In a History and Systems course we studied quite a bit about the systems of psychological thought that anticipated the rise of scientific psychology. I’ve mentioned a bit about these debates before, but one of the interesting things about consciousness that was simmering underneath quite a bit of this debate is the apparent unity of our conscious experience.
Locke and his successors in the Associationist schools rejected any previous philosophical notions that humans are born with some kind of built-in knowledge. Instead, he believed that everything we know and experience is due to associations. We associate warmth and milk with mother and we grow to love her more. We hear a loud, threatening dog’s bark and associate dogs with danger. Over time these associations continue to build up into a complete picture of the world. It should very much resemble Behaviorism to the psychologists reading this blog, and indeed, Pavlov, Skinner, and Watson would have had no qualms with it. However, James pointed out that there was something fundamentally quirky with the idea that all our knowledge is built on associations: where does the mind get the idea that associations could be made in the first place? In his words, whence does the brain get such fantastic “laws of clinging?” I would add – what exactly is putting things together?
It is one thing to address the underlying structure of the brain – the different sensory systems, the physical structure of neurons, storage structures, etc. It is another thing to think that there is some algorithm or structure that is capable of “combining” “information” from all the different systems. How exactly would it look or operate, where is it located, and/or where did the algorithm come from to begin with? We don’t see any analogues in computational research because nowhere in computers do we see any part of the computer that “points at” any other part, nor do we see any real “combinations” of separate bits of information anywhere. Anything that looks like a combination falls apart into its component parts upon closer inspection.
It is hard to see how a mechanism, no matter how complex, can really unify two separate things at all. It is related to my previous post about Mario because I noted that there is no unifying principle behind all the different wires, pixels, and systems that make up the character Mario on the screen. Another example: I can set up a webcam on a computer to take video, and I can also set up the computer to record audio. But without any further instruction, the computer will record both streams indefinitely without ever “associating” them together. Without “laws of clinging” they would remain separate and distinct parts.
But even when we encode audio and video together, there does not seem to be any unifying principle behind both parts. On a VHS tape the audio and video are on different strips. When we watch a video on YouTube there are separate mechanisms that encode audio and video and play them back on our computers. They only seem unified because when we watch them, we somehow combine them into one unified experience. If we really trace the paths of the information in the audio and video, we find two separate streams every time.
Now some materialist philosophers, most notably Dennett, recognize the difficulty here and simply deny that we do have a unity of consciousness. But once you get the point where materialist philosophers have to deny the very existence of a unity of consciousness, qualia, free will, or intentionality in order to buoy up materialism, I think their arguments just bounce off me. Maybe they don’t experience those things, but I certainly do. In fact, if someone asked me which is more sure to me: that the external world exists, or that I have subjective experience? The answer seems pretty clear to me – the latter. The external world could be a dream or an illusion, however unlikely. But my own subjective experience? How could I ever reject that? I’m a philosophical simpleton but I simply can’t part ways with what seems to me to be the absolute base-level structuring of my entire experience as a human. And even if I did reject it, who – or what – exactly is doing the rejecting?
I have always been befuddled by people who say that materialism is somehow the end-game of honest reason. I just can’t make that leap of faith. It’s not that I don’t want to, I would love to. I just don’t see how it’s possible.
So, in this case, Aristotle’s revenge would be his acknowledgement that all the material and efficient causes collected by the scientific mecanists just don’t amount to much in the absence of formal and final ones. He dealt with this in his “On the Parts of Animals” where he differentiated between homogeneous and heterogeneous substances, especially organisms.
But if minds, according to Aristotle, are some kind of feature of living (non-mechanical) organisms, then the existence of multiple simultaneous contents of consciousness should be expected. We can certainly think of and remember multiple ideas. The ideas might well be related, and make a unified experience, but they are still organic components of our mind. In general, human psychology is not ‘simple’.
So I think a future non-mechanical ‘Aristotlean’ psychology will, for example, discuss the anatomy of minds. Just as it discusses the anatomy of organic bodies.
Yes, it is true that psychology is not simple and that there are plenty of ideas, memories, structures, components, etc. However, the post deals more with the subjective feeling that those parts have anything to do with one another.
I’m not sure how you are defining unity here, so it is hard to evaluate exactly what your argument is.
When you say “It is hard to see how a mechanism, no matter how complex, can really unify two separate things at all” I find this surprising. Neurons are integrators par excellence, able to combine information from multiple sources. Most theories of concciousness takes this kind of concern head on (as documented in this scholarpedia article). Dennett is an exception in that regard, and I think it is no coincidence that he isn’t a neuroscientist.
