Author: Richard Brown

Brain Reading, Brain States, and Higher-order Thoughts

Richard Brown 4 Comments

Recently there has been a lot of progress in brain reading; for instance Here is a nice piece done by CNN, here is a nice article on brain reading video games, and here is a link to Frank Tong’s lab, who may be familiar to those who regularly attend the ASSCor the Tuscon conferences. This stuff is important to me because it will ultimately help to solve the empirical question of whether or not animals, or for that matter whether we, have the higher-order states necessary to implement the higher-order strategy for Explaining What It’s Like so I am very encouraged by this kind of progress. The technology involved is mostly fMRI, though in the video game case it is scalp EEG. But though this stuff is encouraging fMRI and scalp EEG are the wrong tools for decoding neural representation, or so I argued in my paper “What is a Brain State?” (2006) Philosophical Psychology 19(6) (which I introduced over at Brain a while ago in my post Brain Statves Vs. States of the Brain). Below is an excerpt from that paper where I introduce an argument from Tom Polger’s (2004) book Natural Minds and elaborate on it a bit.

Polger argues that thinking

that an fMRI shows how to individuate brain states would be like thinking that the identity conditions for cricket matches are to pick out only those features that, statistically, differentially occur during all the cricket games of the past year. (p 56)

The obvious difficulty with this is that it leaves out things that may be important for cricket matches but unique (injuries, unusual plays (p 57)) as well as includes things that are irrelevant to them (number of fans, snack purchasing behavior (ibid)). The same problems hold for fMRI’s: they may include information that is irrelevant and exclude information that is important but unusual. Irrelevant information may be included because fMRI’s show brain areas that are statistically active during a task, while they may exclude relevant information because researchers subtract out patterns of activation observed in control images.

I would add that at mostwhat we should expect from fMRI images are picture of where the brain states we are interested in can be found not pictures of the brain states themselves. They tell us that there is something in THAT area of the brain that would figure in an explanation of the task but they don’t offer us any insight into what that mechanism might be. Knowing that a particular area of the brain is (differentially) active does not allows us to explain how the brain performs the function we associate with that brain area. We need to know more about the activity. Consider an analogy: we have a simple water pump and want to know how it works. We know that pumping the handle up and down gets the water flowing but ‘activity in the handle area’ does not explain how the pump works. Finding out that the handle is active every time water flows out of the pump would lead us to examining the handle with an eye towards trying to see how and why moving it pumps the water.

And, as I go on to argue, after examining those areas to find what the actual mechanisms are neuroscience suggests that it is synchronized neural activity in a specific frequency that codes for the content, both perceptual and intentional, of brain states. So, multi-unit recording technology (recording from several different nuerons in the brain at the same time) is the right kind of technology for looking at brain states. This is not to say, of course, that the fMRI and EEG technology is not valuable and useful. It is, and we can learn a lot about the brain from studying it, but it must be acknowledged that it is ultimatly, explanatorily, useless. To find higher-order thoughts or perceptions we will need to use advanced multi-unit recordings.  

Applying Frigidity

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As commonly understood Kripke’s notion of rigidity is a property that some terms have and that others lack. I argue that there is no such property that is had by some terms and lacked by others; hence there is no rigidity as commonly construed . Recent discussions of rigidity have, I claim, forgotten the importance that stipulation plays in Kripke’s original account. In short the argument is that the truth-conditions of sentences with supposed rigid designators in them can vary depending on the stipulative act of the speaker. But if rigidity were a property of the terms themselves the truth-conditions should not vary! I introduce the notion of frigidity which is not a property that terms have, but something that we do and is a tool that we use to evaluate counter-factuals (Introducing Frigidity). We decide to ‘freeze’ the referent of a term and then try to evaluate counter-factual statements in terms of the constant referent. The ‘freezing’ is accomplished by a stipulative act on the part of the speaker.

