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Philosophy 3

1.) Witness-Consciousness - Miri Albahari

2.) Consciousness not yet explained - Ray Tallis - Criticisms of mainstream neuroscience and philosophy arriving at a new mysterian view.

3.) Response to the structural argument against physicalism - Barbara Montero - Shrewd analysis of the reasons behind irrational hostility to the idea of consciousness as a fundamental property.

4.) Explaining the Brain - Carl F. Craver - Argues that 20th century philosophy as approached neuroscience in the wrong way.

5.) David Chalmers: in:- Conversations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore

6.) Patricia & Paul Churchland: in:- Conversations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore

7.) John Searle: in:- Conversations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore

8.) Kevin O'Regan - In:- Conversations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore

9.) Thomas Metzinger - In:- Conversations on Consciousness - Susan Blackmore

1.)

Witness-Consciousness

Miri Albahari

Philosophy Dept., University of Western Australia

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, No. 1, 2009, pp. 62-84

Near the beginning of her paper, Albahari defines the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, as the need to discover how subjective qualities fit into the physical world. Subjective or phenomenal qualities, otherwise known as qualia, are defined as those qualities, where there is ‘something it is like’, to have them. For instance, there is something it is like, to have the experience of the colour green. Qualia are associated both with the sensory modalities such as colour and with thoughts and feelings.

Albahari is not content to leave the definition of consciousness at that. She considers that consciousness is split into the qualia of green etc., and a subject that is aware of the qualia, described here as a background hum, or an observing aspect of the subject, to which the experiences are presented. This observing aspect is not related to any particular modality, and can be viewed as modality neutral.

Albahari describes this observing aspect as ‘witness-consciousness’. Witness-consciousness sounds, initially, to be very similar to the ‘self’, which is so easily deconstructed into being a combination of narrative memory and the distinction between body and non-body. A common trick in consciousness studies, is to conflate self or self-consciousness with consciousness, de-construct the self, and Pow! ^_____ our author has astonished us all, by dismissing the suddenly trivial problem of consciousness.

Albahari, who is open to Buddhism and Eastern thought, does not go down this route. Instead, she relates witness-consciousness to advanced states of meditation, where, first, it is possible to become more aware of experiences and thoughts, as they enter and leave the mind, and, finally, it is possible to experience an objectless consciousness, where it is something it is like to be in this objectless state.

This idea accords with a large body of literature, in which altered states of consciousness reached by various means, or sometimes entered spontaneously, produce a state in which the self disappears, or merges with he surrounding environment, but there is, nevertheless, still something that observes. Albahari suggests that this observer may be always present, but seldom noticed in the rush of ordinary conscious states. Such an observer is not restricted to any particular modality.

Albahari particularly stresses that this observer is not to be confused with the action of introspecting, an action which has itself been hounded by many western thinkers of the last century. Introspection is a self-conscious act of reflecting on thoughts, feelings or experiences, as opposed to the altered state of still observing, when the self is no longer there.

Albahari also distinguishes it from what she calls the ‘for-me-ness’ of experience, the feeling that an experience belongs to the self. Damasio, in his somewhat disappointing book on emotion, ‘The Feeling of What Happens’ (1.), seems to try and evade the issue of emotions and consciousness, by trying to make everything a property of the self. This probably doesn’t stand up even in ordinary life, because while some experiences are very much attached to our identity as a person, on other occasions, we may, perhaps literally, ‘lose ourselves’ in, for instance, a story or a landscape or the feeling of a fine day. In the widely reported experience of loss of self in altered states of consciousness, Damasio’s conflation of consciousness with the self definitely does not apply. The notion of ‘for-me-ness’ that can sometimes allow conflation of qualia with the self, is not there at all, if we arrive at this objectless consciousness.

One counter argument to Albahari is that the subject of experience is actually only a cacophony of background experiences. Albahari suggests that this argument does not take account of the distinction between attention and in-attention. If we listen to an orchestra, while having a mild back pain, we may be unaware of the back pain for a time. If the self, or the ‘for-me-ness’, is involved in this at all, it is in attending to the orchestra and not the background of unattended pain.

