Minds and Brains

How to be a genuine achiever in the experience machine

January 20, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

The experience machine is a hypothetical thought experiment whereby one is jacked into a supercomputer and you live in a Matrix-like virtual reality that is experientially identical to normal experience here on Earth. Here’s the question: would you “plug in” to the experience machine and experience a perfectly pleasant existence despite the fact that it wouldn’t be “real”? From what I have gathered, most philosophers believe the most sensible answer is “No, I would not plug in; I prefer reality”. The reasoning behind this judgement is tied into the nature of achievement. What is more satisfactory? To climb Mount Everest in real life or in an experience machine? Most philosophers argue that real achievement, as opposed to false achievement (“You didn’t actually climb Mount Everest”) is more satisfactory or valuable. Real achievement is supposed to be more meaningful, valuable, and satisfactory.

There is also another worry about the experience machine: it would generate false beliefs. If you were in the experience machine and climbing Mount Everest your belief “I am at Mount Everest” would be in fact false. You would really be sitting in some darkened room, plugged into the experience machine, not at Mount Everest. Since it is rational to value true beliefs as opposed to false beliefs, we should not want to plug into the experience machine, because almost all of our beliefs would be false.

I think both of these objections fail in their attempt to show the inferiority of the experience machine. Let me start with the epistemic worry. Suppose that the experience machine is designed so that when you first plug in you retain all your memories acquired in real life. Moreover, suppose that before you plugged in, you asked the programmers to code a clear and definite signal once you are plugged in that says “Hello X, this is the programmers. We’re just letting you know that you are now in fact in the experience machine. Have fun!” Once you plug in and “wake up” in the indistinguishable virtual world, you hear a great booming omnipresent voice that says “ ”Hello X, this is the programmers. We’re just letting you know that you are now in fact in the experience machine. Have fun!” Since you will have retained your memory of having talked to the programmers about this very signal, you have reasonable confidence (inference to the best explanation) that this voice does in fact mean that you are in the experience machine, and that you didn’t hallucinate the signal (which would have disastrous effects if you wanted to be a dare devil in the experience machine).

Thus, when you climb the virtual Mount Everest, you will not in fact believe “I am actually at Mount Everest”. Instead your belief will be “I am climbing Mount Everest inside the experience machine”. This conscious knowledge of being in the experience machine, so long as you continue to recall that fact, will inevitably affect every single other belief. Thus, your beliefs will be by and large true. The objection that the experience machine will lead to false beliefs therefore fails, because so long as you are conscious of the fact that you are in the experience machine, you can have a meta-knowledge to the effect that “I am not actually climbing Mount Everest, I am just in the experience machine”.

Now, let me spell out how it’s possible to be genuinely successful in your achievements in the experience machine. I’ve been assuming that while in the experience machine you have genuine conscious choice. That is, in the experience machine you have the genuine ability to consciously direct your actions. If you consciously decide to drink a cup of coffee in the experience machine, it will because the experience machine is responding to your genuine intentions (which are obviously grounded in an objectively real neural substrate). So let’s take the example of playing chess in the experience machine. If you decided to play someone in a game of chess in the experience machine, each and every one of your decisions about how to move the pawns and pieces would be a decision that you and you alone consciously chose to make. No one forced you to make those moves, and they weren’t the result of some automatic mechanism (except to the extent that the fleshy brain processes realizing your conscious intentions are themselves “automatic”, which in this sense simply means causally deterministic as opposed to not consciously intentional). Moreover, since the only memories you would be programmed to have access to were your original memories, any chess theory recalled during a decision making process would be a result of having remembered it from your actual study during real life or during study while in the virtual machine (it seems perfectly possible to get better at chess while in the experience machine). I therefore think it would be false to say that if you won a game of chess in the experience machine, it wouldn’t count as a genuine achievement. I believe it’s intuitive that winning a game of chess against a programmed chess opponent would count as a genuine intellectual achievement, especially if the programmed chess opponent wasn’t a patzer.

Chess is a clear example because it seems intuitive that intellectual achievements can be substrate neutral. It doesn’t matter if you play chess in real life, over the internet, or in virtual reality, each and every decision made is a result of your own conscious will just the same as in real life. A win is a win: a clear demonstration of your intellectual skill, an achievement if there ever was one. So that’s one way to generate “genuine” satisfactions in the experience machine. But I think that even something like climbing Mount Everest in the experience machine could still be considered a genuine achievement. Sure, you are not placing your life in jeopardy or exerting actual physical energy, but the programmers could be extremely clever. They could simulate difficulty of breathing, feelings of fatigue, etc., that you would have to mentally fight against. Moreover, it would take genuine climbing skills, knowledge, and effort to be able to determine which route to take in the experience machine. If a complete climbing novice was in the experience machine, they could attempt it under realistic simulation conditions all they wanted, but the chance of them figuring out how to actually choose where to step and where to hold so as to get to the top are slim. So it would in fact require genuine intelligence to be able to consciously choose which ascension route to take.

Therefore, the claim that the experience machine is inferior to real life cannot be supported by the arguments that one will have primarily false beliefs and that one will be incapable of genuine achievement. With the right programming and the presence of genuine conscious belief and genuine conscious decision making, true belief and genuine achievement are possible in the experience machine. It might be objected that one will miss having “genuine” social encounters if one was in the experience machine. But so long as we are discussing science fiction, there is no reason why different people in different experience machines couldn’t interact in a realistic version of Second Life. Now let’s fire up our imaginations and suppose that every person in the world was plugged into different experience machines so that they could all live in a perfectly realistic version of Second Life. Let us also suppose that (1) the experience machine technology is eternally self-repairing and (2) the experience machine technology is eternally life-supporting.* Now what would be a better possible world? A future “real” world or a future virtual utopia without any worry of death or suffering? If someone decided to consciously inflict evil while plugged in, the programming would simply prevent that person from interfering with the well-being of the other virtual persons. It seems obvious to me that virtual utopia is much more valuable and genuinely optimific than our current reality as mortal beings on Earth.

*When the Sun eventually dies out billions of years from now, the robots will have to evacuate all the plugged in humans to a safer system. I also assume that some kind of heat death wouldn’t be a problem. And even if it was a problem, the extension of sentient pleasure all the way to the farthest possible time in universal history would have still been the best thing to have done, regardless if it wasn’t eternally everlasting.

Consciousness, Philosophy achievement, consciousness, the experience machine, value, virtual reality

The Argument From Marginal Cases For Animal Rights

January 16, 2012 Gary Williams 4 comments

As of late, I’ve been getting really interested in animal rights philosophy, not because I’m close to turning into a vegan or anything, but simply because I find philosophical arguments that depend on comparative animal psychology to be really interesting. And I’ve been interested in the philosophy of animal minds for a long time, so the connection to my research is obvious. In particular, the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC) really interests me. The AMC is one of the primary arguments used to support the idea that nonhuman animals have rights just the same as humans. I found the following summary of the AMC in a paper by Daniel Dombrowski:

1. It is undeniable that [members of ] many species other than our own have ‘interests’ — at least in the minimal sense that they feel and try to avoid pain, and feel and seek various sorts of pleasure and satisfaction.
2. It is equally undeniable that human infants and some of the profoundly retarded have interests in only the sense that members of these other species have them — and not in the sense that normal adult humans have them. That is, human infants and some of the profoundly retarded [i.e. the marginal cases of humanity] lack the normal adult qualities of purposiveness, self-consciousness, memory, imagination, and anticipation to the same extent that [members of ] some other species of animals lack those qualities.
3. Thus, in terms of the morally relevant characteristic of having interests, some humans must be equated with members of other species rather than with normal adult human beings.
4. Yet predominant moral judgments about conduct toward these humans are dramatically different from judgments about conduct toward the comparable animals. It is customary to raise the animals for food, to subject them to lethal scientiﬁc experiments, to treat them as chattels, and so forth. It is not customary — indeed it is abhorrent to most people even to consider — the same practices for human infants and the [severely] retarded.
5. But absent a ﬁnding of some morally relevant characteristic (other than having interests) that distinguishes these humans and animals, we must conclude that the predominant moral judgments about them are inconsistent. To be consistent, and to that extent rational, we must either treat the humans the same way we now treat the animals, or treat the animals the same way we now treat the humans.
6. And there does not seem to be a morally relevant characteristic that distinguishes all humans from all other animals. Sentience, rationality, personhood, and so forth all fail. The relevant theological doctrines are correctly regarded as unveriﬁable and hence unacceptable as a basis for a philosophical morality. The assertion that the difference lies in the potential to develop interests analogous to those of normal adult humans is also correctly dismissed. After all, it is easily shown that some humans — whom we nonetheless refuse to treat as animals — lack the relevant potential. In short, the standard candidates for a morally relevant differentiating characteristic can be rejected.
7. The conclusion is, therefore, that we cannot give a reasoned justiﬁcation for the differences in ordinary conduct toward some humans as against some animals

So here’s why I think the AMC is rather weak.

I don’t have any problems with premise (1). Premise (2) is already problematic though. The claim is that “human infants and some of the profoundly retarded [i.e. the marginal cases of humanity] lack the normal adult qualities of purposiveness, self-consciousness, memory, imagination, and anticipation to the same extent that [members of ] some other species of animals lack those qualities.” While it is undoubtedly clear that a human baby possesses less self-consciousness, imagination, and anticipation that human adults, there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that human babies are remarkably well-developed cognitively, they just lack the capacity of expression. So a human baby is certainly more intelligent than a chicken, and possibly more intelligent than a cow. The problem is that human babies have no way to express their intelligence since they can’t speak yet nor can they use their motor skills to communicate. But subtle experiments demonstrate the extent of their cognitive sophistication.

Moreover, the AMC ignores an obvious extension of the “marginal case” of the human baby: human fetuses. It seems like many speciesist would not include human fetuses in the moral sphere precisely because of how marginal their cognition is. And the development of human-like cognition is one of the markers for where we start drawing the line for abortion. The more developed the brain becomes, the less we feel it’s right to abort a child. And it could be said that the actual birth is an arbitrary cut-off point. If a baby was born without any brain, then it’s likely we would not include that baby into the moral sphere and mercifully end its life without its explicit consent.

But what about mentally retarded people like those with severe autism or Alzheimers? Clearly these entities lack the uniquely human cognitive capacities that characterize a normal human adult, yet we don’t treat them like cattle. Isn’t this inconsistent? Hardly. In the case of most autistic children, I believe the evidence shows that they either have a reduced human cognitive skill set or a different cognitive skill set, but it is rare that they have no skill set at all. I would daresay that your average autistic child is more cognitively sophisticated than a chicken. And the same for your average Alzheimers patient. Likely, an Alzheimer patient, for the majority of their disease progression, has a reduced cognitive skill set, but they don’t lack one altogether. And when such persons do eventually completely lack consciousness, why would a speciesist assume that they have full moral rights? Personally, if I ever developed Alzheimers, I would hope that my society permitted assisted suicide or mercy killing once I reach a totally advanced stage of the disease. Likewise for vegetative coma patients. It seems as if humans who totally lack consciousness are not fully included into the moral sphere, as, say, a normal human adult. This explains our attitudes towards those in comas with no foreseeable chances of recovery.

Thus, I think premise (3) is wrong in almost all cases. Moreover, we can use a different strategy to show why it’s consistent for a speciesist to treat newborn infants differently than they treat cattle: counterfactual biological development. Under normal healthy circumstances, a human infant will grow into a cognitively sophisticated adult. Under healthy circumstances, it is very very unlikely that a cow will grow into a cognitively sophisticated adult. And if that cow ever does mutate and develop the ability to rationally talk and engage humans in high-level moral conversation, then we should include that cow into the moral sphere. But what about someone with severe mental retardation who has no potential to grow into a normal adult? Well, as I said before, it’s doubtful that most retarded children are as cognitively stupid as a cow or chicken. Moreover, we can engage in a counterfactual analysis and think that it would have taken much less different alignment of genes for a retarded child to have been born with the potential to grow into a normal adult than it would be for a chicken or cow. A cow would have to have a total restructuring of the genome in order to produce a brain capable of learning human-like cognitive skills. So the counterfactuals are in fact quite different.

And there is another point where the AMC fails: it paints a false dichotomy whereby either animals have rights equivalent to adult human rights or they have no rights at all. This is a false dichotomy, because we can imagine a continuum of rights rather than an on or off switch. It makes sense to me that although a bonobo or dolphin has less rights than a human adult, it has more rights than a chicken, and a chicken has more rights than an oyster. I would never treat a bonobo like I would a chicken or a mosquito, but I would not treat a bonobo like a human child or a human adult. If there was a burning building, I would rescue a normal human adult or child over a bonobo, but I would rescue a bonobo over a chicken. Moreover, it’s false that this reasoning is arbitrarily speciesist because I would rescue a bonobo over a vegetative coma patient or a human fetus.

