able to obtain information about consciousness complementary to the research into parallel functions, and that attacking the problem from both sides will lead to a better understanding of the interaction of consciousness and matter and produce a more meaningful explanation of consciousness.
01.07-- Abstract No:1031
Sensory science is a cross-scientific discipline dealing with human perception of an object by the senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Perception as information processing may here be understood as an interaction between physical stimuli and mental stimuli resulting in a human response. Since this connection of physical energies to psychological experiences is a complex and dynamic process, a multivariate psychophysical approach as developed within sensory science and infometrics (cognitivly accessible multivariate data analysis by soft modelling) may contribute to bridging the explanatory gap.
It seems obvious to say that the senses constitute essential channels between the outer and inner worlds. Nevertheless, very little is known about what happens in these channels, and why? Within neurosciences and (cognitive) psychology mainly vision has drawn research attention during the last decades; a knowledge which now appears useful in understanding the stream of visual impressions competing for attention in the modern societies. But how can we stimulate research on the other sensorymodalities (taste, smell, touch etc) and interactions between them? Within philosophy already Plato discussed relationships between sensing and thinking and Aristotle had theories about the five senses. However, despite a long history of "sense" philosophy (e.g. primary versus secondary sense qualities and qualia) , it seems today difficult to find a common ground for cross-scientific discourses between phenomenologists and realists, as well as between the humanities and technologies. A nonreductive theory of conciousness is needed.
The present paper aims at a better understanding of the senses bridging mind and matter by relating ongoing research within sensory science and data modelling (based on 20 years own experience in the field) to the ongoing debate for a nonreductive theory of conciousness based on psychophysical principles (e.g. Chalmers, 1996) . Examples from food research will be given. The simple reality that we have to eat illustrates the complexity of interactions between many sensory modalities and between food (matter) and person (mind) . A multitude of chemical and physical properties of foods (objects) causes a multitudeof first-person and third-person responses. A third-person response may be both descriptive, verbal response (analogous to a chemical measurement) , and a report of experiences, emotions and behaviour .Multivariate data modelling are used for finding which combinations of properties or stimuli (X) that are relevant for the which combinations of responses (Y) for a given set of objects or situations. A space of latent structure is thereby revealed between predictability and surprise.
The concluding argument is that sensory science, multivariate psychophysics and infometrics offer useful theories and tools for extracting an underlying, latent information space common to the physical and the experiential, and to distinguish the common ground from the uniqueness in information spaces. This may open for deeper discourses about the "hard problem".
01.07-- Abstract No:1032
The aim of this paper is twofold. The first half presents conceptual and empirical considerations that show functionalist and representationalist accounts of mind to be incapable of explaining how a physical process or information processing can cause or realize experience. In the second it is argued that though we may not be able to comprehend how experience is brought to be, we may be able to understand the reasons for the explanatory gap.
There are a number of well known thought experiments that are intended to show that functionalism cannot explain the qualitative aspects of experience. These experiments encourage the intuition that there can be differences in qualia that do not lead to differences in discriminatory behavior. Recently, there have been attempts to argue that such objections can be overcome by identifying qualia with representational or intentional states. Although these states are typically cashed out in functional terms, I accept that this move circumvents some key objections to functionalist accounts of consciousness. I argue, however, that this success is not complete.
Representationalism with regards to qualia does not close the explanatory gap in so far as it fails to explain why any system in the relevant sort of representational state must be in the related experiential state. Instantiation of the relevant representational state does not logicallyentail the existence of the related experiential state. Worse yet, this approach cannot explain why the laws of nature as now known requires that instantiating the right representational state mustresult in an experiential state. This explanatory gap can, of course, be papered over by positing a new natural law that provides for the desired entailment. My aim, in the second part of the paper is to present an explanation for our apparent inability to do more than posit such a law.
The explanatory gap is a result of at least the following three facts: 1) the spatial nature of our conception of physical causation, 2) the non-spatial nature of some kinds of experience, and 3) the superpositioned manner in which our brains store and operate on some kinds of represen tations. (Superpositioned representations occur whenever two or more semantically independent representations are instantiated in the same syntactical pattern) .
Efforts to link facts one and two typically lead either to the conclusion that a perspicacious bridge across the gap is beyond our cognitive powers or to bridging proposals that refer to hidden causal powers of poorly understood physical process. Well understood phenomena make poor candidates for bridging proposals as we presume that they lack undiscovered causal powers. This reasoning has led to numerous proposals concerning quantum mechanical phenomena. I argue that the macroscopic superpositioning that occurs in some connectionist systems has significant advantages over its quantum-mechanical competitors as a candidate for a process that is both required for the causation or realization of experiential states and partially responsible for the explanatory gap. Its role in spawning the gap is explained by reference to the inapplicability of reductive forms of analysis that involve locating function in space-time to superpositioning representational systems.
01.07-- Abstract No:1056
Any attempt to understand the emergence of consciousness inevitably will rest at the cross -- roads of two extreme paths: panpsychism and generation problem. According to the first path, the phenomenal quality of consciousness is reduced indefinitely (infinitely?) to certain properties of any elementary physical particles which, hence, are not purely physical but also mental. According to the second path, the consciousness emerges within a developing system (human brain) whichpotentially can become conscious at a certain stage (state) of the development that is associated with the systems formal complexity. The panpsychism alternativeis an unavoidable outcome of the urge to present the consciousness as a new natural fundamental: as a final result, the concepts of free will and proto -- consciousness of the elementary particles demand the establishment of totally new Physics. The generation problem alternative leads to the explanatory gap (hard problem) .
The theory suggested here permits to obviate the inevitable fatal choice. It is based on a non -- tautological vitalistic extra ingredient which is expressedby the Gurwitschian biological field (Gurwitsch, 1944, 1991) non -- reducible to any known physical fields. Its restrictively specific (non -- omnipotent!) mode of action is subjection of initially equipotential elements (cells) to their spatial orientation or vectorized movement. The Gurwitschs field theory is based on strictly defined postulates deeply associated with biological reality. These postulates concern vectorial repulsive character of the field, its anisotropy, way of the field action on the material (intracellular) substrate, nature of the elementary field flash, field sources, formation of integral microfields and macrofields, dynamics of the field tension and its association with metabolic rate. By means of these postulates, some biological phenomena expressed at different levels of biological organization -- molecular, cellular, and morphological (organismic) -- have been described, namely, mitosis, morphogenesis, differentiation and some reversible physiological processes (metabolism, neuromuscular activity, and general principles of brain cortex functioning) .
Using this background, I suggest a concept of primordial consciousness which is identified with geometrical feeling inalienable from the living state and, hence, inherent to ANY living system. Accordingly, any living system feels (experiences) its own quasi -- stationary developing species -- specific morphology and acts morphologically to smooth its perturbances. Consciousness per se (human) being derived from the primordial consciousness is associated with the brain cortex integral field continuum upon which current afferent excitations are superimposed. The dynamic three -- dimensional geometry of this field continuum is felt (experienced) . The theory helps to escape the fatal choice between the equally hopeless two extremes: panpsychism and generation problem. The proposed vitalistic principle based not on the tautological vital spirit but on the restrictive working postulates of the Gurwitschian field keeps the postulated primordial consciousness on the level of Life without falling either into the bottomless panpsychistic well, or into the unbridgeable abyss of the explanatory gap created by the generation problem.
The Fatal Choice: The Fathomless Depths of the Panpsychistic Sea or the Unbridgeable Explanatory Gap of the Generation Problem? A Theory Avoiding the Fatality.
01.07-- Abstract No:1080
Well-known arguments designed to block materialist accounts of consciousness seem to be equally threatening to non-materialist accounts. For instance Chalmers challenges materialist theories, couched in terms of particular functional or structural features, to explain why just those features give rise to phenomenal experience. But there is a similar difficulty for non-materialists. Traditional dualists, for example, have a deep problem showing why 'spiritual substance' necessarily requires experience to have its 'what-it's-like' character. In the naturalistic account that Chalmers himself favours, a dual-aspect view of information is invoked as a way of bridging the phenomenal/physical gap. But casting experience as informational just doesn't explain why it necessarily has its phenomenal aspect.
For any proposed explanatory set of non-material features, the dilemma seems to be this: if the explaining features are able to be characterised in a way that is conceptually independent of experience, then an unbridgeable explanatory gap always threatens to open up. If they aren't then they how can they fulfill a genuinely explanatory role (being circular) ? Critics of materialism argue that in other explanatory domains there are conceptual links between higher and lower level properties - between macroproperties of liquidity, for instance, and microstructural molecular properties, etc. Such links are unavailable in the case of explaining experience because of the latter's special nature, it is claimed. There are only the surface properties, and hence no underlying processes to which the explanations could be conceptually tied. But a retreat into non-materialism does not help here, since, on that construal of experience, it is equally impossible for there to be underlying non-material properties fulfilling the necessary explanatory role, as material ones.
Assume the truth of some non-materialist theory T, supposedly fully explanatory of colour experiences, say. Now consider Maria, who has complete knowledge of the propositions of T, but who has never enjoyed red qualia. Maria's knowledge would be just as incomplete as would Mary's, in the parallel materialist case considered by Jackson.
Is there a way out? Perhaps via a different construal of experiential concepts. The 'detached' construal presupposed by the arguments of Chalmers, Jackson et al insists on the radical separability of pain or other qualia from any underlying process. An alternative, more holistic construal, will maintain a necessary link between the notion of a given experience and the (at least outline) notion of a 'sub-experiential' process which underpins it . So, on this account, experience would be conceptually inseparable from its underlying constitutive processes, just as it is conceptually impossible to remove the Cheshire Cat's face and leave only its grin (or to have its face -- set in just that way -- without the grin) . On such a construal it will be part of the very concept of a certain experiential type that its underlying features explain its phenomenal features. This would surely defuse 'hard problem' arguments, hence weakening a powerful source of opposition to materialism.
01.07-- Abstract No:1082
In this paper I investigate the importance of the methodological principle of transparancy in the discussion on the explainability of consciousness. Roughly, the principle of transparancy is the demand that the explanans of consciousness should stand in a special sort of qualitative, structural or intrinsic relation to its explanandum. The demand for transparancy feeds the worry that purported explanations of consciousness can offer no more than brute and unintelligible correlations between brain states on the one hand, and conscious experiences on the other. As is widely acknowledged, the principle has played an important role in classical and medieval theorising about vision. It was characteristic of those theories of visual perception to analyse the perceptual process as the transmision of the form of the percieved object to the visual organ of the perceiver. This particular application of transparancy is now believed to have been a serious obstacle in the progression of visual theory. To give this claim additional force, I describe an episode in the history of color vision theories in which transparancy has played a similar negative role.
I then argue that, contrary to what one would tend to believe, transparancy is still with us. I illustrate this by referring to Davida Teller's work on bridge loci, brain places where visual theorists think neural processes are directly correlated with visual awareness. Identifying bridge loci by relying on similarity relations between neural process and experiences seems to be a common, productive and generally uncontested practice. On the philosophical forum, the demand for transparancy can be -surprisingly enough- discerned at both the skeptical and the ultra-reductionist ends of the spectre. On the one hand, it seems to underlie worries about the existence of an explanatory gap. On the other hand, it can be discerned in Paul Churchland's argument for the adequacy of his reductionist theory of color quala. It might also be an ingredient of the Higher Order Thought theory of consciousness.
I then propose a construal of the principle of transparancy which has the following properties:
a) it allows us to keep transparancy as a methodological aid to look for bridge loci
b) it explains why it works where it works
c) it shows why the principle can neither be used in a skeptical conclusion about the explanatory gap nor in some reductionist claims about the reducability of qualia.
This construal of the concept of transparancy is possible thanks to a distinction that is made between the focal content of a conscious experience or state and the additional properties of that state that warrant its being conscious.
01.07-- Abstract No:1138
Identicals ought to be easy to differentiate since there is no difference to discern. For to ostensibly claim that two things are identical is to claim that the two things are really one and the same. As Frege argues, epistemic, not metaphysical, considerations make identicals cognitively interesting. But physicalists who, on the one hand, claim that mental states are (identical with) brain states, seek to bridge the alleged explanatory gap on the other. How can there be an explanatory gap of metaphysical significance if the two are one and the same? We argue that physicalists ought to learn from Frege and change the focus to epistemic issues concerning identity claims about the mind and the body.
Physicalists might understandably be reluctant at least initially to accept our view. For many issues appear to have been left behind: whether the subjective depends or "supervenes" on the objective; reconciling the irreducibly subjective first person perspective of phenomenal consciousness with third person view of neurons and their firings; reducing our mentation to their neural correlates. Implicit here, however, is the assumption that human beings were bodies to which a mysterious addendum mind --was made. Hence the various dichotomies: subjective/objective; first person/ third person; neural correlates/consciousness, and the need to bridge nature's gap between them. But the existence of the dichotomies is undermined on the view that the human experience is equally expressive of both our body and mind. Indeed, as we argue, the dichotomies become incoherent once we take the identity hypothesis of the mind and the body seriously.
01.07-- Abstract No:1149
Many descriptive labels have been advanced for theoretical approaches to understanding the phenomenon of consciousness (Mysterianism, Materialism, Inessentialism, Epiphenomenalism, etc.) without a consensus definition of the thing being described. The advancement of these labels has hindered thinkers in all disciplines in making progress toward a unified theoretical construct, and seriously hampered efforts in psychology and the neurosciences to define an experimental program. It is my contention that a distillation of these positions to their logical basis yields a fundamental confusion of approaches that I attempt to clarify. It has further been my experience that the everyday researchers in psychology and the neurosciences are operating under the unspoken assumption that a theoretical reduction of consciousness to neuroscience is the goal, or at least will be the final outcome, of all research in cognition. In this paper I outline the definitional and conceptual difficulties of the ideas of consciousness and theoretical reduction, and then advance my position that consciousness will never yield to a reduction of the kind that the recent history of the physical sciences has bequeathed to us. This argumentation is based on the definition and requirements of reduction (epistemological validity, ontological appropriateness) , the ontology of subjectivity, and a new operational definition of consciousness itself. The operational definition that I propose has implications for the analysis of confounds in psychology and evolutionary biology/behavioral genetics, which will be briefly discussed.
