Minds and Brains

Frank Jackson is famous for the following argument:

Mary the color scientist knows all the physical facts about color, including every physical fact about the experience of color in other people, from the behavior a particular color is likely to elicit to the specific sequence of neurological firings that register that a color has been seen. However, she has been confined from birth to a room that is black and white, and is only allowed to observe the outside world through a black and white monitor. When she is allowed to leave the room, it must be admitted that she learns something about the color red the first time she sees it — specifically, she learns what it is like to see that color.

Pretty simple, right? The argument is usually put like this:

1. Before exiting the room, Mary knew everything physical about the phenomenon of seeing the color red.
2. After leaving the room, Mary gains new information about seeing the color red, namely, the information concerning what it is like to see that color.
3. Accordingly, there are some truths about seeing color that are not physical.
4. Therefore, physicalism as a theory of phenomenal properties is false.

This argument is sometimes said to be a definitive proof for the existence of things called “qualia”. And because the thought experiment shows that qualia are not physical things, physicalism is false because it claims that what we call mental things are really just physical things. Right? Well, not really. The only thing this argument knocks down is a giant strawman of physicalism. Here are my thoughts:

• On first blush, the whole thing is dreadfully implausible. Accordingly, it becomes difficult to extrapolate from science fiction to what’s actually going on in someone’s mind when they perceive a red object. Physicalism’s explanation of seeing the color red should be based on studying normal people looking at red objects under normal lighting conditions (similar to the lighting conditions and medium composition in which we evolved for millions of years: day and night). If Mary had been confined to a black and white room for the entirety of her life, her visual cortex would be wired (“fire together, wire together”) completely differently than a normal person, and may not even be capable of discriminating colored objects. Moreover, anyone who spends their entire life in a single room is going to have some serious neural abnormalities compared to the average human adult. If Mary stepped outside of her room into the real world, I’m not sure she would learn anything about colored objects since her brain had never been exposed to the light reflecting off colored objects, and accordingly would have not been properly configured for discriminating colored objects in the way a normal human adult does.
• Jackson’s physicalism is a strawman because he is assuming that physicalists are internalists just like him. He says that a physical story about seeing color would talk about the “neurological firings that register that a color has been seen”. Notice that word “register”. It sounds so innocuous, doesn’t it? This way of talking is actually an inheritance from John Locke’s empiricism. Locke thought that the purpose of consciousness was to copy experience onto the “white paper” of the mind, which was devoid of ideas at birth. To register something is to record it somewhere. To record is to copy. When Jackson talks about the brain “registering” the color, he really means copying the properties onto a recording format, which is then read off or “interpreted” by the Inference-machine.
• In other words, Jackson’s strawman of a physicalist story is the famous “Glassy essence” or “Mirror of nature” theory that Richard Rorty always talked about. It can also be called the Myth of the Given because it is implicitly assumed that the perceptual stimulus for animal perception is an objective (i.e. valueless) world which is given as such to the organism. In a way, this is trivially true. Of course an objective world is given to organisms. But the objective world is not stimulating. In other words, animal brains did not evolve to be responsive to the properties theorized in physical science such as wavelengths or protons. They evolved so as to be responsive to the ecological level of reality. In Gibsonian terms, we can say that animals evolved in a niche such that the information for the specification of affordances (values) is invariant over retinal transformation. Therefore,  the stimulus information discriminated by animals is immediately meaningful for the animal insofar how it perturbs the system is familiar to its nervous system in virtue of the history of interaction with these very values. Affordances are really just possibilities. We perceive the world in terms of the different possibilities afforded by the environment. And as Matthew Ratcliffe has pointed out, these possibilities should not just be seen in terms of bodily possibilities, but also event possibilities e.g. seeing manifold possibilities for social interaction, for how objects might behave in the world, etc.
• Therefore, we must reconceptualize what it means for Mary to “gain new information” when she steps into the colored world. First and foremost, she would gain possibilities for discrimination, not registration. It wouldn’t be that there was now a new “quale” or phenomenal object floating around inside a conscious space, being associated with other quales. This is ridiculous. When the brain perceives a red firetruck, it doesn’t just “copy” or “register” the objective physical properties onto an internal film for later recovery. Upon seeing a red firetruck coming right at you, the very elementary subcomponents of the stimulus are valenced in terms of “Oh shit, get out of the way!”. It is patently ridiculous that an organism would have evolved a object-registering capacity before a threat-discrimination capacity. This fact explodes the Myth of the Given because it turns out that what stimulates animals are meanings, which is to say possibilities.
• So, now we can see a tacit premise in Jackson’s argument: (4a) Physicalism is committed to the Myth of the Given. However, since physicalism is not necessarily committed to the Mirror-hypothesis, Jackson’s argument only defeats a weak strawman of physicalist explanations of color perception. Because ecological theory holds that “information for perception” is relative to the individual possibility space of the perceptual agent, Mary could definitely not have learned about “all there is to know” about perception while trapped inside a black and white room, since she had never explored her own possibilities for discrimination in the real world. But why this should “prove” physicalism to be false is beyond me. Of course Mary is learning “something”. But we should not take this too literally, for possibility-spaces, valences, and meanings are not “things” in the way a stump of wood is a thing. It is a thing only when speaking metaphorically. The Myth of the Given, where given ideas are  ”quales” manipulated in cognitive space by the brain, is itself a metaphor for understanding perception,structured by our everyday experiences with individuated (possibly withdrawn?) objects that can be manipulated in physical space, just like ideas.