Now I want to discuss premise (5): human uniqueness. I see it claimed a lot in animal rights literature that the attempt to find uniquely human cognitive attributes has failed. Oh yeah? What about the set of cognitive attribute that allows you to send a robot to Mars? Or write a philosophy book?* Although there are certainly many similarities between humans and nonhuman animals, I just don’t take seriously anyone who denies the obvious and vast differences. Robot to Mars! Seriously! For those skeptical of human uniqueness, I highly recommend Michael Gazzaniga’s excellent book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. As evidenced by practically everything in our culture as well as particular neural structures/functions, we are not just different by degree, but in kind. And even if it was just in degree, the level of difference in degree is of such magnitude it stills warrants the conclusion of human cognitive uniqueness. See this post for more.

So yeah, imo, the AMC has so many problematic premises it can barely even get off the ground as a convincing argument.

*Edit: I’ve realized that someone might wonder why the ability to send a robot to Mars is morally relevant. I don’t think it is. But the type of creature capable of sending a robot to Mars is also probably capable of moral deliberation and reflection, which certainly seems to me like a candidate capacity for bestowing moral worth. But since I do in fact place some value on basic organic sentience, clearly moral reflection is not the source of all of human worth, but I do think it grounds the majority of human worth. In fact, I think moral reflection (which is a skill enables by reflective consciousness) is of such importance than it generates moral value in terms of the counterfactuals for biological potential.

Consciousness, Philosophy, Psychology animal consciousness, animal minds, animal rights, ethics, human uniqueness, marginal cases, moral, moral sphere, philosophy of mind

Just how far should we expand the circle of ethics?

January 14, 2012 Gary Williams 10 comments

Right now I am reading Peter Singer’s book The Expanding Circle. It’s a good book so far. It’s clear, well-argued, and written with a sense of moral urgency. The central argument is that due to the way ethical reasoning works on the basis of impartiality, it would be arbitrary to restrict the moral community to a single group, such as your own tribe, gender, or race. Hence, the evolution of morality over the years is moving (and will hopefully continue to move) in the direction of ever greater impartiality as seen by societal advances in abolition, woman’s right’s, etc. However, Singer also argues that we should expand to circle of ethics beyond the human realm to all other sentient creatures capable of feeling pleasure or pain. Singer argues that it would be just as arbitrary to restrict ethical considerations to humans as it would be to restrict them to a certain class of humans.

But then how far down the evolutionary continuum should we go? Singer thinks we should probably draw the line around oysters and the like, since it seems implausible that oysters are capable of feeling pleasure or pain. And Singer definitely thinks we should not expand the circle to include inanimate entities like mountains or streams. So what’s so special about the ability to feel pleasure or pain? Singer thinks that this capacity is a nonarbitrary dividing line because it’s something that humans can take into consideration. On what basis could we include mountains and streams into our moral deliberation? There seems to be none. But the fellow capacity to feel pleasure and pain seems like a good candidate.

This is where I must disagree with Singer. I simply don’t see what’s so morally special about the ability to detect cellular damage. And that is all pain perception really is. It’s an evolved biological mechanism that registers damage to cells and then relays that information to appropriate motor centers to move the creature out of harm’s way, which increases the biological fitness of the creature, maintaining homeostasis and organisational structure. Vegetarians like Singer loathe this line of thinking because it brings to mind the old practice of torturing cats and dogs because Descartes argued they can’t really feel pleasure or pain because animals are simply unfeeling mechanisms. But I don’t think the permissibility of wanton torture follows from the idea that pain perception is just a simply biological mechanism for damage detection. Even if it is permissible to use animals for food, it doesn’t follow that it’s permissible to torture them for fun. Even if it’s permissible to eat animals for food, we might still be obligated to treat them with respect and try to lower the occurrence of pain to it’s absolute minimum. But, personally, I believe that just having the capacity to feel pain doesn’t launch you into the moral category whereby it becomes impermissible to be used for food for humans.

I’ve heard it claimed that this kind of speciesism is injustifiable if we consider the cognitive capacities of those who are extremely mentally handicapped or incapacitated. Since presumably I think speciesism is justifiable because humans are cognitively superior to nonhuman animals, then it should be ok to treat cognitively inferior humans just like we do cattle. Since we wouldn’t think it’s ok to do this to mental invalids, we can’t just use cognitive superiority to justify the way we treat nonhuman animals. My immediate response to this is that there is a difference between entities who, if everything had been biologically optimal, could have developed to the human cognitive level, and entities who could never reach that level despite being developed in optimal biological conditions. This principle of potentiality is enough to show how it’s nonarbitrary to treat human invalids different from nonhuman animals.

There’s another point I want to make about the moral worth of pain itself. How could it be of that much importance when nonhuman animals themselves seem to be indifferent to it compared to the typical human response to pain? I read in Euan MacPhail’s The Evolution of Consciousness that there have been field reports of chimps getting into fights with other males, having their testicles bitten off, and immediately afterwards being capable of having sex with a female. I doubt there is any human who is horny enough to ignore the pain of having their genitals mutilated just to have sex. On the basis of this observation, we can infer that chimp pain perception is different from the awareness of pain that humans possess. And since chimps are seen by people like Singer as being the most worthy of our ethical consideration, what does this say about the pain capacities of animals even lower down the totum pole than chimps? Nonhuman animals don’t seem to “care” about their pain to the same extent that humans do. Caring about pain as opposed to pain itself goes by another name: suffering i.e meta-consciousness of pain. While it is plausible that some nonhuman animals have the capacity for a kind of protosuffering, it seems clear to me that human suffering is of a level of sophistication far beyond that of any nonhuman animal. Now, I don’t have a clear argument for why human suffering is more morally valuable than the mere pain of nonhuman animals, but it is at least a nonarbitrary cutting off point and one that has a kind of intuitive support.

However, I don’t think the moral worth of human suffering over nonhuman pain is enough to justify the claim that nonhuman pain has no moral worth at all. As a matter of fact, I agree with Singer that the pain of nonhuman sentient beings does have some moral worth, and that we are obligated, ultimately, to reduce that pain. For this reason, if I was presented in a supermarket with the choice of eating real beef or artificial beef grown in a lab, I would choose the artificial beef. So the only reason I am not a non-meateater is because the right technology has not been invented yet. As soon as that technology becomes available (and they are working on it), I will gladly give up my practice of eating meat. But since I believe that eating meat is a very healthy way to get protein and animal fats into my diet, I do not think the current pains of nonhuman animals is enough to overcome the selfishness involved in maintaining my own health, for I value my own life over those of nonhuman animals. Again, this is not because I don’t place any value in nonhuman life. In my ideal world, not a single sentient entity would ever feel unnecessary pain. I feel predation to be evil, but I nevertheless eat animals for health reasons. If I sincerely thought vegetarianism was healthier than an omnivorous diet, I would be a vegetarian (which would be nice because it would line up with my beliefs in the evils of predation). But since I am a speciesist and value human life more than nonhuman life, I think it is permissible for me to continue my practice until the technology of artificial meat becomes widely available. I’m aware of the possibility that this reasoning could be nothing more than a post-hoc rationalization of my comfortable habits of meat eating. But I do think that there is a nonarbitrary argument to be made for speciesism that makes the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the moral sphere far less arbitrary than the exclusion of subclasses of humans. Contra Singer, I don’t think speciesism is equal to racism or sexism.

Philosophy animal cognition, animal pain, animal rights, ethics, evolution, pain, Peter Singer, vegetarianism

A Return to Blogging – Thoughts on the Myth of the Given: Hybrid Holism and Cognitive Spinning

December 21, 2011 Gary Williams 9 comments

My first semester as a PhD student at Wash U is finally over. Although I haven’t been blogging much this semester, I have still been writing a lot for my classes. I just didn’t have the intellectual stamina to complete all my work for classes and also come up with topics to blog on and then formulate my ideas into posts. I’m not even sure that I will have a chance to blog much over Winter break since I will be visiting with family. But I will at least put down some of my thoughts on the Myth of the Given, inspired by reading a chapter on Locke and Rorty in Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide.

The Myth of the Given, as I understand it, is the idea that the world is “given” to perceiving subjects in some kind of “raw”, “objective” form. The Myth is that this raw sensory data counts as a secure epistemic foundation upon which to build the complete cognitive edifice. The logical positivists conceived of this raw form as sense-data, out of which we could supposedly construct our knowledge of material objects. When Quine rejected logical positivism in his Two Dogmas, he replaced the metaphor of a hierarchy founded on individual sense-data for a holistic web of belief, with the mind making contact with the world only at the fringes of the web. Rather than the raw sense-form being the unit of significance, Quine argued that the unit of significance was the whole of science. By rejecting atomistic foundationalism, Quine and the holists attempted to solve the mind-body dualism by supposing the mind connects to the world through the totality of science.

But this form of holism quickly collapses into the problematic view that our beliefs are “spinning in the frictionless void”, unconnected at any actual point to the world. How can we reconcile holism with the current paradigm of embodied cognitive science? Embodied cognition theory seems to endorse a quasi-foundationalism whereby the groundfloor of our beliefs is the basic foundation of sensorimotor knowledge, which is certainly foundational with respect to higher forms of cognition. But modern cognitive science also recognizes the limited capacity for the brain to wire itself independently of sensory input along the lines of genetic recipes, giving rise to innate modules, faculties, and schemas for dealing with the world and learning in an efficient, uniquely human fashion.

Thinking of the tension between frictionless holism and foundational atomism, I was led to the idea of Hybrid Holism.

Thesis of Hybrid Holism: the foundationalism-holism dualism is a false dichotomy. Although there is a foundation, some beliefs can still “spin”.

As I see it, the thesis of embodied cognition supports a mild form of foundationalism. Sensorimotor knowledge is the foundation upon which we construct higher-order beliefs. Lakoff and Johnson’s work on embodied metaphor amply illustrates the ways in which our beliefs about abstract things are grounded and structured by our lower sensorimotor concepts. Embodied cognition theory supports the metaphor of a cognitive hierarchy, starting from the bottom with low-order sensorimotor concepts and going higher up the hierarchy as conceptual abstraction increases.

So that makes up the foundationalism of Hybrid Holism. But when you get sufficiently abstract in your conceptual frameworks, there arises the phenomenon of beliefs spinning in the void. This spinning is likely unique to humans. I propose it is the result of our having learning an awesomely abstract symbolic form of communication. When humans master language, they have the ability to spin in various ways, including the capacity to confabulate stories on flimsy evidence, spout post-hoc rationalizations, and believe in the most absurd things imaginable on the basis of hearsay, superstition, flim-flam, hucksterism, naivety, etc. Language lets us spin looser and looser.

This concept of linguistic spinning is supported by Iain McGilchrist’s theory of left-hemispheric lateralization put forth in his magisterial book The Master and His Emissary. One of McGilchrist’s hypotheses is that as humans have cognitively transitioned into modernity, the left-hemisphere has becomes increasingly isolated or encapsulated from it’s more perceptive and embodied right-hemisphere neighbor. A consistent finding in the neuroscientific literature is that the the left and right hemispheres have different attentional styles. The right hemisphere’s attention is more widely spread out, looking for novelty, being open to new experience, looking at the wider context, etc., whereas the left-hemisphere is more analytically focused on the narrow and familiar, looking at the trees instead of the forest. McGilchrist provides compelling evidence that the cognitive features distinctive of human modernity can be analyzed in terms of the hyper-linguistic left-hemisphere growing increasingly absorbed into the frictionless web of belief, the so-called “space of reasons”.

This was one of Sellars’ main points: the inferential flow in the logical space of reasons never flows from an raw foundation to a secure construction. Propositions can only be inferred from other propositions. The web of propositions is interlinked so strongly that we cannot separate it at its sensory joints. This is one of the defining features of propositional thought. We thus have the “holism” in our Hybrid Holism. Hybrid Holism says that there are foundations in the cognitive architecture, but also the capacity to build up spinning linguistic modules. We start off as embodied sensorimotor primates, but we have the capacity to partially detach our left-hemisphere from the secure bodily foundation. Perhaps this spinning could explain the phenomenon of people claiming to have “really” astral projected, or really traveled outside their bodies. I speculate that the degree of phenomenological separation in out-of-body experiences is directly proportional to the degree of cognitive spin. The less friction in your web, the more easily it is to detach yourself from sensorimotor foundations and hallucinate. We could also possibly explain other cognitive disorders with the spin model, such as Dissociative Identity Disorder, with each alter being understood as a spinning narrative complex, isolated from other complexes, with each spinning complex have tendencies to reattach itself and assert cognitive control. This is of course just a useful metaphor. I take the idea of “spinning” to be a helpful standin until implementation models can be constructed. But I don’t think it would be difficult to translate talk of spin into some kind of neurophysiological disconnection, be it in isolated signal pathways or strongly looping feedback circuits in the neocortex.