Towards the end of her paper, Albahari discusses the views of the prominent mid 20^th century philosopher, Ryle. This philosopher seemed to accept that there was something elusive about consciousness, but as is the way in consciousness studies, decides to pass it off as an illusion. He suggests that the elusive nature of the conscious subject is no more mysterious than the fact that one can never jump onto the head section of one’s own shadow. As with so many, for a moment, beguiling images in consciousness discussions, there is an important flaw with this approach. The reason that one cannot jump onto one’s shadow in this way can be explained with a simple diagram of the position of the sun, your body and your shadow, and the whole thing could no doubt be made to look more scientific, and slightly harder to understand, with a bit of geometry. This goes for many similar arguments in consciousness studies, such as the assertion that people who don’t accept that consciousness can be derived from existing neuroscience plus classical physics are like people who think the Earth is flat. The roundness of the Earth is fairly easy to demonstrate, but the efficacy of existing neuroscience in producing consciousness is not, which is why more ink gets spilt on the latter than the former subject. Albahari’s own argument is that, if it was as simple as Ryle seems to be suggesting, the nature of consciousness would have been explained to general satisfaction by traditional scientific methods, and philosophers would not now be continuing to spend a lot of time discussing the issue. But it hasn’t, and they are. Her view is that the reason for this is that there is an awareness of a subjective element in the act of experiencing.

2.)

Consciousness not yet explained

Ray Tallis, Academy of Medical Sciences

New Scientist, 9 January 2010

Tallis attacks the latest fad in consciousness studies, to the effect that near-term advances in technology will allow more and more accurate correlations between neural activity and conscious experience, and that when sufficient accuracy of correlation has been achieved, consciousness will have been explained. This idea that finding correlations will amount to an explanation is something that has crept up on mainstream consciousness studies. In the 1990s, it used to be clearly explained that correlation was not identity. Thunder and lightning are correlated, but thunder is not the same physical thing as lightning. However, since Crick and Koch encouraged researchers to concentrate on the correlates of consciousness, somehow the basically illogical or even magical idea that the correlates of consciousness are necessarily the same thing as consciousness has been allowed to work its way into consciousness studies.

Tallis is also dissatisfied with the approach of mainstream neuroscience and its philosophical under-labourers to the issues of the self and freewill. The mainstream denounces these notions as non-existent or illusions. The author takes the view that declaring the data that they have been called on to explain (self and conscious will) to be non-existent, does not constitute an explanation of the data.

Tallis also considers that there is a problem with time and consciousness. Memories are stored in the cortex, effectively coded into configurations of synapses. The author worries that our synapses exist only in the present, but our experience of memories allows us to experience the past. He refers here, to relativity theory, as viewing the distinction between past, present and future as an illusion. I am not sure that there is such a great problem here. Special relativity proposes that every point has its own frame of reference. If two people shared the same frame of reference, and then moved apart at differing speeds, time will progress at different rates in their now separate frames of reference, but within each individual frame of reference, the increase in entropy, which is seen as the hallmark of time, will progress at a consistent rate, and should therefore be relevant to the behaviour of an individual brain.

There seems to be some rule in consciousness writing that an author has to mention Penrose, and then quickly dismiss him as wrong, but in such a way as to indicate that they have not understood what Penrose was saying. Tallis feels that neuroscience is not making much headway in understanding the unity of consciousness, sometimes referred to as the binding problem. He conflates Penrose, McFadden and strangely Crick, as researchers who have attempted to explain this unity, rather as if they had propounded the same theory. He argues that a unification of nerve impulses would not of itself produce subjective experience, which looks to be probably true. However, this fails to discuss the Penrose-Hameroff proposal that a neuronal assembly could be a unified by a macroscopic quantum feature, the collapse of which could give access to subjectivity. Even at the more modest level of Crick's original advocacy of the gamma synchrony, it seems reasonable to think that this could bind together different modalities, although it does not appear to do anything to explain qualia or subjective experience as such.

