Consciousness and Culture

Lamarck, Darwin, and cultural evolution

2006-02-04T12:45:00.000-08:00

Let's assume that cultures, in all their fractal variety, do in fact "evolve" -- that is, they change over time in ways that enhance their environmental fitness, and in a way that's analogous to (though certainly not identical with) the way biological organisms do. The question then is, in light of the previous post, what model better explains this phenomenon, the Darwinian or the Lamarckian?

Many people might be inclined, in this case, to say Lamarckian, and it's easy to see why: culture is acquired, after all. Thus, if we take Lamarckism to be simply the notion that acquired characteristics are passed on to (inherited by) later generations, it seems natural to assume that this is the model to explain cultural evolution. But, as the previous post discussed, the Lamarckian model leaves the actual mechanism of adaptive change unexplained -- it seems, instead, to require that there be an agent able to determine what constitutes environmental fitness, and then generate the required adaptation. Still, while that may have been a problem for biological evolution, such a requirement might seem entirely in keeping with cultural evolution, since cultures, after all, are made up of agents -- namely, us. And aren't we smart enough to figure out what our environment demands, and then produce our own cultural adaptations?

My answer, in short, is no. I don't say that out of any disdain for human intelligence, though I do think that we have a long-standing, if understandable, tendency to exaggerate the specialness of our situation in that regard -- in our scientific age, this tendency might be seen as the secular equivalent of the religious tendency to see human beings as having a special relationship to the divine. But our "intelligence", such as it is, and whatever it is, has no more ability to lift us out of nature than our "soul" or "spirit" had or has. That means, among many other things, that we can't simply avoid the question of how culture changes by handing it off to the mysteriously transcendent processes of agency. We need, in other words, a way of grasping how change can come about without having to postulate an agent that can step out of itself, so to speak, apprehend what sort of change the environment requires, and then step back into itself and make that change.

And once again, a Darwinian model can provide just such mechanism, despite having to deal, in the case of cultural evolution, with acquired characteristics that are inheritable or transmissible. We can remove agency from the picture simply by assuming that there are incessant (daily, hourly) microchanges in an individual's cultural imprint, some of which are more "effective" than others and are consequently reinforced at the expense of the others. The changes themselves stem from the individual's daily, hourly, moment-by-moment encounter with the world, which is automatically incorporated into the individual's cultural imprint as fresh experiential content. The "effectiveness" of those changes refers to environmental feedback, and has two primary forms -- one in communicative encounters, in which the feedback always results in some degree of increased semantic alignment (in fact, this just is the transmission of culture); the other in planning or thinking about intentional or purposeful behavior in the world, in which the feedback pertains to the degree to which the change helped attain the purpose. The key point to note is that both change and feedback -- variation and selection -- are independent of the conscious will or purpose of the individual herself, just as they are in biological evolution. No agent necessary.

None of this is to deny that there is such a thing as "knowledge", of course. And that knowledge, to the extent that it's "true" (meaning, to the extent that it's effective), can certainly be used to help plan and guide cultural change, including individual change, in ways that are purposeful or agent-driven. But we can think of the knowledge contained in culture as representing the potential of that culture for change, much as the development of organs through use -- which Lamarck took to be representative of species change generally -- represents the potential inherent in a given species. But, just as true biological evolution, contra Lamarck, marks a change in species potential, so real cultural evolution as such, involving the summed result of a myriad microvariations and reinforcements over time and geography, pertains to changes in cultural potential, which is inherently outside of our control or agency. In the last five hundred years or so, it's true, we've developed a kind of meta-level of knowledge, called science, which, (along with its derivative, technology), is a systemization of the process of acquiring new knowledge -- and which quite obviously has revolutionized our global culture, expanding its potential for change by orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, nature itself -- to give a name to that impassive, implacable, indifferent environment -- remains outside of all cultural potential, no matter how potent it appears to us, and nature's judgment is final.

Explanatory examples: Darwin vs. Lamarck

2006-01-22T06:57:00.000-08:00

Having distinguished two primary explanatory models, mechanism and agency, I want to try to apply that distinction in an example -- and the one I have in mind is one that excited much interest over a century and a half ago: the phenomenon of species change.

That the phenomenon existed at all was by no means evident, in the first place. Species appeared to be not just fixed, but admirably and ingeniously suited to their place in the world, which of course is just what one would expect from an Intelligent Designer. Thus, like contemporary ID advocates, the explanation for the remarkable "fitness" of species is modeled on the notion of the will or purpose of a supernatural agent, and that was all one could (or needed to) say. The fossils turned up by geologists (later, paleontologists), however, began to put this neat and static picture under increasing stress, and the distasteful but unavoidable conclusion seemed to be that species that once existed no longer do, and species that now exist once did not. What could account for this?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, as everyone knows, tried to answer that. He thought that individual organisms tried to perform certain actions in response to changing conditions, for example; that in doing so changed themselves, in the way that exercise develops muscle; and that these changes were then inherited by subsequent generations, which over time resulted in a changed species. Now, as everyone also knows, Lamarck was mistaken about the heritability of acquired characteristics, and this mistake is often taken as the defining error of Lamarckism. But I think that mistake was a relatively superficial one, and even somewhat understandable -- the deeper, more profound problem with Lamarckism has to do with how change comes about in the first place. It is true, of course, that some organs (mainly muscle) are developed through use, but many changes to species -- e.g., color of fur, structure of eye -- have nothing to do with anything that an organism is or could be "trying" to do. Moreover, even if an organism could try to change the color of its fur or the structure of its eyes, how would it know that that's the right thing to do -- that is, how would it know how to design itself so as to fit its environment? The primary problem with Lamarckism, in other words, isn't the notion of the heritability of acquired characteristics, but the fact that it lacks a mechanism for adaptational change -- instead, it simply located the agent of biological fitness within the organism itself, where it remained as mysterious as the ways of the supernatural Designer.

And then along came Darwin. By and large, he understood that acquired characteristics (which would be at least as likely to be damaging as beneficial) were not inherited, but that was not the essence of his surprisingly simple and remarkably general insight. What Darwin provided was precisely what Lamarck lacked -- a mechanism for adaptational change. It broke the process into two parts or aspects -- on the one hand, there was a blind but incessant generation of small random (i.e., not willed or agent-directed) changes; and on the other hand, there was an equally blind (again, no agent involvement), equally incessant process of culling those random changes. "Natural selection", as a phrase, emphasizes the agent-less nature of that culling process just by its contrast with the agent-based process that goes on in human or "domestic" selection. And with that two-part mechanism, what had seemed vague, obscure, and mysterious, suddenly became lucid and clear -- and perhaps all the more marvelous (and controversial) just because of that clarity.

This contrast between mechanism and agency is so important, I think, that it really has become implicit in the very meaning of evolutionary change. It's worth observing, after all, that the sort of willed or agent-directed change that Lamarck thought was at the basis of species change does indeed occur (even though he was wrong about its heritability), but is inherently limited -- we could think of it as exhibiting the potential of a species at a point in time. Evolutionary change, on the other hand, represents a change in that potential, and that is something that nature or the environment imposes, through the twin but independent mechanisms of natural variation and selection.

Explanatory models: what about "holism"?

2006-01-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

The previous post distinguished two very general models for explaining a phenomenon: mechanism, defined by the primary role it gives to causation; and agency, defined by the parallel primary role it gives to will or purpose. What was absent was a term that a fair number of people would view as a possible alternative to, and improvement over, both -- "holism". In this note I just want to say why it was left out -- why, in other words, I think it's not really an alternative, much less an improvement, to either.

The short answer is that holism is not actually an explanatory model as such at all, but rather a set of explanatory guidelines at best, and an avoidance of explanation altogether at worst. Like many "isms", holism comes in a range of flavors or versions, from what's usually called "weak" at one end of the spectrum to "strong" at the other end. In all versions, I think, we can distinguish two broad aspects or themes to holism: that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that context or environment is important in understanding a system. Let's briefly look at both:

That the whole is greater than the sum of the parts:
In weak or moderate versions of holism, this notion is certainly valid, but largely a truism -- any machine, after all, is greater than the simple sum of its parts in the obvious sense that the structure or relationship of the parts is a vital aspect of its functioning -- and understanding the mechanism of any phenomenon entails an understanding of how the parts interrelate. In its mild form, admittedly, this theme can sometimes provide useful advice when dealing with particularly subtle or complex phenomena, where the "whole" may not be immediately evident. But in its stronger versions, this idea is often taken to imply that the "whole" contains some mysterious extra quality or ingredient that is impervious to analysis, and this simply becomes a way of refusing or blocking explanation altogether.

That context matters:
This theme, in moderate versions of holism, is actually quite important -- the behavior of many systems is quite dependent upon the environment in which they're situated, and may change drastically if that context is changed. It may still, of course, be a reasonable strategy to try to gain as good an understanding as possible of the system in isolation (a simpler problem), while realizing that a full or real-world understanding will need to include the larger "whole" of which the system is a part. That said, however, this theme too is frequently taken to untenable extremes in the "stronger" or more mystical versions of holism, where it's used to assert that "everything is connected" and hence nothing can be studied, understood or explained in itself.

So: "holism" in its more moderate flavors can add a helpful perspective to an explanatory project, but hardly qualifies as an explanatory model in itself; and in its stronger flavors, it tends to become a means of opposing explanation as such (sometimes, perhaps, in an effort to protect a favored belief, or sometimes just in the service of mystery itself).

Explanatory models: machine vs. agent

2006-01-16T16:19:00.000-08:00

(Continuing reflections on the topic of "explanation"....)

The machine hasn't fared well as a cultural icon for the last while. From the image of the dehumanized, roboticized workers in the vast urban machine of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the metallic death's-head horrors of the Terminator series, the mechanical in film and culture generally has been portrayed as something deeply antithetical to the human. No doubt the antipathy goes back at least as far as the coal-fed steam engines that powered Blake's "dark, satanic mills". It's as though there's an undercurrent of fear running throughout technological culture that we ourselves are in danger of turning into machines. Little wonder, then, given that sort of context, that there might be some serious resistance to the idea that, in fact, we already are machines.

But what exactly is a machine in the first place? Apart, that is, from a lifeless and soulless artifice, the very embodiment of the anti-human? In one sense, a machine is just a tool, as evident in that "simple machine", the lever. But there's a different, though related, sense, in which a machine is any system involving a number of parts, assembled in a particular manner, connected by determinate or causal processes, and capable of performing some function. As such, the idea of the machine or mechanism applies not just to artificial constructions but has become a general model of explanation for natural processes of any kind -- if we can provide an account for any phenomenon in terms of purely causal interactions between its parts or components, then we can say that we have provided a mechanism for that phenomenon. And with that we will have gained a metaphorical but nonetheless very effective "lever" for it, or a way of bringing it under our control. The idea of seeking out the "mechanisms" of natural phenomena lies at the heart of the technological or industrial civilization that has transformed the earth.

This idea wasn't always so prevalent, however. Just as the extension of the idea of the simple tool provided one explanatory model for natural phenomena, so an extension of a concept based upon our own social interactions provided another: this is the notion of "agency" as an explanatory model. At the basis of this notion is the idea of will or purpose, which plays an explanatory role parallel to that of cause in mechanism. Once, it was common to view such an animating will, instantiated in God or gods or spirits, as the explanation of virtually all natural phenomena of any significance, and we can still see a vestige of this in the tendency to speak of natural disasters as "acts of God", for example. Note that this notion of agency as an explanatory model offers nothing like the kind of effective control over phenomena that mechanism does -- instead, the forces behind events could only be flattered or appeased, with always uncertain results.

About four or five hundred years ago in Europe, however, this model began, slowly but implacably, in one field of phenomena after another, to be replaced by the mechanistic model. One of the last of such areas, and one which looked to be particularly resistant to the advance, was that of living organisms, which seemed, almost by definition, to exhibit the sort of will or purpose that was the essence of agency. But, of course, the last fifty years or so have witnessed perhaps the greatest success of the mechanical explanatory model yet, with the discoveries of the various mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of life itself*. (It's worth pointing out that living processes often depend upon randomness rather than strictly determinate causal sequences, but that such "stochastic" processes are nonetheless sufficiently reliable on a statistical basis to qualify as mechanisms.) So by now, the notion of agency as an explanatory model has been pushed back to the social and psychological arena in which it first arose, and is under some pressure there.

For reasons that I've already touched on -- having to do with an inherent indeterminacy in cultural self-knowledge -- I think agency is secure in this arena, finally, against further encroachment. In this more limited field, agency really serves more significantly as a moral concept than as an explanatory one in any case (though of course it can also play a different kind of explanatory role to some degree as well). In this, it addresses directly much of our fear of the machine, since what really arouses concern, in this contest between models, is not our humanity per se (except in a broad or metaphoric sense) but rather our status as moral agents. At some point in our future, after all, an expanded cultural ecumene might well include actual machines (e.g., robots, androids, etc.), not to mention aliens, speaking animals, or what have you, and they too would be simply incorporated as fellow agents into the moral realm that communication engenders. What repels us, quite rightly, about the image of ourselves as machines is the thought that it seems to turn us into mere tools or instruments (in the hands, implicitly, of another will or agent) -- but that is something that mechanistic explanation in itself is simply unable to do (though some ideologies have thought they could, and tried, with horrifying results). It's not the machine that we should fear, in other words, nor mechanism as an explanatory model, both of which have brought immense benefits and opportunities, and have, if anything, on the whole enhanced rather than diminished our humanity. It's, as always, the tragically mistaken uses to which they're put, but to which we can, and must, refuse. Understanding that can make the enquiry into the mechanisms even of consciousness and culture not just a useful, but an entirely human undertaking.

*Including, in just the last twenty or so years, the mechanisms behind the enormously complex processes of developmental biology -- this is a plug for a fascinating book I'm in the middle of, Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll.

