Is the eliminative stance productive?

A number of recent conversations, some I’ve been in, and others witnessed, left me thinking about eliminative views like the strong illusionism of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the view that access consciousness, the availability of information for verbal report, reasoning, and behavior, exists. But phenomenal consciousness, the qualia, the what it’s like aspect of experience, doesn’t.

The problem with this view has always been clarifying what exactly is being denied. This seems complicated by the fact that terms like “phenomenal” and “qualia” have a number of different meanings. For example, many people use “qualia” to refer to something in the vicinity of the primary and secondary qualities discussed by early modern thinkers like Galileo and John Locke.

(Primary qualities include size, shape, duration, motion, etc. These are perceived properties understood to actually be out in the world. Secondary qualities include color, sweet, bitter, hot, cold, etc. These are argued to only exist in the mind, or at least only exist because of minds.)

These types of qualities definitely exist, and serve functional roles. Imagine a yellow elephant with green polka dots. Unless you’re aphantasic, I’m betting you had no trouble picturing it, even though I doubt you’ve ever seen a yellow elephant with green polka dots. (I was careful to make sure the featured image had different colors.) But, unless you’re blind, you have seen yellow things, green things, polka dotted patterns, and elephants before. You were able to combine these characteristics, these qualities, based on your familiarity with them.

Of course, the illusionists are denying a stronger claim. David Lewis, in asking whether materialist should believe in qualia, discussed the functional aspect I described above, a version he saw as compatible with materialism. But there’s another proposition regarding qualia that he discussed: the idea that we can know their full nature solely through self reflection.

I think it’s this assumption that causes the trouble. If we can introspect the full nature of qualia, then their seeming simplicity is irreducible simplicity, which implies they exist separate from the operations of the brain, allowing space for talk of inverted qualia and the absent qualia of zombies. And since no one can detect anything like that in the brain, they must be unobservable to anyone but the subject, who has special “direct” access, resulting in the intuitions behind Mary’s room.

This is the version Daniel Dennett attacked in his 1988 paper, “Quining Qualia.” But Dennett did more than just attack the concept, he attacked the term “qualia,” a standard other illusionists have followed. It’s not enough to attack the idea. The “tangled theoretical knot” of the terms themselves must go. Or at least that’s the argument.

But this causes a problem. There is widespread confusion about what exactly is being denied. For many people, terms like “qualia”, “phenomenal properties”, or “what it’s like” refer to the functional notion, the one we use to imagine weirdly colored animals. So when they see these terms attacked, it sounds like the basic concept is being denied.

The results over the years seem to have been endless conversations with the illusionists trying to clarify exactly what they mean. And yes, not all the confusion is genuine; some people use the conceptual confusion as a rhetorical weapon. But the very fact that it is such an effective weapon speaks to the confusion for anyone not familiar with the history.

Does this mean we should try to rehabilitate “qualia” and related terms? I personally stopped using them a few years ago, specifically due to the definitional confusion. For a long time I thought I was aligned with Pete Mandik’s qualia quietism, an idea I took to mean that these terms were best avoided due to the disparate definitions out there. There’s always other ways to talk about the perception of characteristics.

But qualia quietism seems to take a stronger stance against this language than I do. I don’t use the terms, but I’m not going to scold someone who does. For better or worse, they seem to have spread beyond obscure philosophical discussions. Instead I’ll typically try to figure out which sense they’re using them in, and deal with the concept they’re discussing. That said, qualia quietism remains the neo-Dennettian view I’m closest to.

But I’ve come to think being intolerant of terms like “qualia”, “phenomenal”, “what it’s like”, and similar labels, is drawing the battle lines in the wrong place, one that seems to sow confusion and produces a message that is easy to strawman. Perceptual qualities exist, at least in a representational and relational sense. This shouldn’t be a problematic admission for a physicalist.

Dennett noted in his 1988 paper (second endnote) that the difference between a reductive physicalist and an eliminative one is tactical, a difference in communication approaches. His goal was to confront people’s intuitions and try to force a reexamination. That seems to work well with some of us, who were already predisposed to agree with this ontology. But it seems to generate summary dismissal from everyone else.

Of course, a physicalist does need to deny the idea that we have introspective access to the full nature of our experience, that we’re perceiving something other than just the tip of the iceberg. Dennett compared these tips to the icons on a computer desktop, calling them a user illusion, but the actual software term seems less judgmental: user interface; experience is the brain’s user interface to its own operations. As Lewis argues, this is still eliminative, but look at how little is being eliminated.

All of which is why I prefer to just call myself a functionalist. It emphasizes more what I think is the case, causal roles, rather than what isn’t. Of course, with developments in AI, functionalism is becoming just as much a target. But in my experience it doesn’t generate the same visceral outrage.

