To anyone who really suffers from doubt about the physical nature of consciousness (...only sometimes, and I’m not proud of it) this line of thinking is pretty exasperating. Yes, the easy problem is easy, and most responsible dualists are happy enough admitting that the mind operates through physical means detectable on an MRI and we gain information about our own mental states through physical neural function...
...none of which makes any difference to the question that non-physicalists actually worry about, the so-called hard problem. Even calling consciousness a “sense” is admitting the lack of a solution to the hard problem: senses are the modalities by which objects are perceived. So our inner states are the objects, consciousness is the modality, and then who’s doing the perceiving? More consciousness? Who’s perceiving that? Hofstadter’s solution of the strange loop is interesting but so nontechnical as to be useless.
Calling consciousness a sense, insofar as it’s not just an equivocation on the term “consciousness”, passes the recursive buck. The subjective level at which the senses bottom out remains just as poorly understood as before. This is more of an argument that thinking is purely physical (and a good one). I’m hoping you’ll get to what I think of as “consciousness” later on in the series.
On the other hand, thanks for that link to the voice recording made in 1860. Getting to hear the oldest accessible human sound in the world? Pretty neat.
So our inner states are the objects, consciousness is the modality, and then who’s doing the perceiving?
A physical substrate, of course. Note that I am not using the word “brain”: we don’t know anything about what the substrate looks like from a materialistic point of view, except that it is somehow strongly related to the brain, and the fine-grained states and processes of the physical substrate should comprehensively explain our inner phenomenology.[1]
[1] This is a surprisingly strong condition. Fourier analysis on a waveform cannot comprehensively account for our auditory perceptions, because it doesn’t account for psychoacoustics. Spectrum analysis on a source of visible light cannot explain the perception of color, since e.g. people have different cone photoreceptors, etc.
Before moving on, note how in these circumstances we don’t conclude that “only sight is real” and that sound is merely a derivate of it, but simply that the two senses are related (-Academician)
You made this point in a previous post, I think. Not that I’m complaining—it’s well worth the emphasis.
...none of which makes any difference to the question that non-physicalists actually worry about, the so-called hard problem. (-Yvain)
But it lays the groundwork, I think. Comparing our grasp of the same object via different senses reminds us that we have different ways of apprehending a single item. Comparing our grasp of the same property via different senses would be even more instructive. Consider visual and tactile assessments of linearity. We consider these to be two ways of apprehending the same property. But it is just barely conceivable that we are wrong. Conceivably—although not with enough probability to warrant revising the way we now talk and think about linearity—future discoveries will lead us to separate linear(tactile) from linear(visual).
This is important to the “hard problem” because many non-physicalists have argued from the premise that there will always be a conceptual gap between physical and mental descriptions, to the conclusion that these descriptions pick out different properties. “Conceptual gap” here meaning just that is is conceivable that one description could apply and the other not apply. The premise, I think, is true, but the inference is invalid. Linearity is a single property that we can pick out with two concepts, tactile linearity and visual linearity, that have a (very thin—but that’s all we need!) conceptual gap between them. Linearity is therefore a counterexample to the alleged inference principle.
I was hoping to pre-empt this sort of confusion in my paragraph starting with
Under Descartes’ influence, the language I’m using here is somewhat suggestive of dualism in its distiction between physical phenomena and our perceptions of them, but in fact it seems that our sensations simply are physical phenomena...
The point is that if physics is right, the distinction between senses and the “objects of sensation” is really just the distinction between the physical phenomenon of sensing and the penultimate causes of such phenomena, outside our bodies.
Think of it this way: of course senses are physical phenomena… you can sense them! At some point when you were a child, being able to sense something is what it meant for it to be physical. I think that’s still the right idea.
You’re talking about three things—object of sensation, sense, and mental representation of sensation. I’m talking about four things—object of sensation, sense, mental representation of sensation, and subject. I think we both agree on everything about the first three and that all of them are physical and inter-convertible, but I’m not sure whether you’re even acknowledging the existence of the fourth.
A friend goes to Africa and sees an elephant. He takes a photograph and sends it to you in .ZIP format via email. You download it, unzip it, and you see the image.
