Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

Frank Jackson (1982) formulates the intuition underlying his Knowledge Argument in a much cited passage using his famous example of the neurophysiologist Mary:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.… What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

The main thing to take away here is that philosophers love subjecting imaginary people to terrible circumstances.

"Depends on what you want from "observed", I guess."

^^this

it's probably not in the spirit of the argument but you can simulate color using a black and white set using some clever optical illusion-y effects.
Actually, I take it back -- that kind of optical illusion, or any kind of illusion shows how you can manipulate and deconstruct conscious sensory perception.
Those magic eye mall posters basically give you the power of Cartesian devils.

First of all not sure i agree with 'but she had all the physical information'.

I just read a passage in Carl Sagan's book "Boca's Brain", about the history of hypotheses about the magnetosphere of Jupiter. Over a number of decades all they had was spectral analysis of the light, and yet they were able to calculate within some amount of accuracy the displacement of the magnetosphere from the equator, the tilt of the axis, and so on. When Pioneer 10 spacecraft physically visited the Jovian atmosphere and took readings, they realized that the hypotheses were correct to a remarkable degree of accuracy. It validated their methods.

Why did it validate something that was already 'proven' by the hard science of mathematics? Maybe there is something inherently 'right' about multiple points of view agreeing with each other. It can be an agreement between two people in person. Or an agreement between two scientists using different methods to study the same thing over different periods of time. Or maybe even an agreement with yourself, your present self confirming an experience that your past self as observed.

It seems totally reducible

I agree that consciousness is somehow produced by - or supervenient on at least - neuronal activity. But I would love an explanation of how such activity can produce felt experience, subjective awareness. How similar looking activity can produce such varied sensations as the sweet sharp burst of a cherry tomato on the tongue; the fingernails down the blackboard feeling; sadness; the sudden feeling that someone is watching you. The best we could ever do (it currently seems) is just correlation - brain area A produces B. Causation - how that area, that neuronal activity, gives rise to subjective experience - is still a complete and utter mystery. And yeah Mary the colour scientist as a classic example, even if you had a complete map of the correlation of neuronal activity to experience, how would you know what something felt like unless you had experienced it yourself?

1. a lot of what people think they are experiencing aren't what they are actually experiencing (given the malleability of memory) so this notion of a privileged, impenetrable subjective world is already on shaky ground.
2. the experiences of synesthetics points to personal experience being completely arbitrary, so in fact we don't know what anything feels like, regardless of experience.

If the best that subjective experience can offer is arbitrary shaky models of things, then why isn't that, at least in the abstract, a reasonable explanation for how subjective experience arises? I.e. through shaky modeling?

1) they are still experiencing. a hallucination of redness is still red.
2) seems like a point to me, if anything. i know what my experience is like and i know there must be a "what is it like" for other creatures, yet it is inaccessible to me.

i don't know how this magical bootstrapping from a model of reality to subjective experience is meant to happen. really the idea of a model is meaningless without already supposing an agent who can identify the correspondences. it begs the question.

Is it not equally tricky to say you can have the model without the agent? The idea of the agent is meaningless without supposing the model.

The bootstrapping of both the agent and the model maps pretty well to infancy, istm. Both increase in complexity in complementary and symbiotic ways.

I think of the chess-playing machine as my go-to in these cases, and the only neat difference is that the observer of the game (the viewer who gives the mechanical operations their meaning) is running on the same hardware.

yes i guess that's equally tricky. ie very tricky! and complexity doesn't really add anything significant to the equation.

i feel like i (and y'know some actual real philosophers, i'm not a lone nut) am shouting about the elephant in the room and y'all are saying "what fucking elephant" and i don't think i'm the crazy one. but i can't be certain.

No! I mean, you're basically asking The Hard Problem, if I read you correctly, right? And that's still the big dog of consciousness questions afaik

Aye The Hard Problem. But Philip seems to be denying that it's a problem at all (and y'know that's basically Dennett's line so he's not a lone nut).

Dennett is usually having a pop at Chalmers when he does that, and Chalmers's claim that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe is a ripe target, I agree. But stripping that aside, Dennett's core is that the easy problems are all there are, and I can't buy that. You don't get to the poetry by examining the typesetting.

I'm on Chalmer's side tbh.

one of the nice things about the gunther piece i linked above is that it explores how and why these discussions tend to go in circles. our options, dictated by the logical structure of our language and thinking, seems to run down to

1) the world is entirely subjective (pure consciousness, idealism)
2) the world is entirely objective (realism, cause and effect, etc....this is the assumption we have to make to do "science")
3) there is a symmetrical relationship between the two--but this is unstable: the world is in my head and my head is in the world.

what's not really possible in classical logical formulation is to posit an asymmetrical relationship between the two and even to suppose that it's possible to say that there are degrees of subjectivity or objectivity in different experiences--or that experience can actually shift in one direction or the other over time, so that an "objective" happening with only the slightest element of subjectivity needed to experience it can then shit to greater degrees of subjectivity until its in the realm of fantasy, memory, narrative. and vice versa.

shift not shit! haha

" i know what my experience is like and i know there must be a "what is it like" for other creatures, yet it is inaccessible to me."
I'm saying you don't know what your own experience is like, but through outside manipulation, you can get a clearer picture of what it is you are actually experiencing (and probably more important, when you are experiencing it -- given how poorly we are able to sense the passage of time)

I don't buy the model/agent distinction -- if the model functions as well as the agent, then why don't you grant same agency privileges?
If the entire subjective experience of an organism can be modeled by three inanimate rocks, then why would you say the three rocks do not also share this experience?
re: the world, everyone's experiential world is purely subjective, but the degree with which we can manipulate it gives primacy and legitimacy to the objective world -- global warming doesn't go away by imagining it so.

