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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 13
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Free episodes:
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
“We” is the “self model.”
The you that is thinking and wondering a is model/interface/consciousness experience instantiated by billions of cells working together that we call an organism.
How else do you suppose that billions of cells might work together?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
They don't all work together under an umbrella of consciousness. There are lots of ways that cells and tissues communicate and work together, probably 99.9999999999% goes on without consciousness - and we don't even know what role consciousness plays ... so ... the interface doesn't have to be a model of the whole body and environment either ...I suspect it's very lightweight.
Thank God. I can't wait until it all floats away.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Harken! Pharoah! ;-)
"awareness" is knowledge or perception, not all of that happens in consciousness, it's also possible not all organisms have subjectivity, yet they are aware ... *sigh* terminology
The rest of it - proclamation, you keep repeating these things, but remember consciousness as representation is an idea that people are working on, Clark says:
(italics mine)
" Peter, many thanks for both your sympathetic and cautionary remarks, the latter well taken. I heard the ice cracking as I skated by the many complexities concerning representation and content that are being addressed by lots of smart people these days, including Andy Clark, Anil Seth, Jesse Prinz, and Thomas Metzinger to name just a few. I’m pinning my hopes on some sort of theoretical convergence on consciousness as the science of representation develops, we shall see."
And Humphrey also claims only a "proof of concept".
smcder
Paranormal Adept
rofl...mao
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I don't see how we can fail to ask questions about the origin and nature of consciousness as it has evolved in life on this planet. The very fact of its evolution and development demonstrates that consciousness is a natural phenomenon and the major one we need to comprehend in our time.
As you yourself recognize, phenomenological philosophy and its methodologies have done that intricate work of description. But how can you make consciousness part of "the model", by which you apparently mean an objectivist, materialistic, physicalist model? Indeed, that's what @Soupie's speculators are trying to do and failing at doing. And what do you mean by "the mystique" about consciousness? Is it the fact that it is radically subjective and open to the world and can't be understood as an object, or a cog in a machine? Is nature a machine and consciousness a cog in it?
Agreed, but you need to get your theoretical physicists and computationalism-fixated neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists to read phenomenological philosophy if you expect them to make sense about consciousness.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
It was an analogy to illuminate the disadvantage of "why" and "how" type questions, the principle of which can be applied to the pursuit of knowledge about pretty much anything. It's not limited by the nature of the subject at hand.
What is your specific reference here? I did a little Googlin' and many people, many good people are asking lots of really great why questions...
What do experts really mean when they say "Science does not answer 'Why' questions"?
Answer (1 of 16): I'm going to have to place myself squarely in the "wait... doesn't it?" camp. There are certain "why" questions which no scientific discipline will attempt to answer, sure. These might include "why did I fart last Tuesday?" (because honestly, who cares?), "why does Zeus throw li...
The first answer is pretty fun and worth quoting in full - the others are good too. Also, he has a PhD, so he's qualified.
italics mine
Neil Coleman, PhD in the Philosophy of Science; Focussed on Modelling & Formal Logic
Answered March 29, 2016
I'm going to have to place myself squarely in the "wait... doesn't it?" camp. There are certain "why" questions which no scientific discipline will attempt to answer, sure. These might include "why did I fart last Tuesday?" (because honestly, who cares?), "why does Zeus throw lightening bolts?" (because he doesn't exist) and "why is it immoral to steal candy?" (because that's a normative, philosophical question).
Why questions can be interpreted as asking after an explanations for some phenomenon. Yes, in many instances, they can be said to imply an implicit teleology (a "goal" or an underlying "reason" behind some phenomenon). The Zeus question above is a clear example of this. And of course that's not what science is about - so asking such questions, is, sure, not within the domain of science. Just to be clear - nor is philosophy about that. Not sure why so many people keep shunting that on us, but anyway.
