Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[Ferris_bg]

Apeiron, let's not repeat the same things again, re-read your own posts and see for yourself in which category the http://philpapers.org/browse/systems-theory" is, I tried my best to explain it (not that it's really something to explain) a few times, I won't do it again however in this thread.

C, Q, M stand for cognition, qualia, mental obviously; https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=3253646".

 

[apeiron]

see for yourself in which category the http://philpapers.org/browse/systems-theory" is.

Are you trying to draw attention to some paper in this list? It is not clear what you mean to say here.

C, Q, M stand for cognition, qualia, mental obviously; https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=3253646".

Thanks for pointing to the actual post. And in fact it wasn't obvious that M was mental. I thought you may have meant matter.

While by the other two you need to involve strong emergence to make the step from C/Q to M.

That is not actually true of the approach I am taking. The development of a system (it's emergence) goes from a state of vagueness to one of crispness. So you would go from the vaguest form of mentality to the most crisply developed. In other words, the model is not an on/off binary story but one of a gradient of development.

So this is neither strong, nor weak, emergence I am talking about. It is a different ontological view of emergence.

 

[bohm2]

4. The No Sign Problem. There appears to be no direct evidence whatsoever that every element of reality has an associated mentalistic and in fact conscious aspect.

To the contrary, there is abundant evidence of rudimentary mentality. Dyson describes explicitly how what we call random behavior in electrons is better described as choice. So where today's science so often posits chance as an explanation, panpsychists see free choice. Obviously, there is even more abundant evidence of mentality in the domains of life, from bats to bacteria.

In many ways, this is the heart of the problem, for me. How do you know when you've come across this "rudimentary mentality" at the micro-level? It's kind of like trying to pass the "Turing test" but on the micro-level. I can't see how that is possible, given that we can't literally "see" this intrinsic, proto-mental aspect of stuff. It's easier with other conscious macro-stuff like ourselves because at least we have something to compare it to (our own subjectivity). I mean what kind of "behaviour" would more fundamental stuff (e.g. electrons, etc.) need to display to us so we get that "aha" feeling like: "Oh, well...now it's obvious how consciousness/experientiality/qualia can emerge from this basic stuff". I'm not sure if I'm making any sense?

While emergence/genuine novelty of stuff studied by current physics might not be predictable, there isn't this "awe" in the same way there appears to be with emergence of the experiential. Even synergestic top-down/down-up models don't seem to cut it in my opinion. Dyson's arguments that electrons have free choice versus randomness just isn't convincing to me. Maybe someone could elaborate on what properties they think would be required at the more "fundamental" level so that given that plus the synergestic stuff could lead to consciousness. I still can't see how this is possible because ultimately any such property will likely have to be some mathematical description and I don't see how such a mathematical object can give us that "aha" feeling. I find McGinn's point below interesting but I think we may have already reached that point in QM, but it doesn't appear of any help but I'm not sure?

I am now in a position to state the main thesis of this paper: in order to solve the mind-body problem we need, at a minimum, a new conception of space. We need a conceptual breakthrough in the way we think about the medium in which material objects exist, and hence in our conception of material objects themselves. That is the region in which our ignorance is focused: not in the details of neurophysiological activity but, more fundamentally, in how space is structured or constituted. That which we refer to when we use the word 'space' has a nature that is quite different from how we standardly conceive it to be; so different, indeed, that it is capable of 'containing' the non-spatial (as we now conceive it) phenomenon of consciousness. Things in space can generate consciousness only because those things are not, at some level, just how we conceive them to be; they harbour some hidden aspect or principle.

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html

There have been some attempts that I've come across to model qualia mathematically or as the authors write, to "begin translating the seemingly ineffable qualitative properties of experience into the language of mathematics" but even these authors concede:

Some experiences appear to be ‘‘elementary,’’ in that they cannot be further decomposed. Sub-modes that do not contain any more densely tangled sub-sub-modes are elementary modes (i.e., elementary shapes that cannot be further decomposed). According to the IIT (integrated information theory) such elementary modes correspond to aspects of experience that cannot be further analyzed, meaning that no further phenomenological structure is recognizable. The term qualia (in a narrow sense) is often used to refer to such elementary experiences, such as a pure color like red, or a pain, or an itch.

Finally, we have argued that specific qualities of consciousness, such as the ‘‘redness’’ of red, while generated by a local mechanism, cannot be reduced to it, but require considering the shape of the entire quale, within which they constitute a q-fold.

http://ntp.neuroscience.wisc.edu/faculty/fac-art/tononi5.pdf

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Bohm,
Thanks for the very interesting write ups. Always good to see someone knowledgeable of philosophy stop by for a discussion.

I’d like to introduce you to what Gregg Rosenberg, “A Place for Consciousness” (pg. 119) calls the “knowledge paradox”. Rosenberg actually quotes Shoemaker, though reading Shoemaker, I think Rosenberg has a much better description of the paradox.

I think we all would agree that mental states (M) are supervenient on physical states (P). By mental states, I mean the phenomenal ones such as defined for example by Chalmers, “The Conscious Mind”. By physical states, I mean the objectively observable phenomena. Hopefully that’s clear.

Many of the philosophers you’ve quoted have suggested there is a correlation between the mental and physical states, and they certainly aren’t in the minority. Kim for example suggests that there is a correlation P1 (P1 is a physical state P at time 1) with M1 (mental state M at time 1) and Strawson whom you’ve quoted similarly calls this [N1→E1]. The quote from Strawson proposes to use this for the basis of comparison to verify that M exists in a given person. Perhaps we could also use this correlation to verify M in any physical system. Functionalism of course, would also suggest that this is true. Any functionally equivalent physical system should produce the equivalent mental states, if any. In other words, functionalism suggests that if a physical system duplicates all the functionality of a known system that is phenomenally conscious, that physical system must also be phenomenally conscious. One of the most heavily quoted examples of this is the thought experiment (Chalmers) that suggests we remove a brain cell and replace it with a microchip which performs all the identical functions that the brain cell did. Then we continue to replace one brain cell after another until we’re left with a functionally equivalent brain made of microchips. Thus, the argument goes, “at what point does phenomenal consciousness disappear?” The obvious implication is that there has been no change in any of the phenomenal states. If we were to disagree, we might suggest it disappears the moment we replace one brain cell or we might suggest it fades away slowly, but how could we possibly know? All the mental states are now represented by functionally identical physical states and any Turing test would certainly not be able to tell any difference between the two.

