The stories in my previous two posts are fantasies, of course. But in my opinion, they are particularly coherent fantasies, and they are the curious kind of fantasy that might be true, in the sense that we have no evidence that the possible world they describe is not in fact our world.
We currently have no evidence of the details of the real psychophysical interaction mechanism. But maybe the real mechanism is similar to my two stories in that it is not consciousness itself that has a direct influence on matter; rather, there is a medium of communication of meaningful messages between the physical domain and the conscious domain.
This theory could be called “client-server dualism”. According to client-server dualism, the conscious mind is like a server that exchanges meaningful messages with a client program running in the brain.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Psychons and Intentyons, Part 3: The Dictionary Theory of Meaning
There is a naive theory of meaning which holds that words have meanings, and if you want to know the meaning of a word, you can look it up in the dictionary.
This theory comes with a ready objection. Definitions themselves are made of words. If you take a sentence and substitute each word with its dictionary definition, you will just get a longer sentence with many more words. If you take each word in your second sentence and substitute it with its dictionary definition, you will get a very long sentence, and you will be no closer to “meaning” than when you started; perhaps, much further away, since you have many more words to interpret.
There is a simple response to this objection, which is almost as naive as the original theory. Maybe there is a base case to stop the recursion. Maybe some words are not really defined by their dictionary definitions. Maybe some words (such as “good”, “evil”, “pleasure”, “pain” and “consciousness”) are primitive, or irreducible, as David Chalmers would say. These special words have meanings that are pure meanings, disembodied concepts, almost like elementary particles: intentyons.
There is a straightforward recursive function from a sentence to a proposition: for each word, if it has a dictionary definition, replace it with the dictionary definition. If it has a characteristic intentyon, replace it with the intentyon. Eventually, you reduce the sentence to a string of intentyons. The reverse function, natural language generation, is more difficult. It’s easy to replace each intentyon with a word, but then you get a very long, very unnatural sentence. The hard work of natural language generation is compressing the long sentence into a shorter, natural sentence that would reduce to the same intentyonic string. (Or at least, a sufficiently similar intentyonic string.)
There are a lot of intentyons, but it’s possible that each one has its own physical signature, that is, its own unique structural pattern of interaction with the GOEPs. The computational and sensory equipment of the brain has no access to, or appreciation of, the intentional properties of the intentyons, but when the brain learns a natural language, it can build a kind of map between the intentyons and the words.
When the soul receives (or generates) a stream of intentyons, it experiences understanding. When the client program running in the brain sends a request to the soul that includes the information about the auditory signature of a sentence along with the string of intentyons carrying the meaning of the sentence, the soul understands the sentence.
So maybe Chalmers’ soul doesn’t know English. Maybe the thought that originates in Chalmers’ soul is not the English sentence “Consciousness is the biggest mystery”, but the meaning of that sentence as a stream of intentyons. Perhaps the stream of intentyons is picked up by the intentyon receptor in Chalmers’ brain, and it is the brain that generates the English sentence. Once his brain generates the sentence, Chalmers can “hear himself think”.
This theory comes with a ready objection. Definitions themselves are made of words. If you take a sentence and substitute each word with its dictionary definition, you will just get a longer sentence with many more words. If you take each word in your second sentence and substitute it with its dictionary definition, you will get a very long sentence, and you will be no closer to “meaning” than when you started; perhaps, much further away, since you have many more words to interpret.
There is a simple response to this objection, which is almost as naive as the original theory. Maybe there is a base case to stop the recursion. Maybe some words are not really defined by their dictionary definitions. Maybe some words (such as “good”, “evil”, “pleasure”, “pain” and “consciousness”) are primitive, or irreducible, as David Chalmers would say. These special words have meanings that are pure meanings, disembodied concepts, almost like elementary particles: intentyons.
There is a straightforward recursive function from a sentence to a proposition: for each word, if it has a dictionary definition, replace it with the dictionary definition. If it has a characteristic intentyon, replace it with the intentyon. Eventually, you reduce the sentence to a string of intentyons. The reverse function, natural language generation, is more difficult. It’s easy to replace each intentyon with a word, but then you get a very long, very unnatural sentence. The hard work of natural language generation is compressing the long sentence into a shorter, natural sentence that would reduce to the same intentyonic string. (Or at least, a sufficiently similar intentyonic string.)
