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Dennett said:Instead, they have objected ‘in
principle’, perhaps playing a little gorgeous Bach for the audience and then asking
the rhetorical question, ‘Can anybody seriously believe that the wonders of
human consciousness can be exhaustively plumbed by third-person methods??’
loseyourname said:Hey, I just read that the other day. It actually got me thinking of Sleeth, to be honest. Dennett's major defense of heterophenomenology is that no philosopher that opposes it has ever been able to propose an experiment that couldn't be conducted using its methodology. It made me think of that Empirical Inductionist Panexperientialism thread from a while back. Of course, I never read that thread in detail, so I have idea whether or not it even proposes an experimental technique that could not be conducted using heterophenomenology. I know that Les believes it is best to trust as accurate the impressions he gets when he conducts his meditations, but I personally wouldn't be so trusting.
Mentat said:Forgive me...what exactly is the relation?
0.hypnagogue said:How disappointing that you would fall to your knees for such a strawman account of the antiphysicalist argument.
selfAdjoint said:Strawman? I was recalling just that very same argument about music, directed at me in these forums a month or two ago. And fall on my knees? How insulting!
hypnagogue said:I don't necessarily expect you to be swayed by the antiphysicalist stance, but can we at least recognize that there is more substance to the arguments than the naive wonderment of some emotional sop? If you truly believe that someone presented you with an argument along the lines of the one Dennett cites in your quoted text, then either a) this person did not understand the substance of the antiphysicalist argument, or b) you did not understand the substance of this person's argument.
loseyourname said:Well, as stated, I never actually read Sleeth's method, but I get the impression that he was advocating a first-person scientific method that he believes could not be conducted using heterophenomenology, which would be a taking up of Dennett's challenge, at least if he were to present Dennett with his method.
Forgive me, but wasn't that obvious?
Mentat said:I'm a little slow, bear with me .
Anyway, I don't know that we could ever test a first-person scientific method, nor that such a thing could really exist. After all, the current scientific method (post-Popper) is quite dependent on disprovability. What would be the criteria for "disproof" (or "consensus", for that matter; "consensus" being another important aspect of scientific method) in a first-person, meditative method?
Note: I'm not asking you to defend it, I know it's not a position that you were holding. I'm just curious to see if this idea could be developed further.
loseyourname said:Well, claims that anyone using the right techniques to turn their attention inward and still all thought will have the same experience and come to the same conclusions. If he were being intellectually honest, then I suppose he would have to admit that a person having a different experience or coming to a different conclusion would be a falsifying instance. He doesn't seem to think it's ever happened, though.
Mentat said:Hypnagogue, if you have something to say about (specifically) Dennett's approach, as explained in my link, then go ahead. As it is, you are countering "naive anti-physicalist arguments" in general, and that is not the purpose of this thread.
hypnagogue said:Nonetheless, naive arguments were introduced, and their naivete needed to be pointed out.
In any case, I read this piece by Dennett some time ago, and my reaction is basically similar to StatusX's. On the face of it, it looks as though heterophenomenology may be as much of an account of consciousness as an objective scientific method could afford. However, I do not think that this implies that heterophenomenology is a complete account of consciousness. If we commit ourselves a priori to the notion that all that is knowable is knowable via third person methods, then it would indeed logically follow that HP tells us all there is to know. But I believe there are good reasons for thinking that phenomenal consciousness is an instance of something that cannot be known from the third person, and I prefer to abandon a commitment to the completeness of third person methods rather than abandon what is apparent to me from first person observation.
Nereid said:Hmm, let's not be too hasty here, re 'falsifiability'; in the 'post-Popper' world, that's not at all the shiboleth!
So what is? Probably extent to which it's a part of a 'research program' (Lakatos); falsifiability may be a helpful heuristic, but it hasn't stopped vast numbers of person-years of effort being devoted, for example, to String Theory/M-Theory (pray tell, is it 'falsifiable'?)
Nereid said:Hmm, let's not be too hasty here, re 'falsifiability'; in the 'post-Popper' world, that's not at all the shiboleth! So what is? Probably extent to which it's a part of a 'research program' (Lakatos); falsifiability may be a helpful heuristic, but it hasn't stopped vast numbers of person-years of effort being devoted, for example, to String Theory/M-Theory (pray tell, is it 'falsifiable'?)
StatusX said:Falsifiability is the standard for traditional, objective science, but it is clear that this kind of science won't be able to account for subjective experience.