Martin: I ask you this then, what is knowledge?

John: Knowledge is justified true belief. For example, I know that I am seeing that tree over there. By all means, it is true that there is a tree over there. Accordingly, I have a belief that there is a tree over there. This belief is justified. Therefore, I know the tree.

M: You use the term “I” as if this term is not ambiguous. When you say “I know”, what is the nature of this “I”?

J: When I use the term “I”, I am referring to my self. This simply serves as an indexical reference. It points something out in the world, namely, myself.

M: Now you have connected the self to your answer of what knowledge is. Tell me, what is the nature of this self?

J: Simple. The self is an agent. An agent is one who acts under his own power and is the subject of experience.

M: Now you use the equally ambiguous concepts of agency, subjectivity, and experience. Tell me, what do you make of the cognitive unconscious?

J: Please, define how you are using that term. I am unfamiliar with the latest developments in the psychological sciences.

M: Of course. The cognitive unconscious is vast and intricately structured. It is emotional and speedy. It is the foundation of our perceptual systems. We are not metacognitively aware of how this network operates, but we are occasionally conscious of its results. We simply give this system instructions and the system executes them smoothly. For example, we are not conscious of how we move our mouth and lips when speaking. We simply get lost in the conversation, in the meaning, not the syntax.

J: I see where you are going with this. You want to know if I consider the unconscious mind as part of the agent. Yes and no. We can say that the unconscious mind is much like the external environment. It simply acts as an input into the self-conscious system. We could say that it “preprocesses” the input but then “presents” or “re-presents” the input to the conscious mind so that we can experience it consciously. This is the mechanism through which I gain knowledge about the tree. If the workings of the cognitive unconscious never reached into my conscious mind, I would never believe that its contents were true, and thus, according to my definition, I would never have knowledge. Consciousness is thus necessary for knowledge because consciousness is essential for believing.

M: Let me see if I understand what you are saying. There is a stimulus first and foremost which is strictly independent of our mind.  We can characterize this stimulus in terms of “primary” qualities such as length, extension, motion, etc. This stimulus impinges upon the receptors in our nervous system and becomes raw “sense-data”. The sense-data is then processed by the unconscious system in order to be presented to the conscious mind. Accordingly, the conscious mind does not experience the stimulus directly, but rather, it only experiences the re-presentation of the stimulus after it has been processed by the unconscious mind. We can say then that the unconscious system generates “conscious percepts” from raw sense-data and that these percepts are characterized in terms of “secondary” qualities, or “qualia”. Is this right?

J: Yes, that sounds more or less right. Knowledge is thus representational. When I see the tree, my belief that the tree is over there and has such-and-such properties is dependent on my having a belief about the tree. The mental content is thus intentional because it is about things “out there” in the world. I know that my belief is true because the properties are more-or-less preserved in the representation. We say then that the representation corresponds to the stimulus and that knowledge is justified true belief. The belief is true because it corresponds to the stimulus and it is justified because evolution usually produces systems which are more-or-less good at getting representational systems to properly correspond to the environment so as to successfully control behavior.

M: Tell me,  what is the nature of this presentation to the conscious mind? To what is the presentation presented to?