But for other why questions, just because there is a potential for offering one type of bad answer to a why question - a teleological one - doesn't mean that it's a bad question. Saying that "oh, it's because Zeus wanted it that way" is just a bad explanation. The question still stands. Let's step away from Physics, and instead go to biology:
- Why does the bird have a big red plume behind its head?
Similarly, a psychologist might ask:
- Why are confirmation biases so common?
- Why do Purkinje cells have such massive bush like branches of dendrites?
So first point - why questions are asked. And the why questions are important, and are relevant. They often act as a starting point for an investigation. Now onto the second point - you worry that why questions can be reduced to "what" questions.
Well, sure. You can. "What is the explanation for ...". It is one of the beauties of the English language that we can rephrase things. "How can we explain..." is another way of rephrasing it. "Which explanation of X is correct?" is another one. You might even ask "what is the mechanism that generates the phenomenon x?" or "what is the causal story that results in x?".
I'm not really sure how this is anything more than a semantic point. It really just causes us to dance around the issues.
Scientists do seek to answer why questions. Yes, you can always ask more. Causal accounts can be traced further and further back. We might not have the full explanation, but that doesn't mean that investigators aren't still asking "why". And yes, explanations will be theory laden. But that's not a problem, that's just how scientific investigation works.
And yes, you could ask scientists to avoid the word "why". But that would be silly and make discussions far more long winded and tiresome.
Some why questions are bad, some are good. Some answers to why questions are bad. But that doesn't make the question bad, just the answer.
But I honestly don't see why people would say "scientists don't ask why questions" for any other reason than to espouse some pseudo-wisdom by making a vague generalisation with little or no basis in reality. I suspect it's just a way of making an unclear rhetorical point along the lines of "science is rigorous, never gives teleological answers, and requires evidential underpinnings".
Ironically, social anthropologists of science would likely have a fit at such an unfounded and clearly false mass generalisation.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I am so having deja vu' here ... seems like the last two posts have been made somewhere verbatim, like we go to this exact point last time we talked about representations ... Ground Hog Day...
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
It is interesting to note which body states we are aware of and which remain beyond us. Same with things in the environment. Could certainly be informative. I’m sure there’s a paper or research on this.
You are 100% correct that the organism does almost everything without conscious awareness. At the same time, as soon as we think about complex, goal oriented behavior over large spatiotemporal windows, conscious experience—or control elements like conscious experience—seems ( perhaps incorrectly ) to play a role.
I will drop the self-world-model talk for now. I’ll do some reading on my own. I’ll be sure to pop in here if i find anything worthwhile.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I was planning to read the papers by Clark and Humphrey again on consciousness/representation with an eye to the questions above - will post that when I finish.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
It's not that "why" and "how" type questions are necessarily bad questions. Whether a question is good or bad is a subjective evaluation that is beside the point. The principle that illuminates the weakness of "how" and"why" type questions is another matter. If a person understands it, it doesn't need references, and credentials are irrelevant. However, here's one well known and respected scientist who has commented similarly on it:
Feynman on Why Type Questions
BTW: The reasons presented in your post by Coleman miss the mark. They do not address the reasoning. They simply make proclamations backed by poor examples. Instead I would return you to one of my previous better examples: Why is the sky blue? For every possible answer, another "why" type question can be asked either ad infinitum or in some circular manner that doesn't answer the "why" of the question.
A more useful approach would be: Describe the situation required for the sky to appear blue.
Why type questions are good when superficial explanations are good enough e.g. "Why did you do it?"
How type questions are good when superficial explanations are good enough e.g. "How do I change a lightbulb?"
We are not intentionally asking superficial questions here with respect to consciousness. Or are we?
Q. Why is it that we experience what it's like to be in the world?
A. We experience what it's like to be in the world so that we can make more informed decisions about our place in it.
Q. How are you experiencing the world today?
A. Wonderfully! Thank you.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
I think Coleman's example of the bird with red plumage is on point with Humphrey's explanation about consciousness (the paper uses the word "why" ten times) and with the answer to "why is the sky blue?":
The Short Answer: Gases and particles in Earth's atmosphere scatter sunlight in all directions. Blue light is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.
