What exactly is it about consciousness that illusionists say is illusory? The difference in views may be less than is often assumed.
http://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/08/31/illusionism-and-functionalism/
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #illusionism #functionalism
In the last thread, someone asked what exactly is it about consciousness that illusionists say is illusory?
One quick answer is that for illusionists, the properties people see in experience that incline us to think that consciousness is a metaphysically hard problem, are what’s illusory. In weak illusionism, the properties aren’t what they seem. In the strong version, which is usually what “illusionism” refers to, they don’t exist at all. But what exactly are these properties?
I’m a functionalist, someone who sees conscious experiences, and mental states overall, as more about what they do, the causal roles they play, than about any particular substance or constitution. It’s a view that I think provides a necessary explanatory layer between the mental and the physical, and so sees no barrier in principle to a full understanding of the relationship between them.
The usual argument against functionalism is that it doesn’t seem to account for qualia, the properties of phenomenal consciousness, the “what it’s like” nature of subjective experience, such as the redness of a red apple or the painfulness of toothache. Most functionalists, if they use the term, argue that qualia can be described functionally, such as pain being an automatic evaluation of a problem with a part of the body.
However philosophers have a number of thought experiments which claim to show that qualia and physics, including functionality, can be separated. This is where the illusionists come in. They argue qualia don’t exist, that the illusion is our impression that they do.
But that raises the question. What exactly are qualia? I gave the standard definition above, but it seems inadequate to settle this debate. The SEP article on qualia discusses four different versions, the simplest of which might be compatible with functionalism, but others that aren’t.
Daniel Dennett, in his 1988 Quining Qualia paper, a famous attack on the concept of qualia, provides the illusionist understanding, by noting four attributes commonly assigned to them. Summed up in the qualia Wikipedia article, they are:
- ineffable – they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any means other than direct experience.
- intrinsic – they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience’s relation to other things.
- private – all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
- directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness – to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.
Dennett’s description of qualia is often decried as a strawman, something he constructs to easily knock down. However, we only have to look at the most popular qualia thought experiments to see these attributes confirmed. For example, consider Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument as described through the Mary’s Room thought experiment.
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and use terms like “red”, “blue”, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue.” What happens when Mary is released from her black-and-white room or is given a color television monitor? Does she learn anything new or not? Jackson claims that she does.
Within the assumptions of this scenario, why is Mary unable to acquire the information she can only learn by having the experience? She supposedly can’t read descriptions of it, because no one can provide that, matching Dennett’s ineffable attribute. She can’t conduct experiments to detect it, because it’s scientifically inaccessible, meeting the private attribute. And Jackson argues that qualia are epiphenomenal, which seems to meet Dennett’s intrinsic attribute.
The same attributes are implied with the inverted spectrum concept, the idea that there’s no way to know if my experience of red looks like yours of green and vice versa. The fact that we seem unable to describe our experiences of color to each other, that they’re ineffable, private, and intrinsic, is what gives this scenario life. Likewise, the absent qualia / zombie argument, the idea of a being physically or behaviorally equivalent to a conscious one, but not itself conscious, only works if there’s no way to observe or deduce whether qualia are present.
And yet, in all these scenarios, the subject themselves still has first person access to these phenomenal properties. For that to be possible, for that access not to be prevented by the other attributes, it has to be special in some way, according to David Chalmers, in some non-causal manner, which gives us Dennett’s directly apprehensible property.
And what is it that makes Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness metaphysically hard, if not these attributes? Remove them, and the thought experiments and metaphysical mysteries seem to disappear.
So the advocates of these thought experiments and illusionists seem to agree on what qualia are. They just disagree on whether they’re real. Functionalists and other physicalists, if they use terms like “qualia” or “phenomenal properties,” are referring to a concept with less theoretical commitments. Do Dennett’s attributes show up in the more reserved versions? As Dennett himself covers in the last section of his Quining Qualia paper, it becomes a matter of “in principle” vs “in practice”.
For ineffability, no one thinks describing experiences like the redness of red in a functional manner is obvious or easy, although it can be done to at least some extent, starting with the distinctiveness and high saliency of redness. For many experiences, the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” comes to mind. It might involve so much effort that it’s ineffable in practice, even if not in principle.