01.07-- Abstract No:1297
A large part of the argument for the existence of an explanatory gap rests on considerations concerning what is and what is not conceivable. Thus, it is argued that there is a crucial difference with regard to what is conceivable between the following two cases. If we know all the relevant chemistry, and also that a certain cup is filled with H2O, can we conceive of its not being filled with water? It seems to me that we really can't. On the other hand, though we may know all the relevant neurophysiology that underlies our conscious experience, as well as the relevant functional facts, it still seems conceivable that one could instantiate these states and yet lack conscious experience, or have conscious experience of a radically different sort. The fact that such a situation is conceivable is a reflection of the fact that the physical and functional facts don't explain the qualitative facts.
I am concerned in this paper to explore the consequences of this argument for the metaphysical question whether qualitative facts are in fact reducible to physical or functional facts. Does the existence of an explanatory gap, based on the conceivability argument just presented, also show an ontological gap? I argue, ultimately, that it doesn't. However, I distinguish two forms of the metaphysical argument, one of which relies on general semantic principles that are suspect, but the other of which is more peculiar to the mind-body case. This second argument is much more difficult to refute.
01.07-- Abstract No:1298
I will argue that the mind-body problem cannot be solved by providing an empirical reduction of consciousness but rather by giving a conceptual analysis of mental concepts. This makes the problem a good deal harder to solve than it would seem otherwise, since we have no real prospect of producing such a conceptual analysis.
01.08-- Abstract No:1103
In a paper published in 1995, I proposed a conception of consciousness as higher-order representation (Gomes 1995) . In the present paper, I develop and improve this proposal. My view has many similarities with Rosenthal's higher-order thought theory, but also some important differences. I believe it avoids some usual objections that Rosenthal's theory has encountered. Other objections derive simply from misunderstandings or are question-begging. Similarities and differences with Armstrong's (1968, 1980) theory will also be discussed. The view presented offers a solution to the trilemma of higher-order perception theories discussed by Güzeldere (1995) . And it's coherent with the hypothesis that Block's concepts of access -- and phenomenal consciousness refer to the same phenomenon (Gomes 1997, paper presented at the Brain and Self Workshop, Elsinore) . Consciousness is seen as a unitary phenomenon, but another distinction is pertinent : that between first-order consciousness (higher-order representation) and second-order consciousness ("reflexive" consciousness or self-consciousness or consciousness of being conscious) . Consciousness, while being conscious of something, is always unconscious of itself. If you're conscious of something, you're not by the same token conscious of being conscious of it. If you're conscious of being conscious of it, that's another state of consciousness, which in its turn involves no consciousness of itself. If you're conscious of something, you're conscious of the content of an originally non-conscious representation of this something. Admitting the existence of non-conscious perception (for which there is extensive empirical evidence) and other non-conscious mental states is essential for our purpose. We come to the question of what is the use of a double representation. Dennett & Kinsbourne (1992) suggest that "feature-detections or discriminations have to be made only once". In order to answer this we must discuss the function of consciousness. Consciousness would not be needed to detect a feature or a pattern of features. Non-conscious perception would be enough for this. Consciousness is needed for going beyond present reality. Even when we are conscious of present reality, the use of being conscious is being able to relate it to what is not present reality : thoughts, remembrances, imaginings, etc. For this, it's necessary to create a global workspace (Baars 1988, 1997) where objects and events are represented. This representation allows the brain not to limit itself to immediate reality (and procedural memory) but to relate it to imaginings, autobiographical memories, ideas, concrete and abstract thought, etc. Consciousness creates internal reality, which includes representation of external reality. The content of this representation of external reality is experienced as being external reality itself. The subject can act not only on external reality, through voluntary action performed by the muscles, but also on internal reality, through voluntary attention, voluntary imagination and voluntary thought. Conscious representation can also be thought to feedback on the processes that create or evoke non-conscious representations. The function of consciousness is thus relating different sorts of representation (of external reality, of past episodes, of imagined scenes and events, etc.) , influencing the creation of non-conscious representations and enabling virtual action (action on internal reality) .
01.09-- Abstract No:785
That there is something empirically unobservable about phenomenal consciousness is established by a modified knowledge argument. Traditional versions hold that if experiencing were equivalent with physical brain states, then complete empirical knowledge of brain states should constitute knowledge of everything about my experiencing; but complete empirical knowledge of brain states would not constitute knowledge of everything about experiencing (the observations alone wouldn't reveal 'what it's like' to have that experience) ; therefore, experiencing is not equivalent with physical brain states. This unwarrantedly assumes that everything 'physical' is empirically observable (from an experimenter's standpoint) . Without this assumption, we can conclude, not that consciousness is non physical (since some physical processes might be observationally inaccessible) , but rather that consciousness isn't identical with anything empirically observable. Still, given the intimate connection between each conscious event (C) and a corresponding empirically observable physiological event (P) , what P-C relation could render C empirically unobservable? If identical, they should be equally observable. I.e., if P --> EO and C --> not-EO, then P [is not equal to] C. But if C were non physical, why such systematic P-C correlations? Can C be physically instantiated, yet distinguishable from anything empirically observable?
One possibility is that C is a relation among Ps which is not identical to the Ps because it is 'multiply realizable' (Putnam) . If C hadn't been realized by P1, it could have been realized by P2, yet still have been the same relation -- a 'self organizing' pattern of activity which appropriates and replaces physical substrata needed for its maintenance or evolution in self motivated directions (Ellis) . Thus the P C relation wouldn't be an identity, epiphenomenalism, or dualism, but a biological relation between an organismic process and its actively appropriated material components, continually replaced and reproduced through the organism's self maintaining organization (Monod, Kaufman) .
But, even if correct, how could this account explain the empirical unobservability of the relation C? The temperature of a gas is multiply realizable by various movements of particles, yet temperature is not empirically unobservable!
Consciousness, unlike many self organizing processes, is empirically unobservable because the self-organizing processes grounding the emotions motivating the direction of conscious attention, partly constitutive of 'what it's like' to experience something, are executed, not undergone by organisms. Organisms feel motivations by generating them. But all phenomenal consciousness, even empirical consciousness, must be motivated; thus the 'what it's like' of a phenomenal experience is inseparable from the emotions permeating it. Visual cortex activation is unconscious of red unless the emotional midbrain and anterior cingulate motivatedly 'look for' red. So directly experiencing someone's subjective consciousness entails executing her emotional motivations, thus being the person whose organism produces them. An experimenter does know what the subject's brain events 'are like, ' but only for her own organism, as motivated by her self-maintaining processes. Understanding or empathizing with another's emotions requires motivation by our own emotional processes, perhaps similar, but not numerically identical with the other's.
01.09-- Abstract No:849
Through a reflection on the nature of mathematics, the author proposes a modified scientific method that includes inner experience and discusses its implications for the scientific study of consciousness.
The scientific method is generally thought to require that scientific verification draw only from outer experience, thus excluding all inner experience as a valid basis for scientific verification. Consequently, the scientific study of consciousness today is largely limited to the physical sciences and the externally observable correlates of consciousness. Mathematics, however, provides an example of a rigorous science based on inner experience that is nonetheless verifiable. Contrary to widespread belief, it is possible, therefore, for an authentic science to be based upon inner experience.
The author then suggests how a science of consciousness can be based on inner experience. Significantly, such an 'inner science' of consciousness (as opposed to the conventional 'outer science' of consciousness based on external observation) is not limited to studying the physical correlates of consciousness, but includes inner conscious experience itself. The 'hard problem' of consciousness, therefore, is only 'hard' for outer science of consciousness because it excludes inner experience from its domain.
This science of inner experience is then generalized to a science encompassing both inner and outer experience. This generalized scientific framework, which the author calls Integral Science, contains as special cases the well-known physical sciences of outer experience as well as the less obvious sciences of inner experience, such as mathematics and an inner science of consciousness. The apparently conflicting approaches to the study of consciousness -- those based on inner experience and those based on outer experience -- can be viewed from the framework of Integral Science as complementary ways of investigating consciousness from different perspectives, each of which alone is incomplete.
01.09-- Abstract No:915
Consciousness does not deliver the whole of physical objects ; worst, it delivers physical objects otherwise than they are. This may be taken as a romantic complaint but it can be taken as well as a clue to explore the nature of consciousness by seeing through that double complaint.
I intend to concentrate on the kin notion of acquaintance and examine why is it that we are acquainted only partially with the physical world and why we get something (an appearance) that is different, altered, otherwise than that world. Correlatively, I want to explore how would it be if we, as persons, were to enjoy a larger acquaintance of the physical objects and of our own mental properties, larger than the one we have today one that engages more of those physical objects and mental properties, may be a different kind of appearance.
Take my reconstruction of Mark Johnston's argument according to which :
1. We do not get acquainted with the (real) surfaces of objects but we get instead an appearance, a conscious experience only, not the real thing but a replacement. Thus, for example, we get acquainted only with an appearance of teal we do not get in cognitive contact with physical teal (with the nature of the physical surface and its hidden essence) .
2. The representations, conscious experiences, of colors have to match (physical) surface properties of colors for otherwise conscious experience will tell only how bodies appear not what are they like (what their nature is) .
3. For otherwise either surfaces are not colored or vision does not bring us information on what surface color is like (and thus what bodies are like) .
4. And if vision does not tell us what surface color is like then we can generalize and get in touch only with an appearance of a woman's body, or an appearance of sexual pleasure and not get in touch with the woman herself neither with her own sex. 5. There will always be a substitute of both the woman and her sex ; we'll be inhabitants of a virtual woman, of virtual sex, of a virtual world only. And as we know Idealism is a poor substitute in human matters. All that touches on the the irreality of acquaintance. 6. Thus we realize that we are ill equipped in our visual system and would need to improve that system getting a larger amount of acquaintance of physical bodies and surfaces if we want to live in a real world, out of virtual rality.
This is the missing acquaintance argument (MA) . One way to press this argument is to inquire what would it be like to have conscious experience or acquaintance (CA) of the hidden nature of a physical surface or of a body. It seems that either the notion of "having CA of the hidden nature..." is not well defined or else we already have CA of hidden natures like those of gold or skin and that CA delivers already the very nature of those physical objects/surfaces that appear insufficient to the MA argument.
But then we face two different loads for MA : either it asks for more acquaintance and thus it could mean either more of the same acquaintance, or else it asks for a guarantee against the skeptic, demanding a very different kind of direct cognitive contact with physical surfaces, human bodies, etc.
I surmise that if we as persons were to have two visions together (the vision of the physical nature and the CA that supervenes or emerges out of that physical nature) our living world would not be apt for art, sensations, eroticism and the rest. For imagine if at seeing the textures of one of Cezanne's Mount St Victoire one were to have simultaneously the physical atomic structure of each of the brushes painted, the artistic experience would be altered in such a way that it would no longer be enjoyable. Also imagine the experience of an erotic caress being accompanied by a view of its neurophysiological basis and a correlative view of its supervening into that golden coloured skin that pulls us irremediably into caressing it ; it could become hideous.
That is not certainly what the MA intends ; its complaint does not want us to have a double seeing that could distort our lives but to get a grip of the things we caress, or see or delight in. What the MA fears is that we live in a virtual world and our eroticism, visual sensations and aesthetic pleasures float randomly in the absence -- total or partial -- of real bodies, real surfaces and real objects. A world of pretence in which we are uncertain of grasping real persons, surfaces or objects but only "we do not know whats" or nothing at all.
If MA does not mean a double vision, does it mean a different sort of vision, namely, one providing direct cognitive contact with the object's nature and such that this extra CE could make us live with certainty about the woman we caress, the Proustean world of sensations and the broad world of arts? It may be that the MA aborts the issue for it may be that our eroticism, sensations and aesthetic pleasures rest on that very form of CE we have and that further CE would destroy all these goods that make worth our daily lives. Going against the form of CE we have could mean destroying our very ways of living. May be the human world has to be a world of appearances but nonetheless of real appareances.
But may be MA's spirit is not claiming new faculties or new facts but only a different conception of 'appearances' one that avoids living in a virtual world. Then we must explore this quite different possibility.
01.09-- Abstract No:936
Consciousness is an epistemological ontological problem. The claim of phenomenal experiences is an epistemic ontological claim, as is the claim that phenomenal experiences are actually something else (lack ontological status) . How the world gives rise to consciousness is an ontological problem; the claim I make about an objective world independent of consciousness is an ontological claim which requires some form of epistemic evaluation.
The ontological question is begged thus: consciousness is assumed, then skimmed off to provide an objective world (an epistemically objective world) . Why invent an objective world that can't handle consciousness, only to be forced into dualism or eliminativism? Both avenues stem from a conception of physical matter in accordance with with the thoughts of Descartes.
Eliminativism isn't true because what is eliminated forms the epistemic basis of eliminativism. This implies consciousness has ontological status. This isn't easy to deny. Firstly, science doesn't tell us about the intrinsic nature of the world, so the 3rd-person objective ontologies of science may be inherently conscious (the panpsychists maybe right) ; we simply don't know. Secondly, how does one justify making a claim of a world populated with fundamental ontological kinds conceived of in a purely 3rd-person manner? (the implicit Newtonian/Laplacian external observer) . Justification is tricky, but not necessary if epistemology is abandoned.
With epistemology deemed too cartesian, such a picture can be taken for granted: empirical science replaces the epistemology which would provide its justification. This is circular, but Quine (1969) urges us to ignore it (and thus 'naturalize' epistmology) ; while Rorty (1979) jettisons epistemology in toto.
Evidence forms the basis for science, but what is evidence and how is it evaluated? There needs to be epistemic evaluation. What is the evidence for evidence, without phenomenology? and what is the evidence for phenomenology? (see Sturgeon 1994) How is the function/behaviour/... of a cognizer translated into epistemic propositions of that cognizer? (Questions asked by McGinn 1991) And what is left once the phenomenalist ontology is eliminated? Pragmatic science doesn't work alone. To claim it does requires us to renounce all ontological commitments and forego justification. The denial of epistemology -- -oft used in the face of ontological embarrassment, in the form of paraphrasing Ryle's (1949) category mistake and parodies on irreducibility (see Churchland 1996, Dennett 1996) -- -leads to a circularity resulting in theories which say nothing about nothing.
