Consciousness, A Discussion

Physicalism grew out of materialism to account for most, if not all aspects of 'energy.'

http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_physicalism.html

 

There is an essential component to qualia, as I understand it, that is not really captured effectively by the Mary Thought Experiment. This component of qualia being the phenomenal experience amongst individuals of theoretically the same object or phenomena. Is your experience of the red that you see, the same as my experience of red that I see? If not, can this be completely accounted for by our physiological makeup, like the quantity of cones, rods and neurotransmitters we have in or visual pathways? Does taking this part of your post into consideration...

account for any and all aspects that the visual processing might not. For instance, we may assume someone who has primarily been exposed to bloody gore and slasher flicks for their experience of red, likely has a different experience of red then someone who has primarily been exposed to red roses, valentine's day type red heart pictures and stuff when shown the same red object.

I haven't delved too heavily in books or papers focused on qualia but the general impression I get is that the proponents of qualia think it is some attribute of our conscious experience that is beyond the experience being like a gestalt formation or interaction of nature and nurture.

 

Okie: It depends on how you feel about art. Many of us are inspired by it.

[/Quote/ Me/Again]The answer is simple, she sees, hears, and feels what she is biologically capable of doing based on her hereditary and environmental conditioning. For example, if she had read in her books that sex only involved pain then we would expect her to interpret some of her experience as pain. And so on for any other unknown but studied experience.[/quote]

Okie: Of course she sees, hears and feels what she is biologically capable of doing based on her heredity and environmental conditioning. Highly functioning zombies are doing the best they can, and more power to them. Dogs, insects and birds have a range of experience that's closed to us, but we don't realize it. All this seems to me to be beside the point and fixated on a heuruistic analogy designed to illustrate that we all (you and Dennett included} are sentient beings experiencing subjectively our inner and outer environments. This phenomenological fact is immediately apprehended by us. Efforts to deny it seem odd--a phenomenon which is itself deserving of study.

[/Quote MeAgain]The Wolof of Senegal had no comprehension of perspective in art, neither did the ancient Egyptians and early Europeans. A picture drawn in perspective has no meaning to them until they understand the concept. Same with Mary.[/Quote]

Okie: What's the relevance of this to consciousness? The Wolof of Senegal had sentience, and also a high level of artistic expression which inspired modern western artists. The ancient Egyptians were also sentient, and incidentially produced such artistic masterpieces as the bust of Nefertiti and the sculpturette of Imhotep. Egyptian art was highly stylized in order to convey important symbolic meanings. Same with early European art--and I assume your're not talking about the art of ancient Greece when you say the art lacked perspective. But to use one of your favorite expressions, were getting off topic. The story of Mary and her inability to perceive redness was an analogy intended to convey the impossibility to reduce sentience to a set of procedures designed to measure behavior.

[/Quote] I also don't understand the qualia bit. All individual consciousness requires "qualia" which is poorly defined and seems to be nothing more than the consciousness of an experience. So I have an experience of the color red. The fact that I can't transmit that experience to another person who has never seen red means what? All it means is that that person has never experienced the color read. I don't have to conjure up the term qualia...I just have to point to the experience itself.[/quote]

Okie: Exactly. Qualia is just a name for sentience. Putting it in Latin seems a bit pretentious, but that's the technical term that the philosophers developed to talk about it.

[/Quote]You can't experience something you never experienced so what is all this non physical mumbo jumbo about transmitting your experience to someone else?
What am I missing here? [/Quote]

Okie:Qualia is not about transmitting anything. It's about experiencing it. And whether or not others can't experience it says nothing about its existence. But asking about qualia or sentience is a bit like asking what jazz is all about. In the immortal words of Louis Armstrong: "If you gotta ask, you'll never know."

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[SIZE=12pt]If we can get past the Mind-body barrier, there’re lots of good studies of consciousness that could help in a more complete picture of the phenomenon. I’ll share some of my favorites.[/SIZE]

