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Mainstream 171.) Max Velmans - Reflexive monism 2.) Patricia & Paul Churchland - In:- Conversations on Conscious - Susan Blackmore 3.) Kevin O'Regan - In:- Conversations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore 4.) Vilayanur Ramachandran - In:- Conservations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore 5.) Metzinger - In:- Conservations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore 6.) Christopher Timpson - Information, immaterialism, instrumentalism - Attacks modern information theories of the universe as a retread of the Copenhagan interpretation. 7.) Article by Julian Baggini based on his book, 'The Ego Trick' - Orthodox views on free will and the self 1.) Max Velmans: Reflexive Monism in:- Conversation on Consciousness Susan Blackmore This piece takes the form of an interview that Max Velmans gave to Susan Blackmore, as part of a series of interviews with prominent consciousness theorists. Velmans has developed a theory of consciousness called reflexive monism. He starts by thinking in terms of the three dimensional space that surrounds us. He contrasts this approach to both dualism, and to standard reductionist approaches that seek to portray consciousness as a state or function of the brain. The standard view is that sensory inputs to the brain are processed to the point where they become a conscious experience in the brain. Velmans, however, suggests that the subjective experience is not in the brain, but is the three dimensional world around us. In this theory, there's no split between the three dimensional world and the world in the brain, although he accepts that there is a world outside the brain, which is as described by physics and therefore very different from what we experience. Velman's view is that the history of the universe through the Big Bang and the process of evolution leads to the present situation where we have human organisms each with an individual viewpoint or perspective on the whole universe. The universe is thus differentiated into bits that each have a view of the whole. This idea is labelled as reflexive monism. Velmans sees consciousness as a fundamental property. He agrees with Chalmers in this although not in other respects. However, he seems, in this interview, uncertain how to develop this concept. He tries to compare the distinction between the objective and subjective view to experiments in quantum mechanics where the description of a particle depends on the arrangement of equipment. Unfortunately, this is a view of quantum mechanics that many have drifted away from. The more modern view might be that the description changes when the quanta interact with the environment, and that particular experimental arrangements produce such an interaction. Velmans, who is not a quantum consciousness theorist, intends only an analogy, but this does place a question mark over whether this whole concept of two unrelated views of the same thing or two aspects of the same thing without any apparent physical connection actually means anything. Velmans suggests here that identical information is being presented in two different ways. In a way, this is likely to be in some sense true of any physical explanation of consciousness in the brain, but without some suggestion of what physical structure might underlie the dual aspects, we really don't have much to go on. Velmans attempts to further substantiate his view with a thought experiment. There could be an experimental situation where a scientist was looking at a brain scan of relevant neurons in a subject's brain, while the subject was simply looking out and getting a subjective impression of the room they were in. So the scientist is getting an objective impression of the subject's brain state, while the subject is getting the subjective output of the brain state. The scientist and the subject then swap roles, with the scientist looking at the room while the subject looks at a scan of his brain. It is suggested that this somehow doesn't make sense, or blurs the subjective/objective roles. However, the action of looking at a scan of neural processing and of looking at what the neural processing produces are still quite distinct as between objective and subjective, whether the person having the objective experience is a scientist or untrained. There is nothing magical about being a scientist that makes their experience objective, regardless of what they are looking at. Velmans suggests that it is something to do with being in a scientist's role when looking at the scan, but the objectivity is nothing to do with the job description of the observer, and all to do with where they are looking. In the detail of his written material Velmans is one of the most logical and incisive of writers, but in the end this looks like an unsatisfactory merger between ideas of consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe and more conventional views wedded to classical physics. 