If we examine any physical state P1 of the brain described by the thought experiment, we’d find that each subsequent physical state P2 is causally determined by the prior state P1 as given for example by Kim. In the case of a deterministic computer such as the ones we have on our desktop, this causal link couldn’t be more clear. P2 is caused by P1 simply because each switch transistor is designed to operate under only one condition, an electrical charge must be applied to the base for the emitter and collector to be either open or close as shown in the figure below.
[PLAIN]http://mboffin.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/pnp-transistor.png
So we could examine P2 and we could determine exactly which state P3 will become, simply by examining the physical process. The mental states that are believed to be present (ie: M1 when P1, M2 when P2, etc…) can make no causal difference to any subsequent physical state. Again, this concept is nicely explained by Kim (Mind in a Physical World) and other literature by Kim. Also, the fact that our computer is fully determined by and dependant on the physical states should be quite obvious.

What makes the digital computer a useful conceptual tool here is the simple fact that it has distinct, physical states but that shouldn’t be construed as a limitation. Clearly, nonlinear physical systems require integrating physical states over time if we use the presumption as everyone does that phenomenal consciousness is dependent on classical mechanical causal interactions. This is done in neuroscience for example in the study of neurons using compartmental methods both in vivo, in vitro and modeled using numerical methods.

Returning to the model of a digital computer, we can see that all physical states over time dt are defined by prior physical states, so P3 follows P2 follows P1. We can know why the physical states occur since they are causally determined by the prior physical state. This can’t be more clear than for a digital computer which, like a series of dominoes falling over, simply proceeds from step to step with no potential for there to be a deviation from those steps. The physical states and any input/output are all that is needed to determine the function of the machine.

We can now ask the question, can we know if this computer harbors any mental states? Strawson would suggest we look for a correlation [N1→E1]. After all, if we can map these correlations (N) in the computer and we find they can be mapped to (N) in the human brain, then there must also be experiential phenomena (E) occurring. The knowledge paradox can now be seen in that assuming the causal closure of the physical, there is a physical cause for each physical state and there is no room for mental states to make a causal contribution to those physical brain events. Further, our claims about having mental states completely depend on those physical states. Both our claims about mental states and our behavior are determined solely by the objectively measurable physical states. So if mental states are irrelevant to the causal dynamics of the brain, those mental states can play no role in producing any of our claims (or behaviors) about those states. We can have no way of knowing from physical statements or behaviors if anyone is conscious nor even if we ourselves are conscious if only physical states are causally relevant. We like to believe there is a 1 to 1 correlation between P and M however, our physical brains would cause us to utter that we are p-conscious, and mere serendipity would have it that we were in fact correct. If the laws enforcing the epiphenomenal correlation between brain events and p-conscious events were to somehow be shut off, we would go on (falsely) claiming that we are p-conscious, none the wiser.

3. The knowledge paradox
If physicalism is false, and if the world is causally closed under physics, it appears as if there is no room for p-consciousness to make a causal contribution to brain events. But clearly, our knowledge claims about p-consciousness (e.g. "I know that I am conscious right now") are driven by physical brain events. If p-consciousness is irrelevant to the causal dynamics of the brain, then, it seems that it can play no role in producing our knowledge claims about it. In short, it seems as if our knowledge claims about p-consciousness should bear no relevance to the phenomenon itself; we should have no way to really know that we are p-conscious, even though we claim that we are.

It appears as if the knowledge paradox forces the Liberal Naturalist to be caught on the dual horns of interactionist dualism and epiphenomenalism. We can escape the conundrum of the knowledge paradox if we deny the causal closure of the physical and claim that non-physical p-consciousness really does directly influence the physical dynamics of the brain. The resulting interactionist dualist ontology presents significant further problems, however, and there is no strong evidence that the world is not causally closed under physics. If we reject interactionism, we can bite the bullet and propose that p-consciousness is epiphenomenal on brain events. On this view, p-consciousness is lawfully correlated with brain events, but still does not make any contribution to their causal dynamics. Epiphenomenalism is not much better than interactionism, as it still presents us with significant problems. While knowledge claims about p-consciousness would be true under epiphenomenalism, it seems they would not be justified. Rather, they would be more like lucky coincidences, since there would be no mechanism by which we could attain reasons for making these claims. Our physical brains would cause us to utter that we are p-conscious, and mere serendipity would have it that we were in fact correct. If the laws enforcing the epiphenomenal correlation between brain events and p-conscious events were to somehow be shut off, we would go on (falsely) claiming that we are p-conscious, none the wiser.

The knowledge paradox is a deep problem for Liberal Naturalism, and on the surface, it seems as if the Liberal Naturalist is forced to choose between two highly problematic views. But perhaps the paradox does not turn on the nature of p-consciousness so much as it turns on our understanding of causation and its relationship to physics. A deeper theory of causation might allow the Liberal Naturalist to maintain that physicalism is false without being forced into either interactionist dualism or epiphenomenalism.

Rosenberg and Shoemaker aren’t of course, the only ones to see this problem. Another good example regards an argument in favor of epiphenomenalism by Susan http://psych.dbourget.com/readings/Pockett.pdf" , “Is Consciousness Epiphenomenal?” There are others.

