Minds and Brains

Nonconscious Qualia?

May 15, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

Here’s a strange idea: nonconscious qualia. Absurd you might say? Well, many proponents of the so-called Higher-order approach to consciousness believe they not only exist, but are quite routine and omnipresent in our mental lives. Peter Carruthers, Uriah Kriegel, and David Rosenthal are three theorists who have openly talked about nonconscious qualia. Examples of nonconscious qualia include sensing redness, loudness, roughness, sweetness etc. The idea is that there can be genuinely nonconscious sensory qualities. The absent minded driver is a common case used to support the idea of nonconscious qualia. The only difference between conscious and nonconscious qualia is that, obviously, the conscious qualia are conscious.

More specifically, these theorists claim that there is nothing-it-is-like to have nonconscious qualia. That is the big difference: there is something-it-is-like to have conscious qualia but there is nothing-it-is-like to have nonconscious qualia. Why is there something-it-is-like to have conscious qualia? Because the presence of a higher-order mental state is what generates what-it-is-likeness. It is easy to see why people find higher-order theory to be absurd. After all, most people associate qualia with what-it-is-likeness, so to talk about qualia that there is nothing-it-is-like to be in seems absurd.

My own position is that there is something-it-is-like to have nonconscious qualia. This puts me at odds with both First-order and Higher-order theory. Higher-order consciousness, in my view, is much closer to a kind of self-conscious introspection than any kind of “noninferential higher-order thought” (granted that the objects of such self-consciousness don’t have to be just the self). And if I were to think that only conscious qualia have what-it-is-likeness, I would have to conclude that there is nothing-it-is-like to be a cat or mouse, since cats and mice obviously aren’t capable of entertaining complex introspection. Some theorists like Peter Carruthers simply bite the bullet and deny there is anything-it-is-like to be a nonhuman animal. But I think that if what-it-is-likeness is going to be a coherent property at all, it will have to be a property shared by pretty much all lifeforms.

I think one reason why higher-order theorists think that what-it-is-likeness is associated with higher-order awareness is that Nagel’s original formulation was in terms of what-it-is-like for a subject and not just what-it-is-likeness. So the idea is that it is absurd to suppose there is something-it-is-like for Jones to not be aware of what-it-is-like to exist. But I fail to see why this is absurd. If we distinguish between what-it-is-likeness and our introspective awareness of what-it-is-like, then there seems to be no difficulties in thinking there is something-it-is-like to lack a meta-awareness of what-it-is-like. The phrase “for a subject” seems to suggest the presence of higher-order awareness, but this is because we are conflating the minimal subject with the conscious subject. If we thought the only legitimate type of subject was a conscious subject, then the idea of what-it-is-likeness without consciousness would be absurd. But if we thought there was a kind of minimal prereflective subjectivity intrinsic to being an embodied creature, then the idea of there being something “for a subject” without that subject being meta-aware is perfectly coherent.

Consciousness, Philosophy consciousness, higher-order theory, nonconscious qualia, qualia

Quote of the Day 5-15-2012

May 15, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

“Traditionally, the problem of existence has been most directly confronted through religion, and an increasing number of the disillusioned are turning back to it, choosing either one of the standard creeds or a more esoteric Eastern variety. But religions are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers. At some moments in history, they have explained convincingly what was wrong with human existence and have given credible answers. From the fourth to the eighth century of our era Christianity spread throughout Europe, Islam arose in the Middle East, and Buddhism conquered Asia. For hundreds of years these religions provided satisfying goals for people to spend their lives pursuing. But today it is more difficult to accept their worldviews as definitive. The form in which religions have presented their truths – myths, revelations, holy texts – no longer compels belief in an area of scientific rationality, even though the substance of the truths may have remained unchanged. A vital new religion may one day arise again. In the meantime, those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.” ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Random none

The Nature of Visual Experience

May 14, 2012 Gary Williams 4 comments

Many philosophers have used visual illusions as support for a representational theory of visual experience. The basic idea is that sensory input in the environment is too ambiguous for the brain to really figure out anything on the basis of sensory evidence alone. To deal with this ambiguity, theorists have conjectured that the brain generates a series of predictions or hypotheses about the world based on the continuously incoming evidence and it’s accumulated knowledge (known as “priors”). On this theory, the nature of visual experience is explained by saying that what we experience is really just the prediction. So on the visual illusion above, the brain guesses that the B square is a lighter color and therefore we experience it as lighter. The brain guesses this because in its stored memory is information about typical configurations of checkered squares under typical kinds of illumination. On this standard view, all of visual experience is a big illusion, like a virtual-reality type Matrix.

Lately I have been deeply interested in thinking about these notions of “guessing” and “prediction”. What does it mean to say that a collection of neurons predicts something? How is this possible? What does it mean for a collection of neurons to make a hypothesis? I am worried that in using these notions as our explanatory principle, we risk the possibility that we are simply trading in metaphors instead of gaining true explanatory power. So let’s examine this notion of prediction further and see if we can make sense of it in light of what we know about how the brain works.

One thought might be that predictions or guesses are really just kinds of representations. To perceive the B square as lighter is just for your brain to represent it as lighter. But what could we mean by representation? One idea comes from Jeff Hawkin’s book On Intelligence. He talks about representations in terms of invariancy. For Hawkins, the concept of representation and prediction is inevitably tied into memory. To see why consider my perception of my computer chair. I can see and recognize that my chair is my chair from a variety of visual angles. I have a memory of what my chair looks like in my brain and the different visual angles provide evidence that matches my stored memory of my chair. The key is that my high-level memory of my chair is invariant with respect to it’s visual features. But at lower levels of visual processing, the neurons are tuned to respond only to low-level visual features. So some low-level neurons only fire in respond to certain angles or edge configurations. So on different visual angles these low-level neurons might not respond. But at higher levels of visual processing, there must be some neurons that are always firing regardless of the visual angle because their level of response invariancy is higher. So my memory of the chair really spans a hierarchy of levels of invariancy. At the highest levels of invariancy, I can even predict the chair when I am not in the room. So if I am about to walk into my office, I can predict that my chair will be on the right side of the room. If I walked in and my chair was not on the right side, I would be surprised and I’d have to update my memory with a new pattern.