2.) Patricia & Paul Churchland In:- Conversations on Conscious Susan Blackmore Oxford University Press (2005) I feel that there's a certain amount of smoke screen in this Churchlands conversation with Blackmore. There's rather too much emphasis on examples of resistance to now established scientific ideas when they were new. This has the effect of putting any opponents of the Churchlands views in the position of the ignorant, or those supposedly too old to come to terms with new ideas, while it is implied that bright young students have no difficulties with their ideas. This is to some extent a substitute for actually substantiating their scientific argument. At the end of the day any argument that happened to be new could be promoted in this way regardless of its merits. There is also a danger to the Churchlands own position from this line. Patricia Churchland has come up with indignant if superficial attacks on quantum consciousness. What if that is the new theory that is too novel for the established players to live with? The Churchlands argument is essentially an identity theory. Few scientifically orientated people would disagree with the first part of their argument. There are identities in physics. Light is the same as electromagnetic waves. The waves don't cause light or correlate with light, they are light. The problem with this is that the brain state of light bears no resemblance to the particles or waves oscillating in the external world. Blackmore does try to get the Churchlands to confront this problem, with her asking them to explain what gives us the sensation of the red or the sensation of pain when the brain state is nothing like the external oscillation of photons or external damage to body tissues. The Churchlands seem to sidestep this argument. The colour red is a relative stimulation of different cells. This does not seem to be an answer. Whether one or several cells are involved, the conscious brain still bears no resemblance to the external particles. Similarly pain is said to refer to a mapping of nociceptive stimulations, but the resulting brain still has no resemblance to the damaged tissue on the outside of the body. Maybe it is the pattern of the brain activations that is meant to be conscious. But pattern arises in all non-conscious information systems so we have no reason why these particular patterns should be conscious. The descriptions of internal processing here seem to serve merely to deflect us away from the central question of why these brain states are conscious. 3.) Kevin O'Regan In:- Conversations on Consciousness Susan Blackmore Oxford University Press The core problem with O'Regan's approach is that like so many mainstream thinkers he is neo-Cartesian. He argues that axon firing cannot be subjective experience. Why not? Because if this were the case the electrochemical processes of the neurons would be magically translated into experience, which we are told is non-physical. The nub of the matter and the problem with this discussion is the assumption that consciousness or subjective experience has to be non-physical. This is an impossible position. We know as axiomatic that subjective experience exists, and we think, if we are not dualist, as O'Regan certainly isn't that everything is physical. Consciousness is physical because it is capable of receiving signals from the physical world. The conscious areas of the brain can only experience the external world, the body and drives from the unconscious areas of the brain by itself being physically capable of receiving such signals. However, given his neo-Cartesian position, O'Regan has a mission to prove that subjective consciousness does not exist. Initially, he takes shelter in the comparison with vitalism, which postulated an 'elan vital' to explain the special properties of living organisms. I find this an unsatisfactory comparison. Vitalism was probably quite reasonable when it was originally proposed given the scanty knowledge of organic life at the time. Since then developments in chemistry and biology have allowed a satisfactory explanation of how organisms behave in terms of metabolising energy, reproducing etc. at the level of the macroscopic world and classical physics. The problem that arises with consciousness, but not with living organisms as such is that although, as Kelvin pointed out more than a century ago, we know more or less everything that's important about classical physics, there is nothing in that knowledge that allows for its components to combine to produce the property of consciousness. Thus it is really a diversion or distraction to give extensive space to vitalism. Beyond this O'Regan's approach can verge on the downright odd. He seems to say that we are convinced that we are having subjective experience because other people talk about it. Well, he must speak for himself. With a thing like this everybody must consider their own experience. I suspect that for most people their subjective experience is the thing that is axiomatic or self-evident or that they are most certain of. Perhaps they might be brow beaten into accepting this idea in a late night session, but when they woke up the next morning they'd be back with subjective consciousness as the basic reality. Philosophers and others are called on to explain consciousness, and it is difficult not to be impatient with approaches that try to by-pass the whole thing by denying the evidence they are called on to explain. In one respect O'Regan did seem to hit the mark. In commenting on electrochemical activity in neurons, he points out that there is nothing in our classical knowledge of these processes to explain how consciousness could arise from them. However, O'Regan doesn't really pursue this, but