Quote of the Day – Geoffrey Miller on Small-minded Theorizing in Evolutionary Psychology

The view of the mind as a pragmatic, problem-solving survivalist has also inhibited research on the evolution of human creativity, morality, and language. Some primate researchers have suggested that human creative intelligence evolved as nothing more than a way to invent Machiavellian tricks to deceive and manipulate others. Human morality has been reduced to a tit-for-tat accountant that keeps track of who owes what to whom. Theories of language evolution have neglected human story-telling, poetry, wit, and song. You have probably read accounts of evolutionary psychology in the popular press, and felt the same unease that it is missing something important. Theories based on the survival of the fittest can nibble away at the edges of human nature, but they do not take us to the heart of the mind.

~Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind

Can We Detect Consciousness in Babies? A Skeptical Reply to Sid Kouider et al.

Sid Kouider et al. recently published a paper claiming to have found a “neural marker of perceptual consciousness” in babies too young to verbally report their awareness, a finding that would be a significant achievement if it actually meant anything. But I will argue that it doesn’t signify any progress at all in the science of consciousness. I have a single over-arching complaint about this paper which will generalize to the entire neural correlation approach: lack of operational precision in defining what they are trying to detect with their measuring instruments. The title says they are looking for a neural marker of “perceptual consciousness”. But in the abstract and paper they use a confusing mixture of different words such as ”conscious reflection”, “conscious access”, “conscious perception”, “conscious experience”, “awareness”, and “subjectivity”.

This is ridiculous. Concepts that play a role in scientific thinking should not be so ambiguous. Are reflection and perception the same thing? How is perception defined? Is perception the same as perceptual consciousness? If not, what’s the difference? Is perception the same as access? Are awareness and subjectivity identical? Can you have awareness without reflection? Is all subjectivity reflective? How is experience defined? Do creatures incapable of reflection have sensory experiences? Is experience the same as having awareness? The slipperiness of these words is paralyzing because you can never pin them down; every time someone claims to have a firm grasp of these terms their meaning vanishes into a vapor of further undefinitions and hand-waving.

How can the science of consciousness ever be taken seriously if it never escapes from the morass of undefinitions and ambiguous synonyms? Are we detecting qualia, phenomenology, reflection, awareness, or experience? What do these terms mean? Do they all mean the same thing? How can we measure them? Can “experiences” be directly measured? If not, how do we justify our indirect measurement? How can we be sure that our measuring instruments are accurately measuring the things we say they are? These studies are built on a foundation of verbal sand, a tangled, confused mass of open-ended verbal definitions that are chained to nothing but other verbal definitions, with no clear sense of how these concepts can be measured by standard scientific instrumentation.

Measurement verification circularity is not completely unique to the “mental sciences”. The mental sciences are just not as well-equipped to practically deal with the problem. The concept of “temperature” is also circularly defined, but unlike consciousness, we have a consensus by convention that if you stick a mercury thermometer into the steam of boiling water the mercury will expand to the point on the thermometer marked “100″ on an arbitrarily defined numerical scale under standard conditions e.g. normal atmospheric pressure, impure water, etc. The problem with consciousness studies is that there is no consensus on how to operationally define our concepts in terms of classes of operations that can uniquely defined and carried out by independent scientists with measuring instruments calibrated to a conventionally agreed standard.

Take Kouider et al’s operational definition for detecting consciousness in babies with EEG. They first use EEG on adults and classify perceptual processing as a two stage process, the second stage they take to be a neural marker for consciousness because the adults report they have “seen” something:

During the first ~200 to 300 ms of processing, brain responses increase linearly with the stimulus energy or duration. This early linear stage can be observed even on subliminal trials in which the stimulus is subjectively invisible. By contrast,the second stage, which starts after ~300 ms, is characterized by a nonlinear, essentially all-ornone change in brain activity detectable with event-related potentials (ERPs)  and intracranial recordings . Note that this second stage occurs specifically on trials reported as consciously seen.

But how do they know there is no consciousness during stage 1 where there is no report? How do we rigorously make the inference from “There is no report” to “There is no consciousness”? It’s certainly not an analytic truth, so there must be some empirical justification. But what is it? Suppose some kind of consciousness exists in stage 1 but we haven’t figured out how to measure it. How do we rule out the possibility that our measuring instruments have missed something? If you define consciousness as “The act of reporting, and/or the contents of what are reported”, then the inference is on firmer ground but the firmness is purely conceptual. To see the verbal nature of this inference, suppose you define consciousness as “The subjectivity that can occur independently of any possibility of reporting it” (forgetting for now this isn’t actually a meaningful definition without also defining ‘subjectivity’). Then clearly the inference from lack of report of consciousness to lack of consciousness doesn’t follow.