Thus it follows that there are two ways to perform the thought experiment of frigid stipulation corresponding to taking one or the other terms flanking the identity sign as frigid and asking ‘what about that in another possible world?’ We decide that we are going to stipulate, trivially as Kripke says, that we want to find out about X in a possible world. So for water=H20 we can ask ‘what if H20, this very chemical substance, was in a world that was different from ours?’ If it turns out that H20 is not ‘watery’ that is OK. We can then also ask ‘what about water? Stuff that acts like this, fills our lakes and etc? What if we found a world that had watery stuff that was not H20?’ And that is OK as well. This has the advantage of explaining why people’s intitions vary about whether twater is water.

However Kripke (Kripke 1980) makes the claim that when it comes to mental kinds we cannot do this because in the case of pains and whatnot their properties are not separable in this way. But once we switch from rigidity to frigidity this is less obvious. We can hold the brain state frigid and ask ‘what is it like to have this brain state in a world that is different from ours?’ It may turn out that that very brain state is not like anything to have at all. On the other hand we can hold the sensation of pain frigid and ask questions about worlds with that sensation. It certainly seems logically possible that some of those worlds will have that sensation and yet not have any brain states at all!

This is just what Kripke’s bjection to the identity theory is. He says “this notion seems to me self-evidently absurd. It amounts to the view that the very pain I now have could have existed without being a mental state at all,” (p.147). Well, yes this is true if what he means is that the very brain state he is in and which is his pain might have existed but was not painful for the creature that had it. This is to do no more than admit that there might exist an unfelt pain. He is wrong if he means that a pained creature, one that felt pain, would not be in pain.

The Meaning and Use of ‘is True’

Richard Brown 4 Comments

The first thing that we need to do is to make a distinction between the redundancy theory of truth, which is a claim about the use of the predicate ‘is true’ in a natural language, and deflationsim, which is a metaphysical claim about the nature of the property picked out by ‘is true’. Usually what you find is that people just use ‘minimalism’ and ignore this difference though they seem to think that redundancy is true and so therefore deflationsism is true (Blackburn is a classic example of this).

The main motivation for redundancy is a collapsing of the meaning/use distinction that is characteristic of Horwich and other neo-Wittgensienians. If the meaning of a word just is the way that that word is used, the function it conventionally plays in a public language game, then finding out how people use the truth predicate and abstracting the rule that defines its function (the T-schema) is finding out the essence of our concept of truth. But there are reasons not to conflate meaning and use (which I won’t go into here). While I do think that people often use the word ‘true’ as a way of communicating that they agree with either what they themselves, or someone else, has said this communicative use of the predicate ‘is true’ depends on its having the correspondence meaning. ‘True’, the English word, means something like ‘being in accordance with the actual state of affairs’ and so it is easy to see how I could use it to express agreement with what has already been said; to say that something is true is to say that it is really the way things are. So in conversation I am able to exploit that meaning in order to indicate that I agree with something that has been said, I am in effect saying ‘yes, that is in accordance with the facts’.

We exploit the meanings of words in this way quite often. Searle (Searle 1969/2001, p. 142) pointed out a similar phenomenon with ‘promise.’ Suppose a parent says to their lazy child “clean your room or I promise I will take away your cell phone!” It is very odd to think the parent is actually promising to do anything here since the thing promised is not something that the child wants the parent to do. In fact this kind of utterance is most likely a threat or a warning. Or consider a professor confronting a student suspected of plagiarism. The professor says “this passage is taken from Wikipedia” and the student says “I didn’t plagiarize! I promise I didn’t!” This doesn’t look like a promise either, how can you promise that you did not do something? This is rather an emphatic denial of the professor’s accusation. How is this possible? It is because the verb ‘to promise’ is one of the strongest indicators of commitment in the English language, and so we adapt it in these cases as a way of indicating that we are really committed. It would be very hard to explain, from Horwich’s view, how the predicate came to have the function of indicating agreement in the first place without appealing to the correspondence meaning that the word has. If this is right then one of the motivations for accepting deflationsim about truth falls apart.

What’s so Unobservable about Causation?