What do you think? Am I overlooking benefits to the eliminative approach? Or missing vulnerabilities to just emphasizing functionality? Or worrying about something that doesn’t really make that much difference?

What exactly is it about consciousness that illusionists say is illusory? The difference in views may be less than is often assumed.

http://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/08/31/illusionism-and-functionalism/
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #illusionism #functionalism

In the last thread, someone asked what exactly is it about consciousness that illusionists say is illusory?

One quick answer is that for illusionists, the properties people see in experience that incline us to think that consciousness is a metaphysically hard problem, are what’s illusory. In weak illusionism, the properties aren’t what they seem. In the strong version, which is usually what “illusionism” refers to, they don’t exist at all. But what exactly are these properties?

I’m a functionalist, someone who sees conscious experiences, and mental states overall, as more about what they do, the causal roles they play, than about any particular substance or constitution. It’s a view that I think provides a necessary explanatory layer between the mental and the physical, and so sees no barrier in principle to a full understanding of the relationship between them.

The usual argument against functionalism is that it doesn’t seem to account for qualia, the properties of phenomenal consciousness, the “what it’s like” nature of subjective experience, such as the redness of a red apple or the painfulness of toothache. Most functionalists, if they use the term, argue that qualia can be described functionally, such as pain being an automatic evaluation of a problem with a part of the body.

However philosophers have a number of thought experiments which claim to show that qualia and physics, including functionality, can be separated. This is where the illusionists come in. They argue qualia don’t exist, that the illusion is our impression that they do.

But that raises the question. What exactly are qualia? I gave the standard definition above, but it seems inadequate to settle this debate. The SEP article on qualia discusses four different versions, the simplest of which might be compatible with functionalism, but others that aren’t.

Daniel Dennett, in his 1988 Quining Qualia paper, a famous attack on the concept of qualia, provides the illusionist understanding, by noting four attributes commonly assigned to them. Summed up in the qualia Wikipedia article, they are:

Dennett’s description of qualia is often decried as a strawman, something he constructs to easily knock down. However, we only have to look at the most popular qualia thought experiments to see these attributes confirmed. For example, consider Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument as described through the Mary’s Room thought experiment.

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and use terms like “red”, “blue”, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue.” What happens when Mary is released from her black-and-white room or is given a color television monitor? Does she learn anything new or not? Jackson claims that she does.

Within the assumptions of this scenario, why is Mary unable to acquire the information she can only learn by having the experience? She supposedly can’t read descriptions of it, because no one can provide that, matching Dennett’s ineffable attribute. She can’t conduct experiments to detect it, because it’s scientifically inaccessible, meeting the private attribute. And Jackson argues that qualia are epiphenomenal, which seems to meet Dennett’s intrinsic attribute.

The same attributes are implied with the inverted spectrum concept, the idea that there’s no way to know if my experience of red looks like yours of green and vice versa. The fact that we seem unable to describe our experiences of color to each other, that they’re ineffable, private, and intrinsic, is what gives this scenario life. Likewise, the absent qualia / zombie argument, the idea of a being physically or behaviorally equivalent to a conscious one, but not itself conscious, only works if there’s no way to observe or deduce whether qualia are present.

And yet, in all these scenarios, the subject themselves still has first person access to these phenomenal properties. For that to be possible, for that access not to be prevented by the other attributes, it has to be special in some way, according to David Chalmers, in some non-causal manner, which gives us Dennett’s directly apprehensible property.

And what is it that makes Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness metaphysically hard, if not these attributes? Remove them, and the thought experiments and metaphysical mysteries seem to disappear.

So the advocates of these thought experiments and illusionists seem to agree on what qualia are. They just disagree on whether they’re real. Functionalists and other physicalists, if they use terms like “qualia” or “phenomenal properties,” are referring to a concept with less theoretical commitments. Do Dennett’s attributes show up in the more reserved versions? As Dennett himself covers in the last section of his Quining Qualia paper, it becomes a matter of “in principle” vs “in practice”.

For ineffability, no one thinks describing experiences like the redness of red in a functional manner is obvious or easy, although it can be done to at least some extent, starting with the distinctiveness and high saliency of redness. For many experiences, the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” comes to mind. It might involve so much effort that it’s ineffable in practice, even if not in principle.

And there are limitations on our access to how these experiences are constructed. They are cognitively impenetrable, for the simple reason that it was never adaptive for our ancestors to be able to access the early processing, such as all the underlying associations and affects red stimuli trigger, but which figure in what red experience feels like. Which makes a full description of the experience impossible with only introspective information.