I see the problem here as simple terminological disagreement. But terminological disputes are not innocent; they have a tendency to pollute the entire downstream scientific process. If competing labs have a terminological dispute but claim to be studying the same thing (“consciousness”) then they will be talking past each other in the most wearisome and unproductive manner. No progress will be made. Sure, there will be progress within the theoretical frameworks of each competing lab. But in Kuhnian language this will be akin to there not being a single “normal paradigm” of consciousness but dozens of rival paradigms, each with their own disciplinary matrix of terminology, definitions, preferred measurement protocols, and standards for measurement verification.

As I see it, the science of consciousness has two futures. In the first future, the dozens of competing definitions and concepts of consciousness will undergo a process of artificial selection, and in, say, 100 years all scientists who call themselves consciousness researchers will have reached a consensus on how to operationally define the concept, much like the current field of thermometry. This wouldn’t mean that the science of consciousness would be “complete”, it’s just that it would turn into a single “normal science”, which, if it undergoes a conceptual or experimental revolution, the revolution will be against a single well-established paradigm. Right now all we have are micro-revolutions that are of no general significance. The victories ring hollow because there is no consensus on how to evaluate the standards of success.

John Dorris called this line of thinking dangerously akin to “scorched Earth skepticism”. But I’m okay with that. To twist the metaphor, I see it as “Forest fire skepticism” because some plant species have adapted to local “fire regimes” such that the fire kills off half the species but triggers seed formation that secures population recovery. That’s my purpose in being skeptical of consciousness studies: to thin the field via negativa.

The second future is more grim: the science of consciousness will simply be abandoned. Either that, or what amounts to the same: the science of consciousness will be fractured into dozens of distinct, hyper-specialized subdisciplines that are effectively distinct academic pursuits, and only historians will remember that they were once all trying to study the same thing.

p.s. I don’t think talk of “perceptual representations” or “neural representations” is on any firmer ground than “perceptual consciousness”.

Quote of the Day – The Code of Consciousness

The code used to register information in the brain is of little importance in determining what we perceive, so long as the code is used appropriately by the brain to determine our actions. For example, no one today thinks that in order to perceive redness some kind of red fluid must ooze out of neurons in the brain. Similarly, to perceive the world as right side up, the retinal image need not be right side up

~

J. Kevin O’Regan, Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell, p. 6

The Distressing Swiftness of Contemporary Philosophical Argumentation

David Chalmers recently posted a paper about panpsychism to his blog. Like an addict returning to the source of their troubles, I can’t help but read almost everything Chalmers writes when it comes to consciousness. He calls his argument for panpsychism “Hegelian” because it works using a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis structure. The thesis is materialism, the antithesis is the conceivability argument against materialism, and the synthesis is panpsychism. Because the paper is focused on panpsychism, Chalmers sets up the thesis and antithesis quickly. Using his finely honed but slightly worn stock pile of arguments against materialism, Chalmers is deftly able to dismiss his opponents in a single sentence! Consider this paragraph after presenting the antithesis:

Materialists do not just curl up and die when confronted with the conceivability argument and its cousins. Type-A materialists reject the epistemic premise, holding for example that zombies are not conceivable. Type-B materialists reject the step from an epistemic premise to an ontological conclusion, holding for example that conceivability does not entail possibility. Still, there are significant costs to both of these views. Type-A materialism seems to require something akin to an analytic functionalist view of consciousness, which most philosophers find too deflationary to be plausible.

For those not acquainted with Chalmers neat taxonomy of everyone who disagrees with him, “Type-A materialism” is that view that zombies are not conceivable. Chalmers created the Type-A concept basically as an honorary category reserved especially for Dan Dennett’s writings on qualia. Crudely stated, Dennett’s Type-A materialism amounts to the view that serious scientific (or philosophical) theorizing about qualia is misguided and confused for innumerable reasons and that people who use the term in the way Chalmers does generally don’t know what they are talking about, or if they do they can’t explain it to anyone else, and that we’re better off denying qualia exist or replacing the qualia concept with some better, more fruitful way of thinking about minds.