Richard Brown 19 Comments

What is it that is supposed to be so unobservable about causation? This question has nagged at me since my days as an undergraduate (and there has recently been a lot of discussion of it over at Brains, which inspired me to post on it). It had always seemed to me that the causal relation was entirely observable. We even have evidence that we have been observing it since before we could talk. For instance from the cradle we witness the passing of the sun behind clouds and the subsequent darkness, we witness objects falling to the ground, we witness that motion is attended with sound, and etc. Nor are these examples special; cases like these can be multiplied indefinitely. We can see water extinguish flame. While walking about I kick a stone and see my foot cause the rock to begin its trajectory. I can see the acid turn the litmus paper red. Pointing a magnifying glass at a piece of paper on a sunny day will cause the paper to smoke and turn brown, eventually catching fire. A small dog biting at my ankles will cause a pinching sensation and perhaps annoyance! I take these to be examples of seeing A cause B, seeing A causing B and feeling A cause B.

So why think that the causal relation is unobservable? I take the canonical text on this to be Section seven of Hume’s Enquiry. For instance in paragraph six of that section he says,

When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in any single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one ball does, actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole as it appears to the outward senses. The mind feels no sentiment or inward impression from this succession of objects: Consequently, there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connexion. (Hume 1999)

No doubt it was passages like this that lead to Kant’s rather rude awakening from his dogmatic slumber. It seems to me to have plunged us into one. In the above passage, which is completely typical of that section, Hume seems to be saying that since we cannot see that the connection between these events is necessary, which is to say that we cannot see why what happens is the ‘infallible consequence’ of the first event as opposed to some other event, there is no way that the idea of causation could be taken from anything perceptible in the outside world. It follows from what he says that the causal relation is not observable; something that makes no impression on the human senses would have to be. The intuition that we have to see the necessity of the causal relation in order to see it at all has guided discussions of the observability of the causal relation. It seems to me that Hume here fails to make a distinction between what we observe and how we analyze what we see. What we observe is a relation; it is when we turn to how to characterize that relation that necessity is involved.

As C.J. Ducasse pointed out, Hume’s claim about the unobservability of causation would be true only under “the assumption that a ‘connection’ is an entity of the same sort as the terms themselves between which it holds…” (Ducasse 1993, p 131). Hume’s mistake was to look for the sense impression of a relation. This we will not find unless relations exist in the same way as the things they relate. But the relation between two objects is not itself a third object! Consider two objects, one to the left of the other. We do not see the relation ‘to the left of,’ but rather see one thing as being to the left of another. It does not even make sense to ask ‘what does the relation ‘to the left of’ look like?’ If asked this question all we could do is describe the position of the objects along with the definition of ‘left,’ and ‘right.’

Any further questioning about what ‘left of’ looks like would betray a category mistake. That is, mistaking a relation for an entity of the sort that it holds between. By way of comparison imagine Hume arguing that ‘left of’ is unobservable. I mean all we see is object A and Object B no where is there an impression of ‘left of,’ and so strictly speaking our idea of ‘left of’ is meaningless. But this is ridiculous! The argument seems to work against any relation and so proves too much.

When we see one ball hit the other we observe that the two balls are related, one causes the other to move, but we do not see that the relation is necessary even though it is in fact a necessary one. Just as we can see X moving without seeing that X is going 22 MPH, or we can see X being 3 ft away from Y without seeing that X is 3 ft away from Y. Despite the fact that I do not see that X is three feet from me I do see the relation ‘3 ft away from,’ I just don’t know that it is this relation. We see relation X qua relation while not seeing that X is such and such a relation. So on the view I am advocating we see A and we see B and we see A cause B but whether or not we see THAT the relation is necessary is a different question. 

As ‘Corny As I Want To Be

Richard Brown 1 Comment

As some of you may know, I have been mounting an offensive against Pete Mandik’s Unicorn argument against higher-order theories of consciousness. We have been having quite a bit of discussion over at the Brain Hammer (Me So ‘Corny) on whether or not my proposed answer works or not, and so I thought I would take this opportunity to sum up the debate so far.

The Argument

Pete’s argument is actually quite simple. Here is the way that he puts it:

First, some quick and dirty definitions of my targets:

[Higher-order Representationalism] – The property of being a conscious state consists in being a represented state.

P1. Things that don’t exist don’t instantiate properties.

P2. We represent things that don’t exist.

P3. Representing something does not suffice to confer a property to that thing.

C1. Representing a state does not suffice to confer the property of being conscious to that state (so [higher-order representationalism] is false).