1. [SIZE=12pt]The CEO Model: David Eagleman, Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain, and Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]This book, by neurobiologist Eagleman, uses the analogy of a loosely structured business corporation to explain current brain research on the place of consciousness in human decision making. I’m afraid the conclusions are rather disturbing and ego-deflating. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]He notes that specialists in Artificial Intelligence discovered that robotic performance could be improved by distributing tasks among specialized modules working semi-independently within a hierarchical structure. This is exactly how the human brain is organized. The mind is not unified but modular, with the habit modules (the grunts) doing the routine work on an autonomic basis, the“supervisory attention system” (“middle management”), developing somewhat different action plans, to propose to top management; and an executive structure of two divisions—one for each of the two hemispheres of the brain which might be described as the CEO and vice-CEO of the operation, both located in the prefrontal cortex each doing roughly the same thing with somewhat different (right brain versus left brain) perspectives--one dominant but the other ready to step in if something happens to the President. “The left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter’, watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events…Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications.” p. 134. Only the top executives correspond to consciousness in the sense of having phenomenological awareness. The rest are largely autonomic or else are part of what Freud and Jung called the unconscious. From an evolutionary standpoint, this arrangement had its advantages. The boss (our conscious self which we call “I”) could concern himself/herself with the high level functions like discussing consciousness on Hip Forums, while the mundane tasks like digesting food, defecating, urinating or breathing could be left to the lower echelons. Eagleman thnks this introduced elements of redundancy and flexibility to the system, with multiple modules doing often similar tasks with enough diversity to assure that if one doesn’t work well, another will.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]So what are some of the major findings and implications?[/SIZE]

1. [SIZE=12pt]Only a tiny part of our behavior is conscious, in the sense of phenomenological awareness. Hence the title of his book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of Brains. The first chapter of the book is entitled There’s Someone in My Head But It’s Not Me, borrowing the immortal words of Pink Floyd to express Jung’s observation that “in each of us there is another we do not know.”[/SIZE]
2. [SIZE=12pt]With the possible exception of really major decisions, the decisions that we make are made before our conscious mind knows about them—a fact that draws free will into some question.[/SIZE]
3. [SIZE=12pt]The brain is a team of rivals, with different modules providing different action proposals.These correspond roughly to Freud’s ego, superego and id, and account for the often conflicted character of our decision-making.[/SIZE]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/qualia/
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qualia

I really get the impression we're all on the same page, but are getting caught up in semantics. If you say you are sentient and experience phenomena, that's the essence of what I mean by consciousness.

 

Yes I think we can assume that Mary has never experienced colour, but she has knowledge of red and blue in the sense that she knows that physical light is a function of the electromagnetic spectrum, that "red" is distinguished from "blue" by their differences in physical wavelength, and that the normal human retina has 3 types of cone receptors which respond to different wavelengths of light, such that humans may experience colour.

But although she knows there is this feature of perception termed colour which has a causal relation to visible light, as she has not experienced colour directly she is missing the conscious subjective experience of colour, which cannot be fully described in objective scientific terms.

I thought of a second example which is the other side of the argument.

Imagine there is a car safety system, let's call it Roger.

The system is attached to a dashboard camera in the car.

When a red traffic light is detected ahead, the system automatically engages the car brake.

If the traffic light is amber or green the system takes no action.

Therefore we can say that Roger has colour perception, in the sense that it can causally (i.e. take action by engaging the brake)
distinguish between the colours green, amber and red.

But would we want to say that Roger has a conscious subjective experience of colour in the same way that we do?

N.B. I am not opposed in principle to the idea that e.g. a computer system can be conscious,
but for the sake of this illustration I am defining Roger as a relatively basic mechanism whose function
is strictly limited to detecting different wavelengths of light and engaging the car brake.

 

The 'hard question of consciousness' seems to be best expressed with the zombie analogy. The idea is that the zombie would be physically identical to the average person, but it would lack a certain type of awareness/experience/consciousness. I don't define the physical in any technical way, for me something must be physical or it doesn't exist. So to better express the zombie analogy I should say; the idea is that a zombie would be physically identical to the average person, except it would lack a certain obscure physical aspect that provides certain types of awareness/experience/consciousness. In the zombie analogy the presumption is that what is lacking is something that another could never detect through simple interaction with the zombie, but would perhaps have to look inside the brain - and only then if he knew what to look for.

The zombie, being by all outer appearances an average person would have the propensity to ask the same 'hard question of consciousness'. On that issue alone we can reduce the possibility of such a type of zombie existing, even hypothetically, to nearly nothing. The fact that the zombie would still ask the 'hard question of consciousness' would establish that the roots of those questions, in anyone, are not from whatever hypothetical obscure physical aspect of physicality the zombie lacks.

So with that solved, the only issue is to explore what the roots actually are. It seems that the root of being-aware-of/experiencing/being-conscious-of something not present inside or outside oneself relates to the way language has established short-cuts/extra-channels to the thought process. Perhaps what happens is that when one speaks to oneself using language or other forms of symbols, the part of the brain-body that speaks and the part of the brain-body that hears speech aren't well connected internally.

