Introspection and Acquaintance

How reliable is knowledge gained through introspection? On the one hand, we have been learning that knowledge gained through introspection is surprisingly fallible. A philosopher who has worked on bringing this fact to light is Eric Schwitzgebel. In this paper, among others, he has argued that,based on the evidence, knowledge gained from introspection is less reliable than knowledge gained in other ways. He now has a book out called Perplexities of Consciousness which looks worth reading -- see reviews here and here.

On the other hand, perhaps there is still something special about knowledge gained via introspection. Schwitzgebel participated in a debate on introspection with Brie Gertler last fall on Philosophy TV. In a draft of a forthcoming paper called "Renewed Acquaintance" (Word doc), Gertler defends a view called the acquaintance approach to introspective knowledge of phenomenal qualities (a book is forthcoming titled Self-Knowledge).

2008-2009 GPPC Program

Here's a link to the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium's program for this year (the GPPC is a cooperative effort by 15 area universities to sponsor philosophy conferences and other programs). There is also a regional calendar which includes some other events taking place at member schools - the great majority are open to the public.

I'm looking forward in particular to the November 22 event at Swarthmore, "New Approaches to the Mind/Body Problem," which will feature talks from the phenomenological perpective on mind from Barnard College's Taylor Carman and Oregon's Mark Johnson.

More About Attention and Consciousness

A new paper by Christopher Mole, called simply “Attention and Consciousness”, is another careful analysis which attempts to deflate overly ambitious conclusions made by other authors when interpreting results in experimental psychology. (The online version is a draft that conforms closely to the version published in the latest Journal of Consciousness Studies).

Some researchers have used experimental evidence to argue that attention is necessary for consciousness (inattentional blindness studies). Others argue from different results (blindsight research) for the conclusion that consciousness is not necessary for attention. In opposition to both these views, Mole outlines the common sense account of the relation between attention and consciousness, which holds that attention requires consciousness (not the other way around), and one is conscious of more than that to which one attends. He argues that this common sense view is not threatened by the experimental evidence.

What makes this tricky is that it certainly is true that some instances and forms of consciousness do require attention. But nonetheless it is wrong to think this fact leads to a conclusion that attention is generally required for consciousness, is coextensive with it, or could exist without it.

One part of Mole’s paper discussing such a form of consciousness which appears to require attention I found interesting in light of the previous discussion in the post about Jason Ford’s paper. When speaking of the performance of subjects in an inattentional blindness study, Mole proposes that attention is required for the subject to deploy conceptual analysis of the experience in order to respond correctly to an experimenter’s question. This suggestion would support the contention that structured conceptual judgments about one’s experience (the kind which may introduce fallibility) are a derived outgrowth of a more extensive “raw” experience. (Note Mole doesn’t discuss this fallibility issue himself in this paper).

There is a good deal of interesting discussion in the paper. I’m sympathetic to Mole’s deflationary interpretations of some of these studies.

The Periphery is the Periphery

A philosopher named Jason Ford offers a dose of sensible phenomenology in a well written article called “Attention and the New Sceptics” which appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (unfortunately not free online). The subject is the proper interpretation of the various interesting studies on inattentional blindness and change blindness.

In various ways these studies show that our ability to make judgments about phenomena on the periphery when attention is elsewhere is poor relative to our ex ante expectations. (Think of the research using the now famous video of people passing a ball among themselves and the inability of most people to detect the entrance of a gorilla when asked to focus on counting passes). Ford’s article discusses the work of several philosophers who take these results as evidence for a broader reaching skepticism about the reliability of consciousness. They think they can argue we don’t have the conscious experience we think we do. Ford argues that they are mistaken in arguing that such skepticism is warranted by the research. Careful analysis of focal and peripheral perception shows that they are fundamentally different in character when it comes to their availability for detailed judgment and comparisons. It is a mistake to hold the periphery to the same standard as the focus of attention: “Being vague and nebulous just is the way the periphery registers in consciousness”.

Once this is acknowledged, one cannot argue from these results that we don’t have the conscious experience we think we have. It remains a viable assertion that when we claim we know what it is like to experience what we’re focused on, we are not in error.