You write:
A more useful approach would be: Describe the situation required for the sky to appear blue.
I'm not sure what this means ... I could say first it would require someone for it to appear to, the sky would have to be clear, it would have to be daylight...
And your example:
Why is it that we experience what it's like to be in the world? is ok given the context of this thread, outside of it, I'm not sure it would be clear.
Here's some examples from Humphrey's paper:
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I think Coleman's example of the bird with red plumage is on point with Humphrey's explanation about consciousness (the paper uses the word "why" ten times) and with the answer to "why is the sky blue?":
The Short Answer: Gases and particles in Earth's atmosphere scatter sunlight in all directions. Blue light is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.
You write:
A more useful approach would be: Describe the situation required for the sky to appear blue.
Without the context of this paragraph, I'm not sure what this means ... I could say first it would require someone for it to appear to, the sky would have to be clear, it would have to be daylight...it seems better to me to say "why is the sky blue?" then if it's a kid and you get to questions that can't be answered, if they are ready you can say why they can't be answered or just say "well, we can't know that"
And your example:
Why is it that we experience what it's like to be in the world? is ok given the context of this thread, outside of it, I'm not sure it would be clear.
Here's an example from Humphrey's paper:
Anyhow, so much for ‘what consciousness is made of’. Following Fodor’s agenda, we’re left with the question of ‘what it is for, and
how it does what it’s for’. The design question. Why is this so difficult? Fodor has explained: ‘There are several reasons why consciousness
is so baffling. For one thing, it seems to be among the chronically unemployed… What mental processes can be performed only because
the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness contribute to their performance? As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious
minds can do they could do just as well if they weren’t conscious’ (Fodor, 2004, p. 31).
Yet I realize, as does Chalmers, that a particular question hangs over the idea that consciousness makes mental life more vivid and
distinctive at whatever level. Why should phenomenal properties be restricted to sensations? Why have the other attitudes not been invited
to the party: beliefs, desires, and so on? When it comes to modelling — and valuing — our own and others’ minds, wouldn’t it be extra
helpful if every kind of mental state had its own phenomenal signature? As Chalmers says, ‘it is not really clear why access to a
[sensory] modality as opposed to an attitude should make such a striking difference’ (2018, p. 24).
Would you re-write these examples? If so, how?
I wonder what great literature would be like re-written without why questions. Reminds me of e-prime.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I have a paper downloaded on my PC and I ask myself: why- I mean, "under what conditions..." oh never mind! I've got a paper on here I don't remember anything about -
Identity Reconsidered: taking a dual perspective on the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Farid Zahnoun
The abstract is very interesting:
Abstract
Despite functionalism’s long reign in philosophy of mind, it has never fully managed to carry off the older idea that the mind-matter relation might be a relation, not of multiple realizability, but of strict identity. Nowadays, we see a resurgence of identity-theoretical proposals in the so-called E-approaches to cognition, and especially in enactive and radical enactive approaches. Here, it is claimed that assuming a strict identity between certain physical structures and phenomenal consciousness isn’t merely a viable option, it is perhaps the only way to avoid the Hard Problem of Consciousness. This paper wants to argue that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a pseudo-problem that should indeed be avoided, rather than solved, and that this can be done by adopting a specific version of identity theory, one which isn’t neuro-centric and which also avoids collapsing into ontological reductionism. This version of identity theory is based on classic work by Herbert Feigl, who provides one of the most elaborated, yet at the same time most overlooked identity theories. Inspired by his work, I will defend, what I will call, a dual perspective theory. The theory will be contrasted with, on the one hand, neuro-centric and reductionist identity theories, and, on the other hand, with other mind-body relation proposals such as supervenience, neutral monism and dual aspect theory. To explain the idea of ‘dual perspectives’, I shall rely on some of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights.