In conclusion, Hybrid Holism is the idea that there is something right to both foundationalism and holism. Foundationalism seems to fit with the thesis of embodied cognition, which says that sensorimotor knowledge is the foundation of higher-order concepts. But the logic of propositional thought and the problems with the Myth of the Given seems to support a kind of Quinean holism. But holism cannot escape the problem of the completely frictionless void. Saying the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science is essentially giving up on the mind-body problem. So embodied cognition reasserts itself in the form of Hybrid Holism, which says that although there are multiple embodied foundations for cognition, cognition is also capable of detaching itself and spinning freely in its linguistic web. On the mild side, this gives rise to basic human ingenuity. On the extreme side, we have pathological disconnection and hallucinatory experiences. But when working normally, cognitive spin allows humans to look to the clouds for inspiration and guidance. Spin allows us to reflect on our moral duties and contemplate philosophical topics such as the existence of God, the origin of our species, why is there something rather than nothing, etc. Spin allows us to take the “view from nowhere”, as Nagel put it, giving us an ironical perspective and the capacity to experience absurdity at our primate lives. But spin, good or bad, is essentially what you make of it. It can take you down to great despair, but also lift you up the great heights. Our sheer degree of spin is what sets us apart from nonhuman animals. It is a contingent gift of evolutionary history. Let’s use it wisely and with great care, not wasting it on frivolous activities.

Consciousness, Philosophy, Psychology cognitive spin, epistemology, foundationalism, holism, Myth of the Given, philosophy of mind, Quine, Sellars, sense-data

On the Existence of Private Sensations

November 29, 2011 Gary Williams 1 comment

This is a first draft of a paper I’m writing this semester for Gillian Russell’s proseminar on analytic philosophy. Feedback is welcome.

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I think it is uncontroversial that most philosophers believe mental events like sensations are private. In this paper I will investigate the extent to which this claim is true. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, I will show by way of thought experiment that sensations are not private in the sense usually reserved for the term by philosophers. If the thought experiment is conceivable and my interpretation of it is plausible, then the concept of absolute privacy will have to be rejected and replaced with the concept of practical privacy. Moreover, it is not just our folk concept of privacy which will be under scrutiny, but rather, the very existence of absolutely private sensations will come into question. It is my view that the thought experiment establishes, not just that the concept of absolutely private sensations is problematic, but that there actually are no such things as absolutely private sensations. The reason the concept of absolute privacy is problematic is because it doesn’t correspond to anything in reality. This does not mean that laypersons will stop believing in the concept of privacy after hearing these arguments. Many generations will have to pass before our lay concepts of privacy will implicitly and explicitly reflect my debunking of absolute privacy. But by showing that absolutely privacy does not exist, I will argue that it is best if we try to reject the idea of absolute privacy. However, it is undeniable that we will, as a matter of convenience and habit, often slip back into familiar ways of thinking in terms of absolute privacy.

Absolute privacy: what is it?

Although it is ultimately an empirical question whether laypersons really believe this, I take it for granted that something like the concept of absolute privacy concerning sensations is well entrenched in how the folk think about their own mental lives, as well as reinforced by most philosophers. Absolute privacy is the idea that only I have access to my sensations and it is impossible that someone else could share my sensations. When I burn my finger and feel the throbbing sensations of pain, the thesis of absolute privacy states that only I have access to the phenomenal content of painfulness. Although it is possible for other people to infer that I am in pain on the basis of the observation of publically available data (such as taking an aspirin or saying “Ouch!”), I do not have to infer that I am in pain, I simply know it noninferentially. The essential idea behind the concept of absolute privacy is that what-it-is-like for a subject to feel sensations can only be known by the individual subject, and no one else. As Hilary Putnam as argued [reference], there could be a race of Spartans who privately feel the sensation of pain while exercising great willpower in inhibiting all external behavioral indications that they are in pain.

The thought experiment

Now I will demonstrate why there are no absolutely private sensations. Imagine the human race has continued evolving at its current rate of technological acceleration for the next million years. Above all these future humans have developed their techniques of robotic neurosurgery to the point of utter sophistication. One of the most popular recreational pursuits in this far-future society is neurosplicing. The basic idea can be illustrated as follows. Take Subject A and B and place them side-by-side on operating tables. The robotic surgeons then take Subject A’s wrist and open it up such that all the nerves are exposed. The surgeons then take specially designed wires and place splitters on each of A’s nerves such that the nerve signals going from wrist to brain are perfectly copied and sent down the wires. The wires are now attached to B’s nervous system in such a way as to mimic the input pattern of A’s hand nerves into A’s central nervous system. Now that the operation is complete, the robots begin to stroke A’s hand with a feather. Here’s the crux: what does B feel when A’s hand is stroked? Is A’s sensation of being stroked shared by B? If so, what does this show about the nature of absolute privacy?

There are multiple ways to interpret the thought experiment. One way is to continue to insist that what A feels can only be felt by A and that A’s privacy has not been violated despite the neurosplicing. This interpretation is supported by the claim that in order for it to be the exact same sensation there would not just have to be an identical input pattern, but an identical way of processing that input. So it might be said that although B had a very similar input to his central nervous system, B doesn’t know what A actually felt because they don’t have similar central nervous systems. Accordingly, A and B bring all the weight of their differing neural histories to bear on their interpretation of the input of the feather stroke. So the mere fact of being spliced into A’s nerve inputs is not enough for B to know what-it-is-like for A to be tickled.

Another interpretation is to say that the thought experiment shows that sensations cannot be absolutely private. This is the interpretation I prefer. In order to show that A’s sensations are not absolutely private, we only need to tweak the parameters of the thought experiment. The wrist-nerve splicing case is rather simple compared to what the far-future robotic surgeons are really capable of. So whereas it might be thought that simple mental events like tickling sensations could be shared, more complex, global mental states like having a headache must be absolutely private. To show why this is not necessarily true, now consider that the robots are capable of not just mimicking peripheral nervous system patterns, but cortical activity itself. Assuming a weak modularity of the mind, it should be trivial for the robotic surgeons to implant artificial cortical modules that are capable of replicating the precise input-output activity of the real biological cortical modules. Now assume the module is a perceptual module. Stroking A’s hand now generates an identical cortical pattern in B’s head that corresponds to the module-activity in A’s head.

Are we still warranted in claiming that A’s tickling sensation is private? I believe that the similarity is enough to overcome absolute privacy because the question of whether B’s sensation is identical to A’s sensation is irrelevant to the question of whether A’s sensation is absolutely private. It could be the case that precisely what-it-is-like to be A is different from precisely what-it-is-like to be B in virtue of idiosyncrasies in their central nervous system. If A and B’s central nervous system were exactly alike except for the difference of a single neuron, would what-it-is-like to be A be different from what-it-is-like to be B? If what-it-is-likeness supervenes on the physical components, then it seems like there is a difference in what-it-is-likeness despite there being a difference of only one neuron.

But is this difference enough to show that A’s sensation is absolutely private? I don’t think this follows. The concept of privacy is often discussed in terms of informational access. The idea is that if I have a headache, only I have direct access to that headache. Other people might be able to infer that I have a headache on the basis of me taking an aspirin or saying something like “I have a headache”. But if in the nerve-splicing scenario A’s cortex becomes wired into B’s cortex, it seems plausible that B could directly know whether A is having a headache without having to make an explicit inference. So the question of whether B’s experience of A’s headache is identical to the A’s experience of their headache is irrelevant to the question of whether B has to explicitly infer that A is having a headache. I think it is plausible that given enough time to adapt to A’s cortical patterns, B could noninferentially know that A is having a headache simply in virtue of being wired into A’s cortex in the right way.

Wittgenstein’s thought experiment

I propose that this anti-absolute privacy interpretation of the thought experiment is a good way of understanding some of the remarks Wittgenstein made in regards to sensory privacy. In fact, a simpler version of the thought experiment can be found in the Blue Book:

One might in this case argue that the pains are mine because they are felt in my head; but suppose I and someone else had a part of our bodies in common, say a hand. Imagine the nerves and tendons of my arm and A’s connected to this hand by an operation. Now imagine the hand stung by a wasp. Both of us cry, contort our faces, give the same description of the pain, etc. Now are we to say we have the same pain or different ones? If in such a case you say: “We feel pain in the same place, in the same body, our descriptions tally, but still my pain can’t be his”, I suppose as a reason you will be inclined to say: “because my pain is my pain and his pain is his pain”. And here you are making a grammatical statement about the use of such a phrase as “the same pain”. You say that you don’t wish to apply the phrase, “he has got my pain” or “we both have the same pain”, and instead, perhaps, you will apply such a phrase as “his pain is exactly like mine”. (It would be no argument to say that the two couldn’t have the same pain because one might anaesthetize or kill one of them while the other still felt pain.) Of course, if we exclude the phrase “I have his toothache” from our language, we thereby also exclude “I have (or feel) my toothache”. Another form of our metaphysical statement is this: “A man’s sense data are private to himself”. And this way of expressing it is even more misleading because it looks still more like an experiential proposition; the philosopher who says this may well think that he is expressing a kind of scientific truth. (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 54-55)

When Wittgenstein suggests that this thought experiment undermines the metaphysical statement “A man’s sense data are private to himself”, I suggest that Wittgenstein is talking about absolute privacy, not practical privacy. This interpretation also helps to make sense out of some cryptic remarks in the Philosophical Investigations. Consider ¶253:

In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain. (And it would also be imaginable for two people to feel pain in the same – not just the corresponding – place. That might be the case with Siamese twins, for instance.)

It is important that we distinguish two different interpretations of Wittgenstein’s remark about privacy “making sense”. On the stronger reading, we might see Wittgenstein as arguing that there actually isn’t any such phenomena as a private sensation. On the weaker reading, we might see Wittgenstein as arguing that the concept of sensory privacy is somehow problematic or confused. I suggest that Wittgenstein makes the weaker claim about concepts because there is no such thing as absolute privacy, as established by considerations such as the nerve-splicing thought experiment. If the thought experiment shows that there is no such thing as absolute privacy, then it is reasonable to ask us to update our concept of privacy to account for this. The concept of absolute privacy needs to be rejected precisely because it does not latch onto any corresponding fact.

Accordingly, it would be wrong to interpret Wittgenstein as arguing that we don’t actually have a concept of absolute privacy. I believe Wittgenstein thinks we do have such a concept. What I think Wittgenstein is doing in Philosophical Investigations is trying to show that this concept is not based on any kind of corresponding metaphysical fact about the absolute privacy of sensations, but rather, is only a product of a language game based on the realities of practical privacy. The story then goes like this: because of practical privacy, humans developed the language game of absolute privacy. Once the language game got going and sufficiently established in our ways of speaking, philosophers became convinced of the truth of absolute privacy as a metaphysical statement. But once we realize that all we possess is practical privacy, we should no longer affirm the truth of metaphysical statements about absolute privacy.

It is an empirical question as to whether humans will ever be able to implicitly give up belief in the truth of absolute privacy. It might be a contingent fact that humans, in virtue of their cognitive machinery, are unable to stop implicitly believing in the truth of something like absolute privacy. But humans are capable of modifying their explicit, consciously held beliefs about absolute privacy. So although right now I have a conscious belief that if surgical nerve-splicing technology ever advanced my sensations could be shared with others, I also have the conscious belief that since we don’t have such technology, my sensations are in fact private. As a matter of fact, I could walk up to my friends in great pain and they would never know it if I sufficiently suppressed my external pain behaviors. And my implicit beliefs reflect this knowledge of how and to what extent my sensations are private. But on the conscious level I also recognize that absolute privacy is an illusion fostered by the depth of practical privacy.

Thus, when Wittgenstein talks about sensory privacy as a grammatical fiction (¶307), what is fictional is absolute privacy. But the cognitive depth of practical privacy lent itself to the construction of myths of absolute privacy (“It’s impossible that my sensations could ever be experienced by someone else”). This interpretation also suggests a way to make sense of Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about the beetle in the box:

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing [or empty]. (¶293)

I suggest it’s plausible to interpret the “beetle” as a stand-in for an “absolutely private sensation”. The point then is that we could all coherently and intelligibly talk about absolutely private sensations without there actually being any absolutely private sensations (the box could be empty). The key is to realize that just because we have a concept of absolutely private sensations does not mean that absolutely private sensations actually exist.

But it’s also important to realize how our beliefs in absolute privacy are not quite delusions. The reason they aren’t delusional or irrational is that the real existence of practical privacy is enough to underwrite the rationality of believing in absolute privacy. So although the concept of absolute privacy does not track metaphysical truth, it would be strange to say that someone is irrational because they assent to the truth of the statement “My sensations can only be experienced by me”.

