As noted here, I was lucky enough to do a record with Chuck long ago, and the lovely Nina and I saw him play just last summer at the bandshell near our home here in Brooklyn.

At the time of his death Chuck Brown was, by any honest measure, the funkiest man alive. I’m sorry he’s gone.

A quibble: in this post Kevin discusses Bill’s dualistic, antimaterialist position on the nature of consciousness, and in doing so skims a little too close, I think, to conflating intelligence and consciousness. We read:

I also disagree completely with Vallicella’s characterization of neuroscience. For him, neuroscience will never “teach us anything about consciousness.” The reality, though, is that neuroscientific theories are paving the way for us to make machines– robots– whose behaviors are becoming increasingly complex. If one definition of “intelligence” is “problem-solving ability,” then by that standard we have been building increasingly intelligent machines for years. Soon, intelligence will come to mean more than the ability to win at chess or participate in a Jeopardy! competition: it will mean the advent of machines that react without confusion in fluid social or physical situations. While true machine consciousness is probably a long way off, I don’t see its realization as an impossible goal. Intelligence isn’t consciousness, but it’s a vital component of consciousness. [Is it? -MP] One day, a machine is going to stare at us with the same speculative curiosity we train on it.

My point is that the increasing complexity of machine behaviors is the result of scientific theories that are grounded in a naturalistic (or, more precisely, physicalist) philosophy of mind. If mind is indeed utterly dependent on matter, as I believe it is, then we will one day be able to arrange matter in such a way as to form minds. This won’t convince the diehard substance dualists,* of course; they’ll go on believing that mind is somehow independent of matter without ever being able to explain how a particular mind is connected to a particular body. Unfortunately, their philosophy of mind can promise no progress: you can’t strive to create artificial intelligence if you believe it’s inherently unachievable.

I don’t have a lot to disagree with here, but I will say that I think it is critically important to pry apart three (at least) concepts that are often muddled together when people talk about these things: consciousness, intelligence, and intentionality. Bill Vallicella, in particular, seems committed to the idea that consciousness is necessary for intentionality; I’ve tried for many years now to get him to discuss this in light of such obviously intentional (and presumably non-conscious) things as the food-dance of bees, etc., but he won’t engage.

Likewise, I consider it perfectly possible for intelligence, even very high intelligence, to operate completely unconsciously (my experience with the Gurdjieff work drove this home very uncomfortably, if I had any doubt). I agree with Kevin that “If mind is indeed utterly dependent on matter, as I believe it is, then we will one day be able to arrange matter in such a way as to form minds”; we do that already, after all (and with unskilled labor!), by making babies. But it may well be that there is something in particular about biological brains that is uniquely capable of generating consciousness: for all we know, you can’t make a conscious machine out of silicon any more than you can make a ham sandwich out of glass.

But as I said, just a quibble. Go read Kevin’s piece here.

This often draws the objection, however, that females have distinctly smaller brains than males, but do not show lower average intelligence within their population groups than males. So if this difference doesn’t account for differences in intelligence within groups, why should mean brain volume be responsible for IQ differences between groups?

The answer is coming into view. It appears, as many have suspected, that the difference in brain size between males and females is due to the presence of extra machinery in the male brain for processing spatial-relationship data — a feature that is independent of general intelligence.

Charles Murray comments here.

But when I looked at the note before sending it, I saw that I had in fact typed “I really can’t comment much about the trial because I paid it no attention at all, and don’t no any of the details.”

I think that’s an odd sort of typo to make — writing ‘no’ instead of ‘know’. They’re completely different words, expressing utterly unrelated meanings, and all they have in common is the way they sound. I wonder what making a slip like that means in terms of what’s happening in my brain as I write.

It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood at the level of the brain. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object—its color, contours, apparent motion, location in space, etc. arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of a ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is perfectly intelligible—and it suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the character of our experience can often be explained in terms of its underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why it should be “like something” to see in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.

For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There seems to be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we fully conscious during sleep and merely failing to form memories? Can human minds be duplicated or merged? Is it possible to love your neighbor as yourself? A precise, functional neuroanatomy of our mental states would help to answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. And yet, whatever insights arise from correlating mental and physical events, it seems unlikely that one side of the world will be fully reduced to the other.

While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is “like something” to be what we are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this universe. How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided. Therefore, although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our mental life. That doesn’t leave much scope for conventional religious doctrines, but it does offer a deep foundation (and motivation) for introspection. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly, or not discovered at all.