There is another conclusion (C2) that first-order representationalism is false, but I already knew that and so will ignore it.

Two Ways to Kill a ‘Corn

Now it is not secret that I think that is a bad argument that rests on several misunderstandings of the higher-order theory. It is not a threat to Rosenthal’s version of higher-order theory because he would deny the assumption needed to get P3 and hence C1. Here is the way I put it in Kripke, Consciousness and the ‘Corn.

[T]his argument does not threaten Rosenthal’s version of higher-order theory because for him the higher-order thought does not ‘transfer’ or ‘confer’ the property of consciousness to the first order state. For him the property of being a conscious state consists solely in my representing myself as being in a certain state. The first-order state is not changed in any way by the higher-order thought. The only thing that has changed is that the creature is now aware of itself as being in the state.

Now it may be counter-intuitive to say that the higher-order state in no way changes the first-order state, but intuition is not argument. Also, the transitivity principle commits you to this claim as I detailed in Explaining What It’s Like, and as Rosenthal is well aware of. Here is his response to the problem posed by P2 (The interviewer is Uriah Kriegal)]

Ephilosopher: Professor Rosenthal, let me raise one final difficulty for your theory. According to your theory, what it is like for the subject to be in a conscious state is determined by how that state is represented by the second-order state. But what happens when there is a misrepresentational second-order state, with no first-order state at all? It seems your theory commits you to saying that, in such cases, the subject is under the false impression that she is having a particular kind of conscious experience, when in fact she is not. Doesn’t that strike you as absurd, though?

David Rosenthal: Answering this question requires a lot of care in how we put things. We can get a feel for what’s at issue by considering a case that actually occurs. Dental patients sometimes seem to themselves to feel pain even when the relevant pain nerve endings are dead or anaesthetized. The widely held explanation is that these patients feel sensations of fear and vibration as though those sensations were pain. We certainly have no trouble understanding this explanation. But how should we describe what’s happening specifically in terms of the patient’s conscious states? It’s undeniable that the patient is in some conscious state, but what kind of conscious state is it? From the patient’s subjective, first-person point of view, the conscious state is a pain, but we have substantial independent reason to say that there simply is no pain. How we describe this case depends on whether we focus primarily on the state of which the patient is actually conscious or on the way the patient is conscious of it. The trouble is that these two things come apart; the patient is conscious of sensations of fear and vibration, but conscious of them as pain. So it’s not at all absurd, but only unexpected, that one be conscious of oneself as being in a state that one is not actually in. It’s worth noting that this divergence between the state of which somebody is actually conscious and how that person is conscious of it has practical importance. The area of so-called dental fear is of interest to dentists and to theorists because patients who understand what’s happening readily come to be conscious of their sensations as sensations of vibration and fear, which is not especially bothersome. How one represents one’s experiences does determine what those experiences are like for one. Is this really the kind of case you asked about? You asked about what happens when one has a higher-order thought that one is in a state that doesn’t occur. But maybe we should treat the dental case rather as a higher-order thought that misdescribes its target; it misdescribes sensations of fear and vibration as a sensation of pain. But I think it will never matter which way we describe things. When a higher-order thought occurs, there are always other mental states, as well. So whenever a higher-order thought doesn’t accurately describe any state that actually occurs, we can say either that it misdescribes some actual state or that it’s about some nonexistent state; it won’t make any difference which way we characterize the situation

So on Rosenthal’s view there simply is no difference between saying that the HOT represents a state that does not exist and saying that it misrepresents a state that does exist. So Rosenthal’s versionof higher-order theory is completely unaffected bythe unicorn argument.

Even so, it does commit him to saying some strange sounding things, but there is another way to think of the relation between the higher-order state and the first-order state, and gives rise to the distinction between what I call K-HOTs and Q-HOTs (Two Concepts of Transitive Consciousness). A K-HOT is caused by the first-order state that it represents, whereas a Q-HOT simply ‘accompanies’ the first-order state it reporesents. Rosenthal used to endorse K-HOTs but has since moved to Q-HOTs, but as I argued in ‘Two Concepts’ there is no reason to abandon K-HOTs and the give us a second, more convincing, way to kill the ‘corn. Here’s how.

