Appearance and Reality

Section 11.8 of "Consciousness Explained" is a Platonic dialogue between Daniel Dennett and his reluctant (and fictional) student, Otto.  Here is an excerpt from the dialogue:

Dennett: These additions are perfectly real, but they are just more “text” -- there is nothing more to phenomenology than that.

Otto: But there seems to be!

Dennett: Exactly!  There seems to be phenomenology.  That’s a fact that the heterophenomenologist enthusiastically concedes.  But it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology.

(Page 366)

It sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it?  “There seems to be phenomenology” doesn’t imply “there is phenomenology.”  Appearance does not imply reality.

The problem is with Dennett’s unorthodox theory of appearances, which he gives a few pages earlier in the same dialogue.

Now you’ve done it.  You’ve fallen into a trap, along with a lot of others.  You seem to think there’s a difference between thinking (judging, deciding, being of the heartfelt opinion that) something seems pink to you and something really seeming pink to you.  But there is no difference.  There is no such phenomenon as really seeming -- over and above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case.

(Page 364)

Dennett seems to be saying that (for some proposition P) “P appears to be true” is equivalent to “I believe that P is true”.  If that is the definition of seeming, then “P seems to be true but it is actually false”, is equivalent to “I believe that P is true but it is actually false”, which makes no sense.

Rotating Images

In Sweet Dreams (sorry I’m not giving page numbers in this essay -- Kindle isn’t showing me page numbers) Daniel Dennett argues that practicing experimental psychologists work under the assumptions of heterophenomenology, and not classical phenomenology (which Dennett sometimes calls “autophenomenology”.)  He cites as an example experiments by Roger Shepard where subjects are shown drawings of two three-dimensional shapes and asked if they are actually the same shape in two different positions.  Apparently, the subjects got the correct answer a lot of the time.  Dennett writes:

Most subjects claimed to solve the problem by rotating one of the two figures in their “mind’s eye” or imagination, to see if it could be imposed on the other.

Shepard argued that the subjects actually did solve the problem by rotating the shapes in their imagination, and he supported this claim by trying to show that the time it took to solve the problem correlated well with the “rotation distance” between the two shapes, that is, how many degrees the shape would need to be rotated from the position of the first shape to the position of the second shape.  “This didn’t settle the issue,” Dennett writes, “since Pylyshyn and others were quick to compose alternative hypotheses.”

Pylyshyn, Dennett argues, is clearly practicing heterophenomenology.  The subjects claim to be rotating mental images -- they report a conscious experience -- and Pylyshyn’s hypotheses suggest that no such experience actually happens.  Even Shepard seems to be practicing heterophenomenology.  If he simply assumes that his subjects actually experience what they think they are experiencing, there would be no reason to find further evidence of those experiences.

Dennett writes:

Subjects always say they are rotating their mental images, so if agnosticism were not the tacit order of the day, Shepard and Kosslyn would never have needed to do their experiments to support subjects’ claims that what they were doing (at least if described metaphorically) really was a process of image manipulation.

This doesn’t quite follow, IMAO.  Dennett doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that there is no “order of the day”, that some experimental psychologists identify with heterophenomenolgy and some identify with classical phenomenology.

Furthermore, I don’t think that Pylyshyn’s alternative hypotheses are actually relevant to heterphenomenology.  Dennett assumes that if the alternative hypotheses were true, it would imply that the subjects’ reports were false, but IMAO this doesn’t follow.  It’s possible that the brain subconsciously solved the problem through some non-rotational algorithm, but people still imagined the images rotating -- the experience may have reflected the nature of the problem being solved, rather than the process of the problem being solved.

In general, these image rotation experiments are not phenomenology experiments at all -- their relevance to phenomenology is indirect.  The experiments analyze the brain’s computational competence, rather than the person’s conscious experiences.

Unbelievable

Is it possible that there are true propositions that we are incapable of believing?

I don’t see why not.  If we are information processing machines, it’s reasonable to assume that we come hard-code with assumptions or modes of thought that we are not capable of stepping away from.  So it seems reasonable that there are propositions that we are not capable of believing.  We could call these the “unbelievable” propositions.  We can hope that most of the unbelievable propositions are actually false, but maybe some of them are true.  We could call these propositions the “unbelievably true” propositions.

If there are unbelievably true propositions, we will never be able to identify what they are.  To identify an unbelievably true proposition, we would have to realize that it is true, which is impossible by definition.

Therefore, if you can prove that some proposition P is unbelievable, that’s almost as good as proving it false.  It might be true, but if it were, it would do us no good, since we couldn’t beleive it anyway.