For all this gloom, though, about the possibility of our ever understanding the nature of consciousness, Dr. Harris does not seem to doubt that consciousness is indeed, somehow, the product of the living, physical brain. (It certainly isn’t as if he thinks human consciousness is a splinter of the mind of God, or something.)

If this is true, then — that in some way our conscious minds really do arise from, and depend for their existence upon, the workings of our material brains — then I have to ask once again, as I always do when this subject comes up: why should our inability, as yet, even to imagine what a true theory of consciousness might look like be taken as evidence that such a theory will never be forthcoming? If what appears to be happening really is what is actually happening — that a process in the physical world gives rise to a phenomenon we can all observe — why should we be convinced that we shall never be able to explain it? Nobody had the slightest inkling how to answer the riddles that tormented the physicists of the late 19th century until the radical — and, what is more to the point, breathtakingly, unimaginably counterintuitive — insights of Einstein and his contemporaries shattered and reconstructed the intellectual landscape. It was Einstein who, when all around him were baffled and losing hope, did exactly what Dr. Harris is calling for here: he imagined “what sort of idea could fit in the space provided”.

I understand the argument that in principle we could describe the working of the brain down to a fare-thee-well and still only have physical, not subjective, facts in hand. But so far, we are nowhere near even to understanding the correlates of consciousness in exhaustive microscopic, neurological, chemical, quantum-mechanical, or computational detail. From an engineering, heuristic perspective, that’s the least we need: to be able to identify with predictive certainty exactly what physical states, processes, and above all, changes correlate precisely with particular effects in consciousness. Is that enough? No, and that’s the point that all skeptics raise: you can have all that, and you still haven’t said what consciousness is, or why those correlations are what they are. But it will only be when you have reduced the facts, the correlations, down to that level of detail — when you can say this bit of matter entering exactly this state, or this pattern of activity across the whole brain, is both necessary and sufficient to cause this effect in consciousness — that you will have focused the problem to the point where some indefatigable genius, some Einstein of the mind, may be able to insert his crowbar.

Can I know this will ever happen? No, of course not. Perhaps I’m too optimistic. Our capacity to understand the world may limited in ways we can never even conceive of, and the answer to this riddle may simply be beyond our powers of imagination. But by the same token, nobody can possibly know that it won’t.

The rest of the post is just a throwing-up of hands. After pausing to remark on the current disfavor of “mind-first’ ontologies fashionable in the mid-20th century in favor of reductionist materialism (with his apparent approval), he goes on to say that the currently prevailing view — that consciousness emerges from the activities of certainly types of matter, suitably configured — is “incomprehensible”:

To say that consciousness emerged at some point in the evolution of life doesn’t give us an inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle.
I believe that this notion of emergence is incomprehensible—rather like a naive conception of the big bang….

[T]he idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) unconscious physical events is, I would argue, impossible to properly conceive—which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are mistaken. We can say the right words, of course—“consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing.” We can also say “Some squares are as round as circles” and “2 plus 2 equals 7.” But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don’t think so.

Well, I don’t know what it means to Harris to “properly” conceive an idea, but it seems to me that the idea that consciousness emerges somehow from the activity of our brains (a distinction needs to be made here between what our biological brains do and mere “information processing”, I think) is surely conceivable, and not incoherently or incomprehensibly so, despite our ignorance as to how the trick is done. It may be that the answer will elude us forever; to fully understand it may even require intelligence, or ways of modeling the world, quite beyond what our modified ape brains are capable of. But the hypothesis itself is comprehensible enough, and given all the evidence that consciousness is supervenient upon the physical brain — and the fact that the only loci of consciousness that we know to exist are our own supremely complex brains, which came into existence through a gradual process of evolution from inanimate matter — I don’t think it’s about to go away anytime soon.

But I will admit: it’s a poser.

You can read Harris’s post here.

Fabulous. Look at them! Gesturing, listening attentively while the other is “speaking”, with rising and falling inflections and cadences — all the attributes of spoken communication. But what’s their subjective experience? Are they actually communicating anything at all, as we would understand “communicating”? Or are they just taking their speech modules, already partially primed from a year or so of listening to the adults around them, but not yet loaded with language, for a dry run? The latter seems more likely, but it’s mighty hard to watch the two of them without thinking that they’re really chatting about something, and understanding each other.