J: It is presented to me, the subject.

M: This term is as ambiguous as the “I”. What is the subject?

J: It is the self, the mind, the agent, the “I”. The agent is someone who has beliefs about the world, that is to say, who has knowledge and a subjective mental life. We call this “consciousness”.

M: You defined the self in terms of knowledge, and you defined knowledge in representations, and you defined representations in terms of a self! It feels like we are going in circles.

J: It does seem peculiar. But that’s why consciousness is so mysterious. We don’t quite know how to define it yet nor how it works. But once we get a better grasp on what consciousness is, we should have a better understanding of how re-presentation works and thus, a better understanding of knowledge. But we need to first update our metaphors. I agree with you that the term presentation is vague and illdefined. Traditionally, it was understood in terms of a homunculus or rational Ego. Theater metaphors are prone to this homuncularity. This is why I like Thomas Metzinger’s notion of a self-viewing theater. The problem with the theater metaphor is that it presupposes an audience, and we then run into a problem of regress when trying to understand the homunculus. But if we say  that the theater views itself, then we don’t actually need a conscious self for knowledge to occur. This is why Metzinger says that his theory of mind is selfless.

M: But the mystery of consciousness which generates these problems of selfhood is entirely of your own making! Because your definition of knowledge is circular when you don’t specify the ontological structure of the “I”, there seems to be this fundamental mystery in coming to terms with knowledge and what the mind is. But why should we define knowledge in terms of beliefs and representations? This is only dogma. You of all people should realize that Descartes himself simply assumed that the mind is set off against the environment in a distinct ontological sphere. You took this insight but naturalized it by assuming that the mind is a process not a distinct ontological substance. But because you assumed that the self is isolated from the world in the first place, you explained intentionality, the aboutness of knowledge, our contact with reality, in representational terms. This is because there has to be some mediation between the senseless primary properties and the sensible secondary qualities. But why should we assume that the primary qualities are meaningless?

J: What do you mean? The stimulus is just a big jumble!

M: On the contrary. Take the example of the ground. Is the ground a jumble? If we consider the objects which rest upon it, yes, the ground is (sometimes) a jumble. But take a flat grassy plain. Surely, if we consider the plain as a whole to be a stimulus, we can say that the stimulus is orderly and structured. Moreover, this plain as it exists in itself is not meaningless for an embodied creature. For one, the whole of it anchors us to it by means of gravity. Our entire bodily sense of reality is permeated by an unconscious knowledge that the ground swells beneath our feet and that it affords stability and locomotion. Even with my eyes closed, the ground primordially means something-to-stand-upon. This meaning is codetermined by the intrinsic rigidity of my own body and the rigidity of the ground itself. My ability to pick up and grasp this meaning is intrinsic to my being, spontaneous, and prereflective. And with my eyes open, I am able to receive stimulus information about the nature of the ground as a surface. Indeed, look out before you:

M:The field as a whole is reflecting ambient light towards us. The farther away the ground, the more compressed the light reflecting off it. There is thus a texture gradient in the field-as-a-stimulus. This gradient is determined by more or less objective, albeit receiver-relative, laws. I suppose that this stimulus is ordered and meaningful. It affords opportunities for behavior if we are running through it, or it simply stands before us as three-dimensional if we stare at it (a rare activity in the animal kingdom). Now, consider the question of intentionality and the structure of our knowledge of affordances. Surely, we do not need consciousness in order to gain knowledge of affordances. After all, affordances are simply classes of behaviorally similar things. The perceptual development of an organism can be more or less described in terms of learning what the environment affords. We learn that the ground is supportive, that mothers afford comfort and food, that chairs are for sitting, food is for eating, doors are for going-through, etc.

In such cases, the skill to be learned is that of discrimination, not inference. We do not need to infer secondary qualities from meaningless primary qualities. If visual perception was actually achieved by means of inferring depth and motion from single-points of light intensity, vision would surely be miraculous. Instead, we need only suppose that the organism’s knowledge of the world is achieved by means of enaction. Enaction is the history of structural coupling with the environment. Our structural coupling with the environment is codetermined by the structure of the organism and the environment. This is intentionality. Our experience with the world is simultaneously about me and about the world. As I move through the environment, my vision gives me information both about the layout of the world and my own position in respect to that layout. This is why affordance perception cuts across the subject-object divide. Perceptions are both subjective and objective. We must reject a strict dualism between subject and object.