There are a lot of intentyons, but it’s possible that each one has its own physical signature, that is, its own unique structural pattern of interaction with the GOEPs. The computational and sensory equipment of the brain has no access to, or appreciation of, the intentional properties of the intentyons, but when the brain learns a natural language, it can build a kind of map between the intentyons and the words.
When the soul receives (or generates) a stream of intentyons, it experiences understanding. When the client program running in the brain sends a request to the soul that includes the information about the auditory signature of a sentence along with the string of intentyons carrying the meaning of the sentence, the soul understands the sentence.
So maybe Chalmers’ soul doesn’t know English. Maybe the thought that originates in Chalmers’ soul is not the English sentence “Consciousness is the biggest mystery”, but the meaning of that sentence as a stream of intentyons. Perhaps the stream of intentyons is picked up by the intentyon receptor in Chalmers’ brain, and it is the brain that generates the English sentence. Once his brain generates the sentence, Chalmers can “hear himself think”.
Psychons and Intentyons, Part 2: Zeros and Ones
Suppose that David Chalmers’ soul experiences the thought “Consciousness is the biggest mystery.” If interactionism is correct, the thought “Consciousness is the biggest mystery” may not, at least initially, be represented by a computational judgment in Chalmers’ brain. The sentence might originate in Chalmers’ soul.
Chalmers’ soul is not satisfied with thinking this thought; it wants to get the thought in writing, and eventually publish it as the first sentence of a book called “The Conscious Mind”. But to do that, it needs Chalmers’ fingers to type the sentence on the computer. And Chalmers’ fingers are controlled by Chalmers’ brain. So in order to put its thoughts in writing, Chalmers’ soul must find a way to communicate this thought to Chalmers’ brain.
How could this be accomplished? Could psychons somehow be pressed into service to deliver this message from the soul to the brain? Text that is stored in a computer, or sent over a computer network, is usually encoded in ASCII or Unicode. ASCII and Unicode are abstract protocols. They are conventions for interpreting sequences of bits -- zeros and ones -- as sequences of text characters (that is, letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.) ASCII doesn’t care what the bits are made of. They can be made of flip-flops, capacitors, photons, checkers pieces, or psychons.
Of course, we don’t currently have devices that can encode text in psychons, because we don’t have hardware that can generate psychons. But if the psychophysical interaction mechanism could generate psychons, it could generate a series of psychons that could encode text in the ASCII protocol. Chalmers’ brain could then detect those psychons, decode the message, and instruct Chalmers’ fingers to type it on the computer.
Is this mechanism -- oversimplified and fanciful as it is -- vulnerable to the psychons objection? The “story about the causal relations between psychons and physical processes” indeed does not “invoke the fact that psychons have phenomenal properties”. In fact, the psychons no longer have phenomenal properties; they have intentional properties. (That is, they have semantics, or meaning.) At this point, “psychon” is a misnomer; a better term would be “intentyon”.
Could we somehow subtract the intentional properties of the intentyons from this story, “yielding a situation where the causal dynamics are isomorphic”? Could we subtract the phenomenal facts about Chalmers experiences and obtain a story that is somehow isomorphic or equivalent?
If we subtract the intentional properties from the intentyons, we get a random stream of particles. We would be two steps away from explanation: we would be oblivious to the pattern that needs to be explained. If we were to subtract the conscious thought that the intentyons were generated to encode, we would be subtracting the explanation for the pattern. So both the intentional properties of the intentyon stream and the phenomenal facts about Chalmers’ experiences are “explanatorily relevant”.
The most outlandish element in my story is the suggestion that the message is in ASCII. So the message is probably not in ASCII or Unicode, but any character encoding will do; A could be 0, B could be 1, and so on.
I am not claiming that this story is true in all its details. Rather, this story is an example of a class of possible psychophysical mechanisms that are not vulnerable to the psychons argument. In the following post, I intend to give another such example.