Here is another paper by Clark that should be helpful in construing what he is attempting to do with consciousness. It was published first in 2005 on the journal Consciousness and Cognition and the version linked here [from his website] includes additions and revisions he's made since then. I'll copy the introductory matter and his section on 'Representationalism'.
Naturalism.org
Nature is enough
"Killing the Observer"
‘Nor is it any longer clear how to understand the notion of our grasping the “simple facts of consciousness” from the perspective of the first person.’[1]
Phenomenal consciousness is often thought to involve a first-person perspective or point of view which makes available to the subject categorically private, first-person facts about experience, facts that are irreducible to third-person physical, functional, or representational facts. This paper seeks to show that on a representational account of consciousness, we don’t have an observational perspective on experience that gives access to such facts, although our representational limitations and the phenomenal structure of consciousness make it strongly seem that we do. Qualia seem intrinsic and functionally arbitrary, and thus categorically private, because they are first-order sensory representations that are not themselves directly represented. Further, the representational architecture that on this account instantiates conscious subjectivity helps to generate the intuition of observerhood, since the phenomenal subject may be construed as outside, not within, experience. Once the seemings of private phenomenal facts and the observing subject are discounted, we can understand consciousness as a certain variety of neurally instantiated, behavior controlling intentional content, that constituted by an integrated representation of the organism in the world. Neuroscientific research suggests that consciousness and its characteristic behavioral capacities are supported by widely distributed but highly integrated neural processes involving communication between multiple functional sub-systems in the brain. This ‘global workspace’ may be the brain’s physical realization of the representational architecture that constitutes conscious subjectivity.
Here's the PDF of this paper as it appeared in Journal of Consciousness Studies(link is external), May/June, 2005. The version below is longer and its conclusions a bit more speculative. The sections "First-person perspectives" and "Implications" are not in the PDF version.
In characterizing consciousness, it is often said that there exists a first-person perspective or point of view associated with having phenomenal experience. On some construals of this perspective, the subject gains knowledge of, acquaintance with, or access to certain categorically private first-person facts, the phenomenal ‘what it is like’ of experience, or qualia (Nagel, 1974; Jackson, 1982; Chalmers, 1995a). It is supposed that such facts about experience (the redness of red, the painfulness of pain) are not reducible or explicable in terms of third-person, objective facts about brains, neurons, patterns of excitation, and other researchable aspects of cognitive states. Nothing about such physical, functional, or representational states of affairs implies that qualia should feel precisely as they do to a particular subject, or that representational states should feel any way at all, in which case the particular qualitative looks and feels of sensory experience certainly seem a realm apart from what science can predict and explain. This difficulty is what David Chalmers dubbed the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.
Despite such claims, there is of course a well-established and intuitive connection between consciousness and functionally essential cognition. First, it’s clear that organisms such as ourselves, by virtue of states and processes realized in our brains, represent or model various aspects of the world and the body. Various sensory maps embodying informational content reliably co-vary with the world as we change our location with respect to the environment (external content), and others reliably co-vary with states of the body (internal content). Such representational capacities, limited and shaped by our particular sensory systems, and modulated by top-down gating and filtering, are clearly essential for successful behavior. Second, cognitive processes involving conscious sensory experience also seem essential to guiding behavior. Despite the fact that, for instance, blindsight experiments show some rudimentary cognitive capacities remain intact with respect to the blindfield in the absence of phenomenal consciousness, the general rule is that if normal consciousness is curtailed, behavior is compromised, often radically (Weiskrantz, 1997; Marcel, 1988). Third, phenomenal consciousness certainly seems to carry information – intentional, representational content – in that sensory qualities are generally (although perhaps not exclusively) experienced as being of or about the world and the body: I feel a pain located in my back, I see that the apple is red, etc. Putting all this together, the natural conclusion is that conscious intentional content plays a key informational role in mediating behavior, such that cognition involving conscious processes is functionally essential.