instead looks to further ways of getting round the issue of consciousness. It is suggested that consciousness is not the underlying firing of axons, but something that "neurons allow organisms to do". If this is the case, we are simply looking at a sequence of physical cause and effect. Something in the electrochemical processing causing another physical process, which causes or in more slippery terminology allows the physical property of consciousness. That's no problem here, except that it does not amount to having explained consciousness away, but simply chases the ghost, if it were such, further into the machine. Beyond this O'Regan suggests that perception may be connected to action and movement as in blinking or moving the head, and interestingly suggests that this link to motion might explain how visual, auditory and other cortices produce widely different qualia. What is not clear is why these ideas should be advanced as explanations of why we have subjective experience when the perception eventually arises. Dependence or otherwise on motion seems to make no difference to this. Much is also made of the partial nature of our conscious observation as in features such as 'change blindness'. I always have a problem with this all too often aired topic in terms of consciousness studies. So we observe less than we think we do, but we are still subjectively aware of whatever visual impression we get, and that is what needs to be explained. Similarly, whether we see incoming data passively, or as a result of interogating the data, something that is discussed here, we still end up with a subjective experience that needs explaining. 4.) Vilayanur Ramachandran In:- Conservations on Consciousness Susan Blackmore Oxford University Press Ramachandran sees the self and qualia as intertwined. Without the self, he thinks that there would be nothing that experiences the qualia, and without the experiencing of the qualia there would be nothing to identify as self. Blackmore raises the objection that in altered states such as Zen meditation the self disappears but there is still experience. Ramachandran is in denial on this, claiming it is not possible, although the evidence of many accounts from meditation and other experiences in varied cultures is that this is exactly what happens. The argument here seems to be quite straightforward, it doesn't fit the pet theory, so it can't be true. To justify this difficult position Ramachandran has to defend the now unfashionable view that animals including great apes are not conscious. His exacts views on this are a bit fuzzy. At one point he's prepared to concede a raw background awareness but not a self. In this he appears for a moment to be close to being in line with the modern consensus that animals can be conscious, but with the exception of great apes and perhaps a few other species not self-conscious. But later on this doesn't seem to be what he really thinks, because he says that animals don't really experience pain, although even this comes in two versions of (1.) they don't really experience pain and (2.) they experience it but don't introspect about it, although weirdly this may also not be really experiencing pain. The non-consciousness of animals, which has thankfully become less fashionable in recent years is a necessary position for Ramachandran because his theory of qualia and consciousness is tied to the emergence of self-consciousness, which for Ramachandran only occurs in humans. The non-consciousness at least of mammals, here developed in a rather confused way, has always seemed unlikely, and may possibly be an unwitting inheritance from the Christian dogma that animals do not have souls. The notion appears improbable, given that other mammals have a similar brain architecture and nervous system to humans and their observed behaviour in the face of pain or fear is very similar, which places a heavy burden of evidence on those who claim that for mysterious reasons the response to pain or fear comes from a different source than in humans. For instance, at one point, Ramachandran seems to say that the animal response comes from the spinal cord, so he appears to be saying that the somatosensory cortex is switched off in some mysterious way in non-human mammals. Apart from anything else, like so much of consciousness studies, this discussion is light on actual science. Assertions about the mind, as in this spinal cord claim are thrown around without any reference to the underlying neuroscience. All these assertions about animal non-consciousness are necessary, because for Ramachandran consciousness emerges from the self and only humans have a self. His view of consciousness is that up to a particular point in evolution, at the point where humans emerge, there are just unconscious representations of the external world, but at the human stage comes a meta representation, or a representation of the representations, which is claimed to constitute the self, which in turn constitutes the qualia or subjective experience. The problem with this is that it is yet another version of the all too common proposition in neuroscience that if one video camera is pointed at another or a film is filmed consciousness will emerge. This is really to say that if one copies something one can add something to it without introducing any new physical process. The world would be a very