On this account, representation and prediction is intimately tied into our memory, our stored knowledge of reality that helps us make predictions to better cope with our lives. But what is memory really? If we are going to be neurally realistic, it seems like it is going to have to be cashed out in terms of various dispositions of brain cells to react in certain ways. So memory is the collective dispositions of many different circuits of brain cells, particularly their synaptic activities. Dispositions can be thought of as mechanical mediations between input and output. Invariancies can thus be thought of as invariancies in mediation. Low-level mediation is variant with respect to the fine-grained features of the input. High-level mediation is less variant with respect to fine-grain detail. What does this tell us about visual experience? I believe the mediational view of representation offers an alternative account of illusions.

I am still working out the details of this idea, so bear with me. My current thought is that the brain’s “guess” that square B is lighter can be understood dispositionally rather than intentionally. Let’s imagine that we reconstruct the 2D visual illusion in the real world, so that we experience the same illusion that the B square is lighter. What would it mean for my brain to make this prediction? Well, on the dispositional view, it would mean that in making such a prediction my brain is essentially saying “If I go over and inspect that square some more I should expect it to be lighter”. If you actually did go inspect the square and found it is is not a light square, you would have to make an update to your memory store. However, visual illusions are persistent despite high-level prediction. This is because the entirety of the memory store for low-level visual processing overrides the meager alternate prediction generated at higher levels.

What about qualia? The representational view says that the qualitative features of the B square result from the square being represented as lighter. But if we understand representations as mediations, we see that representations don’t have to be these spooky things with strange properties like “aboutness”. Aboutness is just cashed out in terms of specificity of response. But the problem of qualia is tricky. In a way I kind of think the “lightness” of the B square is just an illusion added “on top” of a more or less veridical acquaintance. So I feel like I should resist inferring from this minor illusional augmentation that all of my visual experience is massively illusory in this way. Instead, I think we could see the “prediction” of the B square as lighter as a kind of augmentation of mediation. The brain augments the flow of mediations such that if this illusion was a real scene and someone asked you to “go step on all the light squares” you would step on the B square. For this reason, I think the phenomenal impressiveness of the illusions are amplified because of their 2Dness. If it were a 3D scene, the “prediction” would take the form of possible continuations of mediated behavior in response to a task demand (e.g. finding light squares). But because it’s a 2D image, the “qualia” of the B square being light takes on a special form, pressing itself upon us as being a “raw visual feel” of lightness that on the surface doesn’t seem to be linked to behavior. But I think if we understand the visual hierachy of invariant mediation, and the ways in which the higher and lower levels influence each other, we don’t need to conclude that all visual experience is massively illusory because we live behind a Kantian screen of representation. Understanding brain representations as mediational rather than intentional helps us strip the Kantian image of its persuasive power.

Consciousness, Philosophy aboutness, philosophy of mind, prediction, qualia, representation, visual experience

Quote of the day 5-13-2012

May 13, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

“What convinces me that a cognitivistic theory could capture all the dear features I discover in my inner life is not any ‘argument’, and not just the programmatic appeal of thereby preserving something like ‘the unity of science’, but rather a detailed attempt to describe to myself exactly those features of my life and the nature of my acquaintance with me that I could cite as my ‘grounds’ for claiming that I am -and do not merely seem to be - conscious.” ~Dan Dennett, “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness”, in Brainstorms

Random consciousness, Dennett

Are Bacteria Capable of Caring?

May 7, 2012 Gary Williams 5 comments

At a conference on consciousness I went to recently, I suggested that bacteria are capable of care, but that rocks aren’t. Several people disagreed with me vehemently on this point. They said that it’s an obvious anthropomorphization to say that bacteria care. Their argument was that bacteria are just fully mechanical biochemical systems. To say a bacteria is capable of care is to speak metaphorically or something, but it can’t be literally true.

I don’t know about this. It seems to me true that bacteria are capable of caring but rocks aren’t. And you can’t just say bacteria are biochemical machines, because under the right description, so are humans. And moreover, seen through the lens of physics, humans are really no different from any other physical system, including rocks and bacteria. It’s all just fermions and bosons at the bottom anyway. So the argument that bacteria can’t care because they are mechanical or fully physical doesn’t work because under the right description humans look the same as bacteria and we all agree it’s appropriate to say humans care.

So the difference between the bacteria and the rock is not going to be a matter of being a physical system obeying physical law. Where I think the difference lies is in the way in which the bacteria’s physical matter is organized. It is at the level of organization that we see differences between rocks and bacteria. Bacteria, like all lifeforms, are balanced at the edge of thermodynamic disequilibrium. They are unstable in their organization, always ready to break down, but somehow they keep going (until death at least). Their unstability is characteristically stable, like a whirlpool in a river.

Moreover, there is something unique about the activities of the bacteria compared to other mechanical systems. The activities of the bacteria are continuously involved in producing the physical structures that constitute the bacteria. When the bacteria digests nutrients, it takes that matter and processes it in order to rebuild the membrane which distinguishes it from the environment. So the bacteria is continuously self-producing itself by always taking in nutrients to maintain the construction of the membrane which defines it against the environment. Theorists have called this kind of dynamic organization autopoietic. Whether or not autopoiesis alone is sufficient to define life against nonlife (some think you will need to also add notions of adaptivity), it is uncontroversial that organic lifeforms have a unique kind of organizational structure in virtue of something like autopoiesis.

But why should we think such an organizational structure warrants the claim that bacteria care about things? Well, I admit that such a gloss is taking advantage of metaphors to some extent, and all metaphors are in some sense literally false. But I still think it’s true to say bacteria care about things but rocks and other inorganic entities don’t. Imagine that you take some sugar and you place it in front of a rolling boulder or a moving bacteria. On one level of description, we could talk about the rock encountering the sugar in its pathway in input/output computational terms. The lump of sugar is an input into the system, the rock “computes” its response, and then generates an output, which is a slightly different change in behavior.