Chalmers’ soul is not satisfied with thinking this thought; it wants to get the thought in writing, and eventually publish it as the first sentence of a book called “The Conscious Mind”. But to do that, it needs Chalmers’ fingers to type the sentence on the computer. And Chalmers’ fingers are controlled by Chalmers’ brain. So in order to put its thoughts in writing, Chalmers’ soul must find a way to communicate this thought to Chalmers’ brain.
How could this be accomplished? Could psychons somehow be pressed into service to deliver this message from the soul to the brain? Text that is stored in a computer, or sent over a computer network, is usually encoded in ASCII or Unicode. ASCII and Unicode are abstract protocols. They are conventions for interpreting sequences of bits -- zeros and ones -- as sequences of text characters (that is, letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.) ASCII doesn’t care what the bits are made of. They can be made of flip-flops, capacitors, photons, checkers pieces, or psychons.
Of course, we don’t currently have devices that can encode text in psychons, because we don’t have hardware that can generate psychons. But if the psychophysical interaction mechanism could generate psychons, it could generate a series of psychons that could encode text in the ASCII protocol. Chalmers’ brain could then detect those psychons, decode the message, and instruct Chalmers’ fingers to type it on the computer.
Is this mechanism -- oversimplified and fanciful as it is -- vulnerable to the psychons objection? The “story about the causal relations between psychons and physical processes” indeed does not “invoke the fact that psychons have phenomenal properties”. In fact, the psychons no longer have phenomenal properties; they have intentional properties. (That is, they have semantics, or meaning.) At this point, “psychon” is a misnomer; a better term would be “intentyon”.
Could we somehow subtract the intentional properties of the intentyons from this story, “yielding a situation where the causal dynamics are isomorphic”? Could we subtract the phenomenal facts about Chalmers experiences and obtain a story that is somehow isomorphic or equivalent?
If we subtract the intentional properties from the intentyons, we get a random stream of particles. We would be two steps away from explanation: we would be oblivious to the pattern that needs to be explained. If we were to subtract the conscious thought that the intentyons were generated to encode, we would be subtracting the explanation for the pattern. So both the intentional properties of the intentyon stream and the phenomenal facts about Chalmers’ experiences are “explanatorily relevant”.
The most outlandish element in my story is the suggestion that the message is in ASCII. So the message is probably not in ASCII or Unicode, but any character encoding will do; A could be 0, B could be 1, and so on.
I am not claiming that this story is true in all its details. Rather, this story is an example of a class of possible psychophysical mechanisms that are not vulnerable to the psychons argument. In the following post, I intend to give another such example.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Psychons and Intentyons, Part 1: Chalmers' Challenge
In "The Conscious Mind", David Chalmers presents a fascinating argument against interactionism. In my next few posts, I want to respond to Chalmers' argument. Meanwhile, here is the argument for your perusal:
In any case, all forms of interactionist dualism have a conceptual problem that suggests that they are less successful at avoiding epiphenomenalism than might seem; or at least they are no better than the view I have advocated...Imagine (with Eccles) that psychons in the nonphysical mind push around physical processes in the brain, and that psychons are the seat of experience. We can tell a story about the causal relations between psychons and physical processes, and a story about the causal dynamics among psychons, without ever invoking the fact that psychons have phenomenal properties. Just as with physical properties, we can imagine subtracting the phenomenal properties of psychons, yielding a situation in which the causal dynamics are isomorphic.
(Page 156)
In any case, all forms of interactionist dualism have a conceptual problem that suggests that they are less successful at avoiding epiphenomenalism than might seem; or at least they are no better than the view I have advocated...Imagine (with Eccles) that psychons in the nonphysical mind push around physical processes in the brain, and that psychons are the seat of experience. We can tell a story about the causal relations between psychons and physical processes, and a story about the causal dynamics among psychons, without ever invoking the fact that psychons have phenomenal properties. Just as with physical properties, we can imagine subtracting the phenomenal properties of psychons, yielding a situation in which the causal dynamics are isomorphic.
(Page 156)
GOEPs and the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Is consciousness real? Some philosophers would answer no. The theory that consciousness does not really exist is usually called eliminativism.