A K-HOT represents its target state via the concepts at the disposal of the creature in question in just the same way that Rosenthal has spent so long arguing is the case. The difference is that the K-HOT is (theoretically) required to be caused by some first-order state or other and it is that causal link that determines what first-order state the higher-order state is about. So, K-HOTs will NEVER represent a first-order state that does not exist, it will rather ALWAYS represent (or misrepresent) a state that does in fact exist. So the property of being represented is none other than the property of causing a higher-order state. This means that while it may be true that WE represent things that do not exists, K-HOTs do not. So again, P2 and P3 are blocked.

So whether you link Quine and Q-HOTs or Kripke and K-HOTs the unicorn is no threat to higher-order theories. Of course having said that I think there are reasons to prefer K-HOTs butthat is another story.  

A Tale of Two T’s

Richard Brown 29 Comments

A while ago over at the Brain Hammer Pete asked the question ‘What are you conscious of when you have conscious experiences?‘ (I think he asked the same question over at Brains a little later). His basic idea was to solicit peoples intuitions about Transitivity and Transparancy, which he defined as follows.

“The Transparency Thesis”: When one has a conscious experience all that one is conscious of is what the experience is an experience of.

“The Transitivity Thesis”:When one has a conscious experience one must be conscious of the experience itself.

Given these two claims he was in particular interested to ask

Since each of these claims is alleged to be obvious, and since they are in opposition, I’d be interested in hearing what others think of the matter: Which is more obvious than the other?

These two claims both seem obvious to me and so I am interested in finding out why people seem to think, as Pete clearly does, that they are in opposition. Part of theproblem is the way inwhich Pete define Transitivity. He claims that it claims that we must be conscious of the experience itself, but this is actually wrong. What Transitivity claims is that we must be conscious of ourselves as having the experience (or conscious of ouselves as being in a certain state). Once we see that this is the right way to construe transitivity it is no longer the case that these two claims are in opposition. When I have a conscious experience (say, as Pete does, of a leafy tree) then it will be the case that I am conscious of myself as having a leafy tree experience (transitivity) and because of that it will also be true that it seems to me that all that I am conscious of is the leafy tree.  So where is the opposition?

There is No Santa Claus

Richard Brown 21 Comments

Philosophers often speak about Santa Claus in the context of discussing the problem of names without reference. Since ‘Santa Claus’ does not refer (that is, there is no Santa Claus) what are we to say about sentences that have the name. Is ‘Santa Claus is Jolly’ true? False? Neither true nor false? Nonsense? There are those who defend each of these positions. Yet there is a more pressing issue that has received almost no attention from philosophers. I speak of the moral issue of lying to our children about the existence of Santa. It is commonly recognized that we have a duty to be truthful and yet millions of Americans engage in the most elaborate deceit imaginable all aimed at duping their children. Is this a moral action on their part? It is my position that it is not. Let me now make the case.

What then is it to lie? Common sense dictates that one lies when one utters a falsehood with the intent to deceive. Thus, our common sense idea of a lie focuses on the speaker and his intentions not on the hearer and their expectations. Perhaps more reasonable is our common sense feeling that it is sometimes OK to lie when the consequences of telling the truth are dire. So, if someone asks where you mother is and clearly has the intention of finding her and commit murder most foul, few of us would feel that we violate our moral duty to tell the truth by lying to this person. So is it the case that telling the truth about Santa would cause more harm to our children? Hardly! In fact the opposite seems to be the case. We actually cause more harm by perpetuating this falsehood. In the first instance what we do is to teach our children that they cannot trust us. They then lack any reason to believe what the parent says about other, more important things. For instance, the child might equate what the parent says about God with what they say about Santa. In the second place what we do is to teach our children that it is OK to lie for no good reason. What the child learns is that the truth is not valuable. So, far from being a harmless ‘white lie’ this is quite a damaging tradition

The most common defense for this behavior appeals to a sense of the mystery of child-hood or ‘child-like innocence’. What is wrong, it is often asked, with having a little magic in ones childhood? Isn’t it just like a child believing in Red Riding Hood or Hobbit’s End? The difference between these kinds of cases should be obvious. In one case we tell the child that it is a fable, or a fairy tale. In the other case we go out of our way to deceive the child. I mean, no one leaves things out for the Big Bad Wolf. Santa Claus is portrayed as real, not only in the story but also by the parents. No parents pretend that Darth Vader is real but when I was on a plane on Christmas Eve the PILOT announced over the intercom that he had spotted Santa on the radar!!!!  And, while it may be Ok to omit certain information in order to protect a child it is absolutely immoral to actively perpetuate a lie.