Nevertheless, it is often pointed out that the particular way a given quality feels for the subject, or the fact that it feels any way at all, seem conceivably independent of the representational, informational processes that occur in tandem with consciousness (Chalmers, 1995a). Because such first-person, qualitative facts about experience aren’t obviously entailed by representational facts, the link between consciousness and behavior remains at bottom a matter of correlation, and the phenomenal qua phenomenal might be a non-functional property that’s causally inessential to cognition and action (Flanagan, 1992, ch. 7). As Jaegwon Kim (1998) points out, if consciousness doesn’t reduce to physical-functional states, then its role in governing behavior simply duplicates the work already being done by the brain, in which case it is causally otiose.
The challenge for those who seek unification of the apparently disparate realms of qualitative consciousness and scientific objectivity, therefore, is to show that, despite appearances to the contrary, the phenomenal is entailed by the functional-representational (if in fact it is), and that all actual facts about experience are third-person facts. In what follows, I will pursue such unification by suggesting, taking a page (or several) from Daniel Dennett, that what seem to be non-functional, categorically private facts about experience are indeed explicable as seemings, not facts, seemings generated by the way in which consciousness comes to be. The key to all this, I will argue, is that as subjects we don’t have a first-person perspective on experience, even though as persons we most certainly have a first-person perspective on the world and a unique cognitive connection to our bodies. To understand consciousness, we must extirpate any lingering notion that we witness experience, or to put it somewhat melodramatically, we must kill the observer.
I should mention that in what follows I will not critique variants of so-called higher order, 2-level theories of consciousness such as those developed by Rosenthal (1993) and Lycan (1987), which seek to explain conscious states by invoking some sort of ‘inner sense’, monitoring, or scanning. Although I have my doubts about such accounts, well expressed by Dretske (1995, pp. 104-116) and Guzeldere (1995), and although such theories may imply varieties of observerhood, I won’t address them here since it would unduly widen the focus of this paper. I’m only concerned with undermining the perspectivalism which supposes or implies that consciousness is some sort of subjective presentation involving a metaphysically distinct category of private, first-person facts about experience.
Representationalism
The basic theoretical context for what follows is the thesis, following representationalists such as Tye (1995) and Dretske (1995), that phenomenal qualities (qualia) are non-conceptual representational or intentional contents, instantiated by neural states and processes, that inform us about the world, including our bodies. Qualia are functional, not epiphenomenal, in that the information carried by qualitative states is essential for guiding complex, flexible behavior successfully. As representations, qualia more or less co-vary with features of external objects and internal bodily states, although of course they also depend on the representational capacities of the organism as well as top-down processes which influence perception. Note that I’ll be mostly concerned here with sensory qualia, which are arguably just a subset of the phenomenal or experiential, since after all there are aspects of experience that are not directly sensory, e.g., the construction of qualia into objects, the sense of being a subject, the feeling of familiarity, etc. (Van Gulick, 1995, p. 64; Mangan, 2001). {note: 'familiarity' seems equivalent to Russell's concept of 'acquaintance'.}
The traditional approach to the issue of phenomenal facts has been via Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ (Jackson, 1982), in which anti-reductionists hold that someone conversant with all the neurophysical facts that correlate with an experience of, say, red (the philosopher’s archetypical quale) nevertheless learns a new, non-physical fact when she first experiences red. There are good replies to Jackson’s original argument in the literature (e.g., Van Gulick, 1993; Levine, 1993; Biro, 1993; Tye, 1995) and Jackson himself has abandoned it in favor of representationalism (Jackson, 2001), so I’ll for the most part avoid these well-worn paths and instead undertake a deliberate consideration of qualia and the subject to whom they might appear. . . ."
Killing the Observer | Naturalism.org
Question: have we discussed here before and linked the text or texts in which Jackson abandoned experience in favor of representationalism, and does Jackson coincide with Clark's and others' use and application of the concept of 'representationalism'?
