I just read an interesting post on the navigation between realism (objectivism) and relativism/nihilism on DuckRabbit. It inspired me to offer my brief take on these issues below.
Human beings have evolved as natural systems embedded in the larger network which is the world. Our view of the world is a view from the inside. There can be no strictly objective truth as if from a standpoint outside the world. Insistence on such a standard leads to confusion. However, our participation in the world's activity provides a solid ground for knowledge and for value. We are not separate from the world, our experience is directly of the world. There is no basis for nihilism.
Also, there is no basis for extreme forms of relativism: human beings are extremely homogeneous with regard to their biology, and their position in space and time. There is therefore an underlying inter-subjective truth we share with one another. Science is based on a methodology constructed to reach this authentic intersubjective agreement. In other spheres of life, like the moral, it is much more complex and difficult, but there is no reason we can't have increasing success as our global culture evolves.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Intelligent Design Creeping Closer to Home
Unfortunately, the politically motivated efforts to get "Intelligent Design" into our schools comes ever closer to home. First, the Dover school district (near York) and now a bill in committee in the PA state legislature. I have just sent off a letter to my state representative. Details on this post on Tea Leaves (which I found via Pharyngula).
Friday, April 01, 2005
Animal Consciousness
The mind/body debate in philosophy got started well before evolutionary theory came on the scene (Descartes evidently thought animals were automata). Debates about the nature of consciousess of course center on the human sort, since that is the one we’re directly acquainted with. But, given we now better understand our close relationship with our non-verbal animal cousins, I am persuaded that animals have first-person experiences. In particular, feelings and emotions appear to be markers of old evolutionary imperatives (fight, flee, eat, etc.), which are likely shared widely in the animal kingdom.
If so, then the “hard problem” of consciousness faces a challenge of accounting for first-person experience in natural systems more broadly than just the human case; the issue can be seen as distinct from others relating to specifically human intelligence and language.
We know about other human minds by analogy with our own. To inform us about animal minds, we would proceed by looking at the neuro-biological correlates of human consciousness, and seeing which have close analogues in the neural structures of animals and which don't. This, of course, can be supplemented by behavioral and other evidence.
The journal Consciousess and Cognition has a new special issue on the Neurobiology of Animal Consciousness. Just what the doctor ordered! Here's the abstract of the introductory article by Bernard Baars:
In humans, conscious perception and cognition depends upon the thalamocortical (T-C) complex, which supports perception, explicit cognition, memory, language, planning, and strategic control. When parts of the T-C system are damaged or stimulated, corresponding effects are found on conscious contents and state, as assessed by reliable reports. In contrast, large regions like cerebellum and basal ganglia can be damaged without affecting conscious cognition directly. Functional brain recordings also show robust activity differences in cortex between experimentally matched conscious and unconscious events. This basic anatomy and physiology is highly conserved in mammals and perhaps ancestral reptiles. While language is absent in other species, homologies in perception, memory, and motor cortex suggest that consciousness of one kind or another may be biologically fundamental and phylogenetically ancient. In humans we infer subjective experiences from behavioral and brain evidence. This evidence is quite similar in other mammals and perhaps some non-mammalian species. On the weight of the biological evidence, therefore, subjectivity may be conserved in species with human-like brains and behavior.
The evidence for human-like subjective experience seems compelling for mammals; less so for non-mammals, but less of the relevant research has been done on those.
If so, then the “hard problem” of consciousness faces a challenge of accounting for first-person experience in natural systems more broadly than just the human case; the issue can be seen as distinct from others relating to specifically human intelligence and language.
We know about other human minds by analogy with our own. To inform us about animal minds, we would proceed by looking at the neuro-biological correlates of human consciousness, and seeing which have close analogues in the neural structures of animals and which don't. This, of course, can be supplemented by behavioral and other evidence.
The journal Consciousess and Cognition has a new special issue on the Neurobiology of Animal Consciousness. Just what the doctor ordered! Here's the abstract of the introductory article by Bernard Baars:
In humans, conscious perception and cognition depends upon the thalamocortical (T-C) complex, which supports perception, explicit cognition, memory, language, planning, and strategic control. When parts of the T-C system are damaged or stimulated, corresponding effects are found on conscious contents and state, as assessed by reliable reports. In contrast, large regions like cerebellum and basal ganglia can be damaged without affecting conscious cognition directly. Functional brain recordings also show robust activity differences in cortex between experimentally matched conscious and unconscious events. This basic anatomy and physiology is highly conserved in mammals and perhaps ancestral reptiles. While language is absent in other species, homologies in perception, memory, and motor cortex suggest that consciousness of one kind or another may be biologically fundamental and phylogenetically ancient. In humans we infer subjective experiences from behavioral and brain evidence. This evidence is quite similar in other mammals and perhaps some non-mammalian species. On the weight of the biological evidence, therefore, subjectivity may be conserved in species with human-like brains and behavior.
