Consciousness Live! with Susanna Schellenberg (S8 E5)

0:03 All right, we are live. Um, at least I think we're live. It's, you know, sometime I've said that once and we weren't live. So now I've been gied so now I've, uh, I'm very cautious, but I think we're live. And joining me today, a very special guest, Susanna Schelonburg, who is a professor at Ruckers University in the philosophy program and also I think associated with the Center for Cognitive Science. Is that right, Susanna? So, I wonder if you could fill in a bit of the details about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you.

0:36 here and thank you for having me on your podcast and your YouTube channel. Um, I'm a professor of philosophy and cognitive science. So I'm both associated with the philosophy department and the Rucker's cognitive science center and I work primarily in philosophy of mind and related um um areas in cognitive science and a lot of my work has been on perception and um though in the last um sort of 10 years I've um worked more on issues um

1:11 in you know um perspectives um you know how my perspective differs from yours and how our two perspectives are alike and how how our human perspectives differ from those of rats and robots and again how they are similar to those of rats and robots and I've also worked on evidence and epsom issues in epsmology and imagination and um mental capacities

2:55 um you know how things look from a certain perspective and how they look constant and non-constant and the relation between um you know perceiving from a certain location and navigating in space from that location as papers um did not in any way feature in the book I wrote which you you referred to the unity of perception that book was just about um well it was about a lot of things but it was not about that It was about mental representation. It was about evidence.

3:28 It was about sort of the unity of our our conscious mental states, the perceptual content we have when we perceive and the evidence we get. And I sort of left out everything having to do with the sort of egocentric egoentricity of perception. And initially when I started writing this book um this new book now um called the nature of perspective it was going to be very focused on on perception and then I realized ah I need to I need to sort of um leave the the chains of perception

4:04 and talk about the mental more generally. And so now it is actually not very much about p perception at all apart from the fact that perception is sort of the primordial perspectival mental state. Um but basically all mental states are from a point of view. Um and all mental states are structured. I mean everything every sorry all information we process that we get from our surrounding be it what you tell me what I read is always

4:38 um interpreted from my general mental capacities and you know I understand perspectives very general as if you have a perspect if you have a mind you have a perspective

5:42 guess that's the sense in which you're like zooming out.

6:14 sense of having a self but like

7:24 perceiver as I do when I say I'm perceiving or I see that that that that coffee cup or I can refer to a social role and I say I'm a professor and of course all those you know the social role the agent the um bearer of the perception they're all bundled in this you know package but that's kind of accidental and and then the interesting question is

7:57 um you know like I'm not denying that we have a sense of having a self and there is something interesting to the bundle here and I'm not denying that we're persons and as persons we have you know legal responsibilities and legal rights and moral responsibilities and moral rights and I'm not denying that we're biological organisms and as biological organisms we're related to you know who we were when we were born and indeed before we were born um you know like the embry em embriionic state um but what

8:31 I'm denying is that there has to be this self clustered between those two

9:05 was there then

9:39 perceptual capacities and

10:11 about your account of capacities and it's I think very interesting and um it it's but just generally before we go into the details it is nice to see people talking about something like a capacity as you point out it used to be standard and maybe earlier um philosophical psychologies uh if you want to call it that appeals to some kind of mental capacity was kind of normal or typical then it fell out out of favor. So to say that it's radical to bring it back, you know, they talk about capacities is to say how far we've gone from where the tradition used to be.

10:45 Would you say that's sort of a correct account?

11:22 with, um, getting rid of capacities, um, um, as a way of analyzing the mental. And of course I should immediately add there's you know many um thinkers philosophers who um have throughout um you know the 20th century talked um about issues in terms of capacities. But the important point is in the vision sciences you know psychology um neuroscience talk about capacities is omnipresent um so that so it never went away. So it's

11:56 really so the little story you gave is very much true of philosophy but it's not true of related fields in cognitive science and I think that's

12:29 is over. I'm not, you know, I don't know. We don't need to debate that here obviously, but I understand what you mean.

13:05 um outputs you know like what the large language model gives you to read when you ask it a question.

13:37 at you we change little things and um look at how they do what they do. Um

14:44 between those two shades.

