Consciousness Without First-Order Representations

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I am getting ready to head out to San Diego for the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 17th Annual meeting. I have organized a symposium on the Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Conscious Experience which will feature talks by Rafi Malach, Joe Levine, Doby Rahnev, and me! A rehearsal of my talk is below. As usual any feedback appreciated.

Also relevant are the following papers:

1.(Lau & Brown) The Emperor’s New Phenomenology? The Empirical Case for Conscious Experience without First-Order Representations

2. (Brown 2012) The Brain and its States

The ASSC Students have also set up the following online debate forum: http://theasscforum.blogspot.com/2013/06/symposium-1-prefrontal-cortex.html

A longer video explaining the Rahnev results can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gQYdGRbkpE

Lot’s of ways to get involved in the discussion!

[cross-posted at Brains]

Recent Events

Richard Brown Leave a comment

Well, the semester at LaGuardia is finally coming to a close (our schedule is out of step with the rest of CUNY). A lot has been going on and I have barely had time to do anything but since today is our reading day and I have a brief break before final exams come in, I thought I would quickly talk about what has been going on.

My new course, Cosmology, Consciousness, and Computation was a huge success and the students really seemed to enjoy the chance to take these kinds of questions seriously. The basic idea behind the course is to explore issues related to physicalism but after a grounding in the actual physics. My experiment to use the Stanford Encyclopedia as a primary text seemed to work ok as well. Some of the readings are fairly technical but I gave students the choice of which to read and which to write a one page summary/reaction to. They also seemed to like the Terminator book, which was nice. This is the first time I have used it in a class. I am toying with the idea of maybe recording the lectures for this course over the summer as I prepare to teach it again next semester (but I am also teaching philosophy of religion and ethics over the summer and I am tempted to record my philosophy of religion as well…they do overlap a bit so maybe I’ll do both!). For those interested, here is the syllabus. As with any new class I expect to update a lot of it in light of what happened this semester and any feedback would be appreciated.

All of that will have to wait until later in July, though, since I am currently getting ready for my trip to San Diego for the 17th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). This year I have organized a symposium on the Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Conscious Experience. The speakers are Rafi Malach, Joe Levine, Doby Rahnev, and myself. I am really looking forward to it, as well as to the rest of the program! I am hoping to post a video of my talk in the nearish future.

I have also been working on a new paper, which came out of discussion at the 5th Online Consciousness Conference. It is entitled Consciousness is (Probably) a Biological Phenomenon. Those who know me know that I am attracted to an identity theory when it comes to consciousness and that I harbor the suspicion that consciousness is a uniquely biological phenomenon. This paper is my first attempt to spell out an answer to Chalmers’ fading and dancing qualia arguments using empirical results (in particular the partial report results that have figured in the overflow debate (see here and here)). It is extremely drafty (I have been working on it an hour here and hour there for the last few weeks) and any feedback would be much appreciated.

In addition to all of this I have just returned from my trip to the Omaha Kripke Conference (during which I was also on my first dissertation committee at the Grad Center, which was very much fun but then I also had to read and think about a dissertation!), which was a really rewarding experience. Omaha is a wonderful town and the conference itself was excellent, if exhausting. Three days of excellent papers and excellent discussion, and it was very cool to see Saul so active and engaging with the material. Unfortunately, due to bad weather, he came late and so he missed my talk but there was none the less a lot of very helpful discussion. The main objection was Dan Shargel’s ‘hierarchy objection’ which he presented at Tucson last year (the basic idea is that we can move the argument up to the level of appearance and imagine that we have that appearance without the neural state, etc). I have got to get better at explaining what my answer to that objection is. After the discussion at the conference I have come to think that the main problem is that we are using ‘how pain appears to me’ as a way to pick out two different states, one a psychological state and the other a neural state. On the one hand we use it to pick out the pain sensations, that is the first-order sensing of bodily damage. But we can also use it to pick out the neural state that the appearance is identical to (note: not the neural state that the sensation is identical to, but the neural state that is identical to the awful painfulness appearance. We can use the appearance property as a way to pick out that state itself). It is in that second sense that we avoid the charge of regress. This takes some spelling out to make sense of it and I am hoping to write something more detailed on it in the nearish future (hopefully before I head out to the ASSC).