The "explanatory gap" series: a summary and a Q-and-A

2006-01-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

(The end of the series, but likely not the topic. Earlier posts are:

In this series of posts, I've tried to look more closely at the widespread thesis that any attempt to explain conscious experience in purely physical terms -- i.e., any attempt to "reduce" experience to a physical level -- is fraught with a very fundamental problem, termed, by Chalmers (after Levine), an "explanatory gap" or "the hard problem of consciousness". Neither Chalmers nor Nagel, the two authors of seminal papers in support of this thesis that I've quoted from here, want to say that this means such a project is necessarily doomed -- in fact, towards the end of their papers, both make useful suggestions for making some headway with it -- but the thrust of both their suggestions and their texts as wholes is that, for any purely physical explanation, the "hard problem" isn't going to go away.

In this, as I've indicated, both philosophers are tapping into a very deep and very long-standing intuition -- which is that experience is an inherently non-physical phenomenon, or, in other words, that there is an absolute and fundamental gulf between the mental, whatever that may be, and the physical (whatever that may be). Such a gulf, of course, creates all kinds of problems concerning the interaction of such radically disparate realms, which is no doubt among the reasons that neither of the two wants to assert that the gap is unbridgeable in principle. But in general when we try to get down to details about mental-physical interaction, we're often met with mystification or ad-hocery or both -- e.g., the mental (aka "experience") is a new fundamental entity in the world; the mental operates in mysterious synch with the physical; the mental is just some mysterious by-product of the physical; the mental is some quantum thingy, etc. What I've wanted to propose is that, instead of such evasions, we question that deep-seated intuition of a gulf between mental and physical in the first place -- it wouldn't be the first time that our intuitions concerning ourselves and our place in things have lead us astray.

The preceding posts in this series (see the list above) have all just been suggestions toward this end. The last one (before this) in particular puts forth an alternative to the ontological divide, and an explanation of the intuition itself, in the form of a difference in orientation toward, or perspective on, experience -- a difference between viewing it as a phenomenon, on the one hand, and being a part of the phenomenon, on the other hand. But, after all, even if we're willing to accept that the intuition of a fundamental gulf between "mental" and "physical" realms may be mistaken (with the scare quotes indicating that these terms themselves may be part of the problem), we're still left with the considerable difficulty of coming up with an actual physical explanation of the phenomenon of conscious experience. That's properly a scientific, not philosophic or speculative, task, but I thought it would be worthwhile, after a series of often critical posts, to try to answer a few of the more obvious questions about this approach in a more positive vein:

If experience is, as you say, just another phenomenon among phenomena, then why is it, after all, that we can't observe it as we can any other phenomenon?
The key point about conscious experience as we experience it is that it's actually a function of two things: a particular kind of behavior-control mechanism, on the one hand, and our situation as a component of such a mechanism, on the other hand. So we can't "observe" this experience directly in any other entity simply because the "we" component isn't in those other entities (see this post). If we could unplug the "we" from our own brains and plug it into the analogous slot in another entity, then we could indeed know what it's like to be a bat, for example. Short of that, all we can do instead is observe the effects of conscious experience in the behavior of other organisms, and infer that the underlying mode of behavior control is consciousness.

One can understand that experience, as a form of information, might have causal effects -- that is, that it makes a difference -- but why does experience have content (like red or ringing or sour)? What does such qualitative content add?
The short answer is because information, unlike the smile of the Cheshire Cat, has to have a carrier. The content itself is largely arbitrary and unimportant (in principle -- there may be technical advantages to certain content in practice) -- what carries the information, and therefore does the work, of experience is simply the difference between one token-like quale and another. Which is the reason that "inverted qualia" arguments -- sometimes used as arguments demonstrating the ineffectiveness of qualia in general -- are irrelevant here.

But why is the content not just voltages or magnetized regions or some such, rather than red, sour, etc.?
Because if voltages, magnetic regions, etc. are interpreted simply as causal factors (which is what we mean by invoking them), then this violates the principle of "loose connectivity" that defines consciousness as a behavior control mechanism. Regardless of how qualia are caused or instantiated themselves, they must be detected solely as distinct tokens of information -- at this stage, there is no notion of quantity as opposed to quality, and certainly no notion of "voltage", etc.; there is only arbitrary content and difference.

But then notice the difference between this desiccated language of "tokens" and what David Chalmers rightly calls our "rich inner life" -- doesn't that alone suggest that there's more to experience than mere information tokens?
Well, there's certainly a linguistic or conceptual difference, but that has to do with the different aims or objectives of phenomenological description, on the one hand, and mechanistic explanation, on the other -- and those different objectives derive, in turn, from the distinct orientations toward experience spoken of already. But it's interesting that Nagel, toward the end of his paper "What is it like to be a bat", suggested the possibility of developing what he called an "objective phenomenology": "... its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences". Examples of concepts for such a phenomenology of qualia, abstracted across different sensory channels, might be the notion of a spectrum (linear or circular?), intensity, locality, definition, motivation, duration, etc. With such as this, though we could never match the richness of experience itself in objective terms, we might begin to approach it, from the outside as it were, by deliberately trying to avoid terms dependent upon a particular kind of experience for their meaning.

In summary and conclusion:

The "mental" and the "physical" (in reference to consciousness) are not two different realms, nor two different aspects of things, but are just two different ways of speaking about the same thing, their difference a consequence of the simple fact that we the speakers are at the center of the thing we're speaking about.
In physical terms, "we" are not agents lurking in the machine, but are complex components of the machine -- a component specialized to receive standardized (tokenized) signals, and integrate such tokens into the processes of behavioral decision-making. (Among other things, this implies that the notion of "feeling" does indeed apply to certain mechanical structures.)
Far from being a pointless and/or mysterious after-effect of physical processes, then, phenomenal experience or feeling is just information in the form of distinct tokens, and is the linchpin in the physical explanation of consciousness -- it provides the essential, loose (i.e., informational as opposed to directly causal) connection between the two key components of consciousness as a uniquely flexible behavior-control system.

And to anyone who makes it through the whole of this post, my apologies for its length.

Is experience a paradox?

2006-01-05T02:54:00.000-08:00

(This is another post in a series, starting with this and continuing here and here, on the so-called "explanatory gap" in any current, or perhaps any possible, theory of consciousness and the reality of conscious experience.)

It might seem so, going by at least some of the statements made in Chalmers' paper "Facing up to the problem of consciousness" "Why," he asks, "should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does." And later: "We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions [such as visual discrimination] are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery." Similarly, Thomas Nagel, in "What is it like to be a bat?", his famous earlier paper that focused attention on the problem of phenomenal experience, frames the issue more sharply:

We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points
of view toward the object of investigation....

Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.

So the paradox seems clear and stark (though practical rather than logical): on the one hand, "subjectivity" is an inherent source of error while "objectivity" is the path to reality; but on the other hand, subjectivity is here the reality to be explained -- how could it ever be possible to be "objective" about the phenomenon of the subjective? As soon as we try to grasp such an illusive phenomenon in objective terms, in other words, we seem to lose the very quality that defines it.

Now, when you come up against a paradox in an explanatory project, you have a number of options (not counting the one of just moving on to another project): you can paste a big label "Mystery" over the whole thing and store it away (perhaps bringing it out occasionally to inspire awe); you can invent new entities and/or ontologies and endow those with just the right features or qualities that you hope will make the paradox go away; or you can take the appearance of the paradox as an indication that there's a flaw or problem buried somewhere in your assumptions. The first option might have its uses, but is clearly an expression of explanatory failure. The second might work, but has an ad hoc or arbitrary aspect to it that rubs off on the concocted entities/ontologies. The third option is the one I'd say has the most promise (and may help clear up some other quandaries as well).

In this case, for example, the assumptions I would question are those lurking behind the quasi-realist epistemology that seems implicit in these approaches. Among the most basic of those assumptions, as we can see from the Nagel quote above, are two: first, that "appearance" is to be distinguished from reality, and second, that explanations can and should approximate that reality (in the process, necessarily shunning appearance). Which obviously leads directly into dilemma and paradox when trying to cope with "appearance" itself. So, first, it might help to look again at that "epistemological inversion" suggested previously, in which appearance isn't a veil but is bedrock, and in which explanations don't aim at approximating a non-phenomenal reality (an impossibility), but rather at constructing more effective and comprehensive structures built out of appearance. Such "efficacious myths", as Quine called them, would still be characterized by ever greater abstraction, in which concrete experiential content is increasingly reduced, but they could no longer be seen as structures inherently alien to appearance or what we've been calling experience.

And that in turn might open the way to a more efficacious understanding of experience within a framework of two distinct perspectives or orientations. Earlier in this series, I'd distinguished those two perspectives as the view from within the phenomenon, as it were, and the view from without (in which experience as such appears only presumptively, based largely on observed behavior). As I said in the previous post, however, this doesn't quite capture the situation, and might even suggest that there is the possibility of a view (of anything) from outside of experience itself, when of course such a notion doesn't even make sense. It might help to expand a little on these different perspectives by pointing out that, on the one hand, experience is all that we are aware of, and is the ground and building material for all concepts, abstractions, and explanations of anything -- this is the first perspective. And, on the other hand, (presumptive) experience (as when we encounter other conscious entities) is but one phenomenon among others within the world that is built out of experience -- this is the second perspective. The second perspective, in other words, is contained within the first -- the situation suggests an Escher-like painting, in which the world is wrapped around and condensed into a localized object within itself. Any explanation -- any attempt at explanation -- of such an object will always be contained within our experiential situation, and can never contain that situation. And that, I think, is a sufficient explanation of the wrongly-named "explanatory gap" -- it would be better to think of it as a situational gap. By its nature, that gap is ineradicable and unbridgeable, since it simply refers to two distinct perspectives (and lies, I believe, at the origin of the many forms and varieties of dualism that have haunted cultures since long before Descartes). But, once we abandon the realist assumption that there must be a single, "true" perspective on the phenomenon, and once we disentangle the two perspectives, it presents no obstacle in itself to the provision of a coherent, effective, and physical explanation of experience as a phenomenon within experience.

UPDATE: Here's the conclusion to this series.

Disassembling "you" (or "I")

2005-12-22T04:56:00.000-08:00

(This is another post in a series, starting with this and continuing with this, on the so-called "explanatory gap" in any current, or perhaps any possible, theory of consciousness and the reality of conscious experience.)

In the first post in this series, I used the phrase "the view you get" in referring to a particular perspective on the phenomenon of experience, namely that from within the phenomenon. This has the less than fortunate effect, however, of appearing, yet again, to support that old homunculus image of a little person inside your head monitoring a bunch of screens. So perhaps it's time to tackle that image head-on -- and ask, where exactly is this "you" (or "I")? We seem to be inside our own heads at least, correct? After all, we can see, if indistinctly, the edges of some facial features. But then, too, when we touch something it's clearly we who do the touching, so in that sense it seems as though we extend throughout our bodies as well. But we don't exactly think of ourselves as some kind of mental fluid nor do we think that if we lose a part of our body we really lose a part of our selves -- rather, it's more like spatial location, while limited to our bodies, is somehow just not a pertinent or appropriate consideration for our selves beyond that. If we have an implicit intuition about the nature of our self, it's more likely something without spatial dimension, like a point of view, or a point-source of agency. In fact, I think, this intuition is itself the source of much of the intuitive power of that notion of an "explanatory gap" -- a point-source of agency seems something inherently at odds with the very basis of mechanistic (aka "reductive") explanation of any sort.

But what if "you" were not such a point-source at all? What if in reality this "you" and "I" were an intricate assemblage of parts, components, and functions? Few people doubt that such mechanisms play a role in the self, of course, but even fewer, I think, believe that that role exhausts the self -- even most philosophers, it seems to me, cling at least implicitly to the notion of a core of selfhood, or "you"- and "I"-ness, that lurks like a ghost or homunculus in the heart of the machine. But look at what happens to the "you" if you suffer some brain damage or impairment -- unlike with bodily impairment, the "you" itself is degraded in some degree, in ways that the "you" may or may not be aware of. As illustrated in the writings of Oliver Sachs, for example, some of these damaged versions of "you" exhibit strange or bizarre impairments, and certain kinds of damage can alter the personality, character, and essence of "you". Beyond some point, "you" not only lose cognitive function, but the sense of self as subject is gone as well, and after that point consciousness itself is gone. (It's interesting, in this context, to think of the scene in 2001 in which HAL's component parts are, one by one, deactivated.) So it would seem that there really is no core or essence of "you" that is distinct from the machinery that makes up the "you".

In ordinary speech, of course, we use such pronouns casually, as simple indexicals, and can safely ignore these complications. But we should be cautious of such language habits when we come to talk about experience, where casual intuitions can become an obstacle to understanding. Taking "you" to mean a functional assemblage of component parts, for example, will change significantly the meaning of the phrase that initiated this post: "the view you get" as a part of the phenomenon of experience -- we're no longer speaking of a dimensionless agent secreted in the heart of the phenomenon, then, but rather of a complex piece of machinery in its own right, specialized to detect signals of a particular kind (e.g., qualia), and that is itself a component of a larger mechanism. For that sort of mechanism, it evidently makes sense to speak not only of the "point of view" of a machine, but of its feelings as well.

UPDATE: Here's the conclusion to this series.

Light and darkness: consciousness and reflex

2005-12-21T11:05:00.000-08:00

(This is another post in a series, starting with this one, on the so-called "explanatory gap" in any current, or perhaps any possible, theory of consciousness and the reality of conscious experience.)

"Why is the performance of these functions [that are 'in the vicinity of experience'] accompanied by experience?" Chalmers asks, in the paper that re-introduced the idea of an "explanatory gap" in all attempts to construct an explanation of consciousness. A little later he puts the same question a bit differently: "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on 'in the dark', free of any inner feel?" It was, presumably, his inability to find an answer to such questions that lay behind his use of the "zombie" thought-experiment to argue against a materialist, and in favor of a dualist, approach to comprehending consciousness as a phenomenon. My argument here, however, is that he gave up too quickly.