We do not need to add anything to the stimulus. We do not need to preprocess it for consciousness, for our minds. This is unnecessary. Our history of structural coupling guarantees that the environment is directly meaningful in terms of affording opportunities for behavior. Behavior is simply a way of being-in-the-world. It is a way to maintain the unity and structural organization of our bodies so as to maintain our continual rigidity in respect to the environment. Behavior is living.

Knowledge therefore cannot be described in representational terms without falling prey to ambiguity or vicious circularity. While there might be representations in the perceptual system, they are action-oriented, not symbolic. We are thus in the world directly. Our primary mode of access to the world is in behavioral terms. We can call this mode of coping circumspective concern. This view of knowledge indicates a fundamental shift in metaphysics, for metaphysics must include the whole of nature, and we are a part of this whole.

J: Yes, but what of consciousness?

M: That, my friend, is a conversation for another day!

What is a perceptual stimulus? Many philosophers never ask themselves this question. They often take it for granted that vision science has settled the issue and nothing more needs to be said except that

1. Visual perception depends on light rays hitting the back of the retina, forming an “inverted image”.
2. The subsequent “retinal image” is imperfect and ambiguous in respect to “macro properties” since it is more or less “flat” , “upside down”, and registered by messy biological  tissue.
3. The brain has to “compensate” for the ambiguity by making “hypotheses” about the macroworld. The first stage of processing is the “2D primal sketch”. Next, the brain generates 3D “depth” from the more immediate primal sketch.  Thus, the brain is essentially a Helmholtz “inference machine” from the ground up.
4. Perceptual experience is what-its-like for the brain to make inferences. Visual experience is thus a simulation grounded by the immediate retinal registration.
5. Our intentionality is directed towards the simulated inferences rather than the world itself. Visual experience is thus illusionary and generated “internally” by the brain, hence the name internalism.

I take it that this crude picture is more or less an accurate representation of internalism. These presuppositions have become so entrenched, they hardly come up for review. I think it is high time to examine them, particularly in respect to the taken for granted assumptions about what constitutes a perceptual stimulus. The stimulus is often understood as being the immediate rays of light “bumping into” the retina. The retina is said to register the light strictly in terms of the wavelength and intensity i.e. the “primary qualities” of the physical sciences. Thus the retinal image corresponds to “micro” properties rather than molar properties. And because the registration of the retinal image is in terms of micro properties, molar properties like depth, surface, texture, etc. need to be “inferred” and are not directly perceived by the brain. It is said then that the micro properties are what make perception “ambiguous” and prone to error in respect to the macroworld.

But why should we assume that the brain is directed towards micro properties? It seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that the brain is behaviorally sensitive to molar properties specified in the ambient array of light “filling” normal environments. After all, molar properties are where all the action is. Only a programmed computer would be interested in micro properties. Biological bodies are far more interested in what’s going on at the molar level, where temporal events occur. Indeed, as J.J. Gibson points out, “Animals and men [directly] perceive motions, events, episodes, and whole sequences”.

And because all the episodes relevant to survival happen at the molar level (being attacked, hunting, socializing), it’s reasonable to suppose that the brain would have evolved so as to be directly sensitive to molar properties rather than micro properties. And if this is the case, then we need not assume that the brain is a Helmholtzian inference machine at the ground level of visual perception. Contemporary ecological optics has repeatedly demonstrated that molor properties such as depth, surface, and texture are directly specified by the invarient patterns of stimuli resulting from movement through the ambient optic array. The transformations across the retina specify molar properties in virtue of successive and adjacent order in the ambient optic array. Perception is thus capable of “holistic” sensitivity from the bottom up. Natural selection insured that brains developed the ability to be directly attuned to molar properties like motion, not micro properties like wavelengths and intensity. Motion indicates prey or predator. Wavelength indicates nothing unless you are a scientist.