And so, back to the conception of the 'objective' world, but with lessons learned. With neither dualism nor eliminativism quite satisfactory, the open route is a neutral monism. But there are two stumbling blocks: the perceived lack of an alternative to cartesian epistemology -- -don't throw out the secure-proposition baby with the cartesian-foundationalist bathwater in the (failed?) quest for certainty (see Dewey 1929) -- -and a confusion about nomological reductionism (accept the empirical evidence from physics: irreducible does not mean fundamental) , which I discuss.
01.09-- Abstract No:970
Lord Kelvin supposedly wrote that 'When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind'. Nowadays, measurement is at the core of many sciences. So, does the desire or need for quantification apply to consciousness, as we strive to elevate its study to the status of an accepted science on a par with other unquestioned sciences?
The first hint that consciousness might be quantified hides in the very terms 'conscious' and 'unconscious'. That is, there are at least two states, one higher than the other, so some relative numerical scale could be assigned. However, such a coarse quantification would not be useful. Is it possible to develop a more refined and helpful scale for the degree of consciousness exhibited by an individual at various times?
A next step might be analogous to the original hardness scale for minerals. In that case, the ability of minerals to scratch each other was arbitrarily assigned values from 1 to 10. In a somewhat similar fashion, consciousness could be assigned values on a arbitrary quantitative scale to correspond to described states, ranging from a coma on the low end, through sleep, drowsiness, reverie and ordinary alertness, to the high states of attention associated with threatening situations. Such a scale would be finer, but still descriptive and not susceptible to measurement.
The purpose of this paper is to propose definable and quantifiable measures of consciousness. The essential idea is the formation and evaluation of spatio-temporal volume integrals over appropriate regions of the cortex. The functions to be integrated and the ranges of integration are not uniquely defined, and these choices are at the heart of this early step toward quantification of consciousness.
After making the defining choices, two major subsequent steps are needed. The first is to critically examine them regarding their consonance or dissonance with other clearer and accepted aspects of the study of consciousness, including, for example, infant development and injuries. If the defined measures survive this scrutiny, the next step to address their experimental evaluation. What good is a measure, if it cannot be measured?! The final part of this paper will address the use of modern experimental tools for brain research for their potential use in the quantification of consciousness, as defined by the new integral method. These tools include ordinary and functional MRI, PET scans, EEG and MEG. The spatial, temporal and other characteristics of each technique will be examined relative to quantitatively evaluating consciousness in the laboratory.
01.09-- Abstract No:1018
However the objective existence of the surrounding world is believed or even accepted without any objection in the spontaneous philosophical representations of many people including scientists, the logical analysis of language, proposed by the leading philosophical groups at the begin of the century, reveals impossibility of verification for such kind of statements. In those philosophical systems, stating objective existence of a physical system, one has to give a meaning to the state which is not observed, e.g., in the time between two observations. In such matter, a meaningful sentence could be articulated about a state which is by definition not observable, however, this strongly contradicts with the basic doctrine of logical empirisms, where the meaning of any sentence is given by the possibility of its positive verification. So, in order to fulfil the idea of a minimal and clear theory, the confusing and unnecessary concept of objective reality has been refused.
There were some attempts to attack the philosophical system of logical empirisms, but without success. For example, one can argue that existence of scientists and scientific theories, which can be verified by other scientists or the subject self (by me) , leads to a notion about existence of thoughts and experiences in brains of those scientists similar to the experiences of the subject who is concerned in the same physical problem. Because the notorious unexpresionability of experiences, such states cannot be observable, nevertheless, they have to exist objectively.
But again, the notion about objective existence of such states in other brains can be made redundant: by refusing the unprovable statements about phenomenal experiences in other beings and replacing the concept of phenomenal actions by a reference to the physical states which are correlated with processes of observation, thinking and expressing (also, I am observing that the scientist is observing - is doing an action which could be interpreted as observing, I am observing physical states correlated with thinking by the scientist - he looks very serious, his EEG has some properties, he writes some work etc.) .
In such way, the process of making a theory could be understand in terms of usual physical processes, without necessity of stating some phenomenal properties in the brains of scientists. Because the object of research can be proved for its identity and used in several experiments, many of similar theories produced by a number of scientists can be expected. Also, fulfilling the local consistency principle, the empiristic system is still closed for the variety of physical theories dealing with a common observable physical object.
However, things can change supposing that there is a physical (or common) problem, which is but not common observable. And, supposing that there is a theory (a set of statements) about this phenomenon, which could be independently proved. The phenomenal experience could be a subject of such theory; as an example can serve the body desintegration Gedankenexperiment proving classical irresolvability of time-binding phenomenon.
By attempt to fit such theory into the empiristic system, one is faced with impossibility of proving the observation act (the scientist is observing his own consciousness) , not even as physical correlations in brain activity. So, the empiristic model does not include the source of knowledge, despite the possibility of repetition of the experiment or repeatedly verified theory, which strongly violates the principle of local consistency. Thus, the occurrence of a provable theory about a phenomenal feature of consciousness evidences the incompleteness of the empiristic philosophical system. Proposed statements about independent, objective existence of physical systems with latently present but still objective existing conscious phenomena could serve as fundaments of a philosophical system, which is closed for both varieties of physical theories - the about common observable physical systems and the about not common observable phenomenal experiences.
01.09-- Abstract No:1026
1. Consciencism is a concept developed by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of independent Ghana. The primary assumption within consciencism is that "monistic materialism" is true: only physical matter has independent existence; conscious experience "emerges" as a "categorial conversion" of a person's brain matter. Nkrumah uses this assumption politically to argue that, as equally matter, all people deserve an egalitarian form of government.
Nkrumah's discussion also involves a direct realist theory of perception, that independent matter causes us to perceive itself as objects such as apples and brains. Thus, for example, independent brains actually have the color and temperature they are perceived to have. As commonly noted, however, a person's conscious experience does not have color and temperature. Thus, Nkrumah's form of materialism is like many such forms in violating the indiscernibility of identicals, that a and b must share all features in common if they are to be regarded as identical.
2. We can avoid this problem by replacing Nkrumah's direct realism with the sort of representative realism advanced by J.L. Mackie. Mackie's representative realism is idealist in treating an object of perception as identical with the perceptions of it. But his representative realism is realist in treating groups of molecules as independent things that cause us to perceive objects without thereby causing us to perceive themselves as those objects. Thus, for example, the molecules whose flows are Smith's neural activity also cause us to perceive Smith's brain, but they do so without being or composing that brain. As a result, we need not ascribe to that group of flowing molecules the publicly perceived features of Smith's brain that seem incompatible with those of her conscious experience. Hence, we can identify that group of flowing molecules with Smith's conscious experience without violating the indiscernibility of identicals.
3. Negritude is a concept developed most prominently by Leopold Senghor, first president of independent Senegal. Among other things, Senghor thinks that people with negritude sometimes "identify" with the objects and situations they perceive: negritude "is expressed by the emotions through an abandonment of self and a complete identification with the object . . ."
Representative realism allows a straightforward interpretation of this claim even though spatial distance obviously separates any perceived person from the objects she perceives. Under representative realism, the human body a given group of molecules causes herself to perceive is strictly identical with her perceptions of that body, things that are themselves strictly identical with certain flows of her neural molecules. The same is true of the other objects she perceives, however. That is, an object she perceives as spatially distant from her own perceived body is strictly identical with her perceptions of that object, things that are strictly identical with certain flows of her neural molecules. As a result, any object perceived by a given sentient group of molecules is just as identical with her neural activity as is the body she causes herself to perceive. There is thus a clear sense in which she, as an independent group of molecules, can identify with spatially different perceived objects just as much as she can identify with the body she perceives herself to have -- neither her perceived body nor those perceived objects are at all external to her qua neural activity.
01.09-- Abstract No:1071
Three examples are considered: Necker cube, motor aphasia and ' blind sight' of Weiskrantz. The phenomena A are described as follows: one is looking at one of two phases of Necker cube, a patient classically categorized as presenting motor aphasia is looking for the name of an object, and one does not see an object placed in the field neuroanatomically defined as an area of visual defect. Phenomena B are described as follows: those who look at Necker cube know the two possible spatial phases, a patient presenting classical motor aphasia knows that at any time of his life he knew the name of an object he can not say now, and one knows he saw an object ever presented in the field of visual defect. These two categories of phenomena are distinct cognitive states. The idea of two phases of Necker cube does not allow one to look at the two at the same moment, recognizing the memory of a name does not help a patient to recall it, and experiencing the blind sight does not prove the absence of real visual orientation.
How these two cognitive states become testable? The characteristics of ' testable' are identical or not between them? These are the main questions of this report.
The test is composed of two structures: one is the method for observation, and another is the form for reasoning. We know empirically that it is very possible to make a test or some so that phenomenon in A ( with test A ) and B ( with test B ) become testable, as Weiskrantz has done for blind sight in a comprehensible way. It is also possible to find some characteristic details in each test. For example, test A inevitably uses what is expressed by a subject, test B has not to take into account the time, for phenomena B are time-free state of cognition, while phenomena A are time-locked, etc.
However, while the two cognitive states are distinct, the way each test is produced must be different, and consequently, its method for observation and form for reasoning. Accordingly, two tests can be tested by the other test, TEST, which could distinguish the difference between test A and B. TEST also has its own method for observation and form for reasoning. The questions above described, therefore, can be modified as: Can we have two tests, test A, B, of which method for observation and form for reasoning can be tested by TEST which could distinguish the difference between the two? TEST apparently depends on how each test is described with the language which is preferentially used by the tests. TEST also has its own language. Whether these languages are identical or not, how the method for observation and the form for reasoning are tested by TEST, how cognitive architectures of three examples are substantiated with the languages the test A and B employ, will be discussed.
01.09-- Abstract No:1083
One of the more common fallacies commited in the practice of science is to confuse the abstractions used in making models of reality with the concrete reality itself. A.N. Whitehead famously called this the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness'. My claim here is that this fallacy is often committed in present cognitive science inquiry, particularly within the area of computer modeling and its associated functionalist philosophy.
I will give some general examples of this error by significant workers in the field. Also, in commiting this fallacy, the distinction between the specific properties of individual entites, and the general properties of aggregates of those individual entities, is often confused. This results in ignoring the important cellular and context-dependent nature of the biological foundation of consciousness. Instead, the independent 'logical atomistic' nature of the machine is taken as a basis for understanding everything, including mental reality. As an important sub-fallacy of 'misplaced concreteness', this is often known as the 'fallacy of simple location'.
I will show, in conclusion, how this fallacy is commited in arguments supporting the 'silicon replacement' thought experiment so prized by computational functionalists.
01.09-- Abstract No:1091
"Consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical": This is the conclusion that David Chalmers reaches in his recent book on consciousness. While agreeing with this overall conclusion, we feel compelled to more closely investigate just exactly what is included in the term "physical." Upon examining Chalmers's argument more carefully, we find that "the physical" includes an entire specification of all spatio-temporal facts AND laws. Despite the inclusion of facts AND laws in the supervenience base, Chalmers is able to effectively argue that consciousness cannot be reductively explained within that framework. This is a monumental achievement. However, in his attempt to distance himself not only from materialists but from idealists as well, Chalmers is forced to allow a trace of epiphenomenalism in his overall argument. Essentially, epiphenomenalism returns when he asserts that while "consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical", nevertheless, "the physical domain is causally closed." Now, Chalmers is forced into this position precisely because he includes both physical facts and physical laws in his supervenience base. The status of physical law is a separate metaphysical puzzle and one suspects that Chalmers's main intent was to sidestep this puzzle in his argument regarding the non-supervenience of consciousness. Unfortunately, the assertion that "the physical domain is causally closed" directly follows from the "physical" supervenience base which includes both physical facts and laws.
In recent times, the entire status of physical law has been called into question. A naive Platonist assumption regarding physical law, widely held until postmodern times, is no longer tenable. Even if we eschew both naive Platonist and naive constructivist views regarding physical law, this problem remains and is exacerbated when the scientific focus of our efforts is consciousness itself. The reason: a circularity is created when we seek a science of consciousness. Since physical law could be dependent at the very least on the collective consciousness of a community of scientists, a circular feedback loop is created between "the laws of consciousness" and the consciousness of the researchers themselves. It is important to stress that this circularity appears only when we seek a science of consciousness. Ontological and epistemological issues do not simultaneously come to the forefront when physics or biology is under investigation but cannot be avoided in the case of consciousness. In addition, these issues affect reductionists and emergentists alike. Consequently, it is surprising that recent emergentist theories of consciousness continue to avoid ontological and epistemological issues. While earlier materialist and idealist theories were at least explicit regarding their ontological and epistemological commitments, the new emergentist theories are typically tacit regarding the same. Being silent on these issues do not make the problems go away, however. Our goal in this essay has been to clearly point out the feedback loop between the laws of consciousness and the state of consciousness of the researchers embarking on that quest. This can be encapsulated into a slogan: "A science of consciousness needs a consciousness of science."
01.09-- Abstract No:1095
In this paper I argue that we can clarify a cluster of problems in philosophical psychology, cognitive science, psychology and philosophy of science by focusing narrowly on Paul Churchland's treatment of the argument from introspection as he discusses this argument in such places as MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS , A NEUROCOMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVE, and THE ENGINE OF REASON, THE SEAT OF THE SOUL .
Paul and Patricia Churchland are two of the strongest advocates in philosophy of the eliminative materialist position and the connectionist theory of cognitive intelligence. In this paper, I concentrate on the arguments Paul Churchland raises against the argument from introspection so often employed by the dualist of whichever variety--interactionist property dualism, emergentism, popular dualism, etc. Churchland undertakes this refutation because the argument from inrospection is one of the most powerful arguments presented by the dualist, and Churchland knows that he must refute this argument on the way to establishing his own position of eliminative materialism.