To conclude, the proposal that there can be a mapping between non-experiential physical states and experiential mental states such as proposed by Strawson and others as well as the problem facing any purely objectively observable physical theory of nature requires that we address these kinds of logical dilemmas.

 

[apeiron]

I think we all would agree that mental states (M) are supervenient on physical states (P).

No, I certainly don't agree, as this already hardwires the axioms of material reductionism into the discussion.

The systems perspective is irreducibly hierarchical and scale-based. It is about the interaction between parts and wholes, the local and the global, so the standard definition of a state (a complete description of a system in terms of parameters such as positions and momentums at a particular moment in time) does not apply.

The synchronic view taken by the notion of state cannot capture global dynamics which live in time (as history, as memory, as anticipation, as intentionality, as meaning, as development, as goals, etc, etc).

Reductionism collapses the global to the local and no longer "sees it". And we know the ontological paradoxes this regularly causes in physics, from special relativity and the block universe to the QM observer issue, to the question of where the laws of physics reside.

If you create a time-less model of reality (using state-speak), then of course you break the material connection between the different spatiotemporal scales of a system and arrive at a forced dualism. You have just stated that only the local is real - and yet it is bleeding obvious that the global is also as real, even if it is now being treated as the unreal.

This is what reductionism does to people. It puts them in the impossible bind of at the same time trying to believe that the global is unreal (according to science or logic) when also it must be real (as in the Platonic forms of maths, the immaterial laws of nature, the subjective impression of being a causal agent, etc).

Then to recover what has escaped explanation while still doing reductionism, there are various bad choices like suggesting the global is epiphenomenal (an a-causal illusion) or some component of the local - some further micro-physical property - which reductionism so far has just missed in its investigations.

But anyway, it is plain enough that if you wire in reductionism as axiomatic to your thought experiments, then a reductionist paradox is all that your arguments can spit out at the end.

For all the talk of dealing with the issue of synergistic interactions or global causal dynamics, that is actually impossible in terms of what has been assumed at the start.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, you ask what evidence I have for suggesting that pansemiosis is equivalent to panpsychism. As we discussed previously, Peirce states explicitly that what is objective to others is subjective for itself. Here's my previous post to you in an earlier thread:

"Look, there are different levels of explanation and terms such as idealism, monism and panpsychism (not to mention physicalism, materialism, etc.) are themselves a bit squishy. Here's how I see it: there is a non-psychical substrate to reality (which I've mentioned previously) that we can call Brahman/apeiron/ether or simply the "vacuum" as modern physics sometimes does. This is the neutral monist substrate from which reality grows. Matter, as Peirce points out, springs from this substrate.

Peirce himself states, as I quoted previously that matter is what is viewed "from the outside" and mind what a thing is for itself "from the inside."

How is this not panpsychism?

Peirce also uses the term "hylopathy" - all things feel. How is this not panpsychism?

Now, we could split hairs and I suspect you will by saying that dual aspect panpsychism isn't the same as "objective idealism." But when we square Peirce's various statements it seems quite clear that his intent was to stress that mind is omni-present. And this is panpsychism. "

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

In many ways, this is the heart of the problem, for me. How do you know when you've come across this "rudimentary mentality" at the micro-level? It's kind of like trying to pass the "Turing test" but on the micro-level. I can't see how that is possible, given that we can't literally "see" this intrinsic, proto-mental aspect of stuff. It's easier with other conscious macro-stuff like ourselves because at least we have something to compare it to (our own subjectivity). I mean what kind of "behaviour" would more fundamental stuff (e.g. electrons, etc.) need to display to us so we get that "aha" feeling like: "Oh, well...now it's obvious how consciousness/experientiality/qualia can emerge from this basic stuff".

bohm2, this is in fact a problem with all knowledge and all conscious beings. How do you know I'm conscious? How do I know you're conscious? We don't. We infer it. The ONLY thing we know is our own consciousness. Literally. All else is inference. So we can infer that electrons have an extremely rudimentary consciousness, as Dyson and Bohm (and many other panpsychists) did, but we can never know this is so. It's all about what conceptual framework best explains the evidence.

See my series of essays on "absent-minded science" for more: http://www.independent.com/news/2010/aug/11/absent-minded-science/

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, you ask what evidence I have for suggesting that pansemiosis is equivalent to panpsychism. As we discussed previously, Peirce states explicitly that what is objective to others is subjective for itself.

I quite agree that in "Man's Glassy Essence", Peirce gets very carried away and ends up arguing for telepathy and group-mind (do you follow him there too?). But you can't just pick and choose your quotes to suit your beliefs here.

In that essay, Peirce was developing a train of thought in which he was trying to account for the evidence of "feeling" right at the protoplasmic level of life. Now if you have read it, you can see Peirce lacked a critical piece of information about how life is actually "mechanistic" in having genes and other forms of systems memory. There is a place where habit is encoded.

So his reasoning goes wrong from there. Because Peirce could not find a place for accumulated habit to reside in a global fashion, he had to speculate about an atomistic level memory.

Likewise, because there was not enough neuroscience to explain how attention is a global brain mechanism, he again had to try and place the "feeling of attending" at the atomistic moment when some habit is being eroded by the vagaries of spontaneity.

So you are jumping in where Peirce is clearly wrong (due to a lack of better knowledge in his day) rather than focusing on where he was right (which is in his hierarchical approach to logic itself - treating causality in self-organising systems terms).

His semiosis does not actually support his own argument towards the end of the essay. But it is modern biologists who are developing the field of biosemiosis on the back of his triadic process. And the critical modification they make is the clear recognition that both words and genes function as symbols - ie: Pattee's epistemic cut.

Then pansemiosis (again, a modern development) would be based on Peirce's logic, but be able to fill in the blanks properly.