But notice the incredibly swiftness of Chalmers dismissal of Type-A materialism as high-lighted by the above bolded statement. He says Type-A materialism is not worth our time because “most philosophers find it too deflationary to be plausible.” However, Type-A materialists are a minority position in consciousness studies precisely because they are equivalent to the phlogiston naysayers who argued that the concept “phlogiston” is an empty symbol, like “the present king of France”. So of course most philosophers are going to “find it too deflationary”! But that’s not an argument! That’s just citing a sociological fact that as a matter of course most people who study qualia disagree with the people who say it’s a bad idea to try and study qualia! The dismissal amounts to nothing more than doing philosophy by survey. Because “most philosophers” find it implausible, it can be dismissed in a single sentence, which is equivalent to saying “A minority view is not held by a majority of philosophers, therefore the minority view is not worth our time.”

This curtness of dialectical engagement with critics who are skeptical of the basic presuppositions surrounding talk of qualia highlights what I see as a critical weakness in the “normal science” of qualia studies: insufficiently precise definitions of concepts. For example, look at how Chalmers sets up the theory of panpsychism:

I will understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities are conscious: that is, that there is something it is like to be a quark or a photon or a member of some other fundamental physical type.

In defining what it means to call protons conscious he appeals to another concept: what-it-is-likeness, which is left completely undefined under the tacit assumption we know perfectly what it means. But, what exactly does it mean? I have no idea. No one who seriously uses the concept has ever given me a satisfactory answer when I press them to define it without appeal to concepts that are equally mysterious e.g. “awareness”, “experience”, “phenomenal”, etc. At this point my interlocutors will just try to get me to sound “weird” and ask “C’mon Gary, are you seriously denying there is something it is like to drink that beer you’re sipping?” And yes,  I will deny it but only because I am unclear what that term means and don’t wish to say nonsensical things and thumping the table and appealing to crass intuitions is unlikely to convince me that our discussion is on firm ground.

P.W. Bridgman anticipated this problem when he wrote in his 1927 book The Logic of Modern Physics that:

It is a task for experiment to discover whether concepts so defined correspond to anything in nature, and we must always be prepared to find that the concepts correspond to nothing or only partially correspond. In particular, if we examine the definition of absolute time in the light of experiment, we find nothing of absolute time in the light of experiment, we find nothing in nature with such properties.

Bridgman’s diagnosis is that these “empty concepts” are often not defined  in a sufficiently operational manner in order to be amenable to empirical inquiry, the heart and soul of science. If you cannot devise or imagine an experiment that would determine if there is anything in nature corresponding to your proposed theoretical entity, then your theoretical concept is unfruitful to scientific progress in the highest degree. Bridgman cites the following as a good example of a “meaningless” question i.e. a question that cannot be operationally defined so as to be resolvable by means of the physical measurement instruments used in science to conduct experimentation:

Is the sensation which I call blue really the same as that which my neighbor calls blue? Is it possible that a blue object may arouse in him the same sensation a red object does in me and vice versa? 

Bridgman doesn’t actually claim this question is meaningless, but suggests “The reader may amuse himself by finding whether [it has] meaning or not”. My guess would be no.

Bridgman’s work is like a breathe of fresh air after wading through the foggy mires of qualia studies. I am intent on studying Bridgman more, so don’t be surprised to see his name being mentioned on this blog more frequently henceforth.

Quote of the Day – A Paleontology of Consciousness

What we need is a paleontology of consciousness, in which we can discern stratum by stratum how this metaphored world we call subjective consciousness was built up and under what particular social pressures.

~Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, p. 216

A Skeptical Response to that Cat on Youtube “Seeing visual illusions”

This video was brought to my attention last night, and it seems to have gone viral with everyone getting excited that this video demonstrates that cats are fooled by illusions just like we are. A common thing people say is that we can reasonably infer that the cat is “seeing things”. The most glaring problem with this “demonstration” is that the paper is placed on a soft couch. If you notice, as the cat paws the paper, it makes the paper move. This self-induced movement changes not only the lighting patterns on the paper but makes the patterns themselves move, which is obviously attention-grabbing. As the cat bats down one “hill” on the paper, another “hill” pops up which immediately attracts attention. I’ve seen my own cat do this with blank pieces of paper or newspaper. Because it’s impossible from this video alone to determine whether the cat was reacting to self-induced movements or “illusory” movements, it’s completely inconclusive whether or not this cat is really seeing things. A better demonstration would be if the printed illusion was laminated flat against a hard and smooth surface, so the cat would not be able to self-deform the pattern and induce movement. My guess is that the experiments would be similarly inconclusive and difficult to interpret.