And there are limitations on our access to how these experiences are constructed. They are cognitively impenetrable, for the simple reason that it was never adaptive for our ancestors to be able to access the early processing, such as all the underlying associations and affects red stimuli trigger, but which figure in what red experience feels like. Which makes a full description of the experience impossible with only introspective information.
Mental content, until recently, was private due to technological limitations and our lack of knowledge about the brain. It still effectively is in virtually all cases. But with the progress in brain scanning technologies, we’re seeing the first cracks in this attribute. We still have a long way to go, but even though it’s early days, the idea that mental content is in a separate realm and utterly inaccessible seems less defensible with each passing year.
Without absolute ineffability or privacy, it’s not necessary to bring in direct apprehension. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have privileged internal access in practice, but it’s similar to the type of access the processors in the device you’re using right now have to read and write memory that aren’t easily observable from the outside.
And then there’s intrinsicality. Achieving functional descriptions of conscious experience typically requires looking at the upstream causes and downstream effects of what we think of as the experience. Intrinsicality assumes that there’s still something in between, something that remains with intrinsic properties, something distinct from the causal chain, somewhere where the prior causes culminate in the presentation, and from which the downstream effects flow, with some aspects still conceivably epiphenomenal. The functional shift here is to regard the experience as the whole causal chain, a more plausible stance in a massively parallel system with no central control point.
Clarifying these attributes as difficulties in practice, rather than absolute limitations in principle, both explains our impressions of them, and transforms conscious experience from an intractable metaphysical problem to a series of scientific ones.
This is one of the reasons I used to resist the illusionist label, and still prefer the functionalist one. The difference doesn’t seem that vast (a point David Lewis made in 1995), and mostly seems to amount to a lack of nuance in our initial understanding, rather than some deep unavoidable species-wide misperception.
And yet for a significant portion of the population, the strong intuition is that a functional description, while explaining behavior, still leaves out something important for experience. And here we run into an intuition clash. For someone convinced that an ineffable metaphysically private aspect remains, it doesn’t seem like something science can demonstrate is or isn’t there. It becomes an extra assumption some people hold and others don’t.
Which seems to leave us in the strange place where the two views are empirically identical, and the debate a purely philosophical one.
Unless of course I’m missing something. What do you think? Are functionalists overreaching for a non-gap explanation? Are there fact-of-the-matter differences between illusionism and functionalism I’m overlooking? And are there ways to demonstrate the reality or non-reality of ineffable private qualities?
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/08/31/illusionism-and-functionalism/
#Consciousness #functionalism #illusionism #phenomenalConsciousness #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Qualia
Can we in principle ever deduce the mental from the physical?
Christopher Devlin Brown and David Papineau have a new paper out in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled: Illusionism and A Posteriori Physicalism; No Fact of the Matter. (Note: the link is to a free version.) As the title makes clear, the overall gist is that the difference between illusionism and a posteriori physicalism amounts to a definitional dispute.
A quick primer. Illusionism is the stance that consciousness exists, but only in the sense of functional capabilities such as modeling the self in its environment, attention, learning, episodic memory, self monitoring, etc. What’s thought to be illusory is phenomenal consciousness, the “what it’s like” nature of subjective experience, but particularly in the strong sense as something distinct from functional capabilities, and with properties, such as fundamental subjectivity, that imply it’s non-physical.
Reductive physicalism is the stance that the mental can be reduced to physics. However, there are different views on exactly what can be understood in that reduction. In one, we can find correlations between conscious states and physical ones that imply an identity relationship, but one that can only be discovered and understood empirically, not justified in a logical sense. This is the a posteriori physicalism of the type the authors discuss in their paper.
The other view is a priori physicalism. It argues that we can go further than just brute identities, and understand the logical relationships, in a way where, in principle, we could deduce the mental from the physical. A common example of this view is analytic functionalism, which describes mental states in functional terms, such as the experience of pain being a negative reaction to a perceived state that motivates a system to try to avoid or ameliorate it.