During and after one of the other sessions I had the chance to talk to Saul about his 1963 paper Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic, which I have discussed previously on the blog. When I suggested that it was a cost to one’s theory to give up logical constants in your quantified modal logic he insisted that it was not. This was because for any sentence with a logical constant in it we could translate it into a sentence without the constant without loss of meaning using Quine’s trick of inventing a predicate. This led me to wonder whether this made it the case that we could reformulate the bothersome proofs using translated sentences. At the time I wasn’t able to come with a way to do this but once I got home I thought about it a bit more and came up with the following.

In the original reductio we used this sentences ☐∃x(x=k), where this is read as ‘there exists an x such that x is identical to Saul Kripke’. How would we translate this sentence to get rid of the constant? We would replace the constant with a predicate, say ‘K’ (‘the Kripisizer’) and thus we would get ☐∃x(x=Ky) but this has a free variable in it so we would have to take it as asserting the ‘closed’ version, so we get ∀y☐∃x(x=Ky). We can then proceed to prove this in the same way as before using a reductio

1. ~∀y☐∃x(x=Ky) -assumption for reductio
2. ∃y~☐∃x(x=Ky) -1, quantifier exchange
3. ∃y◊~∃x(x=Ky) -2, definition of ☐
4. ∃y◊∀x~(x=Ky) -3, quantifier exchange
5. ∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) -Universal instantiation on 4
6. ∀y☐(Ky=Ky) -instance of axiom of identity
7. ~∃y~☐(Ky=Ky) -6, quantifier exchange
8. ~∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) -7, definition of ☐
9. ∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) & ~∃y◊~(Ky=Ky) -4,8 -conjunction introduction
10. ∀y☐∃x(x=Ky) -1-9 reduction

I think the main issue with this reformulated proof is line 5 when I use ‘Ky’ as an instance of x in 4. It seems to me that this move should be allowed, though. This is because part of the whole point of the 1963 paper was that we could block these kinds of proofs and still keep our traditional quantification theory. So we should be able to use UI, but if we are not allowed the use of constants then we will have to use predicates, which is what I did. Also, the variable in 5 is not free and is bound by the existential quantifier. So all in all I think this reformulated proof works but I really haven’t had the time to think about it very carefully.

Well that is enough for now…time to head over to Brains to read some of the commentaries in the Symposium on Louise Richardson’s “Flavor, Taste and Smell”.

Pain, Painfulness, and Kripke’s Modal Argument

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I am getting ready to head out to Omaha for a conference on the work of Saul Kripke at the University of Nebraska Omaha. My talk is on Monday the 20 but for those that can’t make it I have recorded the below rehearsal. It should be a really fun conference. I have never been to the ‘midwest’ before so I am looking forward to finally setting foot in a flyover state. As for the talk, the content is stuff people familiar with my work might recognize but I think I am getting better at expressing it. As usual, any comments or feedback is welcome.

Mental Qualities 02/21/13: Phenomenal Concepts

Richard Brown 1 Comment

Like I don’t have enough going on over at this year’s Online Consciousness Conference (which is still in session until Friday March 1st) I have been sitting in on David Rosenthal’s class at the Graduate Center on Mental Qualities (previous post here). Today he presented an argument against phenomenal concepts that was very interesting.

The argument began with pointing out that our normal concept of pain is one that we are able to apply to other people. It then proceeds to point out that a phenomenal concept is such that it can only be applied in one’s own case. The challenge then, according to Rosenthal, is to give an account of how it is (or how it is even possible) that these two concepts (one public and the other private) line up. I take this to mean the following. How can we explain how the extension of these concepts come out to be the same (viz pains). So, for instance, when I see you moaning and groaning with a visible injury I am likely to say ‘you are in pain’. When I do so I must be employing the public concept of pain (the other one applies only in my own case).

It is certainly the case that those who like phenomenal concepts allow their referents to come apart. Chalmers, for instance, argues that the public language concept has its reference fixed in a relational way. It will refer to whatever it is that is the typical cause of painful experiences. Whereas the phenomenal concept (the ‘pure’ one to use Chalmers’ terminology) does not have its reference fixed in this relational way, but rather picks out the conscious experience by its intrinsic nature or essence (that it is painful for me). So, if we consider a ‘pain invert’ -someone who experiences pleasure in response to painful stimuli- then their public language concept will pick out the same things that mine does (I am not inverted). This is because the pain-invert learns the word ‘pain’ in the way we all do and she will apply it to stabbings, burnings, etc. However the pain-invert’s phenomenal concept picks out the pleasure as the kind of conscious experience that it is. So when they think “I am having *this* kind of experience” they single out and refer to a pleasurable experience, whereas when I do so I single out and refer to a painful one. So in this kind of case the referents of the two concepts come apart.