I'm saying you don't know what your own experience is like

i know experience is in some sense highly fictional, e.g. the brain filling in details at the edge of the visual field, retrospective editing of consciousness etc. But do you not think that in another sense it's infallible? I cannot be mistaken that there is a patch of red in my visual field.

idk if this model business is a red herring. it's just another arrangement of particles, it gets us no closer to how experience arises.

You can totally be mistaken about a patch of red through any number of optical illusions.
Philosophers were able to deduce/predict a surprising number of physical mechanisms behind visual processing by examining the differences between what we see and what is there, without the fancy technology to confirm it.
I disagree that models are just another arrangement -- they are a particular arrangement corresponding with equivalent states of cognition with the thing they are modeling -- why not consider that experience doesn't have to arise from modeling because it is the modeling? That modeling and experiencing are synonyms?

You can totally be mistaken about a patch of red through any number of optical illusions.

you don't understand. it doesn't matter if i'm hallucinating, if there's an illusion, i'm not talking about what is out there in the world, i'm talking about the content of my experience. that there is a red patch in my visual field is undeniable. what causes it is open to question.

saying modeling and experiencing are synonymous is a million miles from e.g. saying liquidity and molecular motion are synonymous. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that we currently have *no idea* how that might work. it takes little insight to see it in the case of liquidity. it seems utterly inconceivable in the case of experience.

What constitutes a visual field? there's a lot of steps in visual processing and the "error" of seeing red could take place in any number of areas, any of which can be denied.

Introspectively, when you think about what it is to contemplate something, can you do it in such a way that you cannot also be said to be modeling that thing?

no, there is obviously correlation. it's a leap from that to causation (or identity).

what happens if there is spontaneous activity in my primary visual cortex such that i seem to see a patch of red? how is my experience mistaken?

It can be "mistaken" by further processing down the visual pipeline (or in another area of processing altogether) contradicting that, ultimately leading you to say "I saw blue" -- what is it you actually experienced then?

Putting it like that, what I experienced was the spontaneous fluctuation in my visual cortex, nothing more. So yes there will always be a physical correlation, but you can't say "you didn't see blue" - yes I did! It was right there in my (personal subjective private experiental) visual field!

Nah, we're pretty unreliable narrators in that regard.

Not if phrased "I remember seeing blue". How do you challenge that, exactly?

like if a light was red, and you drove past it, but you're utterly convinced of being a good, law-abiding citizen, you can resolve this by editing your master experiential narrative to having seen a yellow light.

oh sorry, i missed the step you were making from visual cortex producing red -> seeing blue, just thought you were changing colour terms for variety. also i erred saying primary visual cortex, i meant the last step in the visual pipeline (assuming for simplicity's sake that there is one).

so.

assuming there is spontaneous activity in v5, or whatever the final step in the colour processing chain is, which would correspond with seeing red in my visual field, then i will always see red. there can be no mistake there.

xposts.

well what do you consider the arbiter of what you, as a coherent identity, experienced? is it whatever controls speech? because I'd make the case that what we say (in internal monologues as well) would very likely contradict any number of activities that are actually going on in the brain.

as far as visual experience goes it is its own arbiter, i guess. yes there could be errors of speech or memory after the fact.

memory is a kind of conscious experience. so i can be sure *now* i'm seeing red, and be sure ten minutes later that i remember seeing yellow. but i shouldn't claim to be sure that i saw yellow. i don't think that's sophistry, not sure if it's useful.

if you allow that memory retrieval is equivalent to experience, why not modeling?

I'm not so sure there is anything you don't experience through memory. Even stuff you claim to be experiencing "now".

there are some interesting experiments w/r/t very short term memory which I think give a clue to the constraints of what's necessary for cognition. (the 5 +/- 2 thing etc...)

if you allow that memory retrieval is equivalent to experience, why not modeling?

I would distinguish between the subjective experience of memory retrieval and the brain mechanisms of memory retrieval. No different from the visual experience case.

let's try a different angle: if an entity is performing recognizable mechanisms of memory retrieval, would you allow that the entity is having a subjective experience?

Perhaps, perhaps. I'm basically a panpsychist u kno. Would you?

I'd say so, too, but if we accept that, why isn't that enough?

Because I don't know what it is like to be a bat. Or a bloody hard drive. Because Mary doesn't know what it's like to see red. Because phenomenal subjective experience is nothing like anything in physics. Because http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I'd say you could know what it is like to be a bat insofar that the bat doesn't know what it's like to be a bat either, so you're both on equal bat-ground.

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

A feedback loop signifying self-awareness?

I dunno. y'all could just be thinking about peanut butter.

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

So I can only know (questionable even whether this analogically reasoning is enough for knowledge) what it is like to experience something I have already experienced? That's the point of Mary the colourblind neuroscientist. Scientific knowledge alone is insufficient or incomplete.

Feedback, models, complexity, none of these bridge the gap.

You can have false memories so you don't have to have first-hand experience of something.

A false memory is a first-hand experience!

The Mary problem is particularly weird and egregious in that in her scenario, she's probably the only person in the world who actually knows what the experience of "red" is like for anyone else.