different from what it is if this was true. In this situation, if the first lot of representations are unconscious, a representation of these will simply be a copy, summary or integration of the originals and therefore as true copies equally unconscious, unless a new physical process or property is introduced. This is nowhere suggested in this discussion. An easier approach is to allow animals some qualia, which all the evidence of biology and behaviour suggests that they have, and then accept that the self is part of the contents of consciousness, in that we have the subjective experience (illusory or otherwise) of being a freestanding entity. All that can really be said for Ramachandran's theory is that it one better than the papers where the self is deconstructed into narrative history and the sense of the boundaries and position of the body, and the problem of consciousness is then declared to have been solved. 5.) Thomas Metzinger In:- Conversations on Consciousness Susan Blackmore Oxford University Press (2005) Metzinger seems to try yo belittle those who think there is a problem in understanding consciousness. He notes that consciousness theories are often rejected because they are not immediately plausible. He suggests that even a good theory of consciousness would not be intuitively plausible to us. He tries to compare responses to the counter intuitive in consciousness theory, where it is rejected, to the more favourable response to the counter intuitive in string theory. I don't think that this argument is at all valid. String theory has an initially attractive feature in reconciling relativity, which is our theory of spacetime, with quantum theory, which is our theory of fundamental particles and fields. Both theories are very successful in explaining how the universe behaves and in making predictions, but have the unfortunate feature of being incompatible with one another. String theory dealt with this last problem. It did require counter intuitive extra dimensions, but they were rolled up very small in the Big Bang, to account for why they are not observed. But conventional consciousness theories tend to lack this sort of appeal. They do not relate to other theories that explain properties of the universe, in the way in which relativity and quantum theory offer explanations of why the physical characteristics of the universe are what they are. They appear more as convoluted assertions of what people want to believe. Altered states: Surpisingly, Metzinger, who is here arguing for a very conventional 'reductionist' view of consciousness, stumbles, apparently, without realising the irony of it, upon what I'll call the altered states of consciousness argument for the sustained through life existence of the self. The mainstream view of the self, which is espoused by Metzinger, holds that the self is an illusion, usually said to comprise mainly the narrative history and the sense of the boundaries and position of the body, and that any idea of an entity persisting through life is redundant. Metzinger, describes accurately, if ironically, someone who goes into the forest early in the morning, and sits down, and suddenly they are one with the world. He desribes here what I'll call the 'standard altered state of consciousness experience' that seems to appear in one form or another in all cultures. Metzinger takes the view that the self hasn't really disappeared, because there is something there that is subsequently able to report the experience. Curiously, this is exactly the same argument that is put forward by the anti-reductionists to the effect that even when the self of common usage is stripped away there is still something that observes, and this something tends to be seen as the thing that continues through life. In the slippery way of conscious studies, Metzinger tries to make an inelegant partial denial of the whole thing. He suggests that people report something (it is not made clear whether they think their report is true) and then impose a theory that they have heard or read about. This at least can be said to be wrong, because these experiences often occurred to people who had no inkling of consciousness theories or the idea of altered states of consciousness. 6.) Information, immaterialism, instrumentalism: old and new in quantum information Christopher Timpson, Oxford University In: Philosophy of Quantum Information and Entanglement - Eds – Alisa Bokulich & Gregg Jaeger - Cambridge University Press INTRODUCTION: Timpson considers that modern views of the universe as being comprised of information constitute a revival of the traditional Copenhagen approach to quantum theory. With informational theories, reality is suggested to arise from the posing of yes/no questions to scientific equipment. The attraction of this is that if the quantum state represents merely information rather than objective reality, then the problem of randomness in quantum measurement and non-locality in entanglement is removed. The quanta become merely information about the outcome of scientific measurements, rather than representing features of the physical universe. It is noticeable that this type of argument tends to be centred on what goes on in the laboratory rather in the wider universe. This approach always gives rise to a worrying question as to what happens in the vast majority of time and space, in