So is there a problem about extension here? It is true that when I attribute painful experience to you I think that I am attributing an experience to you which is like the one that I have when I pick out my pain via a phenomenal concept but what could possibly guarantee this? Especially in light if the invert cases. I suggested that at this point those who like phenomenal concepts ought to appeal to the dancing and fading qualia arguments (though in light of Dave’s recent backing off of the dancing qualia argument maybe we should focus on the fading qualia one). Those arguments aim to show that it is highly implausible that you and I are inverts with respect to our conscious experience (even though it is logically possible the argument tries to suggest that it is not nomologically possible). The reason why it is highly implausible is that it would entail that I am radically out of touch with my conscious experience and we have good reason to think this is not the case (for some discussion of this see here). If those arguments work then we can be reasonably confident that your phenomenal pain concept picks out a conscious experience which is like the one that I pick out with my phenomenal pain concept. So when I use the public language concept I am attributing to you a property which is typically caused in a certain way (stabbing, burning, etc) and I can identify this property in my own experience via a phenomenal concept. So I take myself to be attributing to you the same kind of property which is caused in those ways in my experience (and which I single out via a phenomenal concept). My belief that these kinds of properties are similar in the way I think they are is licensed by reflection on dancing and fading qualia.

Ok, now off to the conference!

Mental Qualities 02/07/13: Cognitive Phenomenology

Richard Brown 1 Comment

As I mentioned earlier I am sitting in on David Rosenthal’s Mental Qualities class and I wanted to jot a few things down in the wake of the class while they are fresh in my mind.

What is this class about? The title is ‘mental qualities’ but what are those? Rosenthal has been suggesting that the mental qualities are those properties of mental states that are produced by the senses. So this would include visual qualities, auditory qualities, tactile qualities, etc but also bodily sensations like pain, itches, and tickles. On this way of doing things it will be the case that there is no cognitive phenomenology.

Before we begin a little in the way of full disclosure. Those who know me, or have looked around this blog long enough, might know that I personally do think that there is cognitive phenomenology (see here). In fact I am tempted to think that what makes a mental state mental is that it has some qualitative property, and that there is thereby something that it is like for me to be in that state when it is conscious (note that is perfectly compatible with the claim that the quality can occur unconsciously and that there is nothing that it is like when it does), but leave that aside. It is controversial whether there are mental qualities associated with thoughts. Indeed, we would only need posit them if there were cognitive phenomenology and we thought there must then be some corresponding mental quality in virtue of which there was phenomenology when the quality was conscious. But why think that there is cognitive phenomenology in the first place? Can we even make sense of what it would mean for the to be cognitive phenomenology? Rosenthal doesn’t think so.

His central challenge seems to be that there is no well defined thesis worth defending in the area. We seem to have a handle on what it means to say that there is sensory phenomenology, but what do we mean when we say that there is cognitive phenomenology? If we are tempted to say, as I would be, that we mean that there is something that it is like for one to have cognitive experiences then David will reply that this phrase is useless. It is used in many different ways by many different people. So we can ask again ‘what does it means to say that there is something that it is like to think a conscious thought?’

One thing we might mean is just that thoughts can occur consciously. But if that is all that we mean, Rosenthal says, then it is not interesting. Everyone knows that thoughts can occur consciously. So we must mean more than that thoughts occur consciously. But what else do we mean? Well, that there is something that it is like to have the thought. But why think that? One line of argument is that we can find cases where the sensory qualitative properties are held constant and we vary the intentional content we get a difference in phenomenology (this line of argument was pushed by Zoe Jenkin). He admits that this can happen (and that it is common) but denies that it supports the existence of cognitive phenomenology.

So, suppose that I am looking at my dog Frankie and that I clearly see her. I thereby have a conscious visual experience as of certain shapes and colors, etc. But I also perceive that she is a dog. Rosenthal conceded that the phenomenology in this case is distinct from that of a similar experience with different intentional content. So if in one case the intentional content is ‘that there is a dog’ (or whatever) and in the other it was ‘that there is an animal of some kind’ then we would have a difference in phenomenology. But this does not show us that there is cognitive phenomenology. Phenomenologically the two properties (that is the qualitative and intentional properties) seem to be intertwined, or co-mingled, in some intimate way. In fact they are so co-mingled that one might think that it is a mistake to talk about qualitative properties without talking about intentional properties and vice versa. Since this is true in the case of perception we may be tempted to think that this is also true in the case of thoughts. This would be one way to give content to the claim that there is cognitive phenomenology. But it does not by itself give us a reason to think that the two properties are the same.