I present in some detail Churchland's reconstructions of the dualist's argument from instrospection and I also present his criticisms of these arguments. I then examine closely these alleged refutations of the argument from introspection and I raise some criticisms against Churchland's claim that he presents parallel arguments (i.e. reutations by logical analogy) that refute the dualist position based on the argument from instrospection. I argue that Churchland begs the question against the dualist (as much, in fact, as the dualist begs his or her position against the eliminative materialist) by identifying mental states with brain states. I argue that Churchland carries out this implicit, almost imperceptible identification by conflating two senses of realism: what I call "internal realism", which is concerned with the ontological commitments of a theory, with a more robust sense of scientific realism that claims that theories give us a literally true account of the world. (Here I use the term "theory" to apply to philosophical theories as well as scientific theories) . I conclude with some remarks concerning the topics of introspection, scientific realism, underdetermination and mind-body.
01.09-- Abstract No:1136
While it is widely assumed among English-speaking philosophers that mental predicates apply to conscious beings in virtue of these beings' physical constitution, much disagreement still persists as to exactly what type of relation prevails between mind and body and, similarly, between the fields of psychology and neuroscience. As a result of this lack of consensus, "reductionism" has become a term of much contention in philosophical circles.
Despite the import of the concept of reduction within this debate, it is most often not clear what philosophers of mind actually mean by "reduction". This is the case for both proponents and oponents of psycho-physical reduction. In this essay I attempt to shed light on current debates in the philosophy of mind by examining the evolution of the notion of reduction in the philosophy of science, starting with Ernest Nagel's influential account . I argue that a study of historical cases of reduction does not allow for a clear-cut distinction between retention and replacement but rather suggests an analysis in terms of degrees of retention or replacement. Consequently, I seek to characterize the various types of inter-theoretic relations along this continuum. The purpose of the paper is twofold: I initially establish the relevance of an inquiry into the notion of reduction as defined in the philosophy of science to current debates in the philosophy of mind, and subsequently suggest, in light of these developments, what it would be reasonable for philosophers to signify when deliberating about the possibility or impossibility of acheiving psycho-physical reduction. Two factors motivate my approach.
First, it seems that a study of the recent history of the notion of reduction in the philosophy of science can provide a more neutral perspective from which we can subsequently address certain fundamental questions issuing from the age-old mind-body problem. This seems to be one of those cases where it is preferable to begin by viewing the problem in a general manner in order to ultimately better understand its details. As Paul and Patricia Churchland have suggested, "expanding our horizons here is important, since little is to learned by simply staring long and hard at the problematic case at issue, namely the potential reduction of psychological phenomena to neural phenomena" .
Second, and probably most importantly, a close examination of the major issues in the theoretical domain of reduction is relevant to current debates on psycho-physical reduction in view of the fact that virtually all reductions, when they are not precisely cases of reduction of one theory to another, are embedded in some form of general inter-theoretic reduction. That is to say, thing, state, process or event reductions always presuppose extended theories as backing. Hence I believe that a study of the recent history of philosophy of science can help shed light on the question as to whether it is reasonable to expect a reduction of psychological phenomena to neurobiological and/or neurocomputational phenomena.
01.09-- Abstract No:1163
Treated as a horizontal continuum an attitude accompanying human self-awareness can be conceived as deep humility on the left and extreme arrogance on the right. The following thought experiment is suggested as boldly prescriptive of how our species should approach the new millennium in this regard. Suggestions concerning the nature and extent of our knowledge will occur as a by-product of the experiment.
Consider a highly-evolved species living on the floor of the arctic ocean with the same sensory apparatus as humans excepting sight over long periods of time. This species has learned to live peaceflilly, to care for one another, to cure disease, to create admirable art forms and to live in harmony with the environment. They have developed scientific knowledge appropriate for their circumstances. Being curious, and in possession of intellectual and material resources, the scientists among this species wish to seek knowledge and understandings of the universe beyond their highly-valued, apparently vast, wet, cold, dark world. What is their challenge?
How are these beings to explore beyond their ocean world to obtain knowledge we have? For them to survive and explore their space ships must be sustained with cold salt water. They must somehow penetrate or go around the arctic ice, the existence of which they are initially unaware. Without sight, how are they to recognize the sun and planets and their motions let alone the more distant galaxies and black holes? How are they to recognize the "big bang" origins of their world and how will they ever discern what we know of space, time and mass as a result of the work of Einstein and his predecessors and followers. What instruments will they develop to rival our various telescopes, microscopes and particle accelerators? How will they discover the many life forms on the surface of the earth. How might they hope to discover, and communicate with, a life form possessed of intelligence to rival their own?
To become as knowledgeable as we their task is clearly awesome at this stage of their intellectual growth. They can be proud of what they have accomplished. But it would be easy for them to delude themselves into thinking they are on the verge of having their entire universe pretty well figured out. They might imagine that other intelligent civilizations would be populated by beings much like themselves who would be intensely interested in communicating with them.
Clearly, this intelligent species of the deep must travel a long, difficult road before they are to know what we know. The appropriate attitude for them would seem to be humility even while enjoying the fruits of their many successes and appreciating the splendor and privilege of existing in their world.
We know the extent of our knowledge is substantially different from that of such an imagined species. Is there the slightest evidence that the challenge before us is not as dauntingly difficult?
As we open the curtain on a new millennium it is appropriate to kneel in recognition of the limitations of our knowledge. Deep humility is as appropriate for those seeking reliable scientific knowledge as it is for religious monks serving their deity.
'The white man drew a small circle in the sand and told the red man, "This is what the Indian knows, " and drawing a big circle around the small one, "This is what the white man knows." The Indian took the stick and swept an immense ring around both circles: "This is where the white man and the red man know nothing."'
(Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes)
01.09-- Abstract No:1243
According to the philosophy of mind which presently prevails in the west, consciousness is of negligible epistemic interest in its own right (because it apparently has no significant properties or powers in this respect) . In short, consciousness is "radically non-epistemic" (Millikan) . A number of powerful lines of argument to support this view (most notably: Wiffgenstein's Private Language Argument and Sellar's aftack on the Myth of The Given) . Indeed, they seem to show something even stronger: that consciousness itself cannot be anything other than epistemically vacuous (and that any ideas to the contrary are bound to be incoherent) .
Drawing on some of the philosophical resources of Tibetan Buddhism, this paper outlines an epistemic model of consciousness which demonstrates that:
(1) Consciousness can be fruitfully characterised in terms of 'self-knowing awareness',
(2) In virtue of its 'self-knowing' features, consciousness has important epistemic potential which is generally unrecognized by western thinkers,
(3) To the extent that they are incompatible with this model, current philosophical conceptions of consciousness are seriously mistaken.
The paper ends with some critical discussion of an intriguing extrapolation regarding the cosmological relevance of human consciousness: if consciousness is epistemic in essence (and not just on account of its possible contents) does it embody the potential for understanding its place in the universe directly (rather than via the intermediary scientifically-encoded mental representations) ?
References:
Millikan, R. 'Metaphysical Antirealism?' In White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1993 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Jnvestigations Sellars, W. Empiricism and The Philosophy ofMind. Harvard University Press, 1997 Malachowski, A. 'Epistemology in Paradise: The Spatial Embodiment of Knowledge and Value'. In Light of Knowledge: Essays on the Interplay of Knowledge, Time and Space. Petranker, J. (Ed.) . Dharma Publishing: California, 1997
01.09-- Abstract No:1272
Although its proponents disagree about the proper scope of evolutionary epistemology (EE) and its useful delimitation from other philosophical and scientific approaches to cognition, genuine versions of EE take cognizance of and are at least programmatically compatible with the status of human beings as products of biological and sociocultural evolution (cf. Campbell 1974) . This implies minimally that the natural kinds envisaged by EE must tie in with the theory of natural selection, a requirement that should single out evolutionary-epistemological explanations not only from "Cartesian" approaches that "disembody" mind and sever cognition and emotion (e.g., classical AI, Popperian "epistemology without a knowing subject") , but also from behaviorism, which relied on explanatory entities that had no ethological or ecological justification (Hendriks-Jansen 1996) .
Perhaps surprisingly -- given its avowed ambition to naturalistically interpret the human cognitive predicament as the "self-conscious" stage of the evolution of life (Lorenz 1976) -- EE until now has had precious little to say about consciousness (but see Oeser 1987) . Amongst the reasons for this neglect -- an assessment we will set out to justify ù are the following: (i) As a theory that aims at grounding mental phenomena through natural selection, EE must start from behavior, which is indispensable for selection to work on. (There are interesting parallels here with discussions of genotype/phenotype equivalents and of the limited scope of rational action explanation in the sociocultural realm, e.g., in evolutionary economics; cf. also Piattelli-Palmarini [1989] on the progressive "general demise" of learning-as-instruction.) (ii) EE claims to explain the a prioris that constrain/enable individual human thinking (say, the faculty of seeing objects as permanent) and, as a system of hypotheses, guide behavior or interpret the environment, as the a posteriori products of genetic "learning." Qua phylogenetic study of cognitive mechanisms (Bradie's 1986 "EEM"; cf. evolutionary psychology) , EE has dealt mostly with preconscious cognitive performances. The adaptive winnowing of the allegedly inevitable a priori forms of intuition and categories that together constitute the human "ratiomorphic apparatus" (cf. common sense, folk psychology) is supposed to have occurred mostly before the appearance of consciousness. Conscious reflection is regarded as unable to overrule our "inborn teachers" (Riedl 1987) . (iii) The preference for a neurological vocabulary and for "killjoy" explanations (Dennett) , which is typical of the "harder" varieties of EE, is sometimes being justified by methodological caution ("The nature of consciousness will remain an open question until it will become feasible to specify the critical parameters that would allow to discriminate between conscious and unconscious systems") . Yet the hope that a "hard" reductionistic research strategy ù say, Churchlandian eliminativism -- will deliver the naturalistic goods is at odds with EE's usual insistence on emergence (Campbell's "downward causation, " Lorenz's "fulguration", etc.) and on the necessity of considering multiple levels of ("vicarious") selection.
Most early varieties of EE sought to explain animal and human cognition, including science, in orthodox neo-Darwinian fashion. Today, both "EEM" and evolutionary accounts of science ("EET, " in Bradie's parlance) more and more try also to account for ontogenetic factors -- constraints, which may be of the "enabling" type (!) , and other "internal selection mechanisms" (Campbell) -- operating on human organisms/persons, to the extent that EE seem to merge imperceptibly with the naturalistic explanation of cognition per se (Callebaut and Stotz 1997) . To the extent that the "quick and dirty"adaptationism of earlier EE is allowed to make way for more balanced treatments that also attend to the details of ontogeny and of individual and social learning in specific natural and constructed ecologies (cf. Hendriks-Jansen's "situated activity" and "interactive emergence") , the consciousness issue is likely to come to the fore in EE. Instead of being banned wholesale from the naturalist's account (perhaps in favor of an exclusive focus on intentionality, as in Millikan's work; contrast Wimsatt [1998] on the merits of folk psychology) , it could shed new light, as we will argue, not only on our "higher" cognitive achievements (say, up from "mnemonically supported thought" in Campbell's 10-level nested hierarchy of selective-retention processes culminating in science) , but on such "perennial" issues as the nature/nurture muddle and the correspondence/coherence imbroglio as well.
01.09-- Abstract No:1246
Within visual science, the terms "linking hypothesis" (Brindley, 1960) and "linking proposition" (Teller, 1984) have been used to refer to implicit or explicit claims about isomorphisms between perceptual and physiological states. My earlier attempt at an examination and systematization of general linking propositions will be reviewed. It will be argued that general linking propositions often come in families, providing important steps in reasoning either from perceptual to physiological states or vice versa. The Identity, Similarity, Mutual Exclusiveness, and Simplicity families will be briefly reviewed, with examples from various parts of visual science. It will be argued that linking propositions, while imperfect, may nonetheless be important tools in the progress of cognitive neuroscience.
References:
Brindley, G. S. (1960) Physiology of the Retina and Visual Pathways. London, Edward Arnold.
Teller, D.Y. Linking Propositions. Vision Research 24: 1233-1246.
01.09-- Abstract No:1303
The focus of the talk will be a comparison of three approaches to an understanding of `what is actual', each of which claims to be, at least potentially, comprehensive: modern science, Husserlian phenomenology, and Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen. Each of the three approaches is the latest phase of a long historical development. Starting from very different points of view, namely classical physics, Cartesian dualism, and Bhuddhist Abidharma, respectively, the three developments have shown clear signs of convergence. In their present form, we find remarkable parallels on the levels of methodology, logic, as well as world views. In each approach, experiment is the central touch stone, while the theoretical `foundations' are dynamically changing, having left far behind some early starting points such as the classical physics triad of objectivity, determinism, and reductionism. The roles that consciousness plays in each of the three approaches will be contrasted, in a comparative study that may provide a fresh look at the possibility of a scientific study of consciousness.
01.10-- Abstract No:830
Both animals and humans are conscious, but only humans attain selfhood. What is responsible for this problematic condition? Is it what is inside the human head, or is it what the head is inside of?
'No' is the answer to both questions. Selfhood is process that is spread out over a system. Parts of this system are inside the head and others are outside. Moreover the mutual evolution of these parts means that they are dialectically interdependent.
However, contemporary research into consciousness draws attention to internal conditions and promotes a modernist agenda of reduction. Selfhood is to be 'explained' by elimination based on mechanistic or formal foundations. This paper, following Rorty and Griffin among other the postmodern critics of scientism, will reject this internalist emphasis and the foundationalism that goes with it.
Postmodern science promotes a process ontology. It deals in chaos, emergence and self-organisation and moves attention towards interactions between individuals and their relationships to each other and to the environment, rather than to merely what it is in the head that mediates these interactions. Selfhood will be better understood once inquiry into brain mechanisms is complemented by better understanding of the intrinsically historical and situated nature of the processes that produce and sustain it.
One of the most important of these processes, and, clearly, one that is crucial to the difference between human and animals, is the capacity to deal in signs. This has long been the focus of philosophers like James and Pierce, cultural theorists like Barthes and Baudrillard as well as scientists like Bohm & von Uexkull.
This paper will review the centrality of semiosis and will bring the postmodern scientific worldview together with historical writings, especially those of Vico, to trace the origins of the human semiotic capacity. These lie in metaphor. While the capacity for metaphor is prefigured in a number of species, only in the humans did it reach a critical point where a qualitatively new phase in evolution was able to begin. It is this phase, which may be broadly identified with cultural rather than with biological evolution, that has seen the emergence of human self-awareness.