15:16 perception, they're basically always talking about discrimination. Um, and you know, um, there is neural activity when you discriminate and in that sense there is if that's if I don't know what notion of behavior you have, but if that's sufficient for behavior, then yes, there's behavior. Um

15:51 on

16:23 neurons you know um sensory cells discriminating um when I in the book talk about discrimination um you know in in with regard to perceptual discrimination. I mean something much more high level

17:32 difference.

18:05 I I like to leave issues about consciousness out if I can. Now sometimes you can sometimes it's hugely relevant and I've written lots of papers with consciousness in the title. Exactly.

18:37 into it.

19:10 book that that uh from well I guess it's 2018 2019

19:46 level and please don't ask me what the personal level is but [laughter] you know just

20:21 that.

20:56 discriminate between two signals A and B. If that discrim if that if it if it reaches a certain threshold such that you know like an above noise threshold the signal gets sent upstream or downstream depending on how you think of the stream. Let's say

21:31 you know certain requirements are met you might end up in a conscious perceptual state. Now um so basically you know um um having a stimulus input is as I see it along with almost everyone although not absolutely everyone is necessary for perception but it's not sufficient um because the stimulus input has to um be you know

22:08 above reach certain thresholds to for the perceptual system to warrant you know I mean I'm using all these highle terms here but

22:41 the neuron from the neuron's point of view. So, the neuron's a pretty complicated system. You know, it's got a whole bunch of stuff going on in this in the cell nucleus and in the internal um liquid going on uh cell membrane, all kinds of uh porous channels, etc. And of course, the cell will not respond. This one particular I'm imagining an orientation detector basically won't respond unless the line in the environment or is of a certain orientation. So from the internal structure of the sale there's a

23:14 complicated process which has to be uh a certain threshold has to be crossed or else the thing doesn't act as so why why doesn't your account sort of apply there is I guess the question um why why doesn't it counterintuitively say that counts as the neuron perceiving the line even and and I understand we don't want to say that which is kind of why I'm asking like how like what is it is What is so here's a different way of putting the question is what you're saying no just perception is like the meaning of

23:48 it it's like a person level thing that a person does not what a neuron does is is and if it's not that's not the answer then what is it that rules out that the neurons perceiving I guess is is does this

24:23 um, you know, I I I'm I'm very sympathetic to um, you know, physicalist reductions. I don't

24:58 mean with very notable I mean you're always going to have a whole uh a somewhat I mean for it to war for it to qualify as perception you're going to have processing that in involves a lot more than one neuron. Now I in the book am completely neutral on the physicalist ramifications of disc of analyzing perception in terms of capacities. Um

25:34 but I you know have since then been doing a lot of work with with neuroscientists and I have this one paper that's um actually a response to Ned Block's book um

26:10 salary for two years and allowed me to become a grad student again and to study um and I I I got it to immerse myself in neuroscience and issues at the intersection of neuroscience and AI. And it it started right when the pandemic started. So that was a little bit unfortunate. Um, and so instead of taking online classes, what I did was just spend a lot of time talking to people. And those three are three of the people I talked to a lot. And um, more papers should be coming out, although you know,

26:44 everything goes slowly, but that's one of the papers that came out of that. And um,

27:52 weren't fuzzy.

28:24 Yeah. Yeah. Um but I suppose I think that often um it can be really helpful to just focus on how perception works and how cognition works and how they interact,

28:59 delineating borders. I think it's it's um it's kind of a deeply personal um [laughter]

30:05 content um as opposed so we might say applying the capacity incorrectly or in a in a ungroundedly or whatever I forget the title or unsuccessfully.

30:38 thing, but I want to get you sort of talking about that if you don't mind.

31:13 Um, and we don't employ them incorrectly or anything in the, you know, in one or the other. Um but the difference between the mental states is just that in perception we employ the capacity and successfully discriminate and single out what's out there in the world. And in hallucination, we employ those very same capacities and unsuccessfully uh or fail to discriminate and um single out what the capacities

31:49 aim to discriminate and single out because there's nothing out there. Um so you can sort of think of it and this is a analogy I use in the book um you know with you have a bike um in a bike shop and it's suspended in air you know the mechanism and it's it's been all fixed you know you twirl the wheels and you can see everything is going well so the mechanism is all good but it's not fulfilling its function of going down the road because it's suspended in air and hallucination is a bit like that the mechanism is working but the environment is not playing along um and I know you

32:22 wanted to move on from neurons but you know this is very much um supported by what we know about the brain like you know when you hallucinate versus see something