Mental content, until recently, was private due to technological limitations and our lack of knowledge about the brain. It still effectively is in virtually all cases. But with the progress in brain scanning technologies, we’re seeing the first cracks in this attribute. We still have a long way to go, but even though it’s early days, the idea that mental content is in a separate realm and utterly inaccessible seems less defensible with each passing year.

Without absolute ineffability or privacy, it’s not necessary to bring in direct apprehension. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have privileged internal access in practice, but it’s similar to the type of access the processors in the device you’re using right now have to read and write memory that aren’t easily observable from the outside.

And then there’s intrinsicality. Achieving functional descriptions of conscious experience typically requires looking at the upstream causes and downstream effects of what we think of as the experience. Intrinsicality assumes that there’s still something in between, something that remains with intrinsic properties, something distinct from the causal chain, somewhere where the prior causes culminate in the presentation, and from which the downstream effects flow, with some aspects still conceivably epiphenomenal. The functional shift here is to regard the experience as the whole causal chain, a more plausible stance in a massively parallel system with no central control point.

Clarifying these attributes as difficulties in practice, rather than absolute limitations in principle, both explains our impressions of them, and transforms conscious experience from an intractable metaphysical problem to a series of scientific ones.

This is one of the reasons I used to resist the illusionist label, and still prefer the functionalist one. The difference doesn’t seem that vast (a point David Lewis made in 1995), and mostly seems to amount to a lack of nuance in our initial understanding, rather than some deep unavoidable species-wide misperception.

And yet for a significant portion of the population, the strong intuition is that a functional description, while explaining behavior, still leaves out something important for experience. And here we run into an intuition clash. For someone convinced that an ineffable metaphysically private aspect remains, it doesn’t seem like something science can demonstrate is or isn’t there. It becomes an extra assumption some people hold and others don’t.

Which seems to leave us in the strange place where the two views are empirically identical, and the debate a purely philosophical one.

Unless of course I’m missing something. What do you think? Are functionalists overreaching for a non-gap explanation? Are there fact-of-the-matter differences between illusionism and functionalism I’m overlooking? And are there ways to demonstrate the reality or non-reality of ineffable private qualities?

Featured image credit

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/08/31/illusionism-and-functionalism/

#Consciousness #functionalism #illusionism #phenomenalConsciousness #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Qualia

Can we in principle ever deduce the mental from the physical?

Christopher Devlin Brown and David Papineau have a new paper out in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled: Illusionism and A Posteriori Physicalism; No Fact of the Matter. (Note: the link is to a free version.) As the title makes clear, the overall gist is that the difference between illusionism and a posteriori physicalism amounts to a definitional dispute.

A quick primer. Illusionism is the stance that consciousness exists, but only in the sense of functional capabilities such as modeling the self in its environment, attention, learning, episodic memory, self monitoring, etc. What’s thought to be illusory is phenomenal consciousness, the “what it’s like” nature of subjective experience, but particularly in the strong sense as something distinct from functional capabilities, and with properties, such as fundamental subjectivity, that imply it’s non-physical.

Reductive physicalism is the stance that the mental can be reduced to physics. However, there are different views on exactly what can be understood in that reduction. In one, we can find correlations between conscious states and physical ones that imply an identity relationship, but one that can only be discovered and understood empirically, not justified in a logical sense. This is the a posteriori physicalism of the type the authors discuss in their paper.

The other view is a priori physicalism. It argues that we can go further than just brute identities, and understand the logical relationships, in a way where, in principle, we could deduce the mental from the physical. A common example of this view is analytic functionalism, which describes mental states in functional terms, such as the experience of pain being a negative reaction to a perceived state that motivates a system to try to avoid or ameliorate it.

It’s long been acknowledged among illusionists that the distinction between illusionism and functionalism is definitional. Functionalists generally target functional capabilities for their explanation. If they speak about phenomenal consciousness, it’s usually in a weaker sense of being the inner perspective of a functional system without the non-physical attributes. (As a functionalist myself, this is certainly the sense I use it in older posts on this blog.)

This weaker sense is one that the authors seem to call for in their paper. They point out that it’s always a judgment call whether to eliminate or reconstruct the concept when it turns out not to have all the attributes we assumed in our pre-scientific understanding. (David Chalmers has a similar discussion in his book, Reality+, which I discussed a while back.) For example, we eliminated the concepts of ghosts and witches from our ontology after scientific investigation revealed too many of their properties didn’t exist. However, we retained planets and stars, holding reconstructed understandings very different from the medieval ones.

But I think this is the first time I’ve seen an argument that the differences between illusionism and a posteriori physicalism are definitional.