He then suggested that we have some reason to think that the two properties, though intimately intertwined, are distinct properties. He argued that since we theorize about these properties in very different ways we have prima facie reason to think that the two things are different properties. So, he concludes, treating them as the same kind of property doesn’t buy us anything theoretically.

There is a lot more to be said about all of these issues, but I’ll save that for another day.

Spring Ahead

Richard Brown Leave a comment

The Spring semester is up and running here in nyc! I have been ultra busy and it looks like there is no end in sight…it is getting harder and harder to find time to write substantial posts (frivolous ones too) but I hope that I will be able to do a bit more this Spring. In the meantime here is a round up of what has been going on in the new year.

Besides preparing to teach my super cool class on Cosmology, Consciousness, and Computation for the first time I have been doing a lot of writing and have finished a few papers (it turns out when you don’t teach during the break you can get a lot done!). One is The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Dualism, which is a product of my presentation at Tucson 2012 and the discussions it prompted. As a result of all of this I have come to understand some of the key issues a lot better and I think this is the clearest statement of the issues yet. Any feedback on this is highly appreciated! Another is David Chalmers on Mind and Consciousness which is forthcoming in Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers edited by Andrew Bailey. The goal? Explain Chalmers’ views on mind and consciousness to someone who was unfamiliar with them in 6,000 words or less. I’ll let posterity judge to what extent I succeeded. (btw completing the Chalmers 2013 trifecta is my review of Constructing the World for The Philosopher’s Magazine which should be coming out later in February…1,700 words to review a book that is nearly 500 pages of highly technical philosophy? No Problem…it’s a bit like a word puzzle! Incidentally, I may be the only person on the planet who has now read both The Character of Consciousness and Constructing the World back to back and cover to cover!)

I am also planning on being at the Grad Center more this semester. I am going to be be sitting in on David Rosenthal’s class on Mental Qualities. Believe it or not I have never taken this course and so I am excited for it. I am hoping to do some posts on some of the readings and discussions (for instance I was re-reading Nagel’s paper on Panpsychism which seems to anticipate a lot of the themes of recent discussions). In addition the CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series looks fantastic and I am hoping to be able to attend more regularly.

And of course coming up shortly is the Fifth Online Consciousness Conference! I can’t believe that it has been 5 years already! The program is nearly finalized (still looking for commenters if you know anyone who is interested). I would really like to thank David Chalmers, Susanna Siegel, Adam Pautz, and John Schwenkler for helping me put together such an awesome program!

Also coming up quickly are a couple of meat space conferences. Sadly I am not able to make it out to the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology but Pete Mandik will be there presenting our joint paper On Whether the Higher-Order Thought Theory of Consciousness Entails Cognitive Phenomenology Or What is it like to think that One thinks that P? (with comments by David Pitt). I am sad to miss this conference since it looks like it will be the best one ever but even I have limits 🙂

But I will going out to the apa in San Francisco to present my solo version of the above paper The Phenomenology of HOT Or What is it Like to Think that one Thinks That P?. It’s a funny story because I wrote that and submitted it to the apa before Pete and I teamed up for the co-written one above. Jake Berger is going to comment on this version of the paper and so it should be a very interesting session! Afterwards Pete and I will revise the paper which is slated for a special issue of Philosophical Topics so any feedback would be greatly appreciated as well.

Finally my edited book Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience is due to be published in March 2013 and is already listed on Amazon.com! After two years of hard work I am very excited to see this finally coming out! It includes rewritten papers, new commentaries, and new responses, from the participants of the Third Online Consciousness Conference held in february 2011.

Looking ahead past the spring my proposed Symposium was accepted by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in San Diego. The symposium is titled ‘The Role of Prefrontal Cortex in Conscious Experience” and will feature talks by Rafi Malach, Joe Levine, Doby Rahnev and me. Very exciting!

Shesh, just writing that out is exhausting!

My Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Number

Richard Brown 1 Comment

Time for a little frivolity in the New Year! I recently found out about the Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath project. I am sure most of you have heard of the Bacon number. You may also know about the Erdos number which is similar except it deals with whether you have co-authored a paper with someone who co-authored a paper, with someone who co authoered with the mathematician Paul Erdos. And then there is the Sabbath number which is much the same but uses members of Black Sabbath. Some people have Erdos-Bacon numbers, but very few (apparently) have Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath numbers.