So semiosis as a triadic process was a proto-theory in Peirce's hands. He polished up the essential logic. But a modern systems thinker can also see that Peirce failed to deal explicitly with the issue of the epistemic cut, and also the centrality of scale to hierarchy.

Coming back to your panpsychism = pansemiosis, if you read Man's Glassy Essence carefully, what happens is that he stretches semiosis as far as he can, then starts talking in a handwavy panpsychic way that is unsupported by the notion of semiosis.

He takes a correct subjective observation (attention loosens habits) and tries to associate it with some micro-physical event. But that is because he lacked a better understanding of brain architecture. If you asked a neuroscientist to explain the relation between habit and attention today, you would get a pretty straightforward account in terms of cortico-striatal interactions.

eg: http://web.mit.edu/bcs/graybiel-lab/pub.html

It would be unfairly anachronistic to use Peirce as a champion of panpsychism when the thrust of his work was instead a focus on systematic causality. That is what scientists are actually using today (biosemiotics does not exist because it supports a panpsychic view of life).

So by all means, try to square Peirce's statements. But you will have to deal with the fact that the panpsychism is not properly derived from the semiotics even in Peirce's own writings. It was a jump he made in handwavy fashion when he ran out of facts that would allow him to imagine the world differently.

Fortunately we now know about genes, neural circuits, and suchlike.

 

[Ferris_bg]

Q_Goest,

The defense of the epiphenomenalist against the knowledge paradox is that "when Sarah knows that she has a toothache or remembers the feeling she had when she first fell in love, there is a causal chain which leads from the neurophysiological cause of her toothache or her feeling to her current state of knowledge or memory... The causal relation she says holds between mental states and their neurophysiological correlates ensures that whenever her opponents appeal to a mental cause to account for some apparently undeniable fact, she can appeal to a physical cause which is correlated with the alleged mental cause with nomological necessity and does exactly the same causal job."

http://www.iep.utm.edu/epipheno/#SH5f

I don't know, for me epiphenomenalism is an option, not very possible, but an option.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Ferris, Thanks for that... I'm not understanding what the defense is though. They say, "Since the epiphenomenalist admits that we have experiences and since we cannot have experiences without knowing that we have them, the epiphenomenalist can admit that we can have knowledge of our experiences." Question is, how can the epiphenomenalist say that?

Remember:
- For a mental state to be epiphenomenal, M can't cause P, not now or ever.
- If we make statements about mental events, remembered or otherwise, the mental event must have inflicted some kind of causal influence on the physical state and is therefore no longer epiphenomenal; M has to cause a change in P for it to be remembered.

Take the case of the computer example; epiphenomenalism is the concept that what caused the transistor to change state isn't the mental event, it is the charge on the transistor's base. Not a single transistor will ever change state because a mental event took place, despite there being claims and behaviors by the computer. Therefore any claim has a purely physical reason for being made, that is; the transistors were arranged in such a way and energized in a given pattern that caused the computer to make that claim. Appeals to mental events are not only not required, they are superfluous to the transistor's function and by extension, to the computer's function. We can't know the computer had a phenomenal experience because we can understand everything about what it does by understanding the circuitry and the physical states and inputs.

I think they're trying to claim that the mental state can cause a memory somehow and that's incorrect. That concept disagrees with the definition of epiphenomenalism taken by Rosenberg and Gomes. Check the paper by Gomes for further explanation.

 

[Pythagorean]

Appeals to mental events are not only not required, they are superfluous to the transistor's function and by extension, to the computer's function.

Of course, computers are a terrible analogy to a conscious biological system. One is predictable, and scale-segregated (we separate noise from signal to fit the computer's operations to abstract human definitions with logic gates) and it waits for instructions to do anything

The other is spontaneous and irregular. It's behavior follows exponentially diverging trajectories (i.e. it's chaotic) when compared to a minimally perturbed clone. It wasn't designed, but emerged from nature, in the wake of several different uncorrelated perturbations. It requires several parallel redundancies to be built throughout the system for it to persist in the first place.

If the system is to correlate particularly relevant information (through synchronicity, for instance as per the Varela paper) than we can reason why cognition may have a functional component (though we can agree that cognition is not important to immediate survival, it's function is geared towards long-term survival).

We can't know the computer had a phenomenal experience because we can understand everything about what it does by understanding the circuitry and the physical states and inputs.

For a computer, I agree. But with biological systems, particularly humans, we have the special treat of having the experience of consciousness and we have developed language to communicate about it. From birth, we can read each others facial expressions and body language (and even that of other mammals). This is only possible because there is a consistent relationship between the kind of stress on an organism and the muscle groups associated with them.

The muscle groups are correlated by interneurons that take central pattern generators (CPGs) and inputs (that either interact with the CPG or the motor pool itself, or booth). The CPG is something that developed over an evolutionary history, while the inputs are representative of the current moment for the organism. The interneurons allow input patterns to be associated with meaningful outputs.

Now, with all the knowledge of functional anatomy and mere "circuitry" (circuitry is, of course, and oversimplification) I can affect mental states in predictable ways by making physical alterations. The more I know about the receptor diversity of a particular physical circuit (and given the appropriate drugs) the more precisely I can target only the receptor variations that participate in a particular functional effect I want you to experience.

Furthermore, I can target particular experiences you don't want to feel and remove them from your experiences without removing the kinds of experiences you'd like to remain?

Which is why this is incorrect:

Knowing how and why every observable molecule in the brain does what it does says nothing about our subjective experience and never will because explaining interactions are the wrong kind of explanations to look for when explaining subjective phenomena.

 

[bohm2]

How do you know I'm conscious? How do I know you're conscious? We don't. We infer it. The ONLY thing we know is our own consciousness. Literally. All else is inference. So we can infer that electrons have an extremely rudimentary consciousness, as Dyson and Bohm (and many other panpsychists) did, but we can never know this is so. It's all about what conceptual framework best explains the evidence.

