Carl Zimmer's Hobbit Update

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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.

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.

Hobbits, Aliens & Morality

Actually, the impulse behind this post started with my reflections about Neanderthals. Over time (and most recently on a NOVA special) I have been exposed to the finding that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for thousands of years prior to the extinction of Neanderthals (only 35,000 years ago). The poignant and tragic dimensions of the story emerge as we consider how similar Neanderthals were to us, and how nearly certain it is that modern humans were the proximate cause of their dying out (through competition for resources and very likely direct warfare).

Recently, an archeological discovery was made in Indonesia of a tiny hominid relative, homo floresiensis (immediately nicknamed “hobbits” -- see the review of the initial findings by Carl Zimmer and more recent follow up). It looks like these small folks lived as recently as 18,000 years ago! Again, we find a species of hominids which were contemporaneous to us. Again, modern humans likely played a role in their demise.

If through some circumstance one of these species had lived long enough to have been part of our more recent recorded history, there is unfortunately little doubt of what the outcome would have been. Given our grim history of racism, war and genocide with regard to our own species, there seems no question that our treatment of near-humans would have been even worse, had they continued to exist up to the present day.

But putting aside what we would have done and instead considering what one ought to do, I ask: should killing a Neanderthal or a hobbit be considered the equivalent of murdering a human in a contemporary moral system?

For humans, the natural origins of our moral impulses and conceptions of how we ought to treat one another can be in harmony. Genetic science has shown that we modern Homo sapiens are a strikingly homogeneous bunch. Experts estimate we can all trace our origins to common ancestors (mitochondrial Eve, for instance) who lived a very brief 60,000 to 150,000 years ago or so.

This seems like an unqualified good and fortunate state of affairs. All of us are close relatives to each other. Therefore, as I argued in a recent post, our naturally grounded impulses to treat our own kin with kindness and generosity can readily come to the fore on behalf of all humans, as our global culture evolves.

Would we extend this circle to include near-humans, or is there a justification for “species-ism” in favoring human life?

Now, ethical treatment of animals is already a great moral challenge of our time. Here, most all agree a moral system must include an imperative to treat animals well, but at the same time it is our undeniable inclination to value their lives less than those of fellow humans. Looking at the reasons for this, we begin with our ancestral need for animal products as tools for survival. Furthermore, it makes evolutionary sense that we lack natural impulses to treat genetically distant species with care as we do our close kin. But what ought we to do? Can an argument be made that the lives of animals are as valuable as our own? Can we come up with an objective argument that they are of inferior value? I have taken a stab at this and thought about a theory which places a value on the robustness and complexity of subjective experience (see this old post). But my confidence in such a model is tentative at this point.

I come away from these musings thinking we should feel grateful that we don’t currently face the moral dilemmas which would accompany sharing our planet with near-humans. I’m pretty sure we’re still not up to it.

One parting thought: What if we were faced with aliens with comparable or even greater intelligence than us? Could we recognize their worth, or would we fall back on our natural species-ism? Of course, this could be a moot consideration if they don’t appreciate our value and have bigger guns.

Philosophical Multi-Tasking

It’s exciting to think that a new theory could have traction with regard to not just one, but several age-old philosophical problems. Sometimes the additional traction an idea gives you on multiple problems may itself seem like evidence that you are on the right track. Now, you still could be mistaken, of course. I recall David Chalmers, in his book The Conscious Mind, pointing out that just because consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics was mysterious, it certainly doesn’t follow that they are related problems.

Still, I will go ahead and speculate that a new metaphysical theory which revises our understanding of the natural world could provide a solution which performs such multi-tasking. The elements of this new metaphysics would include the naturalization of consciousness through adopting a panexperientialist perspective (the term panexperientialism, due to process philosopher David Ray Griffin, refers to the idea that first person experience is a fundamental and ubiquitous part of nature). It would also include a new model of causality which reveals the necessary role the attribute we know as phenomenal experience plays in the evolution of natural systems: here Gregg Rosenberg has done important work providing a detailed example of what this might look like.

I now present, with all due humility, an outline of the several outstanding problems which could be addressed if we construct a new metaphysics with these ingredients.

A. The mind/body problem: The theory will address how the “mysterious” aspect of consciousness fits into the natural world. First-person experience will be seen as a natural effect marking the work of a previously unacknowledged pole of causality which provides a binding and coordinating function in natural systems.

B. Causality and emergence: the new causal theory will replace traditional models which excluded the existence of subjects of experience. It will show how causality can work across multiple levels of nature, rather than assuming it happens only at the micro-level. The existence of a coordinating pole of causality (which is revealed to us through first-person experience) will resolve the question of how high-level features emerge in complex systems.

C. Knowledge: The nature of knowledge will be understood as arising from the direct acquaintance we have with nature given our existence as a system embedded in the causal network. Because we are a natural system within the world, truly objective knowledge (as if from a perspective standing outside the world) is not achievable and may not even be a coherent idea. At the same time, it will not be an “everything is relative” stance: this is because human perspectives are extremely homogeneous leading to inter-subjective agreement on most important facts.

