That assumes that whatever a mind is must be accessible to consciousness. I don’t think there is a good reason to belief that a mind is just conscious experience as a matter of fact (as opposed to stipulation). Without several unconscious processes, we’d probably lack a mind.
You also say that mind is thinking. That is a standard argument, but then I have to ask, what is thinking? It’s an extremely difficult thing to define. So it could be that thinking is essential for a mind, but yet we don’t know what thinking consists of, or at least, we can list some properties that we believe are components of thinking.
I didn’t for a moment imagine that you were a Dennett fan. I didn’t lay out my objections to try and convince you, but to show that I too don’t agree with him, and why.
I should at this point stick up my hand and confess that I have other reasons to be suspicious of Dennett that have nothing to do with his work, and more to do with his habits in his lifetime. Before and after he retired, he collected a great many more junior sciencetists who did experiments on his behalf, and reported results and conclusions similar to his. Sometimes he would write an introduction or review of their work, and he was influential in getting them funding and publication. It’s how academia works.
However, after he stopped being active, a remarkable number of these scientists immediately published their own work, in the same area, with conclusions that clashed quite strongly with Dennett’s ideas. Haggard, for example, spent a decade or so supporting Dennett’s ideas to the letter, but is now talking about the role of consciousness in successful learning, and applying studies of consciousness to schools.
Sure. I’ll warn you now I’m not an idealist. After a very long period of beiong a physicalist and identity theorist, I got into Chalmers and dualism. I don’t like dualism, particularly, and I’m not convinced I really understand his ideas around supervenience, but I don’t see how to do without it. I can’t justify to myself the idea that either mental or physical can be dropped from the picture entirely. The mental evidence doesn’t support dropping the physical, and the physical evidence doesn’t support dropping the mental.
I liked your article. I’m sympathetic about the ideas around studying consciousness as a phenomenon itself, and the limits of purely emperical approaches. I’m fond of the parody of emperical science and objective observer found in Alice through the Looking Glass, where Alice plays croquet with the Red Queen. The hoops you are aiming for gets up, stretch, and wanders off, the ball (a hedgehog) moves when you’re not looking at it, and the mallet you’re using (a flamingo) turns it’s head to look back at you.
Where your article loses me is here:
I can’t see any reason to regard consciousness as self-evident, or absolute. Indeed I don’t see why we can’t be mistaken about at least aspects of our consciousness, and I’d dispute that everything we experience under the umbrella of consciousness is either full or even complete.
In terms of framing, I’m not sure that framing should be taken as primary or fundamental. It’s not enough to have a frame and then be content to examine that. We must periodically revist our frames along with our other assumptions, to ensure that such assumptions are worthy of us and what we trying to achieve. As a result, to me such framing to me is automatically provisional.
Because to comment on that, to say anything about it, you must first be conscious. It’s essentially building on Descartes’ cogito, albeit after several generations of critique.
Bitbol’s point is that scientific method tends to omit or occlude ‘consciousness’ (or more simply, the observing mind) and then to try and understand it in objective terms. But it is not objectively real - it is that to which or to whom phenomena appear or are experienced.
Going back to Chalmer’s dualism - I’ve never read his accounts of what that might be, other than the defensive claim that whatever it is won’t be in contradiction with naturalism. But I say as soon as you begin to treat mind or consciousness as a ‘that’, then the point is already lost. It is not objectively existent, but is the ground or basis of objective knowledge.
Good point to raise. One of the things I disagree with the skeptics regarding the problem of consciousness is this-- how do we know we’re not just dreaming and all the experiences we have are just an illusion.
To me, the only reason they got a stranglehold on this “unanswerable” challenge is because philosophers do not have a name for that condition when we know we are dreaming. It’s called lucidity and philosophers do not want to use this word because it didn’t come from philosophy.
Our own agency can tell the difference between a dream and reality. No matter how lucid the dream, we have a way of knowing.