In the end, it turns out that Tallis is a 'mysterian' or 'new mysterian' in that he thinks that it is in principle beyond the ability of science to explain consciousness. Science is about objective measurement, which is a level which rejects the validity of subjective experience. Science is interested in measuring the frequency of photons bouncing of an object, rather than listening to my subjective impression that the object is red, but it is the latter which needs to be explained here. This seems to leave us in limbo. Tallis does not seem to be proposing a dualist 'spirit stuff' explanation, so there is apparently no reason at all for consciousness. This seems a rather defeatist position. My own feeling is that if we are not dualist, and the argument against dualism appears strong, consciousness must be some physical process or force, and as such can ultimately be described in terms of physics.

3.)

Response to the structural argument against physicalism

Barbara Monetero

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17, No. 3-4, 2010, pp. 70-83

INTRODUCTION: This paper could be viewed as mainly interesting for its shrewd analysis of the underlying reasons for hostility to theories that argue that consciousness is a fundamental or quantum property.

The author discusses the arguments of David Chalmers' who favoured an approach to consciousness called 'Russellian monism' after the philosopher, Bertrand Russell. This is the view that physics tells us only about the relationship between things and not about the things themselves, nor the nature of the underlying properties and forces, such as mass and charge.

However, Montero wonders whether at the quantum level there really is a distinction between the level of the relationship between things and the level of the fundamental properties and forces. She argues that if there were an explanation for what these were, it might be in terms of a further relationship quality, presumably because it is difficult to conceive of anything else. This seems quite logical, but it somewhat evades the fact that, at least in terms of existing scientific knowledge, there does appear to be a level in the universe beyond which there is no further explanation.

At any rate, Montero is open to discussing the possibility that consciousness is such a fundamental property. She accepts that this can be consistent with the dominant physicalist view of science, if the fundamental level is not actually conscious as such (that would be panpsychism), but is merely a ground for consciousness to arise from, given certain favourable circumstances.

Montero says that although there is widespread disagreement about how to define physicalism, there is a measure of broad agreement that the features of the world arise from a fundamental physical substrata. Every feature of the world can therefore be traced back, and shown to depend or supervene on fundamental physical properties. From this simple definition, it would appear that any theory of consciousness that arises from the fundamental level is a physicalist-type theory, and does not involve any form of dualism.

Montero rather shrewdly seems to put her finger on the reason why mainstream thinkers are so unhappy with theories of consciousness that derive from the fundamental. She asks why fundamental properties that are mental should be accounted as non-physical, rather than as part of the physical universe. She says that she thinks that properties related to the mental are not regarded as acceptable parts of the physical world, because if the mental were seen as fundamental, it would have emerged like that from the Big Bang. She thinks that for 'some' this might in turn 'hint' at the existence of a God and further to that a human or mental-related purpose to the universe.

I think the important point here is not whether or not consciousness as a fundamental does suggest gods or purposes, but the fact that this gives a good idea as to why quantum/fundamental theories arouse, in many quarters, such unreasoning and unscientific hostility. Montero suggests that even researchers who may not be fully aware of the gods/purposes link may pick up on the generally bad reputation of fundamental consciousness and respond in hostile/irrational fashion.

Montero herself appears to adopt a 'new mysterian' view that consciousness may in fact be beyond human understanding, if only because the nature of the fundamentals as a whole is beyond understanding. However, she wants to leave open the possibility that in the future physics may be able to understand the fundamentals themselves, rather than just the relationships that they govern.

Montero's reasons for not accepting a theory of consciousness straightforwardly based on consciousness as a fundamental is not altogether convincing. The problem she invokes is really a version of the 'binding problem', as to how many small conscious fundamental entities could bind together into the unified experience of subjective consciousness. However, although this is an important problem, it is not such a hard problem as all that. Neuroscience already tells us that brains work by forming large neuronal assemblies related to particular activities, and also that conscious activity tends to correlate with the gamma synchrony. These facts are at least suggestive of some underlying binding property. At the other end of the spectrum, most quantum theories of consciousness think in terms of macroscopic extension, as with both versions of Penrose-type theory and also the different versions of quantum brain dynamics. Thus the main value of this paper seems to lie in its rather acute analysis of the reasons for the widespread hostility to the idea of consciousness as a fundamental property.