What does all of this have to do with heterophenomenology?  Maybe nothing.  See, however, an interesting passage from the heterophenomenlogy chapter in Consciousness Explained: “People undoubtedly do believe that they have mental images, pains, perceptual experiences, and all the rest, and these facts -- the facts about what people believe, and report when they express their beliefs -- are phenomena that any scientific theory of the mind must account for.” (Page 98)

What does Dennett mean when he says “people undoubtedly believe that they have mental images...and all the rest”?  Does he mean:

Everyone necessarily believes that he has mental images and all the rest
Most people currently happen to believe that they have mental images and all the rest

Undoubtedly, Dennett doesn’t mean #1.  After all, the question of whether people “have mental images and all the rest” is exactly what heterophenomenologists are supposed to remain “agnostic” about.  So if we are going to be good heterophenomenologists, which Dennett seems to think that all sensible people can be without too much trouble, we are required to not believe that people have mental images and all the rest (and, of course, not to believe the negation, which would be that people do not have mental images and all the rest).

So Dennett must mean #2.  The belief that people have mental images and all the rest must be a hunch, similar to what Dennett calls “the zombic hunch”, that will soon experience (so to speak) “the death of an illusion” (see the title of Sweet Dreams, Chapter 1).  We could call it “the phenomenological hunch”.  As Dennett writes at the end of Chapter 1:

I anticipate a day when philosophers and scientists and laypersons will chuckle over the fossil traces of our earlier bafflement about consciousness: "It still seems as if these mechanistic theories of consciousness leave something out, but of course that's an illusion. They do, in fact, explain everything about consciousness that needs explanation."

Does Dennett also anticipate a day when philosophers, scientists and laypersons will chuckle about our earlier confusion about experiences?  Will they say something like, “It still seems as if we have mental images, pains, perceptual experiences, and all the rest, but of course that’s an illusion”?

Is that all?  Is Dennett’s science of mind about nothing more than explaining the mistaken beliefs of some people?

The Dinosaurs of Deuteronomy

According to the numbers given in the Torah, human beings have walked the Earth for about 5000 years, and the Earth predates us by about one week.  Modern science, on the other hand, has accumulated a wealth of evidence showing that human beings have been around for millions of years, and the Earth predates us by a few billion years.

How can these different positions be reconciled?  One possible solution would be to speculate that the scientific evidence favoring millions and billion of years, for humans and the Earth respectively, was planted by Hashem to test our faith.  However, most people who take the question seriously don’t take the “testing our faith” answer seriously, for a simple reason.  Hashem is infinitely good, therefore it’s impossible that He would deliberately mislead us.

A priori, this makes a certain amount of sense. But before projecting our own categories on Hashem, maybe we should take a minute to see what the Torah has to say.  Particularly relevant is the passage of the False Prophet, from Dvarim 13:1 to 13:5:

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes to pass; and he says to you, “Let us go after other gods, who you do not know, and let us serve them”; do not listen to the words of the prophet, or that dreamer of dreams.  For Hashem your God is testing you, to know whether you love Hashem your God with all your heart and all your soul.

The Torah tells us that sometimes, Hashem allows false prophets to provide convincing evidence of their false religions, in order to test our faith.  If Hashem doesn’t see anything wrong with sending false prophets to test our faith, why would He have any qualms about planting a few dinosaur bones in the ground?

I Believe in Miracles

A miracle is an event that violates the laws of nature.

The conservation of mass-energy is a law of nature.  (For simplicity, we can assume that mass is a form of energy and call it “the conservation of energy”.)  Energy is never created or destroyed.  No lab experiment has ever succeeded in creating or destroying energy.

Energy was created in the Big Bang.

Therefore, the Big Bang was a miracle.

Baby You Can Drive My Car, Part 6: The Argument from Self-Evidence

This is the final installment in a series responding to "The Conscious Mind" by David Chalmers: http://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Search-Fundamental-Philosophy-ebook/dp/B004SL4KI0/

The previous installment can be found here: http://mccomplete.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/baby-you-can-drive-my-car-part-5.html

As I explained in my previous post, I don't think knowledge needs to be justified; it just needs to be true.  David Chalmers does not agree.  He wants us (the epiphenomenal us) to have justified knowledge of our own consciousness.  He writes:

Intuitively, our access to conscious experience is not mediated at all.  Conscious experience lies at the center of our epistemic universe; we have access to it directly…What is it that justifies our beliefs about our experiences?...It is having the experiences that justifies the beliefs...There is something intrinsically epistemic about experience.  To have an experience is automatically to stand in some sort of intimate epistemic relation to the experience -- a relation that we might call “acquaintance”.

(Page 194)

Chalmers is saying that experience is self-evident, and I couldn’t agree more.  But if experience is self-evident, then epiphenomenalism must be false.

If epiphenomenalism were true, experiences would be facts.  But facts can only become evidence if they fall into the hands of an epistemological agent.  And if epiphenomenalism is true, the epistemological agents are all out to lunch.

If epiphenomenalism is true, then the only (relevant) epistemological agent is the nonconscious brain.  The nonconscious brain has no access to phenomenal facts.  Since no epistemological agent has access to the phenomenal facts, the phenomenal facts never become evidence.

Epistemological agents have inputs and outputs.  My experiences are inputs to me as an epistemological agent.  Not a functional organization isomorphic to my experiences, not information about my experiences, but my experiences themselves.  That is how I know that in the real world, the world that I inhabit, epiphenomenalism is false.