In asking why there is experience, as in an "inner feel", Chalmers appears to be asking for a functional reason for experience, not necessarily for a mechanism (which may or may not be the case, but let's assume so). With that understanding, then, we can compare a conscious response to a stimulus with another type of response which really does go on "in the dark", as Chalmers puts it -- and then ask what additional functionality does consciousness or feeling supply? That other type of response is the reflex: if you accidentally touch a hot surface, for example, your hand moves away before you're able to feel anything -- a very simple instance of information-processing "in the dark", as it were. Yet, slightly later, you still do feel the pain as well -- why? Because the feeling is an essential component of a more sophisticated kind of response-generator or behavior control. It is the bearer of necessary information, about the location, type, and severity of the injury, for example, but it also provides that information in a significantly passive form -- i.e., simply as feeling, not as a direct connection to a response -- that is the key to the functional adaptability of consciousness as a control mechanism. Of course, any sort of pain is a form of feeling that, unlike sight, say, or hearing, has a built-in motivational component of varying strength, but the point of the feeling is precisely that, while it may motivate a response, it doesn't direct one, and so the motivation may be over-ridden under dire enough circumstances -- conscious experience, in other words, is a vital component of a behavior control mechanism of astonishing flexibility, without which we would be "in the dark" in a more than just literal sense.

Which is the problem with Chalmers' hypothetical zombies -- without the "light" of experience, such entities lack the form of information that provides consciousness with the free play needed for its flexibility. Now Chalmers, of course, starts out by viewing experience as something inherently different from a mechanism of any sort, and so will always return to his insistence that, given any mechanism, even one of an allegedly "conscious" kind, one can always view it's processes as "dark", or without feeling, which therefore always makes the feeling (for him) appear as an addition to the mechanical, causal processes, or as an "epiphenomenon". In fact, Chalmers must insist not just that you can view any possible mechanical process as dark, but that you must so view it, since feeling and mechanism are fundamentally distinct.

And this, despite everything I've said to this point, might be considered to be half right -- it accurately reports one's intuition from one of two possible perspectives on a phenomenon. Consider, for example, a researcher studying the difference between reflex and conscious response in another organism, and who doesn't, obviously, have direct observational access to the experience itself, but must rely on proxies of one sort or another (e.g. verbal report, other behavioral signs, neural activity, etc.) -- from her perspective, even if she could trace every single neural signal involved in the two different processes, and even though one might be more complex than the other, both would be as apparently "dark", since no trace of "feeling" would ever be observed. As soon as the same researcher studies her own reactions to the same stimulus, on the other hand, it's immediately evident that, while the reflex is as dark as before, the conscious response is inextricably connected with feeling -- indeed, "feeling" is the very meaning of such a response. The difference between the two cases is solely one of situation or perspective -- in the first case she was external to the phenomenon; in the second, "she" was a part of the phenomenon. What Chalmers does, to generate the intuition of an "explanatory gap", is to superimpose the two perspectives, in effect, which produces a rather odd and puzzling sort of double vision, certainly, but which has nothing in itself to do with an explanatory deficiency.

UPDATE: Here's the conclusion to this series.

That "explanatory gap" again

2005-12-20T05:27:00.000-08:00

(This is the first of what may -- but may not -- be a series of posts on the so-called "explanatory gap": the supposed gulf between any current, and perhaps any possible, explanation of conscious experience and its reality.)

Without question, conscious experience (aka qualia, phenomenal experience, etc.) presents special problems of interpretation and explanation. On the one hand, we can't doubt that it exists (despite some philosophical quibbling over exactly what that's supposed to mean), nor does anyone seriously doubt that it's a characteristic of other human beings than oneself. Virtually all ordinary people (i.e., non-philosophers), in fact, also think it's a characteristic of a number of other animal species as well, but those same people are also likely to want to draw a line somewhere down the phylogenetic chain, and pretty certainly will wish to exclude things like rocks and machines from the class of conscious entities. So from a scientific (i.e., physicalist or naturalist) perspective, in other words, conscious experience appears to be an entirely natural phenomenon, that's evolved in certain organisms but not others, that's localized in time and space, and that's as subject to cause and effect as any other phenomenon. Yet on the other hand, out of all phenomena, and in a very odd sort of way, it seems to be alone in being inherently unobservable -- not unobservable because it's too small or too quick or too slow, in other words, but because it's not something that can be observed, even in principle. We can see the effects of the phenomenon, in the sense of the behavior it generates, and we can see something of the underlying mechanisms that themselves generate the phenomenon, but we can't see "seeing" itself ... or see "hearing", or "tasting", or "hurting", etc. Experience itself, in other words, can only be experienced, rather than observed, and each conscious entity can only experience its own experience.

Little wonder, then, that all attempts at an explanation of conscious experience have left at least an appearance of an "explanatory gap" -- as David Chalmers says, in his seminal paper on this topic:

... even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open. [emphasis his]

This sense of a gap or inadequacy, that remains even after all attempts at explanation, is a persistent one, to an almost surprising extent, and in what follows I want to look at some of the reasons for that. A start would be to notice that not all gaps are explanatory gaps -- some "gaps" may be a sign not so much of a lack or absence but rather simply of a difference, in the same ordinary way, for example, that categories are different (failing to recognize such difference leading to the familiar notion of the "category mistake"). Here are some examples of simple differences that might appear, wrongly, as an "explanatory gap":

There's a difference between an explanation of function -- which is an answer to the "why" question -- and an explanation of mechanism -- which answers the "how". In particular, it may be possible to answer why there is experience -- because experience just is the information necessary for behavior control, for example -- without, yet, being able to answer how there is experience.
There's also a difference between any sort of explanation of a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself. This may seem obvious, and indeed it is in almost any other instance, but there often seems to be an element of this difference implicit in complaints along the lines of: "but that explanation still doesn't give us the experience of red, say", even if both the function and the mechanism of experience had been explained. Part of the problem may be that both explanation and experience are phenomena of consciousness, and we may have an expectation that the latter should be contained somehow in the former (partly at least for reasons given in the next point).
And then there's a difference in perspective, between the view of a phenomenon from the outside, as it were, and the view from inside -- the view you get when you're not just a part of the phenomenon yourself, but when the "view" itself is the phenomenon. With this difference in perspective, of course, we're getting closer to the nub of the real problem here -- it's as though explanation, in the unique case of this particular phenomenon, is trying to wrap back on its own origins, and baffling itself with its own reflection.

Now, I don't expect any of this to dispel the appearance, at least, of an "explanatory gap", an appearance that has a very powerful grip on our intuitions. But what I hope these kinds of reflections might begin to suggest is that much of the philosophic problem of conscious experience is located not necessarily in the phenomenon itself but rather in the particular, and peculiar, nature of that "gap".

UPDATE: Here's the conclusion to this series.

Against evolutionary psychology

2005-12-18T05:20:00.000-08:00

This too one might think an odd topic for a blog that describes itself as "devoted to the 'naturalist' explanation of the related phenomena of consciousness and culture", a phrase that could almost serve as a succinct characterization of Evolutionary Psychology* (often abbreviated as EP) itself. But "natural", even when speaking of biological organisms, is not limited to "genetic", and my argument with EP has to do precisely with that implied limitation. Like social constructionism, of course (which we might as well abbreviate as SC), EP comes in a range of varieties, from "weak" to "strong", and, just as with SC, the weak versions are largely unexceptionable: there's no doubt that mental and cultural phenomena are products of biological -- meaning genetic -- evolution, and as such exhibit features that derive directly from such evolution. But, also as with SC, there's a "strong" version of the school as well, which implies that the most adaptive and significant features of mind and culture are genetically derived, and that what is not so derived is merely conventional, or more or less arbitrary and random. And this is to make a profound mistake -- it misses or ignores the fact that culture is itself a natural phenomenon that has broad influence on human psychology and society, and that responds to the same kinds of environmental selection pressures that biological evolution does, only more rapidly. A little more specifically, the school of EP exhibits three main sources of error, as I see it:

It fails to understand culture itself as a wholly natural phenomenon, as physical in its basis in neural structure as genetics is in its basis in DNA.
It therefore fails to appreciate that culture itself is susceptible to a general Darwinian process of natural selection (though different, obviously, in its mechanisms) -- and that, in adapting to environmental challenges and opportunities far more rapidly than biology, culture can not only come into conflict with biology but can be a source of biological selection pressure itself.
And that failure in turn leads to an under-appreciation of the idea that the most important contribution of biological evolution to human environmental fitness has been to cede psychological and social ground to culture, precisely by reducing the role of instinct and other genetic factors on human behavior.

It's instructive to put social constructionism and evolutionary psychology side by side, actually, and then to see them both as twin expressions of an undercurrent of ideological/political struggle that's been a feature of the culture for a while now. The former is aptly characterized as a type of anti-essentialism, and the latter, more recent school (in its contemporary versions), as perhaps an anti-anti-essentialism -- with each, depending on its degree of politicization, repelling the other toward increasingly untenable extremes. But even in their weaker, less political versions, both these schools simply miss the most salient fact about culture: that it too, just like DNA, is embedded in the natural, physical world. So, contrary to social constructionism, cultural concepts are driven by the real, natural environment; and contrary to evolutionary psychology, cultural concepts are themselves the primary evolutionary response to that environment.

*Here's the Wikipedia article (a start, but badly written even by Wikipedia standards); here's an FAQ by one of the important names in the field; and here's a "Primer" by Cosmides and Toobey, the two at the start of the recent surge in interest.

Against social constructionism

2005-12-12T17:52:00.000-08:00

Which might seem like an odd title for a post in a context that has repeatedly stressed the point that "symbols", aka "concepts", are in fact "socially constructed", and has maintained that "language-based consciousness is an inherently social phenomenon". If you compare that with, for example, the Wikipedia's rather bland characterization of "the focus" of social constructionism -- "to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived reality" -- you could certainly be forgiven for assuming that the stance of this blog is implicitly social constructionist. But that assumption would be wrong, in all but a rather weak sense. In fact, of course, there are a number of different varieties of this school, as there are for most, but it's possible, here as elsewhere, to distinguish two general strains or strengths. One is a relatively "weak" version that simply isolates a particular phenomenon as a focus of sociological investigation -- knowledge as a social construct; the other is a stronger, more sweeping, and usually political version that makes claims, or at least has implications, about the nature of the phenomena -- knowledge is a social construct. The former version seems fairly innocuous in that it seems clear enough that knowledge, whatever it may be, is in fact socially produced and disseminated. And even the latter isn't inherently wrong -- it accords, in fact, with at least a portion of the "epistemological inversion" I've been proposing, in which "knowledge" or explanation is seen not as congruence with an external reality but rather as a more or less effective structure (i.e., construction) built out of phenomenal experience. But the problem is that social constructionism is a sociological theory, and as such, its followers have, understandably, tended to set aside epistemological and philosophical issues generally in order to concentrate on the purely sociological issues involved. This setting-aside of epistemology, in combination with a strong claim about the nature of knowledge, and -- it needs to be said -- with an obvious political and ideological temptation, has lead social constructionism into serious difficulties and a kind of hubristic error. For some of its practitioners, I think, and at least for a time, it began to seem as though sociology (particularly in a politicized form) could provide a critique of all knowledge, scientific as well as popular. And then came the Social Text debacle, aka "Sokal's Hoax", and a quiet, chastened retreat.

So what, after all, is the real problem with social constructionism? It's that, in neglecting epistemology, it's neglecting half the equation, so to speak. That other half is what gives meaning to the term "objectivity" -- the immersive environment that's independent of any human construction. Without that as a backstop -- that is, as long as we stay solely in the realm of social interactions -- it can appear as though concepts and knowledge are indefinitely plastic. And then, within a political or ideological context, it can seem as though "reality" has been constructed merely for political ends, and so can be re-constructed at will to serve different political ends. But the fundamental and ultimate criterion for knowledge, given its constructed nature, is its effectiveness within a natural environment, a criterion which goes far beyond politics. Social constructionism is correct to note that, as opposed to versions of platonism, abstractions are cultural constructions (though in this they are already well beyond politics alone), not objects inhering in nature ("nature" itself being just one of those constructions). But it goes fatally wrong in failing to see that, as Marx said of history (and as I've noted before), we do not make such constructions just as we please. It ends up, ironically, becoming a kind of cultural idealism.

Freedom, determinism and Indeterminacy

2005-11-30T08:55:00.000-08:00

Disputes over free will and determinism are old ones, and here I just want to sketch in some of the ways in which such debates might be affected by the notion of culture, or language-based consciousness, that's been developed here.

My position on the issue can be described as "compatibilist" -- the at-first-sight odd idea that free will and determinism can go hand-in-hand. Determinism, of course, is pretty much required by a naturalistic or physicalist account of consciousness and culture (leaving aside quantum indeterminacy, which wouldn't affect the argument here in any case). But free will is another matter -- it's bound up with notions of agency, culture, and that cultural Indeterminacy Principle that was the topic of the previous post. As we'll see, I think free will and determinism are compatible simply in the sense that both are indispensable in their particular ways.

Compatibilism is a philosophical position that goes back a fair way, but it's never really surmounted the common intuition that the two are fundamentally incompatible, an intuition well captured by the so-called "Consequence Argument" (quoting from SEP):

1. No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
2. No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail that only one future is possible (i.e., determinism is true).
3. Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

But the tack I want to suggest here is that, in situating an agent in the midst of a causal sequence, this argument is in fact conflating two properly distinct orientations or "modes of discourse", one that deals with causation and one that deals with agency.

This might be seen as a version of "Multiple Viewpoints Compatibilism", for philosophical categorizers. Within the perspective of causation -- what I'll call the mechanistic orientation -- the notion of "freedom" is either meaningless or pointless, since the only alternative to saying that our behavior and our will is caused is to say that they're uncaused or random. And within the perspective of will -- i.e., the agency orientation -- the notion of cause appears simply as reason or intention, which is always present no matter how minutely we examine ourselves (or others, to the extent we're able). In the latter orientation, freedom does indeed have meaning, but it means precisely that our will, our behavior, and the facts that result from that, are determined by our own reasons/intentions, rather than by some other force or agency (e.g., "fate", as Sartre suggested some while back*) that might be manipulating them. Given different facts (that is, counterfactually), from the mechanistic orientation our present behavior would be different and so, therefore, would the future facts -- and from the agency orientation, our reasons/intentions would be different, and so, therefore, again, would the future facts.