Similarly, we could use the same input/output description to talk about the bacteria encountering the lump. The sugar is an input into the system, the bacteria “computes” its response, and the output is a new set of behaviors. But just because we can apply this abstract characterization to both systems, that doesn’t mean that the rock and the bacteria are doing the same thing when they encounter the sugar. The difference, I think, is in the way the two entities “experience” the sugar. I don’t think the rock is really quite experiencing the sugar in the same way because I think the bacteria is on the look out for sugar. It is attuned for sugar, as opposed to other nutrients. It desires sugar. It seeks out sugar. It’s perception is valenced. It lives in a small lifeworld where all that matters is finding nutrients. None of this is true of the rock. If the rock sees the world through a valence at all, it valences everything equally. It has no preferences. No affectivity. As Heidegger said,

A stone never finds itself but is simply present-at-hand. A very primitive unicellular form of life, on the contrary, will already find itself, where this affectivity can be the greatest and darkest dullness, but for all that it is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being present-at-hand like a thing. (History of the Concept of Time, p. 255)

I think this is a very insightful remark from Heidegger. He recognizes that there is something unique about the organizational structure of a bacteria when compared to a rock. When I say a rock “cares” about the world, I am really referencing Heidegger’s technical notion of “affectivity”. I talked about this a lot in my Master’s Thesis. The key idea is about the bacteria “finding itself”. This kind of self-reflexive organizational structure is I think a nontechnical precursor to the concept of autopoiesis. Pretty speculative, but bear with me. The idea is that rocks and stones don’t see the world as ready-to-hand. That is, they don’t see the world in terms of what it affords the possibility of doing. In other words, it is appropriate to think of bacteria as organized with respect to the future. This is a potentially mystifying claim, but it’s not that complex. From the perspective of physics, it’s still all just fermions and bosons obeying the laws of physics. But when dealing with lifeforms, the concept of valence is necessarily tied into the concept of a creature lacking something. The bacteria lacks the nutrients necessary to construct its membrane, so it seeks it out. Lack in organisms is always defined with respect to the future, what some ecological psychogists have called prospectivity. This type of absential, future-oriented organization is what Terrence Deacon has called ententional phenomena in his new book Incomplete Nature. I haven’t finished the book yet, but what I have read so far is quite brilliant.

Consciousness, Heidegger, Philosophy autopoiesis, bacteria, caring, cognition, embodied cognition, Heidegger, life, mind in life

Does Mary the Neuroscientist Learn Anything New?

May 5, 2012 Gary Williams 1 comment

I was thinking about the famous Mary the Neuroscientist thought experiment today, and had a few thoughts I’d like to write down and try to make clear in my head. I’m not sure what follows is perfectly coherent, but here goes. In case you haven’t heard of it, the thought experiment goes something like this. Mary is a super scientist. So super that she has theoretical knowledge of all physical facts (emphasis on theoretical). She has the theoretical knowledge of a complete physics, biology, chemistry, and neuroscience. This sounds great, but there is a catch: Mary has been confined to a black-and-white room her entire life. For perhaps obvious reasons, Mary is very interested in scientifically explaining color vision. She knows every physical fact relevant to color vision. She knows, theoretically, exactly down to the quarks how every brain physically responds when it steps in front of a colored object. Now suppose Mary’s cruel captors finally let her out of her black-and-white room such that she sees a red rose for the first time. Here’s the big question: does she learn anything new upon seeing the red rose?

Many philosophers find it intuitive that she does learn something new. What does she learn according to these philosophers? Well, she learns what-it-is-like to see red. She knew all the relevant physical facts about how her brain would react to a red rose, but upon actually seeing one, she learns what-it-is-like to have red experiences. This thought experiment was originally designed to show that physicalism is false (although the creator, Frank Jackson, no longer thinks the argument shows physicalism to be false). But why conclude that physicalism is false from the thought experiment? The argument goes something like this. If physicalism is true then all facts are physical facts, including facts about consciousness. Since Mary by hypothesis knows all physical facts, there shouldn’t be any information about consciousness that she isn’t already privy to. But our intuitions strongly suggest that she learns something new upon stepping outside the room. If physicalism is true, and Mary knew all physical facts, then it seems like she wouldn’t learn anything new. There would be no epiphany. Mary would be like “Yep, already knew it.” But since most people think Mary does learn something new, physicalism can’t be right because there is nonphysical information to be learned, namely, information about what-it-is-like to have certain experiences. Physicalists have responded to this thought experiment in many ways. Some have suggested that Mary doesn’t learn any new fact, but rather, gains a new ability of some sort. Or some have suggested that Mary doesn’t learn any new fact, but rather, learns about these same facts from a different perspective.

As of right now I lean towards the idea that Mary does learn something new, but I don’t think it’s necessary to talk about her new knowledge as being about what-it-is-likeness. And I don’t really think Mary was surprised in anyway either. Rather, what I think Mary learns is that her color discriminatory capacities are in fact working. Having been confined to a black-and-white room all her life, Mary never got a chance to put her color discrimination skills to the test. Theoretically, she knew that given the state of her brain compared to other people that her visual capacities do work, but when she stepped out into the real world she got actual confirmation of her theoretical guess. Using her theoretical knowledge of science, she had previously hypothesized that if she stepped outside and looked at a rose, she would be able to discriminate the redness of the rose from the greenness of the grass behind the flower. She also obviously wasn’t surprised by how her brain reacted. In fact, Mary had rigged up a portable brain monitoring device such that when she stepped outside to see the rose her brain was completely monitored. Prior to stepping outside, she had made predictions about what her brain would do. And of course, checking the data later, Mary was not surprised at all. The brain data came out precisely as she predicted. After all, she has near God-like theoretical knowledge of science. So I don’t think she had any sort of epiphanies when stepping outside. All she learned was the fact that her visual discriminatory capacities do in fact work. Prior to stepping outside, she had only hypothesized that they worked based on good scientific guesswork. But when she stepped outside, the fact that she could see the redness of the rose as against the greenness of the grass confirmed her hypothesis.