I am not aware of any scientific attempt to determine whether cats really see things. This is probably because most level-headed experimentalists understand there is a deep epistemological problem in trying to make inferences about the private mental states of animals that are incapable of giving verbal reports about their experience in terms we can make sense of. A scientist could only ever tentatively make such inferences on the basis of analogy, but since cats can’t talk to us, we must make these analogical inferences about their visual qualia from strictly physical cues as measured by physical measuring instruments. But therein lies the problem: how do we know we made the right inference about “what-it-it’s-like” to be a cat based purely on the read-outs of our physical instruments e.g. electrical recordings of neuronal activity? This problem about an “inferential gap” is similar to familiar philosophical chestnuts such as the “explanatory gap” or “problem of inverted qualia” , which in turn are related to that much older chestnut: the “Problem of Other Minds”.

As far as I know, there is no solution to these problems that doesn’t involve some kind of handwaving appeals to intuition, circular reasoning, or wishful thinking. One thing to do is deny foundationalism and the loosen our standards for what counts as knowledge such that our blind inference about the cat’s visual qualia becomes something more secure and less troublesome when we ask the pesky skeptical questions. There is nothing wrong in principle with inferential reasoning and analogical bootstrapping because we will always run into these sorts of worries when trying to make sense of the unknown in terms of the known through an iterated extension of our properly basic knowledge. But some bootstrapping extensions are more reasonable than others. In terms of Otto Neurath’s analogy of repairing a boat while out at sea, some repairs will keep us afloat but others will sink us. A good extension is when scientists turn their newly calibrated instruments on these unknown domains and they can make sense of the unfamiliar readings in terms that overlap with familiar domains of extension where the experimental results are robust and reliable.

So why can’t we “extend” our knowledge to the unknown domain of visual qualia in nonhuman animals? The crucial disanalogy is that in the natural sciences the successful extension of the concept is done by using reliable instruments that work using known means and provide reliable, replicable data in familiar domains. Moreover, if different versions of the same instrument made by different scientists gave similar data we would have a good reason to be confident that this instrument would be a good “base” upon which to extend our knowledge. But as far as I’m aware, we haven’t got a clue how to build a “qualia-scope”. What materials would such a device be made of? Why those materials and not others? What physical quantities would it be designed to respond to? Why those quantities and not others? What theory can we appeal to to justify a decision to use some quantities over others?

Quote of the Day – The Geometry of Vision

There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception – that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems; one may see it in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning but a universal of nature itself.

~Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations, p. 132

The Refrigerator Light Problem

1.0 The Problem of Phenomenal Consciousness

Phenomenal consciousness has a familiar guise but is frustratingly mysterious. Difficult to define (Goldman, 1993), it involves the sense of there being “something-it-is-like” for an entity to exist. Many theorists have studied phenomenal consciousness and concluded physicalism is false (Chalmers, 1995, 2003; Jackson, 1982; Kripke, 1972; Nagel, 1974). Other theorists defend physicalism on metaphysical grounds but argue there is an unbridgeable “explanatory gap” for phenomenal consciousness (Howell, 2009; Levine, 1983, 2001). “Mysterians” have argued the explanatory gap is intractable because of how the human mind works (McGinn, 1989; 1999). Whatever it is, phenomenal consciousness seems to lurk amidst biological processes but never plays a clearly identifiable causal role that couldn’t be performed nonconsciously (Flanagan & Polger, 1995). After all, some philosophers argue for the possibility of a “zombie” (Chalmers, 1996) physically identical to humans but entirely devoid of phenomenal consciousness.

Debates in the sprawling consciousness literature often come down to differences in intuition concerning the basic question of what consciousness actually is. One question we might have about its nature concerns its pervasiveness. First, is consciousness pervasive throughout our own waking life? Second, is it pervasive throughout the animal kingdom? We might be tempted to answer the first question by introspecting on our experience and hoping that will help us with the second question. However, introspecting on our experience generates a well known puzzle known as the “refrigerator light problem”.

2.0 The Refrigerator Light Problem
2.1 Thick vs thin

The refrigerator light problem is motivated by the question, “Consciousness seems pervasive in our waking life, but just how pervasive is it?” Analogously, we can ask whether the refrigerator light is always on. Naively, it seems like it’s on even when the door is closed, but is it really? The question is easily answered because we can investigate the design and function of refrigerators and conclude that the light is designed to turn off when the door is closed. We could even cut a hole in the door to see for ourselves. However, the functional approach won’t work with phenomenal consciousness because we currently lack a theory of how phenomenal consciousness works or any consensus on what its possible function might be, or whether it could even serve a function.