We can thus overturn the five assumptions stated above. Intentionality is directed towards molar properties in the world rather than representations in the head. Because internalists are empirically mistaken about the ambiguity of perceptual stimuli available in the optic array, the absolute bottom-up inference making of classic computational approaches can be rejected as overcompensatory. Sure, the brain probably does make many inferences, particularly at higher-level stages in visual processing. But a complete Helmholtz machine? Unlikely. The availability of molar information in the optic array “ripe for sampling” obviates the need for a bottom-up inference from the micro to the molar. Our genetics ensure that nervous tissue is behaviorally sensitive to molar properties in the environment. This means that the “eternal now” of instantaneous registration is mythical and purely heuristic. Perceptual registration is temporally extended in virtue of its intentional directedness towards molar properties. We need to thus think about the brain in terms of a temporally extended coherence or “resonance” that is behaviorally sensitive to molar properties. This requires rethinking the constitution of perceptual stimuli and the evolutionary development of sensorimotor systems.

[What change blindness experiments suggest] is that the visual brain may have hit upon a very potent problem-solving strategy, one that we have already encountered in other areas of human thoughts and reason. It is the strategy of preferring meta-knowledge over baseline knowledge. Meta-knowledge is knowledge about how to acquire and exploit information, rather than basic knowledge about the world. It is not knowing so much as knowing how to find out. The distinction is real, but the effect is often identical. Having a super-rich, stable inner model of the scene could enable you to answer certain questions rapidly and fluently, but so could knowing how to rapidly retrieve the very same information as soon as the question is posed. The latter route may at times be preferable since it reduces the load on biological memory itself. Moreover, our daily talk and practice often blurs the line between the two, as when we (quite properly) expect others to know what is right in front of their eyes.

-Andy Clark, Natural-born Cyborgs

I really like this quote. I think it captures perfectly the evolutionary argument against representational internalism, which stipulates that the brain continuously generates an internal phenomenal model to compensate for imperfections in the retinal image, particularly in respect to “depth ambiguity” (since the image would be more or less 2D). That my current experiential content is the result of a compensatory brain simulation seems wildly unparsimonious. In regards to the computational problem of depth ambiguity, we can reasonably propose that ambient light in normal environments nomothetically reflects certain information concerning the surface layout. An important part of this information directly relevant to spatial perception is the texture gradient. Take this field:

The ambient light of the sun “settles” into a stable array wherein the visual angles meeting at your geometric point of view specify a “gradient” of texture density that conforms to the actual 3D layout of the environment. Because this information is reflected by the light and contained in the structure of the overlapping visual angles, we can say that information directly concerning 3D layout is “specified” by the ambient light. If we wanted to access spatial information for usage in locomotion or hunting, how do you think Mother Nature would accomplish this task? By developing a simulation system that literally constructs phenomenal visual experience from ambiguous retinal inputs through inferential reasoning? Or would evolution develop an Andy Clark-style on-the-fly access system that developed metaknowledge about how to pick up information specified in the ambient array (this is called “sampling” the optic array)?

On this “externalist” view, additional information processing to jump from 2D to 3D is unnecessary provided that the brain-body system learns how the ambient optic array changes in response to bodily locomotion. By learning the rules between how our eyes move and how the visual angles are transformed (this might be the function of microsaccades), we can pick up information in such transformation that specifies the 3D layout of the environment (thanks for texture gradients and motion parallax). Accordingly, the experiential content of visual perception does not consist in experiencing a brain simulation but rather, experiencing the brain-body system behaviorally reacting or “resonating” to the information specified in the environment relevant to our bodily concerns and projects. Such information is not just visual but tactile, gravitational, chemical, and aural. Behavioral resonance of course becomes complicated when we realize that the human environment contains information not just relevant to navigating through a 3D world, but also, information that is relevant to social concerns and our higher-order narrative consciousness.

Hopefully this brief essay has showed why representationalism is unnecessary and unparsimonious as an explanation of visual consciousness. It is also worth mentioning that this critique of internal representationalism does not rule out the usefulness of representations in theoretical explanation e.g. topographic or “isomorphic” representations in the cortex don’t suffer from the ontological problems that “indicator” representations do.

