Chalmers on what conciousness is *not*

"Frequently, someone putting forward an explanation of consciousness will start by investing the problem with all the gravity of the problem of phenomenal consciousness, but will end by giving an explanation of some aspect of psychological consciousness, such as the ability to introspect.  This explanation might be worthwhile in its own right, but one is left with the sense that more has been promised than has been delivered."

David Chalmers, "The Conscious Mind"

I am totally onside with this quote.  I read an article, or a book, or a theory, hoping to find out why there is a movie going on in my head, but I end up having aspects of my behaviour, or my knowledge explained instead.  "Why is it *like something* to know that or to do that?" is what I really want to know.

Chalmers goes on to list the types of these Consciousness Red Herrings:

But hold on a minute... one of these on the list seems funny to me.  Look at what Chalmers has to say about Attention:

"We often say [wrongly] that someone is conscious of something precisely when they are paying attention to it; that is, when a significant portion of their cognitive resources is devoted to dealing with the relevant information.  We can be phenomenally conscious of something without attending to it, as witnessed by the fringes of a visual field."

This rubs me the wrong way.  Of course, after reading it, I got a funny look on my face as I tried to pay attention to the edge of my visual field!  Yep, there it is, fuzzy information waiting there at the edges.  But was I truly, phenomenally conscious of that edge before I was paying attention to it?  I'd be willing to admit peripheral information might affect my behaviour, but I just don't think I'm conscious of it.

Maybe Chalmers wants to make too clean a break between the "phenomenal" consciousness and the other stuff going on in the head.  One could certainly study something called "devoting large amounts of cognitive resources", but I don't think that's synonymous with "paying attention".  I think this topic is something of a bridge between phenomenal considerations and what Chalmers calls "psychological" ones.  Yes, Attention has both phenomenal and psychological aspects, but unlike the other categories, I'm not sure you can carve the phenomenal away and still have something that makes psychological sense.

David Chalmers, "The Conscious Mind"

Coming from a background of Math and Science, I can remember what a relief it was that I was not the only one who thought about this disconnect.  In fact, there was a small, but increasingly respectable core of academics who obsessed over this exact problem.

David Chalmers could be called the Standard-Bearer for the non-materialist side of this core.  And I'm finally now getting around to starting his book!

At this point I'm deep into the theory of Intentionality from Searle's Lecture Series.  And Searle threw out these sentences, and stated "There's a critical difference in the 'awareness' of the first statement and that of the second."

Take a second... what do you think the difference is?

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Searle says that in the awareness of a pain, the object of the awareness is identical with the awareness itself: the awareness of the pain just *is* the pain!  Not so with the awareness of the shoe.  In that case, the subject of the awareness is a totally separate physical object: the shoe.

It's funny when you think about it - we claim to be aware of things that just are that very awareness.  Like "I'm aware of a pain", "I'm aware of a visual experience", etc.  How meta.

It could be this confusion between awareness as it's own object, and awareness of separate objects that causes "disasters" (Searle's word) like Phenomenalism, Idealism, etc.  They mostly seem to have their roots in saying things like "When I see a hallucination, I'm not seeing a shoe [for instance], but I'm seeing *something*"

Searle's answer is that awareness of hallucinations is like awareness of pain.  The object of the awareness is identical with the awareness itself.

Kurt Vonnegut, from "Breakfast of Champions".

It should be pointed out that these words are put forth in the novel, by it's narrator.  The way it is written, this narrator could indeed be Vonnegut himself, and this could be a diary entry.

Or, they could simply be strange thoughts that Vonnegut has bestowed on one of his characters.  The narrator is not named, and describes the events of the novel as his creations... so it isn't clear who is speaking.  In either case, these thoughts and observations penetrate.

The Wheel and the Molecule - Causation Up and Down Levels of Complexity.

I heard about this great thought experiment a couple of weeks ago, but I hesitated to post about it because I forgot who the credit belongs to.  But I finally tracked it down...