4.)

Explaining the Brain

Carl F.. Craver

Oxford University Press (2009)

INTRODUCTION: Craver's work could be viewed as an attempt to clear away some of the undergrowth of 20^th century philosophy that has tended to constrain, both attempts to interpret neuroscience's discoveries, and ultimately the attempt to understand the physical basis of consciousness. Craver is critical of those philosophers who have interpreted neuroscience in terms of simple and predictable laws deriving purely from the neuron level. He suggests that this approach is lacking in evidential support. Instead, he favours causal mechanisms. Thus complete explanations in neuroscience are argued to be those that capture all the causal relations between the components of a mechanism. Explanations in practical neuroscience are seen to describe mechanisms, and show how components make something work, rather than relating to the effect of general laws. Particular components arranged in a particular system is what is seen as necessary for explanation. The author also argues against any absolute concept of 'levels' that cannot interact with one another. Levels are only seen as a constraint within a particular mechanism. So the hippocampus and the pyramidal cells might be at different levels in a particular mechanism, but this should not be seen as a general rule that must apply to these components in all instances. The levels in neuroscience are argued to be levels within a particular mechanism, rather than levels applying as a general law.

At the beginning of this book, Craver states that the general form of mechanistic explanation is his focus. He says that he is concerned with constitutive or componential causal-mechanical explanations, which means that the explanation of some occurrence is based on the organisation and activity of component entities.

As an example relevant to neuroscience, he quotes the opening of a Ca²⁺ ion channel that happens as a result of the components of a system. Craver is critical of some other philosophers such as Patricia Churchland, who seek to place all neuroscientific explanation at the neuron level, in accordance with the so-called neuron doctrine. The neuron doctrine is the most widespread form of interpretation in both neuroscience and philosophy, but Craver suggests that this approach is lacking in evidential support. He argues instead that neuroscientific explanations are multilevel in form with component parts specified at the brain system, cellular and molecular levels. He claims that practical neuroscience both past and present has relied on such descriptions.

This book argues for the causal and explanatory relevance of phenomena at multiple levels. The role of the Ca²⁺ ion in neurotransmitter release is taken as an example of a neuroscientific system that is explained in terms of a particular mechanism, in this case the mechanism allowing the inflow of calcium ions, rather than in terms of any particular fundamental law. The classic Hodgkin and Huxley study that led to the understanding of the action potential is viewed in similar terms.

Craver also warns that correlations may not be explanatory, an elementary caveat, but one that is on the verge of being forgotten in modern consciousness studies. He reminds us that it is necessary to distinguish between what is a cause and what is a correlation, and to be careful in distinguishing which amongst a choice of variables explains a phenomena. Craver argues against explaining neuroscience in terms of the unfolding of simple predictable laws. Explanations in practical neuroscience describe mechanisms, and show how components make something work, rather than relating the effect to the fundamental laws.

He points out instances such as the unpredictable relation between action potentials and synaptic firing, with only about 15% of potentials leading to a firing, and similarly the fact that Ca²⁺ channels can open under conditions where such an opening has a low probability. Thus, effects do not necessarily have to have high probability for them to have been caused by something. Complete explanations are described as those that capture all the causal relations between the components of a mechanism. Temporal sequence, i.e. one thing happening before another is not sufficient explanation by itself. Similarly, effects that derive from a common cause do not as such explain one another.

Generalisations that hold true about organisms, may hold true only some of the time. Craver takes the example of long term potentiation, which is a general truth but may be defeated by individual circumstances, and is not as such a law of nature. Thus, Craver argues that in the past, there was a time when no LTP existed, because it had not evolved, whereas the laws of nature are assumed to have existed from the beginning. What is true of LTP in this respect is regarded as applying to large areas of neuroscience.