The technological relativity of publically observable behavior

Many philosophers are impressed enough with practical privacy that they assent to the truth of absolute privacy. The possibility of Spartans seems enough to conclusively demonstrate that there is more to pain than just pain behavior. In addition to publically observable behavior, the Spartan case seems to suggest that there are also private sensations. What I suggest is that the concept of “publically observable behavior” is relative to the technological sophistication of the society. What’s publically observable for far-future societies is different than what’s publically observable for us today, or for our ancient ancestors. With the invention of better brain imaging and surgical techniques, what becomes publically observable changes. And if it were the case that the precise patterns of our central nervous system were publically available in the sense of anyone else being capable of “splicing” in, then the very data out of which our own brains generate sensations would be available for other brains to digest.

Coming back to the issue of whether B’s experience of A’s headache is identical to A’s headache, we can now see that the question of “direct vs indirect” access is also relative to the way in which B observes A. If B judged that A is having a headache simply by observing A take an aspirin, then we could say that B did not have direct access. If B judged that A is having a headache because scientists correlated headaches with certain kinds of neural activity and B is looking at a brain scanner of A, then we would also say that B’s access is indirect. But if B’s cortex was directly wired into A’s cortex, is the judgment about A’s headache direct or indirect? It seems intuitive to me to say that B’s judgment is direct. But in this case what is the real difference between direct and indirect knowledge? It seems like the directness cannot simply be a matter of direct causal linkage because in the case of looking at A’s brain scan, there is a direct causal link between A’s brain activity, the image displayed on the computer, and B’s looking at the computer display of A’s brain activity. The question of direct or indirect seems then to be a matter of whether the judgment happens explicitly or tacitly. In the case of looking at A’s brain scan, the judgment is indirect because has to be made on the basis of explicit scientific knowledge of various correlations between brain activity and headaches. But surely there is a difference between a novice interpreter of brain scanning images and an expert. Whereas the novice might make a slow explicit judgment, the expert could directly know A is having a headache based on years of experience of looking at headache-brain correlations. It seems then that the nerve-splicing case is more similar to the case of the expert than the novice, because once B’s cortical module has been exposed to A’s cortical activity for long enough, B’s cortical module would start to automatically make judgment’s about A’s activity in the same automatic way B’s cortical module would make judgments about other cortical modules in B’s brain.

Conclusion

In this paper I have argued that when it comes to investigations concerning whether or not sensations are private, it is crucial to distinguish between absolute and practical privacy. Based on the nerve-splicing thought experiment, I have tried to show that absolute privacy does not exist. In normal situations, what we have instead is practical privacy. It’s merely practical rather than absolute because the inability of other people to know what I am feeling is only a matter of those people not having access to the right technology. If we lived in a far-future society where nerve-splicing had become incredibly sophisticated, we would better understand why statements about absolute privacy are false. Because of the depth of practical privacy, we feel justified talking about absolute privacy as if it corresponds to some metaphysical fact. But I have tried to argue that any facts of privacy are merely practical, not absolute. Accordingly, this suggests that we should revise our concepts of privacy to be about practical privacy. Although this conceptual revision can happen on the explicit, conscious level, the extensiveness of practical privacy suggests that it will take a long time before our implicit beliefs can catch up with any explicit denial of absolute privacy. And because we know that practically speaking our sensations will be private until the distant future, absolute privacy will always seems like an attractive thesis. But as the thought experiment suggests, this conviction of absolute privacy is mistaken.

Consciousness, Philosophy consciousness, Philosophy, philosophy of mind, privacy, private sensation, thought experiment, wittgenstein

Why You Can’t Be Harmed by Your Own Death

November 15, 2011 Gary Williams 5 comments

This is a draft of a short paper I am working on for Roy Sorensen’s Advanced Metaphysics class. The final version will obviously have proper citations and a full conclusion, but I’m at the writing stage where I’d like to get some feedback. Let me know what you think!

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Imagine a girl named Susie dies in a car accident at a young age. Although it is undoubtedly tragic for someone to die so young, a question arises: if death is the final end of existence, is there a sense in which Susie herself, and not just her grieving relatives, was harmed by her death? That is, besides the pains associated with the dying process, was it bad for her to die? One standard response that has been given is that Susie’s death is bad for her because it deprived her of goods that she might have had if she led a longer, more fulfilling life. Call this the “Deprivation Thesis”. The Deprivation Thesis states that Susie’s death was not just bad for her grieving relatives, but bad for her. According to one version of the Deprivation Thesis, we can determine that Susie’s death was bad for her by making a simple comparison between what happened in her actual life (early death) and what happened in a near possible world (long life). Since she might have experienced 50 more years of well-being in the near possible world, Susie’s early death is bad for her because it deprived her of all that well-being.

In this paper, I will argue that there is at least one sense in which Susie’s death was not bad for her for the simple reason that once she died, there was no subject around to, so to speak, “soak up” the badness associated with death. Call this the “Harmless Thesis”, which could also be called the “No Subject Thesis”. Perhaps the most famous defender of the Harmless Thesis is Epicurus, who said

So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.

According to the Harmless Thesis, the finality of death is never subjectively bad for the person who dies because once you are dead, there is no one around to be subjectively affected by the state of being dead. According to the version of the Harmless Thesis I will be defending, the only agents subjectively affected by death itself (and not just the dying process) are friends and family members who are in grief because they lost a loved one, as well as any other sentient being whose well-being was directly or indirectly affected by the death. In my own case, I don’t want to die young because, in part, my significant other would likely be devastated, and if I have a child, I don’t want to leave that child fatherless before he or she is an autonomous adult. But since I believe the Harmless Thesis to be true, I have no good reason to fear or be worried by the state of death itself for death cannot possibly affect me because “me” is no longer around to be affected.

An immediate objection to the Harmless Thesis is that I am assuming something like hedonism to be true, where hedonism is the idea that in order for something to be bad for me, it has to have some affect on my intrinsic mental states. Some thinkers have argued against hedonism on the following grounds: if pleasure is the only thing that matters, then I should have no objection to being lobotomized so as to be in a permanently infantile state of pleasure. Since most people would not want to revert to such a state, then intrinsic pleasure cannot be all that matters for living a good life. Likewise, since (apparently) most people wouldn’t want to be put into an experience machine where “fake” pleasure is generated by stimulating the brain in particular ways, experienced pleasure cannot be all that matters. These objections to hedonism all rest on the idea that there is more to well-being than just intrinsic mental states. What matters, according to these anti-hedonic theories of well-being, is that we achieve things, that we have our preferences fulfilled, etc. According to this brand of anti-hedonism, we should be horrified by the prospect of a life of infantile pleasure. So pleasure is not all that matters to living a good life. Accordingly, it doesn’t matter that Susie is no longer capable of experiencing displeasure once dead. Her life “went bad” because of the fact that she was deprived of a full life insofar as her preferences were never satisfied and she was unable to achieve lifelong goals. Therefore, her death harmed her, despite her not being around to be subjectively affected by her death. Call the thesis that well-being is tied into intrinsic mental states Internalism, and call the opposing view Externalism.

The internalist can respond to the infantile pleasure case by distinguishing between simple pleasure and complex pleasure. It is not just brute, infantile sensory pleasure that matters to adults. Take the pleasure of playing and studying chess. The pleasure of winning a chess game against a tough opponent is not the same as infantile pleasure. The adult chess player who reverted to an infant would be missing out on the capacity for complex pleasure, and would thus be harmed. But wait a second. If adults can be harmed by being deprived of well-being in virtue of losing the capacity for complex pleasure, can we not say, in contrast to the Harmless Thesis, that people are harmed when they are deprived of the capacity to feel any pleasure, simple or complex, as in the case of death?

I do not think the analogy works, because in the case of death, there is no subject around to experience simple or complex pleasure, whereas in the case of the infantile adult, we can point out the subject who is currently being harmed. The Deprivation Theorist might respond that I am contradicting myself, since from the perspective of the infantile adult, everything is peachy. Therefore, if I am committed to hedonism and Internalism, I have to say that the adult’s life is going pretty well. But I don’t think I am committed to that if there is a legitimate distinction to be made between simple and complex pleasure. Being deprived of complex pleasure would be a bad thing if prior to losing the capacity you really enjoyed complex pleasure and wanted to continue experiencing complex pleasures. But in the case of death, there is no subject around who is being deprived of anything, which is not the case for the infantile adult. The only adult who wouldn’t be harmed by lobotomy would be the adult who wants to only experience simple pleasures, but I imagine this is rare.

The key here is to realize that for sophisticated versions of Internalism, intrinsic mental states can be as complex as you wish. And so long as you are around to be deprived of complex pleasures, you can be harmed by lobotomies. But once you cease to exist, you can no longer be harmed, for there is no “you” around anymore to be harmed. Therefore, deprivation only works if there is a subject who is being deprived. But once there is no longer a subject, there can no longer be any harms. Death is therefore not harmful to the person who dies. It is only the process of dying which is harmful, for the dying process affects the intrinsic mental states of the organism. And death also affects the intrinsic mental states of family and friends and others whose lives will be affected by the death. So it is no objection to the Harmless Thesis that death is a bad thing. But once we ask the question, “Yes, but bad for whom?” it becomes clear that it cannot be bad for the person who died, but only for the people who are left in the wake of the tragedy. The loss of potential life is therefore not experienced by the person who dies, but by those still alive.

It might be objected that death is a harm because it can be an appropriate object of worry, thus leading to suffering. According to versions of four-dimensionalism, posthumous events really do exist. And since posthumous events exist, and can therefore be objects of genuine mental reference, it would be intelligible for someone to have a mental state of fear in regards to their posthumous state of nonexistence. Accordingly, the view that death is a harm is intelligible even if we hold Internalism to be true, since the intrinsic mental states of suffering are intentionally directed at posthumous nonexistence. My response to this is simply to claim that yes, it is possible to be harmed by thoughts of death, but this is, strictly speaking, irrational if you accept the Harmless Thesis to be true. So although in practice death harms humans because we have negative intrinsic mental states directed at our posthumous nonexistence, this is irrational if we hold the Harmless Thesis to be true. And we know humans are irrational in regards to all sorts of things. But this is no objection to the truth of the Harmless Thesis. All humans could, as a matter of contingent fact, suffer enormously from thoughts of death, but this would not be enough to show that death actually harms us. Moreover, since it is perfectly rational to fear death out of concern for the grief of those who love you, one could still think death is an evil while believing the Harmless Thesis to be true, but not because you think you are going to be personally harmed by death.

But would it not be bad if the entire human race was obliterated by a comet? Even though there would be no one around to feel grief, it seems like everyone would be harmed by being killed by the comet because the comet deprived everyone of future pleasures. This seems to be a counter-example to the Harmless Thesis but here I am willing to bite the bullet. If we thought that it would be bad for the human species to suddenly end, we could always ask, “Bad for whom?” It is only from a detached, objective perspective that we can think it tragic the human race ended because we are capable of thinking “What a waste of potential”. We could even imagine an alien utilitarian observing the event from a distance also thinking “What a waste of potential”. But I hold to the Harmless Principle in that it would not be harmful to the humans for everyone to die. In order for the cataclysmic event to be harmful, there would have to be some subject capable of having their intrinsic mental states changed in response to the event, such as the alien utilitarian.

Nevertheless, there is a distinct sense in which our imagination allows us to think of the “wasted potential” of the human race such that we can also imagine the wasted potential of Susie’s early death. But I think that there is a distinction to be made between harms as imagined and harms as experienced. It is because of the human power of imagination that we think it tragic that Susie died so young, because we can imagine how her life might have went if she had not been killed in the car crash. But I do not believe that imagination alone is enough to support the claim that Susie herself was harmed by her death. It was everyone around her after her death that was actually harmed, just like it was the alien utilitarian who was harmed by the death of all humans on account of feeling the anguish of observing such a tragic event.

I thus think that the tragedy of death can be distinguished between the experienced reality of death. It is no objection to the Harmless Thesis that we unanimously think Susie’s early death was tragic, just like we would think it tragic if the human species suddenly ended. The tragedy comes from the fact that we can imagine how Susie’s life might have gone if she didn’t die. If we are utilitarians who value pleasure, we might think it would have been objectively better had Susie not been killed, for she would have spent the next 50 years experiencing simple and complex pleasures, as well as giving pleasure to all her friends and family (and maybe even pleasure to millions if she was planning on being a cancer scientist). But this question of being “objectively better” is entirely distinct from the question of “Who is harmed by death?”