What property of electrons do you believe suggests rudimentary consciousness? The non-locality or non-separability implied by QM? With objects like ourselves we have a conception via introspection to make inferences with other objects similar to us but that is not the case when trying to compare proto-mental electrons versus non-mental electrons.

I believe Chalmers makes this point when he argues:

Of course it would be very desirable to form a positive conception of protophenomenal properties. Perhaps we can do this indirectly, by some sort of theoretical inference from the character of phenomenal properties to their underlying constituents.

I think that’s a really good proposal but what are some of those protophenomenal conceptions that we can infer from the character of phenomenal properties?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

bohm2, as with all inferences about other consciousnesses we make such inferences based on observed behavior, including movement, speech, etc. In the case of non-human consciousnesses, obviously the repertoire of behaviors doesn't include speech. Dyson's point, which I agree with, is that it makes more sense to ascribe a very rudimentary consciousness to electrons and other simple structures, on up the chain to us, because even these subatomic particles display behavior that suggests consciousness. As Dyson states, instead of ascribing such behavior to chance (the traditional QM interpretation, which is based on probabilistic predictions because predictions in any given instance are not possible due to the chance/choice nature of each instance), it makes more sense to ascribe such behavior to choice. So choice not chance. Chance is the modern idol in scientific explanations. Where we don't understand something it's presumed to be chance. However, in the panpsychist view of the world, it's choice not chance that pervades reality.

Again, Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West is a great introduction to these ideas.

 

[disregardthat]

What does it mean to "know you have a toothache"? Could you have a toothache and not know it? Could you be in pain and not be aware of it?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

To know you have a headache is to have that realm of sense-data accessible to the dominant consciousness that you call "you." Pain could certainly exist in the body and not be accessible to the dominant consciousness - during local anesthesia for example. Under a holonic view of consciousness, each natural individual has its own sensations and is part of a hierarchy. In humans, what we call our conscious self is at the top of this hierarchy.

 

[disregardthat]

Pain could certainly exist in the body and not be accessible to the dominant consciousness - during local anesthesia for example.

But is that what we mean by pain? I would say certainly not. You are taking an expression, pain, and using it where it does not belong. No one knowledgeable of the correct use of the word pain would claim to be in pain if they could not feel it. "I am in pain, but I can't feel it" has no place in our vocabulary of sentences. Likewise; "I am in pain, but I'm not sure of it", or "I doubt I am in pain" are both meaningless. We don't refer to any physical condition of the body (which can be doubted, or known).

 

[bohm2]

I think it's really interesting how this mind-body problem seems to kind of play itself out in the debate regarding the meaning of the "quantum wave"/empty waves of Bohm's model between Many-worlds vs Bohmians. These 3 articles below, in particular, are very interesting. It's as if the Bohmians are trying to defend dualism at the micro-level:

Lewis writes:

An obvious strategy for defeating the above argument in the Bohmian case is to claim that wavefunction-stuff is just not the kind of stuff from which objects like cats could be made, even in principle. One might even claim that the wavefunction is not any kind of “stuff” at all, but is merely a mathematical device for calculating the motions of the Bohmian particles. If either of these claims could be substantiated, then one would have a principled reason to deny that empty branches could contain cats, either dead or alive, or any other measurement outcomes for that matter. Against this strategy, however, Deutsch writes of the empty branches (or “unoccupied grooves”) that “it is no good saying that they are merely a theoretical construct and do not exist physically, for they continually jostle both each other and the ‘occupied’ groove, affecting its trajectory” . Since empty branches interact with each other and with the occupied branch, and empty branches are nothing but aspects of the wavefunction, the wavefunction must be real a physical entity and not just a mathematical construct.

The wavefunction states of the two branches are the same, but according to Bohm’s theory, the physical state of a system consists of its wavefunction state and its particle state. An occupied branch and an empty branch plainly do not have the same particle state, and hence Deutsch fails to establish that empty branches contain measurement outcomes.

Empty Waves in Bohmian Quantum Mechanics
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2899/

Valentini discussing Bohmian "empty waves":

Furthermore, in realistic models of the classical limit, one does not obtain localised pieces of an ontological pilot wave following alternative macroscopic trajectories: from a de Broglie-Bohm viewpoint, alternative trajectories are merely mathematical and not ontological.

De Broglie-Bohm Pilot-Wave Theory: Many Worlds in Denial?
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/valentini_2008_denial.pdf

Brown responds:

The analogy in pilot-wave theory to dualism, and in particular to mental substance, in this story is obviously the matter assumption. Why impose it? Why is it necessary within quantum mechanics to understand the nature of physical systems, apparatuses, people, etc., in terms of configurations of hypothetical point corpuscles? If it can be shown that the wave-function or pilot-wave is structured enough to do the job, why go further?

Comment on Valentini, “De Broglie-Bohm Pilot-Wave Theory: Many Worlds in Denial?”
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/brown_on_valentini.pdf

I think there's something very important here in these debates. While Bohm's non-local pilot wave is not just a mathematical device as in Copenhagen it isn't as "real" in the same sense, as Many-worlds. In a sense, Bohmians are almost forced to try to preserve this mental-physical distinction at the micro-level while the Many-world perspective are going all out to the ultimate and treat each branch as being another "world".

 

[apeiron]

But is that what we mean by pain? I would say certainly not. You are taking an expression, pain, and using it where it does not belong. No one knowledgeable of the correct use of the word pain would claim to be in pain if they could not feel it. "I am in pain, but I can't feel it" has no place in our vocabulary of sentences. Likewise; "I am in pain, but I'm not sure of it", or "I doubt I am in pain" are both meaningless. We don't refer to any physical condition of the body (which can be doubted, or known).

Neuroscience shows that pain experience is hierarchical, as I noted in a previous post. And the complexity of pain experience - its reportability, its anticipation, its suppression - are understood in reasonably fine detail now.