I was surprised, therefore, to see that another Englishman — the Victorian author Samuel Butler — seems to have beaten Dawkins to the punch by a century or so. Yesterday I ran across this quote:

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

The word “interests” is of particular relevance here, as it shows Mr. Butler taking the “intentional stance” toward ideas themselves. As I’ve stressed often (see here, here and here, for example) it is only by understanding replicators as things that can be seen as having “interests” that we can arrive at naturalistic accounts of intentionality and a Darwinian grounding for the notion of “design“.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this connection — a Google search of the quote together with “meme” turned up nothing — but I think Samuel Butler was perhaps the first carrier of the “meme” meme.

The notions that this paper supports — that intelligence is real, that it is measurable, and that it is in large part heritable — are a good example of PC orthodoxy contradicting the findings of both everyday experience and scientific inquiry. Yet the orthodoxy persists. I recently had a fairly heated dinner-table argument with a Harvard sociologist in which she denied that the idea of ranking “intelligence” had any value at all, because there are so many “kinds” of intelligence. I suggested that even if that were so (and even if we generously leave aside the general problem-solving sort of intelligence that people usually think of and is the metric usually sought), one could still entertain the notion of being more or less intelligent as regards whatever particular “kind” of intelligence one might choose to consider, and that surely we would have to say that someone who did better in every “kind” of intelligence than someone else could fairly be ranked, by any reasonable examiner, as “more intelligent” than that other person.

At this she bobbed and weaved a bit, and then finally gave away the real basis of her resistance by saying that regardless of any of these points, we shouldn’t be conducting such research, as it could be fodder for discrimination. In her mind that was more or less the end of it, and in the interest of friendship and good digestion I let the matter drop.

She’ll be sorry to hear that the research has gone ahead anyway. I’ll try not to mention it.

The contrasting view (and the one that I incline toward) is that consciousness arises, in some way that we do not yet understand, from the workings of the brain — which means that before there were any brains in in the world, there was no consciousness — and that reason is a practical affair, a Good Trick that we have learned as a highly effective (and therefore highly adaptive) way of modeling the world so as to predict those aspects of the future that have, over the eons, had some bearing on our reproductive success.

C.S. Lewis considered this physicalist view of reason to be “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”. Genuine Reason, he argued, must flow according to the logical relations between ground and consequent, while any form of “reason” instantiated as a purely physical system can only proceed according to physical cause and effect. Therefore, he argued, our Reason must cannot rest upon a purely physical foundation, or we wouldn’t be able to trust it.

For Lewis this was a sort of reductio ad absurdum: of course we do consider reason to be trustworthy, and so the only possible basis fit can possibly have is one that transcends the “merely” physical. But as I argued in a post some time ago, there’s another possibility: that our reason actually is quite limited and imperfect, in ways that are hard for us to see — just as we’d expect from a purely practical brain-based system that has been cobbled together over the eons by natural selection. Our trust, in other words, may go too far.

A great deal of clever experimentation and neuro-psychological research has been done since C.S. Lewis died (on November 22nd, 1963, by the way), and the peculiarities, defaults, and curious limitations of human cognition have become far more apparent. Among the more recent ideas about why we reason the way we do is one put forward by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier in a paper called Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Their premise? As Jonathan Haidt explains:

“Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Here’s the abstract:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

It’s an interesting idea, though my first impression is that it sounds a bit all-or-nothing: while I can easily see how such social factors could have exerted a strong selection pressure, it seems to me that more objective feedback from the real world must have had a major role to play also.

But I’ve only just run across this, and haven’t yet read the paper (or the article linked below), so I can’t say yet if it makes a truly persuasive, well-reasoned argument.

Learn more here.

I had coffee very briefly today with my friend Salim Ismail, a remarkable fellow who was most recently the director of the Singularity University. I don’t get to see Salim very often, because he is always either hard at work out in California, or jetting around the world explaining the future to international conferences and heads of state. But we always try to have lunch or dinner or coffee whenever he’s in town, and I always find that even a brief chat with him is enormously stimulating. He’s a human dynamo, and he’s always up to something interesting.

Today our conversation revolved around the fascinating topic of consciousness research. By way of introducing the subject, Salim produced a curious little gadget, about the size of a smartphone, that turned out to be a quantum-mechanical random-event generator, developed by Princeton University’s “Engineering Anomalies Research” laboratory, and manufactured by a company called Psyleron — upon which he has cast an interested eye.

Have a look here.

David Chalmers, who made quite a splash with his book 1997 The Conscious Mind, has a new one out, called The Character of Consciousness. Peter Hankins, the marvelous writer who manages the outstanding philosophy-of-mind blog Conscious Entities, has posted a review, which is well worth reading if you are interested in this addictively engaging and infinitely frustrating subject.