In this case, the elephant is the object of sensation. Your friend is the sense of vision. The photograph is the sensory representation of the elephant, the email is the optic nerve, and the unzipper is the visual cortex. The thesis of this post is that your sense of vision (within the metaphor) is equivalent to your sense of consciousness (outside the metaphor), and that’s fine, but then what’s the equivalent of you? (wow that metaphor came out badly)
And I know that the answer in a neurological sense is that different features of the elephant activate various forms of mental processing which result in actions like saying “Wow, great elephant photo” and the like, but that’s an answer that works equally well for humans and p-zombies. The philosophical answer that explains the subjective sensation is harder to come by.
but I’m not sure whether you’re even acknowledging the existence of the fourth. … what’s the equivalent of you?
Thanks for posing the question so clearly; and roughly speaking, yes, I see no need to separate the notion of “subject” and the last phases of the sensation process in the brain. I am the phenomenon of my perceptions and behavior. What else would I call “me”?
That you ask your question with an analogy is no coincidence: what leads one to ask for a subject is precisely a misapplication of metaphor. You are mapping an event chain of length N into an event chain of length N+1, and demanding that the first chain is therefore missing something: An object is like an object, a sense is a like a transmission about it, so what’s like the recipient of the transmission?
Well, no… at the end, at the visual cortex or wherever visual perception happens (as mind-state “playback” technology might help us verify), the perception is not a transmission… it’s the recipient of it. And “you” are just a collage of such recipients (and subsequent phenomena if you identify with your thoughts and actions too).
I hope that this series will eventually progress to an explanation of what it means for a perception to be its own recipient or for a subject to be a collage of such perceptions. It sounds promising, and I have lowered my probability that you are secretly a p-zombie (see the paragraph here starting with “He kind of took this idea and ran with it”), but I definitely want to know more.
The philosophical answer that explains the subjective sensation is harder to come by.
Subjective sensation of perceiving a photo is explained by an event in your brain of perceiving the photo in the same sense e-mail with a photo of an elephant is explained by the elephant. With e-mail and the elephant, the map-territory distinction is easy to make. With experience of perception and perception itself, it’s harder, because the same neurons in the same brain are involved in both, over overlapping periods of time. Change the elephant analogy to a crowd of people, all of which are taking pictures of each other and e-mailing them to each other’s phones.
Whenever I come across a conversation concerning the mind and it’s relation to physics I think of what a Cognitive science lecturer of mine had to say on the subject.
Physicalism is a form of insistence that there is some mind-independent description of the world. Any definition of
the physical brings with it the concomitant necessity to define the mental. I’m sorry if my writing is unclear on this, but
it attempts to point out that there is no “easy route” through an appeal to the physical, as any appeal to the physical
necessarily depends on some view of the mystical, magical, never to be seen, mental. Physicalism is thus not any
kind of plausible metaphysics.
To anyone who really suffers from doubt about the physical nature of consciousness (...only sometimes, and I’m not proud of it) this line of thinking is pretty exasperating. Yes, the easy problem is easy, and most responsible dualists are happy enough admitting that the mind operates through physical means detectable on an MRI and we gain information about our own mental states through physical neural function...
...none of which makes any difference to the question that non-physicalists actually worry about, the so-called hard problem. Even calling consciousness a “sense” is admitting the lack of a solution to the hard problem: senses are the modalities by which objects are perceived. So our inner states are the objects, consciousness is the modality, and then who’s doing the perceiving? More consciousness? Who’s perceiving that? Hofstadter’s solution of the strange loop is interesting but so nontechnical as to be useless.
Calling consciousness a sense, insofar as it’s not just an equivocation on the term “consciousness”, passes the recursive buck. The subjective level at which the senses bottom out remains just as poorly understood as before. This is more of an argument that thinking is purely physical (and a good one). I’m hoping you’ll get to what I think of as “consciousness” later on in the series.
On the other hand, thanks for that link to the voice recording made in 1860. Getting to hear the oldest accessible human sound in the world? Pretty neat.
A physical substrate, of course. Note that I am not using the word “brain”: we don’t know anything about what the substrate looks like from a materialistic point of view, except that it is somehow strongly related to the brain, and the fine-grained states and processes of the physical substrate should comprehensively explain our inner phenomenology.[1]
[1] This is a surprisingly strong condition. Fourier analysis on a waveform cannot comprehensively account for our auditory perceptions, because it doesn’t account for psychoacoustics. Spectrum analysis on a source of visible light cannot explain the perception of color, since e.g. people have different cone photoreceptors, etc.