By the way, in the course of the article, Ford does a good job reminding us what such a claim of infallibility is and is not. The claim says nothing about the following ways we can be mistaken (p.62):

"We can be mistaken about the proximate causes of our experience… We can be mistaken about how our biology produces experience…We can make mistaken categorical judgments when we try to classify our conscious experiences…Our memories are fallible."

To this list, he says, we can add that we need to be very careful when making claims about the content of the periphery of attention. But skepticism about our knowing what our own experience is like is unfounded.

Endnote: it’s been awhile since I’ve written on phenomenology – here’s the list of posts with that label. These are mostly focused on the key insight of continental thinkers: analysis of everyday lived experience (now often called primary or core consciousness ) offers the best hope for insights in the philosophy of mind. The other side of this coin is that higher-order reflective self-consciousness (a derivative late-comer to evolution), while central in our lives, can give a misleading picture of how experience fits into the natural world.

Sean Kelly Blog

{UPDATE 24 March 2008: please note this blog I linked to below never really got going. Updated the link to Kelly's homepage at his new Harvard digs.}

Now I see that philosopher and phenomenologist Sean Kelly has a blog. It's focus is on Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception, of which Kelly is undertaking a new translation. I mentioned Kelly's work in admiring fashion in old posts here ,here, and finally here.

Dreyfus-in-the-World

A philosopher I like is Hubert Dreyfus, the existentialism and phenomenology scholar. Years ago I got more out of Heidegger by virtue of reading his commentary volume Being-in-the-World. Dreyfus is famous for his criticism of artificial intelligence, especially in the early days when many thought HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey might soon become a reality! His What Computers Can’t Do from 1972 turned out to be prescient when the early versions of AI (now called “good old-fashioned AI” or GOFAI) started hitting tough obstacles.

I just finished reading Dreyfus’ APA Pacific Division Presidential Address, which was called “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise.”

When working on the foundations of knowledge and many other problems, many assume (explicitly or implicitly) that our conceptual thinking facility is the primary dimension of mind. Dreyfus argues that our capacity for detached conceptual thinking rests on top of (is derived from) our non-conceptual embodied engagement with our environment.

The fundamental core of mind is not detached, deliberate, rational, or conceptual; it is our facility for skillful coping with the world. This is a key insight derived from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. It is also consistent with an evolutionary perspective on the human mind: after all, this core of skillful coping is what we share with animals and infants. What differentiates the mature human mind is that “we can transform our unthinking non-conceptual engagement, and thereby encounter new, thinkable, structures.” Accounting for this transformation is the research project recommended by Dreyfus.

I have liked this line of argument, and think Dreyfus’ perspective can serve to make the problems of perception and knowledge more tractable, reducing a bit the seemingly huge divide between the mental realm and the rest of the world.

Desert Phenomenology

{UPDATE 24 March 2008: Please note the 'Desert Landscape' blog is defunct and the links were broken. A shame}

Uriah Kriegel at Desert Landscapes has had a number of interesting recent posts on phenomenological topics. The most recent discusses Alva Noe and Sean Kelly's take on perceptual constancies, which I discussed in previous posts (here and here). He leans toward Kelly's view as I did.

Perception Grounded in Action

This new paper by Alva Noë describes his action-oriented approach to perception. Interestingly, he discusses the “constancies” of perception quite a bit and disagrees with Sean Kelly’s account (discussed here) on some points. Whereas Kelly stresses two modes of perceptual attitude (the engaged and the detached), Noë views both ways of perceiving an object (with and without constancy) to be concurrent – a “two-dimensional” experience. I tend to prefer Kelly’s take on this. But much more important than these differences is what I take to be the two philosophers’ broad agreement on the main way to approach the problem of perception: that is, perception is grounded in bodily engagement with the world.

According to Noë, one’s relation to perceived elements of the environment is essentially sensori-motor. Even in the case of vision (which somewhat unfortunately dominates discussion of perception), our perception of objects is shaped by how we could move and probe the object in its environmental context. This is how we perceive the missing part of the object which is partly obscured behind a picket fence, and how we view the penny to be round despite its being turned at an angle which presents an elliptical image to the retina.

