Reducing felt experience requires not preemptively dismissing the solutions

Annaka Harris has a new audio book out which she is promoting. I haven’t listened to it, but based on the interviews and spots like the one below, it appears that she’s doubling down on the conclusions she reached in her book from a few years ago, that consciousness is fundamental and pervasive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2swgDVl5M

Harris starts off by discussing the profound mystery of consciousness. But she clarifies that she isn’t thinking about higher order thought, like the kind in humans, but something more basic: “felt experience.” She takes this to be something that can exist without thought, and so discusses the possibility of it existing in plants and other organisms that don’t trigger most people’s intuitions of a fellow consciousness.

As I’ve noted in a couple of recent posts, the hard problem of consciousness seems specific to a particular theory of consciousness, that of fundamental consciousness, the idea that manifest conscious experience is exactly what it seems and nothing else, that there is no appearance / reality distinction or hidden complexities. I’m sure Harris, like so many others, will argue that there’s no choice but to accept fundamental consciousness. How else to explain the mystery?

But like David Chalmers and many others, she starts off by dismissing the possible solution, “higher order” processing. Without that, felt experience, the feelings of conscious experience, do look simple and irreducible. But that’s only because we’ve chosen to isolate something that didn’t evolve to be isolated, that has a functional role to play in organisms.

Harris’ example of looking at decisions vines make in where to grow is a good example. In most biological descriptions, this behavior is automatic, done without any volition. She wonders if this may not involve any felt experience. But she doesn’t seem to wonder if similar behavior in a Roomba, self driving car, or thermostat has similar types of feelings. (Some panpsychists do admit that their view implies experience in these types of systems, but in my experience most resist it.)

Many animal researchers have similar intuitions, that the observable behavioral reactions in relatively simple animals must involve feeling, since similar reactions in us are accompanied by them (at least in healthy mentally complete humans). Of course, similar to most panpsychists, they typically resist the implication for machines, often gesturing at some unknown biological ingredient or principle which will distinguish the systems they want to conclude experience feelings from those they don’t.

My take is that the solution is to reject the theory of fundamental consciousness. What’s the alternative? A reductive theory. But how do we reduce felt experience? Remember, to do a true reduction, the phenomenon must be broken down into components that are not that phenomenon. If anywhere in the description we have to include the overall phenomenon itself, we’ve failed.

Along those lines, I think part of the explanation of what feelings are is that they are composed of automatic reactions that can be either allowed or overridden. So if an animal sees a predator and always automatically reacts by running away, that in an of itself isn’t evidence of fear. On the other hand, if sometimes the animal can override their impulse to run away, maybe because there’s food nearby and they judge the risk to be worth it, then we have an animal capable of feeling fear.

So a feeling is a perception, a prediction, of an impulse which an organism uses in its reasoning to decide whether to inhibit or indulge the impulse. This means the higher order thinking Harris immediately excludes from her consideration is actually part of the answer. That answer, incidentally, also explains why we evolved feelings.

An organism is generally only going to have feelings if they provide a survival advantage, but that advantage only exists if they have some reasoning aspect to make use of it. Note that this reasoning aspect doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as what happens in humans, or even mammals or birds necessarily, although the sophistication makes it easier to detect. It just needs to be present in some incipient form to act as one endpoint in the relationship between it and the impulse, the relationship that we refer to as a “feeling”.

This requirement for a minimal level of reasoning seems to rule out felt experience in simple animals, plants, robots, and thermostats. It also gives us an idea of what a technological system would need to have it, a system of automatic reactions, which can be optionally overridden by other parts of the system simulating possible scenarios, even if only a second or two in the future.

Figuring out how to do this is not trivial. None of the current systems people wonder about are capable of it. But while it’s hard, it’s not the utter intractability of the hard problem of consciousness. Once we dismiss fundamental consciousness, that problem seems to no longer exist.

Unless of course I’m missing something?

#Consciousness #FundamentalConsciousness #panpsychism #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind

Fundamental and naturalistic panpsychism

Nicolas Rouleau and Michael Levin have a new preprint out: Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments. The gist of the paper is that we should be open to seeing consciousness in places other than brains. While I’m onboard with that general premise, they take it to places that don’t seem productive to me, arguing, for instance, that we could see the liver as conscious. They acknowledge that this can be seen as a type of panpsychism.

There are many variations of panpsychism out there, with some blurring into variants of idealism. But it’s always seemed like it can be broken into two broad groups: fundamental panpsychism and naturalistic panpsychism.

Fundamental panpsychism starts with the theory of fundamental consciousness, discussed a couple posts back, a view which sees consciousness as a property or properties that are simple, irreducible, and fundamentally private. When these properties are only thought to be in brains, we have property dualism. But if the properties are considered to be in all matter, then we’re at fundamental panpsychism.

(I’ve previously called fundamental panpsychism “pandualism”, but panpsychists tend to resist the dualist label. However most do lean into the idea that consciousness is fundamental, so hopefully “fundamental panpsychism” isn’t objectionable.)

Naturalistic panpsychism seems like a minority view that stays firmly within the naturalistic framework. Human and animal consciousness is reducible and explainable in physical and functional terms. However, with this understanding, it can be argued that there is no sharp boundary between systems we consider conscious and those we don’t. One approach, the one I usually take, is to regard consciousness as a hazy semantically indeterminate concept. But another is to argue that consciousness is far more prevalent in nature than conventionally assumed.