32:55 my question if you think about the bicycle in suspended in the air versus a bicycle that you can ride on the on the on the ground. Um, I guess one way of asking what I'm asking is how can you tell the difference between a a bicycle that was produced for riding uh as opposed to one that was produced specifically as an art installation to be hung in the air that way. So that you would say it was in fact fulfilling its function when you when you crank the thing and it doesn't go anywhere because it was to illustrate the futility of

33:28 mechanical motion or some artistic thing that the artist had had meant for you to do to experience that in that way. So, so both of them result in the same output in a sense like the bike hanging there, but one of them is a is a capacity that's unsuccessfully being exercised and the other one

34:02 imagining sort of a theoretician who looks at the bicycles where you know the bicycles are metaphorically the brains and wonders

34:36 discriminating things of such and such, but you also do the same thing um in like I would say maybe in dreams, I don't know, but you want would say one's more fundamental than the other. And what got me thinking about this, by the way, and the reason I'm asking this is because I recently read an an article about um the evolutionary basis of consciousness and that maybe the primordial state of like sea creatures is a sort of like dreaming uh state and then maybe you know action is an offshoot of that. So it's a speculative idea and who knows but but my it got me thinking about yeah why do we why do we

35:10 start with this assumption that perception is the basic mode um as opposed to just experience or something like that or information. Yeah. So anyway, that's what I was wondering.

35:45 I why I focus on the perceptual case. Putting that aside, that's sort of the the copout response. Um, I think it's, you know, there's reason to think that perception plays um, okay, there's there's m multiple ways to answer this question. Here's one. Perception is primary or fundamental in that it helps us guide our actions. It helps us navigate the world. M

36:20 and you know um and in that sense it's primary relative to hallucinations that don't do that. Now of course I think you can be a being that is constantly hallucinating and in fact hallucinating more than perceiving. I would still say that the perceptual capacities are primary. I'll I'll get into that in a second. But a second question is why are their perceptual capacities primary over you know experiential conscious primaries?

36:52 carefully. Um I want to explain conscious consciousness in terms of employing these perceptual capacities.

37:26 to perception, we have a lot in common with other animals. And you know, our perceptual states happen to be um um um sorry, I just need to turn something off here. You know, our perceptual states happen often to be conscious. Um but perception seems to do its job really well in many cases without the sort of, you know, addition additional um cherry of consciousness. Um

38:34 intimate link between perception employing perceptual capacities and consciousness but um

39:08 the other way. So that's I guess I'm Yeah. So I guess I don't know if that changes the way if you want to add anything to what you just said or or not, but that

39:43 that and I I wouldn't know. I um [laughter]

40:17 um evidence the evidence we gain from perception and so I try to give a unified account of all these three roles that perception plays in our lives you know bringing about conscious mental states bringing about evidence and knowledge of the world um and bringing about mental perceptual content that you know guides our actions and so forth,

40:50 um it's it's a key part of my view but mostly for epmological oriented reasons. A key part of my view is that the capacities are ahistorical in the sense that

41:24 um if um lenses annoying. Like I'm hit by a lightning and then a duplicate comes about that's materially um identical. Um I would say the duplicate that comes about that's materially identical to me has all the same capacities that I have.

42:32 whatever like because part of the book is like a capacity is is when you are ex imple um when when you're employing a capacity you're producing a certain kind of content and to engage in that capacity is to produce that kind of content that particular

43:04 perceiving this you're perceiving that or you're thinking about this you're thinking about that so these fine grained things and so do you have an issue or do you have an answer for the kind of objection that maybe you could get from a photoype who is saying that look because the these are intentional contents with an S then you're going to get this kind of problem about signing content in cases where you could assign multiple contents to the same behavioral outputs so to speak like the frog with the with the black versus the

43:38 frog with the fly

44:42 ask about the frog or the bicycle um to go back to that case or

45:48 possess. I mean to explain that a bit. Um and this is I I you know I I I developed this in the in the book. Um you know when we teach kids math um you know the plus sign has a certain function and we teach teach kids what function it has. Namely you add what's in front of it to what's after it. Um now there's a certain history to how the plus sign came to have that function. Mhm.

46:20 that history is. Frankly, it just doesn't matter. Like, who cares, you know?