So for instance, the anterior cingulate itself can be divided into a mid part that maps the current intensity of a pain, a rear part that is crucial to actively anticipating a pain (ohh, sticking my finger in the fire is going to hurt), and a forward part that deals with the modulation of pain (this is how much it should be hurting me).

It is this kind of neuroscientific evidence that makes a nonsense of panpychism.

http://www.wesleyan.edu/psyc/mindmatters/volume02/article02.pdf

The brain is calculating what to feel. If you are anticipating that a planned action will make a pain go away (ie: take you away from a cause of damage), then already you are becoming less concerned about it.

Now this can be explained in terms of the brain's functional architecture (particularly the anticipation-based brain models I've cited). But by panpsychism - not so much.

How does panpsychism account for the suppression of experience?

The top-down inhibition or modulation of neural activity is not a problem for neuroscience. You can count the fibres and synapses if you want.

But if panpsychism says everything lights up with awareness, then how does it explain the active switching off? Especially if the theory is that "panpsychic complexity" is what produces human-scale reportable awareness and neuroscience is telling us that actual hierarchical complexity is what is modulating the reportable levels of pain with phenomenon like placebo. Complexity is needed to dial pain down.

 

[apeiron]

I think it's really interesting how this mind-body problem seems to kind of play itself out in the debate regarding the meaning of the "quantum wave"/empty waves of Bohm's model between Many-worlds vs Bohmians. These 3 articles below, in particular, are very interesting. It's as if the Bohmians are trying to defend dualism at the micro-level:

I don't see that in Bohmian mechanics. Instead, it is trying to preserve the atomism and locality that is essential to a materialist paradigm. It wants to make concretely physical the machinery of local~global interactions. And it attempts to do this by imagining a new kind of space - a multidimensional configuration space - in which a guidewave can propagate in.

So this is "all physics". It is not about employing experience, choice, feelings or any other kinds of "mental properties" to account for what is happening.

 

[Ferris_bg]

Q_Goest, disregardthat,

The idea behind the epiphenomenalist defense is that knowing is certain neural firing. For your BRAIN the mental states and their definitions are just different firing patterns, for YOU they are what we feel. P and M are distinct, but correlated.

Imagine how would you explain the word "consciousness" to a 4 year child for example. What will you tell him? After the word "consciousness" gets matched with everything else in his brain, with every other information it has available, the child will know what it means to have consciousness. It will know what it is to not have, to be in deep sleep for example. The same process goes with "pain" or every other word. A specific word can make you laugh today and cry tomorrow, depending on its current representation in the brain.

For the agent "I am in pain" is certain neural firing in the brain. And because the mental supervenes on this firing, the agent has pain while in this physical state. And because knowing represents the introspective process of this firing, the agent can know what it is to be in a certain state. M stays hidden to P, but the correlation between the two (P -> M) makes it possible for the agent to know and be able to make a difference between its own states.

Just to say the above are my thoughts, many of the philosophers reject epiphenomenalism and every theory leading to it.

 

[apeiron]

The idea behind the epiphenomenalist defense is that knowing is certain neural firing. For your BRAIN the mental states and their definitions are just different firing patterns, for YOU they are what we feel. P and M are distinct, but correlated.

What these conversations keep coming back to is the intuitive view that there is an "inside" aspect to whatever is physically going on.

That is what needs to be philosophically examined with more rigour.

If you are a reductionist, the only place that can still be "inside" is a place that is still smaller than your current scale of reduction. So that is why we have people believing in panpsychism. Experience must still be in there, somewhere, inside the electron or QM event.

Epiphenomenalism takes the different tack of putting the inside right outside - of the physical. So the interior aspect of being becomes something with a dualistic existence. It isn't to be found anywhere "in there" - inside the physical neural machinery - so it must float off as some unplaced separate thing. Naked "insideness" much like the Cheshire Cat's grin.

So fine, reductionism leaves you its unsatisfactory choices. Or you can take the systems route where the "inside" is the interior of the system. Once you recognise global causes as well as local causes, there is a place that is now always "within".

The M is inside the P as an interior complexification of its organisation, not something that has to be either even more microscopic (existing on the inside of particles) or mysteriously supervenient (having a concrete existence that floats off somewhere that is not part of the closed causation that is the M).

Reductionism is just a modelling tool, a simplifying paradigm. When it proves too simple to handle the job, then it is time to find a better tool.

 

[disregardthat]

Ferris, you have simply taken the word pain and given it an entirely new meaning. When I say I am in pain, I don't mean that my neurals are firing in such a way that I am experiencing pain. I am simply in pain, and that is what I report. I can know and doubt any statement about neural firing in my brain, but I cannot know or doubt whether I am actually in pain, it doesn't make any sense.

Only other people can know or doubt it, but then it will be a question of what I report, and whether or not I am lying, not a question of neural firing.

Sure, you can find that when we observe a certain effect in a brain, the subject will report it is experiencing pain. But we haven't found pain, or discovered what it really is by this sort of experiment.

 

[apeiron]

but I cannot know or doubt whether I am actually in pain, it doesn't make any sense.

So there is no borderline case where you are not sure whether it is pain or discomfort you are experiencing? Or emotional or physical pain? Or that sudden realisation you were in pain, but hadn't being paying it attention until just now?

So you can't treat pain as a single unambiguous thing - a qualia. It is as varied (as its neural and cognitive basis).