The evidence for human-like subjective experience seems compelling for mammals; less so for non-mammals, but less of the relevant research has been done on those.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Wanted: New Theory of Causality
Unacknowledged problems with the concept of causation plague philosophical debates. Take, for instance, the issue of the causal closure of the physical world. This seems to require that first person experience must be either epiphenomenal (no causal impact) or, if we insist it can cause, we are left with interactionist dualism (which fails because it has no plausible way to connect the physical and non-physical worlds).
This is the heart of the free/will determinism debate. To say a human has free will, we must reject causal closure or find some way to redefine free will to make it seem compatible with determinism.
The real problem is that we do not have an adequate concept of causality which fits the true workings of the natural world (of which humans are a part!)
In many of these debates, it seems pretty clear that people on both sides have in their minds a causality based on something like classical mechanics. While there is a philosophical literature on causation which highlights the controversies surrounding the concept, I rarely see it invoked in philosophy of mind or free will discussions. The notable recent exception I’ve discussed here is Gregg Rosenberg’s book, A Place For Consciousness, which presents a detailed new theory of causality and connects it to the body/mind problem. I'll be going through the book soon for a third time and will continue to assess its causal model.
Here are 3 reasons to think we need a new treatment of causality:
1. Quantum mechanics has overthrown the classical picture, but when philosophers bring it into the discussion, they oversimplify by assuming it is a simple probabilistic version of the classical.
2. Complex non-linear systems resist reduction to classical causation, but no one has offered a new explanation, except to say higher level features somehow emerge.
3. Remember also the difficulty we have of finding an explanation of the asymmetrical "flow" of time, in which causality takes place. This concept is not part of the laws of mechanics. While time asymmetry arises in the 2nd law of thermodynamics, this statistical law dangles unconnected to the other laws of physics.
Let’s start with the case of QM, where the causal process is indeed richer than the classical one. We have a unitary process of evolution described by the wave function, and then we have a second process: measurement. There is obviously more going on here than in the classical picture of billiard ball ‘A’ effecting billiard ball “B”. One or both systems involved in a measurement need to have an additional (natural) property in order to have a quantum causal event. This “ability to measure” or “ability to observe” or “ability to receive information” property is an integral part of the picture.
A new concept of causality should make this “ability to measure” property explicit and work out the role it plays in construction of natural systems, including complex macroscopic ones like us.
With regard to complex systems, they appear to manifest a binding or coordinating dimension to causation which supplements classical micro-causation of the parts of the system. A new theory should include an explanation of this phenomenon.
With regard to time, all the evidence shows that the asymmetrical flow of time and causality is an consequence of the first person perspective, rather than an objective feature of nature. A new theory of causation should show how the causal interactions of an individual system constitute the flow of time.
The best case is that these 3 requirements come together in a new theory. The theory would explain how a natural system implements quantum events, coordinates them, and generates a system-relative flow of time.
This is the heart of the free/will determinism debate. To say a human has free will, we must reject causal closure or find some way to redefine free will to make it seem compatible with determinism.
The real problem is that we do not have an adequate concept of causality which fits the true workings of the natural world (of which humans are a part!)
In many of these debates, it seems pretty clear that people on both sides have in their minds a causality based on something like classical mechanics. While there is a philosophical literature on causation which highlights the controversies surrounding the concept, I rarely see it invoked in philosophy of mind or free will discussions. The notable recent exception I’ve discussed here is Gregg Rosenberg’s book, A Place For Consciousness, which presents a detailed new theory of causality and connects it to the body/mind problem. I'll be going through the book soon for a third time and will continue to assess its causal model.
Here are 3 reasons to think we need a new treatment of causality:
1. Quantum mechanics has overthrown the classical picture, but when philosophers bring it into the discussion, they oversimplify by assuming it is a simple probabilistic version of the classical.
2. Complex non-linear systems resist reduction to classical causation, but no one has offered a new explanation, except to say higher level features somehow emerge.
3. Remember also the difficulty we have of finding an explanation of the asymmetrical "flow" of time, in which causality takes place. This concept is not part of the laws of mechanics. While time asymmetry arises in the 2nd law of thermodynamics, this statistical law dangles unconnected to the other laws of physics.
Let’s start with the case of QM, where the causal process is indeed richer than the classical one. We have a unitary process of evolution described by the wave function, and then we have a second process: measurement. There is obviously more going on here than in the classical picture of billiard ball ‘A’ effecting billiard ball “B”. One or both systems involved in a measurement need to have an additional (natural) property in order to have a quantum causal event. This “ability to measure” or “ability to observe” or “ability to receive information” property is an integral part of the picture.