On my story, we can talk about Mary learning something new without positing talk about what-it-is-likeness. But I suppose based on how it’s defined, there would have been something-it-is-like for Mary to have confirmed her theory about her visual system working. But what does what-it-is-likeness really mean anyway? I have written before on how I think the term is vague, ambiguous, and poorly defined. Usually people use it to talk about “phenomenal feels” like the feeling of redness when looking at a flower. But I have argued before that in talking about properties like the “sensation of redness” we need to be careful. We can’t be talking about the redness of the rose when we are introspectively aware of our looking at a rose, because the introspection severally distorts the mental content. But if we are talking about nonintrospective redness, then it’s unclear to me that the mental content is anything but purely discriminatory capacities. Imagine how a mouse looks at a rose. It doesn’t see redness qua redness but rather, redness qua some affordance. Seeing “pure” sensory qualities is something humans do in virtue of our introspective capacities. Otherwise we get absorbed into the affordances of things, like the hammerability of a nail when we have a hammer in our hands. If all what-it-is-likeness is referring to is these certain kinds of affordance-style mental content, then I’m not sure that Mary would be incapable of learning about this content from a theoretical perspective. What you couldn’t learn about affordance-style mental content in other creatures is what-it-is-like from the inside to discriminate information. But we shouldn’t be confused by metaphors like “from the inside” to think that there actually is some inside distinct from gushy brain bits. The “insideness” of cognition stems from facts about the individuality of being embodied creatures. But the fact that you can’t know for ourselves what-it-is-like for a bat to perceptually discriminate should not lead one to think physicalism is false, because surely discrimination is a purely physical process, and there is nothing “nonphysical” involved when a bat discriminates flies from nonflies.

So although we could translate what Mary learns about her own capacities into talk about what-it-is-likeness, I don’t see how this shows physicalism to be false. We might say Mary learned what-it-is-like to discover that her visual capacities for discrimination do in fact work, in addition to learning the fact that her ability to be introspectively aware of first-order color content was also working. But her inability to learn these facts in her black-and-white room is not a limitation of complete scientific knowledge. It’s a limitation in confirming a hypothesis. Obviously, Mary had pretty good confidence that her hypothesis was right given her knowledge of her own brain. But she was never sure it worked until she stepped outside. Stepping outside allowed her to experimentally confirm her prior hypothesis. But I don’t see why we should conclude physicalism is false just because there are limitations to what theoretical knowledge of science is capable of providing. If she made any hypotheses while in the room about her own capacities outside the room, theoretical knowledge would never translate into confirmed or corroborated knowledge until she steps outside and makes the relevant tests. So on my reading, the limitations of what Mary can know are really limitations of testing. Obviously if she is confined to the room she is unable to carry out certain tests related to her own person.

Consciousness, Philosophy consciousness, knowledge argument, Mary the neuroscientist, physicalism, qualia

Thinking About the Libet Experiments (Again)

May 4, 2012 Gary Williams 2 comments

In a way, I hate thinking about how to properly interpret the famous Libet experiments on free will. For those who haven’t heard of them, the experiments are fairly simple. First, the brain is monitored in some way, usually with EEG. Then, the subject is asked to “consciously decide” to wag a finger. There are electrodes on the finger that can detect precisely when the finger moved. Moreover, when the subject “consciously decides” to wag their finger, they are instructed to look at a clock with a fast rotating hand. They are supposed to remember where the clock hand was when they felt like that had consciously decided to wag their finger.

What are the results? Well, the main thrust of the experiments is that Libet would see EEG activity that would reliably predict the movement of the finger before the subject reported even feeling to consciously decide to wag the finger. In other words, before the subject had “consciously decided”, some part of the brain was already active that reliably predicts finger-wagging. They can do this experiment now with more sophisticated techniques, and I think they can use brain activity some 10 seconds before the conscious decision to predict when the finger would wag. Pretty wild stuff, right?

Usually the Libet experiments are interpreted as showing that free will is an illusion and that consciousness is basically a mere side-effect of nonconscious processes. The idea is that the preconscious brain activity is in charge of really deciding to wag the finger. The “conscious decision” to wag the finger is a by-product or side-effect of this preconscious activity. So the idea then is that consciously deciding to do something and then feeling like it was that conscious decision which did the causal work is an illusion. Many theorists like Dan Wegner have thus concluded that consciousness is a retrospective illusion, with no causal efficacy.

Every time I think about the Libet experiments and all these interpretations about free will my head starts to hurt. Somehow it feels super fishy to me to conclude from the experiments that free will is an illusion. Of course, there is a sense in which the Libet experiments do prove the idea of free will to be false. If we thought that, whatever the will is, it can’t be physical or realized in the brain, then yes, the Libet experiments do seem to undermine this idea. Libet’s experiments conclusively show that the brain is a major player (if not the only player) in deciding what we do. If you are a physicalist like me, then this idea is pretty obvious. But I don’t think this immaterial spooky free will concept is really what’s at stake philosophically (although of course theists and dualists will disagree).

What’s at stake in my opinion is whether the Libet experiments call into question the conceptual distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions. Is there a fundamental difference between sneezing when I step into strong sunlight or on deciding to get married? Sneezing is usually understood as an automatic, involuntary reflex. Deciding to marry someone is a classic example of what we call a “voluntary action”. In my opinion, Libet’s experiments don’t call into question the basic legitimacy of this distinction. If even we lived in a perfectly deterministic world, it would still be right to distinguish in humans voluntary and involuntary behavior.

I think what the Libet experiments might show is that there is a neural realizer base for voluntary actions. No surprises there. But what about the idea that the “conscious decision” to wag a finger comes so late? It doesn’t seem to be quick enough to really call the shots for motor control. But I think this comes to the heart of the matter: is the “conscious decision” to wag a finger really the best example of when consciousness exercises control? Wagging a finger and deciding to get married are two radically different kinds of decisions. The first happens over the course of milliseconds, the second can happen over the course of months or years. In my own case, my decision to want to marry Katie was drawn out over a long time period. I really had to stop and reflect deeply about my future with Katie and whether I saw myself being happy with her 50 years in the future.