This view, when taken together with contemporary developments in evolutionary theory such as those put forward Edelman and of Kingdon, allow us to repair the unjustified marginalisation of Lamarck and Bergson, and lead to the conclusions: Selfhood is a process. It is, following Whitehead's broader organic ontology, part of the creative advance of nature. This condition is dialectically both produced by but also produces an effort after meaning. This effort is the motor of mental development, both ontogenetic and phylogenetic. This view, to follow Bergson, suggests that consciousness has produced brains rather than that brains have produced consciousness. Moreover, in the human case, this effort after meaning has, using metaphor as a bridge, crossed over a qualitative boundary into new realms of self-aware mental action.
To provide a suitably rich but explicit framework for this view requires a move beyond the implicit Cartesianism of contemporary discourse on selfhood. The Whiteheadian ontology that underlies the postmodern scientific worldview is both more productive and more realistic for dealing with intrinsically historical phenomena such as selfhood. This will lead to the investigation of brain mechanisms being complemented by the study of the ecology of consciousness. In the human case, this ecology is one of cultural signs.
01.10-- Abstract No:852
The main conclusion of this paper is that there is no ('constitutive') criterion of our persistence or identity through time. This is because the conditions for our being selves, i.e., referents of the first-person pronoun as used by us, imply that selves can outlast the human organisms to which the pronoun refers.
Three aspects of a self are set out. (1) The owner aspect: the self must be a subject of experience in the sense that it owns or has experiential states, like those of perceiving and thinking. (2) The phenomenal aspect: it must be aware of itself, i.e. it must enter into the content of some the experiential states owned by it. In a world like ours, subjects having perceptual experiences would scarcely survive if they were not perceptually aware of the spatial relations in which they themselves stand to prey and predators in the environment. This awareness of ourselves largely takes the form of a proprioceptive awareness of our own bodies 'from the inside', as having a certain shape and size, and solidity in the sense of filling a certain three-dimensional region of space. (3) The introspective aspect: the self must be aware of itself not only as a body, but as a subject of experiences, e.g., be aware of itself not only as body bearing spatial relations to other bodies, but as perceiving those relations.
Closer inspection reveals, however, that the human organism which meets the phenomenal aspect of selfhood meets the owner aspect only 'derivatively': experiential states belong to a human organism only in virtue of it having a certain proper part, the brain (or parts of it) , to which they are attributable, since it is minimally sufficient to sustain them. The brain, on the other hand does not meet the phenomenal aspect. This is the cause of the perplexity over our identity which, e.g. brain-transplants create. Secondly, and more problematically, what is essential both to being a biological organism -- roughly, being capable of biological life -- and to such an organism belonging to a certain species -- which is a matter of genes -- have to do with processes that are not phenomenally apparent to us. Consequently, it is conceivable that a human organism ceases to be such without this showing up in the phenomenal aspect and the correlated stream of 'I'-thoughts which refer to this aspect. The conditions of selfhood then imply that the same self persists, while the organism disappears. So, the persistence conditions of our selves, of the referents of our first-person pronouns, cannot be those of our organisms. Yet, as we have seen, these organisms are the referents of these pronouns. Therefore, there are no persistence conditions of us. And there need be no such for our demonstrative-like reference to ourselves by means of 'I' to succeed.
01.10-- Abstract No:966
Let us be wildly optimistic. Let us suppose that at this conference, perhaps in one of the sessions addressing quantum neurodynamics, or maybe neural networks and connectionism, that the so-called 'hard problem' of consciousness -- that is, why there is subjective experience at all -- is solved. Qualia are explained, and the neural correlates of consciousness are found; maybe they turn out to be the mysterious 40Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex, or perhaps consciousness is discovered to be the result of a coherent quantum collapse taking place within the microtubules of the hippocampus.
All further sessions are therefore cancelled, until it is suddenly noticed that the really hard question has been left unanswered -- that is, why we have privileged access to exactly one set of subjective experiences, those occurring to a particular individual. In other words, the harder question of consciousness is: why is that individual me? Note that the standard response of "because you are that person" fails, because it begs the question. Given that all individuals meeting certain criteria have conscious experience, what is it that links me (first-person subjective experiencer) with the conscious experiences of one particular organism (third-person objective individual) ?
This paper contends that the above questions are not empty, and that the underlying assumptions to the standard responses are not mere tautologies, as many suppose. The relationship of this problem to Chalmers' hard problem, the related issue of indexicality, and the nature of the self are examined, and the suggestion is made that by concentrating our attention on the hard problem of consciousness, rather than the harder problem of consciousness, we may be searching in the wrong direction.
References
Chalmers, D, 1996. The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D, 1978. Brainstorms. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
------------, 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown.
Madell, G, 1991. Personal Identity and the idea of a human being. In D. Cockburn, ed., Human Beings. Cambridge University Press.
Nagel, T, 1983. The Objective Self. In C.Ginet and S.Shoemaker, eds., Knowledge and Mind: Philosophical Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D, 1984. Reasons and Persons. New York: Oxford University Press.
01.10-- Abstract No:1001
Our inability to perceive conscious subjects as spatial entities prompts McGinn to claim: "Things in space can generate consciousness only because those things are not, at some level, just how we conceive them to be; they harbour some hidden aspect or principle (1995, p. 157) ." He concedes, without backing away from this position, that " . . . we take each subject of consciousness to be somewhere in the vicinity of a distinguished body (p. 151) ."
In this paper, elementary set theory is used to investigation why the self, the conscious subject, is perceived to be nonlocational in the way McGinn describes. A fictional being, Manifold Man, is introduced. His consciousness consists of only surface points of awareness, surface areas of awareness, a self, and awareness of self. A point of awareness is due to the firing of a heat receptor. An area of awareness is any combination of points of awareness (including a single point of awareness) due to simultaneous firing of heat receptors anywhere on Manifold Man's surface. If P is the set of points of awareness, then an area of awareness is any subset of P (except the empty set) . A well-know, elementary result from set theory dictates that, since the set of areas of awareness, A, has the cardinality of the power set of P (the set of all subsets of P) , A is exponentially larger than P.
Manifold Man needs a self to provide a point of view for each member of A. This self is constructed, through memory processes, out of A and represents all members of A. Thus, the point of view provided for each member of A is an integrated whole representing all members of A. However, because the self represents all members of A, it can not be perceived to be any one of its members, any area of awareness. That is, the self can be neither P nor any of its subsets. Such awareness of self would undermine the self's representation of all members of A. In this sense, Manifold Man's self is nonlocational.
This would not necessarily be so if A could be mapped one-to-one into P or any of its subsets. However, there is no such mapping. In fact, since A is exponentially larger than P, there is no mapping that even comes remotely close to being one-to-one.
However, such restrictions do not bar Manifold Man from having an awareness that his self is somewhere in the vicinity of the surface of his body (allowing for the sake of argument that Manifold Man is aware of the space around him) . Since this space bounds all members of A and since his self is constructed out of A, Manifold Man can be aware that his self is within this space.
Does the reason for Manifold Man's nonlocationality of self apply to conscious beings like ourselves? This paper argues that with appropriate caveats it does. The argument is premised on the claim, also argued, that a bodily sensation, such as feeling that one's hand feels hot, individuates an area of awareness.
Reference:
McGinn, Colin 1995. "Consciousness and Space". In Thomas Metzinger, ed., CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE. Schoningh / Imprint Academic
01.10-- Abstract No:1037
In my paper I discuss two concepts of models of the self and their significance for a simulation theory account of folk psychology. According to Dennett and Flanagan the self has to be understood as an explanatory fiction. The assumption of a self ("actual full identity") as the unifying point of all experiences, actions and mental processes is a useful theoretical construction. The self does not exist as a real thing which directs our mental processes and behavior but it is a theoretical construction within the ideal explanation of the cognition and behavior of conscious beings. The reality which has to be explained by the assumption of a "proper self" are the functions of the cognitive system. In this view the self is purely conceptual, because it belongs to the level of theoretical explanations or descriptions. The "proper self" is the theoretical principle which gives a sufficient explanation of the functioning of our mental and behavioral activities: "A construct that draws on the best theories available to describe what a person actually does" (Flanagan) . The models of the self used in folk psychology or cognitive science are more or less adequate conceptual reconstructions, that never reach the explanatory ideal of the "proper self".
This instrumentalist conception of models of the self does not take into account a non-theoretical, direct access of the subject towards his/her own cognitive mechanisms as is presupposed in simulation theory. This possibility seems to be accounted for by a realist conception of self models as are held e.g. by Metzinger. According to his conception, the self is not an explanatory fiction but relies upon a non-conceptual representation formed by the system itself. According to this view the model of the self is designed by nature as a non-conceptual instrument to simulate the biological system in counterfactual situations. In this position the model of the self is the "fundamentum in re" and the sufficient reason for all self-directed activities of the cognitive system (introspection, phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, etc.) . Because of its non-conceptual nature this realistic conception of the model of the self seems to cover also the non-theoretical access of the subject towards his/her inner mental states presupposed in the simulation theory account of folk psychology.
However, it can be shown that the realist conception of the model of the self is logically dependent upon Dennett's view of the self as an explanatory fiction. So it cannot be placed totally outside the theoretical or conceptual level. This realist self model cannot fulfill the conditions, which are required in the non-theoretical access of the subject towards its inner mental states presupposed in simulation theory. As with any theoretical or explanatory fiction, in this self model there is – owing to the time lag -- no possibility of simulating the actual constituton of the simulated system.
Simulation theory presupposes a stronger identification with the simulated system than it can be garanteed by the realist conception of a self-model. Evidence brought about by simulation theory presupposes a self, which cannot be exhausted by the concept of a model of the self.
01.10-- Abstract No:1076
In this paper I want to focus on two strategies that will allow a further understanding of the postructuralist deconstruction of the 'self'. Firstly I state the post-structural project of the 'de-centring of the subject' in a way that will raise the possibility of reinvesting in the synthesis of being with action in an holistic notion of human agency; this we will attempt through summarising and evaluating a phenomenological treatment of the 'subject' in certain poststructural positions. Secondly, I will concentrate on the view of the subject that, while still negates the 'I' as an essence or substance, retain a privileged position in the notion of human agency. What I will want to further maintain is that the expression of the subject in a linguistic act is more than just signifying practices but signifying activity that arises and emerges from social life and social practices. The paper will then describe a Wittgensteinian view of the self and claim that in rejecting the cogito this position still retains an interactive and dynamic agent as a description of the subject. I will also maintain that to understand this we have to see language and discourse as a product of knowledge that is its expression and this knowledge is tacit but not unconscious, and arises out of the social milieu and its social practices. This articulation of an alternative to the 'orthodox' model to which we have already referred is a crucial part of Wittgenstein's move to demetaphysicalize the private 'inner-world' of the subject. And moreover, this move has major implications and ramification on the concept of 'self'. I will outline one view of the self in Wittgenstein's earlier work which seems to be suggesting a 'self' that was akin to a bundle of psychological elements which are not the property of some simple entity but stand in relation to other psychological elements that have occurred previously. I mentioned then that such a view of personality identity to Wittgenstein, which resembles that which has recently been established by Parfit, which also dismisses the view that allows specific and privileged status, both descriptively and normatively, to the concept of the person. Not that there are not entities, individuated and continuous which are worthy of a kind of respect and moral evaluation but they are not entities that are described by the cogito. The words 'person' and 'self', used under such a description, do not denote something ultimately real. However, I will finally wish to draw a distinction between the Parfitian view and the Wittgensteinian view of self that becomes more apparent in his later 'self'. This view, I will wish to point out, sees self-consciousness and the states that indicate its presence as not something that has its own nature distinct from being the state of the living organism. Experiences and mental states are essentially the natural expressions of human beings.
01.10-- Abstract No:1233
Action and knowledge are considered as conscious activities of the self to relate with itself and with the world. They are supposed to have reflexive and recursive properties. It is argued that these characteristics make conscious processes irreducible to deterministic or to random models.
Nevertheless, practical objective models of these processes can be made using statistical models. The analogy with the models used in the theory of elementary particles is remarked. From that analogy a proposition of a similar nature of human and so called non-thinking beings is discussed. A complementarity relation is suggested between objectivity and subjectivity.
The relations of this proposal with anthopic and cosmological principles are considered. The hypothesis is applied to solve the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism, mind and matter, reductionism and emergentism, inmanentism and transcendentalism, determinism and indeterminism. Some ideas are discussed about the possible changes in scientific research if this approach is taken into account.
01.10-- Abstract No:1242
Every theory of ethics must presuppose an ontology of the self in order to explain what constitutes responsible action and show how it can occur. So it is not surprising that a fundamental reconceptualization of human experience in terms of cognitive science has occurred at the same time that philosophers and scientists are working to develop a naturalized ethics. This paper presents an architecture of interior life that can make sense of both conventional and anomalous mental phenomena, but can also anchor this new ethics.
According to the proposed view, a person or self is historically constituted by and enmeshed in networks of connections with other selves, places, objects, events, ideas, cultural forms, among other entities. These connections are tube-like tracks leading out from the human organism to make contact with some part of the environment, either physical or social or, most likely, both together. A track is a mutual mental awareness between two entities, primordially between two people, through which each influences and communicates with the other. They are mental extensions of a person that terminate in the mental extensions of other people, or other entities, through which conscious experience can be shared. The self or person, then, is a human organism whose interior life is composed of thousands of tracks, each having its origin in an experience, either past or present. When a group of people connect with each other and also with the same physical spaces, cultural forms, and routines, the resulting network has the potential to function as a small community. Within this network, an individual mind appears as a node, the intersection of a unique bundle of connections, illuminated by the concentrated sensation we call conscious awareness. At no time in a human life is the self solitary; an embryo is already connected and is actively forming new tracks.
The paper will develop an architecture of a social mind using the metaphor of tracks which contain person experiences. It is a version of identity theory that includes not only the body/brain and mind, but also the social and material environment. Whether neural nets and dynamic systems theory can be adapted from a modular metaphysics of the mind and applied to a "bundle of tracks" ontology will be considered, along with what might also be needed to extend the scientific study of consciousness into the social and physical environment.