Now, Dennett has put forth a version of "Multiple Viewpoints", with "Intentional" and "Personal" Stances contrasted with a Deterministic one, and arguing that the former are simply more pragmatic when dealing with certain complex systems. My feeling is that, while the idea of the "stance" is a good one, this isn't quite right, nor sufficiently far-reaching. The "Intentional", in fact, isn't really a "stance" at all, but applies literally to all conscious or aware entities (and is only metaphorically, or, worse, sentimentally applied to non-conscious mechanisms like thermostats). And the "Personal Stance", or what I'm calling the agency orientation, hasn't to do with the complexity of an entity, but rather simply with the fact that we're in communication with it. If we encountered an alien species that was without language, for example, it wouldn't make sense (and certainly wouldn't be practical) to adopt a Personal Stance toward it regardless of how "intelligent" or complex individual organisms appeared to be (they might, in fact, even be manufactured rather than evolved entities). If we're able to establish communication, on the other hand, then, regardless of the "natural" status of the beings involved, the agency orientation comes into play and a moral dimension comes into being. And what enforces this is precisely that cultural Indeterminacy Principle mentioned above -- because they cannot deal with one another in a purely instrumental fashion, beings in mutual communication are in an inherently moral as opposed to instrumental relationship with one another (and the attempt to deal with one another instrumentally or manipulatively is itself widely viewed as an immoral act).

Thus, the notion of an "agent" -- the "one" assumed in the Consequence Argument above -- has meaning only within a particular orientation, in which "causation" has, at best, only a secondary significance, after "will" or "purpose". Within the mechanistic orientation, on the other hand, the notion of an "agent", in the true sense of the word, simply vanishes, to be replaced by causal sequences. Both orientations are needed --mechanism because of its obvious practical benefits, and agency because of the inescapable moral dimension. But trying to conflate the two, as the Consequence Argument does, is just a mistake -- and the result is often the sort of confusion and mystification that we find in the unfortunate, homunculus-like image of the "ghost in the machine".

* "So, contrary to what could be believed, the imaginary world occurs as world without freedom: nor is it determined, it is the opposite of freedom, it is fatal." The Psychology of Imagination, Washington Square Press, 1966 (1948), p. 221.

An Uncertainty Principle for culture

2005-11-23T10:20:00.000-08:00

This blog is, as the short blurb on the upper right indicates, focused on the "naturalistic" explanation of consciousness and culture, meaning that I view those phenomena as part of the natural world, and therefore as subject to causal processes as any other part of that world. (Here, "that world" simply refers to the physical or material world, and so is distinct from notions of a separate mental world, realm, aspect, or orientation, regardless of whether or not any of the latter "supervene" on the physical.) Both consciousness and culture are viewed as mechanisms, in other words. So, given that, and supposing that we continue to make progress in understanding those mechanisms, the question is whether we could eventually come up with a truly predictive science of psychology and sociology/anthropology? That is, would we at that point be able to calculate individual and social behavior?

I think the answer is no. And that's because I think, in fact, that there's a fundamental obstacle to such predictive calculations when made by those who are themselves part of the phenomena being calculated -- which is that such predictions become themselves part of the phenomena. If I try to predict your behavior and communicate this prediction to you, then that prediction itself becomes a factor in your subsequent behavior, that the original prediction hadn't incorporated. I might try to keep my prediction from you (or incorporate my telling you as part of a subsequent prediction which I don't tell you about, etc.), but just by having access to the same calculations I use, you'd be able to, in a sense, predict my predictions, and then decide whether or not to behave as predicted. And the same sorts of considerations would apply society-wide or culture-wide -- any such predictions, or indeed any such techniques for making predictions, would themselves tend to alter the society or culture in ways external to the predictions themselves. (In some cases, it's true, the predictions might be made recursive and the alterations may converge to a stable configuration -- and then, and to that extent, a predictive science of psycho-cultural phenomena is possible -- but there's no indication that that would happen at all, much less to what extent.)

In this way, then, I think it's appropriate to speak of a cultural Uncertainty Principle, analogous to (though of course not as rigorous as) Heisenberg's physical Uncertainty Principle (see also the brief remark at the end of this post)-- both involve the unavoidable disturbances introduced by observer/predictors, and the limits those disturbances present to precision. In the case of cultural Uncertainty, though, because of the nature of the phenomena, those limits also have moral implications, but I think I'll need another post to get to that.

The platonists and the aliens: a science fiction fable

2005-11-19T12:42:00.000-08:00

In an interesting debate in the comments to this post, Steve Esser made an assertion to the effect that, while the tokens we use to represent mathematical objects are arbitrary and conventional, the "logical and mathematical relations" we use are not, and, were it possible to "replay the tape" of (presumably cultural) evolution, those would be replicated. His point in making this hypothetical statement is that it illustrates that such relations are, as he puts it, intrinsic to reality and not merely human inventions or conventions. And that in turn may buttress the case for the existence of abstract objects -- i.e., for platonism, of at least a mathematical variety.

My position is a different one, though, as I said in a response, it may look similar up to a point -- I think that the mathematical entities and relations we use are indeed human inventions, but useful inventions as opposed to mere conventions, and this usefulness would lead to the reappearance, in some form, of at least the simpler and more basic ones -- that is, there would be at least some degree of convergence, based upon practical utility, in any replay of the tape. But it's interesting that the " tape" metaphor was famously used by Stephen Gould in Wonderful Life to make just the opposite assertion -- in his hypothetical, the replay of the evolutionary tape would be very unlikely to replicate the same biological forms we see today (such as ourselves). The point he was concerned to make was that we commonly fail to appreciate just how varied are the options that evolutionary processes have before them -- nature, for Gould, is no platonist.

In any case, with that as setup, here's the fable:

Imagine that we finally encounter technological aliens. I think we underestimate the problems involved in translating the communicative processes of radically dissimilar life forms, but let's say that those problems are mutually ironed out and communications are established. At that point there was some consternation on the human side when we had a hard time even detecting, in the alien culture, anything that looked like mathematics as we understand it, and what we did find seemed to bear little resemblance to the concepts, objects, or relations that we use. Now, platonism had long since won the day within human culture, and so this seemed puzzling to say the least, particularly in understanding how they could have developed a space-warp drive without even discovering complex numbers. But human mathematicians were in any case happy to share such insights into the intrinsic nature of reality with their alien counterparts, and in doing so they even learned from the aliens a few computational tricks, involving some fictitious "entities" and highly dubious "relations", but which nevertheless turned out to greatly simplify certain crucial calculations.

The aliens, as it happened, were as puzzled by our own "mathematics" and our own technological success as we were of theirs, but, since the idea that "abstract objects" might have an actual existence hadn't occurred to them, they took a more pragmatic approach to the problem. Complex numbers, it turned out, weren't really of much use to them, though they were polite about it, but they too found that other human abstractions and relations did work better than their own, and these they simply incorporated into their version of mathematics quite readily, since they didn't feel that they were in any way thumbing their noses (they did have noses) at intrinsic reality in doing so.

Eventually, though, a human-alien team working on the problem of reconciling the two versions announced a fairly comprehensive revision of mathematics/[rough alien equivalent] which brought together the most efficient and useful concepts, objects, and relations from both traditions. Humans, working within their platonist assumptions, were torn -- some were scandalized by the revision, and felt that, in its alien-inspired portions, it really amounted to little more than an assortment of cheap tricks; some even began to have doubts as to whether mathematical abstractions really did exist in nature, rather than being just a handy and practical way of organizing our thoughts about nature. Others, however -- the more progressive platonists -- hailed the revision as a fundamental change in our understanding of the true nature of reality. For these people, our old mathematics, though appearing to provide us with a grasp of the abstract objects inherent in the universe, had actually mislead us in certain subtle but critical ways, which the revision had fixed -- and this now was the new, the really real, intrinsic reality.

And then, just as this progressive view was taking hold, and platonism had regained its old confident self within the airy reaches of human higher learning, another technological alien race was discovered....

The moral: Oh, something like -- "Even platonists need to be elastic" (which is admittedly a bit limp).

Fractal culture

2005-11-18T18:34:00.000-08:00

Having gotten back into what I've sometimes called "special consciousness" (meaning language-based consciousness) lately, in talking about abstraction and concept formation, I thought it would be useful to look again at the proper framework or context for that kind of consciousness, which is culture. And the question I want to raise here is, when we refer to a culture -- i.e., not the concept of "culture", but a particular instance or example of it -- what do we mean by that? In particular, how do we determine what or whom it includes, and how do we establish its boundaries?

Well, an obvious sort of boundary might be a political one -- "a culture", in that sense, refers to a national culture, and extends to the borders of a state. But it's clear that the notion of a culture is, or can be, larger than a political entity. Another, and at least potentially larger, boundary would be a language, and this also seems like a "natural" boundary since a culture depends upon communication, and a common language clearly defines a cultural space that includes its speakers, excludes its non-speakers. The evolution of different languages, in fact, might seem to resemble a kind of cultural "speciation" in the way it impedes further influence external to the language speakers. But there's another, and potentially even larger type of cultural boundary to be considered, and that would be religion (or religion-like ideology) -- so that all of "Christendom", for example, can be considered a culture, or all of Islam or others, that include not just a number of states but different languages as well.

But now the idea of "a culture" starts to seem complicated, if not confusing. Because, while a religion can include multiple states and languages, it's also true that a language area can include multiple religions, a state can include multiple languages as well as religions, and so on. There doesn't seem to be any neat hierarchy of boundaries that would allow us specify a culture in a simple or unambiguous way. Furthermore, this complexity/confusion extends downward from these larger formations as well, so that we can and often do speak of the culture of regions, of cities, of organizations, of neighborhoods, of cliques, even of meetings, and the boundaries of these "cultures" seem to be nested or overlapping in many different ways.

Now, one response to this kind of usage is just to throw up one's hands and say that "culture" is a vague and general word with different applications, and let it go. But, as I've indicated in earlier posts (see the list at the top of this recap), I think that the concept actually has a reasonably precise and fundamental meaning -- one that clarifies the confusion above, accounts for this apparent diversity or complexity of usage, and provides the basis for understanding how culture functions as well. And this is the idea that "culture" really does exist, and really only exists, as a structural imprint in the mental apparatus of each language-using individual -- an imprint acquired in the course of learning a native language, and developed and maintained in the course of social interaction through the rest of a person's life. Each such imprint or memotype is unique, as I've said, because of its dependence on the unique individual experiences that it's made from. But when such individuals associate, however few and however briefly, their interactions bring their cultural imprints into greater semantic alignment, and this group harmonization, as long as it persists, can then be said to constitute a kind of micro-culture. In this way, any one individual is typically a member of a number of such micro-cultures (family, workmates, friends, etc.), which overlap in ways that are sometimes quite fluid or changeable, but also comprehensible. And these "memotypes" will also display similarities on the largest scales of tribe, nation, language/ethnicity, and religion/ideology as well, which is what underlies the sense of referring to these groupings as cultures. The encultured individual, in other words, constitutes a kind of cultural atom, out of which particular cultures of various sorts, on different time scales, and on varying levels, are built. "Culture" becomes a fractal-like phenomenon.

What is an abstraction?

2005-11-14T06:56:00.000-08:00

This question occurred to me as I was reading a little more about the supposed platonism revival mentioned in the previous post, and alluded to by Steve Esser in a couple of recent posts. Platonism makes what I think to be the "classic" (so to speak) mistake of reifying at least certain kinds of abstractions (mathematical and geometric, principally, but also possibly property-like) -- that is, it makes "things" out of abstractions, and then, having done that, it has the problem of determining the ontological status of the things, including where they exist, etc. Without going any deeper into platonism itself at this point, I'll just say that I don't think abstractions as such, of any kind, are things at all, and so have no ontological status, special realm, etc., to worry about. Apart, that is, from their existence as concepts, or psychological/cultural constructs, in which sense they are part of each individual's cultural imprint and exist as physical states in each individual's brain. Thinking about that, however, made me wonder about how such concepts are formed in the first place, and what that might say about the nature of abstraction itself?

For example, consider what happens when a child is learning to speak (or, for that matter, when an anthropologist is learning a language in another culture) -- someone points to something and utters a word, "dog" say. The pointing is an action that directs or focuses attention, but there's no indication from that alone what the utterance is supposed to "mean" -- within the field of attention, it might refer to a particular object (a proper name), a type of object, a property of an object, or a behavior or a process. In the early stages of language-learning, in fact, these distinctions themselves would be meaningless, and the very notion of an "object" might be unclear (though this might also be hard-wired in some fashion, giving rise to "natural objects", e.g., mama and dada). But after repeated pointing-acts accompanied by the same utterance, it's noticed that there is something in common in the phenomenal field to which attention is directed, and a generalization is made and tested -- the child herself does the pointing action and utters the sound whenever a dog-like object presents itself, and then looks for confirmation. But this "noticing" can't be a simple observation, it has to involve some kind of structuring -- that is, the repeated uttering of a sound in different circumstances generates, in a sense, a commonality to those circumstances. This is because the elicited structure will almost certainly be wrong initially ("wrong" as defined by the ones doing the pointing) -- "dog" will need to be distinguished from "cat", for example, or "squirrel" (or maybe "pillow"), "red" from "orange" or "pink" (or "ball"). So it isn't that the sound simply links to, or labels, a pre-existing structure, it's more like the pointing-and-uttering behavior as a whole has forced experience to take on a structure. And then, in an iterative and essentially social process of generalization and distinction, the structures will be aligned -- the "meaning" of the utterance will be brought into semantic harmony with everyone else (a process that continues all through life, though not with such major adjustments).

After some initial concepts have been formed in this way, more sophisticated abstractions of abstractions can be formed, so that "animal" can be used for both dog and squirrel (but not pillow), or "color" for both red and orange (but not ball), etc. And at some point after that, it starts to become possible to use words themselves to shape experience -- generalizations and distinctions can be made into verbal rules, and both communication and thought can come into being. But initially, and essentially, an abstraction is just a named common feature, element, or aspect of experience -- experience that may include other, already-formed abstractions. This sort of ability to create a semantic structure out of experience is also a linguistic capability just as syntax is, and its potential must be as built-in or hard-wired.