An excerpt from Peter’s review:

In Chalmers’ view, the epistemic gap, the fact that knowledge about the physics does not entail knowledge of the phenomenal, is a sign that that there is a real, ontological gap, too. Materialism is not enough: phenomenal experience shows that there’s more. He now gives us a fuller account of the arguments in favour of qualia, the items of phenomenal experience, being a real problem for materialism, and categorises the positions typically taken (other views are of course possible).

• Type A Materialism denies the epistemic gap: all this stuff about phenomenal experience is so much nonsense.
• Type B Materialism accepts the epistemic gap, but thinks it can be dealt with within a materialist framework.
• Type C Materialism sees the epistemic gap as a grave problem, but holds that in the limit, when we understand things better, we’ll understand how it can be reconciled with materialism.

In the other camp we have non-materialist views.

• Type D dualism puts phenomenal experience outside the physical world, but gives it the power to influence material things,
• Type E Dualism, epiphenomenalism, also puts phenomenal experience outside the physical world, but denies that it can affect material things: it is a kind of passenger.

Finally we have the option that Chalmers appears to prefer:

• Type F monism (not labelled as a materialism, you notice, though arguably it is). This is the view that consciousness is constituted by the intrinsic properties of physical entities: Chalmers suggests it might be called Russellian monism.

The point, as I understand it, is that we normally only deal with the external, ‘visible’ aspects of physical things: perhaps phenomenal experience is what they are intrinsically like in themselves – inside, as it were. I like this idea, though I suspect I come at it from the opposite direction: to Chalmers, it seems to mean something like those experiences you’re having – well, they’re the kind of thing that constitutes reality whereas to me it’s more you know reality – well that’s what you’re actually experiencing. Chalmers’ way of looking at it has the advantage of leaving him positioned to investigate consciousness by proxy, whereas I must admit that my point of view tends to leave me with no way into the question of what intrinsic reality is and makes mysterian scepticism (which I don’t like any more than Chalmers) look regrettably plausible.

Type A has always struck me as obvious nonsense; Type B as wishful thinking. Type D suffers, I think, from two major weaknesses: the difficulties of the interaction problem, and the obvious extent to which the mind appears to be entirely supervenient upon the physical brain. Type E, epiphenomenalism, is a dead end, I think (see our discussion of Titus Rivas’s convincing argument to that effect here). That leaves C and F, and I’m not sure I see quite what the difference is between them. I’ve always thought that consciousness is somehow the way certain material systems “look” from the inside; that it is a reflexive feature of the material world that emerges in suitably configured arrangements of matter.

Anyway, the book is no doubt interesting, and the review certainly is. Read it here.

For Jaynes, there was a profound difference between perception and action on the one hand, and self-aware consciousness on the other. He gave the example of a man driving a car while having an engaging conversation. Miles pass as the driver negotiates the twists and turns of the highway, moves from lane to lane, and changes speed to accommodate the other cars around him. Much later he returns his attention to the road, and realizes that he has no memory at all of his driving all that distance; though he may remember well what was said, the complex actions of driving the car proceeded altogether mechanically, and quite unconsciously. Now subtract out the conversation, and what is left is what Jaynes imagined preconscious Man to be: a perceiving, behaving machine.

Jaynes further supposed that before our transformation, the operation of our minds was “bicameral”: there was one part that acted in an executive role, and another that heard the commands of the first part as voices of the gods — in just the same way that schizophrenics hear imperative, disembodied voices today — and acted on them, with no more consciousness than our imaginary motorist’s consciousness of driving the car down the highway.

Jaynes argued — persuasively enough that his view is still the subject of lively debate thirty-three years later — that it was not until the commanding Self began to fuse with the perceiving, reacting Hearer that our modern composite, self-aware consciousness began to form. (For our February 2006 post about Jaynes’s book, and a good comment thread, see here.)

The point that I want to emphasize here is that in Jaynes’s opinion, we are capable of a very great variety of sophisticated perception, intention, and behavior without needing to be conscious at all. We can function very capably in a completely mechanical way.

These ideas — that we are capable of sophisticated unconscious behavior, that a great deal of our cognition, planning, and perception is in fact completely unconscious, and that without some degree of reflective self-awareness we cannot claim to be conscious in any meaningful way — are by no means Jaynes’s alone. Freud persuaded the world that there were such things as completely unconscious emotions, motives, and intention, and the idea that we are, in the absence of guided inner work, little more than talking machines is central to a number of esoteric systems, most notably perhaps that of Gurdjieff (see various posts here).

