In a recently fascinating move, various researchers at
a meeting at Cambridge University, including cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists,
neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists, signed a
declaration voicing their support for the notion that homologous circuits and
activity within non-human animal brains demonstrates consciousness. Any such
exciting claim requires careful reading. Their declaration is summarazied thus:
“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to
preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence
indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological
substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional
behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not
unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.
Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures,
including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
The problem with the declaration is that it is far too
quick to throw around important words, like “affective states”, “emotions” and more
importantly “consciousness” without carefully defining them. This isn’t
pedantry, it is a necessity given the ambiguity of key concepts within the
debate.
This photograph proves cats are much more like humans than first thought.
The idea of looking at neural correlates for
demonstrating consciousness is interesting in itself, and I do think it has
some value. The logic seems founded on the idea of looking at the neural activity
when humans are performing or undergoing x (presumably taking x to
involve some unquestionably “affective” or “emotional” state), then discovering
some parallel activity in animal. But without much hint of their reasoning (and
yes I understand this is just a declaration but this seems to me to be the
keystone), the declaration takes this parallel activity to be obviously a sign
of consciousness. In short, we need a good clear definition of consciousness before
we start talking about it in important contexts. I’m not saying the signees are
wrong in their conclusions, but that they are overly ambitious for a two page declaration, or out of
touch with the necessities of the debate.
As an aside, here are my two favourite comments from
the article about this on io9:
“ if science says this is correct, it is. end
of story.”
And,
“Animals don't
have souls or a conscience, they were put here on the Earth to serve man. This
is the truth from the Lord our God himself as written in his Holy Bible.”
It’s nice to a see a variety of
constructive opinion keeping the debate alive!
"The idea - that the bottom level, thought 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless irrelevant to what happens - sounds almost paradoxical, and yet it is an everyday truism."
Inspired by this line from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop (2007: 42), I want to talk a little bit about levels of explanation - what they are, and why they're so important in cognitive science. As Hofstadter indicates, the idea that there can be differing levels of explanation should be a familiar one. Consider something as simple as crossing a road. How do we explain it?
Apparently Lennon is Jesus
We can say that you wanted to get to the other side, that you looked left and right, then left again, then began to walk across, that your brain sent a signal telling your arms, legs and hips to move in unison with one another, that certain chemicals were released and certain electronic currents traveled down your nerves, or even simply that a whole lot of atoms interacted with one another. Already we have five different levels of explanation, although some of them might seem to blur a little at the boundaries.
In the 'hard sciences' (biology, chemistry, physics), levels of explanation are also common. Each discipline will describe the same phenomenon in a very different way. Biology will talk at the level of the organism, chemistry at the level of molecular interactions, and physics at the level of atoms or smaller1. Ultimately the explanations used by physicists underly all other explanations - this is the sense in which they are "responsible" for what is happening. Yet at the same time, they are often "irrelevant" as well. When we are describing how and why someone crossed a road, the precise atomic processes taking place make no real difference to our description (although of course it's important that certain kinds of atomic processes are taking place). Furthermore, an accurate description at this level of explanation would be hopelessly complex, maybe even impossible to compute. So the abstraction of talking at a higher level of explanation allows us to make sense of the world.
Back to cognitive science. When we study the mind, levels of explanation become particularly important, and getting them wrong can lead to serious misunderstandings. Obviously most of what cognitive science studies is underwritten by neuroscience (or at least, biology more generally), but we can nonetheless get things done without referring to neuroscientific levels of explanation. Many psychologists study human (and animal) behaviour without worrying too much about what is precisely going on at the neuronal level. Many philosophers discuss theories of mental representation and consciousness without ever looking at the empirical work of the psychologists, let alone the neuroscientists. They are able to do this because whilst the lower levels of explanation are ultimately responsible for one's own level, they are often not particularly relevant.