Science and its discontents

2005-11-13T08:31:00.000-08:00

Steve Esser has a very good blog relating to philosophy, of mind and other matters, in which he approaches things from a somewhat different point of view than I do here. As the description of this blog indicates, I'm interested in what I call a "naturalistic" explanation of consciousness and related issues, or what's often called "physicalist" (or, a somewhat older term, "materialist"). Steve, on the other hand, in a recent post on what he sees as a renewed interest in platonism, writes in a concluding paragraph about a "meta-theme" he's been pursuing:

These metaphysical questions are difficult, and simple solutions obviously don’t work or the debates would have ended long ago. What this means to me is that the common presumption that something like physicalist monism should be the "default" metaphysical position is unfounded. More "extravagant" metaphysical systems need to be weighed in the quest to find a better mousetrap for explaining how the world works.

I think that's well expressed -- but I also find it a sign of a disturbing tendency (or at least a possible tendency) to simply or effectively abandon the goal of understanding consciousness in a scientific sense. We can see something like that tendency again in a recent blog post by David Chalmers that interpreted Jaegwon Kim as backing away from physicalism, and adding: "... this makes at least three prominent materialists who have abandoned the view in the last few years". And, with a certain irony, I think we can also see this in the repeated hopes that maybe a "new physics" or some quantum oddity will be needed to cope with consciousness (see Conscious Entities, Nov 10/05) -- these hopes may appear to rely on science, but really, in their invocation of mysterious, unknown theories, become a way of effectively obscuring the problem.

This, of course, is making the assumption that resort to non-physicalist accounts of consciousness (or, generally, anything) represent a form of abandonment of science. I think that's the case, since I think that terms like "physicalist" or "naturalistic" really take their meaning from science -- that is, they can include anything that science itself includes. But it may be that some of this apparent tendency is not so much a reaction against science itself but really against over-reaching by some proponents of a scientific approach, particularly against the sometimes blustery defensiveness that such proponents can display when their grand claims are questioned. This isn't to question real or actual projects in neuroscience or cognitive science as such, in other words, but rather some philosophical stances that are influenced by the goals of such sciences, but are driven to make claims or denials that appear more ideological than scientific. And one of the more egregious illustrations of that is the claim, by Dennett, for example, and some of his more excitable "computationalist" followers, that "qualia" as such don't exist*. Now, qualia, as we've seen, have famously been called "the hard problem of consciousness" (Chalmers), and rightly so, I think, because, for all of Dennett's long-winded hard work manning his various "intuition pumps", the simple fact of phenomenal experience (call it what you will) leaves it still fundamentally ineffable, private, and immediate**. But Dennett's reason for trying so hard to deny this is made evident by just inverting the motivations he attributes to the defenders of qualia:

I suspect, in fact, that many are unwilling to take my radical challenge seriously largely because they want so much for qualia to be acknowledged. Qualia seem to many people to be the last ditch defense of the inwardness and elusiveness of our minds, a bulwark against creeping mechanism. They are sure there must be some sound path from the homely cases to the redoubtable category of the philosophers, since otherwise their last bastion of specialness will be stormed by science.

No doubt this is true for many, as we've seen from the revivals of dualism, panpsychism, platonism, and quantum mysticism. But the reverse wishes also exist: people who want so badly for "mechanism" to triumph that they're anxious to banish, deny, ignore, or "explain away" any phenomena that seem conceptually difficult for a mechanistic orientation -- even phenomena that are quite literally right before their eyes. But "ineffable, private, and immediate" experience, while problematic, doesn't equate to mystic, and certainly doesn't imply "non-physical" -- in an obvious sense, in fact, what we see, hear, touch, etc., is the very essence and basis of the physical. These "computationalists" concede too quickly and too much to the anti-physicalists in accepting their inferences, in other words, and their rigid defenses make their position more a matter of doctrine than of either science or philosophy -- in both ways, they hurt more than help the physicalist program.

*He either denies qualia exist, or, for him equivalently, claims that, for example, a sufficiently sensitive or discriminating machine for analyzing the chemical composition of wine (and, I guess, emitting the results using canned wine-snob phrases) would actually experience the taste of the wine.

** I've left out "intrinsic" from Dennett's list of deniable attributes since I'm unclear what he means by it.
I won't try to make a counter-argument for the other three attributes here -- I would say that I think Dennett mounts a good critique of a number of assumptions that have often gone along with qualia, and a more modest aim might have led to a better result. As it is, he's left with a reluctant late admission that there may indeed be "primary or atomic properties of what one consciously experiences" that are set by "one's current horizon of distinguishability", which in my view pretty much re-admits the core of what he's been arguing against (while clinging, a bit forlornly, to "current" to save face).

Knowledge, experience, and Mary

2005-11-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

I've said a number of times that the casual way in which "consciousness" is used to refer both to awareness or phenomenal experience as such, on the one hand, and to language- or concept-based experience, on the other is liable to obscure and confuse issues, and an excellent example of just such a thing seems to me to be the so-called "knowledge argument" used against physicalist/materialist explanations of mind. It takes the form of a (needlessly arcane) thought experiment involving a woman, Mary, who is stipulated to know everything physical about color vision, but who is also stipulated to have lived all her life in a monochromatic room, and so doesn't know "what it's like" to see red, say -- hence, there must be some knowledge that's inherently non-physical. Like other such arguments against physicalism (e.g., the conceivability or zombie argument), this gains what persuasive power it has by appealing to presumed anti-physicalist intuitions, and so has a kind of question-begging feel to it, but it can be perplexing at first sight.

The key to its solution, though, is just to distinguish between knowledge and experience, both of which may be physical states, but different physical states. Mary may know everything physical about color vision but still not have experienced color vision, and this wouldn't tell you anything about whether or not the experience itself was a physical state. With this understanding, we can attack the argument in a number of ways:

If the phrase "know what it's like" to feel something is just used as a synonym for feeling that thing -- so that, for example, pre-verbal infants, or cats, or bats could also be said to "know what it's like" to experience such-and-so even though they lack concepts -- then the word "know" is just being used to mean two different things. There may be no facts, physical or otherwise, left over from Mary's knowledge in the first sense of "know", even though she lacked experience in the second sense of "know".
On the other hand, if we're really talking about things like the concept of "red", e.g., then we would just say that, according to physicalist interpretations, the premises of the thought experiment are self-contradictory -- it cannot be the case both that Mary has complete physical knowledge of color vision and that she lacks the experience of color vision (which is either a form of, or an essential ingredient of, physical knowledge).

The last case might seem a little more arguable, in that people might want to say that physical knowledge, as such, is objective knowledge, and is independent of phenomenal experience, which is inherently subjective. But this then gives the game away -- if you define "physical knowledge" as knowledge devoid of phenomenal content, then you hardly need a thought experiment to show that some knowledge is not physical (I'd say, in fact, that all knowledge is not physical in that sense), but you win the point only by definitionally begging the question.

In general, it seems to me that this debate, like many in this area, has been sustained by a failure to recognize how important is the distinction between basic phenomenal consciousness (i.e., experience) and the distinctive features of language-based consciousness (e.g., knowledge).

"Whereof we cannot speak"

2005-11-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

As much as I've disliked the phrase "the external world" (see below), I've long admired that last proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, often translated (a bit sententiously perhaps) as, "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" -- followed by nothing. It has a teasing, mysterious, Zen-like quality to it, that may at least partly be due to the fact that it's paradoxical, or self-contradictory -- since the subject clause itself, brief though it be, speaks of that "whereof we cannot speak". And I don't think this is a mere quibble -- that very paradox illustrates an important understanding of both the limitations and the power of thought and its medium, language. There are some things which, by their nature, are beyond, or at least outside of, thought as such, but which at the same time, owing to the recursive, object-making nature of language, are "containable" by thought -- thought can hold them, in a fashion, even if it cannot reach them. And a very simple, mundane example of this is simply phenomenal experience itself, the stuff out of which thought is made.

But, speaking of what we cannot speak of, what about that "environment" mentioned parenthetically in the previous post as something altogether outside of knowledge, properly speaking -- should or can anything be said about it? The problem is that, once we're at the level of "saying" anything, we're immediately above the level of the foundation and into the social/cultural realm -- there is no way, in other words, of using abstractions like words that could ever get us "below" or beyond, in any sense, the basic level of phenomenal experience. But there is the word "environment" itself, after all (we could call it the "noumenon", or "external world" even, were it not for the representationalist baggage those terms bring with them) -- what can be meant by that? Suppose that we think in terms of two distinct contextual levels, an epistemological level and an explanatory (scientific) level. Then, on the epistemological level, given the epistemological inversion referred to in earlier posts, the "environment" simply names the principle that the world of conscious experience is a given, independent of conscious agency -- it isn't really a "thing" or "realm" at all, in other words. Within the explanatory level, on the other hand, when we're trying to formulate one of those efficacious "myths" that Quine speaks of (as, for example, in this blog generally), then it can be useful to think of the environment as an externality that stands in a determinate but possibly complex relationship to phenomenal experience. In this sense, and in this context, we could retain three different levels involved in language-based consciousness -- knowledge/belief (i.e., the cultural imprint), phenomenal experience, and environment, all of which are physical, all of which knowledge can embrace, but not all of which knowledge can be.

Internalizing "externalism"

2005-11-07T07:43:00.000-08:00

I've long felt that the phrase "the external world" (as in "our knowledge of") has seemed a bit crude or clumsy -- first, by its rather presumptuous (question-begging) division of things into two worlds, one of which was "external"; and second, by the absurd image it evokes of a "little person" inside a skull peering out, just as in the old homunculus straw man. Why not, instead, just speak of the world as such, and our knowledge of it?

Well, because there are the problems with our perception of the world -- we perceive things (solid surfaces, e.g.) that aren't there, and fail to perceive things (atoms, radio waves, e.g.) that are there. This opens up that familiar gap between appearance and reality, and that in turn leads to the notion that reality is what's "outside", in some sense, while "appearance" is what's inside, in presumably the same sense -- in other words, it leads to just that awkward splitting of the world.

"Awkward", because once the world has been split in this way, it becomes a problem to knit it back together. Representational accounts of perception are formulated but are riven with difficulties -- are such "representations" dependent in some fundamental way on the external reality they're supposed to stand for, e.g.? Or are they simply internal mental structures that have at most a derivative, referential relationship to anything "external"? Such questions relate directly to the significant issue of how we can come to know anything of this external world.

(As an aside, I'll note that the disputes surrounding this issue seem to me to be a prime example of the kinds of confusions or at least unnecessary complications that result when the distinction between language-based consciousness and more general awareness is neglected. Thus Putnam, e.g., seems to be unnecessarily involved in some sort of metaphysics of "natural kinds" [but that Burge, with his social/cultural turn, avoids], which might lead you to think that the problems disappear if we simply reject such metaphysical entities -- but which would be wrong. In trying to understand or explain consciousness in general, the problems go beyond just such culturally-mediated structures as beliefs or concepts.)

But notice that, though we've split things in general into an internal and an external realm, consciousness itself retains its intuitive unity. What if, instead, we were to think of consciousness as a binary structure, as I've been arguing? Might this have the effect of moving the gap or split in the world inside consciousness? And would there be any benefit to so doing? Well, for one thing, the idea of so-called "natural kinds" seem immediately more plausible if we're speaking of "natural" or evolved structures of consciousness rather than of metaphysical structures. More importantly, I think, we're able not only to maintain the distinction between a mental structure and its meaning, but also to move both structure and meaning inside the general structure of consciousness -- because now we're speaking of two different mental structures. Thus, for example, when we see something red, in addition to perceiving red (the presentation of the quale "red" in the world-manifold component of consciousness), we also experience red (the "apprehension" or effect of this token by/on the actor/controller component) -- the content of the apprehension is just the quale or token itself, and the meaning of the quale or token is just the apprehension (i.e., its effect).

Such an internalizing of the split, of course, looks as though it leaves some epistemological concerns unresolved, assuming we continue to work within a representationalist framework -- multiplying internal components of consciousness doesn't appear to address the question of the relationship between either quale or token and the "external world". But this then becomes another reason to consider the epistemological inversion mentioned earlier, whereby the phenomenal world that consciousness presents is regarded as both the foundation and building material of all knowledge, and knowledge is seen as layered structures, of greater or lesser extent, built on top of, and out of, experience (and the environment is not considered as an object of knowledge in any sense). Wouldn't that make "truth" inherently, and disconcertingly, subjective? No, because, in speaking of "truth" or "knowledge" at all, we're speaking of consciousness in its special or language-based sense -- in this sense, truth admits of degrees, and both truth and knowledge become inherently social and practical (the latter being the feature that recovers a notion of objectivity). Here's a passage from Quine that makes a similar point -- it's toward the end of his "Two Dogmas of Empiricsm", in which he compares the objects of physical science with the gods of Homer, stating that the "epistemological footing of the two "differ only in degree and not in kind":

Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

Naturalizing information

2005-10-30T04:23:00.000-08:00

In this account of consciousness, "information" is a key concept -- it's the idea of information that allows the distinctive gap or "loose connection" between the two subcomponents of consciousness that in turn underlies its distinctive flexibility as a control system. But it's also a concept burdened with problems, including one major one for any use in a causal or mechanistic explanation -- it appears to require consciousness itself as generator and/or receiver of information. In an interesting post on Conscious Entities a while back (Sep 11/05), it was pointed out that "Information is a slippery but seductive term", at least partly because, though it can be treated in a very rigorous and well-defined manner, its more familiar use it carries with it the notion of "meaning", with hard-to-avoid overtones of conscious agency, for whom the information would be meaningful. Is information itself, in other words, not meaningful in a purely causal mechanism?

In trying to answer that, it might be useful to consider a couple of instances in which something that at least looks like "information" plays a key role in an operation that is without doubt mechanical. One such case is just that ubiquitous modern machine, the computer. Leaving aside, for now, the input and output of such devices (in which human agents are usually involved, though they needn't be), their data store and operational instructions (software) -- i.e., the means by which their behavior is controlled -- certainly have an information-like quality to them. In any case, another example would be that chemical machine, the living cell, in which the sequence of nucleotides on the long DNA coding molecule constitutes something that looks very much like information, used to construct the protein molecules that do the work of the cell. In both these cases, it's true that if you look closely enough, you can see the strictly causal (and/or stochastic, in the case of the cell) processes that are actually operating the mechanism, but such a close-up view also seems to lose an important or distinctive aspect of their functioning.