In this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review I found a critique, by the eminent philosopher of mind Ned Block, of a new book called Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The book is by Antonio Damasio, a leading neuroscientist and explorer of the physiological underpinnings of the human mind.

In his book, Damasio takes a firm Gurdjieffian/Jaynesian position: that “phenomenal awareness”, or, as Block describes it in his review, “what it is like to have a headache, taste chocolate or see red”, is not in any sense really “consciousness” in the absence of self-consciousness: that self-consciousness is necessarily prior to any real subjectivity.

I think this is correct, and it is gratifying to see this view defended by a researcher of Dr. Damasio’s stature. Ned Block is having none of it, though, and he raises various objections, none of which I see as terribly persuasive.

First, Dr. Block refers to an exchange between Julian Jaynes and the philosopher W.V.O. Quine:

The philosopher W. V. Quine once told me that he thought Jaynes might be on to something until he asked Jaynes what it was like to perceive before consciousness was invented. According to Quine, Jaynes said it was like nothing at all — exactly what it is like to be a table or a chair. Jaynes was denying that people had experiential phenomenal consciousness based on a claim about inflated self-consciousness.

This is presented withouth further elaboration, as though it is some sort of reductio ad absurdum; it is nevertheless precisely Jaynes’s and Damasio’s (and Gurdjieff’s) point that in the complete absence of self-aware consciousness, we are entirely justified in denying “experiential” phenomenal consciousness. The assertion may be a radical one, but it is coherent, and Block’s anecdote is certainly not a counter-argument; it is nothing more than an incredulous stare.

Next, Dr. Block offers an example of a patient in a persistent vegetative state:

You may have noticed an exciting report a few years ago of a patient in a persistent vegetative state (defined behaviorally) studied by the neuroscientists Adrian Owen and Steven Laureys. On some trials, the two instructed the patient to imagine standing still on a tennis court swinging at a ball, and on others to visualize walking from room to room in her home. The patient, they found, showed the same imagistic brain activations (motor areas for tennis, spatial areas for exploring the house) as normally conscious people who were used as controls.

More such cases have since been discovered, and this year Owen and Laureys described a vegetative-state patient who was able to use the tennis/navigation alternation to give yes-or-no answers to five of six basic questions like “Is your father’s name Alexander?” These results are strong evidence — though not proof — of phenomenal consciousness in some of those who showed no behavioral signs of it. But Damasio scoffs, saying that these results “can be parsimoniously interpreted in the context of the abundant evidence that mind processes operate nonconsciously.” His skepticism appears to be grounded in the fact that these patients show no clear sign of self-consciousness and thus constitute a potential roadblock in front of his theory.

Again, we have here no evidence of subjectively aware consciousness, but rather of areas of the brain reacting in the same way they would be expected to react in a healthy person. To be sure, these are murky waters here: an unambiguous objective test for subjective consciousness is the Holy Grail of both neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. But again, Dr. Block is not refuting anything here: he dismisses Dr. Damasio’s suggestion that what we see here is mere neurological reaction, devoid of real subjective awareness, as mere “scoffing”, while he in turn scoffs at Dr. Damasio’s assertion on no more solid basis than that it must surely be obvious that “real” consciousness must surely attend such examples of perception and reaction.

Dr. Block presses Dr. Damasio somewhat more effectively with his next objection: dreaming.

Damasio also stumbles over dreaming. In dreams, phenomenal consciousness can be very vivid even when the rational processes of self-consciousness are much diminished. Damasio describes dreams as “mind processes unassisted by consciousness.” Recognizing that the reader will be puzzled by this claim, he describes dreaming as “paradoxical” since the mental processes in dreaming are “not guided by a regular, properly functioning self of the kind we deploy when we reflect and deliberate.” But dreaming is paradoxical only if one has a model of phenomenal consciousness based on self-consciousness — on knowledge, rationality, reflection and wakefulness.

Here we do have a more difficult question. Dreams are a form of subjective experiencing, and they are obviously different from waking consciousness; indeed, the practice of “conscious dreaming” is not uncommon in South Asian esoteric systems. But I would argue that even if the perceptions in dreams are not actual physical responses to stimuli from the outer world, we may regard them as neurological “mock-ups”, to which the dreaming self-awareness stands in a similar relation as it does with the perceptions it receives during ordinary wakefulness. In other words, it is still the case that even in dreams, self-consciousness, however encapsulated it may be from the real world, is necessary for subjective consciousness of the mocked-up perceptions it is fed by the sleeping brain.