Often, but not always, and so I don't think Hofstadter is totally correct when he says that the lower levels are "irrelevant". Whilst a lot of the time it's going to be unhelpful to try and explain consciousness in terms of quarks and Higgs bosons, it's also important not to lose sight of the essentially physical nature of mental phenomena. Too much abstraction can lead to confusion. I think a lot of philosophical thought experiments fail to appreciate this, and end up leading us to meaningless conclusions that have absolutely no real world application. (My thoughts on Frank Jackson's 'Mary' experiment reflect this worry.) It's why scientists sometimes laugh at philosophers, accusing us of just making things up. At its best, philosophy can provide a level of explanation that is symbiotic with those below it, bringing clarity and organisation to the complexities of scientific research. At its worst philosophy deals in empty abstractions and ungrounded concepts, neither of which are relevant or responsible. So whilst the philosophy of cognitive science can often afford to ignore aspects of the more fundamental levels of explanation, its also essential that it doesn't lose sight of the grounding in physical reality that those levels can provide.
1. Although it's worth acknowledging the increasing cross-over between these levels, with the likes of biochemistry providing interdisciplinary "bridges".
Hofstadter, D. 2007. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books.
I work on a shop floor. In between the
inevitable chores any quality retail outfit would demand, is the less
inevitable philosophical discourse that frequently arises between
staff. Yesterday the topic of the day was personal identity. What I
particularly enjoyed about the discussion was the surprising, for me
anyway, acceptability of what I thought was a non-conventional view
of the self. Not that everyone was in precise agreement, but what was
in consensus was a rejection of the “traditional view” of there
existing a distinct and fundamental self which essentially
constitutes “us”, which is independent of the complex interaction
of varied biological processes and is ultimately, if not always
completely, at the helm of the gross body. The rejection of this view
in favour of an idea that self is far more fragile, far more
contingent, and without constituting a single central executive, was
a pleasant discovery.
It reminded me of a class a couple of years ago when my lecturer polled the class asking whether they would
willingly enter Nozick's famous experience machine (in short, a
machine capable of producing in the subject an artificial life
consisting of whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences she
should want). When a little over the half said they would be willing
to enter the machine he responded, unfazed, that this was a
consistent trend among contemporary undergraduates that contradicted
the results of polls taken in the 70s when the thought experiment was
first introduced in “Anarchy State and Utopia” (1974). Though I'm
a fan of thought experiments (usually because they sound like cool
ideas for scifi stories), it does make you question the value of
generalised results . In this case, initial results may not be the refutation of a certain utilitarianism some might like to think it is.
My experience machine life would basically look like a prog rock cover
In any case these discussions continue to prove that philosophical dialogue is as popular as it ever was and will continue to be, and further that we should be cautious to infer intuitions or make sweeping conclusions about societies' predominant convictions.
Nozick, Robert (1974). Anarchy,
State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books
In Good and Real, an ambitious attempt to "demistify paradoxes from physics to ethics", Gary Drescher discusses the "false reification" of concepts in the philosophy of mind (2005: 50ff). The fallacy of reification is familiar in other areas of philosophy, but to my knowledge Drescher is the first to apply it specifically to consciousness (although he acknowledges Dennett [1991] as a source of inspiration). Today I want to discuss a few of his insights, and I'll maybe go into more detail with my thoughts on them in a future post.
First off, what is false reification? It occurs when we mistakenly interpret our empirical observations as identifying a new and distinct entity. In the case of consciousness, that basically means identifying "being conscious" as a property over and above the cognitive processes that we are conscious of. A simple, non-cognitive example of false reification is the historic notion of vitalism. It used to be believed that there was a separate life-force that endowed living things with life, animating them in a way that non-living things could not emulate. We know now that no such vital life-force exists, and that being alive is in fact no more than a function of the biological processes that compose living things. Whereas vitalism supposed that biological processes involved an extra 'spark of life', modern biology simply identifies life with certain biological processes. We can say that vitalism falsely reified life, believing it to be a distinct entity or property over and above the physical processes that instantiate it.