The author distinguishes between 'how possibly' and 'how actually' models of explanation. How-possibly models might produce the effect that they are trying to explain, but there is little evidence that they actually do. Mainstream consciousness theories such as functionalism could be argued to fall into this category, although some might argue that they fail even the 'possibly' test. Functionalism certainly fails to come up with any specific mechanism, by which consciousness could arise either in brains or machines. Thus the particular components arranged in a particular physical system are what the 'how-actually' explanatory models require. These models show how the neuroscience works, not just how it might work.

Daniel Dennett's model in particular is criticised for lacking the input to distinguish 'how-possibly' from 'how-actually'. It is necessary to know not only how mechanisms such as action potentials occur, but also how they may be inhibited or altered by variations in conditions. The author criticises so-called 'box and arrow' explanations because they only work if the boxes and arrows correspond to physically active components, which is often the case. He stresses it is necessary to distinguish real components from fictions in order to distinguish good explanations from bad explanations.

As an example, he discusses how channels in cell membranes were initially not much more than a convenient fiction, but gradually became physically substantiated as proteins, with a description of their amino acid chains and secondary and tertiary structure. This process was a function of a convergence of independent evidence rather than any particular fundamental law.

The mechanical explanations also depend on the spatial and temporal organisation of the component parts, and a different spatial and temporal organisation of these parts can result in a different outcome. Thus the activities of the components have to happen in a particular order. The author criticises the practise in much artificial intelligence of ignoring such temporal constraints on processing. The concept of a mechanistic explanation involves the behaviour of the mechanism as a whole. Parts have to be arranged in a particular spatial and temporal order. It matters how the components are organised with respect to one another. The higher-level property is not a simple sum of the components, but is a function of how they are organised.

Levels: The fact that parts are smaller than the whole is not because they are on a particular scale as such, but simply because they need to fit inside the whole, for instance a hippocampus involved in spatial memory needs to fit inside a brain. Similarly, it makes no sense to ask whether two components are at the same level, if they are not part of the same system. It thus makes no sense to ask whether a water pump and a heart are at the same level, because they are not part of the same system. The hippocampus and a pyramidal cell might be at a different level in a particular system, but this does not mean that they have to be at a different level in every system.

This local view of levels is seen as providing a more solid basis for neuroscientific explanations. The author sees no difficulty in things of different size interacting if they are part of the same mechanism, and the understanding of neuroscience can suffer if there are attempts to force explanations into preconceived size hierarchies. Parts plus organisation are what is causal in any mechanism. Further to this mechanisms can do things that individual parts cannot. The actual structure and organisation of the mechanism mean that it can be influenced by the environment in a way that the parts cannot. Thus the causal power of the whole mechanism is greater than the causal power of its parts, and therefore the ability to be causal cannot be confined to the lowest level of the hierarchy, but also exists at the level of the whole mechanism.

Explanations in neuroscience are viewed as spanning multiple levels. For neuroscience, the lowest level is viewed as the molecular level of electrical and chemical activity in cells. The author argues that levels in neuroscience are best seen as levels of mechanism. Lower-level components are organised to make up higher- level mechanisms. The author accuses some 20^th century philosophers of creating an over rigid hierarchy of levels that could neither cope with the complexity of the real world, nor respond to changes in scientific knowledge. In the authors view, levels of processing are ranked according to their place in a temporal and causal sequence. For instance, processing in the retina occurs previous to and is causal of processing in the thalamus. It is a components level in a causal chain rather than their actual size or scale than determines their level in the hierarchy.

5.)

David Chalmers: In:- Conversations on Consciousness

Susan Blackmore

Chalmer's ideas are covered elsewhere on this site, so here we'll simply focus on particular points that come out of Blackmore's interview with Chalmers. Blackmore puts the view that the idea that the existence of subjective experience is a hard problem is analogous to the 19th century theory of vitalism, where an elan vital was required to explain life, as distinct from inanimate objects and chemistry. Chalmers counters by saying that this is a disanalogy. He asks what it is that has to be explained with regard to life. Life metabolises energy from the environment, and uses this to control its behaviour, compete for resources, adapt, grow and finally reproduce. These are functions, and the functions are what have to be explained. The vitalists using the knowledge of the 19th century could not understand how inanimate matter could perform the functions observed in living things, and therefore postulated the idea of an elan vital. However, the progress of science demonstrated that there were mechanisms in living organisms that could perform these functions. However, Chalmers points out that the vitalists were only trying to explain third-person behaviours that they could observe from outside the organism. With consciousness, we are trying to explain the first-person subjective experience, which is quite distinct from the third-person observed behaviours of living organisms.