If one read's Dennett's book carefully and dispassionately it soon becomes clear that his main arguments don't hold water. That doesn't in itself make heterophenomenology wrong, but he fails to make a good case for it.
Canute said:Perhaps the only answer is to find evidence that is unfalsifiable because it is self-evident.
If one read's Dennett's book carefully and dispassionately it soon becomes clear that his main arguments don't hold water. That doesn't in itself make heterophenomenology wrong, but he fails to make a good case for it.
"The challenge is to construct a theory of mental events, using the data that scientific method permits"(p. 71)
I pick this because it shows the way in which Dennett tries to have his cake and eat it. It is true that this is the challenge. However one wonders what scientific data he refers to. So far scientists have been unable to prove that mental events exists, so the data is a little thin on the ground. In order to collect such data we would have to show first that mental events exist. If they exist, as distinct from brain-events, then consciousness is not brain.
Someone equated heterophenomenology with epiphenominalism earlier. This seems incorrect. Dennett says -
"ince heterophenomenology is a way of interpreting behaviour (including the internal behaviour of brains, etc.), it will arrive at exactly the same heterophenomenological world for Zoe and for Zombie-Zoe, her unconscious twin." (95)
As zombies do not have consciousness we can see that heterophenomenology works as a theory whether or not mental events exist. It is therefore more akin to eliminativism than epiphenomenalism.
This statement asserts that hetero-phenomenology is not an explanation of consciousness but rather of behaviour, and that it is therefore just as useful for explaining zombie behaviour as it is for explaining human behaviour. Thus it is made clear that his theory does not acknowledge the existence of mental events, and is not a theory of consciousness so much as a theory of non-consciousness.
Mentat said:
Dennett said:(http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/JCSarticle.pdf )Most of the method is so obvious and uncontroversial that some scientists are baffled that I would even call it a method: basically, you have to take the vocal sounds emanating from the subjects’ mouths (and your own mouth) and interpret them! Well of course. What else could you do? Those sounds aren’t just belches and moans; they’re speech acts, reporting, questioning, correcting, requesting, and so forth. Using such standard speech acts, other events such as button presses can be set up to be interpreted as speech acts as well, with highly specific meanings and fine temporal resolution. What this interpersonal communication enables you, the investigator, to do is to compose a catalogue of what the subject believes to be true about his or her conscious experience. This catalogue of beliefs fleshes out the subject’s heterophenomenological world, the world according to S—the subjective world of one subject—not to be confused with
the real world. The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness.
Just what kinds of things does this methodology commit us to? Beyond the unproblematic things all of science is committed to (neurons and electrons, clocks and microscopes, . . . ) just to beliefs—the beliefs expressed by subjects and deemed constitutive of their subjectivity. And what kind of things are beliefs? Are they sentences in the head written in brain writing? Are they nonphysical states of dualist ectoplasm? Are they structures composed of proteins or neural assemblies or electrical fields? We may stay maximally noncommittal about this by adopting, at least for the time being (I recommend: for ever), the position I have defended (Dennett, 1971; 1987; 1991) that treats beliefs from the intentional stance as theorists’ fictions similar to centres of mass, the Equator, and parallelograms of forces. In short, we may treat beliefs as abstractions that measure or describe the complex cognitive state of a subject rather the way horsepower indirectly but accurately measures the power of engines (don’t look in the engine for the horses). As Churchland (1979) has pointed out, physics already has hundreds of well-understood measure predicates, such as x has weight-in-grams n, or x is moving up at n meters per second, which describe a physical property of x by relating it to a number. Statements that attribute beliefs using the standard propositional attitude format, x believes that p, describe x’s internal state by relating it to a proposition, another kind of useful abstraction, systematized in logic, not arithmetic. We need beliefs anyway for the rest of social science, which is almost entirely conducted in terms of the intentional stance, so this is a conservative exploitation of already quite well-behaved and well-understood methods.
Third-Person Science connected to ‘First-Person Science’ via Reports.
Why not live by the heterophenomenological rules?
Canute said:This statement asserts that hetero-phenomenology is not an explanation of consciousness but rather of behaviour, and that it is therefore just as useful for explaining zombie behaviour as it is for explaining human behaviour. Thus it is made clear that his theory does not acknowledge the existence of mental events, and is not a theory of consciousness so much as a theory of non-consciousness. To me it seems no more than a rehash of Lyle in the spirit of Watson and Skinner with added sophistry and longer words.