The refrigerator light problem is the problem of deciding between two mutually exclusive views of consciousness (Schwitzgebel, 2007):

The Thick View: Consciousness seems pervasive because it is pervasive, but we often cannot access or report this consciousness.
The Thin View: Consciousness seems pervasive, but this is just an illusion.

The thick view is straightforward to understand, but the thin view is prima facie counterintuitive. How could we be wrong about how our own consciousness seems to us? Many philosophers argue that a reality/appearance distinction for consciousness itself is nonsensical because consciousness just is how things seem. In other words, if consciousness seems pervasive, then it is pervasive.

On the thin view, however, the fact that it seems like consciousness is pervasive is a result of consciousness generating a false sense of pervasiveness. The thin theorist thinks that anytime we try to become aware of what-it-is-like to enjoy nonintrospective experience, we activate our introspection by inquiring and corrupt the data. The thin theorist is for methodological reasons skeptical about the idea of phenomenal consciousness existing without our ability to access or attend to it. If phenomenal consciousness can exist without any ability to report it then how can psychologists study it if subjects must issue a report that they are conscious? Anytime a subject reports they are conscious, you can’t rule out that it is the reporting doing all the work. The thin theorist challenges us to become aware of these nonintrospective experiences such that we can report on their existence and meaningfully theorize about them.

Philosophers might appeal to special phenomenological properties to falsify the thin view. This won’t work because, in principle, one could develop a thin view to accommodate any of the special phenomenological properties ascribed to phenomenal consciousness such as the pervasive “raw feeling” of redness when introspecting on what-it-is-like to look at a strawberry or the “painfulness” of pain. Thin theory can simply explain away the experience of pervasiveness as an illusion generated by a mechanism that itself isn’t pervasive. Julian Jaynes is famous for defending a strong thin view:

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of…It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that doesn’t have any light shining on it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not. (1976, p. 23)

Thin vs thick views represent the two most common interpretations of the refrigerator light problem, and both seem to account for the data equally well. The problem is that from the perspective of introspection, both theories are indistinguishable. The mere possibility of the thin view being true motivates the methodological dilemma of the refrigerator light problem. How do we rule out thin explanations of thick phenomenology?

2.2 The Difference Introspection Makes

The intractability of the refrigerator light depends on the inevitable influence introspection has on nonintrospective experience. Consider the following case. Jones loves strawberries. He eats one a day at 3:00 pm. All day, Jones looks forward to 3:00 pm because it’s the one time of the day when he can savor the moment and take a break from the hustle-and-bustle of work. When 3:00 pm arrives, he first gazes longingly at the strawberry, his eyes soaking up its patterns of texture and color while his reflective mind contemplates how it will taste. Now Jones reaches out for the strawberry, puts it up to his mouth, and bites into it slowly, savoring and paying attention to the sweetness and delicate fibrosity that is distinctive of strawberries. What’s crucial is that Jones is not just enjoying the strawberry, but introspecting on the fact that he is enjoying the strawberry. That is, he is aware of the strawberry but also meta-aware of his first-order awareness.

Suppose we ask Jones what it’s like for him to enjoy the strawberry when he is not introspecting. The refrigerator light problem will completely stump him. Moreover, suppose we want to ascribe consciousness to Jones (or Jones wants to ascribe it to himself). Should we ascribe it before he starts introspecting or after? Naturally, the answer depends on whether we accept a thin or thick view. According to a thin view, whatever is present in Jones’ experience prior to introspection does not warrant the label “consciousness”. The thin theorist might call this pervasive property “nonconscious qualia” (Rosenthal, 1997), but they reserve the term “consciousness” to describe Jones’ metarepresentational awareness that his perceiving. The thin theorist would agree with William Calvin when he says, in defining “consciousness”, “The term should capture something of our advanced abilities rather than covering the commonplace” (1989, p. 78).

What about nonhuman animals? Whereas a thin theorist would say there is a difference in kind between human and rat consciousnesss, the thick theorist is likely to say that both the rat and Jones share the most important kind of pervasive consciousness. Is this jostling a purely terminological squabble? Kriegel (2009) has argued that the debate is substantial because theorists have different intuitions about the source of mystery for consciousness. The thick theorist thinks the mystery originates with first-order pervasiveness; the thin theorist thinks it originates with second-order awareness. Unfortunately, a squabble over intuitions is just as stale as a terminological dispute.

3.0 The Generality of the Refrigerator Light Problem
3.1 Introducing the Stipulation Strategy

If you are a scientist wanting to tackle the Hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, how would you respond to the refrigerator light problem? If the debate between thin and thick theories is either terminological or based on conflicting intuitions, what do you do? The only strategy I can think of for circumventing the terminological arbitrariness is to embrace it using what I call the stipulation strategy. It works like this. You first agree that we cannot resolve the thin vs thick debate using introspection alone. Unfazed, you simply stipulate some criterion for pointing phenomenal consciousness out such that it can be detected with empirical methods.