This approach is the best way to address the long-standing philosophical “problem of perception” discussed in this SEP article recently posted. Historically, different approaches to the problem suffered from explicitly or implicitly viewing perceptions as representations or other entities in the mind. Instead we should view perception as actually based on direct interaction with the world. How does this address the phenomena of illusion and hallucination? If perception is direct contact with the external world, how are these possible? Well, through other causes impacting our body/brain, it becomes as if we have the perception. But if we cut out the middle-man of sense-data or representations, the existence of illusions or hallucinations shouldn’t lead to radical skepticism about the reliability of normal perception.

The Limits of Introspection

In the talk I mentioned in my recent post, Sean Kelly discussed the ways one might account for the “constancies” in perception. This refers to the phenomenon whereby the color, size, and/or shape of an object is perceived to be the “same” from different perspectives (distance from object, angle, lighting), even as the details of the image presented to our retinas shift. An example used in the talk was a penny turned at an angle: while presenting an elliptical image, we still perceive it as round.

The key to the discussion was that to correctly characterize our perception in these cases one must distinguish between two modes of perceptual attitude which Kelly called the engaged and the detached. The engaged mode is our mode the majority of the time, when we are immersed in our activities. This mode, shaped by evolution and early development, is one where perceptions are guided (essentially automatically) in ways which serve our bodily goals (“motor-intentionality”). The detached mode describes the introspective investigation of our perceptions we undertake when we “step back” and reflect on a phenomenon.

The engaged mode is the one in which the “constancies” properly reside. In contrast, an account of perception which explicitly or implicitly makes use of the detached mode leads to misleading accounts of the phenomenon.

I’ve said in the past that investigations of consciousness which assume the primacy of what I’ve called the reflective or introspective mode of self-consciousness can be flawed. This introspective capability (which is of recent historical vintage and almost surely unique to humans) is part of our highest cognitive skill set, and yet, when applied to our own conscious experience, can obscure as well as illuminate the details of that experience.

This is discussed in detail in this SEP entry, “Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness”. The authors outline a distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness with which I concur.

One place these limits come into play is in Benjamin Libet’s work on the temporal dimension of conscious experience. The experiment I’m thinking of is the one where subjects are asked to flick their wrists at a time of their choosing. Libet timed the wrist action and compared it to both a measured “readiness potential” detected in the motor cortex of the brain as well as the subjects’ own reports on when they experienced the desire to perform the action. Famously, the readiness potential preceded the reported time of experienced volition by an average of 0.5 seconds. Now, I think much of the commentary on this experiment suffered from a simplistic separation of the subjects’ internal states into the unconscious (the readiness potential) and the conscious (the report). By reporting on the experience, the subject had to bring the experience into reflective self-consciousness. This probably introduced a delay beyond what would be the case in the mode of pre-reflective self-consciousness (which couldn’t directly be measured in this setup). Nothing I’ve said means the experimental findings are not interesting and meaningful, but just that it may tell us more about the limits of the reflective mode of self-consciousness than it does about the divide between the conscious and the unconscious.

One final note I find interesting: the phenomenological account of self-consciousness in the SEP article I noted above dovetails nicely with the account described in this previous post, which was derived within the context of analytic philosophy.

Meet M. Merleau-Ponty

I attended a talk at Penn by Sean Kelly, who was visiting from Princeton. He is a philosopher working on (among other things) issues in perceptual experience and how they relate to bodily action. In a follow-up, I intend to post a comment on the content of the paper he presented, but here I want to relate a fairly unique experience I had at the talk.

About halfway through, I had a strange “rush” of some combination of relief and gratitude as Kelly began to relate his views to Merleau-Ponty and read quotes from the Phenomenology of Perception. Now, I hadn’t reviewed Kelly’s work prior to the talk – if I had, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But here is a young philosopher, working comfortably within up-to-date analytic philosophy (and keeping up with developments in cognitive science), who is making use of expertise on Merleau-Ponty and Continental phenomenology more broadly. This struck me as a rare and noteworthy thing.