Mentat said:How can that be "clear" in light of heterophenomenology? The whole point of the endeavor is that it is not clear that subjectivity is outside of traditional science.
StatusX said:It is clear those methods will never be able to answer questions like "Why does orange look the way it does?" and "Why is there any inner experience at all - that is, why isn't it all black inside, with all the same observed behavior?"
loseyourname said:That would only matter to Dennett if you could propose a way that one could answer those questions. He only seems interested in questions that can be answered, and if you think you have shown that those particular questions cannot be answered using heterophenomenology, then propose a way in which they can be answered. If you can do this, e-mail Dennett, because he will have been proven wrong.
StatusX said:I don't pretend to have answers, or even vague ideas of what the answers might look like. In fact, any answer or guess I could give you could be easily accounted for by heterophenomenolgy. But would you deny those are meaningful questions? And is there any way in principle they could be answered by third person observations? (the second one, in particular, was worded so as to make this clear)
It seems that research into consciousness would become impossible, since C does not exist. It seems also that it would become impossible to explain experiences in terms of neural correlates, since experiences do not exist. What Dennett is really saying is that because the only things that science can study are brain-states and first-person reports then these must be all that exist. Unfortunately the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. It's the sort or assertion that leads Chalmer's (and me) to wonder if some philosophers of consciousness are conscious in the way the rest of us are.Loseyourname - So can you think of an experiment or line of research that cannot be conducted using heterophenomenology, or that would better be conducted by treating one's own reports as incorrigible?
Canute said:On the basis of some of the arguments here it seems to me that we ought to believe in God, since there is no question that cannot be answered by using a theological methodology, in principle at least. Of course to many people this contradicts common sense, but as Dennett himself says, so does does his theory.
Btw it's worth reading Gibert Lyle's earlier book on consciousness as well as Dennett's (Lyle was Dennett's tutor) because it shows the origins of many of D's arguments.
As StatusX points out earlier, the reason that it is difficult to ask questions that heterophenomenology cannot answer is because all questions that it cannot answer are presumed to be non-questions. It's a neat trick, but its success depends on abandoning common-sense and having an uncritical faith in Dennett's assertion that consciousness is made out of reports and brain-states.
It seems that research into consciousness would become impossible, since C does not exist. It seems also that it would become impossible to explain experiences in terms of neural correlates, since experiences do not exist. What Dennett is really saying is that because the only things that science can study are brain-states and first-person reports then these must be all that exist. Unfortunately the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. It's the sort or assertion that leads Chalmer's (and me) to wonder if some philosophers of consciousness are conscious in the way the rest of us are.
I don't think anybody argues that their reports are incorrigible. However what is inevitably true is that one cannot be misled as to the state of ones consciousness at any moment. This is true however innacurately we report those states. (Quite how we can be conscious of what it feels like to taste a peach while being quite unable to report what it tastes like I don't know).
Some off-the-cuff questions come to mind.
a) If consciousness is no more or less than what can be reported then how is it possible that we can experience more than we can report?
b) If consciousness is identical with what is reported about consciousness then it would be impossible for a person to give a false report, so why do scientists distrust first-person reports?
c) If, as Dennett argues, consciousness is just reports of what a subject believes they have experienced together with their brain-states then what is it that the subject is reporting? It cannot be brain-states, since we have no idea about our brain-states. Do we just report our reports?
d) If we report an experience innacurately does that mean that we had a different experience to the one we thought we had?
loseyourname said:Well, that's just it. For all of his brashness, Dennett doesn't have answers either. He's only provided a framework and a method. You don't need to provide answers to meet his challenge, you just need to propose a method by which the questions might be answered that cannot be answered using heterophenomenology. If you can't so much as conceive of an alternative method, why criticize the one that science currently uses? I'm not saying that you are criticizing his method, but there are clearly those in the antiphysicalist camp that feel Dennett is in the wrong.
StatusX said:I don't need to have another method in mind to criticize his. He claims that all the important questions can be answered by heterophenomenology, and I'm simply disagreeing with that notion. I've already given examples of questions his method clearly can't answer, so the only way to preserve his thesis is to deny they are meaningful questions.
It is true there is no method I can think of to answer them (in fact, "method" itself implies an investigation into extrinsic, causal properties, which is clearly not appropriate here). But does that mean they don't have answers? What about the question of why the universe exists? Has anyone proposed a method to answer this? If not, do you take that to mean it has no answer?