D. The problem of time: Time will be better understood. It will be seen that time arises from causation at the level of an individual system (experienced by that system as subjective time) and is relative to that system.

E. And yes, the interpretation of quantum mechanics: The micro-level of causality is that of quantum interactions. The experiential pole of causality implements the theory’s measurement operation. These interactions happen ubiquitously in nature, given the presence of the experiential pole in all natural systems.

I think such a theory would likely reframe the free-will/determinism debate as well (since our concept of determinism depends on the traditional notion of causality), but I’ll stop here.

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.

Faces of Nature

The devastation caused by the tsunami is taken by many commentators to be a dramatic reminder of the impersonal, mindless destructive power of nature.

Remember, though, that humanity is part of the natural world. The worldwide response of sympathy and aid needs to be reckoned with to consider what this episode means for one’s view of nature.

I do not believe developments in our world feature a higher purpose in the usual top-down theistic sense. However, I believe the story of evolution (cosmic, biological and most recently cultural) gives indications of progression – an expression of purpose built from the bottom-up.

In terms of human cultural evolution, I see a positive trend. Our expressions of generosity, altruism and cooperation (all grounded in our nature) have expanded through time to include larger and larger groups: from kin-based clans to larger tribes, to cities and nations (this point was featured in Robert Wright’s book Nonzero). The conclusion of this trend is to consider all of humanity part of our group, and to end the depersonalization of the other which is a feature of wars and of the national and religious conflicts which still trouble the world.

It’s hard not to see signs of continued movement in this direction in the wake of the tsunami.

Wrestling with Decoherence

In my amateur attempts to understand quantum mechanics (QM) I realize I have usually either oversimplified or misconstrued the phenomenon known as decoherence. In my mind, I had pictured decoherence as an interaction of a quantum system with the environment that brought about a collapse of superposition states essentially the same way a measurement did in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. After renewed attempts to understand this topic, (including reading summaries like this), I should say instead that decoherence is an entanglement of the system with its environment. This entanglement involves a sharing of the degrees of freedom of the original coherent system with its environment which leads to creation of a “mixture”. From the perspective of a potential observer, decoherence takes away the interference aspect of the quantum superposition, but it still doesn’t tell the potential observer that a definite outcome of a potential measurement on the mixture has been realized. So, decoherence may account for why quantum interference effects are not seen in our macroscopic world, but it doesn’t remove the quantum measurement effect/problem from the picture at all.Also, while many believe decoherence lends support to one or another interpretation of the measurement problem, it provides no decisive evidence for any of them.

Now having said this, I have read a couple of papers by one of the leaders in the field, Wojciech H. Zurek. He (along with collaborators) seems to be trying to take the program of decoherence farther in the direction of it becoming a replacement for the concept of measurement. As explained in papers such as this and most recently this (see also this brief summary in Nature), the idea is that multiple observers can sample the environment and gain knowledge of a preferred state of a system in question without direct measurement. Decoherence leads to a dissemination of redundant copies of information about the preferred state into the environment such that an observation of any fragment will do the trick. Thus further progress is made explaining why the objective-seeming classical world arises from quantum physics.

This is very good. To understand how a classical-looking world arises from quantum reality is an important project. But it still is a quantum reality.

Despite my mistakes in understanding decoherence, I think some of the issues I’ve focused on seem relatively untouched. It is still true that quantum interactions (whether an observing system is measuring another system or a fragment of the environment or whatever) have a very different nature than classical interactions. I think the issue is sometimes obscured by terminology. Is the interaction a measurement, an observation, or an information transfer? However you put it, there is more going on in these interactions than the classical causal picture of “A” effecting “B”. One or both systems need to have an additional property in order to have a quantum event. This “ability to measure” or “ability to receive information” property is an integral part of the picture. This is in step with Gregg Rosenberg’s postulate of a receptive property in nature discussed in my recent posts. And it continues to make sense to me that incorporating this important aspect of nature into one’s toolkit will help explain consciousness and also perhaps other complex phenomena which resist a reduction to classical mechanics.

The macroscopic world may look classical, but it doesn’t follow that macroscopic phenomena can be explained classically!

Q&A with Gregg Rosenberg

Gregg Rosenberg was nice enough to correspond with me via e-mail and gave me permission to post this Q&A exchange we had (his answer actually addresses not just my question as posed below but also the related comments I made on my last post here).

Q: My main question is: have you thought any more about the problem of time? In the book, it seemed a bit of a challenge to link the subjective time of consciousness back to the emergence of time (and space) from the causal mesh at a more primitive level (sections 10.6 and 14.3.2). Now, it's very possible I didn't comprehend some of the arguments there, but I was wondering if there is any other way to address the status of time as something which inherently accompanies (not emerges from) causality and experience?

A: I would not say that I divide time in 'subjective' and 'objective' time. Rather I divide it into 'subjective' and 'intersubjective' time, with intersubjective time being a relativistic construction from the structure of the causal mesh. That is, one must pick a node in the mesh and then back into a structure for time relative to that node, so intersubjective time is not an 'objective' view of time. FWIW, I think this view dovetails fairly well with the treatment of these things in quantum loop theory, which is a theory of physics that I find appealing.