Naturalism.org
Nature is enough
"Killing the Observer"
‘Nor is it any longer clear how to understand the notion of our grasping the “simple facts of consciousness” from the perspective of the first person.’[1]
Phenomenal consciousness is often thought to involve a first-person perspective or point of view which makes available to the subject categorically private, first-person facts about experience, facts that are irreducible to third-person physical, functional, or representational facts. This paper seeks to show that on a representational account of consciousness, we don’t have an observational perspective on experience that gives access to such facts, although our representational limitations and the phenomenal structure of consciousness make it strongly seem that we do. Qualia seem intrinsic and functionally arbitrary, and thus categorically private, because they are first-order sensory representations that are not themselves directly represented. Further, the representational architecture that on this account instantiates conscious subjectivity helps to generate the intuition of observerhood, since the phenomenal subject may be construed as outside, not within, experience. Once the seemings of private phenomenal facts and the observing subject are discounted, we can understand consciousness as a certain variety of neurally instantiated, behavior controlling intentional content, that constituted by an integrated representation of the organism in the world. Neuroscientific research suggests that consciousness and its characteristic behavioral capacities are supported by widely distributed but highly integrated neural processes involving communication between multiple functional sub-systems in the brain. This ‘global workspace’ may be the brain’s physical realization of the representational architecture that constitutes conscious subjectivity.
Here's the PDF of this paper as it appeared in Journal of Consciousness Studies(link is external), May/June, 2005. The version below is longer and its conclusions a bit more speculative. The sections "First-person perspectives" and "Implications" are not in the PDF version.
- Introduction
- Representationalism
- First-person perspectives
- Informational characteristics of qualia
- The essential characteristic of a quality
- The unspecifiability of private facts
- The limits of representation
- The contingency of private facts
- The observing self
- Neuroscientific accounts of qualia
- Implications
- So, what’s missing?
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Notes
In characterizing consciousness, it is often said that there exists a first-person perspective or point of view associated with having phenomenal experience. On some construals of this perspective, the subject gains knowledge of, acquaintance with, or access to certain categorically private first-person facts, the phenomenal ‘what it is like’ of experience, or qualia (Nagel, 1974; Jackson, 1982; Chalmers, 1995a). It is supposed that such facts about experience (the redness of red, the painfulness of pain) are not reducible or explicable in terms of third-person, objective facts about brains, neurons, patterns of excitation, and other researchable aspects of cognitive states. Nothing about such physical, functional, or representational states of affairs implies that qualia should feel precisely as they do to a particular subject, or that representational states should feel any way at all, in which case the particular qualitative looks and feels of sensory experience certainly seem a realm apart from what science can predict and explain. This difficulty is what David Chalmers dubbed the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.
Despite such claims, there is of course a well-established and intuitive connection between consciousness and functionally essential cognition. First, it’s clear that organisms such as ourselves, by virtue of states and processes realized in our brains, represent or model various aspects of the world and the body. Various sensory maps embodying informational content reliably co-vary with the world as we change our location with respect to the environment (external content), and others reliably co-vary with states of the body (internal content). Such representational capacities, limited and shaped by our particular sensory systems, and modulated by top-down gating and filtering, are clearly essential for successful behavior. Second, cognitive processes involving conscious sensory experience also seem essential to guiding behavior. Despite the fact that, for instance, blindsight experiments show some rudimentary cognitive capacities remain intact with respect to the blindfield in the absence of phenomenal consciousness, the general rule is that if normal consciousness is curtailed, behavior is compromised, often radically (Weiskrantz, 1997; Marcel, 1988). Third, phenomenal consciousness certainly seems to carry information – intentional, representational content – in that sensory qualities are generally (although perhaps not exclusively) experienced as being of or about the world and the body: I feel a pain located in my back, I see that the apple is red, etc. Putting all this together, the natural conclusion is that conscious intentional content plays a key informational role in mediating behavior, such that cognition involving conscious processes is functionally essential.