Theories are often supported by unquestioned assumptions. One of the oldest unquestioned assumptions in philosophy concerns the nature of perceptual stimuli, namely, that sense-data are immediately perceived and that sensation consists in the sequential processing of  ”motions” immediately pressed upon the eye. Originating in Plato’s Theaetetus, this idea reached maturation in Descartes and was then taken up by Locke under the concept of primary and secondary qualities. According to these thinkers, sensible ideas (sense-data) are immediate impressions upon the eye which communicate the motion of light particles through the nerve conduits so that they may be processed and deposited onto the internal mental theater for subjective viewing. It is important to note that the conduit metaphor assumes that perception can only perceive the atomic sequence of impacts upon the eye; any nonimmediate mental perception is the result of “inference”. In other words, there is a “bottleneck” of immediacy that cannot be overcome without higher-order cognitive acts. Moreover, sense-data are private in that the primary qualities “appear” differently for different people in accordance with their individuality.  The logic of this conduit metaphor was radicalized by Berkelely in his extreme sense-data empiricism. In the First Dialogue, he writes:

Philonous. It seems then, that by sensible things you mean those only which can be perceived immediately by sense.

Hylas. Right.

Phil. Doth it follow from this, that though I see one part of the sky red, and another blue, and that my reason doth thence evidently conclude that there must be some cause of that diversity of colours, yet that cause cannot be said to be a sensible thing, or perceived by the sense of seeing?

…

Phil. This point then is agreed between, that sensible things are those only which are immediately perceived by sense. You will further inform me, whether we immediately perceive by sight any thing beside light, and colours, and figures: or by hearing any thing but sounds: by the palate, any thing besides tastes: by the smell, besides odours: or by the touch, more than tangible qualities.

…

Phil. Sensible things therefore are nothing else but so many sensible qualities [immediately perceived], or combinations of sensible qualities.

…

Our discourse proceeded altogether concerning sensible things, which you defined to be the things we immediately perceive by our senses. Whatever other qualities therefore you speak of, as distinct from these, I know nothing of them, neither do they at all belong to the point in dispute.

As a good empiricist, Berkeley radicalized the logic of the conduit metaphor for visual perception. If there is nothing “in” the mind-container other than impressions formed by the immediate perception of sensible things, and if sensible things cannot exist without a perceiving mind, then we have no rational recourse for knowing anything about an extrasensory material world composed of primary qualities not dependent on the mind. Thus, the ultimate substance of reality is Mind or spirit, for we can never escape the confines of our mental container.

The essence of the conduit/container metaphor consists in understanding the perceptual process in terms of an immediate communication of sense-data across the nerve-conduits into the “container” or “theater” of the mind. Accordingly, the very nature of the perceptual stimulus ensures that the mind can never rationally proceed beyond the causal immediacy of private sense-data. Because the perceptual stimulus is assumed to consist of immediate impressions upon the retina, any perception of motion must be inferred from the two-dimensional patterns of light, which are then transduced into sense-data. For Berkelely, the radicalization of this logic leads to the proposal that we have no rational recourse for getting “outside” of the internal theater of sense-data, for what we “perceive” is not the primary real, but rather, the secondary quality of “how it appears” subjectively.

Upon reflection however, we can see that the flatness or “immediacy” of sensory input is usually presupposed only after thinking about perception in terms of a frozen snapshot of reality. Ecological information, however, does not exist exclusively in an instantaneous slice of time for, as J.J. Gibson points out, “Animals and men [directly] perceive motions, events, episodes, and whole sequences” (1966, p. 276). Thus, the information we perceive in the environment has both successive and adjacent order. For Gibson, it is a mistake to think of persisting patterns as being a separate stimulus; biologically speaking, “Transformations of pattern are just stimulating as patterns are…motion is immediately detected by animals, not secondarily deduced from change of position”( ibid., p. 40). Accordingly, the brain is not in the business of continuously constructing a mind bogglingly detailed phenomenal model from spots of sensations differing in brightness and color. If this were true, Gibson sardonically notes that “the fact of perception [would be] almost miraculous”. Instead, Gibson theorizes that the nervous system directly “picks up” or behaviorally “resonates” to the ecological information available in the environment, particularly in respect to changes in the layout of surfaces, changes in the color and texture of surfaces, and changes of existence of surfaces. As Mark Rowlands nicely puts it,

information is simply optical structure-together with the deformation in this structure generated in a nomothetic way from the environmental layout and events. This optical structure is not similar in any way to the environment, but it is specific to it. That is, optical structure is nominally dependent upon environmental structure. Because the structure in the optic array is specific to its environmental sources, an observer whose perceptual system detects some optical structure is therefore aware of what this specifies. Thus, the perceiver is aware of the environment not the array. Therefore, once we describe the input for perception in terms of a structured optic array, we are committed to the idea that there is enough information directly available in the organism’s visual input to give that organism useful knowledge about the nature of its environment. Postulation of additional information processing would, to this extent, be superfluous. (1995, p. 9)