Many philosophers would answer yes. (The theory that consciousness is real should probably be called “realism”, but it seems to me that the term “realism” is not always used in this context.)
If consciousness is real, it must be ontologically accounted for. It must be made of something, or made of itself. Can we account for consciousness with the familiar material categories of physics?
Many philosophers would answer yes. Consciousness can be reduced to configurations of GOEPs (protons, neutrons, and electrons, the “good old elementary particles” of physics). This theory is usually called materialism.
Some philosophers would answer no. No matter how many GOEPs you throw at the problem, you will never get consciousness until you add a new ontological category, the conscious or “phenomenal” category. The theory that consciousness can’t be realized in GOEPs is usually called dualism.
If consciousness and the GOEPs are members of two different ontological categories, what is their causal relationship? GOEPs must have a causal influence on consciousness; after all, if I hold an orange in my hand I see an orange, if I hold an apple in my hand I see an apple. But can my conscious experiences influence the behavior of the GOEPs in my brain?
The theory that the GOEPs have a causal influence on consciousness, but that consciousness has no influence on the GOEPs, is usually called epiphenomenalism. The opposing theory, that both categories causally influence each other, is called interactionism.
According to epiphenomenalism, the physical properties of the brain are in the driver’s seat. The brain has phenomenal properties too, but those properties are in the back seat, and cannot influence our behavior, our speech, or even our thoughts.
Many philosophers would answer yes. (The theory that consciousness is real should probably be called “realism”, but it seems to me that the term “realism” is not always used in this context.)
If consciousness is real, it must be ontologically accounted for. It must be made of something, or made of itself. Can we account for consciousness with the familiar material categories of physics?
Many philosophers would answer yes. Consciousness can be reduced to configurations of GOEPs (protons, neutrons, and electrons, the “good old elementary particles” of physics). This theory is usually called materialism.
Some philosophers would answer no. No matter how many GOEPs you throw at the problem, you will never get consciousness until you add a new ontological category, the conscious or “phenomenal” category. The theory that consciousness can’t be realized in GOEPs is usually called dualism.
If consciousness and the GOEPs are members of two different ontological categories, what is their causal relationship? GOEPs must have a causal influence on consciousness; after all, if I hold an orange in my hand I see an orange, if I hold an apple in my hand I see an apple. But can my conscious experiences influence the behavior of the GOEPs in my brain?
The theory that the GOEPs have a causal influence on consciousness, but that consciousness has no influence on the GOEPs, is usually called epiphenomenalism. The opposing theory, that both categories causally influence each other, is called interactionism.
According to epiphenomenalism, the physical properties of the brain are in the driver’s seat. The brain has phenomenal properties too, but those properties are in the back seat, and cannot influence our behavior, our speech, or even our thoughts.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
The Heterophenomenological Fallacy, Part 4: Conclusion
(Sorry, Dear Reader, I couldn't come up with a good title for this post.)
I hope I have shown that Heterophenomenology is not taking us Philosophers of Mind one step closer to the Hard Scientists, but actually one step further away. What could justify this regression?
I think that the major intuition that makes Heterophenomenology so appealing is that experiences are (supposed to be) Subjective, whereas the objects studied by physics, chemistry and biology are supposed to be Objective. I did my basketball experiments alone. No one else was watching, or at least, no one else was paying attention. But *in principle* others *could have* been watching, and those others would have seen the *very same* basketball that I saw. The entire Scientific Community could have been watching, in principle if not in practice.
I agree that this is a real difference between physics and phenomenology, a true difference between images of pencils and real basketballs. However, I do not agree with the conclusions that Dennett and the Heterophenomenologists draw from this difference.
In practice, the entire Scientific Community could not have seen my basketball, and in fact, the Scientific Community has no interest in *my* basketball. What the scientific community really cares about is the universal basketball. The universal basketball is intersubjective in exactly the same way that seeing double is intersubjective. The Law of Falling Basketballs is intersubjective in exactly the same way as The Law of Double Pencils is intersubjective.
I hope I have shown that Heterophenomenology is not taking us Philosophers of Mind one step closer to the Hard Scientists, but actually one step further away. What could justify this regression?