Similarly, many philosophical puzzles can be neatly side-stepped if we avoid falsely reifying consciousness. A common mistake, according to Drescher, is to view consciousness as being an intrinsic property of mental events that we discover when we examine those events. "Rather," he writes, "the examination of a mental event [. . .] is what constitutes that event's consciousness" (Drescher 2005: 49). Under this interpretation, it is no surprise that whenever we examine a mental event, we find that event to be conscious. Like the light that turns on whenever we open a refrigerator, consciousness 'turns on' whenever we focus on or examine a particular mental event (ibid.). The false reification that we commit here is to think of consciousness as something extra that we must discover within a conscious system, beyond the physical processes that constitute that system.
Quale, not quail.
The false reification of qualia can also result in philosophical confusion. A quale is a philosophical term referring to the conscious sensation of an experience, for example the feeling of what it is like to see red or hear a loud noise. A famous thought-experiment asks what would happen if you were able to 'invert your spectrum' - that is, make everything look the opposite colour to what it does now. So red would look green, blue would look orange, and yellow would look purple (or something like that, the precise details are unimportant). Would you notice any difference? If colour-qualia have an existence independent of the physical process of colour perception, then perhaps you might - but to argue that they do is to commit a false reification. Our conscious experience of a colour just is the act of perceiving that colour, and so the inverted spectrum experiment is simply incoherent. It just isn't possible that we could perceive everything in the same way that we do now, but with the colours inverted. There are no independent qaulia that we can switch around in order to make the experiment work.
A final, related false reification can occur when we consider our motivations for certain actions. Put (extremely) simplistically, we are motivated by a desire to experience pleasurable things and avoid painful things. So it seems natural to say things like "you want to eat chocolate becuase it just tastes good; you want to avoid stubbing your toe becuase that just feels bad" (Drescher 2005: 77). Intuitively this makes sense, but Drescher thinks that it gets things the wrong way round. There is no property tasty that is intrinsic to chocolate, and no property painful that is intrinsic to toe-stubbing. Rather it is the fact that we have a natural desire for sugar that makes chocolate taste good, and the fact that we have a natural aversion to harming ourselves that makes toe-stubbing painful. So pain and tastiness are constituted by these evolved processes, and to view them as intrinsic properties that we aim for (or aim to avoid) is to falsely reify them.
Thus concludes my whistle-stop tour of Drescher's views of false reification in the study of consciousness. His book is very interesting, although I'm doubtful of his central claims concerning free will and determinism in chapters 5-7. More on those next week, perhaps, or for now you can just re-read my previous post on the topic.
Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company.
Drescher, G. 2005. Good and Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
(Being the techno-wiz that I am, I've worked out how to add additional authors to the blog. So who's written what should now be both more obvious and less obtrusive...this is Joe, by the way.)
"Mary the Colour Scientist" is a classic thought experiment, originally formulated by Frank Jackson (1982; 1986). For those unfamiliar with it, it goes something like this:
Mary has been raised from birth in an entirely monochrome environment, although she has been provided with a wealth of scientific data on colour and colour perception. She is in fact the world expert in the field, despite having never seen colour. For the purposes of the experiment, we are asked to assume that she knows all there is to know about the physical process of colour perception. What happens when she is released into the world? The thought is that she must learn something about what colours look like, despite already knowing all the physical information about colour and colour perception. Thus, there is more to experiencing colour than just the physical process, and therefore physicalism is false.
Monochrome
There's been a huge quantity of debate about this experiment over the years, and I don't intend to discuss much of it now. Most of the replies can be found in an anthology, There's Something About Mary (2004). What I want to discuss is a potential response, from the perspective of embodied cognition, which I don't think has been discussed in any detail before.