Canute said:a) If consciousness is no more or less than what can be reported then how is it possible that we can experience more than we can report?
b) If consciousness is identical with what is reported about consciousness then it would be impossible for a person to give a false report, so why do scientists distrust first-person reports?
c) If, as Dennett argues, consciousness is just reports of what a subject believes they have experienced together with their brain-states then what is it that the subject is reporting? It cannot be brain-states, since we have no idea about our brain-states. Do we just report our reports?
d) If we report an experience innacurately does that mean that we had a different experience to the one we thought we had?
loseyourname said:I'm pretty sure that what he is saying is that all questions about human consciousness that can be answered can be answered using heterophenomenology. I'm going to post his own description of the method and see what it is that you guys find so controversial.
That's a bad example because, to be honest, I do think that there is no answer to that question. A priori purpose is an artifact of conscious beings. The only way you can answer a question such as "Why does the universe exist?" Is to postulate the existence of a conscious entity that created the universe with some purpose in mind, a reason why. After that, we can simply go back and ask why that creator exists. Does he have a creator? Why does that second creator exist? The buck has to stop somewhere with something that exists for no reason whatsoever; it simply exists. For the sake of simplicity, I'd prefer sticking with the assumption (open for revision should I ever receive evidence to the contrary) that the universe itself is that thing that simply exists, for no apparent reason.
To return to your initial question, I don't know whether the questions you've asked about consciousness have an answer. It is certainly intuitive to suggest that there must be a definite reason that some event occurs. However, if you are going to call these events intrinsic and cut off from the extrinsic causal chain of the investigable world, does there still have to be a reason? I know that Rosenberg has proposed a way to make intrinsic properties play a role in causality, but I'll hold off on that radical departure until we get there.
More from Dennett:
- What this interpersonal communication enables you, the investigator, to do is to compose a catalogue of what the subject believes to be true about his or her conscious experience. This catalogue of beliefs fleshes out the subject’s heterophenomenological world, the world according to S—the subjective world of one subject—not to be confused with the real world. The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding
environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness.
Now how exactly do you propose that Dennett is wrong about this? What else is there that should be studied? He is proposing an inventory of all of the physical facts about a subject's brain and environment, plus an inventory of the subject's own beliefs about his consciousness obtained through introspection. What else is there to be looked at? The only alternative I can think of is to take this same inventory, but treat the subject's impressions as incorrigible. I really can't see why any person would suggest this is a better method, given the long history of subjects being incorrect regarding their own 'facts of introspection.'
Can you see the problem with trying to go this far? By saying that we should treat experiences themselves as the primary pretheoretical data, you are assuming incorrigibility on the part of your subject (again, be it yourself or another person). Heterophenomenology takes no such stand. The subject's beliefs might be correct, they might not be. It should be obvious from clinical studies, in particular of blindsight, blindness denial, and hemispheric separation, that subject's beliefs about their experiences can indeed be incorrect.
- A week ago, I heard James Conant give a talk at Tufts, entitled “Two Varieties of Skepticism” in which he distinguished two oft-confounded questions:
Descartes: How is it possible for me to tell whether a thought of mine is true or false, perception or dream?
Kant: How is it possible for something even to be a thought (of mine)? What are the conditions for the possibility of experience (veridical or illusory) at all?
Conant’s excellent point was that in the history of philosophy, up to this very day, we often find philosophers talking past each other because they don’t see the difference between the Cartesian question (or family of questions) and the Kantian question (or family of questions), or because they try to merge the questions. I want to add a third version of the question:
Turing: How could we make a robot that had thoughts, that learned from “experience” (interacting with the world) and used what it learned the way we can do?
There are two main reactions to Turing’s proposal to trade in Kant’s question for his.
(A) Cool! Turing has found a way to actually answer Kant’s question!
(B) Aaaargh! Don’t fall for it! You’re leaving out . . . experience!
You seem to fall into camp B and object to anyone that falls into A, including Dennett.
So to review again, what is it that you object to exactly? Do you think we should grant Chalmers' Zombic Hunch incorrigible status as an item that needs to be explained? Or do you agree with Dennett that it is best for a science of consciousness to remain open-minded about this and simply aim to explain why certain people have this belief, without making a committment just yet as to whether or not the belief is true?