Possible criteria are diverse and differ from scientist to scientist. Some theorists stipulate that you will find phenomenal consciousness anytime you can find first-order (FO) perceptual representations of the right kind (Baars, 1997; Block, 1995; Byrne, 1997; Dretske, 1993, 2006; Tye, 1997). This would allow us to find many instances of phenomenal consciousness throughout the biological world, especially in creatures with nervous systems. However, we might have a more restricted criterion that says you will find phenomenal consciousness anytime you have higher-order (HO) thoughts/perceptions (Gennaro, 2004; Lycan, 1997; Rosenthal, 2005), restricting the instantiations of phenomenal consciousness to mammals or maybe even primates depending on your understanding of higher-order cognition. Or, more controversially, you might have a panpsychist stipulation criterion that makes it possible to point out phenomenal consciousness in the inorganic world.

Once we understand how the stipulation strategy works, the significance of any possible reductive explanation becomes trivialized qua explanation of phenomenal consciousness. To apply this result to contemporary views, I will start with FO theory, apply the same argument to HO theory, and then discuss the more counterintuitive (but equally plausible) theory of panpsychism.

3.2 The First-order Gambit

FO theorists deny the transitivity principle and claim one does not need to be meta-aware in order for there to be something-it-is-like to exist. The idea is that we can be in genuine conscious states but completely unaware of being in them. That is, FO theorists think there can be something-it-is-like for S to exist without S being aware of what-it-is-like for S to exist, a possibility HO theorists think absurd if not downright incoherent because the phrase “for S” suggests meta-awareness.

FO approaches are characterized by their use of perceptual awareness as the stipulation criterion for consciousness. A representative example is Dretske, who says “Seeing, hearing, and smelling x are ways of being conscious of x. Seeing a tree, smelling a rose, and feeling a wrinkle is to be (perceptually) aware (conscious) of the tree, the rose, and the wrinkle” (1993, p. 265). Dretske argues that once you understand what consciousness is (perceptual awareness), you will realize that one can be pervasively conscious without being meta-aware that you are conscious.

However, there is a serious problem with trying to reconcile the implications of theoretical stipulation criteria with common intuitions about which creatures are conscious. The problem with using perceptual awareness as our criterion is that it casts its net widely, perhaps too widely if you think phenomenality is only realized in nervous systems. Since many FO theorists think that if we are going to have a scientific explanation of phenomenal consciousness at all it must be a neural explanation (Block, 2007; Koch, 2004) they will want to avoid ascribing consciousness to nonneural organisms. However, if we stipulate that a bat has phenomenal consciousness in virtue of its capacity for perceptual awareness, I see no principled way of looking at the phylogenetic timeline and marking the evolution of neural systems as the origin of perceptual awareness.

To see why, consider chemotaxis in unicellular bacteria (Kirby, 2009; Van Haastert & Devreotes, 2004). Recently chemotaxis has been modeled using informatic or computational theory rather than classical mechanistic biology (Bourret & Stock, 2002; Bray, 1995; Danchin, 2009; Shapiro, 2007). A simple demonstration of chemotaxis would occur if you stuck a bacterium in a petri dish that had a small concentration of sugar on one side. The bacterium would be able to intelligently discriminate the sugar side from the non-sugar side and regulate its swimming behavior to move upstream the gradient. Naturally we assume the bacterium is able to perceive the presence of sugar and respond appropriately. On this simplistic notion of perceiving, perceiving a stimulus is, roughly speaking, a matter of valenced behavioral discrimination of that stimulus. By valenced, I mean that the stimuli are valued as either attractive or aversive with respect to the goals of the organism (in this case, survival and homeostasis). If the bacterium simply moved around randomly when placed in a sugar gradient such that the sugar had no particular attractive or aversive force, we might conclude that the bacterium is not capable of perceiving sugar, or that sugar is not ecologically relevant to the goals of the organism. But if the bacterium always moved upstream of the sugar gradient, it is natural to say that the bacterium is capable of perceiving the presence of sugar. Likewise, if there were a toxin placed in the petri dish, we would expect this to be valenced as aversive and the bacteria would react appropriately by avoiding it, with appropriateness understood in terms of the goal of survival

Described in this minimal way, perceptual awareness in its most basic form does not seem so special that only creatures with nerve cells are capable of it. Someone might object that this is not a case of genuine perceptual awareness because there is nothing-it-is-like for the bacterium to sense the sugar or that its goals are not genuine goals. But how do we actually know this? How could we know this? For all we know, there is something-it-is-like for the bacterium to perceive the sugar. If we use perceptual awareness as our stipulation criterion, then we are fully justified in ascribing consciousness to even unicellulars.