Well I am here to tell the world that I am one of them!

Erdos Number– I recently co-authored a paper with Pete Mandik (Erdos #=6) which puts me at 7 (incidentally we will be presenting it at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in February, and it will be forthcoming in Philosophical Topics).

Bacon Number– This one is a bit trickier. I was in (the background of) an episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, which featured David Chalmers. Morgan Freeman has a Bacon number of 1.He did not actually come out to the shooting, but he did say ‘New York Consciousness Collective’, if this counts that would put my Bacon number at 2.

I think that is pretty good but for the picky there is an alternate, perhaps more embarrassing, route. Some of you may know that my wife and I appeared in episode 2 of Fly Girls (Jen’s sister Farrah Williams was one of the Fly Girls). In that episode Sir Richard Branson himself had a cameo, and his Bacon number is 2, which would put mine at 3. In what follows I’ll use 2 unless someone objects.

Sabbath Number– Way back in the 1990’s I used to live in San Luis Obispo Ca, and would occasionally play with the Shival Experience when they needed someone to sub for their regular drummer. In total I think I must have sat in for 3 shows, though I can’t recall for sure. Way before I ever met Shival he recorded an album with Babatunde Olatunji, the world renowned percussionist, and featured Carlos Santana, who has a Sabbath number of 6 (due to Brad Wilk playing on their new album ’13’). That put’s Shival’s at 7 and mine at 8.

Sadly no recordings from that era exist (to my knowledge), and it would be nice to have it all based on recordings. And there is a longer route that is based on recordings. Way back in the old days I played with Jonathan Boyle in Cannibalistic Mutilation. Jonathan played in Charlie Christ with Erik Lindmark. Erik is the founding member of Deeds of Flesh (actually I once tried out for Deeds of Flesh and so have played with Erik but since there is no recording I am not counting that), which now has Erlend Caspersen on bass. Erlend has done session work with Decrepit Birth , which now has Derek Boyer on bass, and who has a Sabbath number of 11. That would put my Sabbath number at 15.

Adding it all up I get an EBS of 7+2+8=17 (or 24 for the death metal route). Same as Thomas Edison!

Plus anyone involved in the New York Consciousness Collective now has a Sabbath number of 9 (or 16) and if they already have an Erdos-Bacon number they’re in! For instance, I know David Chalmers has an Erdos number of 5, and if the Morgan Freeman connection works, a Bacon number of 2, which would give him an EBS number of 16. One better than mine! Now if only my co-authors/bandmates Pete Mandik (from whom I get my Erdos number) and Hakwan Lau (Erdos number 8 because of our co-authored paper) had a Bacon number! Anyone know of anyone else, or better connections?

Ok, now back to work…

———-UPDATE———-

Here is some video from the Fly Girls!

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Cosmology, Consciousness, and Computation

Richard Brown 3 Comments

:::UPDATE::: FOR A MORE RECENT VERSION OF THE SYLLABUS SEE HERE
———————————————-

In the Spring semester I hope to be teaching a course at LaGuardia called ‘science, humanism and technology’ (the Liberal Arts capstone course). The idea of the course is to explore the ways in which science and technology can hinder and help human civilization. I have been thinking that it would be cool to have the class focus on physics, philosophy of mind and computation. We would start with a conceptual overview of physics/philosophy of physics (including cosmology). This would include a brief introduction to the history of physics, going to Newton, the basics of relativity theory, quantuun mechanics and issues surrounding string theory. We could then look at the debate in cosmology about the origin of the universe and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. With that as background we would then go into the debate about the metaphysics of consciousness and other issues in the philosophy of mind. That would naturally lead us to a discussion about the nature of computation and the debate about artificial intelligence and consciousness. From there we could talk about issues in transhumanism, the simulation argument, and the Singularity. Of course I have to work out the details and weekly schedule, but this is just a rough idea of what I am thinking about doing.

I want the course material to be accessible (this is for undergraduates) and mainly online (there will be a couple of books I will require but I haven’t decided yet). I have started to compile a list of them, below, but I am wondering what anyone else might think would be useful for a course like this. I have until March (our semesters start late) so any suggestions would be great!

I. Physics

II. Cosmology

III. Philosophy of Mind

IV. Transhumanism

V. Computation

VI. Simulation Argument

VII. The Singularity