As a Jaynesian, I like to define consciousness to be a kind of introspective power, a power to reflect on the past, present, or future in ways that transcend the automatic and habitual tendencies of action shared by our animal cousins. Defined in this way, I’m not really sure the decision to wag a finger is really representative of the kind of action planning that consciousness is best suited for. Consciousness as I define it is not suited for millisecond control of finger motion. It’s more relevant for planning a wedding, or deciding to take that new job, or go on vacation. Consciousness as a action-controlling process is less a sensorimotor function as it is a narrotological function. Consciousness thinks in terms of stories. It is a long-term synthetic function. It operates on the longest time-scales in the brain. So finger wagging might just miss consciousness all together. So I’m not sure it’s best to conclude from the Libet experiments that consciousness is just an epiphenomena or mere side-effect that plays no causal role.

Don’t get me wrong though. There is a sense in which even the operations of a narratological consciousness are determinstic insofar as they are realized in brain tissue, and brain tissue of course follows physiological laws without deviation. So there is a sense in which even long-term, narratological conscious processes are “determined” by brain processes. If we could do a long-term Libet-style experiment on the causal precursors of my decision to get married, I’m sure we could find all sorts of precursors. But again, this is only surprising if we thought that the will must be immaterial and free-floating from physical processes. But the fact that consciousness is realized in the brain is no reason to think that sneezing is of the same action type as deciding to get married. And of course there is whole host of intermediate action types between sneezing (a reflex, really) and getting married. There are certainly a lot of “higher” cognitive functions that are nonconscious, including powers of reasoning and perception. But I think it is crucial to the human sciences that we don’t collapse all these distinctions because of simple experiments like Libet’s. There is an important distinction to be made between voluntary and involuntary, between conscious and nonconscious. And consciousness is not just a synonym for awareness. As I use it, it’s meant to capture that process of reflection and deliberation characteristic of “big” decisions like deciding to get married or whether to take a job.

Consciousness, Philosophy, Psychology consciousness, determinism, free will, libet, nonconscious, philosophy of mind

3:AM’s Richard Marshall Interviews Pete Mandik

May 3, 2012 Gary Williams 1 comment

Pretty interesting interview. Marshall and Mandik discuss consciousness, philosophy of mind, science fiction, the matrix, and a variety of other issues. I was struck by this remark in particular by Mandik:

“All those early contemplations of jacking into the matrix and jockeying around in cyberspace have made me permanently allergic to stuff like direct realism and the embodied cognition movement. I can’t shake the conviction that brain in a vat that is a perfect intrinsic duplicate of my brain is going to be a perfect mental duplicate.”

This remark puzzles me. For surely the “vat” of the brain can be understood as a kind of body, supplying nutrients to the brain. So the possibility of a brain in a vat doesn’t undercut the thesis that all cognition is embodied. As for the brain-in-a-vat being a “perfect mental duplicate”, wouldn’t a more plausible claim be that the brain-in-a-vat would fairly similar but not identical? “Perfect mental duplicate” seems like a stretch. But let’s suppose that every input to the brain was simulated perfectly. Wouldn’t it then be a perfect duplicate? Well, those simulated inputs would have to mimic the ways in which diffuse clouds of chemicals influence the brain, as well as simulate patterns of astrocytal modulation. I don’t think a perfect duplicate would be merely a simulation of neuronal firing rates with electrical brain interfacing. That would be an imperfect but close simulation. And if you could achieve a perfect simulation of diffuse chemical input, astrocytal modulation, and all other subtle but non negligible modulatory influences, then it seems like the chemical-input generator and host of modulators would just be a kind of artificial body. So I’m not sure the embodied cognition thesis is really threatened by brains-in-vats. Sure, there might be some overly strong forms of the embodied cognition thesis (thinking of Alva Noe) that don’t support even the idea of an imperfect simulation being minded in a similar way to normals. But we shouldn’t always think in terms of the strongest forms of any given thesis. Moreover, I have been developing this idea about organisms without nervous systems having primitive mental states. If this is right, then there is a mindedness intrinsic to the activities of cellular organisms, not just organizations of neural cells. Accordingly, the brain-in-a-vat will be missing all of that nonneural mindedness, and would thus be a similar but imperfect duplicate.

Consciousness, Philosophy brain-in-a-vat, matrix, pete mandik, philosophy of mind

Review of Daniel Everett’s new book Language: The Cultural Tool

May 2, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

If you have been paying attention to the world of linguistics lately, then you will know that there is a paradigm shift in the works. The old paradigm is Chomsky and Universal Grammar, the idea that knowledge of grammar is more or less innate and not learned. The new paradigm is not quite a coherent movement, but it sometimes goes by names like constructivism, nurturism, machine learning, empiricism, and a host of other names. Basically, if you think that language is for the most part learned during childhood, then you are a constructivist. Dan Everett’s new book Language: The Cultural Tool is an excellent book defending the new paradigm and attacking the old. The Cultural Tool is above all a response to Chomskyans.

The Cultural Tool has a simple thesis: language is not innate, but rather, a cultural tool. He starts the book off with an anecdote about using a bow and arrow in the jungle. Obviously, the bow and arrow is a tool that was invented for the purpose of solving a problem. Although there are general cognitive dispositions that would have enabled humans to invent such a tool, it is very likely false that humans have innate bow and arrow construction knowledge. In the same way, Everett argues that humans do have some uniquely human cognitive dispositions than enable us to rapidly and efficiently learn language, but there is no such innate Universal Grammar that is the same in all humans.

The bow and arrow was invented to solve the problem of killing fast moving sources of protein. But what problem was language invented to solve? (“Invent” must also not be understood as necessarily reflectively conscious) Everett quite rightly argues that it was invented to help solve the problem of communication in a large group of primates. With language, communication takes on a new level of complexity in virtue of its abstraction and information carrying capacity. As Everett says, “Nouns and verbs are the basis of human civilization”. Moreover, Everett tells a nice, fairly plausible evolutionary story about how the needs of communication during a time of medium intensity environmental change during the final phases of the Pleistocene led to selection pressures for language. In a word, humans were in the right place at the right time with the right set of cognitive dispositions. Everett also gives a great defense of the idea that the “universality” of language learning can be accounted for without positing innate grammar by simply acknowledge the fact that all languages serve to solve similar communication problems, and thus have similar (but nonidentical) grammatical structures.

