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 efficie