There is some resonance between illusionism and the phenomenal concept strategy, an argument often made by a posteriori identity theorists about why we tend to think phenomenal properties are distinct from physical ones. In short, our phenomenal concepts are thought to be isolated from our physical ones, making the relationship one we can’t bridge, leading to an epistemic gap, the notorious “hard problem”. This is similar to possibilities explored by some illusionists, such as François Kammerer, who see the illusion as deeply enmeshed in our cognition, something we can’t avoid, and so no explanation of consciousness, including of the illusion itself, will ever feel right.

But it seems like there are differences. For one, the phenomenal concepts strategy is often described as recognizing the conceivability of functional zombies, entities that are behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious being, but aren’t actually conscious. Most illusionists I’ve read see zombies as an unproductive concept.

And many illusionists take the illusion to be more of a theory error, a failure in philosophical reasoning more than something universally embedded. That’s the feel I get from Daniel Dennett’s writing, although in reality I suspect he would have rejected the distinction.

Still, most illusionists seem in the a priori camp, rejecting any notion of an unbridgeable divide. The phenomenal concept strategy, and a posteriori physicalism overall, seem to skirt mysterianism, a view generally rejected by the a priori camp. To be sure, most of this camp see empirical investigation necessary for progress in any practical sense, but the idea that we can’t have a theory explaining the identity relations is rejected.

Of course, a lot depends on just how much work we’re asking these identities to do. Often the identity relationship between H2O and water, genes and DNA sequences, or heat and molecular motion are given as examples of identities that, once established, we don’t need to explain any further. But these identities have 1:1 relationships, and the reduced concept can in principle be used anywhere the higher level version can in descriptions, making the concepts causally equivalent.

Much depends on what we mean by a conscious concept like “pain”. Is pain a relatively simple primitive like water above? As a phenomenal property, the painfulness of pain is often assumed to be that kind of primitive, which is how many end up thinking of it as something separate from the functionality.

Or is pain more a complex collection of processes, in a way similar to the concept of “democracy”? In principle we could find the physical identity relationship between the concept and a physical occurrence of democracy, although it would be extremely complex. But more broadly, democracy as a type encompasses too many physical instantiations with too many variations for this kind of identity primitive to be useful. We need intermediate abstraction layers, such the role people play in governance. Such roles are multi-realizable, which puts us in functionalist territory, where I think most illusionists live.

Ultimately the difference between the views seems to remain, although it doesn’t seem vast. I suppose it could come down to what is expected of an explanation. If it doesn’t feel right, does that mean we’ve failed to bridge the gap? Given scientific theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics, it doesn’t seem like we have any right to expect an explanation of mental states to necessarily feel right, but that’s a view from someone firmly in the functionalist camp.

I do think the authors are right that “consciousness” is a semantically indeterminate concept. Its meaning has varied too much over the centuries for anyone to claim a particular version is the one true definition. It can mean introspection, perception of the outside world, attention, sentience, imagination, a non-physical ineffable essence, and a host of other notions. Which means these definitional disputes are probably unavoidable.

What do you think? Are these views more similar than I’m seeing? Are all physicalists basically illusionists, even if only implicitly? Or does the ambiguity of the word “consciousness” render these kinds of distinction a hopeless muddle?

Featured image credit

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/08/24/illusionism-and-types-of-physicalism/

#Consciousness #eliminativeMaterialism #illusionism #materialism #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #physicalism

"… whatever the ordinary mind conceives and whatever language expresses:

All such things, which thus become the object of thought and word, if examined, are found to be nonexistent.

They are empty like mirages and it is never possible for them to withstand analysis."

Kunzang Pelden: "The Nectar of Manjushri's Speech".

#Buddhism #Sunyata #Santideva #Dharma #Illusionism #Emptiness #Madhyamaka

SMBC: Consciousness: a definition thing

God answers someone's question on what is consciousness. Nothing controversial here at all, I'm sure.

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/07/18/smbc-consciousness-a-definition-thing/
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #illusionism

Experiencing without knowing?

A blog post looking at a new paper which purports to have found evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness.

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/07/04/experiencing-without-knowing/
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy #illusionism

Daniel Pallies: Why I Worry About Phenomenal Realism

https://www.danielpallies.com/post/why-i-worry-about-phenomenal-realism
#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy #PhenomenalConsciousness #illusionism

Do regular people see a hard problem of consciousness?

Is there even a folk concept of consciousness? Or more specifically of phenomenality? Experimental philosophy seems to be showing that philosophers may be assuming too much about universal intuitions.

A blog post looking at the topics raised in the recent Mind Chat episode.

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/02/18/do-regular-people-see-a-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
#consciousness #philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #illusionism #PhenomenalConsciousness

Daniel Dennett | Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32u12zjgJww

Classic Dennett. No magical theories of consciousness here, just insights on how a system of 86 billion neurons produces a mind. Plus some counters to well known philosophical quotes.

#consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy #illusionism