Neurobiologist and Nobel laureate Roger Sperry came up with this idea as a way to show that meaningful causal relationships can move up and downs levels of complexity, and not just forward in time.  To underline that:

Regular causation has all kind of easy examples,.. flicking a switch causes a light to turn on, frowning at me causes me to get anxious, tipping a water glass causes the table to get wet... etc!  Level-Crossing causation happens all the time too, but it seems harder to come up with clear examples.  But Sperry hit on a good one with The Wheel and The Molecule.

It's simply this: Imagine a wagon wheel rolling down the road, and somehow pick out a single molecule on it's outer circumference (incidentally, this is a common thing to be asked to picture when learning Trigonometry in high-school, so feel free to tap into that memory of Sine and Cosine waves).

We'd like to know "What is causing the motion of the molecule along it's particular path?"  Sure, it's got some sort of electrical bonding with it's immediate neighbours.  However, that just pushes the question outward, as in "What is causing the molecule along with it's neighbours to travel in this particular path?"

The real explanation, of course, is the wheel rolling on the road.

Once one knows about the wheel, the road, and their properties, one can actually mathematically predict the path of the molecule into the future.  It's clear to me that the right answer to "What is causing the motion of the molecule?" is "The molecule is part of this wheel rolling along this road."   The higher level cause (wheel and road) is having a lower level effect (path of the molecule).

What makes this semi-profound is that the Solidity and other properties of the wheel are entirely caused by the electrical bondings of it's constituent molecules!  This is causation moving *up* - the lower level cause (the molecules and their electrical bonds) is having a higher level effect (the solidity of the wheel).

So the molecules compose the wheel which in sum determines the path of the molecules it is composed of...

...and causation flows up and down levels of complexity.

Michael Harris, from an interesting interview on CBC Spark.

Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions".

I'm drawn to this quote, either as a truth, or as a token of solidarity with Vonnegut.

Searle's Basic Actions

I'm listening to a lecture series on Searle's Philosophy of Mind (given by John Searle himself I should add) that I'm really enjoying.  This past week I came to a pleasing concept - that of a Basic Action.  To get the idea, consider this:

At some point in a series of "How are you doing what you are doing?" questions, you'll come to a point where you can't go further (or at least, the further actions are nothing you are doing consciously).  At this point, where you can't really say how you're doing it, *that* is a basic action.

The cool thing is that basic actions differ for different people.  The above exchange was written to convey an idea, but it would only really make sense if the person being questioned had only just learned how to ride a bike.  You only *consciously* move your leg and arm muscles when you're learning.  After a while, you just "ride".

So,

If you doubt that "lower level" actions can be unconscious, notice that there's actually an answer to "How are you flexing your leg and arm muscles?"  We could answer "By secreting certain neurochemicals" or something.  But that level isn't conscious for any of us.

I haven't gotten to the end of Searle's lecture series, but I suspect he's going to assert that the level at which actions become basic might be somehow constitutive of our identity (in some part anyway), which I think is a really interesting idea!

I also think it's interesting to wonder whether basic actions can be moved down the ladder as well as up?  The usual progression would be to start with dead simple basic actions as a baby ("What are you doing?" "Vocalizing", "trying to move my arm", etc), and moving them up to more complex things later.

But I actually think it's a sign of real intelligence to be able to move back down the scale on purpose.

Like, maybe a mindful tennis player could stop just "swinging a backhand", and refocus on the muscles to unlearn an ingrained mistake.  In any of our social lives, we could stop sizing people up as possible friends, and start to wonder how are we making that judgement, and should we rethink it.

Good food for thought.

Moses Znaimer at the intro to the 2014 Ideacity conference.

John Searle (paraphrased)

An interesting turn-around from the midst of John Searle's theory of intentionality.

A prime example of how this "bare behavior" is insufficient is when the exact same behavior is performed, but with different intentions.  For example, saying "je suis fatigué" to express one is tired, vs saying it to practice French pronunciation.

I think an opponent might reply that if you expand the context of the behavior, these differences can be seen outwardly.  But I don't know, if we have to zoom out *too* far, are we just bending over backwards to keep "the mind" out?