You made this point in a previous post, I think. Not that I’m complaining—it’s well worth the emphasis.
But it lays the groundwork, I think. Comparing our grasp of the same object via different senses reminds us that we have different ways of apprehending a single item. Comparing our grasp of the same property via different senses would be even more instructive. Consider visual and tactile assessments of linearity. We consider these to be two ways of apprehending the same property. But it is just barely conceivable that we are wrong. Conceivably—although not with enough probability to warrant revising the way we now talk and think about linearity—future discoveries will lead us to separate linear(tactile) from linear(visual).
This is important to the “hard problem” because many non-physicalists have argued from the premise that there will always be a conceptual gap between physical and mental descriptions, to the conclusion that these descriptions pick out different properties. “Conceptual gap” here meaning just that is is conceivable that one description could apply and the other not apply. The premise, I think, is true, but the inference is invalid. Linearity is a single property that we can pick out with two concepts, tactile linearity and visual linearity, that have a (very thin—but that’s all we need!) conceptual gap between them. Linearity is therefore a counterexample to the alleged inference principle.
I was hoping to pre-empt this sort of confusion in my paragraph starting with
The point is that if physics is right, the distinction between senses and the “objects of sensation” is really just the distinction between the physical phenomenon of sensing and the penultimate causes of such phenomena, outside our bodies.
Think of it this way: of course senses are physical phenomena… you can sense them! At some point when you were a child, being able to sense something is what it meant for it to be physical. I think that’s still the right idea.
You’re talking about three things—object of sensation, sense, and mental representation of sensation. I’m talking about four things—object of sensation, sense, mental representation of sensation, and subject. I think we both agree on everything about the first three and that all of them are physical and inter-convertible, but I’m not sure whether you’re even acknowledging the existence of the fourth.
A friend goes to Africa and sees an elephant. He takes a photograph and sends it to you in .ZIP format via email. You download it, unzip it, and you see the image.
In this case, the elephant is the object of sensation. Your friend is the sense of vision. The photograph is the sensory representation of the elephant, the email is the optic nerve, and the unzipper is the visual cortex. The thesis of this post is that your sense of vision (within the metaphor) is equivalent to your sense of consciousness (outside the metaphor), and that’s fine, but then what’s the equivalent of you? (wow that metaphor came out badly)
And I know that the answer in a neurological sense is that different features of the elephant activate various forms of mental processing which result in actions like saying “Wow, great elephant photo” and the like, but that’s an answer that works equally well for humans and p-zombies. The philosophical answer that explains the subjective sensation is harder to come by.
Thanks for posing the question so clearly; and roughly speaking, yes, I see no need to separate the notion of “subject” and the last phases of the sensation process in the brain. I am the phenomenon of my perceptions and behavior. What else would I call “me”?
That you ask your question with an analogy is no coincidence: what leads one to ask for a subject is precisely a misapplication of metaphor. You are mapping an event chain of length N into an event chain of length N+1, and demanding that the first chain is therefore missing something: An object is like an object, a sense is a like a transmission about it, so what’s like the recipient of the transmission?
Well, no… at the end, at the visual cortex or wherever visual perception happens (as mind-state “playback” technology might help us verify), the perception is not a transmission… it’s the recipient of it. And “you” are just a collage of such recipients (and subsequent phenomena if you identify with your thoughts and actions too).
I hope that this series will eventually progress to an explanation of what it means for a perception to be its own recipient or for a subject to be a collage of such perceptions. It sounds promising, and I have lowered my probability that you are secretly a p-zombie (see the paragraph here starting with “He kind of took this idea and ran with it”), but I definitely want to know more.
There’s no causal loop… input is a previous brain-state, and output is a subsequent brain-state.
Subjective sensation of perceiving a photo is explained by an event in your brain of perceiving the photo in the same sense e-mail with a photo of an elephant is explained by the elephant. With e-mail and the elephant, the map-territory distinction is easy to make. With experience of perception and perception itself, it’s harder, because the same neurons in the same brain are involved in both, over overlapping periods of time. Change the elephant analogy to a crowd of people, all of which are taking pictures of each other and e-mailing them to each other’s phones.
Whenever I come across a conversation concerning the mind and it’s relation to physics I think of what a Cognitive science lecturer of mine had to say on the subject.
Fred Cummins