The logic of Gibsonian information processing goes counter to the thesis of radical sensory immediacy. Under the Gibsonian framework, perception is not constituted by the processing of sense-data through the bottleneck of retinal immediacy. Instead, the perceptual system is capable of a first-order perception of whole sequences in the environment. By proposing that the transformations of pattern within the ambient optic array contain both sequential and adjacent order, the notion that perception consists of immediate detection and transduction of motion across the two-dimensional retina loses its status as an unquestioned assumption. Accordingly, the Gibsonian framework argues that perception is grounded by ecological information, not sensory immediacy. And because ecological information is temporally extended, the classic model of immediacy is overcome by supposing that animals are capable of directly resonating to such information. As it turns out then, we are not trapped within the theater of our minds; access to reality is quite pedestrian.

Since I’ve been shamelessly posting my latest paper around the internet trying to gather critical commentary, I figured I would make a solicitation on my blog as well. I am really excited about this article. I definitely think it’s my tightest and most analytic paper written to date, but it also encompasses a deeply Heideggerian perspective coupled with Gibsonian ecological theory and Clarksian cognitive scaffolding. The central idea is that Julian Jaynes was the most radically Heideggerian thinker of the 20th century, arguing, with both philosophical and empirical evidence, that Cartesian forms of self-consciousness are not necessary in the everyday coping of pragmatic habitual behavior. As Heidegger says, the constitution of human Dasein’s basic perceptual disclosure always remains “outside”. In other words, the internal representational space of Cartesian theories of mind  is a philosopher’s fiction.

Or is it?Despite his withering critique of Cartesian philosophy of mind, Heidegger admits that there is a sense in which the Cartesian mind-space is real, but not in terms of  being a mental container for the representational bits of sensory qualia as Cartesian psychology would have it. In my favorite section of Being and Time (Care and Selfhood), Heidegger calls Cartesian-Kantian mindedness  the I-structure or Ichheit. While Heidegger admits the phenomenological reality of this executive operation, the difference with Descartes and Kant lies in that Heidegger does not assume the I is constantly present-at-hand and ontologically foundational for perceptual disclosure. Instead, selves and their operations are rare, fleeting, but real. The human Dasein is always oscillating between the unconscious coping habits of the They-self and the self-identical authenticity of Ichheit i.e Cartesian mind-space and Kantian I-hood. By removing I-hood from the ontological foundation however, we can account for organic behavior without recourse to representational internalism, which assumes the constantly present Mind’s Eye (a mere cultural construction) to view the “tunnel” of reality constructed by the sub-personal perceptual routines. Instead, “the Dasein that knows remains outside as Dasein“.

Anyway, here is the introductory paragraph for my paper. Enjoy, and please feel free to leave critical commentary.

In this paper I want to respond to Ned Block’s claim that it is simply “ridiculous” to suppose that consciousness is a cultural construction. In so doing, I will argue that a distinction can be made between what-it’s-like to be a nonhuman animal and the phenomenality of average, adult humans. In accordance with this distinction, I will argue that Block is wrong to dismiss social constructivist theories of consciousness on account of it being simply “ludicrous” that first-person experience is anything but a basic biological feature of our animal heritage, characterized by sensory experience, having slowly evolved over millions of years. By defending social constructivism, I will claim that a distinction can be made between the basic biological experience of nonhuman animals and the consciousness that constitutes the experience of an average human adult. In other words, there is more to phenomenal consciousness than brute, biological perception of the world. Following Julian Jaynes, I will argue that to be in a conscious mental state means more than just to experience the way things look, smell, or feel. To experience the world consciously means to experience it (and yourself) in terms of certain conceptual filters. It will be the task of this paper to work out what these filters amount to and to argue that it is only in light of these filters that human experience should be considered “conscious”. In so doing, I will address the plausibility of unconscious human cultures and conclude, contra Block, that such “cultural zombies” are entirely plausible based on known psychological facts. Essentially, such zombies would have a what-it’s-like while nonetheless lacking consciousness proper. Demonstrating this will amount to answering the question, “What is it like to be unconscious?” By doing so, I will give a Jaynesian answer to the question, “What is it like to be conscious?”

Click here for paper: What Is It Like To Be Unconscious?