Nevertheless, it is often pointed out that the particular way a given quality feels for the subject, or the fact that it feels any way at all, seem conceivably independent of the representational, informational processes that occur in tandem with consciousness (Chalmers, 1995a). Because such first-person, qualitative facts about experience aren’t obviously entailed by representational facts, the link between consciousness and behavior remains at bottom a matter of correlation, and the phenomenal qua phenomenal might be a non-functional property that’s causally inessential to cognition and action (Flanagan, 1992, ch. 7). As Jaegwon Kim (1998) points out, if consciousness doesn’t reduce to physical-functional states, then its role in governing behavior simply duplicates the work already being done by the brain, in which case it is causally otiose.
The challenge for those who seek unification of the apparently disparate realms of qualitative consciousness and scientific objectivity, therefore, is to show that, despite appearances to the contrary, the phenomenal is entailed by the functional-representational (if in fact it is), and that all actual facts about experience are third-person facts. In what follows, I will pursue such unification by suggesting, taking a page (or several) from Daniel Dennett, that what seem to be non-functional, categorically private facts about experience are indeed explicable as seemings, not facts, seemings generated by the way in which consciousness comes to be. The key to all this, I will argue, is that as subjects we don’t have a first-person perspective on experience, even though as persons we most certainly have a first-person perspective on the world and a unique cognitive connection to our bodies. To understand consciousness, we must extirpate any lingering notion that we witness experience, or to put it somewhat melodramatically, we must kill the observer.
I should mention that in what follows I will not critique variants of so-called higher order, 2-level theories of consciousness such as those developed by Rosenthal (1993) and Lycan (1987), which seek to explain conscious states by invoking some sort of ‘inner sense’, monitoring, or scanning. Although I have my doubts about such accounts, well expressed by Dretske (1995, pp. 104-116) and Guzeldere (1995), and although such theories may imply varieties of observerhood, I won’t address them here since it would unduly widen the focus of this paper. I’m only concerned with undermining the perspectivalism which supposes or implies that consciousness is some sort of subjective presentation involving a metaphysically distinct category of private, first-person facts about experience.
Representationalism
The basic theoretical context for what follows is the thesis, following representationalists such as Tye (1995) and Dretske (1995), that phenomenal qualities (qualia) are non-conceptual representational or intentional contents, instantiated by neural states and processes, that inform us about the world, including our bodies. Qualia are functional, not epiphenomenal, in that the information carried by qualitative states is essential for guiding complex, flexible behavior successfully. As representations, qualia more or less co-vary with features of external objects and internal bodily states, although of course they also depend on the representational capacities of the organism as well as top-down processes which influence perception. Note that I’ll be mostly concerned here with sensory qualia, which are arguably just a subset of the phenomenal or experiential, since after all there are aspects of experience that are not directly sensory, e.g., the construction of qualia into objects, the sense of being a subject, the feeling of familiarity, etc. (Van Gulick, 1995, p. 64; Mangan, 2001). {note: 'familiarity' seems equivalent to Russell's concept of 'acquaintance'.}
The traditional approach to the issue of phenomenal facts has been via Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ (Jackson, 1982), in which anti-reductionists hold that someone conversant with all the neurophysical facts that correlate with an experience of, say, red (the philosopher’s archetypical quale) nevertheless learns a new, non-physical fact when she first experiences red. There are good replies to Jackson’s original argument in the literature (e.g., Van Gulick, 1993; Levine, 1993; Biro, 1993; Tye, 1995) and Jackson himself has abandoned it in favor of representationalism (Jackson, 2001), so I’ll for the most part avoid these well-worn paths and instead undertake a deliberate consideration of qualia and the subject to whom they might appear. . . ."
Killing the Observer | Naturalism.org
Question: have we discussed here before and linked the text or texts in which Jackson abandoned experience in favor of representationalism, and does Jackson coincide with Clark's and others' use and application of the concept of 'representationalism'?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Yes, I believe we have - I know I came across the paper (or maybe an interview with Jackson) and I think I posted it. It's been a while.
And yes I think, at least broadly, they would all be in agreement on representationalism.