To see this, consider two kinds of machine: a basic mechanism involving straightforward causal processes and pathways; versus a mechanism based upon an information-like, intermediate structure that consists of patterns of small differences. The "small differences" may be differences in voltage, in magnetization, in nucleotide code, or some other content, but what's really determining the operation of the machine as such is the difference, not the content of the difference. In this sense, we could say that the "semantics" or meaning of any such pattern of difference is simply the difference it makes in the operation of the machine. (Information has been defined -- see Floridi, quoting Bateson, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- as "difference which makes a difference".) The advantage of such information-based machines is just their adaptability -- their "programmability", in a real sense, whether by an agent or by "natural selection".

Generally, then, I think it's possible to understand "information" in a kind of naturalized or "de-agentized" sense that still retains some notion of "meaning". In this blog, I've been using this same naturalized concept of information to suggest a mechanism for consciousness, in which the intermediate, information-like structure is just the phenomenal world as created and presented by consciousness. Qualia, in this understanding, are simply the tokens in that structure, or the bearers of the difference that "makes a difference".

categories: philosophy consciousness information

Qualia: the "hard problem" as runaway recursion

2005-10-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

Picking up around where I left off in the previous post, I want to look a little more closely at what happens when we try to apply the explanatory processes discussed there to the phenomena from which all explanations originate. As that post indicated, we start with the world that's presented to us -- or, really, with that world as already pre-organized into chunks and hierarchies of abstraction by the particular cultural imprint that we "learn". Upon that basis, we've collectively constructed very elaborate structures of explanation which embrace ever wider areas of experience, and in the process become ever more abstract (where "abstract" means less experiential content and more pure structure or form). One particular source or technique of such abstraction that's proven very effective because it can be applied in a very well-defined and repeatable manner involves the number system, which, combined with standardized units and sensitive measuring devices, allows us to construct "physical descriptions" that are almost entirely quantitative. And this, together with a realist/representationalist epistemology that views such descriptions/explanations as coming ever closer to the real nature of things, can lead to the rather odd view that quantities, rather than being just usable abstractions based upon an old and simple technique of counting, must be the basis for all physical descriptions at their root (with the clear implication that quantities are what lie at the core of "reality", whatever that's taken to mean).

Having painted ourselves into this corner, so to speak, it's not surprising that we have trouble when we try to turn this highly structured apparatus of abstraction back on the phenomena that it itself is made out of: namely, phenomenal experience, "feelings", or so-called "qualia". The problem is that it seems as though any physical description simply has no space in it for "feeling" as such, even though all such descriptions are founded upon just such feeling. And it's not just the fault of an over-emphasis on quantification -- with representational epistemology, we assume (in one sense quite appropriately) that what's real is what can at least be observed. But this assumption, when made in the context of the sort of self-investigation noted above, leads to a kind of runaway recursion (i.e., one with no stop-condition) , as we try to get a perceptual hold on these "feelings". And this in turn generates a kind of head-scratching perplexity -- and an almost comic image of investigators peering into the brain, hoping to catch sight of "seeing", or touch "touching", or hear "hearing".

And so qualia, or simple, basic "feelings", have become, in David Chalmers' now famous formulation, the "hard problem of consciousness". Unable to get a quantitative or even perceptual handle on such "feels", and yet faced with the embarrassing fact that they do seem to be there, scientists, being practical people, have tended just to ignore them or at least to have focused on what they had a hope of measuring. Philosophers, being less practical, have adopted a number of diverse tactics -- the time-honored one, since Descartes, of course, being the splitting of reality into dual realms, but others include spinning qualia off as some sort of puzzling side-effect called "epiphenomena", hoping that "feeling" might turn out to be one more bizarre "quantum" effect, or even locating "feeling" throughout the universe in some sort of pan-psychic "neutral monism".

It's interesting to compare this with the intuitions of people in general (i.e., non-philosophers). On the one hand, I've found that it's difficult to get people to appreciate that there's a problem with qualia at all -- they tend to view phenomenal experience simply as immediate, obvious and not inherently problematic; on the other hand, they have no problem denying such experience to a brick or even to a computer. And while this sort of intuition is philosophically naive, I think this might be one of those times when "common" sense has remained a better guide than more sophisticated analyses. In any case, one of the beneficial effects of the sort of epistemological inversion recommended previously is that it might allow us to, in a sense, demystify or normalize qualia -- instead of experience being viewed as some sort of strange and inexplicable irruption in the physical world, it's restored to its role as the substance of the world, and the fundamental stuff out of which all explanations or descriptions are built. And in that way, when we want to construct explanations for mental phenomena, we might actually be able to view qualia as functional -- as, e.g., necessary carriers of information that enable the critical loose connection between the two components of consciousness.

categories: consciousness philosophy epistemology qualia

The world and its explanations: an epistemological side-trip

2005-10-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

This blog touches on such a melange of disciplines -- from "cognitive studies" (itself an amalgam of cognitive science, psychology, neurological science, cognitive philosophy, philosophy of mind, etc.), through linguistics, to cultural anthropology -- that you might almost say it was undisciplined. In any case, the deep and ancient waters of epistemology seem a bit of a stretch even for such a melange. But, as I indicated in the post on "general consciousness" below, the idea that consciousness actually creates the world that we experience (going Wordsworth one better) has philosophical implications that shouldn't be avoided even if we wanted to. I said I'd return to this, so here I am:

If I thought it were really feasible, I'd say that the created world of consciousness is the only meaningful sense of the notion of "world", and await the accusations of idealism with resigned equanimity. I'm not, in fact, advocating idealism, and don't have any doubt that there exists an environment that's independent of consciousness and to which the created world is one response. But I want to say that I think there are some compelling reasons to leave that immersive environment just as such, and save the word "world" for the sort of knitted-together totality that consciousness presents us with.

For a long time, of course, it's been commonly thought that consciousness provides us with a representation of the "external" world, but a flawed one. That is, what we get is simply an "appearance", which is at odds with an underlying "reality", and it's been the task of philosophers, originally, and then of scientists, to penetrate the veil(s) of appearance and arrive at the truth, or the really real. This appeals to an intuitive understanding of how appearances can mislead, and even though the philosophers tended often to obscure things more than clarify them, the scientists have had a series of unquestionable successes, at least of a certain kind (as I'll get to). But at the same time, this scientific truth has been getting further and further removed from human experience, removing layer after layer of appearance, until there seems to be little "appearance" left at all, and all we -- "we" being the few adepts with the requisite abilities and training -- have to cope with it are the diamond-hard structural abstractions of mathematics. And, as one scientific revolution succeeds another, there seems to be no end to this process, with new questions forming faster than old ones are answered, and the real truth receding at least as fast as we approach it. In any case, beyond all human reach, there hovers the tantalizing idea of the "thing-in-itself", the noumenon, the final truth. We seem to be left peeling an onion that has no core.

So, in contrast to that situation, let me suggest another. Do you want to know the truth? Think you can handle the truth? Then all you have to do is remove layers upon layers of cultural sediment, let go of all theories, ideas, concepts, and even thoughts and words, and leave yourself open, as far as you can, to the moment-by-moment experience that presents itself to you. Become like an infant, in other words -- not a Wordsworthian infant, "trailing clouds of glory", no, but like a pre- or non-linguistic consciousness. And that's as close as you can ever come to the really real, to the underlying, bedrock truth of things. Because that just is the world. (In this context, the notion of the "thing-in-itself", the noumenon, is a mere conceptual mirage, a will o' the wisp.)

Now, the problem with the truth, in this sense of the word, is just that it doesn't do us much good. Well, that's not quite right, since the conscious world is above all a practical construction, but it's not nearly as useful as even some fairly simple explanations of experience. Notice, however, that "explanation" now becomes not a "penetration" of appearance, but rather a kind of overlay, a way of structuring experience through appropriate and opportune abstractions (see below, on the symbol) that provides us with practical and effective ways of planning our behavior in the world. And the test of an explanation is not how closely it matches some supposed, but unreachable, "external" world, but rather how well it functions in serving our immediate and long-term individual and social needs. This is a pragmatism, certainly, but one built upon a kind of epistemological inversion -- in this sense, what science is really doing is not peeling away layers of appearance, but adding layer upon layer of explanation, each layer extending the reach of experience that it covers. It's not surprising that, in this process, it necessarily becomes ever more abstract, nor that the process should be potentially without end. And all the while we can happily make do with various intermediate levels of explanation that are closer to our actual experience, without feeling that we're somehow being fooled by appearances. We might, in fact, want to change the meaning of "truth" to refer not to correspondance to the world (since that we have immediately), but rather to the breadth of experience covered by a particular explanation -- in that sense, truth would be a relative term, and one explanation could be more or less true than another.

Well, I said near the start that "if it were feasible" I'd assert that the world that consciousness creates for us is the only meaningful sense of the word -- but I doubt that it's really feasible in general. None of us, including myself, can really get away from the common use of "world" to mean the external environment. Still, I think that this sort of re-orientation can have significant and, I hope, helpful consequences in trying to address some questions and issues of a less common nature.

categories: philosophy epistemology

A Recap

2005-10-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

This might be a good place to stop and summarize what's been proposed. The key posts, in order, have been:

Intro

The Gist

Consciousness: the gap

Culture as imprint

That culture is functional

The sign/symbol pair

The "I" and the cultural imprint

The nature of the symbol

General consciousness again

From this, the following points are most important:

First of all, there is a crucial distinction between consciousness as such -- aka "awareness" -- and language-based consciousness (which enables self-consciousness or self-awareness, reflection, etc.). That is, consciousness in general does not imply self-awareness, introspection, etc. -- it simply implies (or is identical with) awareness, or experience, or so-called "raw feels".
Consciousness just as such, or just as awareness, is a general behavioral control system that has evolved in mobile organisms. The crucial feature of this control system is that it introduces a gap or "slippage" between environmental stimuli and behavioral response, and this gap allows for more complex and adaptive responses by providing an opening for other inputs such as memory, expectation, and system state.
The gap of consciousness is a function of its two subcomponents -- a world-creating mechanism and a behavior-determining mechanism -- and, crucially, of the loose connection between those subcomponents. "Loose connection" just means that the world that consciousness creates is made up purely of information-bearing tokens -- i.e., irreducible, qualitatively distinct signals, or "qualia". Since it's only the information contained in their qualitative distinction that provides the input to the decision-making algorithm of consciousness, qualia are not just functional, they're required.
The advent of language introduces a new order of complexity into this control system, by providing a way to separate experiential memory into "chunks", structure those chunks through abstractable features, and provide a handle for such structured fragments of experience by associating them with specific experiential signs, such as word-sounds. Among the most powerful of such sign/symbol combinations is that for the "self" or "I", which is something that only comes into being through language, and which provides the basis for a recursive self-awareness or introspection.
Unlike general consciousness, however, this special or language-based consciousness is an inherently social phenomenon, and is learned through a developmental process that imprints an entire "memetic" structure on each individual's mental apparatus, a structure that can be called a cultural imprint. This structure undergoes constant change not just in every "communicative encounter" between individuals within a cultural group, but also as individuals use the structure to think and formulate plans on their own. And this change provides the basis for Darwinian-like selection pressures on the cultural imprint, and hence for cultural adaptation and evolution.

To summarize the recap, the key ideas here are:

General consciousness or simple awareness is not the same as linguistic consciousness, and any discussion of consciousness should be aware of the distinction.
The function of general consciousness is as a highly flexible behavioral control system.
The qualia of consciousness are signals or bearers of information essential to its operation as a mechanism.
The advent of language produces a new or special kind of consciousness characterized by a socially learned and maintained cultural imprint or "memotype", which in turn provides the basis for social/cultural change or evolution.

categories: consciousness culture cultural evolution meme

General consciousness again

2005-10-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

Here I'd like to step back from cultural or language-based consciousness, and look again at just the phenomenon of general consciousness, or what's often called simply "awareness" or "sentience". General consciousness, in other words, is consciousness without language. That such awareness is possible without words, in the first place, should be evident from our common experience of pre-linguistic infants, where I don't think anyone would doubt that they're aware of colors, tastes, touches, sounds, etc. -- that is, that they experience so-called "raw feels". But this common observation is then easily applied to the animals, like dogs or cats, that often share our lives as well. What about budgies? Goldfish? Again, it seems apparent just from the fact that they react to stimuli that they must also experience those stimuli in some manner. But as we move toward progressively simpler organisms, this becomes less apparent -- it's not so hard to imagine systems with relatively few behavioral options reacting to their environment in some hard-wired manner, as in reflex arcs, without necessarily any sort of internal experience. And when we go below the level of nervous systems altogether, it becomes hard to believe that "responses" to stimuli are anything other than merely chemical or physical.

Of course, ultimately everything is merely chemical or physical. But what these admittedly simple observations imply is that at some point in the sequence from, say, amoeba to dog, consciousness in the sense of experiential awareness appears -- at some point it becomes meaningful to assume that it is indeed "like" something at least to be that organism. If we accept that (if only for the sake of the argument) and if we reject dualism in all its forms, then this is saying that the chemical/physical behavior of neurons has produced a peculiar kind of mechanism, a mechanism that, however astonishing it may seem, is responsible for the appearance of the phenomenon of awareness. The hypothesis of this blog, as I've said, is that such a phenomenon is functional -- that is, that awareness, as such, has an adaptational purpose, in that it introduces a gap or distance between stimulus and response, which makes the stimulus available but not determinate. And this in turn allows for an exceptionally flexible form of behavioral control, needed for systems that have a wide range of behavioral options and operate within complex environments.