 

[bohm2]

So fine, reductionism leaves you its unsatisfactory choices. Or you can take the systems route where the "inside" is the interior of the system. Once you recognise global causes as well as local causes, there is a place that is now always "within".
...Reductionism is just a modelling tool, a simplifying paradigm. When it proves too simple to handle the job, then it is time to find a better tool.

apeiron,

Let me summarize 2 points that need to be stressed. Nobody is denying that some macro-micro, synergisti/systems stuff is not relevant. For, this is already implied even at the micro-level in all interpretations of QM including Bohm's. What is being questioned is whether this on its own is enough to infer the mental/experiential. Many don't believe so. Chalmers writes:

A low-level microphysical description can entail all sorts of surprising and interesting macroscopic properties, as with the emergence of chemistry from physics, of biology from chemistry, or more generally of complex emergent behaviors in complex systems theory. But in all these cases, the complex properties that are entailed are nevertheless structural and dynamic: they describe complex spatiotemporal structures and complex dynamic patterns of behavior over those structures. So these cases support the general principle that from structure and dynamics, one can infer only structure and dynamics.

http://consc.net/papers/nature.pdf

So the systems view isn't being neglected. It's just not going to lead us to the promised land of bridging the gap. That's the argument. You disagree. Fine.

I don't see that in Bohmian mechanics. Instead, it is trying to preserve the atomism and locality that is essential to a materialist paradigm. It wants to make concretely physical the machinery of local~global interactions. And it attempts to do this by imagining a new kind of space - a multidimensional configuration space - in which a guidewave can propagate in.

I have no idea what you mean by locality but Bohmian mechanics is manifestly nonlocal. Furthermore, "observables" other than position are contextual; that is, measurements depend crucially on experimental set-up. In Bohm’s model, all the properties of a “physical” system (i.e. spin, energy, etc.) are encoded into the non-local features of the quantum potential as the only property really and intrinsically possessed by a particle is its position.

See:

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/passon_2006.pdf
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/#hv

Moreover, the properties of the guiding wave in Bohm's model are a bit unusual. I'll just list some of the major ones:

1. As stated above, in Bohm’s model, all the properties of a “physical” system (i.e. spin, energy, etc.) are encoded into the non-local features of the quantum potential as the only property really and intrinsically possessed by a particle is its position.

2. In Bohmian mechanics the wave function acts upon the positions of the particles but, evolving as it does autonomously via Schrödinger's equation, it is not acted upon by the particles...And as you say, the guiding wave, in the general case, propagates not in ordinary three-space but in a multidimensional-configuration space (the wavefunction lives in 3n-dimensional space, where n is the number of particles). What is the meaning of this?

3. In the case of the quantum wave, the amplitude also appears in the denominator. Therefore, increasing the magnitude of the amplitude does not necessarily increase the quantum potential energy. A small amplitude can produce a large quantum effect. The key to the quantum potential energy lies in the second spatial derivative, indicating that the shape or form of the wave is more important than its magnitude. For this reason, a small change in the form of the wave function can produce large effects in the development of the system. The quantum potential produces a law of force that does not necessarily fall off with distance. Therefore, the quantum potential can produce large effects between systems that are separated by large distances. This feature removes one of the difficulties in understanding the non-locality that arises between particles in entangled states, such as those in the EPR-paradox.

4. Unlike ordinary force fields such as gravity, which affects all particles within its range, the pilot wave must act only one particle: each particle has a private pilot wave all its own that “senses” the location of every other particle of the universe. Although it extends everywhere and is itself affected by every particle in the universe, the pilot wave affects no other particle but its own.

What I find interesting, is if accurate, are the meaning and consequences of:

(i) The non-locality
(ii) The multidimensional-configuration space where a single 3n-dimensional Bohmian 'world particle', evolves, a particle that encodes all the information about the apparent n particles.

 

[apeiron]

So the systems view isn't being neglected. It's just not going to lead us to the promised land of bridging the gap. That's the argument. You disagree. Fine.

But that does neglect what the system view actually claims. Which is that the micro-scale does not "exist" in the way that is being implied in such arguments.

Reductionism assumes that reality is constructed from a micro-scale that is atomistic - a fixed elemental stuff. But the systems approach argues the micro-scale is shaped up by top-down causality. The micro-scale does not exist, it gets actively made. It is a process view of reality.

This being so, you can't appeal to the micro-scale as the locus of all causality. The micro-scale cannot entail the macro-scale (except to the extent that the macro-scale is in turn, mutually, synergistically, entailing the micro-scale).

I have no idea what you mean by locality but Bohmian mechanics is manifestly nonlocal.

It still wants to retain the propagation of something. It still wants something that is localised to guide every step of the way. It still wants a particle that marks an actual location at all times.

So it is nonlocal in a good old fashioned local way. It agrees some stuff has to be contextual - but then does that by "spreading it about a bunch of locations" in a concrete fashion.

I don't have a problem with that at the modelling level if it offered something new and observable. But as an ontological interpretation, it seems a backward step.

4. Unlike ordinary force fields such as gravity, which affects all particles within its range, the pilot wave must act only one particle: each particle has a private pilot wave all its own that “senses” the location of every other particle of the universe. Although it extends everywhere and is itself affected by every particle in the universe, the pilot wave affects no other particle but its own.

Again, you are highlighting the attempt to preserve assumptions about atomism and locality. Which only pushes the mysteries another step deeper.

Now we have particles with private waves, and no explanation of how all the implied information processing occurs.

It seems much more commonsense to take a coarse-grain decoherence type approach where locales have freedoms and contexts exert constraints, then a synergistic balance emerges that is quasi-classical.

So like a dipole of a bar magnet (at the critical temperature). Each dipole has some local indeterminate potential in its thermal jiggling. The bar magnet also has a developing global emergent orientation, a field that constrains all its dipoles to an alignment. Each dipole "senses" this global field - but not in some mystical way in that it has a personal interaction with a second kind of object, a field, or in an information-heavy fashion where it is having to be in touch with every other dipole in dimension-collapsing nonlocal style. But instead, there is a coarse-graining correlation, with nearest neighbours being given the greatest weight, and a dynamical balance emerging.