01.10-- Abstract No:1251
To approach the problem of subjective experience, we need a working notion of the subject of an experience. To know what it is like to be something, we first need to settle what it is to be something. Subjecthood must be a fundamental part of all theories of mind. There are hard requirements to meet. We have to feel comfortable with the notion, or were back at square one. Nothing has really been explained. At the same time, it has to be possible to make it precise enough for use in science. It should, for instance, find its place in biological evolution.
The proposal put forward here is that we could think metaphorically of concavity as a necessary requirement for subjecthood. The mathematical concept of concavity applied to an area in two-dimensional space means (informally) that there is some straight line originating and ending within that area, while the line is at some point outside the area. Any subject has to be able to reach out and touch itself from the outside, in order to know itself as something in the world. Needless to say, this initial characterization will be elaborated on (to meet the second requirement) and put in relation to other approaches to subjecthood. Self-stimulation and knowing which thing in the world one is has been a recurrent theme in Daniel Dennetts work (e.g. Consciousness Explained 1991) . But where he claims that some original self-knowledge must be wired in, I suggest we must try this path all the way.
Comparisons are made against what I will call No Search approaches, Inward Search approaches, and Inside Outside Systems Search approaches. The NS is used as a straw man. The intention is simply to show that we get nowhere in talking about subjectivity in closed systems. Think of a closed network of computers sending signals to each other where and how should we look for dividing lines among the signals? IS approaches are those focusing on central control systems, exemplified by the inner eye hypothesis. The way I picture them is by a collection of funnels with the narrow parts pointing to a shared center. The wide parts are openings to the outside world, but they cannot themselves be turned inwards. IOSS approaches are exemplified by Gerald Edelmans (Bright Air, Brilliant Fire 1992) focus on the distinction between neural systems taking care of basic internal bodily needs, and the ones coping with outside world relations. The subject, I picture it, is the surface where the system looking inwards and the one looking outwards make contact. There is openness both inwards and outwards, but no way of looping into the outside world and back. No way of knowing oneself as something in the world.
01.10-- Abstract No:1266
Why does the human brain insist on interpreting the world and constructing a narrative? Our mind and brain accomplish the amazing feat of constructing our past--a process clearly fraught with errors of perception, memory, and judgment. By showing that the specific systems built into our brain do their work automatically and largely outside of our conscious awareness, our everyday notions of self and reality are called into question.
01.10-- Abstract No:1276
'Materialism' is true: every thing and event in the universe is physical in every respect .
Use of the phrase 'the self' is very unnatural in most speech contexts in most languages.
Some conclude from this that it is an illusion to think that there is such a thing as the self, an illusion that arises from improper use of language.
This is implausible - people aren't that foolish. The problem of the self doesn't arise from an unnatural use of language which arises from nowhere. On the contrary: use of a phrase like 'the self' arises from a strong, prior and independent sense that there is such a thing as the self.
The phrase 'the self' is completely useless as a theoretical term, however. It is used in too many ways (the woo-woo levels are high).
So the first goal is to set up 'the self' as a workable theoretical term and establish a strong framework for discussion.
The question that we would like to answer is the straightforward question of fact (1) Is there such a thing as the self? Does the self exist?
But we need to know what sort of thing we are asking about before we can begin trying to find out whether or not it exists.
How should we proceed? As remarked, it is the sense of the self - the vivid experience of there being such a thing as the self - that starts us off on the problem.
So the first thing to do is to see what sort of thing is figured in, and in that sense postulated by, the sense of the self. We can then ask whether or not such a thing exists.
That is: before we ask (1), the straight-up metaphysical question of fact (Does the self exist?) we need to ask and answer the phenomenological question (2) What sort of self is postulated by the sense of the self?
This is at first best taken as a question about human beings, as the local pheno-menological question (2.1) What sort of self is postulated by the ordinary human sense of the self? I will defend the view that we can generalize about the ordinary human sense of the self.
Once we have an answer to the local phenomenological question, we can go on to the general phenomenological question (2.2) Are there other possibilities, when it comes to having a sense of the self? (What sort of self is postulated by the minimal case of a genuine sense of the self?)
Once we have an answer to phenomenological questions (2.1) and (2.2), we can go back to (1), the metaphysical question about the self (Does the self exist?)
The proposal, then, is that phenomenology precedes metaphysics and strongly constrains it: the content of (1), the metaphysical question about the self, is fixed by the answers to (2.1) and (2.2), the phenomenological questions about the sense of the self.
More particularly: the answer to question (2.1) delivers necessary and sufficient conditions on being a self as ordinarily conceived of. The answer to question (2.2) delivers necessary and sufficient conditions on being a self.
This claim that phenomenology precedes metaphysics in this very strong sense is likely to be resisted. I think there is no other worthwhile way to approach the problem of the self, but even if you reject this view, you can still accept the framework of discussion that it sets up.
Proposed answer to (2.1), the local phenomenological question: the self is ordinarily conceived or experienced as
[1] a entity, in some sense
[2] a mental entity, in some sense
[3/4] single both [3] synchronically considered and [4] diachronically
considered
[5] ontically distinct from all other things
[6] a subject of experience, a conscious feeler and thinker
[7] an agent
[8] an entity that has a certain character or personality.
Corollary: if the self exists as ordinarily conceived of, it must have all these properties. And if something exists that has all these properties, then the self exists as ordinarily conceived of.
Comment: All of these proposed properties need examination, in order to see what they amount to (Note, for example, that I stretch the meaning of 'synchronic' slightly, and take it to apply to any consideration of the self that is a consideration of it during an experientially unitary or unbroken or hiatus-free period of thought or experience).
Proposed answer to (2.2), the general phenomenological question:
[1] a entity, in some sense
[2] a mental entity, in some sense
[3] an entity that is single synchronically considered
[5] ontically distinct from all other things
[6] a subject of experience, a conscious feeler and thinker.
Corollary: it may be that the self does not exist as ordinarily conceived of, but if something with these five properties exists, then the self exists.
Materialist constraint on any acceptable answer to (1), the factual or metaphysical question:
If it is to be true that a self exists, then a self must be shown to be a fully materialistically respectable occupant of spacetime, a physical object, as real as a rock, a rabbit, a mayfly or a W-particle.
Proposed answer to (1)
Selves do not exist as ordinarily conceived of: there is nothing that has properties [1]-[8].
More moderately: the best thing to say, all things considered, is that selves do not exist as ordinarily conceived of.
But selves do exist: there are things that have at least properties [1], [2], [3], [5], and [6].
More moderately put: the best thing to say, all things considered, is that selves do exist.
To see this clearly, one has to do more work on the so-called 'mind-body' problem, and on metaphysical questions about the relations between objects, processes, and properties.
01.11-- Abstract No:912
The status of free will has been been complicated by evidence which suggests that action sequences are initiated before individuals are aware of their subjective intention to perform the action (Libet) . Baars and his asscociates get around the problems created by this evidence by proposing that subjective consciousness does not influence actions directly but rather indirectly, by recruiting unconscious routines. I will extend what I see as Baars' view that the relationship between subjective experience and action is an indirect relation by providing two additional arguements to indicate how subjective consciousness and action are (can be) indirectly related. First arguement: Perceptual Filtering. -- Subjective consciousness can influence actions when conscious assessment of the social environment in the immediate past causes individuals to focus attention on particular aspects of the social environment in the immediate present. In this view, consciousness, as an extension of the immediate past, filters incoming stimuli to identify and make vivid significant features of the social environment that would not otherwise receive attention. The filtering argument for the utility of subjective consciousness is based on the importance of Fast Feedback Loops (Fast FLs) and in this sense can be seen as an extension of Baars' position. In addition to Baars, Cotterill has indicated the importance of Fast FLs, though he has not suggested this may be a way to understand the influence of consciousness on behavior. Still, the careful structure of his arguments is consistent with the possibility that consciousness functions to detect the social consequences of an action. Second argument: Slow Feedbakc Loops (Slow FLs) and the effects of subjectivity on actions -- In contrast to Fast FLs, which operate in the present, Slow FLs have a delated influence on actions. Slow FLs operate whenever conscious intentions are objectified in social relations through a process of externalization. The process of externalization can be grasped by an example. In modern societies, individuals who want to become scientists (or accountants, or engineeers, etc.) must, as a rule, enroll in universities. The university environment (geographical isolation, buildings, blackboards, classrooms, instructors, books, assignments, tests, grades, etc.) all constitute an institutional structure designed to keep students aware of the immediate tasks they must perform to reach their long-term goals. The institution, conceived as the organization of all educational resources, is, in part, a conscious design to accomplish specific long-range goals which members of the community (or their elite) consider important for the maintenance of the culture. Members who participate in institutional activities are continually made aware of the cultural design by the artifacts, relations and practices embodied in social institutions. The externalization of past consciousness into the formation of institutions exerts continual pressure on day-to-day working memory and so influences the everyday subjective states of the indivuals who perform within the institution. The premises involved in the operation of Slow FLs at the personal and cultural level are explored by Merlin Donald and Berger and Luckmann. When consciousness is externalized into the environment and returns to consciousness through Slow FLs, it should be apparent that the 'problem' of free will cannot be formulated entirely in terms of: (1) consciousness as a direct influence on actions; or (2) consciousness as a perceptual filter of Fast FLs. Formulations of free will must take accunt of the relations between individual consciousness and past consicousness, as elements of past consciousness are preserved in artifacts and practices of the social world. I will propose mechanisms to explain how the anonymous past, embodied in institutions and other social forms, comes alive as a subjective reality for individuals in the everyday, lived-in world.
01.11-- Abstract No:980
In this paper, the claim made "that man has free will, and at least sometimes makes use of it", will be examined from different viewpoints. First of all, to examine the concept of free will, it is necessary to formulate the concept in a way that is logically correct and coherent. Many philosophers have put forward proposals; which theory is the most likely candidate to be of philosophical value and coherence has yet to be seen and will be analysed.
It will be proposed that psychological studies (e.g. on emotions and cognition) of the past decades do, indeed, make it necessary to tighten the concept of free will and to redefine the philosophical concepts of what it means to have "desire", "reason", "urge", and/or "motive" to do a certain action or to choose or prefer one such given action and outcome over another.
Once we come to such a redefinition of free will, we will seek to weigh the evidence for and against this concept from a (1) neuropsychological viewpoint (e.g., the findings of Gazzaniga et al., on confabulating split-brain patients, Benjamin Libet's studies of readiness potientals preceeding a voluntary intentional simple action, and related findings by Kornhuber et al.), (2) from a psychological viewpoint (motivation theory), and (3) several other significant clues (e.g., the influence of drugs, the insanity-defense, necessity of choosing a recognized good, biological and evolutionary viewpoints).
This analysis suggests that the concept of free will is far from being disproven, as sometimes claimed, yet it is also still unproven. Even without a definite conclusion, discussion and research of this intriguing problem will be substantially easier and more productive, once we apply a coherent concept of free will as proposed in this paper. In the appendix, several thought experiments to further tackle the problem are listed.
01.12-- Abstract No:757
Unconscious beliefs -- innocently understood as beliefs that one has while asleep, otherwise unconscious, or conscious but thinking about other things entirely -- are not intentional, not directed at objects. That conscious beliefs are intentional, while unconscious beliefs are not is an important but unnoticed difference that goes far in both resolving and explaining why there are such deep divisions in the literature as to the relevance of consciousness and the first-person perspective to investigations of cognition.
In the process of developing the above, I examine what it is to 'have' a belief. I reject a 'storehouse' view of unconscious belief, arguing for a kind of dispositional analysis. I also contrast my view with John Searle's, who holds that unconscious beliefs are intentional, and show some of the advantages my view has over his. Further, since a belief is one and the same whether it is conscious or unconscious, my view would seem to violate Leibniz's Law; I explain why there is no such violation.
Building on the above and relying on the work of Kathleen Akins, Walter Freeman, and Christine Skarda, I generalize from my argument that unconscious beliefs are not intentional to the bold claim that unconscious representations are not intentional. But a 'representation' that is not intentional is no representation at all; thus, there are no unconscious representations. Although it is widely held that the same sense of 'representation' and 'belief' is involved in conscious and unconscious states, I argue that this is false. This false assumption is a major source of division in studies of cognition.
01.12-- Abstract No:758
Recently, a number of philosophers and psychologists (e.g., Baars, Chalmers, Flanagan, Goldman, Jackendoff, Levine, Loar, McGinn, Peacocke, Schweizer, Searle, and Strawson) have expressed the view that intentional states have qualitative character. As I will understand it, this view is that there is something it is like consciously to entertain the propositional content that p, which is distinct from what it is like consciously to entertain the propositional content that q. The thesis, though widely endorsed, is not widely argued for. In this paper I offer two arguments for it.
If the thesis is correct, it extends the problem of qualia to a realm whose presumed immunity to it has, for some, fed hopes for a complete naturalistic theory of the cognitive mind, utilizing only the resources of our current understanding of the nature of the brain and the principles of its structure and function. Moreover, it makes trouble for a certain brand of cognitivist eliminativism about perceptual phenomenology.
The first argument is a knowledge argument. I claim that it would be impossible for us introspectively to distinguish our conscious thoughts with respect to their content if there were not something it is like to think them, and that it clearly is possible for us to do this, since we do it in fact on a regular basis. This argument is defended against a number of objections, the most important of which appeals to a reliabilist account of self-knowledge.
The second argument is an argument from acquaintance. Using some standard cases from the linguistics literature (e.g. so-called 'garden-path' sentences, such as 'the horse raced past the barn fell') , I induce in the reader the sort of experience I am claiming exists. I claim that to deny the existence of the experience is to deny the obvious (it is like denying that you have felt pain when I pinch you very hard) , and that this is too heavy a burden for an eliminativist to bear.
In closing, I discuss the uniqueness, indescribability and extent of cognitive phenomenology, and make some preliminary remarks on the issue of the relationship between cognitive phenomenology and cognitive content.