Now, there is an enormous body of literature -- putting it mildly -- that deals with the issue and issues of consciousness (see this collection for at least a start). But in what follows, I'd like to just set it to one side, temporarily (and perhaps foolhardily). Because I want, first, to be able to quickly sketch out some of the implications and elaborations of the hypothesis above -- in particular, that the mechanism of consciousness must have two main components -- two sides of the gap, so to speak -- one of which "presents" the environmental stimuli in some structured manner, while the other "apprehends" such presentations in some "loosely coupled" manner (where "loosely coupled" is intended to mean that the presentation is but one input among others -- others such as memory, expectation, internal state, etc. -- to the apprehender, whose job is to determine behavior or response).

Consciousness as World:
This is to make the claim that consciousness really does create some version of an "inner world" -- "inner" in the sense that it's created by, and only exists within, the mental apparatus of the organism or system; and "world" in the sense that it is a whole that unifies the various sensory sources of environmental stimuli in a presentation that is centered on the body and environmental location of the organism. I deliberately used the word "presentation" here, and avoided "representation", because I wanted to emphasize the fabricated nature of this manifold, as well as its practical or functional aspect. (Later I want to come back to some of the philosophical issues and implications surrounding this usage.)

Such a world (I hope later, as I say, to make it more apparent why I think the adjective "inner" is actually redundant here) is made up out of a number of distinct "channels" of sensory input, corresponding to the different kinds of sense organ. And each of those channels provides for an indefinite number of qualitatively distinct, but otherwise irreducible, "tokens" of information (usually termed "qualia"), identifiable by channel (e.g., as a color or a sound), and corresponding to at least some of the difference in impinging stimuli. Note that different channels are not only identifiably distinct from one another, they display different characteristics as wholes -- sounds, for example, can be organized into a linear spectrum (among other characteristics) from high to low, whereas color seems to display a circular one, even though both channels render environmental stimuli that display a linear variation in wavelength; smell seems to display simply a large collection of distinct qualia without any question of a spectrum; touch seems to involve a number of distinct "spectra", such as smooth to rough, soft to hard, warm to cool, etc. (perhaps implying that there are really a number of distinct sensory channels commonly associated as "touch"?). In any case, it is the job of this component of consciousness to take the input signals from various sensory sources and render them simply as distinct, irreducible tokens on the various channels of the manifold that is the world.

Consciousness as Actor:
If the fabricated World of consciousness is a presentation, there needs to be something that it's presented to or for. And this is the other major component of consciousness -- the other side of the gap that is its defining feature -- which we might as well call the Actor. Doing so, of course, immediately invites comparison with the oft-ridiculed "homunculus" theory of consciousness, which posits that there's a little person inside our heads who's monitoring sensory input on screens and dials -- which, apart from its inherent silliness, is clearly avoiding or begging the question of the nature of consciousness by merely locating it one step removed. Now, I don't think anyone has ever actually proposed such a theory, but it gets used often enough as a straw man in the course of proposing other, contrasting, theories. And that's the use that I'll make of it here too -- as a way of distinguishing this notion of an "Actor" component of consciousness from efforts at merely putting off the problem. The main idea is that the Actor component is itself just a mechanism, or a mechanical component of a larger mechanism, not a ghost in the machine, and not an agent at all. That is, "Actor" is just a label for a mechanism that outputs behavior based upon inputs from the "World" component of consciousness, but also, importantly, from other sources, such as a memory store, an anticipation generator, and various internal "drives". The algorithms, so to speak, by which this output is generated might vary considerably depending on the general complexity of both the conscious system and its environment, but a common theme might well be the ability to formulate a "goal" or intention based upon the general state of the system, and then the ability to prioritize or focus upon certain portions of the various input sources on the basis of that intention -- which would give rise to the phenomenon of conscious "attention". (Note that even though words like "goal" or "intention", or even "prioritize", commonly imply will or agency, here they're just used metaphorically, as is often done in describing the structure and operations of, say, software systems.)

Questions:
To wind up this already too-long posting, let me address a couple of the more obvious questions that might arise:

Why does this "Actor" component need that fabricated "World"? Why doesn't the Actor simply receive, and respond to, sensory input directly?

Because the functional advantage of consciousness as a control system is precisely that it's not tied directly into its environment -- that is, the point of the created "world" of consciousness, in a very real sense, is that it acts as a buffer between Actor and environment. It does this by rendering the barrage of environmental stimuli as standardized, "tokenized" bits of information -- "qualia" -- on a pre-structured, unified, and persistent manifold -- which is all that's meant by "World".

But if both components of consciousness are "mechanical" or deterministic, then how is this proposal fundamentally any different from any other general assertion of causal, neurological, or algorithmic bases for consciousness?

Well, since this proposal is certainly a mechanistic one, it isn't fundamentally different from any other of the sort. But, first, this proposes an actual structure for such a mechanism -- two parts, loosely coupled (like a limited slip differential). Second, such a structure provides a reason for the logical necessity of something like qualia -- irreducible and qualitatively distinct tokens -- as being the only way that the two parts can be connected in a loose or non-determinate manner. Third, the two part structure offers an explanation for the functionality, or evolutionary effectiveness, of consciousness, since the loose connection provides a control system of unusual flexibility and adaptability. And fourth (though this is a little more vague), such a structure provides some basis for, and explanation of, the often-noted "freedom" of consciousness and of will, in its escape from causal determination by the world or by any single source of input (even though, like all mechanisms, it is determined by the sum of its inputs).

Despite the hand-waving about "metaphors" and so on, isn't this "Actor" still just a way of ducking the "hard problem of consciousness", since you never really say how such a mechanism would actually work?

No, I don't. Skepticism here is entirely reasonable, and at this point I'm really just putting forth an hypothesis or suggestion. But I'd make two general points in response: first, I think the suggestion is not implausible, and specific enough to be interesting. Second, since the mechanism being proposed is a general one, it should be possible to instantiate such a structure in an artificial system such as a robot -- in other words, the real test of this proposal would be the production of even a simple version of a synthetic consciousness.

categories:
consciousness

The nature of the symbol

2005-10-13T19:02:00.000-07:00

The symbol is where the rubber, as they say, meets the road in cultural evolution. For all the analogies with biological evolution, memes are not genes, and the operations of the sign/symbol pair are quite different from the molecular machinery involved in genetics. In particular, as we've already seen, the various cultural imprints making up a cultural social system have nothing like the degree of similarity of the molecules that make up the genome of a species, nor the exact replicating mechanism of DNA. But though the similarity of individual cultural symbols is rough, it's also robust, since it's constantly updated in every communicative interaction. And at the same time, the symbols are used as elements of thought or as means of planning effective behavior in the world, and their own effectiveness is increased or reduced on the basis of their results. So I think it's evident that there are indeed causal, and hence machine-like, processes at work here, albeit, at this point, of a largely unknown neurological kind.

Without venturing into neurology, let me suggest a few more characteristics of the symbol as such, that might help provide a more concrete idea of how cultural change proceeds:

Symbols derive their individual relevance and behavioral effectiveness from the fact that they are built out of our conscious experience -- they are experiential containers, in a sense, that group or classify experiences on the basis of the abstraction of features. E.g., the symbol corresponding to the word "tree" is an abstraction from our experiential encounters with a number of different concrete instances.
Because of this, symbols can be related to one another hierarchically, in levels of abstraction, like containers that contain, and are contained in, containers -- e.g., "tree" relates to "poplar" in one direction and to "plant" (as opposed to "animal") in the other.
If we think of the "shape" of a given symbol as determined by its abstracted features, then this shape is a malleable one, as those features are constantly being adjusted under the pressure of new experience, including especially communicative experience. That shape also affects how it fits with other, related symbols.
At any point, new symbols can be made up by agglomerating new abstractions from experience -- we might decide we need a new category of "plants suitable for urban landscaping", for example, and give such a thing a name (sign).
Also at any point, new symbols can be formed by introducing a distinction that breaks an existing one into new, more usable parts. (In fact, these may well be the twin fundamental operations that underlie all thought: comparing/distinguishing, associating/discriminating, synthesizing/analyzing.)

Consider, for example, a micro-incident: X sees an odd-looking plant (to her), and says to Y: "Look at that odd tree," and Y replies, "Actually, that's a shrub, not a tree." At first, X's tree-symbol has been altered to some extent by the need to include this new experience -- and then it's quickly altered again by Y's reply, which serves at least momentarily to bring the two into greater (but certainly never exact) "semantic alignment". X may try to argue the point, may be puzzled about it, or may simply accept the correction, but in any case, both will have had their symbols associated with the words "tree" and "shrub", as well, perhaps, as their notions of each other, affected, however slightly, by both the perception and the communication. And the affect will not, typically (though it can), be a matter of their conscious wills or agencies -- it will be a matter of the mechanism of cultural adaptation.

meme symbol cultural evolution

Cultural materialism?

2005-10-13T04:09:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I mentioned the possibility that a very significant change in cultural evolution may have been brought about by a purely cultural development -- i.e., not by a new technology, or the development of a new technique or mode of production, but rather through the emergence of a new cultural form, or through, in a sense, a purely cultural mutation. The change in this case referred to the rise of urban civilizations, usually associated with the advent of farming. But what if farming, at least at low levels of intensity, had been around for some time, many thousands of years perhaps, without giving rise to cities? What if that development, instead, hinged on the idea that the charisma of a god-like ruler was attached to the office rather than to the office-holder, and was supported or maintained by an increasingly powerful class of priests/scribes/administrators, with their associated ritual and mystique? What if it was only through such a purely cultural development, in other words, that significant numbers in the more densely populated regions could be organized and mobilized to supply the labor that not only built the cities, carried on the increasingly complex commerce, and developed more systematic farming practices, but also conquered the surrounding people who lacked such an awe-inspiring "meme" (though, of course, once conquered, didn't lack for long)?

Well, that particular idea, however interesting, might well be wrong. The point I want to make, however, is that such an explanation, were you to make it, would appear to expel you from the camp of the cultural materialists and force you in with cultural idealists. And then I want to make the point that that appearance might be wrong -- first, because the explanation doesn't involve the idealist implication that human agency or will is what directs cultural evolution; and second, because culture itself -- even considered as an imprint on the mental apparatus or neural structure of language-using primates -- is a material thing, with at least as much material affect on the world as a practical technique like irrigated farming. What's important here isn't so much the labels or the disciplinary camps, but the understanding that culture isn't a mere abstraction (nor a matter of conscious choice) but has a real, concrete, and material presence in the world.

An interlude: on evolution, teleology, and "complexity ratchets"

2005-10-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

A major reason for talking about culture in this way -- that is, in terms of the functionality of culture, cultural imprints or memotypes, the changeable nature of the symbol/meme, etc. -- is to be able to talk about, and understand, the phenomenon of cultural evolution. But evolution in itself raises an interesting and controversial side-issue that is especially pertinent to cultural evolution: which is the question of whether or not evolutionary processes display a "directedness" -- i.e., the puzzle of "progress", or the notion of teleological change without a director. The conventional answer, I think, is that such "progress" is merely an illusion, clung to for self-flattering reasons (Stephen Gould being a typical proponent of such an answer). The counter assertion is to argue for "complexity" as being the long-term direction of change, where it would be helpful to make some further specifications along the following lines:

define "complexity" as something like the total number of parts of a system and the total number of connections between such parts;
stipulate that the purported increase in complexity over time applies only to entire ecosystems (i.e., is an assertion concerning the increase in average complexity of systems within an ecosystem);
further stipulate that the change is a stochastic process, meaning that ecosystem complexity fluctuates in the short term and only generally increases, usually, and in an uneven manner, over the long term.

On the basis of that, then, a useful approach to making the case for directed change is the temporal cross-section, whereby we consider an entire ecology at long intervals of time and try to assess the complexity level of organisms or systems within that ecology. And it seems reasonably clear, at least in a quick examination of the history of both biological and cultural systems, that such cross-sections do in fact display increasing complexity. (We could also note that the universe itself appears to display a certain directedness to its evolution, not simply in an entropic, “running down” sense, though that certainly is happening, but also in a steady increase in heavier, more complex elements over time.)

Without going any further into the dispute at this point, then, I'd like to just make the hypothesis that the phenomenon of directed evolution is real, and ask what could account for it. Gould is at least right to assert that Darwinian natural selection as such does not explain it. It could only do so if complexity in itself somehow conferred greater adaptational advantage upon a system. But while that might be so in particular instance, there are also lots of both reasons and evidence to show that, other things being equal, simplicity wins out over complexity in a straightforward competition. If the phenomenon of a long-term, or “teleological” trend toward complexity is nonetheless real, then other explanations are needed.

One such might be something like a "complexity ratchet". Random fluctuations within an ecology (biological or cultural) will produce systems of varying levels of complexity from moment to moment. But suppose that occasionally one of the more complex systems takes on a form that’s more stable than others – this would raise the average complexity of the ecosystem as a whole, then, at least as long as the system persisted. And if, very occasionally, that system was in a form that was self-reproducible, then the increased stability would generate an enduring increase in ecological complexity. Which, interestingly, seems very much like what those particular chemical systems known as “life” represent.

Of course, if such a ratchet were to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then it’s not going to work – it would be as illusory as perpetual motion. The usual "out" here is to say that the Second Law really only pertains to closed ecosystems, not necessarily to particular systems or subsystems within those environments. But the real question is simply whether it's possible at all, in a stochastic environment, and within the constraints of the Second Law, for a more "complex" system (as defined above) to be more stable, even to a slight degree, than a less complex one -- if the answer is "yes" (which again I'll assume, for the sake of the hypothesis), then the complexity ratchet becomes a possibility.
(An aside: is "disorder", in the entropic sense, necessarily the opposite of "complexity", in the above sense? Could a closed environment simultaneously become more disordered and more complex? Like a kind of crystallization process? If so, maybe it's not that God created the universe, but that the universe is in the process of creating God, hmm? Or, maybe I should just cut down on the caffeine.)