Jackson asks us to imagine that Mary knows all that there is to know, scientifically speaking, about colour. Ignoring the fact that the sheer weight of this claim is often underestimated1, we might want to challenge his interpretation of what this in fact means. He assumes that a fully-detailed factual knowledge of colour perception will necessarily, if physicalism is correct, grant Mary knowledge about what colour looks like. On a traditional understanding of cognition, this seems to be a fair assumption. Knowledge, including phenomenal knowledge, is just in the head, and if we knew how colour perception worked, we would be able to imagine what it would be like to have such perceptions. This is the kind of cognitive materialism that was Jackson's original target, and given those assumptions his experiment can seem fairly convincing. My opinion used to be that we had just failed to grasp what truly complete knowledge of colour perception would be like, and that, contra Jackson, Mary in fact wouldn't learn anything knew when she perceived colour for the first time.
However, another possibility has now occurred to me. What if experiencing colour were to be more accurately conceived as an embodied phenomenon, involving not just the brain, but also the visual system and other physiological responses?2 If this were the case, then scientific knowledge of colour perception just wouldn't allow for phenomenal knowledge of what colour looks like. Such knowledge would necessarily be impossible to acquire without actually seeing colour, and not because of any non-physical quality, but simply because that's how colour perception works. Once we shift our focus from the brain to the body as a whole, this seems pretty obvious.
A related kind of response has been made previously, that what Mary acquires when she first sees colour is knowledge, but knowledge of a different kind to that which the scientific understanding of colour perception granted her. Harman (1990), Flanagan (1992), and Alter (1998) all make arguments of this kind. What the perspective of embodied cognition adds to these kinds of responses is a principled stance from which to argue that there is more to knowledge and experience than what goes on in the brain. A more extreme response would be to deny that visual knowledge is ever possible without a world to perceive,3 in which case we would simply deny one of Jackson's original premises, that Mary has total scientific knowledge of colour perception. Such knowledge might not be acquirable without actual experience of colour. This might seem like a cheap way out, but scientifically implausible thought experiments can't easily be given scientifically plausible responses. Once you start discussing things that can't actually happen in the real world, the need to give you a real answer sometimes becomes moot.
1. A problem which pervades many thought experiments of this kind. Whenever you're asked to consider a situation where someone has total physical knowledge of a situation, be wary. Such knowledge is way beyond the reach of current science, and might simply be impossible for any human to comprehend. I often feel that the best response to such experiments is a cautious "I don't know what that would be like, so let's withhold our judgement". 2. There's a secondary issue here, which to my knowledge has not been satisfactorily resolved. After a lifetime of monochrome experience, Mary might in fact be totally unable to perceive colour. Experiments on sensory privation during visual development suggest that, at best, her perception of colour would take a while to develop, and might never quite reach 'normal'. Oversimplifications of this kind haunt many otherwise powerful thought experiments. 3. Gibson's ecological theory of perception, discussed at length by Rockwell (2005), might entail something like this.
Alter, T. 1998. “A Limited Defense of the Knowledge
Argument.” Philosophical Studies 90/1: 35–56.
Flanagan, O. 1992. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Harman, G. 1990. “The Intrinsic Quality of
Experience." Philosophical Persepctives 4, Action
Theory and Philosophy of Mind: 31–52.
Jackson, F. 1982. "Epiphenomenal Qualia". Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.
Jackson, F. 1986. "What Mary Didn't Know". Journal of Philosophy 83: 291–295.
Ludlow, P., Nagasawa, Y. & Stoljar, D. (eds.) 2004. There's Something about Mary: essays on phenomenal consciousness and Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
I finished reading Reasons and Persons over the weekend - as you may have noticed, I haven't blogged about it like I threatened to at the start of the month. Its incredibly dense and technical, and whilst I got a lot out of it, I wasn't that inspired to write anything. I probably got the most out of section three, which concerns personal identity. Whilst most of Parfit's ideas weren't new to me, they've been incredibly influential in shaping my views on the self, so it was nice to read them in the original. Sections one and two, concerning self defeating theories, and rationality and time, respectively, weren't directly relevant to most of my work, but were nonetheless interesting. Once you get used to it, Parfit's writing is actually extremely enjoyable, full of dry humour and inventive examples.