01.12-- Abstract No:807
Visual scientists have sometimes supposed that there must be an isomorphism between the spatially distributed properties of the neural substrate of a percept and the spatially distributed properties of the percept itself (e.g. Todorovich 1987, Teller & Pugh 1983) . Suppose, for example, that you see a light patch to the left of a dark patch. According to the requirement of isomorphism, the neural substrate of this experience must consist of two sets of spatially continuous neural activity together with some neural structure corresponding to the perceived stepwise difference in brightness. This requirement of isomorphism functions as a condition on the adequacy of explanation in cognitive neuroscience. Following Pessoa et al. (in press) , I call this a priori requirement on explanation 'analytic isomorphism'. Its analytic character comes out in the fact that from the absence of isomorphism it is taken to follow that one has not yet reached the 'final stage' of neural analysis; one has not attained the immediate neural substrate of the experience.
The purpose of this paper is to develop an argument against analytic isomorphism, one drawing on important and largely neglected facts of phenomenology (and on the discussions in Thompson et al. (in press) , as well as Pessoa et al. (in press) ) . The argument turns on determining what is to count as a satisfactory characterization of the content of a perceptual experience. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult problem. Suppose, for example, that you see a hundred geese flying overhead. In one sense the content of your experience is that there are a hundred geese overhead. But in another sense this is not the content of your experience, since the presence or absence of one goose would make no noticeable difference to your experience. From this it can be concluded that the content of the experience is indeterminate with respect to the precise number of geese represented.
It has sometimes been noticed that this sort of indeterminacy or vagueness is an intrinsic and ineliminable feature of perceptual experience (Wittgenstein 1930/1975) . But what has not often been appreciated is the significance of this fact for our understanding of the neural bases of cognition.
In this paper I argue that a careful phenomenological investigation of experience indeed reveals this indeterminacy to be a hallmark of perceptual experience. In addition, I argue that analytic isomorphism is false because, as I shall try to demonstrate, it is not possible for a neural state to be isomorphic (in any appropriate sense) to the content of a perceptual experience (thus more adequately conceived as indeterminate) . The distinction between the personal and the subpersonal will play an important role in this discussion.
These considerations are shown to help us assess recent experimental literature on the detection of changes in visual scenes (Rensink et al. 1996; O'Regan et al. 1996; for a discussion of other relevant research, going back to the seventies, see Grimes 1996) , and to shed light on current debates about the nature of consciousness.
References
Grimes, J. (1996) On the failure to detect changes in scenes across saccades. In Perception, ed. K. Akins. New York: Oxford University Press.
O'Regan, J.K., Rensink, R.A, and Clark, J.J. (1996) 'Mud splashes' render picture changes invisible. ARVO Abstract. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science 37: S213.
Pessoa, L., E. Thompson & A. Noë. (in press) Finding out about filling in: a guide to perceptual completion for visual science and the philosophy of perception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Rensink, .R.A., O'Regan, J.K., and Clark, J.J. (1996) To see or not to see: the need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. ARVO Abstract. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science 37: S213.
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Wittgenstein, L. (1930/1975) Philosophical Remarks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
01.12-- Abstract No:845
The privileged access we have to our thoughts is one of the main points of contention between internalist and externalist theories of semantic representation. Recent criticisms of externalist interpretations of privileged access have demonstrated that it has difficulty capturing the fundamental intuition that we know what our thoughts are when we think them. very much into doubt. Thus it seems the onus is on the externalist to provide an account of semantic representation that preserves this intuition but eschews reference to narrow content. The purpose of this essay is to argue for an externalist account of privileged access that respects this intuition but does not entail that our thoughts have narrow semantic content. To accomplish this, we need to look carefully at the similarities between our knowledge of the content of our thoughts and our knowledge of the content of our sensory states. Most importantly, sensory and cognitive states both share a resistance to purely wide individuation; both sensory and cognitive states admit of narrow individuation uniquely by the subjects who occupy them. It is possible, therefore, that the way we individuate our own sensory states is the same way we individuate our own thoughts. The properties of these mental states responsible for the privileged access we have to them are simply their phenomenal properties. This suggests an alternative externalist strategy. Externalists can consistently deny the existence of narrow content and affirm the narrow individuation of thoughts, by maintaining that the phenomenal properties of our thoughts (as well as our sensory states) allow us to individuate them narrowly but do not constitute any part of the content of our thoughts.
01.12-- Abstract No:1104
The idea that something is an epistemic given, a piece of immediate knowledge etc, is closely connected with a notion that consciousness includes both an intentional and an epistemic component. We tend to believe that awareness is often awareness of something. In the spirit of Cartesianism we seem to take it for granted that we can't be mistaken about what we are consciously aware of. Undoubtedly many current philosophers admit that Decartes and Brentano are wrong. Almost everyone claim that we are not ghosts in machines doing introspection. But when it comes to notions as meaning, intention and consciousness there are definitely essential problems involved in construing a coherent non-vitalist picture.
Frege's sense-reference semantics allows for the possibility that different co-referring terms make different contributions to thought content. In 'Tully is Cicero' the nontrivial information is gathered from the distinctive modes of presentation that 'Tully' and 'Cicero' provide. These modes of presentation are distinctive ways in which to fixing the referent cognitively, to sorting it out from every other thing in the universe. The Fregean idea that one must have a way to cognitively fix Q, in order to think about Q, implies a sort of intentionality. To grasp a meaning is to be aware of a mode of presentation.
In the naturalist framework there has been different strategies to handle Frege's observation that there are cognitive differences between different co-referential terms. One way has been to take a Millian 'direct reference' approach to semantics. This approach has recently been developed in different directions which all more or less explicitly depart from the idea that one has to be able to get a cognitive grip on the referent to be able to refer.
In this paper I will discuss Millikan's suggestion (1984, 1993) that 'meaning rationalism' is false: an intact thinker that gets two contents presented to herself in an identical mode of presentation does not need to recognize the sameness of content. Modes of presentation are not a priori. Millikan claims (1990) that our being conscious does not make us intentional. Meaning is neither a state of awareness nor an epistemic given.
I will discuss an alternative naturalistic strategy according to which an aspect of consciousness performs a certain function in relation to epistemology and semantics. Consciousness has a role to play in cognitive simulation of the world.
According to Millikan, semantics should be based on truth correspondence rules. These are distinctive from, and supported by, proximal assertability rules. The biological purpose of conformity to the proximal rules is to effect conformity to the distal correspondence rules.
The alternative strategy discussed considers the possibility of embracing both verificationism and the correspondence thesis. Perhaps we could have one semantics based on verificationalist truth conditions connected with our internal simulated world, and another related semantics based on correspondence conditions between the simulated world and the world.
01.12-- Abstract No:1195
Intensionality is often stated as "the mark of the mental." There is no room, however, for intentional mental phenomena given Churchland's model of cognition, a computational approach inspired by successes in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence and founded on the eliminative materialist position.
Churchland wishes to challenge intentionality, opting to direct his criticisms at the theoretical level rather than at the philosphical level of intentionality in general. He does this by linking intentionality to propositional attitudes, and then the propositional attitudes to folk psychology. He claims that switching the debate from intentionality to the nature of folk psychology is justified because the key feature or "mark" of cognition is not intentionality but rather the fact that folk psychology exploits a standard scientific explanatory strategy (e.g. the D-N Model of explantion) in its function of explaining and predicting human behavior. Churchland then tries to establish the structural similarities folk psychology shares with more estabilshed scientific theories, such as theories in physics (e.g. the structural similarities between propositional attitudes and numerical attitudes) . If these structural similarities prove to be the mark of the cognition, then these alleged intentional phenomena, he argues, are little more than theoretical entities that stand or fall in relation to the strength of the theory of which they are a part, viz. folk psychology.
But all that Churchland does here, we argue, is to create a strawman in order to evade directly addressing intentionality itself. This is because, even if it is the case that Churchland proves that (1) the fundamental aspect of cognition is the fact that it is explained in a standard scientific fashion; and (2) this folk psychological theory is fundamentally deficient in comparison to a developin neuroscience. Churchland still falls short in his goal of defeating or dissolving the problem intentionality poses for his eliminative materialism. This is because his argument commits a second fallacy: the fallacy of division. For arguing that folk psychology as a whole is a weak theory does not entail that all intentional mental phenomena explainable within folk psychology are similarly weak. The intentional mental phenomena cannot be categorically dismissed simply by pointing out a few chinks in folk psychology's armor.
Churchland, however, cannot really avoid the philosophical level of treating the problem of intentionality for he must respond to John Searle's Chinese Room Argument. Searle's thought experiment aims at establishing that no computational account of cognition will suffice because it will be forever stuck at the level of mere syntax, forever barred from genuine meaning or semantic content. Searle's argument illustrates how a monolingual anglophone acting as a CPU (i.e. guiding outputs of Chinese characters by virtue of syntax sensitive rules) will forever be barred from the genuine understanding that a Chinese speaker who is aware of meanings of the various characters. Searle's argument is meant to illustrate that intentionality could therefore never be reduced to the brain's computational processes.
Churchland enters this debate in an attempt to illustrate, with his own Luminous Room Argument, that Searle's argument is question begging in its assumption -- not proof -- that syntax is forever distinct from semantics, as question begging as concluding that light couldn't be electromagnetic waves because a bar magnet shaken by hand in the dark produces no light. (Churchland argues that such a magnet would produce light.) However, we argue that Churchland's own argument appears to be question begging in a number of ways, all turning on the attempted parallel between the well established theory of light on the one hand, and a speculative and a significantly less well established position that sufficiently complex syntax creates semantics, other hand.
01.12-- Abstract No:1287
[abstract to follow]
01.13-- Abstract No:918
Our understanding of consciousness is key to a larger paradigm of knowledge. Attempting to lay out an over-all framework of my present understanding, I've asked four "primary questions": (I) What is world's over-all structure? (II) How can I know world's structure? (III) Can I relate causality to 'free will'? (IV) What are the limits of knowledge? Tentative conclusions were these: (I) To understand world's over-all structure I need the related concepts of structural levels and downward causation, and to look at the ways these concepts are used to map our world. World's basic structure then maps as a holarchy of multiple nested levels (Koestler 1978), each a holon constructed out of (and including) the holons of the level beneath, in a way that yields downward causation as tautological necessity. (II) My mind is a holarchic system of dynamic maps, which anticipate my actions and their consequences. Thus, mind is predictive process, analogous to a predictive scientific theory. As my brain reconstructs its processes of anticipation, I am aware of those map-structures -- my awareness is postulated to be the process of revising them. Thus the function of my consciousness is the reconstruction of my anticipatory maps. The present structure of these maps is product of the total history of my consciousness. Correspondences of these ideas with those in consciousness theories of Baars, Edelman, Pribram and others are traced. Neurophysiological correlates and underpinnings of consciousness will also be explored (using especially writings by Baars, Edelman, Flohr, and Newman). (III) Freedom arises out of downward causation when my choice is determined from a higher level (thus by something 'larger') than the ordinary compulsions that are predictively modeled by my unconscious anticipatory automatisms. My choice may also be freed by non-algorithmic components in the accommodative restructuring that characterizes conscious volitional actions -- a freedom far thinner than I know, because (by my situation's logical structure) my awareness has no immediate access its own depth. Finally, it is postulated that mind's action-choosing is inseparable from its effect-predicting. (IV) What can be known is relatively tiny: My ignorance is inevitably vast yet invisible. The complexity -- the dimensionality -- of my maps is necessarily limited, because human cognitive capacities are limited. Yet (it is hypothesized) there is no upward limit to the dimensionality that would be required to exhaustively map all the world's levels of order. If this is true, then the existence of levels higher than any we can know or imagine is undeniable, and the human generation of complete predictions is in principle beyond reach. This perspective can reconcile free will with determinism. Conflict between the advocate of "free will" and that of "determinism" is unnecessary, for each is correct -- but their thoughts, problems, intentions and interests occupy significantly different universes. We can best enlarge our paradigm, opening it to further evolution and inclusion of seeming opposites, by probing and questioning our unconscious presuppositions.
01.13-- Abstract No:921
A major challenge for philosophy of the mind is to reconcile our everyday experience of a distinct mental life, which has a causal effect on our actions and hence on the physical world, with the materialistic and reductionist theories that dominate current thinking. It is attractive to propose mental life as a distinct property of the physical world that in some way depends or supervenes upon it. If such a property is fully reducible to the physical, as many materialist would have it, then there is really no place, no 'added value' for considering mental properties as distinct. On the other hand, if mental properties are not fully reducible, then how can they play a causal role when we consider cause and effect to be characteristic of the physical nature of the world?
Jaegwon Kim [Kim 1993] describes causal mechanisms between properties that are fully reducible to physical explanations as Epiphenominal Causation. The causal link is real enough, but the appearance that it is a causal link between high level properties is illusory or epiphenominal. Kim proposes Supervenient Epiphenominal Causation to describe a similar illusory causal link between properties that are supervenient, that is where the properties are not reducible to the physical, but where the causal mechanism is a recognisable physical law. I propose an extension to the concept where Supervenient Causation describes a causal mechanism that itself is a genuine supervenient property, not a basic physical law. Kim rejects such a concept; he calls it a causal dangler. I propose that such a rejection naturally follows in a philosophical culture that considers causes and effects to be independent isolated event pairs or to occur only in simple chains.
Complex phenomena such as the weather or biological organisms are explained scientifically in terms of interacting systems, feedback loops, complexity and emergent behaviour. Networks of serial and parallel causal interactions produce chaotic emergent behaviour that follows physical laws, is deterministic, exhibits stable patterns, but is essentially unpredictable, unrepeatable and not explicable just in terms of the low level physical laws. The human brain is a system of complex interacting neurons and neuronal groups and I propose it is possible to conceive that complex patterns of systems interaction within the brain give rise to the emergence of high level behaviour that we recognise as mental life. The behaviour, that is to say the complex systems interaction, is part of the causal network of the physical world, but its nature and effect is not explicable simply in terms of fundamental physical laws. Mental life explained this way is truly an example of Supervenient Causation.
Systems theory has been slow to find its way into philosophical explanations of the mind. I propose that theories of the mind based on such concepts will open the way for explanations of mental causation that fit with materialist explanations of the world, but do not deny the distinct nature of our mental life.
Kim, J. 1993. Epiphenominal and Supervenient Causation. In Supervenience and the Mind. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy, Cambridge University Press.