In asking the question, “Is Susie’s death bad?” we can thus distinguish between two different ways to ask “Bad in what sense?” Objectively, we can hold it was bad for Susie to die because her death had an affect on the overall well-being of the universe in virtue of affecting the total calculus of intrinsic mental states. Subjectively, we can hold it that her death was not bad for her, but bad for everyone who loved her, or was affected by her death. It is only on the objective sense that the Deprivation Thesis makes sense, since it is sensible to imagine how Susie’s death deprived her of well-being. But subjectively, it does not make sense at all to think Susie’s death was bad for her, for there was no subject to be harmed by nonexistence.

We thus have two different senses of “bad”. From a God’s eye utilitarian view, Susie’s death certainly led to a deprivation of universal well-being in terms of there being one less subject capable of experiencing simple and complex pleasure, as well as changes in the well-being of her friends and family. But from Susie’s own perspective, she was not harmed by her death, because once dead, she is no longer capable of having her intrinsic mental states changed.

This might sound like I have conceded the main point to the Deprivation theorist in holding that there is at least one sense in which Susie’s death was bad. But I think that it is the subjective sense which is important for the development of a “therapeutic philosophy”. One should want to avoid early death because it would be a tragedy from a utilitarian perspective. But one should not fear early death on account of some worry about being personally harmed by death. One might fear early death on account of worrying about the painfulness of the dying process, or worrying about the wake left behind in your family. But death itself, as seen from the “inside”? Sweet nothingness.

Accordingly, we can now interpret the “badness” of the infantile adult in two ways: objectively and subjectively. Objectively, we can see that it is a tragedy because there is a deprivation of complex pleasure and this affects the universal calculus assuming we value complex pleasures. Subjectively, we can see that the infantile adult doesn’t mind from their internal perspective. Objectively, we can imagine that the pre-infantile adult is deprived of complex pleasures; subjectively, the infantile adult doesn’t know what they are missing, and hence, are content. However, there is a sense in which the subjective realm tracks the objective deprivation since we could track the shift in subjectivity from the ability to experience both simple and complex pleasures to the ability to only experience simple pleasures. So there is a deprivation on the subjective level too, although the infantile adult doesn’t complain.

But as I mentioned before, subjective deprivation only works so long as there is a subject capable of being deprived of something. But once you are dead, there can be no subjective deprivation, only objective deprivation. But objective deprivation does not harm the subject in question, but only harms those whose intrinsic mental states are affected by the imagination process. This is in keeping with the thesis that harms have to be realized in a subject capable of experiencing mental states.

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Gilbert Ryle and the Proper Referents of Psychological Vocabulary

October 25, 2011 Gary Williams 7 comments

When we say “Bob sees a cat” or “I see a cat”, what does the term “see” refer to? If you are of a scientific bent, then you might say that verbs like “see” refer to internal physiological events such as patterns of brain activity. Alternatively, if you are of a psychologistic bent, you might think that the term “see” refers to internal mental events of some kind. Gilbert Ryle thinks both of these positions are mistaken.

Ryle uses the example of winning a race to illustrate his point. Imagine a hard-nosed materialistic scientist who was conducting a study of the physiological processes and cognitive functions intrinsic to a runner’s natural makeup. He studies the runner’s muscle tissues, brain fibers, sweat glands, heart function, etc. in painstaking detail. But now he begins to investigate whether or not that runner has won a race. He puts tissues under the microscope and inspects the entirety of the runner’s intrinsic physiological and psychological makeup but he just cannot find out whether or not the runner has won a race or not.

Ryle thinks that the scientist fails in his investigation of whether the runner has won a race because he is looking in the wrong place and the wrong way. The proper thing to do to tell if the runner has won a race is to investigate into whether the runner recently competed against rivals, did not cheat, and crossed a socially-recognized finish line. Likewise, Ryle thinks that, in determining whether or not Bob has seen the cat, one does not need to open up Bob’s body and brain to discover whether or not seeing has occurred. For Ryle, to look for “seeing” as if it were an internal physiological event or process would be like looking for “winning” by opening up the body and brain of a runner. A big motivation for Ryle’s view is the fact that a person ignorant of the physical details of his or her own brain can clearly still determine whether he or she is successfully seeing a cat. So, Ryle thinks, the verb “see” does not refer to inner physiological processes. Thus, Ryle thinks that seeing is not a process at all, but something else.

Ryle contends that because facts about psychological verbs like “see” are not discovered in the same way as facts are about physiological processes, it is a “mistaken assumption that perceiving is a bodily process” (109). There are at least two ways to read this claim: strong and weak. The strong version is that Ryle is making a bold metaphysical claim about how critters actually perceive the world. On this strong reading, internal bodily processes are just not involved in perceiving at all. This reading is untenable because Ryle probably did not mean to overturn any neurophysiological facts of perception. The weak reading is more plausible. It says that Ryle thought that psychological discourse is of an entirely different sort than physiological discourse. On the weak reading, when Ryle says “Perceiving is not a bodily process”, he means to say that talk about perception is not on par with talk about bodily processes.

In my opinion, the philosophical force of the weaker claim is reduced given the fact that psychological discourse is not fixed or stable or even universal. Given the almost certain possibility that human languages will continue to evolve, what is the philosophical significance of saying that right now the folk psychology of English speakers is different from our scientific psychology? Is this a necessary truth or a contingent historical fact? Following a Sellarsian line, if we could coherently imagine a society of techno-elites growing up with portable brain scanners permanently attached to their skulls and the schooling necessary to effortlessly interpret the scanning analyses displayed on their wrist-computers, then we could imagine a society where the way facts are discovered about the psychological world would essentially be no different from the way facts are discovered in the physical world.

Replicating such technology in the here and now isn’t completely fantastical either; it would only be a matter of sophisticated biofeedback making information available in a format accessible by our brains. However, if you were inclined to accept a higher-order theory of consciousness, then in a way we already have biofeedback of our brains insofar as what makes higher-order thought special is our brain’s way of reacting to itself, of perceiving its own perceptions. There is an analogous point to be made about thinking itself insofar as in some scientific circles it is fashionable to talk about conscious thought as overt speech that has been sufficiently internalized.

It seems then that Ryle’s contention that perceptual verbs do not refer to internal physiological processes and cognitive functions could turn out to be both metaphysically and grammatically incorrect given we specify the relative technological sophistication of the society in question. If we lived in a more scientifically literate society, we could easily imagine (à la Richard Rorty’s Myth of the Antipodeans) psychological verbs referring to internal physiological processes (available to view through portable brain scanners). And if this is true, the philosophical force of Ryle’s argument is diminished, for what else is Ryle doing except pointing out the merely sociological fact that right now our language games about psychology are dissimilar from our language games about physiology? If this is only a contingent fact of history, I take it that, following Sellars, the interesting philosophical point is not that we have such language games, but that the language games are not fixed, and in fact indicate an evolutionary trajectory. Just as a child eventually internalizes overt speech into conscious thought, a scientifically literate society could internalize computer generated analyses of brain scanning data.

It would only be a matter of adjusting to new methods of information extraction. If Ryle only wants to point out a sociological fact about current linguistic practice, then that is fine, and might still be philosophically illuminating in some respect. But such sociological commentary does nothing to diminish the metaphysical force of the physiologists who insists that perception is nothing but a bodily process in reaction to internal and external perturbations. And since we could imagine such bold metaphysical claims about perception catching fire and eventually establishing itself throughout the world’s language games, the facts Ryle discovers about psychological discourse are not necessary, but contingent.

In a way then, I have not shown that Ryle is wrong in his analysis of ordinary English use of verbs like “seeing”. Obviously Ryle is right that a peasant farmer is not referring to his or her inner brain states when proclaiming “I see the cows in the field”. But this is a contingent fact of history. If the farmer had been born in a different technological society, it is plausible that the facts might be different. Ryle’s point is that the current criteria for successful perception do not depend on any knowledge of physiology; we can know we or others have seen something without knowing anything about brain states. Acknowledging this, my point is that despite this current fact of how we understand the concept “seeing”, it does nothing to diminish the philosophical force of the materialist who insists that perceiving really is just an internal bodily process. The thing standing in the way of the materialist changing our language games then is not metaphysical truth, but only convention and inconvenience.

Consciousness, Philosophy cognition, eliminative materialism, folk psychology, Gilbert Ryle, materialism, philosophy of mind, science of mind

Some thoughts on why I would kill myself in order to teleport

October 9, 2011 Gary Williams 1 comment

Imagine a future society with teleportation technology. Instead of having to spend all day traveling to get from Orlando to L.A., you can now step into a teleporter booth, hit a glowing green button and be more or less instantly transported anywhere on the planet. Here’s how it works: the machine scans your full atomic structure, stores the pattern, then beams it to another teleporter, where a matter-assembler puts you back together again from a stock pile of atoms. You have used this machine many times with no qualms whatsoever. Now, imagine that one day you step in the booth, press the green button, but nothing happens. You are then told in a polite, robotic voice, “I’m sorry traveler, but something went wrong. Although we successfully scanned your body and reassembled you in L.A., the disintegration process failed. Would you please press the purple button in order to finish the disintegration process?”

Horrified, you run out of the booth because there is no way you are going to commit suicide by pressing the purple button. And suicide is exactly what it is to push the purple button. This twist in the teleporter story is meant to alert us to deep issues in the philosophy of personal identity. The point of the twist with the purple button is to pump our intuitions to the effect that any sane person would refuse to use the teleporter at all. After all, the only difference between the normal operation and the purple button case is that you failed to die in the latter. This is supposed to show that there is no continuity between the original person and the duplicate made in the matter-assembler. After all, if there is continuity, why would you not press the purple button? If you sincerely thought your personal identity would be preserved in the reassembly process, and you knew the machine had already reassembled you elsewhere, why would you not press the purple button? The upshot of this analysis is supposed to be that using a normal teleporter is akin to suicide. Identity is not preserved.

I’m not convinced. I would use a teleporter if I knew there was a 99.999999999999999999…% chance of it working properly. But I would not press the purple button. This is not a contradiction. There is in fact a crucial difference between the green button and the purple button. Only a fool would press the purple button, but only a fool would refuse to press the green button if it was working properly. What’s the difference? The green button is useful. It does something, namely, allow you to efficiently travel from location A to B. The purple button, however, does nothing. It kills you. Therefore, any rational agent should have no qualms pressing the green button but would be a fool to press the purple button (unless they wanted to commit suicide). But let’s say you are the traveler in the purple button situation. You know there is a near physical duplicate of you out there somewhere. You know that the duplicate will fulfill whatever responsibilities you have in L.A. What should you do? Well, whatever you want. If you want to travel to New Zealand, you can press the green button and utilize that amazing technology to achieve your desires. The fact that you have a duplicate does not matter. You have no obligation to kill yourself. Why commit suicide when you can travel the world by simply pressing a button? It would be foolish not to use something that had a 99.999999999999999999…% success rate in doing something so incredibly useful.

Thus, I propose that any rational agent, knowing the extreme usefulness of the teleporter and it’s normal success rate, should use the teleporter but shouldn’t press the purple button (unless the agent actually wants to die). It would be quite irrational to refuse to use the teleporter out of the fear that your identity wouldn’t be preserved. The reassembled clone is atom-by-atom identical to the you that pressed the green button. You can’t get any better in terms of continuity of identity than an atom-by-atom preservation. But suicide is irrational unless you want to die. If your atom-by-atom duplicate wanted to use the machine to travel, then presumably that person did not want to commit suicide (unless they were teleporting to an ideal place to commit suicide). Therefore, given that you would have identical desires, it would be strange to want to commit suicide by pressing the purple button given you just previously had a traveling mindset. There is thus no contradiction between using a working teleporter but not pressing the purple button.