Having two things is always less satisfying than having one, so I can understand why you might find my view a bit unsatisfying. Let me do my best to make it more digestible. The two kinds of time are really directed at answering two entirely different questions,

1) Why does experience contain an asymmetric flow?

and

2) Why does it work when we assign numerical indexes to natural events to mark their locations relative to one another?

My answer to the first question is: because real flow is needed in the world to carry asymmetric constraint within the causal nexus. Since the carriers are experiential, the flow is a flow of experience. This is subjective time.

My answer to the second question is: because each experiencer is a node in a network, and the structure of the network is such that a temporal index is useful for cross-correlating nodes in the network. This is intersubjective time.

So the two kinds of time are really "about" two remarkably different things, though one is modeled analogically on the other. Since the initial questions are about such different things, "time" is actually a very subtly ambiguous word. That's why the final position I come to has two kinds of time.

I don't personally feel as if this is an uncomfortable answer. I think it fits together nicely within the framework and also with observation and science.

BTW, the signaling system I invoke when trying to reduce spatial direction is intended to be local.

Rosenberg, Consciousness & Causality (Part 2)

Clearly, I’m a fan of this book. This is no doubt partly because I was already persuaded by the panexperientialist approach to solving the mind/body problem (and I have believed Quantum Mechanics provided evidence for panexperientialism as well). But Rosenberg has added important new strength and depth to panexperientialist ideas by addressing the metaphysical problems posed by causality and showing their connection to the existence of subjective experience in the world. In particular, his system puts forth a credible way to solve the combination problem in showing how experience might participate in causal structures across all levels of nature, including our own “middle” macroscopic level.

In terms of criticism, I was first put off by the fairly complicated nature of the causal model which provided the bulk of the second half of the book. At the level of specificity Rosenberg has given, he has pretty much guaranteed that many details will prove to be wrong in describing our world. There was a part of me that thought the conceptual arguments may have been stronger with less detail (sometimes “less is more”). On the other hand, after getting through it, I thought that the effort could still pay off by showing an example of what to look for as we investigate nature.

To be more specific, it is scientists who need to explicate the receptive/experiential side of nature and find out how it really works. They won’t find anything, of course, until they know what to look for. It is my hope that the irreducible presence of subjective points of view in nature will eventually be taken seriously enough to guide science in new directions. And while it is the case that the “hiddenness” of first-person experience to third-person investigation is an obstacle to investigating this part of the natural world, if Rosenberg is right about the impact the experiential pole has on causality, then it does leave its tracks on nature. Certainly, the interpretation of QM is one area which can be rethought, and the construction of new cosmological theories which include QM will likely be influenced. But I speculate that the other great place to look for evidence of this other aspect of causality is in the area of complex systems. Non-linear dynamical systems display organizational features which are resistant to reduction to micro-physical causation. A new approach may pay dividends here.

My main question about Rosenberg’s approach relates to the concept of time. When giving his examples and diagrams explaining how the effective and receptive properties fit together to form natural individuals in chapters 9 and 10, he pictures this taking place against a fixed background of space and time. Implicitly, space and time are more fundamental entities. Then, in section 10.6, he adds a discussion of how space and time could be seen as emerging from an underlying more fundamental causal mesh.

Here, he says an ingression of an individual from possible to actual is an atemporal process. Then a series of asymmetric connections (he names this a “cascade”) among actualized entities could give rise to time. Then, another step shows how distance in space could be viewed in terms of another set of connections. To make this work, Rosenberg also has to add the ideas of non-local “signals” which propagate between cascades to keep things in sync.

Finally, in section 14.3.2, the attempt is made to link the discussion in 10.6 to the subjective flow of time experienced in human consciousness. Here, he admits the flow of time is not easy to reconcile with the “objective yet panexperientialist” model of nature. So there is a distinction between time in the fundamental picture – Rosenberg decides to call it inter-subjective time (which is derived ultimately from the causal mesh as in section 10.6) -- and subjective time. He then warms up to the existence of subjective time and proposes that this subjective flow “carries” the asymmetry of the causal process which gave rise to time in the first place.

While I admire the effort here, I found this two-fold nature of time somewhat unsatisfying. Rosenberg shows that experience and causality cannot exist without each other, but I would speculate that time itself is part of this relationship in an even more intimate way. There really isn’t any causality or experience except in subjective time - subjective time is the dimension of existence which co-arises with the causal process. There is no “objective” time, and this is OK – we shouldn’t expect any and the notion of true objectivity is an impossibility anyway. Now unlike Rosenberg, I’ve just presented a few bald statements and haven’t worked out anything like a complete competing picture of how this works, so for now I’ll just assert it is a topic worth further thought.

To conclude, I thought this was an excellent and thought-provoking book which really moves the discussion forward toward an improved metaphysics of the natural world. I hope the ideas in it gain circulation.