Furthermore, it is misleading to say bacteria only respond to “proximal” stimulation, and therefore are not truly perceiving. Proximal stimulation implies an implausible “snapshot” picture of stimulation where the stimulation happens instantaneously at a receptor surface. But if stimuli can have a spatial (adjacent) component why can they not also have a temporal (successive) component? As J.J. Gibson put it, “Transformations of pattern are just as [biologically] stimulating as patterns are” (Gibson, 1966). And this is what researchers studying chemotaxis actually find: “for optimal chemotactic sensitivity [cells] combine spatial and temporal information” (Van Haastert & Devreotes, 2004, p. 626). The distinction between proximal stimulation and distal perception rests on a misunderstanding of what actually stimulates organisms.

Interestingly, the FO gambit offers resources for responding to the zombie problem. Since we have independent reasons to think bacteria are entirely physical creatures, if perceptual awareness is used as a stipulation criterion then the idea of zombie bacteria is inconceivable. Because bacterial perception is biochemical in nature, a perfect physical duplicate of a bacteria would satisfy the stipulation criterion we apply to creatures in the actual world. The problem, however, is that we have no compelling reason to choose FO stipulation criteria over any other, including HO criteria.

3.3 The Higher-order Gambit

HO theories are reductive and emphasize some kind of metacognitive representation as a criterion for ascribing phenomenal consciousness to a creature (e.g. awareness that you are aware). These HO representations are postulated in order to capture the “transitivity principle” (Rosenthal, 1997), which says that a conscious state is a state whose subject is, in some way, aware of being in it. A controversial corollary of the transitivity principle is that there are some genuinely qualitative mental states that are nonconscious e.g. nonconscious pain.
Neurologically motivated HO theories like Baar’s Global Workspace model (1988; 1997) and Dehaene’s Global Neuronal Workspace model (Dehaene et al., 2006; Dehaene, Kerszberg, & Changeux, 1998; 2001; Gong et al., 2009) have had great empirical success but they are deeply unsatisfying as explanations of phenomenal consciousness. HO theory can explain our ability to report on or monitor our experiences, but many philosophers wonder how it could provide an explanation for phenomenal consciousness (Chalmers, 1995). Ambitious HO theorists reply by insisting they do in fact have an explanation of how phenomenal consciousness arises from nonconscious mental states.

However, ambitious HO approaches suffer from the same problem of arbitrariness that FO approaches did. In order decide between FO and HO stipulation criteria we need to first decide on either a thick or thin interpretation of the refrigerator light problem. Since introspection is no help, we are forced to use the stipulation strategy. But why choose a HO stipulation strategy over a FO one? If everyone had the same intuitions concerning which creatures were conscious we could generate stipulation criteria that perfectly match these intuitions. The problem is that theorists have different intuitions concerning what creatures (beside themselves) are in fact conscious. Surprisingly, some theorists might go beyond the biological world altogether and claim inorganic entities are conscious.

3.4 The Panpsychist Gambit

A more radical stipulation strategy is possible. If antiphysicalist arguments suggest that neurons and biology have nothing to do with phenomenal consciousness, we might think that phenomenal consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality. On this view, matter itself is intrinsically experiential. Another idea is that phenomenality is necessitated by an even more fundamental property, called a protophenomenal property (Chalmers, 2003).

Panpsychism is a less popular stipulation gambit, but at least one prominent scientist has recently used a stipulation criterion that leads to panpsychism (although he downplays this result). Guilio Tononi (2008) proposes integrated information as a promising stipulation criterion. The intellectual weight of the theory rests on a thought experiment involving a photodiode. A photodiode discriminates between light and no light. But does the photodiode see the light? Does it experience the light? Most people would think no. But the photodiode does integrate information (1 bit to be precise) and therefore, according to the theory of integrated information, has some experience, however dim. Whatever theoretical or practical benefits come with accepting the theory of integrated information, when it comes to the Hard problem of phenomenal consciousness we are left scratching our heads as to why integrated information is the best criterion for picking out phenomenal consciousness. Given the criterion leads to ascriptions of phenomenality to a photodiode, many theorists will take this as good reason for thinking the criterion itself is wrong given their pretheoretical intuitions about what entities are phenomenally conscious. But as we have learned, intuitions are diverse as they are unreliable.