I think that the major intuition that makes Heterophenomenology so appealing is that experiences are (supposed to be) Subjective, whereas the objects studied by physics, chemistry and biology are supposed to be Objective. I did my basketball experiments alone. No one else was watching, or at least, no one else was paying attention. But *in principle* others *could have* been watching, and those others would have seen the *very same* basketball that I saw. The entire Scientific Community could have been watching, in principle if not in practice.
I agree that this is a real difference between physics and phenomenology, a true difference between images of pencils and real basketballs. However, I do not agree with the conclusions that Dennett and the Heterophenomenologists draw from this difference.
In practice, the entire Scientific Community could not have seen my basketball, and in fact, the Scientific Community has no interest in *my* basketball. What the scientific community really cares about is the universal basketball. The universal basketball is intersubjective in exactly the same way that seeing double is intersubjective. The Law of Falling Basketballs is intersubjective in exactly the same way as The Law of Double Pencils is intersubjective.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
The Heterophenomenological Fallacy, Part 3: Are the College Students Really Necessary?
To make my point clear, I will return to the story of the diverging pencils, and retell the story so that it is close as possible to the basketball story. I will retell the basketball story, keeping all the details constant, swapping in the pencils experiment for the basketball experiment.
One day, I notice that pencils often produce diverging images when I hold them close to my eyes. I decide to study the phenomenon more carefully. I stand in front of a wall and hold a pencil vertically against the wall. I focus on the wall and slowly move the pencil closer to my face, between my eyes. Sure enough, the two pencil images diverge as the pencil moves closer to my face.
I repeat the experiment ten more times, and each time, the images of the pencil diverge. I seem to have stumbled on a Law of Nature, “When a person brings a pencil to his nose, he sees two diverging pencil images.” (This is not a fundamental law, of course, but it is a law.) I publish a paper with my findings.
Other scientists read my paper and get interested. But they don’t just take my findings on faith: they either see if they can reproduce my results, or if they are busy and lazy, they hope that others will try to reproduce the results. Ten scientists repeat my experiment, and they all get the same results: the images diverge every time. Satisfied, The Scientific Community arrives at Consensus: when a person brings a pencil close to his nose, he really, really sees two diverging images.
Interestingly, in the new story of the diverging images, the college students are nowhere to be found. This is as it should be. Real world experiments in hard science do not round up a simple random sample of college students to do the experiment; they simply employ how ever many experimentalists are practically necessary to carry out the experimental procedures and measurements.
As Dennett points out in "Intuition Pumps", when phenomenology was first proposed by Husserl and others, the college students were not part of the deal; the phenomenologists were writing about their own experiences. In my opinion, this is how it should be.
One day, I notice that pencils often produce diverging images when I hold them close to my eyes. I decide to study the phenomenon more carefully. I stand in front of a wall and hold a pencil vertically against the wall. I focus on the wall and slowly move the pencil closer to my face, between my eyes. Sure enough, the two pencil images diverge as the pencil moves closer to my face.
I repeat the experiment ten more times, and each time, the images of the pencil diverge. I seem to have stumbled on a Law of Nature, “When a person brings a pencil to his nose, he sees two diverging pencil images.” (This is not a fundamental law, of course, but it is a law.) I publish a paper with my findings.
Other scientists read my paper and get interested. But they don’t just take my findings on faith: they either see if they can reproduce my results, or if they are busy and lazy, they hope that others will try to reproduce the results. Ten scientists repeat my experiment, and they all get the same results: the images diverge every time. Satisfied, The Scientific Community arrives at Consensus: when a person brings a pencil close to his nose, he really, really sees two diverging images.
Interestingly, in the new story of the diverging images, the college students are nowhere to be found. This is as it should be. Real world experiments in hard science do not round up a simple random sample of college students to do the experiment; they simply employ how ever many experimentalists are practically necessary to carry out the experimental procedures and measurements.
As Dennett points out in "Intuition Pumps", when phenomenology was first proposed by Husserl and others, the college students were not part of the deal; the phenomenologists were writing about their own experiences. In my opinion, this is how it should be.
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