In an earlier phase of my interest in philosophy, I focused on Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. I was interested in the way that these philosophers took on the subject-object divide which runs through the traditional problems in philosophy. Then, during the 1990’s, spurred by the expansion of new books and articles on the subject of consciousness, I began to go back and start finding and reading some of the relevant works in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of mind and related areas.

Obviously, many others have noted the divide between the analytic and Continental traditions, and I’m not knowledgeable enough to do justice to the topic, but the depth of separation always seemed to me to be unfortunate. A recent issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (vol.11 No.10-11, 2004) focused on work inspired by the Continental tradition. In an editorial introduction, it was suggested that recent work in consciousness which passed over this tradition was guilty of “re-invention of the wheel”. Maybe so.

Self-Consciousness

{UPDATE 24 March 2008: fixed some links, but unfortunately the Desert Landscape blog referenced below is defunct and the archives unavailable}

I had been thinking that self-consciousness was a subset of all consciousness. This means that one could have an experience without it being reflected on and brought to self-consciousness.

Uriah Kriegel is a philosopher at the University of Arizona and is associate director of the Center for Consciousness Studies there. He is also the lead contributor to the Desert Landscapes group philosophy blog at Arizona. He argues that all consciousness depends on self-consciousness (defined a certain way). Having read the arguments, I believe he is right to say that phenomenal conscious experiences necessarily have what he calls a subjective character, that is, they exist for a particular subject. While this isn’t necessarily an earth-shaking conclusion, I think it is important to the project of identifying the role consciousness plays in us (and potentially elsewhere in nature).

To do full justice to Kriegel’s arguments, one must read his papers and attend to his careful definition of terms (see this one, which presents the thesis, then this one, which compares the conclusions to those of Ned Block and presents the implications for consciousness studies). Nevertheless, I’ll go ahead and paraphrase the core of the argument here and then discuss some implications.

While we can easily distinguish between experiences which are the focus of our attention or reflection, and others in the background which are not in focus, it would be incorrect to say we aren’t self-consciously experiencing the latter as well. This is meant in the sense that we are at least implicitly or peripherally aware that the experience belongs to us. It has the property of being a first-person experience. If self-consciousness is defined in this limited sense, then it can be argued that all (normal) forms of consciousness depend on self-consciousness.

The idea is that we shouldn’t let our intimate acquaintance with the human ability to introspect and become highly reflective to lead us to conceptually divorce consciousness from self-consciousness. Let me now discuss some implications for the ideas I’ve been exploring in this blog.

Having concluded from analysis of the mind/body problem that subjective experience is a fundamental component of the natural world, a central problem is to then explain how it ends up manifesting itself as human phenomenal consciousness. Here I would usually say that the human organism, through its functional organization, somehow leverages the experiential quality inherent in nature to produce our human experience. Despite the fact that the building blocks of experience are ubiquitous in nature, we shouldn’t expect everything to have a human-like mind: the full-bore version depends (somehow) on the complex organization of our bodies and brains.

In this account, the experiential quality is still kind of a passive free rider. It depends on functional organization, but no particular functional or causal role is given to it. More recently I have been focusing on the question of what work subjective experience performs in nature. This is because I’ve come to view the idea that subjective experience is epiphenomenal to be nearly as absurd as the idea that it doesn’t exist at all (explicitly or implicitly defended by some philosophers).

The discussion of self-consciousness above is helpful because it points back to the kinds of role experience might play in a system like the human brain. This role probably involves binding, integration, and/or coordination of subsidiary interactions. The idea to explore in the brain and more generally, is this: complex dynamic systems resist reductionist explanations; a binding or coordinating function over and above the effective causes of the component parts is necessary to explain them. This additional quality is what manifests itself in the first person as experience.

Feelings

The first two definitions of “feelings” in my dictionary are 1. The sensation involving perception by touch and 2. An affective state of consciousness, such as that resulting from emotions, sentiments, or desires.

Considering these two definitions of feelings prompts these thoughts about human consciousness and its relation to the rest of the natural world.

1. Vision is the dominant sense of modern humans. The largest part of the sensory processing portion of the brain is devoted to sight, and this part of the brain has been the most studied. And it seems that when philosophers throughout history have tried to develop their models of how humans interact with the world and gain knowledge, they usually have vision at the forefront of their thinking.