Conclusion

Unable to define phenomenal consciousness, theorists are tempted to use their introspection to “point out” the phenomenon. The refrigerator light problem is motivated by the problem of deciding between thin and thick views of your own phenomenal consciousness using introspection alone. If introspection is supposed to help us understand what phenomenal consciousness is, and the refrigerator light problem prevents introspection from deciding between thin and thick views, then we need some other methodological procedure. The only option available is the stipulation strategy whereby we arbitrarily stipulate a criterion for pointing it out e.g. integrated information, or higher-order thoughts. The problem is that any proposed stipulation criterion is just as plausible as any other given we lack a pretheoretical consensus on basic questions such as the function of phenomenal consciousness. Our only hope is to push for the standardization of stipulation criteria.

p.s. If anyone wants the full reference for a citation, just ask.

New paper (comments and criticism welcome): Consciousness and the Indeterminacy of Introspection

Consciousness and the Indeterminacy of Introspection

This is the first draft of my qualifying paper for Wash U. I got a revise and resubmit, so I am looking for feedback on how I can improve. It was already suggested to me that I am trying to do two things in the paper: (1) create a narrow argument that has results for higher-order theorists in particular and (2) create a broad argument that has results for anyone trying to reductively explain nonintrospective phenomenal consciousness. I was told I should pick which path to take. Right now I am leaning towards the broad argument since it is much more interesting (and potentially significant)  and it would allow me to engage more with panpsychist views (which I only talk about in footnotes), but I’d be interested in hearing what other people thought. Here’s the abstract (which will have to change once I revise the paper but it gives you a general sense of what I am doing in the paper):

“Since it is widely recognized to be difficult to define phenomenal consciousness, theorists might use introspection to “point” to the phenomenon in order to fix upon what most needs explaining. However, there is a well-known methodological problem built into introspection – the “refrigerator light problem” – that prevents us from gaining introspective access to what we most want to explain in some theories of consciousness. To deal with this, some theorists simply stipulate criteria for pointing out the phenomenon that needs explanation. However, I argue that the most common stipulation strategies pose problems for Higher-order theories of phenomenal consciousness because they inevitably cast their net wide in ascribing phenomenal consciousness to nonhuman organisms. If I am right, then there are repercussions for how we understand the phenomenon that needs explanation when setting up the problem of consciousness.”

Book notice: William Calvin's The Cerebral Symphony

William Calvin, otherwise known as “That guy who talks about throwing a lot”, is one of my favorite popularizers of neuroscience. The Cerebral Symphony (1989) is an attempt to explain what it is that makes human consciousness so special. One of my favorite things about Calvin’s approach to human consciousness is that, in his view, “The term should capture something of our advanced abilities rather than covering the commonplace” (p. 78). In other words, the primary explanandum of consciousness studies is not the “sensory qualia” we share with nonhuman animals, but rather, our ability for abstract thought, imagination, and “mental time travel”. That is, Calvin is trying to explain the more “narratological” aspects of consciousness (to borrow a term from Julian Jaynes, who Calvin cites approvingly on this issue) as opposed to the more sensorimotor aspects. However, being a Darwinian, Calvin doesn’t want to necessarily say that capacities that make humans able to narrate and imagine sprung out of evolutionary thin air, so perhaps there are some functional overlaps with other primate species.

The central explanatory tool of the book is what Calvin calls a “Darwin Machine”, which is a variant of the “neural darwinism” approach to brain function. Calvin’s idea goes something like this: suppose the evolution of the ability of humans to throw (and thus hunt more efficiently) necessitated the development of a “neural sequencer” that plans linear motor patterns. Now imagine you have a massive array of sequencers operating in parallel but generating different “variations on a theme”. Calvin’s idea is that consciousness is the sequence that best survives based on various selection criteria that change depending on the task at hand. This is in fact very similar to Dennett’s notion of “multiple drafts” or “fame in the brain”, and I think I first heard of Calvin’s book in Dennett’s 1991 book Consciousness Explained. To me it sounds like pretty much the same theory, which limits the originality of Dennett’s theoretical framework (supposing that Calvin came up with the idea first). Overall, The Cerebral Symphony is an interesting and theoretically insightful account of human consciousness that is solidly grounded in Darwinian thinking (perhaps to a fault). The book is also interspersed with sociological commentary on the scientific community at Woods Hole in Cape Cod Massachusetts, which makes for relatively easy reading.