But Everett is also keen to point out linguistic diversity. And Everett is surely a renowned expert on this subject with his decades of experience working with Amazonian peoples. His work with the Pirahã is very well-known and he spends a good amount of time using the Pirahã as examples to support his thesis that language is a cultural tool. But I think a lot of people think Everett’s arguments depend on his interpretations of the Pirahã data. This is not true. The Pirahã are but one strand in his overall argument against Chomsky and Universal Grammar. If the Pirahã didn’t exist, Everett would still be capable of arguing against nativism. But his data on the Pirahã are very interesting and do, in my opinion, strongly support his basic thesis about constructivism.

My main complaint of the book is when Everett deals with the idea of there being thought without language. Everett thinks that nonlinguistic animals can clearly think. He uses the intelligence of his dog as an example. But obviously this depends on what we mean by “think”. If we defined it more narrowly as something like an introspective inner speech, think there is good reason to think “thinking” depends on language. This is actually more like “thinking about thinking”. But there is good philosophical reason to use the term “thought” to refer to such metacognition rather than the type of cognition shared by dogs and other animals. But so long as we are clear Everett is not talking about metacognition, it is really just a terminological quibble, for I surely agree with Everett that there is a good deal of cognition going on independently of learning a language. So Everett is not defending a strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

In summary, The Cultural Tool is an excellent book summarizing in an accessible manner what a response to Chomskyan theory could look like. It’s not a monumental work, so some of the details are left sketchy, but in general I get the sense that Everett is reporting on the development on a progressive research program. And if you are like me, then you will come away from the book with a better understanding of why Chomskyism and Universal Grammar is a degenerating research program. If you are a Chomskyan though, then you will probably be really irritated by Everett. That’s to be expected. But if you are at all skeptical of Universal Grammar though, then you will probably love The Cultural Tool. I think Everett has done the field a huge service by introducing a set of easy to understand metaphors to help us understand language. Thinking about language as culturally constructed cognitive tools as caused me to start thinking of all sorts of other things as tools, like philosophy and reason. So I think it’s an incredibly useful metaphor. Oh, but I do think Everett took the tool-idea a little far at the end of the book when he defended a strong philosophical pragmatism that consciously forgoes the quest for truth. Although in my younger years I would have loved this, Everett’s jump from linguistic pragmatism to philosophical pragmatism strikes me as a little naive. Of course we strive for truth! Or do you not think it is true that language is cultural tool? I would argue that the invention of the concept of truth was itself a great cognitive tool. But nevertheless, Everett’s book is well worth reading and I highly recommend it.

Overall rating: 4.8/5 stars

Psychology anthropology, book review, Chomsky, dan everett, linguistics, nativism

On Becoming an Expert

April 30, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

Gradschool is providing me a great opportunity to become an expert in my chosen field: philosophy. But there is another field besides philosophy that I am also interested in reaching expert level in: chess. Before I die I would love to reach “Master” level in chess. However, this is no easy task. If I assume the 10,000 hour rule is roughly accurate, and I study an hour a day every day, it will about another 30 years before I reach Master level. Obviously, if I spend some days studying more than an hour a day, I can speed this up, but there are also going to be days when I don’t study at all, or don’t study that seriously. So it looks like it really is going to take a long time for me to become a true chess expert. What will probably be the biggest factor in reaching expertise in chess will be to maintain motivation for study over the decades. If in a few years I get burned out from chess and take a long break, then obviously my path to expertise will be slower and less effective. Continuous motivation for decades without burning out is necessary to achieve expertise in just about any field.

When I think about being an expert in philosophy though, it’s a little different. Chess expertise is easy to quantify because there is an objective ratings system. But how do you know when you have become an expert philosopher? Is it when you publish? Or when you’ve read enough literature? Or get a tenure-track job? Hard to say. There is only one way to be a good chess player (make better moves than your opponent) but there are probably thousands of different ways to be an expert in philosophy. So the question of expertise is a great deal more subjective than in chess. The objectivity of chess is in fact one of the reasons why I love it. When you play a game, there is only the board, with everything in plain sight. Philosophy expertise is more fluid and harder to pin down. It’s hard to “see” expertise in philosophy. Yet I strive for it everyday. At the moment this involves just surviving grad school, reading as much as I can, and writing my thoughts down as often as possible while trying to stay sane. Doing these things will hopefully translate into philosophical expertise some day. In the mean time, I will also be working on my chess. The struggle then is to find a balance between these two tracks towards expertise. Every time I am reading I could be studying chess, and vice versa. The ideal balance is also not going to be equal, since I should take philosophy much more seriously since it is my future career track. I never plan on making money through chess playing, but this philosophy thing is supposed to turn into a future job (although one could see grad school as a job too). But at the same time, I think it’s good to have an intellectual outlet that isn’t philosophy. When I get tired of reading and writing philosophy, chess is always there to keep my mind stimulated.

Random chess, expertise, Grad school

New Paper: In Defense of the Extraordinary in Religious Belief

April 26, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

Read it here: In Defense of the Extraordinary in Religious Belief

So this is a paper I wrote for Ron Mallon’s Culture and Evolution seminar. I’m really happy with how the paper turned out, and I believe this is the direction I want to go for my future dissertation project. The paper is really a response to some of Pascal Boyer’s claims about the importance of extraordinary religious experience in explaining the origins and cultural success of religious belief. For example, Boyer says:

Even if prophets were the main source of new religious information, that information would still require ordinary nonprophets’ minds to turn it into some particular form of religion…This is why we will probably not understand the diffusion of religion by studying exceptional people, but we may well have a better grasp of religion in general, including that of prophets and other virtuosos, by considering how it is derived from ordinary cognitive capacities. (Boyer, 2001, pp. 310-311)

This is a standard thing to say in the evolutionary origins of religion literature. Most psychologists who are trying to explain religious belief do so in terms of the operation of various ordinary cognitive mechanisms like the Agency Detection Device or our theory of mind capacities. The basic idea then is that we don’t need to posit any sort of “special” religious mechanism that serves as the generator of religious belief. According to what I am calling the Standard Cognitive Model (SCM) of religious belief, religious thoughts are really not that different from any other kind of cognitive operation. Crucially, the SCM is committed to the idea that the order of explanation is that you explain both religion in general as well as extraordinary experience in terms of the ordinary, and not the other way around.