This is a classical analogy, but the point is about the nature of local~global interaction. If you allow causation to be properly divided (into local freedoms and global constraints) then you can get actual emergence of order with little mysticism. If you insist on reducing all causality to one end of the spectrum (such as the micro-physical) then you end up having to make strange claims about how the other aspect of causality gets handled.

So if you fixate on the existence of fundamental point particles, then private pilot waves reaching out to know the entire state of the universe are the kind of clunky objects you need to account for nonlocal (ie: global) factors.

 

[disregardthat]

So there is no borderline case where you are not sure whether it is pain or discomfort you are experiencing? Or emotional or physical pain? Or that sudden realisation you were in pain, but hadn't being paying it attention until just now?

It is simple and unambiguous because it is a grammatical form of expression. Have you ever been unsure whether you are in pain or simply in discomfort, or whether your emotional distress really is pain? What form of uncertainty is this? If you learn that you are in pain, you have in fact learned a grammatical rule, a new application of the word. The doubt here is not of the pain, but of the grammar of the expression.

A sudden realization of pain is nothing like doubting (and then suddenly knowing) that you are in pain, it is something completely else.

I want to show the error of equating expressions such as pain, distress, happiness etc.. with mental states of the mind (physical states). Knowledge is no part of these things, when you report them as "mental states of mind".

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

It is this kind of neuroscientific evidence that makes a nonsense of panpychism.

http://www.wesleyan.edu/psyc/mindmatters/volume02/article02.pdf

The brain is calculating what to feel. If you are anticipating that a planned action will make a pain go away (ie: take you away from a cause of damage), then already you are becoming less concerned about it.

Now this can be explained in terms of the brain's functional architecture (particularly the anticipation-based brain models I've cited). But by panpsychism - not so much.

How does panpsychism account for the suppression of experience?

apeiron, human brains modulate consciousness in a way unique to humans, with specialized architecture for many aspects of consciousness, including pain. But what about pain in insects or other creatures without anterior cingulate cortex? Are you suggesting that only creatures with ACC experience pain? I hope not because that is a very difficult position to defend given everything else we know about biology and neuroscience.

Just because we know certain functions of ACC with respect to pain does not in any way preclude subconsciousnesses within the hierarchy of human consciousness from experiencing pain and other features of consciousness - or other creatures from experiencing pain or other aspects of consciousness.

More to come this weekend with respect to your comments on Peirce.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, I wanted to ask you also, which may warrant its own thread, how you view causality more generally?

I'm planning an essay on this issue and I don't see much basis for the duality you seem to have suggested many times between local and global causality. Rather, I see causality as, like most things, a continuum from near to far, both spatially and temporally.

In science and philosophy, we tend to focus on local causality, by which I mean near in time and space, but we never know what the actual causal influences on any given event are, in a comprehensive sense. We can never rule out causal influences other than the ones we've chosen to focus on - just as has happened in recent decades with non-locality.

 

[apeiron]

It is simple and unambiguous because it is a grammatical form of expression. Have you ever been unsure whether you are in pain or simply in discomfort,

Well, right now for instance. First thing in the morning and I'm full of aches which on a spectrum between discomfort and pain.

Surely you would agree that pain is not a single undifferentiated experience but reasonably rich in its variety and so we might have as many words to describe the shades of feeling as eskimo have for snow (or Brits for rain).

If you learn that you are in pain, you have in fact learned a grammatical rule, a new application of the word. The doubt here is not of the pain, but of the grammar of the expression.

A sudden realization of pain is nothing like doubting (and then suddenly knowing) that you are in pain, it is something completely else.

I want to show the error of equating expressions such as pain, distress, happiness etc.. with mental states of the mind (physical states). Knowledge is no part of these things, when you report them as "mental states of mind".

If you are saying that self-awareness - introspection and reportability - is language-scaffolded, then I would agree. Humans do have a way of being objective about their subjectivity through the distancing power of speech.

So what is your point here then?

If the question becomes what is the material basis of human scaffolded self-awareness, then I would say brains still have to run the habits and ideas, but those habits and ideas are socioculturally evolved and encoded in language. So to put it crudely, human mentality is made more hierarchically complex in having memes on top of the genes.

That is the simple psychological view. Then philosophically-speaking, you seem to be raising the symbol-grounding problem. And that of course is central to semiotics and is what I have argued is best answered by Pattee's epistemic cut approach.

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, human brains modulate consciousness in a way unique to humans, with specialized architecture for many aspects of consciousness, including pain. But what about pain in insects or other creatures without anterior cingulate cortex? Are you suggesting that only creatures with ACC experience pain? I hope not because that is a very difficult position to defend given everything else we know about biology and neuroscience.

The ACC is standard mammalian issue so not unique to humans.

The point I actually made is that the phenomenological complexity (forebodings, anguish, broken heart) can be tightly correlated to a known brain architecture. So if neural design explains the variety, why does it not in the end explain the experience?

I have already agreed earlier in this thread that we cannot get beyond a certain point with this strategy. We need counterfactuals to have explanations (of why this, and not that). But that is a general epistemological issue for any theory. In physics, we can explain everything as a variety of energy, for instance, but then are still left with just having to accept energy as a brute fact.

Just because we know certain functions of ACC with respect to pain does not in any way preclude subconsciousnesses within the hierarchy of human consciousness from experiencing pain and other features of consciousness - or other creatures from experiencing pain or other aspects of consciousness.

Do you not think there is a problem in talking about non-conscious experience here? It is taken by most as definitional of conciousness that it is reportable, surely?

Now I don't defend that definition as it is obvious that "consciousness" is a too-simple label slapped on a vast amount of complexity. So I would prefer to talk in terms of processes with known architectures, such as attention and habit.

So I would say that for pain to be reportable, an animal would have to be able to attend to this fact. It would have to have a brain that supports attentional processing. Clearly mammalian brains do. Reptiles, not so much. Arthropods, well not really at all (though jumping spiders are interesting to discuss).