which there is no scientific equipment or scientists to observe. The informational position is popular with a number of prominent physicists. The physicist, Zurek, remarks that the randomness in quantum measurement is the core problem in quantum physics, and that a measurement is essentially about obtaining information. This approach is often extended to deal with both the problem of quantum entanglement. Zeilinger is another physicist who seeks to explain the appearance of randomness and entanglement by means of an informational concept. Timpson, however, is doubtful about the usefulness of this latter day Copenhagen argument. He says that 'immaterialism' and 'instrumentalism' are associated with the Copenhagen way of thinking, and that information is often pulled into the argument by Copenhagen based theorists. The appeal of information based theories is seen as having reversed a drift away from the Copenhagen interpretation in the later part of the 20th century. The main concept is that the quantum state is not a real thing, but merely the information that the observer has obtained. For instance, the physicist, Hartle, postulates that a quantum state is information obtained from knowledge of how a system was prepared in the laboratory that can be used to make predictions about future measurements. On this basis, the wave function collapse is neither an objective physical process, nor something that is created by the consciousness of the observer, but is a state that is constructed by the observer. The most frustrating thing about this type of approach is that it might just work for interpreting individual experiments, but it tells us nothing about how matter and energy function in the world outside the laboratory. The advantage for its proponents is that it makes the problems of randomness and non-locality go away. According to such a theory, the non-locality of entanglement is not a problem because the quantum states do not represent how things are in the world but merely the information that the particular observers possess. Thus when there are two observers (conventionally Alice and Bob) out of range of one another even given a signal travelling at the speed of light, and the wave function of a particle observed by Bob is collapsed, the fact that this also instantaneously collapses the wave function of a particle in Alice's laboratory is merely an update of the information available to Alice, and does not say anything about the reality of her particle. Timpson says that the mathematician John Bell highlighted the problems of this approach. Bell asked what this information in the Copenhagen interpretation was. There appeared to be two possible answers to this, either the information was about the results of experiments or it was about the state of the system before measurement. Timpson thinks that neither of these answers can apply in the case of the Copenhagen/informational position. If the information represents the state before measurement then it requires hidden variables that are not part of the information available to the observer to produce the this information, and these hidden variable have been ruled out by experiment. The alternative is that the information is about what the results of experiments will be. This appears to be the so-called 'instrumentalist' position, which is that the theory is merely a means of predicting the result of experiments. This has been the position of some theorists, but modern information theory has claimed to add something more interesting. Ensembles v. individual studies: Timpson discusses whether it is a fair to claim information theory as an advance on instrumentalism . What he refers to as 'standard instrumentalism' only attempts measurement results over a number of systems rather than for an individual particle. However, the informational approach is different in that it says that different agents have different information about the same individual system as opposed to having it for an ensemble of systems. Timpson argues that to know anything about an individual system or particle/waves gives it an element of objectivity because the system has to be just as the information specifies, and it is not just a product of the observer's activity. Thus information theory has not freed us from the objectivity that it was trying to dispense with. This suggests that informational theories cannot provide an improvement on Copenhagen in terms of explanatory power. Zeilinger's foundational principle: Timpson discusses the physicists, Zeilinger's modern attempt to produce an informational theory. Zeilinger tries to establish a single foundational principle that makes quantum theory more acceptable to traditional thinking. The Zeilinger foundational principle states "an elementary system represents the truth value of one proposition." This is taken to mean that each of the quanta represent one bit of information. This is supposed to explain both randomness and non-locality. In Zeilinger's idea a proposition is an experimental question. The truth value of a proposition is the same as a yes/no question in an experiment. Timpson therefore rewrites the Zeilinger foundational principle as "The state of an elementary system (a quanta) specifies the answer to a single yes/no experimental question." Timpson's argument here is that because the quanta only relates to one bit, it cannot provide a definite answer to all the questions that could be answered, and therefore randomness is the answer to the remaining questions. In this system, hidden variables would not help, because they would themselves represent more bits of information. Timpson argues that what the foundational principle does not explain is why the finest grained description of the system still leaves this element of randomness. Similarly is not clear why there are experimental questions that can be asked of entangled systems, but cannot be asked of non-entangled systems. The difference between these positions implies that entanglement involves extra bits of information that is not allowed for in the informational theories. 