It’s long been acknowledged among illusionists that the distinction between illusionism and functionalism is definitional. Functionalists generally target functional capabilities for their explanation. If they speak about phenomenal consciousness, it’s usually in a weaker sense of being the inner perspective of a functional system without the non-physical attributes. (As a functionalist myself, this is certainly the sense I use it in older posts on this blog.)
This weaker sense is one that the authors seem to call for in their paper. They point out that it’s always a judgment call whether to eliminate or reconstruct the concept when it turns out not to have all the attributes we assumed in our pre-scientific understanding. (David Chalmers has a similar discussion in his book, Reality+, which I discussed a while back.) For example, we eliminated the concepts of ghosts and witches from our ontology after scientific investigation revealed too many of their properties didn’t exist. However, we retained planets and stars, holding reconstructed understandings very different from the medieval ones.
But I think this is the first time I’ve seen an argument that the differences between illusionism and a posteriori physicalism are definitional.
There is some resonance between illusionism and the phenomenal concept strategy, an argument often made by a posteriori identity theorists about why we tend to think phenomenal properties are distinct from physical ones. In short, our phenomenal concepts are thought to be isolated from our physical ones, making the relationship one we can’t bridge, leading to an epistemic gap, the notorious “hard problem”. This is similar to possibilities explored by some illusionists, such as François Kammerer, who see the illusion as deeply enmeshed in our cognition, something we can’t avoid, and so no explanation of consciousness, including of the illusion itself, will ever feel right.
But it seems like there are differences. For one, the phenomenal concepts strategy is often described as recognizing the conceivability of functional zombies, entities that are behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious being, but aren’t actually conscious. Most illusionists I’ve read see zombies as an unproductive concept.
And many illusionists take the illusion to be more of a theory error, a failure in philosophical reasoning more than something universally embedded. That’s the feel I get from Daniel Dennett’s writing, although in reality I suspect he would have rejected the distinction.
Still, most illusionists seem in the a priori camp, rejecting any notion of an unbridgeable divide. The phenomenal concept strategy, and a posteriori physicalism overall, seem to skirt mysterianism, a view generally rejected by the a priori camp. To be sure, most of this camp see empirical investigation necessary for progress in any practical sense, but the idea that we can’t have a theory explaining the identity relations is rejected.
Of course, a lot depends on just how much work we’re asking these identities to do. Often the identity relationship between H2O and water, genes and DNA sequences, or heat and molecular motion are given as examples of identities that, once established, we don’t need to explain any further. But these identities have 1:1 relationships, and the reduced concept can in principle be used anywhere the higher level version can in descriptions, making the concepts causally equivalent.
Much depends on what we mean by a conscious concept like “pain”. Is pain a relatively simple primitive like water above? As a phenomenal property, the painfulness of pain is often assumed to be that kind of primitive, which is how many end up thinking of it as something separate from the functionality.
Or is pain more a complex collection of processes, in a way similar to the concept of “democracy”? In principle we could find the physical identity relationship between the concept and a physical occurrence of democracy, although it would be extremely complex. But more broadly, democracy as a type encompasses too many physical instantiations with too many variations for this kind of identity primitive to be useful. We need intermediate abstraction layers, such the role people play in governance. Such roles are multi-realizable, which puts us in functionalist territory, where I think most illusionists live.
Ultimately the difference between the views seems to remain, although it doesn’t seem vast. I suppose it could come down to what is expected of an explanation. If it doesn’t feel right, does that mean we’ve failed to bridge the gap? Given scientific theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics, it doesn’t seem like we have any right to expect an explanation of mental states to necessarily feel right, but that’s a view from someone firmly in the functionalist camp.
I do think the authors are right that “consciousness” is a semantically indeterminate concept. Its meaning has varied too much over the centuries for anyone to claim a particular version is the one true definition. It can mean introspection, perception of the outside world, attention, sentience, imagination, a non-physical ineffable essence, and a host of other notions. Which means these definitional disputes are probably unavoidable.
What do you think? Are these views more similar than I’m seeing? Are all physicalists basically illusionists, even if only implicitly? Or does the ambiguity of the word “consciousness” render these kinds of distinction a hopeless muddle?