Consciousness, Philosophy derek parfit, personal identity, philosophy of mind, selfhood, teleportation

An Extended Tractarian Argument for the Simplicity of Objects

October 3, 2011 Gary Williams 4 comments

I’ve been getting back into Wittgenstein lately. For my proseminar at Wash U we had to read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for a weekly assignment. I had never really studied it in depth before, but I now have a new found appreciation for early Wittgenstein. I’m fascinated by the metaphysical claims in the book. For example, 2.02-2.0212 might be charitably understood as endorsing the following reductio ad absurdum argument for the idea that any meaningful language must presuppose the existence of metaphysically simple objects:

1. Assume that a meaningful language does not necessarily presuppose there being metaphysically simple objects i.e. objects that are not composed of further objects.
2. Assume that in this language you can successfully refer to ordinary middle-sized objects (which are not simple).Accordingly, assume the statement “The cat is orange” is meaningful.
3. If “The cat is orange” is meaningful, it’s because, at the very least, in saying it a speaker presupposes that the cat is an object.
4. If (1) is true, and if the statement “The cat is orange” presupposes a distinct cat exists, then it also presupposes that the cat is a metaphysically nonsimple object (i.e. it is composed of further objects)
5. If statements about a cat presuppose that it is composed of further objects, and (1) is true, then those objects it is presupposed to be composed of are also presupposed to be nonsimple and composed of further objects, ad infinitum.
6. Thus, if (1) is true, the presuppositions built into the statement “The cat is orange” are infinite in complexity.
7. By the same reasoning, the presuppositions about the cat built into the opposing statement “The cat is not orange” are also infinite in complexity.
8. It seems natural to think that if talk about objects like cats has an infinite complexity in its presuppositions about how the cat is composed, then the statement “The cat is orange” can only be logically distinguished from the statement “The cat is not orange” if the most elementary parts of the presupposed infinite complexes of objects are different in some distinctive manner. [2.0201, 2.0211-2, 4.221]
9. By (1), the language is not committed to there being such things as “most elementary parts”; everything is composed of further things ad infinitum, for any posited basic entity would not be basic if it was assumed there were no basic entities. In other words, there would be no “substratum” for the regress to bottom out at; no substance [2.021]
10. Therefore, by (8) and (9), two opposing statements in the language about a complex object with infinite presuppositional complexity cannot be logically distinguished from each other simply on the basis of their elementary presuppositions because it seems strange to say two infinite complexes are different unless their (basic) members are different, but this is ruled out by (1), which assumes there are no basic members.
11. If two opposing statements are logically indistinguishable in the totality of their presuppositions, then they cannot refer to different states of affairs.[2.02331]
12. If two opposing statements cannot refer to different states of affairs, then the statements are not meaningful, for each statement could not be true or false.
13. The statements “The cat is orange” and “The cat is not orange” are obviously meaningful, so we must reject (1), since that is what got us into the infinite regress.
14. Thus, any meaningful language that refers to objects at all must be logically committed to the existence of metaphysically simple objects i.e. objects that are not composed of further objects.

Arguably premise (8) is the most problematic and controversial, for it might be begging the question. For this I don’t know how to repair the argument. Either you get it or you don’t. This might be a clash of intuition between people who have a gut feeling that it’s “parts all the way down” or that it bottoms out somewhere. I used to not have a strong opinion on this, but I am now inclined to think it bottoms out somewhere. I take this to be a logical fact, and not a fact of the universe, for only science can tell us what the actual bottom to reality is, be that quarks or whatever physics tells us. The intuition that reality bottoms out is driven by the inner logic of the idea of finite objects being composed of parts. It just seems downright strange, almost mystical, to say that a finite object like a coffee mug is composed of an infinite number of smaller objects. Surely it makes sense to say it is composed of a great many smaller objects, but I see no reason for thinking this amount infinite. Objects must bottom out according to the sheer logic of our ways of talking about composition. If this is right, then we arrive at a different interpretation of Wittgenstein’s argument for metaphysical simples than is commonly given. The concept of simple objects is not arrived at by seeing it in our language and then saying because language mirrors reality there really are metaphysical objects. Rather, the argument is transcendental in the sense that Wittgenstein shows that if we are going to talk about objects at all, we must presuppose metaphysically simple objects. So the Wittgensteinian point is not that language mirrors reality therefore simple objects exist (“One cannot, e.g. say “There are objects” 4.1272). The point is that language use logically commits us to the idea of there being simple objects when discussing objects. As Wittgenstein says, “Logic is transcendental” [6.13].

Philosophy concepts, language, logic, metaphysics, objects, simplicity, wittgenstein

Philosopher’s Carnival – September 19, 2011

September 19, 2011 Gary Williams 4 comments

Welcome to the September 19th edition of the Philosopher’s Carnival. As always, there is a lot good philosophy happening on the internet. It’s hard to keep up with everything, but I offer my recommendations for the best in academic philosophy blogging for the last 3 weeks.

Philosophy of mind & philosophy of psychology broadly construed

Kenny Pearce (http://blog.kennypearce.net)”, in post called “Berkeley, Commonsense, and Surprising Discoveries“, discusses the relationship between commonsense and philosophical and scientific discovery, particularly in respect to questions of freewill.
Luke Muehlhauser (http://lukeprog.com/index.html), in a post called “The Cognitive Science of Rationality“, gives a basic overview of the cognitive science of rationality.
Mohan Matthen (NewAPPS), in a post called “When Does One-Shot Induction Work?“, discusses issues in the philosophy of science through the example of Broca’s area and questions of brain localization.
Richard Brown, in a post called “Stazicker on Attention and Mental Paint“, talks about James Stazicker’s paper “Attention, Visual Knowledge, and Psychophysics”.
Peter (Conscious Entities), in a post called “Not Exactly Free“, discusses some issues related to the freewill debate in response to this piece in NatureNews.
Eric Schwitzgebel (The Splintered Mind), in a post called “The External World: More Experimental Evidence of Its Existence“, gives an interesting solution to the traditional problem of proving the external world exists beyond the stream of experience.
I humbly submit one of my own posts, “Thoughts on the fundamental problem of representation“, which attempts to answer the question “What is a representation?And how does it work?”

Ethical Inquiry

Richard Chappell (Philosophy, etc.), in a post called “Elite Normativity“, engages in metaethical inquiry and puts pressure on naturalists who appeal to “Lewisian ‘Elite’ properties” to try and settle normative issues.
Yeah, Ok, But Still, in a post called “Meta-ethics and scholasticism“, offers an interesting perspective on the noncogntivism vs cognitivism debate in contemporary meta-ethics.

Epistemology

Dave Maier (3quarksdaily), in a post called “What kind of perspectivist is Nietzsche?”, discusses questions of truth and knowledge in a long post on how to properly understand Nietzsche

Metaphysics

Philosopher professor Timothy Williamson skeptically asks “What is naturalism?” in the NYT’s The Stone. Philosopher professor Alex Rosenberg responds to Williamson in a post called “Why I am a Naturalist“. More discussion here.

Philosophy of Language

Philip Cartwright (Philosophical Investigations), in a post called “Of Simples and Samples“, discusses some pressing issues in the philosophy of language by means of comparing early and later Wittgenstein.

Continental Philosophy

Kelly Jolley (Quantum Est In Rebus Inane), in a post called “Reading “RM” 11: “The Grace of Our First Certainties”, comments on a passage of Merleau-Ponty dealing with Montaigne.
Heated discussion about Derrida over at NewAPPS here and here.

Miscellaneous

Rick Sincere (Book Reviews by Rick Sincere), interviews philosophy professor Jason Brennan about his new book The Ethics of Voting.
Jeremy Pierce (Parableman), in a post called “White Philosophers and Black Conversations“, discusses some issues concerning the latest decision by Brian Leiter to include “philosophy of race” as a category on the next revision of the Philosophical Gourmet Report.
I recommend all philosophers read the blog “What Is It Like To Be a Woman In Philosophy?” as well as the blog “Disabled Philosophers“
Rachel, in a post called “How to finish a PhD“, offers some helpful advice on how to complete a dissertation project.
Check out this discussion of the “two-body problem” in academia over at the Philosophy Smoker

And that’s it for this edition of the Philosopher’s Carnival!

Philosophy philosopher's carnival

Russell and Knowledge: Implications for the Ontological Argument

September 17, 2011 Gary Williams No comments

In his article “Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description”, Bertrand Russell explores how we can know something about an object even if we lack direct acquaintance with that object. For example, it seems that I can know that the biggest crater on the moon exists without ever being acquainted with that particular crater. In this case, I know something about the crater (that it exists), without being acquainted with that crater in any way. Thus grounds the fundamental distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. In the case of the largest moon crater, we can have definite and certain knowledge of it (that it exists), without knowing in the slightest anything like where it is located, or how deep it is. Knowledge by acquaintance is a matter of the subject having a “direct cognitive relation” with that object. On Russell’s view, we are not acquainted with physical objects themselves, nor are we acquainted with other people’s minds. Instead, Russell claims that, when it comes to particular things, we are for the most part directly acquainted with sense-data. Although Russell thinks that the most common object to be acquainted with is a sense-datum, he also thinks that we can be acquainted with universals, such as “yellow”, which he calls a “concept”. Russell thus thinks that we are acquainted with two basic types of objects: particulars and universals. The basic particulars which we are acquainted with are sense-data, and the universals we are acquainted with are various kinds of abstract concepts such as “roundness”. In addition to knowledge by acquaintance, Russell thinks there is also knowledge by description. For Russell, a description is generally any phrase such as “the so-and-so” e.g. “the biggest crater on the moon”. And accordingly, we can have knowledge by description of an object without being directly acquainted with that object insofar as we can have knowledge that there exists the biggest crater on the moon without being directly acquainted with it, or know anything about its particular details.

An important corollary of Russell’s theory is that any description of a particular must, ultimately, be cashed out in terms of acquaintance with sense-data. The fact that I know “The biggest moon crater is 13km deep” has to be cashed out in terms of a sense-datum that I have been acquainted with, be that a sense-datum of reading about the moon crater on a website, or the sense-datum of talking to my astronaut friend who visited the moon. And likewise, the knowledge by acquaintance of the biggest crater by the astronaut has to be cashed out in terms of his acquaintance with the sense-data of his exploration of the crater, or the sense-data of his looking through a telescope. In the case of particulars then, Russell is committed to a strong reductionism whereby any knowledge by description of a particular can, in principle, be reduced to knowledge of sense-data. We thus come to what Russell calls a fundamental epistemological principle: “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted” (p. 117). For Russell then, all knowledge of the moon crater as a particular thing (e.g. the fact that it is 13km deep), no matter how abstract, must rest on original first-person acquaintance with the sense-data of the moon. Of course, prior to us being acquainted with the largest moon crater such that we know it is 13km deep, we could have had only some knowledge by description of it, namely, “The biggest crater on the moon exists somewhere, but we’re not sure where yet”.

The epistemological implications of this principle run deep, for it seems like Russell would want to apply it to cases where people claim to have descriptive knowledge of entities that, in principle, no one could have ever been directly acquainted with e.g. God. If we asked what it means to understand the proposition “God exists”, a theist persuaded by the ontological argument might say it requires an understanding of the phrase “an absolutely perfect being exists”, for that is the conclusion of the argument it tries to establish (on the premise that a perfect being is most perfect, and existence is a perfection). But if we were to accept Russell’s epistemological principle, we would need to be acquainted with the concepts of absoluteness and perfection in order to properly understand the proposition “God exists”, for it seems reasonably agreed that theists are not basing their description of God on sense-data of God, except for perhaps schizophrenics. Does Russell’s theory of knowledge prevent us from being acquainted with universals like “perfection”? It’s hard for me to reconstruct what Russell’s actual view is on this question, for we would need to know more about Russell’s views on how we learn about universals. He does say, however, that in regard to learning the universal concept of “yellow”, that “Not only are we aware of particular yellows, but if we have seen a sufficient number of yellows and have sufficient intelligence, we are aware of the universal yellow” (p. 111).

If the case of yellow is analogous with the case of perfection, then it seems we would have to have been acquainted with a sufficient number of perfect beings in order to understand the concept of “perfection”. However, it is highly debatable as to whether anyone has ever been acquainted with a perfect being in his or her lifetime. Thus, if the ontological argument seeks to establish the existence of a perfect being, and such an argument requires the prior acquaintance with the concept of perfection in order to understand the conclusion, and it is only possible to learn about perfection through acquaintance with perfect beings, then the ontological argument cannot actually establish what it seeks to establish (namely, that a perfect being exists). In other words, because we must be acquainted with the concept of perfection in order to know what a “perfect being” is (as per Russell’s principle), and Russell’s principle seemingly indicates that we can only learn about such a concept through acquaintance with perfect beings, then the ontological argument cannot possibly go through because it requires that we know in advance what it sets out to prove, namely, that there exists a perfect being through which we learned about the concept of perfection. But since it seems plausible to suppose that we have no direct acquaintance with perfect beings as finite creatures, then we cannot learn about the concept of perfection in the way theists require, and thus we do not really understand (and thus know) the phrase “a perfect being exists”. That is, if we can not understand that phrase without being acquainted with a perfect being, and the only reason we would have for thinking a perfect being exists is the ontological argument, then it is plain that the argument does not work, for it assumes that one has a prior acquaintance with perfection. But as we have seen, the possibility of having an acquaintance with perfection is what it sets out to prove! One would have to show that you can learn about the concept of perfection without ever being acquainted with perfect beings. This might be possible, but if it were so, then it would be of no help to the theist using the ontological argument, for any supposed jump from having a conception of a perfect being to there actually being a perfect being wouldn’t necessarily follow if we establish that we can learn about perfection without there actually being any perfect beings.