7.) Article by Julian Baggini based on his book, 'The Ego Trick' New Scientist, 12 March 2011 Free will: Unfortunately, it has to be said that consciousness studies, to which the subject of free will is appended, is often dominated by what can be described as pseudo-facts, these being reports of studies that bolster orthodox views of consciousness, but crumble to dust on closer inspection. The oft-repeated claim that the Libet experiments have disproved the existence of free will is perhaps the most prominent of these pseudo-facts. In the earlier part of the article, the author is guarded in his reference to the Libet experiments, merely saying that they showed that certain bodily movements were initiated before subjects were consciously aware of them. Later, and in referring to the work of another author, this caution is thrown to the winds, with a quote asserting that all actions can be traced to biological events of which we have no conscious knowledge. At this point, we need to recall what Libet actually discovered. He demonstrated the readiness potentials for trivial actions, and only for trivial actions, such as flexing a finger, when it had already been decided to periodically flex a finger, are initiated by readiness potentials before subjects are aware of the decision to act. Libet never made any attempt to study the more deliberative or strategic decisions that might reasonably be associated with free will. Despite this, the pseudo-fact that Libet had disproved the existence of free will is everywhere repeated in consciousness studies. In a separate and unrelated article in the same issue of 'New Scientist', the psychologist, Dan Wegner repeats this Libet-related claim. Wegner, to his credit, is one of the few conventional researchers to even examine the question of free will and longer-term decisions. However, the improvement here was marginal. A whole book aimed at refuting freewill essentially rested on a single incident of failure of will, where a person on a diet succumbed to the temptation of a pudding. This can happen, but there is no wider discussion here, such as the possibility of exerting the will by avoiding situations that had tempting puddings. Libet himself postulated the idea of a 'free won't' being the ability to consciously intervene to halt an action that had begun unconsciously. At the time, it was impossible to test his idea, but more recent research has shown that there is a mechanism in the basal ganglia that can intervene to thwart actions that have begun elsewhere in the brain, although it is not really clear whether this intervention is conscious or unconscious. This important finding has received little attention in consciousness studies. Self and self-consciousness: In discussing the self or self-consciousness, Baggini stresses the role of the continuity of the same brain in the same body, in supporting the sense of self. He argues that what is important is the continuity rather than the physical matter of the brain. While continuity is clearly important to the self, this approach seems somewhat superficial in effectively sidestepping the question of what type of physical process is able to give rise to any form of consciousness. The author is inclined to be dismissive of neuroscience and its recent advances, but he does think that the self emerges as a result of many regions of the brain working together. This idea relates to studies of the gamma synchrony, although this interesting feature is not discussed here. What is more apparent is the unspoken assumption that for self-consciousness rational processing in the cortex is more important than activity in the emotional regions of the brain, an assumption that suggests a lack of engagement with recent neuroscientific research into the emotional regions. The author continues with the idea that 'the brain is merely a bundle of thoughts sensations and experiences'. It seems to be implied that this is consistent with the previous concept of many regions of the brain working together, but in reality the ideas look divergent. As is often noted, the remarkable thing about consciousness is the unity of the experience of different modalities and types of processing, something which is essentially different from the idea of a bundle of separate items. Conclusion: The message here seems to be that modern philosophers and psychologists need to engage more with neuroscience when discussing consciousness, and neuroscientists could do well to think more for themselves on the subject rather than blindly downloading from the philosophers and psychologists. |
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