A new concept of causality should make this “ability to measure” property explicit and work out the role it plays in construction of natural systems, including complex macroscopic ones like us.
With regard to complex systems, they appear to manifest a binding or coordinating dimension to causation which supplements classical micro-causation of the parts of the system. A new theory should include an explanation of this phenomenon.
With regard to time, all the evidence shows that the asymmetrical flow of time and causality is an consequence of the first person perspective, rather than an objective feature of nature. A new theory of causation should show how the causal interactions of an individual system constitute the flow of time.
The best case is that these 3 requirements come together in a new theory. The theory would explain how a natural system implements quantum events, coordinates them, and generates a system-relative flow of time.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Another Hobbit Post on The Loom
Can't get enough hobbit blogging. Here is the link. The Loom has had a great run of other interesting posts lately as well.
(Note to visitor: I'm sorry I haven't yet introduced a hack which would remove the tag referring you to "continue reading" on short posts where there isn't any more to read. I hope to fix this at some point, but right now I can either make it appear on all posts or none.)
(Note to visitor: I'm sorry I haven't yet introduced a hack which would remove the tag referring you to "continue reading" on short posts where there isn't any more to read. I hope to fix this at some point, but right now I can either make it appear on all posts or none.)
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
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.
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.
Friday, February 25, 2005
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
The Fight against Substance
Alerted by this post on Fragments of Consciousness, I read the excellent new Stanford Encyclopedia article on Neutral Monism by Leopold Stubenberg. The article distills the essential framework of this approach, disentangling it from the particular features associated with its most prominent historical proponents (of whom Bertrand Russell understandably gets the most attention).
One of the threads of the discussion is the battle neutral monists have fought against “substance thinking” in constructing their ontologies. Many other philosophers have dealt with this problem, notably Hume (not to mention Heraclitus), but the discussion in this paper reminded me how difficult it is to keep substance thinking from creeping back in to our presuppositions about reality almost against our will.
Common sense leads us to view the world around us as made of stuff. It also led us historically to view the human mind (or soul) as another kind of substance, an invisible stuff. The evil triplets of substance dualism, materialism and idealism were the philosophical derivatives of this view. Of course, the progression of modern physics gives the lie to the solidity of the world around us; but the common sense notion of a world of stuff is deeply rooted.
A neutral monist could posit that the world consists of a neutral substance which gives rise to minds and physical objects under certain specified conditions. But the mysterious nature of this newly proposed substance undercuts the appeal of the approach. Russell proposed that the neutral element be conceived as events or occurrences (I’m also immediately reminded of Whitehead’s “actual occasions”, although he is not mentioned in the article). By utilizing an “event ontology”, one can propose that certain relations or connections give rise to a physical object or a conscious experience within a network of events which is itself neither physical nor mental. Of course, at this point there is still much heavy lifting to do, which may or may not succeed. One must explain why the relations can do the work they need to do. It still may be (I suspect)that an atomistic event must have both an objective and subjective pole to do the job, and this moves us from strict neutrality to more of dual-aspect view.
In any case, I’m convinced that reaching a deeper understanding of reality requires us to continue to look past the appearance of static substance and instead evaluate theories which treat the world as a network of events in which we are embedded.
One of the threads of the discussion is the battle neutral monists have fought against “substance thinking” in constructing their ontologies. Many other philosophers have dealt with this problem, notably Hume (not to mention Heraclitus), but the discussion in this paper reminded me how difficult it is to keep substance thinking from creeping back in to our presuppositions about reality almost against our will.
Common sense leads us to view the world around us as made of stuff. It also led us historically to view the human mind (or soul) as another kind of substance, an invisible stuff. The evil triplets of substance dualism, materialism and idealism were the philosophical derivatives of this view. Of course, the progression of modern physics gives the lie to the solidity of the world around us; but the common sense notion of a world of stuff is deeply rooted.
A neutral monist could posit that the world consists of a neutral substance which gives rise to minds and physical objects under certain specified conditions. But the mysterious nature of this newly proposed substance undercuts the appeal of the approach. Russell proposed that the neutral element be conceived as events or occurrences (I’m also immediately reminded of Whitehead’s “actual occasions”, although he is not mentioned in the article). By utilizing an “event ontology”, one can propose that certain relations or connections give rise to a physical object or a conscious experience within a network of events which is itself neither physical nor mental. Of course, at this point there is still much heavy lifting to do, which may or may not succeed. One must explain why the relations can do the work they need to do. It still may be (I suspect)that an atomistic event must have both an objective and subjective pole to do the job, and this moves us from strict neutrality to more of dual-aspect view.
In any case, I’m convinced that reaching a deeper understanding of reality requires us to continue to look past the appearance of static substance and instead evaluate theories which treat the world as a network of events in which we are embedded.
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