That basically seems like the approach Rouleau and Levin take, arguing that many of the popular theories of consciousness actually predict consciousness in fairly simple systems. It seems like a variation of the substitution argument that IIT theorists have argued for before, that many theories of consciousness, if taken literally, imply that consciousness exists in much simpler systems than the theory authors imagine.

However, a counter for this argument is that most of these theories are formulated within a broader context of cognitive neuroscience and biology. They’re not meant to be considered in isolation. So although a local area computer network could be seen as implementing a sort of basic global workspace, a global workspace theorist can argue that too much of the surrounding context is missing, that of a body with sensory organs and action abilities, along with a broader set of cognitive abilities like episodic memory and imagination.

Of course, the more of this context that is required, the smaller the subset of systems we regard as conscious. A naturalistic panpsychist might argue that if we want to include all animal life, as many do, then that inevitably will include a lot else, both living and non-living. Which I think is a valid point.

In the end, it comes down to how strict or liberal we want to be with the word “conscious”. My long standing solution is to split the baby and talk in terms of hierarchies. For example:

We can of course choose to regard “consciousness” as only referring to 0, in which case it’s widespread. But this has long struck me as pyrrhic. The resulting notion of “consciousness” is not one I find particularly interesting. It changes the question from how to explain consciousness to how to explain human and animal consciousness, and we’re largely right back where we started.

But similar to notions like pantheism, naturalistic panpsychism could be seen as a poetic form of naturalism. It’s not a view I can say is necessarily wrong, although it does introduce the possibility of confusion, particularly with fundamental panpsychism. So in that sense, Rouleau and Levin are making much more of a philosophical rather than scientific argument.

What do you think? Am I missing anything with their view? Are there problems with naturalistic panpsychism I’m overlooking? Or problems with the division I make between fundamental and naturalist panpsychism?

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#Consciousness #FundamentalConsciousness #panpsychism #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind

Manifest and fundamental consciousness

I think the problem of consciousness is primarily one of definition. The word “consciousness” can refer to a range of concepts. Some of the concepts are scientifically tractable, while others, once we clarify them, are metaphysical assumptions that we can either choose to hold or dismiss. This is one of the reasons I find exploring and delineating these different concepts productive.

One distinction that’s been around for a few decades is Ned Block’s between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Access consciousness is use of information for cognitive purposes, such as memory, attention, discrimination, self report, etc. Phenomenal consciousness is described as “raw experience”, the “what it’s like” aspect of consciousness, the character of the experience.

Access consciousness is the scientifically tractable version. But what about phenomenal consciousness? One of my concerns with the concept is it is itself ambiguous. In my view, “phenomenal consciousness” can refer to one of at least two concepts.

One is what I would call “manifest consciousness”, consciousness as it seems to us from the inside. Manifest consciousness seems irreducible, ineffable, and private. Indeed, strictly from a subjective perspective, it is irreducible. I can’t, from the inside, break down my experience of redness into any components. It’s just there. Describing it seems difficult. And it seems private to me. Yet I myself seem to have unfettered access to it.

Manifest consciousness is the seeming before any theoretical commitments. I think manifest consciousness is what Eric Schwitzgebel was aiming for when he developed his “innocent” definition of phenomenal consciousness. I do know it’s what I meant by the term on older posts prior to deciding that, without clarification, it’s a misleading use of it.

The problem is that most philosophers, both illusionists and phenomenal realists, seem to have a stronger meaning in mind. There are many theories about consciousness. One of the most straightforward is that the reality implied by the appearance is true, that manifest consciousness is a fundamental reality. Let’s call this “fundamental consciousness”.

Fundamental consciousness is the theory that consciousness not only seems irreducible, but is. That it’s not only difficult to describe, but impossible. That it’s not only difficult to observe from the outside, but fundamentally impossible. Which means that our first person access to it is privileged in some metaphysical manner.

I think manifest consciousness is what illusionists say is the illusion of fundamental consciousness. When they deny phenomenal consciousness, they aren’t denying manifest consciousness, but fundamental consciousness. But for weak phenomenal realists, phenomenal consciousness just is manifest consciousness.

On the other hand, strong phenomenal realists deny that there is any distinction between manifest and fundamental consciousness. For them, they are one and the same. So any denial of fundamental consciousness they take to be a denial of manifest consciousness, which seems incoherent.

This distinction can also be applied to synonymous concepts like qualia. When I argued for the existence of qualia some years ago, I was arguing for the manifest version, not the fundamental one. When I largely stopped using terms like “qualia” and “phenomenal” (except in replying to others using them), it was to avoid the confusion between these different versions.

Of course, as a reductionist, I think there are better theories than the fundamental one. In particular, we can see the concept of access consciousness itself as a meta-theory to explain manifest consciousness.

In any case, it seems like a lot of arguing past each other could be avoided if we acknowledged these distinct concepts. Most of the debate is about different theories of consciousness, not whether the manifest version exists.

But maybe I’m missing something? Are manifest and fundamental consciousness more difficult to separate than I’m thinking? Or are there additional distinctions we could use to further delineate the concept of phenomenal consciousness?

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#Consciousness #FundamentalConsciousness #ManifestConsciousness #phenomenalConsciousness #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Qualia