Scholarpedia link didn’t embed properly:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_consciousness
Hmm, on its face a neuron is a good “integrator” of information. But a deeper problem would be how to define “information” and “unity” as you mentioned. The information that goes into a neuron and the information that goes out are only the same if you define “information” extremely broadly. The definition of “unity” then comes to the forefront, as it is not clear in what sense a chemical receptor site being activated and the subsequent neuron charge and signal down an axon, etc. are “unified” except that they occur in a temporal series. If temporal causes and effects are “loose and separate” like Hume said then we are still left to wonder in what sense “information” can be “unified.” It ends up looking like two events occur, and then one subsequent event occurs as a result – two bits of information being destroyed and one new one being created. Add together a bajillion of those and it’s still a mystery how you can get one unified sense of subjective experience.
Now if there is something like irreducible final causality or teleology in that chain of information, then I think a case could be made that a chain of events truly is the “same” information being passed along.
I agree with the mention about final causality: something like this is necessary in order to obtain the required sense of unity. The trouble is, we do not yet have a clear sense of how ‘final causality’ functions in the mind+brain system.
One minimal option is some kind of ‘reciprocal causality’ as between simultaneous components of an organismic whole. For this, we might get some clues from the non-locality we see in quantum physics, which also has simultaneous correlations at a distance. It is not the same as in quantum physics, but the ontological and causal processes may require similar kinds of theorizing.
Ian, check this out: http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2009/11/dynamic-entanglement-in-living-systems.html
(I don’t know about the twin stuff – but the linked article talks about quantum entanglement in large, complex, warm living systems)
Exactly.
Ian wrote:
One minimal option is some kind of ‘reciprocal causality’ as between simultaneous components of an organismic whole. For this, we might get some clues from the non-locality we see in quantum physics
Why not reciprocally coupled populations of neurons? Is it really important that things be simultaneous? For that matter, if you would insist on taking a more physicist-like approach, Isn’t objective simultaneity a suspect notion anyway? I thought special relativity did away with that. Have I misinterpreted the physics?
It seems you are both underestimating how much neurons can do without requiring quantum entanglements etc. (which incidentally have not yet been shown to be important in neural function, not even in a petri dish much less on the spatiotemporal scales likely required for conscious experiences: compare this to the clear and drastic importance of the standard electrochemical features of nervous systems we have been studying since Galvanni).
Also, I would think you’d resist the claim that only entangled systems display teleology. Even if you are right that ‘final causality’ is required here, can’t that also be inherent in nervous systems that don’t use quantum entanglement? Don’t venus fly traps display teleology in their behavior without quantum entanglement?
I strongly recommend reading Edelman, Koch, Baars. At minimum. Before being too dismissive of how far traditional neuroscience can take us with consciousness.
Or my book when it comes out in 20 years.
BDK wrote:
I thought special relativity did away with that. Have I misinterpreted the physics?.
Yes, in a sense. For you have put your finger on one of the critical differences between quantum physics and relativity. There are ‘space-like’ non-local correlations in quantum physics. The fact that they are space-like according to special relativity is what makes them so interesting. How is this done, we must ask?
And I agree that there must also be teleology in biological systems without quantum entanglement. What I said was that organismic teleology was like or analogous to quantum entanglement. More specifically: it is like quantum non-locality, but ‘on another level’.
You say I am “underestimating how much neurons can do without requiring quantum entanglements”. My question is then, what is it that neurons can do?. Can they produce consciousness, for example? Can they act for a purpose, or (like mechanical systems) only appear to act for a purpose. Those are the relevant questions.
Ian asks:
My question is then, what is it that neurons can do?
As a first pass, I’d say they integrate information from the internal and external world to adaptively control nearly every system in the body, from the muscular system (behavior) to the digestive system. How do they do this? That’s the answer neuroscience is slowly revealing.
Can they produce consciousness, for example?
Sure, why not?
Can they act for a purpose, or (like mechanical systems) only appear to act for a purpose. Those are the relevant questions.
Purpose is a complicated question. The venus fly trap shuts in order to get food. I can temporarily sidestep questions about the meaning of that ‘in order to’ and do good science by explicating the biological basis of the trap shutting.