Finally, Dr. Block cites experiments in attention:

In one experiment, the Israeli neuroscientist Rafi Malach presented subjects with pictures and asked them to judge their own emotional reactions as positive, negative or neutral — a self-oriented, introspective task. He then presented different subjects with the same pictures and asked them to very quickly categorize the pictures as, for example, animals or not. Of course these subjects were seeing the pictures consciously, but Malach found that the brain circuits involved in scrutinizing self-reactions (as indicated by the emotional reaction task) were inhibited in the fast categorization task. Subjects also rated their self-awareness as high in the emotional reaction task and low in the fast categorization task. As Malach puts it, these results comport with “the strong intuitive sense we have of ‘losing our selves’ in a highly engaging sensory-motor act.”

From a Gurdjieffian perspective, this is simple: for those who have not practiced this sort of inner work, maintaining a self-reflective fragment of attention pointed back toward oneself is slow and effortful, and under stress, we act more mechanically. Dr. Block assumes that “Of course these subjects were seeing the pictures consciously” but I suspect that they were seeing them less consciously than before, and that in general they performed the second drill far more mechanically. (One common assumption is that consciousness is either “on” or “off”, but anyone who has made the sort of careful self-observation that systems like the Gurdjieff work require knows that there are continuous gradations of consciousness.)

I don’t think Dr. Block has made his case, and I’ll be interested to read Dr. Damasio’s book. You can read the review here.

(I’ve also just noticed that all the excerpts I’ve included from Ned Block’s review are indented using an HTML <blockquote> tag. Given the context, I think that’s kind of funny.)

But judging by what I’ve just seen, Olympus may soon be under new management. Have a look here.

Recall the myth of Cupid, who flutters about on his cherubic wings making people fall in love by shooting them with his little bow and arrow. This is such a lame cartoonists’ convention that it’s hard to believe that anybody ever took any version of it seriously. But we can pretend: Suppose that once upon a time there were people who believed that an invisible arrow from a flying god was a sort of inoculation that caused people to fall in love. And suppose some killjoy scientist came along and showed them that this was simply not true: No such flying gods exist. “He’s just shown that nobody ever falls in love, not really. The idea of falling in love is just a nice — maybe even a necessary — fiction. It never happens.” That is what some might say. Others, one hopes, would want to deny it: “No. Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn’t what people used to think it is. It’s just as good — maybe even better. True love doesn’t involve any flying gods.” The issue of free will is like this. If you are one of those who believe that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.

Freedom Evolves, p. 222-223

Of particular relevance were these passages, which describe the experience of a dissolving of the “self” that hallucinogens can produce:

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” [a subject] recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.” …

In interviews … subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished.

These experiences are very much like those achieved by various meditative disciplines, and esoteric adepts have long used hallucinogenic drugs to give beginners a glimpse of the road ahead. The correspondence, it turns out, is not just subjective:

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

That these substances can induce mental states that are both subjectively and objectively similar to, or perhaps indistinguishable from, “genuine” religious or mystical experiences, has led to the coinage of an excellent word for them: entheogens. And that these ineffable subjective experiences can be brought about by such “material” causes as the use of drugs, or even brain trauma (watch this extraordinary video, if you haven’t seen it before) is, it seems to me, more grist for the materialist’s mill.

Read the article here.

My friend and I make fundamentally opposite assumptions. For him, consciousness and purpose are bedrock features of the world, while I suppose that consciousness emerges, somehow, from the substance and activity of our brains. (It’s worth noting that he is a theist, and I’m not.)

My interlocutor asked me:

Do you think there is such a thing as raw consciousness, awareness, an Observer; or do you think there is just an incredibly complicated causal mental chain that somehow includes self-awareness, somehow generated by the same process?

My inclination is toward the latter model, of course, and though I wasn’t sure I understood just what “raw” consciousness means, I replied that the materialist view would be that the brain being what it is, and doing what it does, is what gives rise to consciousness, and that any Observer is therefore just an aspect of the brain in action.

My friend clarified:

Obviously there is the question of how a materially-caused causal chain of thoughts can observe itself, let alone how/why it “feels” qualia.

This is, of course, very much the question. It’s all very well for us materialists to simply assert that consciousness arises from the workings of the physical brain, but until we can offer some account of in virtue of what, exactly, a pinguid, three-pound lump of meat can do this trick, we are never going to persuade the dualists and idealists. We may indeed have plenty of good, empirical reasons to think this must be the way it is, but as it stands we really have no physical account whatsoever of what consciousness is, nor of what the necessary and sufficient physical circumstances are for it to arise. Any materialist who doesn’t admit this is simply not being honest.