The fourth and final section, concerning future generations, and our moral responsibility towards them, raised several fascinating issues. Not least of these was the question of how, morally speaking, we ought to compare different distributions of well-being1. If we could have either 1% of the population very well off and 99% in poverty, or 100% just a fraction above poverty, which should we choose? In some cases these kinds of questions are going to be intuitively obvious, but Parfit weights them in such a way as to make them very difficult to answer. Does a slight reduction in overall well-being justify more equality? Should we be worried about the total or the average well-being? Can any amount of well-being justify any amount of suffering?
Yes, I chose those numbers intentionally.
These are all important questions, ones that we struggle to answer to this day, but I think that there's a crucial point that Parfit, and others, have missed. Economists and (utilitarian) ethicists tend to view well-being as a pseudo-numerical quantity - even if we can't count it precisely, we can at least make general statements about whether a certain policy will result in "more or less" well-being. Often this isn't a problem; when we discuss famine relief, or NHS funding, an analysis of the well-being that different options are likely to produce is essential. However, when we start to talk about higher levels of well-being (what Parfit terms "quality"), the numerical metaphors begin to break down. What does it mean to say that somebody is a million times better off than somebody else, or even just a hundred times better off? I genuinely don't know - I just don't have any conception of the kind of happiness or fulfilment that somebody this well off would be experiencing. When I'm asked to consider whether ten people suffering is worth one of these "super-lives", I just don't have any meaningful way of answering.
Parfit is at least partly aware of this difficulty, writing that Nozick's appeal to a "utility monster" as a refutation of utilitarianism is weakened due to the "deep impossibility" of such a creature. Nozick imagines a being who, unlike ourselves, has no limit to the pleasure it can get from the consumption of basic resources. Such a monster has a potential quality of life millions of times better than our own, thus requiring that we sacrifice everything to it in the name of greater utility. As "we cannot imagine, even in the dimmest way", what it would be like to be such a creature, we can deny that Nozick's argument has any intuitive force to us (Parfit 1984: 389). Parfit still thinks that such considerations can shed light on what we ought to do, but as a direct refutation of utilitarianism, Nozick's argument fails.
Nozick's utility monster was capable of consuming a limitless amount, and deriving equal pleasure from every bite. What about those who consume 100 times what the average person does? In terms of raw monetary resources, such people are relatively common. Do they really have a quality of life that far above my own? I don't think they do, and I think that this highlights a general flaw common to economic and utilitarian reasoning.
The internet seems to think that it might look like this.
I can , of course, imagine being fabulously wealthy, but I'm very sceptical of how much more well-being this wealth might bring me. Basic economic security, enough for me to enjoy the things that I enjoy, is all that I ask for. Maybe I'm just unusually ascetic (although this doesn't seem to be true, as I enjoy good coffee, expensive books, and nice food), but it strikes me that a basic level of well-being, not that far above what I currently enjoy, should be enough for anyone. I don't mean that they'll necessarily be happy, but rather that above this baseline physical resources aren't going to do most people a great deal of good. Being happy seems far more reliant on personal outlook and lifestyle choices than any degree of wealth or privilege. Parfit introduces the notion of a life being "worth living", but then goes on to include lives that are much better than this in his calculations. I'm not sure that this makes any sense in the real world - once a life is worth living, there's only so much that external factors can do to improve it. So when we're calculating how to allocate resources, we should bear in mind that "super-lives" may simply be an a posteriori impossibility - something that in practice does not, and cannot, exist.