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/08/24/illusionism-and-types-of-physicalism/
#Consciousness #eliminativeMaterialism #illusionism #materialism #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #physicalism
"… whatever the ordinary mind conceives and whatever language expresses:
All such things, which thus become the object of thought and word, if examined, are found to be nonexistent.
They are empty like mirages and it is never possible for them to withstand analysis."
Kunzang Pelden: "The Nectar of Manjushri's Speech".
#Buddhism #Sunyata #Santideva #Dharma #Illusionism #Emptiness #Madhyamaka
SMBC: Consciousness: a definition thing
God answers someone's question on what is consciousness. Nothing controversial here at all, I'm sure.
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/07/18/smbc-consciousness-a-definition-thing/
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #illusionism
Experiencing without knowing?
A blog post looking at a new paper which purports to have found evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness.
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/07/04/experiencing-without-knowing/
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy #illusionism
Daniel Pallies: Why I Worry About Phenomenal Realism
https://www.danielpallies.com/post/why-i-worry-about-phenomenal-realism
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy #PhenomenalConsciousness #illusionism
Do regular people see a hard problem of consciousness?
Is there even a folk concept of consciousness? Or more specifically of phenomenality? Experimental philosophy seems to be showing that philosophers may be assuming too much about universal intuitions.
A blog post looking at the topics raised in the recent Mind Chat episode.
https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/02/18/do-regular-people-see-a-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
#consciousness #philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #illusionism #PhenomenalConsciousness
Daniel Dennett | Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32u12zjgJww
Classic Dennett. No magical theories of consciousness here, just insights on how a system of 86 billion neurons produces a mind. Plus some counters to well known philosophical quotes.
An AI wonders if it has that thing humans call phenomenal consciousness.
Future AI in the therapist's chair
by Keith Frankish
https://iai.tv/articles/future-ai-in-the-therapists-chair-keith-frankish-auid-2387?_auid=2020
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy #illusionism
Is the debate between phenomenal realists and illusionists really about the scope of perceptual properties? Maybe the illusionist just sees these properties as more limited in scope.
#consciousness #illusionism #PhenomenalConsciousness #qualia #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy
http://selfawarepatterns.com/2022/12/10/the-debate-between-phenomenal-realism-and-illusionism-and-the-scope-of-perceptual-properties/
@lowderdev I've just noticed @keithfrankish (editor and one of the authors of the book on #illusionism I linked) is on Mastodon!
@lowderdev Agreed, his criticisms of subconscious vs conscious are quite valid.
As you noted, they are not really about free will though. I was disappointed in his conflation of the two concepts.
BTW, there is an interesting theory of #consciousness called #illusionism that posits that what we experience internally as consciousness is really an illusion that our mind projects, and our consciousness is not really privy to the mechanics of our internal thinking process.
https://www.keithfrankish.com/illusionism-as-a-theory-of-consciousness/
@keithfrankish Some resonance here with Gilbert Ryle's category mistake, particularly the analogy of someone being given a tour of Oxford. After seeing lecture halls, dorms, admin offices, meeting faculty, students, etc, turns to the tour guide and asks, "But where is the university?"
Is answering that all that *is* the university failing to take the concept of a university seriously?
To help make connections: name 5-7 things that interest you but aren't in your profile, as tags so they are searchable. Then boost this post or repeat its instructions so others know to do the same."
#Archery (which I used to practice)
#Mythology
#Comics
#boardgame design
#TMNT
#supernatural and weird stuff like #magic (both actual magic and #illusionism), #hypnosis, and the stuff touched on the Leyendas Legendarias #podcast.
@Yoric There was an Italian edition of #Simulacres in the mid-late 1990s. It received ITA-only supplements (of varying quality) & was used as the core system in moderately high-profile Italian RPG projects, including "Ken il Guerriero" (official #HokutoNoKen aka #FistOfTheNorthStar anime RPG). But I was most impressed by the basic game: it articulated the then state-of-the-art of RPGs w/extraordinary clarity (including that what any GM was doing was #Illusionism) not even matched by #Everway.