I acknowledged to my correspondent that this was indeed a truly vexatious problem, and added a link to Daniel Dennett’s oft-cited paper on the slipperiness of qualia. In his reply, he mentioned Dennett’s “multiple drafts” model of the way the brain promotes localized cognitive processes to full conscious awareness by a sort of competitive process, as well as Dennett’s focus on the easily demonstrable “gappiness” of consciousness, and said:

I suppose you go along with this? Could it be like putting the cart (certainly not Descartes) before the horse — pledging faith in materialism so that, if Dennett’s line of thought is where materialism winds you up, then you believe it; you can’t really question the result because the result proves you’re incapable of doing that. Materialism is the premise, not the consciousness you live with. It’s a faith-based thing. You believe in materialism more than your own consciousness…

I replied:

Not so fast. It isn’t just an arbitrary choice to think that consciousness is a result of the material brain at work; the balance is tipped toward that view by all the ways that consciousness seems to be supervenient on the state of the physical brain. Damage the brain, damage the mind in predictable ways. Stimulate this or that neuron, get a conscious perception – a smell, a memory, a melody – again in repeatable, predictable, mappable ways. Etc., etc., etc., in a thousand compelling examples.

If the brain were just a “radio receiver” of some sort, a metaphor that some find appealing, you wouldn’t expect to be able to interfere with reason itself, or personality, the way we can by tampering with the brain. Then there are also all those Libet-style results, about “action potential” preceding conscious awareness of voluntary decision-making.

It seems to me the most parsimonious account to imagine that the brain came first, and that consciousness arises from its activity somehow.

But I do think Daniel Dennett goes too far in trying to fob off consciousness as an illusion. Yes, it’s gappy as hell, and tricks itself in various ways. But he almost seems to try to get rid of subjective awareness altogether, which is crazy. I mean, for there to be an illusion, there has to be someone being fooled, right? But he always says he isn’t denying consciousness altogether, that he is misunderstood — though I’ve yet to figure out what he means. Wish I could find myself next to him on a plane someday.

We found ourselves, albeit briefly, on common ground. My friend next sent this:

We’re in synch here… I know and can’t disagree with the supervenience points, of course. I don’t suppose the Buddha really said it, but I’ve always kind of thought the points we’re discussing explained the aridity of consciousness that Buddhism posits. You see where I’m going, or where I came from at the beginning. The other side of the supervenience stuff is the unalterability of the raw, observing consciousness, if stripped of sufficient secondary reactions: it doesn’t matter how drunk, how in pain, how dizzy, etc., you are. Sometimes you go out like a light, but your raw awareness in dreamland is the same awareness and the dream and sleep yoga literature tells us you can learn to wake up to raw awareness in non-REM sleep, or whatever, non-dreaming, deepest sleep.

I thought he was helping himself to too much here:

I am not sure I agree about the “unalterability” of the “raw” experience. It seems you are going for a binary, there-at-all/not-there-at-all distinction — and certainly there are times where it’s not there at all, and times when, obviously, it is — but you are compressing the dynamic range far too much. I think the lowest levels of consciousness are very different indeed from higher ones, and also that dreaming consciousness is very different (in degree, or level, or whatever) from waking consciousness.

It seems to me that consciousness is one of the most “alterable” things there is, in fact.

He replied:

I disagree. The observer is constant. I know this from personal experience. It would be interesting to talk about the layers built thereon, and the degree to which they are merely causal in origin, and whether the observer can jog the causal chain so as to nudge things out of your material view. But the observer is always there, always the same.

Hmmm… I thought that this Observer was getting awfully detached, indeed rather suspiciously so:

Well, as they say, “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything”. But I’d say that pretty much everything about our conscious experience can change: its contents, emotional state, level of awareness, just about anything you care to name except the most basic distinction between being conscious at all or entirely unconscious — and of course we are not conscious of being unconscious. That is a very important point: consciousness is not aware of its own borders, so it seems that it is plenary, constant, consistent, in a way that it most certainly isn’t.

I am well aware of the cultivation of an Observer; it is the foundation of the Gurdjieff work, and I worked very hard at it for many years. But to me that is about control of attention, about training the brain to work in a new way. So I see consciousness very much as changing, as coming and going, expanding and contracting, depending on what is happening in the physical brain.

Also, I had to ask:

What do you mean by “always the same”?