This is pretty contentious, to say the least. It obviously undermines mainstream economics, and the whole acquisitive structure of the modern world. However, the important thing to note is that even if we set this baseline at my own level, or slightly above, it is still an extremely privileged position. Most of the world's population have not yet reached it. Parfit's moral conundrums remain, albeit in a slightly reduced form. We no longer need to worry about the moral worth of extremely good lives, because such lives simply don't exist. Instead we need to look at maximising the number of lives that reach the level of basic well-being. For argument's sake, we might define such a level as (currently) £10,000/year, ignoring tax. It's obviously going to depend on local prices, as well as extraneous issues such as childcare and differences in taste. What's essentially is that our level of basic well-being involves a relatively comfortable life, but nothing particularly fancy. How we go about maximising those at this level is obviously an even more contentious issue, and one that I don't plan to discuss here any time soon - this blog's meant to be about minds, not politics.
(This video has been doing the rounds today, and the basic point at 3:00, that rich people can't actually spend all their money, is similar to what I've been trying to say. TED apparently refused to publish it, although I'm sure things are a bit more complicated than that.)
1. Parfit uses a variety of different terms for the general idea of 'living a better life'. It's a very contentious topic, and one that I'm going to be ignoring today.
Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition, which I've noticed has several indexical errors - so watch out!)
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that memetics might still prove useful even if memes, strictly speaking, don't exist. Even if the unit of replication that Blackmore posits isn't real, the study of memes might still be tracking some feature of the world that is. Of course, if this turns out to be the case then we might not want to continue calling it memetics - or alternatively, we might want to adapt our definition of a meme.
In The Meme Machine, Blackmore spent a couple of chapters considering the possibility of morality evolving (either genetically or memetically), and it is this broad topic that concerns Richard Joyce in The Evolution of Morality. Given the complex relationship between culture and (genetic) evolution, and the recent popularity of memetic explanations of culture, I was surprised to find only a single, terse reference to memes in Joyce's book: a footnote explaining that his talk of cultural evolution "is not to be confused with 'meme theory'" (2006: 235, note 21).
Despite agreeing with Blackmore that "[t]here is nothing in the theory [of evolution] that says that the traits in question must be genetically encoded" (Joyce 2006: 42), as well as finding explanatory value in the idea that culture might evolve independently of genetics, Joyce keeps his distance from memetic explanations. His use of cultural evolution "leaves open the issue of whether cultural items satisfy the criteria for being considered replicators" (2006: 235). This is a fair point, but not one that should render any contribution from memetics completely worthless. A lot of what he has to say about the cultural evolution of morality meshes well with Blackmore's memetic explanation of altruism, although of course they place their emphasis differently (Joyce on genetic evolution, Blackmore on cultural). Nonetheless, the basic idea that culture might come to "harness" an innate compulsion to feel certain 'moral' emotions (such as guilt or empathy) is shared by both of them.
I think that the Dawkins-inspired 'memetic revolution' has hit upon a very powerful heuristic for investigating cultural evolution, but has also shot itself in the foot somewhat by trying to be too radical. Their emphasis on defining the meme as unit of replication akin to the gene has tended to undercut the seriousness with which some of their ideas might otherwise have been considered. This is unfortunate, as whilst the idea of cultural evolution per se isn't necessarily that radical, it could certainly do with some more focused study. Anthologies such as The Adapted Mind (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992)and volume two of The Innate Mind (Carruthers, Laurence, & Stich, 2007) certainly go some way towards doing this, but by and large they are still limited by the artificial dichotomy between (genetic) evolution and culture. Memetics could break this dichotomy, if only it dropped some of its reverence for the slightly implausible comparison between memes and genes. There's certainly room for the meme as a unit of replication, although it will be a much vaguer unit than the gene, one that is necessarily somewhat metaphorical.
Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. 1992. The Adapted Mind. Oxford: OUP.
Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: OUP.
Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S. 2007. Innate Mind, Vol. 2: Culture and Cognition. Oxford: OUP
Joyce, R. 2006. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