Further into the interview, Chalmers makes an important distinction between the reducible and the irreducible in physics. He points out that in physics there are irreducible things or properties, such as spacetime, mass and charge. They are just given aspects of the universe, and science does not try to explain them in terms of anything else. These things are taken as fundamental. Chalmers argues that if we cannot derive consciousness from other physical properties, then it must itself be a fundamental. If consciousness cannot be reduced to something else, it must itself be irreducible or fundamental. From this basis, we can look for laws that govern the connection between first-person consciousness and third person behaviour, akin to the laws that prevail in normal physics. He rejects Blackmore's suggestion that the idea of consciousness as a fundamental is necessarily panpsychist. He suggests that consciousness can be fundamental and rare, just as mass is relatively rare in the prevailing vacuum of the universe.

Chalmers argues against the idea of quantum properties being linked to consciousness, but his approach seems rather superficial in this area. His argument is prima facie attractive in asking why a wave function collapse in the brain should produce consciousness there, when wave function collapses occur all over the universe. However, this does not really look at the more detailed question of what might happen if longer-lived quantum coherence and wave function collapse are involved with the sensory processing involved in brains. In this situation the brain could be literally a gate to the background fundamental consciousness of spacetime. Chalmers is in fact himself not so far from that view, where he suggests that the fundamental property of consciousness might only emerge where we have complex information processing as in brains. What Chalmers lacks is any description of the mechanism by which this would happen, something that is provided in some forms of quantum consciousness theory.

6.)

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.

7.)

John Searle

In:- Conversations on Consciousness

Susan Blackmore

This conversation includes a summary of Searle's chinese room thought experiment, the thing for which he is best known in consciousness studies. Searle used this in his dispute with the artificial intelligence community to try and demonstrate that a computer would never be conscious. There are similarities in concept to Penrose's view that there is a lack of understanding in computers.

In the chinese room demonstration Searle says that he does not understand Chinese. He is, however, confined to a room with a programme for handling Chinese symbols. Questions are sent to the room also expressed in the form of Chinese symbols. When these are received, Searle consults a rule book and sends back the appropriate answer again in the form of Chinese symbols provided by the rule book. This means that he has received Chinese input and provided Chinese output without understanding anything about the Chinese language. His suggestion is that computers are in the same position of receiving input, following certain rules, and producing a resulting output, without any understanding of the subject matter. The computer only needs to manipulate symbols such as sequences of zeros and ones.

The conversation does not attempt to deal with all of the numerous arguments that have been advanced against the chinese room. However, Searle does discuss what he claims to be the favourite counter argument, known as the systems reply. In this argument the whole room as a system, including tables, desks and paper plus Searle is categorised as a system that understands Chinese. He regards this as a desperate attempt to escape the obvious conclusion of the chinese room thought experiment. It is difficult not to agree with him. It is difficult to conceive a world in which paper, desks and tables add any conscious understanding to the brain of a human manipulating unknown symbols according to a rule.

Searle suggests that criticism of the chinese room conclusion is metaphysically based relative to a believe that computation must be all that comprises the human brain, because that is part of a particular world view. He also points out that if a realisation of the limitations of computers became more widespread a lot of research funding in the artificial intelligence area would be threatened. Governments and corporations had been happy to plough money into robotics because of the naive or 'folk' believe since the mid-twentieth century that autonomous robots were just round the corner and essentially only involved strapping a computer onto a mobile electrical appliance.

8.)

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.

9.)

Thomas Metzinger P. In:- Conversations on Consciousness P. Susan Blackmore P. Oxford University Press (2005) P. 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. P. 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. P. 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 sel