So assuming that they're possible at all, then we'd expect complexity ratchets to come in all sizes at all times – they would be "fractal", in a sense. But at long intervals – depending on their relative improbability – there would appear major ratchets that provide a floor for a fairly sudden expansion in possible system complexity after that point. A major example of that, of course, as we've seen, would just be the molecular systems we call "life" itself. But now look at the history of life on earth: billions years of simple unicelled packets, and then, fairly suddenly, maybe half a billion years ago, the appearance of a significant increase in complexity – nucleated cells. And after that, the advent of multi-celled forms. It was as though, in stumbling across this invention of an inner, protected wall for the growth of the coding molecule, a new complexity ratchet was attained, which allowed for the proliferation of the enormously more complex machinery underlying developmental biology. This seems to say that eukaryotes were an even larger – even more improbable – step forward in complexity than the relatively simple chemical packets of prokaryotes.

If we describe “life” as the phenomenon of molecularly coded and transmitted complexity, then "culture" could be described as the phenomenon of aurally coded and transmitted social structures -- "language", in other words, could be viewed as a complexity ratchet for animal behavior. Let’s say that such cultural social formations first make their appearance some half million years ago or earlier – then, again, for a relatively long stretch, very little changes. Until, only some 7 to 10 thousand years ago, farming first appeared, and so did writing. Whichever constituted the ratchet -- and another possibility might have been the purely cultural invention of new, surplus-generating religious forms -- it does seem clear that a major advance in social complexity took place in isolated pockets around that time, giving rise to the first urban cultures. And then these persist, in varying forms, spreading slowly and intermittently, but at roughly similar levels of complexity for thousands of years themselves, until about 500 years ago – when we see the first hints of an industrial culture. Was the invention of “science” the ratchet in this case? The emergence of the "bourgeois" class of merchant producers? The appearance of the modern notion of the "individual"? Whatever it was, here again we see a form of social organization at least an order of magnitude more complex then its predecessors, simply in terms, again, of the number of parts and the number of connections between them (communication, transport, velocity).

And what, we might ask, about now? Would the advent of the digital computer, digital information, global networking, etc. be another major complexity ratchet? Perhaps we'll need to include, as parts of the systems under consideration, entities other than those carbon-based ones we've usually focused on....

The "I" and the cultural imprint

2005-10-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

This is a note picked from a bracketed aside, below, to the effect that we do not make our own cultural imprint "just as we please". Why not, you might wonder? We can't make our culture just as we please because "culture" (as understood here) is an abstraction from all of the cultural imprints of the individuals that comprise the cultural formation -- but our own cultural imprint is just that, our own, and you might think that its make up is, within practical limits, up to us to decide. What would limit our ability to do so?

Two general considerations:

First, there is the idea that the symbols of the cultural imprint are affected by each "communicative encounter" through a so-called determinate or causal process, not a conscious one. Just as we can't choose whether or not to recognize a sign (e.g., understand a word seen or heard), so we can't help but be affected by the context and manner in which a sign is used -- where "affected" pertains to the bundle or chunk of experience that constitutes the symbol invoked by the sign.

But -- such symbols are also affected by new experience that's relevant to their content (e.g., each encounter with a new instance of, say, the concept "tree" will have a small -- depending on one's developmental stage of course -- affect on the concept itself). And thought is also experience of a certain kind, so in that sense we can recover at least some control over our own cultural imprints -- that is, over our own concepts (among other things), as we expect. But there's another, perhaps more interesting, form of limitation:

This has to do with the fact that the "self" or the "I" is itself just another concept or symbol within the cultural imprint, and has no privileged access to any other symbolic construct. The advent of language, by providing a way of breaking conscious experience into chunks, (aggregating those chunks through abstraction, etc.), and by providing perceptual "handles" for those chunks in the form of signs, has made possible not just self-awareness, but a "self" or an "I" in the first place. The "I", notice, is inherently (grammatically) the active subject and hence difficult to make into an object of thought at all -- if we can even think of "I", it's as some kind of point of view, irreducible, and standing outside of all other objects of thought. But I (!) think this is a fundamental error, and source of error -- the word "I" is a sign like any other, and the symbol it evokes is also a construct or assemblage of experience like any other.

Now, it's true -- and important -- that language provides a kind of recursive process by which we can interrogate or investigate our own symbolic constructs, including our notion of our own "self", and even our own "I". But there is no standpoint outside of our self from which to do that, and so any such investigation is necessarily affected from the start by the existing structure of the "I". And the very act of investigation, as another experience, also affects the "I" of the investigator and whatever symbolic construct is being investigated. In this sense, it's hard to resist bringing in another metaphor from, or analogy to, physics, and call this limitation a kind of Psychic Indeterminacy Principle (so I didn't resist). We're complex, mutable, contingent beings not just in our physical wholes, but in what we'd like to think of as our psychic core or essence as well.

The Sign/Symbol pair

2005-10-10T15:53:00.000-07:00

At this point, I don't want to make too much of this pairing, particularly because it's ground well-covered, in a wide variety of different contexts, meanings, histories, controversies, etc. The terms I'm using are an admitted mish-mash drawn from those different contexts, and pulled in here only for want of something better. Saussure, for example, uses the more technical-sounding, and certainly more coherent, "sign", "signifier", and "signified" to mean roughly what I refer to as "meme", "sign" and "symbol", but I didn't want to become entangled in all the structuralist, semiotic nets that such terms now drag with them. With "meme", on the other hand, while I recognize that the term has become an over-used pop-anthropology cliche, I did want to make use of its overt genetic and Darwinian analogies, and so I've included it as the general term for the sign/symbol (signifier/signified) pair. The term "symbol" is perhaps the sloppiest usage of the lot here, since it's often understood as something that already refers to, or stands for, something else. But I want to use it somewhat differently -- I mean by it a unit or chunk of conscious experience that is pre-defined and pre-structured ("pre-" meaning that it exists as a structure within an individual's mental apparatus and is available for use in communicative behavior, without having to be pulled together). And then "sign" is maybe the simplest and clearest of the three -- it simply means a perception (or a memory of a perception, as in internal speech or self-reflection) that evokes, or calls up, that chunk of experience that is the symbol.

Out of all that, there are just two points that I want to make for now, since I think they've sometimes gone unnoticed or underemphasized, but are crucial for the operation of a cultural system:

First, we cannot choose whether or not to "recognize" a sign. We can and do choose, obviously, where to focus our attention, but once a sign is experienced, then its associated symbolic "meaning" is activated in a strictly causal or determinate fashion. (There are interesting fringe cases where we're confused about which sign was experienced, or even whether it was a particular sign, or where we can reduce a sign to just its contingent sense experience through repetition -- saying a word over and over again, for example -- but these serve only to outline the determinate nature of the sign-symbol interaction.)

Second, the symbol, since it's constructed out of the stuff of each individual's actual experience, is unique for each individual in a cultural social formation. When two (or more) people use a particular sign in a communicative encounter, then the associated symbols are always to some extent (however slight) brought into what we might call semantic alignment, but they can never be identical because they'll always be affected to some extent (however slight) by the differences in each person's experience to that point. And this too is a strictly causal or determinate process.

That culture is functional

2005-10-10T03:11:00.000-07:00

Looking upon culture as a structured imprint in the minds of every individual in a cultural social formation, rather than as simply a collection of practices and artifacts, makes it less likely that we'd view it as any sort of social "epiphenomenon", more likely that we'd see it as functional. But functional in what sense? In the sense, I think, that it directly supports the maintenance and adaptation of the cultural group* (*leaving to another post the task of saying what exactly constitutes the "cultural group"). That is, the ideas, concepts, values, etc. (among a great many other things) that make up a cultural imprint have a direct effect on the behavior of the individuals making up the group -- this effect generating what might be called a cultural "phenotype". And just as the genetic phenotype exposes the underlying genotype to Darwinian selection pressures, so this cultural phenotype (the actual, summed behavior of the individuals in the group) exposes the underlying "memotype" to the same kind of selection pressures. Thus, cultural social formations adapt to changing circumstances and evolve just as do biological species -- but, because the memotype is much more changeable or dynamic than the genotype, cultural evolution typically proceeds at a much faster pace. It's worth noting that, at times at least, this can put culture in conflict with biology, with the latter losing its claim upon the "natural". (At the same time, it's also worth noting that, for a variety of reasons, and as Marx said of history, we do not make our culture "just as we please".)

Culture as imprint

2005-10-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

Maybe even more than "consciousness", "culture" is a word that everyone uses but few are comfortable defining. Perhaps it's commonly thought of as art, design, custom, folklore, ritual, etc., but even in anthropological circles, in which culture is the core of the discipline, the word often has a peculiar and somewhat frustrating vagueness. It might be defined, for example, as the shared or common values, traditions, norms, etc., "of a people", but how does that relate to the actual individuals that make up the "people", for example? Is there a difference between these "shared" values and individual values? How "shared" do such values need to be? How do we determine the boundaries of the "people"? And where do these shared values actually reside, after all?

Another hypothesis, then: linguistic consciousness provides the basis for a structure of sign/symbol pairs (a "sign" being a perception that evokes or activates a "symbol", which is a ready-made and meaningful element of consciousness), a structure which is imprinted on the mental apparatus of each individual making up a particular cultural group. If we use the admittedly slippery term "meme" to refer to such sign/symbol pairs, then we can refer to the entire structure of such pairs as the individual's "memotype", in an obvious analogy to the individual genotype. And just as each individual's genetic blueprint is unique, yet sufficiently like other humans' to constitute a species, so each individual memotype is unique, but similar enough to allow communication and shared understandings of certain values, etc. -- similar enough, in other words, to constitute a culture.

A note on terminology

2005-10-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

A big part of the problem in this whole area has to do with the ambiguity and outright confusion of the terms that deal with it. E.g., "consciousness" sometimes is just supposed to mean linguistic consciousness or self-awareness, sometimes to mean just "awareness" or "sentience" as such, and sometimes, indiscriminately, to mean both or either. That's not so bad if the distinction among these usages is clear (more or less) from the start, but is a great source of muddle and pointless disputation if it's not. Similarly, terms like "perception" and (especially) "experience" have been used in a wide variety of contexts and carry with them such considerable semantic baggage that their use in more specific or defined senses carries the constant threat of misunderstanding. Still, it's difficult to do without them without seeming merely artificial. And this kind of dilemma will recur in subsequent posts as I try to deal with familiar topics but from a less familiar, and perhaps more comprehensive, standpoint. So I won't try to invent a new jargon to cope with this perspective, but I will try to alert any readers from time to time, as here, that some common words are being used in some uncommon ways.

As an example, the terms "perception" and "experience" are often used somewhat interchangeably, though the latter usually includes awareness of internal states as well. But in the preceding post, and subsequently, I'd like to reserve the term "perception" to refer to the rendering of environmental stimuli on the internal "world" of consciousness, and "experience" to refer to the apprehension of that world (which includes other internal states, such as memories, imaginations, dispositions, etc.) by the "actor" component of consciousness. (But I can't promise I won't lapse into more casual usages myself.)

Consciousness: the Gap

2005-10-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

An hypothesis: consciousness evolved in mobile life forms as a particularly efficient and effective kind of behavioral control system -- and its effectiveness derives from its defining feature: the introduction of a space or gap between perception and behavior, or between stimulus and response, or, we might say, between world and act. Compare it with a reflex arc, which "hard wires", in a sense, behavior to perception -- by contrast, in consciousness a perception is first rendered to an internal, created "world", and then becomes available as an "experience" (as opposed to "perception") to an an internal "actor", which determines behavior on the basis of that input along with many other features of the current state of the organism. Thus, the crucial and defining structure of a consciousness-type of control system is this two-part design -- on the one hand, a world-creating subsystem, and on the other, a behavior-controlling one -- the two components of which are only loosely coupled to one another, through the phenomenon of experience.

The Gist

2005-10-09T06:03:00.000-07:00

Here are some key assertions (and negations) that form the basis for this blog experiment:

That consciousness is not an inherently mysterious phenomenon, not an aspect of some parallel or ideal or non-physical realm, not some inexplicable by-product of neuronal activity, not likely a bizarre effect of quantum mechanics, and not solely confined to homo sapiens. Instead, it is as physical a phenomenon as the replication of a DNA molecule, say, or the working of a diesel engine, and is a feature of virtually all mobile organisms more complex than planaria.

That linguistic consciousness is something significantly more complex than simple or general consciousness, and is likely something so far only found to have evolved in one species -- human beings. This special form of consciousness might also be called conceptual or, in a broad sense, symbolic consciousness, since those are structures that are simply aspects of language. One of the more important or central concepts or symbols that appear for such consciousness is that of the self, or the "I", this being an aspect of the capacity for self-consciousness, or internal reflection, that the advent of language allows.

That culture is not a decorative by-product of human activity, but rather is a structure within the consciousness of language-using individuals, and is the means by which their activity is organized into social formations of varying complexity. Culture, in other words, is functional, and as such is subject to the same sorts of selection pressures that govern biological or genetic evolution. Culture is manifested through a large number of created signs and artifacts, but it exists as a constantly adapting pattern within the consciousness of each individual within a cultural social formation. (Not all of this pattern -- perhaps not even most of it -- is available to the self-consciousness of such individuals however.)

Some of these propositions -- I hope -- are at least arguable, and making those arguments will be one purpose of the entries to come. Another purpose, however, will be to develop and extend the propositions in various directions, including pointing to others working along similar lines wherever I can.

Intro

2005-10-08T15:55:00.000-07:00

Just a quick explanation of the blog description, at the upper right. Consciousness, in its general sense, is understood here as a control system for complex mobile organisms (referring, to this point, to naturally evolved animals, but the idea is that this limitation is not essential). Consciousness in the "special" sense* refers to the profound change that occurs when language is added to such conscious systems -- change that allows the emergence of a "self", self-consciousness, and all of the phenomena gathered under the name of "culture".

(* The use of "special" and "general" here, of course, is an allusion to the Theories of Relativity. Physics-envy, perhaps, but also a way to emphasize the importance of distinguishing the two kinds or levels of consciousness, which otherwise is often an important source of confusion.)

UPDATE (Oct 11/05):
These views and notes have been evolving (so to speak) for some time, going back to a "Culture Project" in the mid-70's. They've taken the form of notes and outlines, some privately circulated, some even online from the mid-90's and on. Here I'm hoping that eventually they'll spark a discussion, of which these views will just be a part. But initially at least, I'll simply be getting out the backlog in blog format.