It’s this emphasis on the “ordinary” that I am arguing against in the paper. My argument is basically this: we cannot use contemporary ratios of ordinary to extraordinary experience as a mirror of what that ratio might have been like in ancient times. Borrowing heavily from Jaynesian theory, I provide several lines of evidence for thinking that what we now consider extraordinary might have actually been quite ordinary in ancient times. If this is right, then we don’t need to think about extraordinary experience as being the exclusive domain of “religious specialists”, as Boyer is prone to think. Instead, we can think about extraordinary experiences such as hearing the voice of a god or demigod talk to you as being quite ordinary.

In the paper, I look at contemporary research on both the incidence of auditory hallucination in children and the factors that lead to the persistence of such hallucinations. What the research shows is that the best predictor of persistence of voice hearing in children is whether they assign the voices to external sources. And prior to the recent invention of the concept of “hallucination”, all ancient voice hearers (like Socrates) would have automatically interpreted their experience in terms of being a communication from an external agent, namely, a god or demigod. Since such attributions are the key predictors of persistence, we can now imagine a society where upwards of 25% or more of adults are actively experiencing auditory hallucinations and interpreting them as being messages from gods or demigods. Accordingly, would we want to still say that “extraordinary experience” is still exceptional and the exclusive domain of religious specialists?

If this is at all historically accurate, then it looks like we can reverse the explanatory arrow of the SCM. Rather than extraordinary experiences being on the sidelines in determining the cultural success of religion, the familiar experience of auditory hallucination and the shared cultural narratives for interpreting such experiences would have played a much greater role in the spread of religion than the SCM allows. To respond to Boyer then, we can say that perhaps the reason why the “insights” of holy persons were widely accepted is because the ordinary population was already quite familiar with what-it-is-like to hear the voice of a god or demigod commanding you to do something.

Psychology, Theology cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, Julian Jaynes, origin of religion, Religious belief

Counterfactuals as Commands

April 25, 2012 Gary Williams 2 comments

One of the reasons philosophers are prone to accept possible worlds into their metaphysical worldview is to find truthmakers for counterfactual claims. If I say “The cat is on the mat”, the truthmaker for the claim is the fact that the cat is on the mat. However, if I say “If I hadn’t caught that egg it would have hit the ground”, what is the truthmaker for this claim? Because the claim is about something that didn’t actually happen, we can’t just point out the truthmaker as we did with the cat being on the mat. So what grounds the truth of the counterfactual claim? Such questions have led philosophers to posit the existence of possible worlds to ground the truth claims of counterfactuals. So the idea is that there is some possible world where I failed to catch the egg and it splatters. It is this possible world that grounds the truth of the counterfactual claim.

But before we accept the existence of possible worlds into our metaphysics, we should ask ourselves whether counterfactual claims even need truthmakers. After all, not every speech act needs to have a truthmaker. Take commands, for example. If I say to you “Pick up that pen”, what is the truthmaker for this claim? It’s not clear what the truthmaker could be, since in commanding you to do something, I am not describing how the world is, but rather, trying to get you to do something.

So here’s an idea I had last night: what if counterfactuals are a species of command? If counterfactual claims are really commands, then we wouldn’t need to find truthmakers for them, and we wouldn’t need to say possible worlds exist. So how could counterfactual claims be commands? Well, my idea is to think of them as commands to imagine or commands to conceive. When I say to someone “If I hadn’t stopped watering the plant it would still be alive”, what I am implicitly doing is giving instructions on how to imagine something. So the idea is that counterfactuals are implicit commands written for the imagination. When I start talking to someone about how things might be or how things might go, what I am doing is giving their brain instructions on how to make an imaginary construct similar to the one in my head. And in the same way that commanding someone to pick up a pen doesn’t need a truthmaker, neither does commanding or instructing someone to imagine something. So on this view counterfactual claims are not truth apt.

My account of modality is not quite a Quinean skepticism about modal concepts. I think modal concepts are quite fine in philosophy, since it just seems self-evident that I am in fact capable of imaging how the past might have gone, how the future might go, or even imagining whole other realities. But I don’t think that the ability for us to think modally require the inclusion of possible worlds into our metaphysics. I don’t think it’s quite right to say possible worlds exist. Processes of imagination exist in our heads. But the intentional objects of such processes don’t need to exist. The imagination doesn’t need truthmakers. It’s only true that I am imagining some way the world could have been, but the imaginary construct does not itself need truthmakers, for the same reason that commands don’t need truthmakers. And counterfactual claims are just implicit commands or instructions on how to guide your imagination.

So in everyday conversation if someone asks me to consider a counterfactual and I say in response “That’s true”, this need not commit me to any sort of possible worlds. It could just be a convenient shorthand for “Yes, it’s true that I am capable of imagining what you just instructed me to imagine”. But I do not think we need to invoke actual truthmakers to make sense of counterfactual language and thought. Let’s reserve truthmakers for things like cats on mats, not abstract imaginary constructs like possible worlds.

I’m quite open to the possibility that this idea of counterfactuals as commands is deeply confused because of some logical quirk about counterfactuals that I am not aware of. I’m also not sure if it’s an original idea or not. But I thought it was a neat idea, and it’s kind of inspired by some of the stuff I have been reading lately about language being first and foremost a tool, which has led me to think about all sorts of other cognitive activities as tools, including Reason. I think you could see counterfactual thinking as a kind of cognitive tool that enables humans to engage in activities that we would otherwise be incapable of.

Philosophy commands, counterfactuals, metaphysics, possible worlds, tools, truth, truthmakers

Forty-hour Workweek in Academia?