He replied:

Well, as I said, no matter how drunk or dizzy or sleepy or sad you are, there is a part of you that just observes this and is not befuddled at all. Sometimes I think there’s a missing period. It gets lost at points, seemingly, during sleep, and seeming hitches at sleep transitions; as far as I can tell, I lost it during anesthesia; but it is so constant, and I can really know it is there through wake-sleep-dream–I’ve traveled with that; so I can believe it’s there during unconsciousness, but bringing back the recollection of it is hard. Presumably, it takes a lot of work to know it when it isn’t observing anything.

Anyway, I was going to add that my last point about it being hard to know the observer when it isn’t observing anything (and of course one works toward that in meditation) raises interesting subject/object questions, including suggesting there is something to the idea individuality is a snare & delusion. If one hypothesizes there is a sea of consciousness, then that membrane of individual awareness, without it being aware of anything, is elusive — or maybe one can grow it bigger with practice. But in my cosmology it must work something like that: that there’s awareness, awareness of self, awareness of self-experience, awareness of one’s thoughts, a lot of layers of awareness of one’s thoughts.

Deep waters here. He continued:

I would say that when one observes one’s thoughts, or shall we say the subject matter one sees arising in one’s consciousness, one sees causal relationships … and the causality can be related to events, and ultimately to materiality; but what is it that observes this? This never changes. My reaction of disgust at the unoriginality of my thoughts spirals out into that same world of causal relationships, but that which observes exists, is never befuddled, is always the same. It is of course hard to sever it from everything built upon it. Perhaps you cannot do it. Perhaps most people cannot do it. Perhaps I cannot do it very well… I don’t really believe that, though. I think everybody can do it, but may not have focused and worked on it. I think this is why children get dizzy and adults get drunk: so they can calmly observe their ordinary consciousness become unusual, so they can separate themselves from their… can’t find the right word, experiences, certainly; so their consciousness can be more obviously on two planes for awhile, because we are so used to the seamless integration of our linear mental chatter and our observing of it. Some people get high to calm down, to feel better, to otherwise regulate their somatic and experiential system; but some healthy people do it as a kind of unwitting spiritual exploration. Dennett doesn’t believe this, but you can’t grasp Dennett on this point; neither can I; and Dennett is not an explorer of consciousness; he is just a manipulator of data and theories about it.

And there we left it, for now. But there was an item in the paper today that said some interesting things about all of this, which I’ll save for next time.

We read:

Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their experiment by showing the subjects images of people, places or objects that were familiar to them, including pictures of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Bill Clinton. They then looked for the neurons that fired when the subject was shown each image.

In each of the subjects they found individual neurons fired when the person looked at a specific image. So there was a “Michael Jackson neuron”, a “Marilyn Monroe neuron”, and others that fired when the person was shown an image of the Eiffel tower, a spider, or other familiar objects or places.

When the neurons corresponding to particular images had been identified, the researchers hooked the electrodes up to a computer that displayed the image corresponding to the neuron that fired. The subject was then asked to think about one of the images. So, for example, a subject was asked to think about Marilyn Monroe. The Marilyn Monroe neuron in the subject’s brain fired, and the information was relayed to the computer, which then displayed Monroe’s image.

Another experiment designed to test how well the subjects could control the single neurons was a fade experiment in which the subject was shown a combined image of two faces: Josh Brolin (star of Goonies) and Marilyn Monroe, and told to think of Josh Brolin. The electrodes sent data on the Josh Brolin and Marilyn Monroe neurons to the computer, which brightened the image of the one causing most neuron firing. As the subject thought of Brolin, the image of Monroe faded out.

This is an impressive result, with enormously important implications.

Next questions: if I have a neuron in my brain that reliably activates when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe, does it really fire only when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe? I’ll be surprised if neural resources are allocated in such a “dedicated” way — a one-to-one mapping of the kind suggested here, with each neuron representing exactly one intentional referent, and doing nothing else; it seems so limiting. I’ve always imagined that the hardware implementation of our memory and intentionality would take the form of configurations of groups of neurons; it seems you’d get more for less that way. And is this “Marilyn” cell activated if I see a picture of Marilyn Monroe without being conscious of it? How about if I dream about her?

And then the much harder question: why that neuron?

Read the story here.

My mind isn’t like that. I can only think effectively about one thing at a time, and furthermore I don’t think I’m really all that different from anybody else. I’ve always thought that people who pride themselves on their “multitasking” are actually operating at a rather superficial and mediocre level.

According to an article published a few weeks ago in the Times, it turns out I’m right. Learn more here.