Philosophy, Theology Bertrand Russell, god, knowledge, Ontological Argument

Thoughts on the fundamental problem of representation

September 17, 2011 Gary Williams 1 comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about the so-called “fundamental problem of representation”: what is a representation and how does it work as a representation? How do representations represent? We need to first answer what a representation is. Many philosophers seem to agree that it has something to do with “standing in”. The obvious example is a photograph. A photograph of a cat is a representation of a cat because the photograph “stands in” for the real cat. How does this work? Well, it seems to need an interpreter to interpret the photograph as a representation of a cat. But if we want to explain how the brain represents something, it obviously won’t do to posit an interpreter, for this is just a homuncular explanation.

So the photograph example is kind of a nonstarter when it comes to understanding how the brain represents something. Many philosophers believe that in order for the brain to perceive the world, it must form a representation of the world. In this way, perceiving the world is seen as forming a model of the world, which is used to compute action plans. But is this really a scientific explanation? When a brain perceives a cat, what does it mean for brain activity to “stand in” for that cat? This “standing in” function is obscure. For this reason, Eric Dietrich prefers to talk about representations as “mediators”. A representation is a mediator between a stimulus and behavior.

This makes sense to me, for I can imagine what it means for something to mediate between a physical perturbation and physical behavior. But doesn’t a thermometer also mediate between a stimulus and a behavior? What makes neurons different from thermometers? Aren’t neurons just complex bio-machines? And machines are machines. But I’m convinced there is a difference between a thermometer and a brain. I think representations in the brain are genuinely mental whereas I do not think this is true of the thermometer. Why? I haven’t quite worked this out, but I think the difference is that the mechanisms of mediation in the brain are responding to meaningful information, whereas the mechanisms of mediation in the thermometer are not responding to meaning at all. Meaning is mental. Mental mediations are mediations in response to meaning. We can thus make a fundamental distinction between nonmental representation and mental representation.

But what is meaningful information? How can we understand meaning ontologically? I think the concept of affordances is useful here. Let’s start simple. Think of sucrose molecules. Now imagine a thermometer like machine that had sensors designed to respond to sucrose, mechanisms of mediation (“processing”), and then an output behavior (turning on a green light). We have no reason to think of this machine as instantiating any truly mental mediations. Its mediations are purely responding to the sucrose causally. But now imagine a bacteria. It too has biochemical sensors designed to discriminate sucrose, mechanisms of mediation for processing it, and output behaviors. Some people think I’m crazy for holding this view, but I genuinely think that in the case of the bacteria, the mechanisms of mediation are mental. Why? Because the sucrose affords something to the bacteria, namely, nutrition. The sucrose is thus meaningful to the bacteria, whereas sucrose is not meaningful to the machine. There is an affective valence even at the level of the bacteria, it is just hard to imagine. But put yourself in the “mind” of a bacteria. Its whole world has a valence. It is attracted/repelled by physical perturbations. But unlike the machine, the bacteria perceives these perturbations as genuinely meaningful, for the sucrose affords the possibility of an opportunity for helping maintain a norm (the norm of survival). I think this emphasis on survival and affective valence is important, because I think of it as a means to solve the frame problem. Having a norm which regulates behavior enables the mechanisms of mediation to be responsive to more than just brute causal information. In enables the perception of affordances. The norm of survival is the Ur-desire, the spark of mentation. Arguably, the category between life and nonlife is fuzzy, so it’s not quite clear where to draw the line, but that there is a line is undeniable. I don’t doubt that robots could in principle instantiate their own norms to solve the frame problem, but I imagine they will look similar to biological norms.

But what about neurons? Many contemporary philosophers of mind think that “mental stuff” only happens in sufficiently complex brains. I think this is a mistake, for any association of representation with strictly neural processes will fail to answer the fundamental problem of representation. I think Dietrich is right that the concept of mediation is the right way to understand representation. But I think that neural mediation is just one form of mediation. Evolutionarily speaking, neural mediation was highly adaptive for it allowed organisms to increase the complexity of the mediation between stimulus and behavior. More complexity in mediation leads to “deeper” processing i.e. more complex behavior. Neural processing allowed for the mediations to become “abstract”. By this, I mean that the mechanisms of response become sensitive to more “global” features of a stimulus profile. This is called an increase in invariance, for differences in low-level stimulus detail will make the “higher-order” circuits fire steady. Think of perceiving a chair. We can recognize a chair from almost any angle of viewing. As we change angles, the lower-level mechanisms of response fire only in response to very specific and low-level features of the chair. At higher levels of processing, the response is steady regardless of the lower-level features. In this way, we say that the representations in the brain have become more “abstract”. Language is the ultimate in abstract mediation, for linguistic “tagging” of the world enables us to respond to very abstract kinds of information, particularly in respect to social cognition and our collapse of human behavior into abstract folk psychological categories. The vocabulary term “mind” is one of these ultimate abstractions, for it abstracts over all physical behavior and gives us a new category of response: person. Such linguistic representations are meta-representational insofar as they allow organisms to represent representations, to mediate mediations. Many theorists, including myself, think that it is meta-representation which separates the mental life of humans from that of other animals.

In summary, the fundamental problem of representation is to understand what a representation is and to answer how it works as a representation. Representations are stand ins for stimuli. A stand in for a stimuli is a mechanisms of mediation between stimuli and behavior. There are two fundamental types of mediation: mental and nonmental. Nonmental mediation is ubiquitous in the physical world, whereas mental mediation is rare. Mental mediation is mental because the mechanisms of mediation are sensitive to affordance information, which is grounded by norms, the most evolutionarily basic being the norm of survival. Mental representations thus form a continuum of possible abstraction, with neural representations only being a kind of mediation, enabling deeper abstraction through stimulus-invariance. There is thus nothing mysterious about representation. The term itself is a shorthand description of the complex mechanisms of mediation intrinsic to an entity.

Philosophy, Psychology mechanisms, mentality, metacognition, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, reductionism, representation

In Defense of Naturalism: A Response to Timothy Williamson

September 5, 2011 Gary Williams 10 comments

In a recent article in The Stone, Timothy Williamson has some strong opinions on the intellectual strength of naturalism as a comprehensive worldview. What does Willamson mean by naturalism? He says “ [Naturalists] believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method.” This is supposed to be a bad thing. Why? Because, for starters, the current science of physics might be superseded by a different physics in the future. Hence, ”Naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers.” And how does Williamson characterize the scientific method? “[Science] involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predictions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is called the hypothetico-deductive method.”

What’s the problem? For one, Williamson doesn’t think this method can handle the science of mathematics. Moreover, “Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History? Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its bite.” Apparently, “I don’t call myself a naturalist because I don’t want to be implicated in equivocal dogma. Dismissing an idea as “inconsistent with naturalism” is little better than dismissing it as “inconsistent with Christianity.” And coming to the crux of his attack on the intellectual respectability of naturalism, Williamson says “Where experimentation is the likeliest way to answer a question correctly, the scientific spirit calls for the experiments to be done; where other methods — mathematical proof, archival research, philosophical reasoning — are more relevant it calls for them instead…Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.”

I find this whole article to be fantastically misguided in its attempts to attack naturalists as “dogmatic” or antiscientific in “spirit”. For one, I think Williamson has not adequately captured the intellectual core of naturalism as a worldview. In my opinion, the essence of naturalism is not a defense of the “hypothetico-deductive method” as the only worthwhile method of inquiry. Rather, the essence of naturalism is the claim that there is no supernatural realm and no supernatural entities inhabiting that realm. The essence of naturalism is thus negative, in the sense that it denies that there is something beyond the natural world (whatever that might turn out to be). But contra Williamson’s caricature, naturalism, in my view, does not impose strict edicts on the best method for investigating the natural world. Naturalism is merely the view that the natural world is all there is, with nothing extra left over.

Of course, one can step into dogmatic waters in trying to explicate what exists in the natural world. But I don’t think naturalism is required to say what the ultimate constituents of the natural world is, be that atoms or some kind of quantum foam. Is there only one universal super object and all other objects are merely modes of that super object? Or are there a lot of fundamental objects? I take it that we can’t decide on these issues from the armchair. But this is not a failure of naturalism for naturalism is essentially a reactive enterprise. Our species’ religious history has caused us to inherit theological baggage such that many people would say that there exists both a natural world and a supernatural world. Naturalism is simply the thesis that the supernatural world is a figment of our overactive imaginations. In order to make this claim, the naturalist need not say anything substantial about the best method to inquire about the natural world. It is only a thesis about the fictive status of historically proposed supernatural realms like heaven and hell as well as the supernatural entities which inhabit these realms like angels, demons, and gods.

Accordingly, we can see that Williamson has it exactly backwards in regards to the supposed “dogmatism” of naturalism and the scientific spirit. For who is more dogmatic? The naturalistic who “dogmatically” proclaims the supernatural realm is an illusion based on the latest and greatest brain science, or the supernaturalist who proclaims he “just knows” the supernatural realm exists because he has faith in it? For this is the great advantage of naturalism: what it “dogmatically” proclaims to exist (the non-supernatural reality) is, in principle, discoverable or encounterable by means of our fleshy sensory apparatuses coupled with whatever tools we can harness, like the telescope or atom-smasher. In contrast, what supernaturalism dogmatically proclaims to exist is not, in principle, encounterable by such flesh for the supernatural is defined as being outside of time and space. Of course, supernaturalists often claim that supernatural entities do in fact interact with our world, but such claims cannot be brought into the respectable scientific arena of prediction and manipulation, so the claims are often left unprincipled and taken on faith. And of course, supernaturalists often report experiences of the supernatural. But in regards to explaining such experiences, it strikes me as obvious that brain science and evolutionary theory (including theories of cultural evolution) does a better job of accounting for why people believe their experiences of the supernatural are veridical. A better explanation than “the experiences are accurate” is that the brain is capable of causing hallucinations that are triggered by specific cultural contexts such as being raised in a religious environment where the interpretational framework of supernaturalism exists. It remains to be seen if a far-future atheistic society would interpret hallucinations in the same way as most people do now.

In conclusion, I have attempted to argue that Williamson is wrong to claim naturalism’s most basic claim is about the hypothetico-deductive method being the only method of inquiry. Instead, naturalism’s most basic claim is that the supernatural realm implicitly and explicitly assumed to exist by religious people throughout history is in fact, fictive. All that exists is the natural world. But naturalism as a basic thesis makes no claims about about (1) what the natural world is most fundamentally or (2) what the best method(s) for inquiring about that world are. Both of these questions need not be completely resolved in order for us to see that supernaturalism (the only true opponent of naturalism) is intellectually bankrupt.

Philosophy, Theology dogmatism, Naturalism, religion, scientific method, supernaturalism

Classes I’m taking at Wash U this Fall, and also some thoughts on why humans are so damned religious

August 27, 2011 Gary Williams 7 comments

School starts on Tuesday and my levels of anticipation for this semester are highly elevated. I’m on fellowship for the first year, so I don’t have any TA responsibilities, but I do have to take four classes a semester. This Fall I am taking:

Required proseminar for first-years with Gillian Russell

We are going to be reading Scott Soames’ two-volume Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. Based on my brief reading, the text seems like very highly quality philosophy. I’m a little intimidated by the Mathematical logic stuff though.

Advanced Metaphysics with Roy Sorensen

Course description: “Through readings from both classical and contemporary sources, a single traditional metaphysical concern will be made the subject of careful and detailed analytic attention. Possible topics include such concepts as substance, category, cause, identity, reality, and possibility, and such positions as metaphysical realism, idealism, materialism, relativism, and irrealism.”

Agency, Metacognition, and Control: a PNP seminar with Larry Jacoby and Carl Craver

Course description: “This seminar will be organized around philosophical and psychological readings pertaining to agency, intentional action, and metacognition. The philosophical readings will be concerned with the nature of human agency, self-knowledge, and the capacity to form second-order desires. The psychological readings will be drawn from research concerned with the distinction between automatic and controlled behavior, illusions of conscious will, attribution, and metacognition (or higher order thought). The goal of the seminar is to promote interdisciplinary communication.”

Varieties of dissociation: a PNP seminar with Liz Schechter

Course description: “In this course we will examine some varieties of dissociation, as they occur in syndromes and disorders like dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, the split-brain phenomenon, anarchic and alien hand syndromes, and blindsight, to see what such phenomena can tell us about the architecture of mind and its unity (or disunity). We will also look at issues surrounding dissociations in cognitive neuropsychology: the role of double dissociations in particular, and whether evidence of different lesion sites is necessary to infer them, and, more generally, what findings of specific impairments following brain injury can tell us about the unimpaired brain.”