An emphasis on vision biases one toward a passive conception of the human mind. We are seen as a vessel waiting to be stimulated by the influx of data from the world. The problem then becomes, how do we then process that data? How does that input get translated into output by cognitive processing? This way of approaching the study of human consciousness and brain functioning has been dominant.

All of our attributes arose through evolution. The prototypes and predecessors to our human-style consciousness can be found in our evolutionary past. However, in terms of evolution, it is the sense of touch which is primordial.

While lacking our nervous system, it seems clear that early organisms knew the world by touching it. They sensed opportunities for food, they felt out where the warmth of the sun was stronger, they sensed the possibility of danger. Touch is an active sense. One reaches out to the world: by touching you change the world and you change yourself.

I think progress in understanding human consciousness benefits from taking on the perspective given by this primordial sense of touch. This is the view of humans as active agents in the world, co-evolving with our environment. Contemplative, reflective, passive self-consciousness is newer on the evolutionary scene and while this mode is a crucial part of who we are, it obscures our more fundamental nature.

2. A few years ago, I read a book which put forth a model of how human consciousness worked. When I got to the end, I realized the author had never mentioned emotions. Feelings, emotions, affect -- these are integrated throughout human consciousness. The idea that the “higher” analytic cognitive functions are completely separate from emotions is a misconception. More recent accounts of the human mind, such as those found in the books of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, show that emotion cannot be separated without degrading other cognitive functions.

Emotions are indeed markers of our evolutionary past as well as a crucial part of our present. We say that animals have instincts rather than higher thought processes. Many would deny that animals have any consciousness as we think of it in humans. Well, I am confident animals experience feelings as they interact with their environment. As we go down the scale to simpler or more primitive organisms, presumably feelings get simpler and more primitive.

And here the two definitions of feelings appear to me to converge. When the first primitive organisms felt their environment, they experienced a feeling.

Human subjective experience, at its core, is a complex of feelings which arise through our interaction with the world.

The Grounding of Human Knowledge

In parallel with the ancient debates over the mind/body dilemma I discussed in my post on consciousness, philosophers have dwelled over the centuries on problems related to what we humans can know about the world (epistemology). For instance, when we see an object in the world, do we know the thing itself, or do we only experience a sense perception (an “appearance”) which falls short of direct knowledge? And if this sense perception is really a phenomenon of our own mind, can we know anything at all outside our minds? Are we cut off from knowing the world as it is truly is in itself? Can we ever know Truth (with a capital “T”)?

Many think our ability to know about the world is so compromised -- both by the limitations of our senses as well as by our many cultural biases and other subjective distortions -- that at the end of the day there is no access to “real” truth. I think these sort of views are a result of a misguided notion about what constitutes truth. My argument tracks the path of my last two posts about consciousness in the universe and its evolutionary development in us. Of course it is true that we cannot know the world from a god-like perspective originating outside the world. We experience the world from within the world. Furthermore we do experience things in a particular way grounded in our evolutionary heritage. But the knowledge gained from this perspective is authentic. Since we are ultimately grounded in the most fundamental stuff of the universe, our perspective is as legitimate as it gets.

Now it is the case that we have a fairly idiosyncratic view of the universe – handed down to us through evolution. For instance we only can see the electro-magnetic spectrum in certain wavelengths. This follows from the fact that, given the kind of light that comes from our sun, seeing those wavelengths gave us a good practical ability to survive and reproduce. All of the details of human capabilities are a product of natural selection, and as such can be considered at least partly arbitrary in how they turned out. But the knowledge we gain as we move through our lives is true knowledge.

Taking evolution very seriously again is an important part of this argument. I think philosophers sometimes got off track both on the mind/body and knowledge problems by stressing insights gained from contemplative or meditative thinking. Our heritage is one of doing, acting, and surviving. These modes of being have been around a lot longer than reflective self-consciousness. Post-modernist thinking seems to miss this point. An undue focus on language can also lead one astray. As important as language is to human cognition today, the roots of our knowledge and our consciousness pre-date language. Stressing the conception of ourselves as a seamless part of the natural world rather focusing on what separates us from nature is a perspective that helps overcome much confusion.