Basically, concerning most of our thinking functions, they are very old in evolutionary terms, and therefore there has been time for the brain-body to evolve multiple connects regarding them. But concerning the language/advanced-symbolic-functions of the brain-body, there has been little time for multiple connections to evolve. So being relatively few connections, we experience a disconnect, that leads to our formulating the 'hard question of consciousness'.

 

The idea is that once humans had a decent sized verbal language, but were still incapable of thinking using words. The parts of the brain-body responsible for speaking and listening had nothing yet even approaching a direct connection. In time they started speaking to themselves out loud when alone. Imagine having heard people speak to you your whole life, and responding without ever thinking of your words, in the direct manner you're used to, before speaking. Then one day, you say something to yourself when alone. In a sense, you'll have had no prior knowledge of those words. You'd naturally listen to yourself as you listens to others, and follow your own directions assuming you respect yourself enough to do so.

Let's say a leading tribesman told one to rake leaves, but after the leader is gone, one tells oneself out loud, "pick fruit instead of raking leaves". When the leader returns and asks about his disobedience, one responds by saying that he told himself to pick fruit instead. Basically, what happened is that during the time between telling himself to pick fruit and the leader returning, the words he spoke, "pick fruit instead of raking leaves", that were picked up by the part of his brain-body used for hearing, had time to find their way through indirect channels back to the part of the brain-body responsible for them; the part used for speech.

As one obtained experience at speaking to oneself, the connections would become better formed, so one could actually have a conversation with oneself. Eventually they'll have formed enough that one will no longer need to speak out loud to have a conversation with oneself. Once that happened people may have thought they were hearing 'voices'. For modern humans the connections are well enough so that we rarely think we're hearing voices when we talk to ourselves. Presumably, if humans were to ever evolve an even more thorough connection between the parts of the brain-body responsible for speech and the parts for hearing speech, humans would then no longer ask themselves the 'hard problem of consciousness', and would be no less advanced.

 

Actually, the concept is only marginally useful, as a means of trying to convey one aspect of consciousness to others. Guerrillabedlam asked about the relationship of qualia to consciousness and Joshua tree introduced the Mary example. I'm more interested in consciousness rather than consciousness of particular aspects of reality, which is what I understand qualia to be. When I wake up in the morning and realize I'm no longer dreaming, even before I open my eyes I'm conscious--i.e., having experiences that I'm aware of. Then the qualia come in--my subjective experience of a full bladder and taking a leak, hearing the birds in the trees, tasting my toothpaste, drinking my coffee, etc. But I think the important thing for our discussion is being awake and aware.

 

That "hypothetical obscure physical aspect of physicality" the zombie lacks is what sets us apart from the zombies, and it's by no means trivial. It is the quality that makes us aware of ourselves and the world around us. The zombie is just going through the motions like an automaton but doesn't realize what it's doing. I think that even before language, humans were conscious in being sentient and having immediate subjective awareness. That of course is an inference, as is my inference that you aren't a zombie. Was I conscious as a newborn infant before I heard my mother's voice or learned to talk to myself mentally? I think so, although I have no recollection of it. This is what makes consciousness a "hard problem."

 

Just as a cultural anthropologist cannot objectively study the culture they were born into, due to the degree of immersion, a person is not a reliable judge of the workings of their own consciousness. I might have seemed like an idea or concept came out of nowhere, in a flash of insight or what-ever but that doesn't mean the idea, or at least the building blocks of that idea or concept weren't rolling around the subconscious for some time previous.

My own example is from playing drums. I'm just learning, still developing new neuro-connections, but a funny thing is I find it extremely difficult to consciously keep time with quarter notes with my left hand while playing a syncopated bass drum pattern with my right foot.
But the other day while just kinda jamming out on this samba pattern, I was astonish to notice my left was playing perfectly metered quarter notes on the cymbal. As soon as I became conscious of that left hand, I started fucking up. As long as I stayed focused on the overall sound, the left hand would do what my body needed it to, to keep the pattern going. As soon as I brought my attention to the left hands action, the whole thing broke down. Funny how it's tricks of the mind that can sometimes hold us back. Trying to be more conscious may actually be detrimental to some kinds of brain function. I almost feel like sometimes too much intentional 'consciousness' can get in the way of great things.

 

The point is that if we can deduce the origins of our desire to ask the 'hard problem' to specific factors, such as a partial disconnect between the speech and listening parts of the brain-body, then we've established that whatever extraordinary special qualities we may possess that enhance awareness, they aren't responsible for the fact that we ask the 'hard problem'. And if they're not responsible for this line of questioning that's going on in this thread, then we can be all but certain that we aren't speaking about them here.