46:52 know there's an onlogical and and a filogenetic history to that

47:58 when I'm asking questions about capacities is what capacity an individual has not how you can tell what capacity it has

49:03 intuitions. Um, but also

49:37 they are there to put us in touch with things in the world

50:09 what they do in perception, it just happens to be that they're used primarily to hallucinate. That's fine. And so,

50:42 there's um even if you know um hallucination is sort of the default case and once in a while the world plays along it's meaningful when the world does play along.

51:18 if you say what the capacity is is to be able to discriminate the thing then don't you need to be able to discriminate the thing in in order to h to h to learn how to get the capacity because it's sort of in there the thing. So doesn't it seem like there's a kind of con photo concept bootstrappingesque related problem to this in this area or or am I overthinking things?

51:53 use capacities rather than competences. Um and so capacities are really cheap like um yes I mean basically I say what I mean I mean the way I think about perception what it is to see you know like this blue thing

52:26 throwing out representations, but

52:59 capacity to discriminate blue then in exercising the capacity I have to be able to discriminate blue.

53:33 talking about like I think an hour ago at this [laughter]

54:07 concepts um um you know the innateness and all that. I mean some some capacities might be innate actually highly plausibly some are innate um but most are acquired um in experience and you know I want to say that if in virtue of p notic or telling noticing the difference you know being able to tell the difference between you know let's say um these two shades you thereby I have acquired the capacity

54:41 to notice the difference between these two shades. Now, you might respond to that by saying, "Okay, but why? I mean, now they're so cheap. Why even bring them in? Why not just say you represent that thing?"

55:15 and any account of representation needs to give an analysis of what constitutes that representation,

55:49 um you have discriminatory capacities of of animals or or any kind of organism are ultimately organized in terms of entering into a certain kind of sensory state that has a mental quality which corresponds to the discriminated quality in the mental space in a way that's similar to the physical property does to its corresponding family of properties in physical case it's a mouthful to say but you get the idea. So now so there that seems to me is now is that different than your view because the

56:21 basic thing is a mental quality uh which you then explain the capacity of the animal in terms of whereas you seem to want to say no if any mental quality there is such it's it is the exercise of the capacity that generates it or yeah so I'm curious about what the relationship of your view to the mental quality view is.

56:53 Andrew Lee and, um, and other people have been, you know, interested in this idea of equality space.

57:32 um but really approach the issue from different angles like I don't want to bring in the baggage of mental qualities or anything like that

58:38 saturations and all the different ways that you can like the full expanse of possible color perceptions. And let's say I'm not very good at this, you know, I discriminate. I can only discriminate quite coarsely, whereas, you know, the other person can do so much more finely,

59:13 grained. And so I mean to keep it short, I would basically say I the the mental quality person.

1:00:59 um they say stuff that we got to at the beginning, but we'll see how far we get because I we can't do forever. But still um still so I want to talk about the singular content and the way that you try to bridge this divide between the the relationalist and the representationalist in in philosophy perception. something that's very close to my own heart because I sort of see my own work in the higher order theories as taking inspiration from the philosophy of perception and moving in so to speak. So I I see myself as a fellow traveler in some sense of that term but uh I I I

1:01:33 like your view. It's very interesting. Um, so I want to ask you about it, but but generally one of my kind of the main problem that I have with understanding views of your sort is what we mean by content and why we call it content when we're talking about the external object. And so I know you have a lot to say about that. So I wanted to get you to just say, you know, give us a general run view of your view about singular content and

1:02:07 a perception, an illusion and a hallucination and and they're qualitatively indistinguishable like you can't tell them apart. Um in all three cases you employ the same perceptual capacities and as a consequence of that you're in the same mental content type. like the content type is the same, but there's a difference. So, so, so there's a substantial common element between the three cases. Um, and

1:02:40 realist and disjunctivist already.

1:03:13 reason to say this additional thing is I mean maybe not the only but for me the main reason for saying this additional thing is because of my interest in epsmology.

1:03:47 so in perception so the the content type is the same in the three cases but as a consequence of singling out a particular in the perception case we are thereby in a state with singular content

1:04:21 just a content type. It's a token content but it's defective. And the hallucina hallucination cases sort of in between and uh I'm not going to sorry the illusion cases of in between and I want to say there you represent the object um but you fail to single out uh uh property instance and in virtue of that the the content is defective with regard to the property place.

1:05:24 content it would be had you not been seeing that very mountain.

1:05:57 conversation because I have a million things I would love to do, but I don't want to torture the poor puppy.