01.13-- Abstract No:948
The dualism of mind and body is not the only hard problem concerning consciousness. There is another one: the dualism of physical and subjective time. It is an open question whether the experience we get of the passage of time is a subjective impression only or an experience of something that exists independently from being experienced. We do not know whether the present is identical with the presence of consciousness or not.
For physics, the passage of time is a subjective impression to which nothing corresponds except itself. For experience, the passage of time is a truth that logical reason has not the power to question. In both the case that the impr ession of flow is purely subjective and in the case that this impression is something other than subjective, the association of consciousness and nowness opens novel ways of attacking the hard problem. In contrast to phenomena such as qualia and intentional attitudes, the now and its travel can be comed intersubjectively. People agree on living in the now. They even agree on the time and date being. In the case that the passage of time is a kind of subjective illusion, it is an illusion that is objective in the social sense. Hence, the now and its travel are phenomena that are accessible from the first person perspecitve and from the perspective of the third person as well.
When looked at from the first person perspective, the now presents itself as the origin of the stream of consciousness. When looked at from the perspective of the third person, the now appears to be the origin of as many branches of this stream as sentient beings are living at present. From a collective point of view it seems much more natural to look at the stream as originating in the past instead of in the present. The sum total of the individual streams of consciousness is what we call history. History reaches past individual rememberance. It even reaches past human memory. When adopting a historical point of view, the vista of a pre-conscious prehistory of time's flow opens. In postulating a pre-conscious p rehistory of nowness, a whole class of empirical questions concerning the origin of phenomenal consciousness enters the field.
Even though no physical or biological mechanism whatsoever could be found giving rise to what we experience as the now, this experience is synchronized intersubjectively. In the case that it the now is a mere phenomenon, this synchronization would come up to a mira cle. It seems safe, thus, to conjecture that there must be some physical or biological mechanism accomplishing this synchronization, at least. By being physical or biological in nature, the search after this mechanism opens another way of invenstigating phenomenal consciousness from an empirical point of view.
In the paper, a perspective is presented showing these empirical questions to be related to unsolved problems concerning the phenomenological description of time's flow. Materially, the paper is a contiuation of the lecture 'Consciousness and Nowness', delivered at the Self and Brain workshop in Elsinore this year.
01.13-- Abstract No:965
What makes the study of subjective experience so challenging is in great part a lack in "fundamental cognitive tools for the task", a lack in taxonomy and mainly, in "consensus on the constructs or terminology with which to characterize its richness" [Galin].
It follows from the very nature of subjective experience that the fundamental cognitive tools for its exploration have to be introspection and self-report. Many materialist philosophers, however, especially eliminative materialists like e.g. Churchland , reject folk psychology (FP) , and in doing so also reject these fundamental tools.
According to Searle, those who reject FP make the mistake "to suppose that FP is a theory, " and, moreover "that all the propositions of the theory are empirical hypotheses." But these propositions are in contrast facts: "We simply experience conscious beliefs and desires." Those who reject FP further argue that commonsense taxonomy fails "to match the taxonomy of brain science (this is what is meant by the failure of 'smooth reduction' [of the elements of FP to those of neurobiology]) . . ." [Searle].
We agree with Searle, who points out that "What is actually likely to happen, indeed is happening, is that common sense will be supplemented with additional scientific knowledge."
Based on Gregory Bateson's studies of systems and schizophrenia, and his observation that "in the processes of learning, change, and communication there were natural hierarchies of classification", the function of each level being "to organize the information on the level below it, and the rules for changing something on one level were different from those for changing a lower level", [Dilts] Robert Dilts has identified different levels of brain processing, which he calls neurological levels.
The basic levels he has been studying and working with are: environment, behavior, capabilities, beliefs and values, and identity. Environment refers to the external context in which our behavior takes place. Behavior refers to our physical actions and reactions through which we interact with our environment. Capabilities are our mental maps and cognitive strategies which allow us to behave as we do. Beliefs refer to "generalization about a [causal, meaning, or boundary] relationship between experiences, [Dilts]." Identity is our sense of who we are, which, in turn, "organizes our beliefs, capabilities, and behaviors into a single system." For this system to exist and function properly, the neurological levels must be aligned. This notion will be explained in detail in this paper. Does the system not work properly, then reasons must be found in the environment, the behavior, the capabilities, the beliefs, or at the level of the identity of the whole system.
Obviously the concept of neurological levels is based on FP elements. However, besides having proven to be of extreme utility in helping people "align themselves", there is increasing empirical evidence that these different levels actually correspond to different levels of neurological commitment: Identity correlates with the immune system and endocrine system, beliefs with the autonomic nervous system, capabilities with the cortical system (semiconscious actions) , behaviors with the motor system (conscious actions) , and environment with the peripheral nervous system, sensations and reflex reactions.
In this paper we will report the results of a study aimed at studying the reasons for higher education math and sciences failing to retain women at a rate which would even come close to that of men. The study is an analysis of questionnaire interview data collected over the period of two years, concerning the neurological levels and their alignment. The study indicates that most women who leave the higher education math or sciences do so in order to attain alignment of neurological levels, which, in turn, suggests that today's higher education math and sciences culture conflicts with these women's pursuit of alignment.
01.13-- Abstract No:1043
A general difficulty for physicalism with respect to consciousness is the threat of epiphenomenalism. The question is how to reconcile the claim that consciousness is ultimately a brain process with the claim that consciousness has causal powers that are irreducible to the causal powers of the brain. As Kim (1993) has argued, the problem for nonreductive physicalism is whether upward determination (ensuring physicalism) can be combined with downward causation (avoiding epiphenomenalism) . Kim challenges nonreductivists to show how the causal powers of a realized property are determined by but not identical with or reducible to the causal powers of its realization base.
Recently, the notion of 'circular causality' has been introduced by proponents of the dynamical systems theory in their analysis of 'how the mind gets into muscle' (Kelso, 1995) . The basic idea of circular causality is that the interaction of low-level components can result in a high-level pattern which in turn causally constrains the behavior of the low-level components. Circular causality is a mathematically well-understood phenomenon that can be observed in many natural events. In the paper I will investigate whether the notion of 'circular causality' can help nonreductive physicalists in answering Kim's challenge.
References:
Kelso, J.A. (1995) Dynamic patterns: the self-organization of brain and behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT-Press
Kim, J. (1993) Supervenience and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
01.13-- Abstract No:1106
As is well known, our ability of sensory discrimination surpasses the corresponding ability of stimulus recognition by far. This discrepancy can be reformulated in terms of the limitations of our conceptual resources on the one hand, and the richness of phenomenal experience on the other. Which is no surprise as concepts, after all, must be classificatory (or abstract) representations, that is, representations carrying generalized information. D. Raffman[1] has recently called this the memory constraint, due to the limitations on perceptual memory which it reveals: as Dretske has already been emphasizing many years ago, 'our sensory experience embodies information about a variety of details that, if carried over in toto to the cognitive centers, would require gigantically large storage and retrieval capacities.'[2]
I would like to explore and assess the implications which have been drawn from the memory constraint in regard to different aspects of the philosophy of mind. Is the memory constraint, as Dretske nowadays contends, fatal to Rosenthal’s and others’ HOT account of consciousness? Does it provide a convincing rebuttal of mode-of-presentation-based replies to the Knowledge Argument, as Raffman would have it? It wouldn't if Dennett is right about conscious uptake requiring some sort of identification or categorization in the first place.What fit, if any, is there between the above-mentioned distinction and the distinctions Block has made between phenomenal and access consciousness?
1. Raffman, D. (1995) : 'On the Persistence of Phenomenology'. In T. Metzinger (ed) , Conscious Experience. Paderborn: Schöningh/Imprint Academic.
2. Dretske, F. (1981) : Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
01.13-- Abstract No:1133
In his short paper 'Varieties of Zombiehood' (1995) , Güven Güzeldere argues that the question if philosophical zombies are possible needs further specification: We have to make clear what kind of zombies and what kind of possibility we talk about. I consider his distinction between behavioral, functional, and physiological zombies to be fairly correct, or at least pointing in the right direction. On the basis of a slightly modified version of this distinction, I shall argue that functional and physiological zombies are impossible in a very strict, perhaps analytical sense, whereas behavioural zombies are analytically and perhaps even nomologically possible - although they are not very likely to evolve under natural circumstances. More exactly, by functional zombies I mean beings which resemble us completely in behaviour and functional design, i.e. in the way of information processing in their nerveous system (or whatever plays the role of a nerveous system in them) , but do not have any internal experiences or qualia. Physiological zombies share our physiological structure down to the last neuron, but not our experiences and qualia; and behavioural zombies share our behavioural dispositions without enjoying any of our experiences. Behavioural zombies can possibly have a different functional design, i.e. they are not necessarily functional zombies, but their behaviour is supposed to be produced in a systematic way by their internal structure - not by a miracle or an act of Deity. I shall try to show that functional zombies are impossible in a strict sense because some central aspects of our functional design seem necessarily to give rise to phenomenal experience. The most important aspect is the highly parallel structure of information processing, which keeps a lot of information about our environment and our position in it simultaneously 'present' and so creates a 'broad basis' for spontaneous decisions as well as for more detailed arbitrary considerations about what to do next. My thesis is that (contra Block) for any being with such a functional design access-conscious internal states will necessarily have the typical qualities of phenomenal experiences (privateness, simplicity, ineffability, etc) . Physiological zombies are as impossible as functional ones, since beings of the same physiological structure evidently share the same functional design. Behavioural zombies are possible in principle, because it is supposed that their design can be very different from ours. Especially, it is at least conceivable that information processing goes on in a less parallel way in them. But since serial information processing seems to be, for the relevant purposes, far less effective than parallel processing, it can be doubted whether such creatures could really evolve in nature. At the end of the paper, I shall try to draw some consequences from my view about functional design and qualia for the the so-called knowledge-problem.
01.13-- Abstract No:1160
The enigma of conscious life is the very heart of occidental metaphysics, and it can be safely argued that it is the impossibility to solve it within a unitary framework which leads to the dissipation of medieval rational theology and consequently to three separate lines of research: science, humanities and modern metaphysics. (The central role of astronomy in what is called the birth of modern science is but a consequence of an impasse that arose earlier.)
It is in the thirteenth century that the mind-body-problem presents itself to its full extent to western philosophers: in a unique constellation, they regain access to greek philosophy and to its hellenistic transformations as well as to its arabic and jewish interpretations. The christian contribution -- an investigation into the life of the human soul and into the interrelatedness of intellect and will in Trinity, of which the human mind is an image -- is deeply challenged. Albertus Magnus becomes acquainted with the non-christian traditions in Paris, where the Dominican Order has sent him, and he is left to etaborate them in Cologne, untouched by the ecclesiastic reactions in Paris, which try to censure, especially, the reception of the arabic sources.
All researchers agree in three basic lines of argument: 1) The crucial point in Albert's philosophy is "rational psychology". 2) More than any other philosopher in the 13th century Albert pays attention to the treasures of empirical observation handed down by tradition. 3) In his attempt to construct a unitary metaphysics he fails -- where his student Thomas Aquinas will succeed.
The impossibility to undertake empirical research, cosmology and rational theology uno actu seems obvious to us today; so the absence of a metaphysical theory that harmonises them is, for us, rather a sign of intellectual soberness than a failure.
Considering today's (and tomorrows) theory of consciousness as a reformulation of the classical philosophical problem of conscious life leads into an investigation of medieval thinking that "reads" the works of Albert from the point of view of a "phenomenology" of conscious life and is more promising than any approach that concentrates on the aspect of its precursorship in regard to modern metaphysics that have excluded the empirical dimension a priori.
But while it is clear what a researcher of medieval philosophy will gain from a closer look on theory of consciousness, it has simply to be "tested", what, vice versa, researchers in other fields could gain from a closer look on Albert's efforts to handle sensual perception as well as the intentionality and self-referentiality of conscious acts, in an approach that had its short day between the reception of the mediterranean traditions and the birth of modern science.
01.13-- Abstract No:1290
Inverted spectrum arguments are blunt instruments that dualists use to thrash type-materialists, functionalists, and other such miscreants. They depend on the assumption that the same color qualia can be instantiated in quite different neurofunctional configurations. I shall suggest that this is an illusion, one that is made possible by underdescribing both the phenomenology of color experience and its neural substrate. This will be illustrated by looking at some color-naming data which show that human and primate color categories are, as might be expected from biological systems, a rag-tag lot occupying regions of color spaces that vary greatly in size and shape. ('Color space' is deliberately used in the plural, since the structure of a color-order system will vary with the purposes for which it is constructed, and the regions that will be carved out will depend upon the task demand.) Such regions cannot be exchanged for each other without leaving large behavioral footprints. Color categories can be linked to opponent-response functions of a more complex sort than appear in spectral cancellation experiments, and there is every reason to suppose that opponent-response functions represent the responses of neural networks. But cannot we imagine creatures very much like ourselves whose color space is fully invertable? The response must be that since color categories reflect similarities and differences among the colors themselves, a "color" space that was invertable would not be a space of colors like ours, so the supposed state of affairs would not be literally imaginable. And why should imaginability carry so much freight, especialy since the imagined story is so sparing of details? In the case of colors, what was so readily imaginable initially proved to be problematic in the extreme when the real details are filled out. Since structure and quality seem so intertwined, why not suppose that the similarities and differences in qualia are simply the expressions of similarities and differences in neural coding? If this heuristic supposition proves frutiful, to explain qualia neurophysiologically would simply be to describe their phenomenal structure exhaustively, exhibit the realization of this phenomenal structure by neurofunctional structure, and show how that enables the animal to guide its behavior. The "hard" problem would then amount to the sum of a vast number of "easy" problems which, heavens knows, are already hard enough.
01.13-- Abstract No:1291
Theories about the physiological basis and the genetics of color vision deficiences led color scientists to the prediction that some people are 'pseudonormal': they are expected to have normal color vision except that the sensations of red and green would be reversed. What are the philosophical consequences to be drawn from this case? Starting from the case of pseudonormal vision the talk argues against functionalism as a theory of mind and for the explanatory gap thesis: there is something about qualitative states that escapes the explanatory resources of any possible scientific theory.