So yeah, this semester is going to be awesome. I look forward to working on full-length research papers again. I haven’t really done any major philosophical thinking since completing my Master’s thesis, so it will be nice to produce some real papers for conferences and possibly more publications. I will need to start thinking about my first qualifying paper next summer. I still enjoy writing blog posts more than writing papers though. I hate citing stuff because I am lazy and just like writing from memory. I also like the length constraints of a blog post. I usually try to stick to around 1,000-1,500 words for my blog posts since I think that’s enough room to make one simple point without losing people’s attention. Also, being able to write 1,000 words in one sitting is a good skill to have, since that turns a 3,000 word research paper into three good sit-downs plus time for major editing. When I break a research paper into 1,000 word segments, it helps me to not feel anxious when I first open a blank document. This is why I highly recommend blogging for all academics. It’s cliche, but the more you write, the easier writing becomes. Stringing sentences together by tapping on a keyboard is a skill like any other and improves with practice, at least with respect to the ease of writing, not necessarily the intellectual content, though that too should, ideally, be steadily rising in quality over time as you grow as a scholar.

The one downside to starting classes is that I will no longer be able to fully control what I read, an immense pleasure for me. Though I will be reading some cool stuff undoubtedly, I imagine I will be finishing books at a slower pace now that I have required reading. I have a contest with myself for reading books each year. This year I’m already at 58. I hope to get to at least 75 by the New Year, which will be a personal best I believe. This year I’ve read some awesome books, both fiction and nonfiction. For fiction, the highlight was definitely DFW’s Infinite Jest. For nonfiction, it’s hard to say; nothing really stands out in the way Infinite Jest does. But I have read some really interesting psychology so far this year. Nothing mindblowing or paradigm shifting in the sense that Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness was back in the summer of 2009.

I remember distinctly when I became a Jaynesian. I was on a cruise with Katie, and had brought along Origin of Consciousness, and was reading it on the pool-deck and white-sand beaches. I was highly skeptical going into the book, since I had read over and over that Jaynes was considered a crackpot and outside the mainstream of academic opinion. By the time I was half-way through, I was a total convert. Almost at once I saw the stunning theoretical elegance of his theory of how religion got started, and my mind started reeling. It united in my head so many disparate strands of research, both philosophical and scientific. It is easily the most important intellectual synthesis since Darwin. Darwin showed us where our bodies came from, but Jaynes showed us where the human mind came from, religious quirks and all. Why does our species hallucinate a spiritual realm filled with authoritative entities? Why do we bury the dead in the way we do, and why do we sacrifice to the gods? Why did humans once have a more direct line to the spiritual world, but eventually lose contact except through singular hyperreligious individuals? Why do normal people pray to gods indirectly but hyperreligious people hear the gods directly talking to them as if they were beaming thoughts directly into their brain? Why did almost all ancient humans treat the newly dead as if they were still in need of items only useful to the living? Why did idolatry become so rampant after humans lost direct contact with gods? Why did oracles and prophets arise in the wake of our losing contact with the will of the gods?

Jaynes’ theory powerfully accounts for all of these phenomena and more. Other theories of religion are far too simplistic in their proposed mechanisms e.g. an “over-active agency detector”. Jaynes’ theory is so much more concrete in its explanation of why humans have such a thick religious history. An agency detector? That only explains seeing faces in the clouds or getting spooked by the wind whipping up a tree. But it does not explain the hallucinations. Religious scholars are reluctant to call experiences of gods what they really are, and instead refer to the fact that religious people suffer a delusion of belief. But where did this delusion come from? Who was the first person to have such a delusion? For Jaynesian theory, the root of all religious delusion is in the hallucination of voices speaking to you. We know this is a vestigial feature of something that was once beneficial because classic schizophrenia has a strong genetic component, and yet is highly damaging to reproductive fitness and hasn’t been bred out of the population. So either hallucinations were an adaptive trait or a side-effect of something else that was adaptive. Jaynes thought that it was a side-effect of humans gaining verbal communication.

But once in place, the side-effect turned out to have great adaptive benefit, since scholars are now forming a consensus that religiosity was in place long before the rise of civilization and was its impetus, so we must conclude that highly religious communities of hominids were more successful than nonreligious communities. The success comes partly because of the fact that the religious humans were verbal humans, and language use vastly increases intelligence, for it aids in the categorization and thus understanding of reality. With better understanding comes better control and flexibility, and better control becomes the ability to adapt to novel environments. But the “side-effect” of religion tapped into the powerful cognitive algorithms of the temporal cortex. The “bicameral” mind is kind of like the unconscious ancestor of the modern savants. Amazing calendrical skills, literally god-like synthesis of novel information, far-flung future predictions of seasons and other rhythmical patterns. The bicameral mind, in other words, gave birth to civilization. This is why ancient neolithic communities were all centrally organized around the temples, the houses of god. It’s why the god-kings and gods held absolute sway over the people’s minds. The god-inspired despot truly dominated. This was because humans had not yet developed the self-consciousness necessary to have a rational dialogue with the gods that controlled society through hierarchically structured hallucinations. But with self-consciousness came philosophy, and with philosophy came reflection, and with reflection humans realized that the gods were projections of human cognitive machinery, a literal remnant of our ancient and primitive past.

Consciousness, Random, Theology bicameral mind, consciousness, Julian Jaynes, origin of religion, Wash U

Noncomputational Representation

August 23, 2011 Gary Williams 3 comments

I’ve been thinking about representations a lot lately. More specifically, I have been thinking about the possibility of noncomputational representation. On first blush, this sounds strange because representationalism has for a long time been intimately connected with the Computational Theory of Mind, which basically says that the brain is some kind of computer, and that cognition is most basically the manipulation of abstract quasi-linguaform representations by means of a low-level syntactic realizer base. I’ve never been quite sure how this is supposed to work, but the gist of it is captured by the software/hardware distinction. The mind is the software of the computing brain. Representations, in virtue of their supposed quasi-linguaform nature, are often thought of in terms of propositions. For a brain to know that P, it must have a representation or belief to the effect of that P. As it commonly goes, computation is knowledge, knowledge is representational, the brain represents, the brain is a computer.

But in this post I want to explore the idea of noncomputational representation. The basic idea under question is whether we can say that the brain traffics in representations even though it is not a computer i.e. if the brain is not a computer, does it still represent things, if so, how and in what sense? Following Jeff Hawkins, I think it is plausible to suppose that the brain is not a digital computer. But if the brain is not computing like a computer in order to be so intelligent, what is it doing? Hawkins thinks that the secret of the brain’s intelligence is the neocortex. He thinks that the neocortex is basically a massive memory-prediction machine. Through experience, patterns and regularities flow into the nervous system in terms of neural patterns and regularities. These patterns are then stored in the brain’s neocortex as memory. It is a well-known fact that cortical memories are “stored” in the same place as where they were originally taken in and processed.

How is this possible? Hawkins’ idea is that the reason why we see memory as being “stored” in the original cortical areas is that the function of storing patterns is to aid in the prediction of future patterns. As we experience the world, the sensory details change based on things like our perspective. Take my knowledge of where my chair is in my office. After experiencing this chair from various positions in the room, I now have a memory of where the chair is in relation to the room, and I have a memory of where the room is in relation to the house, and the house in relation to the neighborhood, and the neighborhood to the city, and so on. In terms of the chair, what the memory allows me to do is to “know” things about the chair which are independent of my perspective. I can look at the chair from any perspective and recognize that it is my chair, despite each sensory profile displaying totally different patterns. How is this possible? Hawkins idea is that the neocortex creates an invariant representation of the chair which is based on the integration of lower-level information into a higher-order representation.

What does it mean to create an invariant representation? The basic idea here can be illustrated in terms of how information flows into and around the cortex. At the lowest levels, the patterns of regularities of my sensory experience of the chair are broken up into scattered and modality-specific information. The processing at the lowest levels is carried out by the lowest neocortical layers. Each small region in these layers has a receptive field that is very narrow and specific, such as firing only when a line sweeps across a tiny upper-right quadrant in the visual field. And of course, when the information comes into the brain it is processed by contralateral cortical areas, with the right lower cortical layers only responding to information streaming in from the left visual field, and vice-versa. As the modality specific and feature-oriented information flows up the cortical hierarchy, the receptive fields of the cells becomes broader, and more steady in the firing patterns. Whereas the lower cortical areas only respond to low-level details of the chair, the higher cortical areas stay active while in the presence of the chair under any experential condition. These higher cortical areas can thus be said to have created an invariant representation of the patterns and regularities which are specific to the chair. The brain is able to create these representations because the world actually is patterned and regular, and the brain is responding to this.

So what is the cash value of these invariant representations? To understand this, you have to understand how once the information flows to the “top” of the hierarchy (ending in the hippocampus, forming long-term memories), it flows back down to the bottom. Neuroanatomists have long known that 90% of the connections at the lower cortical layers are streaming in from the “top”, and not the “bottom”. In other words, there is a massive amount of feedback from the higher levels into the lower levels. Hawkins’ idea is that this feedback is the physical instantiation of the invariant representations aiding in prediction. Because my brain has stored a memory/representation of what the chair is “really” like abstracted from particular sensory presentations, I am able to predict where the chair will be before I even walk into the room. However, if I walked into the room and the chair was on the ceiling, I would be shocked, because I have nothing in my memory about my chair, or any chair, ever being on the ceiling. Except I might have a memory about people pulling pranks by nailing furniture to ceilings, so after some shock, I would “re-understand” my expectations about future perceptions of chairs, being less surprised next time I see my chair on the ceiling.

Hawkins think that it is this relation between having a good memory and the ability to predict the future based on that memory which is at the heart of intelligence. In the case of memories flowing down to the sensory cortices, the “prediction” is one that predicts what future patterns of sensory activity are like. For example, the brain learns Sensory Pattern A and creates a memory of this pattern throughout the cortical hierarchy. The most invariant representation in the hierarchy flows down to the lower sensory areas and fires the Pattern A again based on the memory-based prediction about when it will experience Pattern A again. If the memory-prediction was accurate, the incoming pattern will match Pattern A, and the memory will be confirmed and strengthened. If the pattern comes in is actually Pattern B, then the prediction will be incongruous with the incoming information. This will cause the new pattern to shoot up the hierarchy to form a new memory, which then feedbacks down to make predictions about future sensory experience. In the case of predictions flowing down into the motor cortices, the “predictions” are really motor commands. If I predict that if I walk into my office and turn right I will see my chair, and if the prediction is in the form of a motor commond, the prediction will actually make itself come true if the chair is where the brain predicted it will be. Predictive motor commands are confirmed when the prediction is accurate, and disconfirmed if inaccurate.

So, a noncomputational representation is based on the fact that the brain (particularly the neocortex) is organized in an hierarchical memory system based on neuronal patterns and regularities, which in turn are composed of synaptic mechanisms like long-term potentiation. According to Hawkins, it is the hierarchy from bottom to top and back which gives the brain its remarkable powers of intelligence. The intelligence of humans for Hawkins is really a product of having a very good memory and being able to anticipate and hence understand the future in incredibly complex ways. If you understand a situation, you will not be surprised because your memory is so accurate. If you do not understand it, you cannot predict what will happen next.

An interesting feature of Hawkins’ theory is that it predicts that the neocortex is fundamentally running a single algorithm: memory-prediction. So what gives the brain its adult modularity and specialization? It is the specific nature of the patterns and regularities of each specific sensory modality flowing into the brain. But the common currency of the brain is patterns of neuronal activity. Thus, every area of the cortex, could, in principle, “handle” any other neuronal pattern. Paul Bach-y-Rita’s research on sensory substitution is highly relevant here. Bach-y-Rita’s research has shown that the common currency of the perception is the detection and learning of sensory regularities. His research has, for example, allowed blind patients to “see” light by wiring a camera onto their tongues. This is to be expected if the neocortex is running a single type of algorithm. So what actually “wires” a cortical subregion is the type of information which streams in. Because auditory data and visual data always enter the brain from unique points, it is not surprising that specialized regions of the cortex “handle” this information. But the science shows that if any region is damaged, a certain amount of plasticity is capable of having other areas “take over” the input. This is especially true in childhood. What Micah Allen and I have tried to show in our recent paper is that higher-order functions of humans are based on the kinds of information available for humans to “work with”, namely, social-linguistic information. So the key to human unique cognitive control is not having an evolutionary unique executive controller in the brain. Rather, the difference is in what kinds of information can be funneled into the executive controller. For humans, a huge amount of the data streaming in is social-linguistic. Our memory-prediction systems thus operate with more complexity and specialization because of the unique social-linguistic nature of the patterns which stream into the executive. So to answer Daniel Wegner’s question of “Who is the controller of controlled processes?“, the uniqueness of “voluntary” control is based on the higher-level invariant memories being social-linguistic in nature. The uniqueness of the information guarantees that the predictions, and thus behavior, of the human cognitive control system will be unique. So we are not different from chimps insofar as we have executive control. The difference lies in what kinds of information that control has to work with in terms of its memory and predictive capacities.

Philosophy, Psychology computation, human cognition, Jeff Hawkins, memory, prediction, representation

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