Similarly, while I have ideas about what consciousness is used for in the brain (e.g., decision-making, episodic memory formation), even if I didn’t have such an idea, that wouldn’t stop us from studying the biological basis of said conscious processes.
On simultaneity, I would defer to you on the physics, but I have read that it is controversial whether there is objective simultaneity in QM. That is, there are interpretations of QM where non-local correlations do not conflict with Lorentz invariance (I get my ideas here from Craig Callender’s essay ‘Finding real time in quantum mechanics’):
http://philpapers.org/rec/CALFRT).
However, that is a side track I don’t think is entirely relevant to the above discussion.
I stole this line “there are interpretations where non-local….”
from this review:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24498-einstein-relativity-and-absolute-simultaneity/
If you can demonstrate that neurons can produce consciousness, then you have solved the mind-brain problem with something that looks like epiphenomenalism. This is where the consciousness has no causal powers to influence the physical world.
Or do you think that the consciousness which is thereby produced can influence the neurons again? In that case, would this influence ever be ‘the answer neuroscience is slowly revealing’?
I am not sure what the Aristotelean position is on this question.
I should have stipulated that I wouldn’t use the language that brains “produce” consciousness. Rather, I see consciousness as a feature of nervous systems, not something separate that they create. Hence, there is no problem of interaction, as it is trivially true that neural states influence other neural states.
Interestingly, in the 19th century most people had this strange view in which brains “produce” consciousness, but consciousness has no influence on brains. Strange, really. When I have a tootheache, this is what causes me to call the dentist.
BDK said “see consciousness as a feature of nervous systems”.
I am therefore curious to know, on this account: Which other systems in the world is consciousness a feature of? If ‘all’, that is panpsychism. If a few, what is the criterion?
Ian: At the very least we know it is a feature of creatures with certain types of brains.
As far as a criterion, I believe neuroscience will tell us the criterion more specifically as the science progresses: it isn’t something we can know a priori. There will be borderline cases where we just don’t know. My hunch is that once we have a good story in the clear-cut cases, that will help settle the more tough cases. We may even find that paramecia are conscious, or other creatures without nervous systems. Or in silicon.
By analogy, we still don’t have a good criterion to identify ‘life’ but that hasn’t stopped us from making great gains in our understanding of living things. Consciousness seems very similar: very hard to define, very productive to study.
Not there are different senses of unity. I talk about unity in spatial and temporal terms. That is, we can simultaneously be conscious of things at different locations in space. Also, we can be aware of things as they happen over time, we do not perceive them as a series of independent snapshots. Spatial unity seems relatively easy to handle in neural terms. It is harder for me to imagine how unity over time works–I assume experiences must be infused with memory at some level. But I haven’t thought about temporal “unity” enough to be confident.
Some put it by saying we take there to be one subject having the experience. So it is the unity of the subject that is the focus. I am less happy with this, because I am not sure what it means frankly. But I’m not dismissing it, just saying I’d need clarification.
If this forum is to live up to its title, let’s have Aristotle ring in on the subject. The temporal unity you are unsure of is connected to the formal cause of the thing. That which makes the thing what it is, is the ground of its being and by the transcendental quality of being, establishes it as one thing or a unity. For Aristotle, something that is non temporal, the form of the thing, makes it be, even in time. For him when some thing degenerated, it ceased to be what is was and literally ceased to be. Now, it is true that in this explanation, Aristotle laid himself open to complaints that were very similar to those laid against Plato and his doctrine of forms and formality, but this was corrected by later Aristotelians, notably Aquinas and later the rediscovers of Aquinas’ existentialism, Ettiene Gilson and Joseph Owens. By laying responsibility for the sense of unity upon the subject you are just muddling up the waters, because now you are treating your consciousness as an object instead of its being just your natural and normal relationship through sense and science to the realities that surround and support us.
r100: Can you recommend a good book, not written by Feser, that goes over the main points of Thomist/Aristotelian philosophy?
r100: Thanks for your comment. I imagine quite a bit of this forum will be just like this post – me reacting to the materialistic worldview that I’m exposed to in classes/research etc. and hinting that Aristotelian metaphysics may provide an answer.
Try getting An Interpretation of Existence by Joseph Owens. In my experience it is hard to find and expensive when found even in paperback, so I will also include the following to be used at your discretion.
http://www.richardghowe.com/Rivendell%20-%20March%202012%20-%20Joseph%20Owens%20-%20An%20Interpretation%20of%20Existence.pdf
Thanks reading it now.