Thus, according to both deontological and utilitarian moral theories it is immoral to lie to ones kid about the existence of Santa Claus. It causes more harm than good and we violate our duty to tell the truth. I think it hardly worth mentioning that it is also vicious and so would be ruled out by any virtue ethics. There is no moral theory that condones this behavior. We do our children, and ourselves, a great disservice by prolonging this nonsense.

Freedom and Evil

Richard Brown 19 Comments

The existence of evil in the world poses a serious challenge to the claim that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving being (henceforth ‘God’).  Perhaps the most common response to the problem of evil is the free will defense. According to this defense the reason that there is evil is because God gave us free will and some people make the choice to be (or to do) evil. This is captured in the story of Adam and Eve. God told them not to eat the fruit and they freely chose to disobey. Even Satan is portrayed as exercising free will when he rebels against God. Thus God is still all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving and evil exists.

The next natural question is ‘if our having free will is the reason that there is evil, then why did God give it to us?’ The answer to this question is that it is better to have free will. A world where there is free will and, unfortunately, some evil is better than a world of pure automatons where there is no evil. Some have even held that we can know this to be true from that fact that we have free will in the first place. From the premise that God could have created any world he wanted to, and the observation that he created this world, it would seem to follow that this is the best of all possible worlds, evil and all!

J.L.Mackie, inhis famous article “Evil and Omnipotence” makes a very interesting response to this kind of argument, which I think has been under appreciated. His argument is actually pretty simple. It is perfectly obvious that I sometimes freely choose to do the right thing, so it is not logically impossible that God should have made me so that I always freely choose to do the right thing. What this shows is that the world we live in is not the best of all possible worlds that God could have created. He could have made a better world where people always freely chose to do the right thing; a world where people were free but in which the Holocaust could not happen. So again, either he is not all-loving or not all-powerful. Another way of making Mackie’s point is by asking ‘why it is that our being free requires that we be allowed to do evil?’ This seems to me to be a very powerful response. If God could have made us so that we always freely choose to do good then the Free Will defense, which I take to be the only response to the problem of evil that had a chance of answering the argument, fails to do so.

It has been my experience that people do not like this argument. The most common objection I hear is that to really be free all options must be on the table, including the evil ones. Mackie objects to this because it assumes that “choices and actions can be ‘free’ only if they are not determined by [the] characters [of those that choose or act]”. This response is rather obviously biased towards some kind of compatibilism, but I do not think that we need to endores a view like that to make Makie’s argument work.  

On a very common sense view about what it means to have free will it turns out to be perfectly reasonable to claim that God could have made us so that we always freely chose to do good. Though there are those who would disagree, a useful way to characterize freedom of the will is in terms of being able to have done other than what we actually did do. This is often summed up in the slogan ‘could of done otherwise’. So, for example, this morning when I got up I had a cup of coffee, but it seems to me that I could have been able to have had tea instead. I did not have to have coffee this morning. Now the next thing we have to talk about is what does it mean to have been able to do otherwise?   It is certainly the case that as I am falling to my death from the Empire
State building, I could have done otherwise in the sense that I might have avoided falling off in the first place, but now that I am falling it is out of my control. Does this mean that I am not free? NO! As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out, even a jailed man is free. His actions are limited but his will is free.

So why couldn’t God have made it the case that I always freely choose good? If it is to be freedom then in any given case I must have been able to do other than what I actually did do, but all this requires is that I have options, not that some of those options be evil! I am not free to fly, or to be the Queen of England, and yet I am free, so why couldn’t God have made doing evil like flying? Putting things this way let’s us be neutral about theories of free will and keep the insight of Mackie’s argument.