April 24, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

Some good tips about productivity in academia from the Get a Life, PhD blog (h/t The Philosophy Smoker):

http://getalifephd.blogspot.com/2012/03/whats-matter-with-forty-hour-work-week.html

I tend to agree with the author and strive to have a similar work/life balance in my own schedule. I almost never need to do anything school-related after I have been at campus all day. My evenings are usually spent with Katie cooking, hanging out, relaxing, watching TV or movies, or goofing off on the internet. Part of it is just making sure I am really productive on campus. The other part is making sure I actually spend enough time on campus during the week so that I don’t have to bring my work home. But I’ve found that there is almost nothing I can’t accomplish so long as I break up a task into doable chunks that can be finished while I am on campus.

Random Academia, productivity

The Struggle of Reason

April 24, 2012 Gary Williams 2 comments

In dealing with the overwhelming desire for cookies last night, I was struck by what I am calling the struggle of reason. Deep within my brain is some hardwired disposition to seek out sweets. This desire for sweets likely served some evolutionary purpose when food was once scarce. But now I can simply walk to the grocery store and purchase premade cookies that I can just pop into the oven. Obviously, if I always indulged in this desire for sweets, it would make me unhealthy in the long term, leading to obesity and diabetes and a host of other health issues. And since I have a strong desire for good health, I am in a dilemma. I could make myself happy in the short-term by satisfying my desire for cookies. Or I could make myself happy 50 years from now when I am enjoying the fruits of good health. There are then two desires at work: short-term cookies desires, and long-term desires for good health.

This can be understood as a competition. Using my powers of reasoning, I have concluded that my short-term desires do not know what’s best for me. So I use my reason to fight against my baser instincts. What’s interesting to me about this struggle of reason is where each desire came from. My desire for cookies obviously comes from my ancient evolutionary past. But where did my desire for health come from? In one sense my desire for cookies is also linked to a desire for health since it was once healthy to stock up on sweets in times of scarcity. But that cookie desiring system is incapable of understanding the complexities of a modern food system. And if I just always indulged my desire for cookies I would ultimately end up unhealthy. So what’s healthy for my cookie desiring system is really just healthy according to ancient standards of gene spreading. It once helped my ancestors to spread their genes to have a strong desire for sweets.

But what about my desire for health? It does not seem to be as closely tied into the basic circuitry for spreading genes. My reason operates at another level of objectivity that takes into account my consciously given values. For instance, I have consciously decided to marry my wife Katie. I desire to make myself healthy for as long as I can in order to be with her and provide for our future family. So if I was reasoning correctly from this desire, I would reason that I ought not to always eat cookies. So my consciously given desire trumps my evolutionarily given desire. This ability of conscious reason to trump baser desires is hugely important for understanding the modern human condition.

The struggle of reason is also interesting because it helps us better understand instrumental rationality. You are instrumentally rational if you make choices that help you satisfy your desires. Normally, instrumental rationality is associated with the reasoning systems of nonhuman animals, with perhaps the strongest desire simply being a desire to stay alive long enough to reproduce. But when we get to humans, instrumental rationality becomes more complex. Am I instrumentally rational to eat the cookies? In a way, yes, because there really are cookie desiring systems in my brain that would be satisfied if I ate the cookie. But eating the cookie would not satisfy my consciously given desire to stay healthy for the sake of my marriage. So there is a conflict of reason.

Some theorists have talked about this struggle in terms of there being two kinds of reasoning systems in the brain: System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the evolutionary more basic reasoning system that would give me a nonconscious desire for cookies. System 2 is the reasoning system that allows me to inhibit my impulses to go to the grocery store and maintain rationality with respect to a higher system of norms, namely, norms and values that I have developed independently of any desire to spread my genes.

So next time you feel an intense desire to raid the kitchen in a late night munchie run, remember the struggle of reason. We are not predestined to give into these baser desires. Although it might be difficult, we are capable of trumping these desires barring any pathological breakdown in System 2 reasoning. It is my opinion that System 2 is ultimately the stronger of the two reasoning systems, which inverts the standard Humean story about reason being the slave of the passions. I believe in the power of the conscious mind to overcome the innate tendencies bestowed to us by evolution. Obviously there are limits to what exactly we can trump. But a healthy adult human with a working System 2 can, if they so choose, trump just about any evolutionarily given desire and act in accordance with whatever values they have worked out for themselves. Humans are not robots. Although we do come stocked with some innate programming, we also are programmed with the ability to re-program ourselves, to assign new values that provide the basis for instrumental rationality with respect to culturally generated values. In my own case, the values I have placed on making my marriage work allow me to overcome any desire for unhealthy living. Of course, I sometimes fail in living up to my own standards. But I know this failing is not inevitable. To end with a cliche, with enough willpower, just about anything is possible.

Consciousness consciousness, desire, dual process theory, evolution, Reason

The Ideal State of Mind in Graduate School

April 23, 2012 Gary Williams No comments

Karen Kelsky’s article “Graduate School is a Means to a Job” was posted a few weeks ago, but I keep thinking about this one piece of advice in particular. She says that a graduate student should:

Cultivate a professional persona as a young scholar. That persona is separate from your previous identity as a graduate student and is, instead, confident, assertive, sophisticated, and outspoken.

Confident, assertive, sophisticated, and outspoken. This is the ideal persona to cultivate as a grad student. It’s interesting to me that this persona is supposed to be different from a “graduate student identity”. But I guess I have find this to be largely true: many grad students are not very confident or outspoken, either in class or in their research. Part of being a “young scholar” then is developing ideas and opinions such that you have something to say about a wide variety of issues in your field. If you have nothing to say about any given subject, what will you be doing as an academic except spouting the ideas of the older generation of thinkers? As Kelsky as aptly noted, part of becoming an academic means being willing to step up to the table and make assertions and be opinionated. Of course, it’s nice to back up these opinions with facts and arguments, but it’s also challenging enough just to find something nontrivial yet interesting to say that hasn’t already been said before. And if you have well-developed ideas and opinions, then you can afford to be confident in your ability to engage with other academics. And the more you engage, the more sophisticated you will become in your ideas. This is all part of being a young scholar. I really like Kelsky’s article for how she shows that self-conception goes a long way towards laying the foundations of a career in academia. The article also has a bunch of other good practical advice well worth reading.

Random Grad school

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