Lucidity is a type of brain state.
Furthermore, intuition is part of epistemology. But philosophers won’t extend the same courtesy to lucidity.
@Mww@EQV
On the sense in which reality is and is not 'mind-dependent’ (and also an experiment in Discourse formatting.)
From the Cambridge edition, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer, A42, p185:
Critique of Pure Reason
We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in or general, then all all constitution, all relations of of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves, would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us ~ Immanuel Kant.
Now a passage from Bryan Magee Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, addressing an objection:
Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy
Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant (‘if I take away the thinking subject’) that is impossible’.
Schopenhauer’s defence of Kant on this score was (that) the objector has not understood the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of ‘the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect’ enter unawares … Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding…which is untainted by them (Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, p 105-106)
And finally, how I read it:
Interpretation
Kant is not saying that the world depends on our perception for its existence. He is saying that the world as we experience and describe it—structured in space, time, and causal relations—depends on the forms of our sensibility and understanding. Outside those conditions we cannot meaningfully describe how things are, because the very concepts we would use to do so belong to those same conditions. We ourselves are an intrinsic part of the universe, not an external observer of it. Which is why the objective stance cannot be extended to the nature of reality as a whole.
Cause and effect doesn’t have to produce the same results every time. In fact “randomness” can be regarded as the predicted effect in cases of social science or psychological investigations as long as the randomness was the result of the observed cause.
Even in QM, Metaphysics, and even the other scientific studies, randomness can be a legitimate effect in the law of cause and effect as long as the link between the randomness and the cause were made.
A734/B762: “…..Experience may well teach us what is, but not that it could not be otherwise…”
Stating for the record, transcendental philosophy in its exposition for the possibility of empirical knowledge, is not necessarily lawful for every life form. Hence the irrelevance of right/wrong correctness relative to it.
Another thing, just FYI: post-1770’s doctoral thesis but still pre-critical, Scholastic intelligibility became Kant’s intuitional predication, or intuitiveness. He did this in order to get Plato’s forms fully and irreducibly inside “….the mind a priori….”, A20/B34, in order to juxtaposition to the matter of appearances, rather than mere instances of universals, thereby maintaining at least a recognizable kind of Greek matter/form duality. Aristotle’s logic was still the law of the land, after all.
So when the transcendental idealist is given something represented to him as intelligible, he is meant to understand it as intuitive. It is from that subjective condition, re: the faculty for the receptivity of impressions, that the intelligible for him can never reside in or be discovered in, the thing which appears to the senses.
“Cause and effect” is not about the same results, it’s about an event be explainable as the direct and necessary result of a prior event or events.
“Randomness” in your usage here, is a general condition, it is not a particular event. So you say that the situation of randomness has a cause, but that is not what we are concerned with. We are concerned with the particular events which occur within that supposed situation of randomness.
What is at question is the reason why, within the supposed situation of randomness, one possible event is the one which occurs, instead of another possible event occurring. My argument was that it is incoherent to say that random chance is the cause of this, because that means that the event just occurs spontaneously with no necessary prior conditions for that event.
Because of this I argue that your proposed “randomness” is actually an incoherent conception, or at best, a misnomer. Take a random number generator as an example. Lets say that this is analogous to your proposed condition of randomness. We say that a number is selected randomly, but notice that we say it is “selected”. Therefore the selection of the particular number, which is the particular event, is not a random chance event, it is a selective act of an agent (the machine). The event is therefore not truly random chance, it is caused by that selective act.
We have to be careful not to make a category mistake with this type of interpretation. “Randomness” is a general description, like “hot” is a general description. “Cause and effect” applies to particular events. We can make general causal statements like “fire causes hotness” but these are inductive rules, not “cause and effect” as it is usually understood.
So to say that some particular events caused a general situation of randomness to come into being would be a mixing of categories. it’s like saying that fire caused it to be hot. Notice, we are not saying the particular thing which “it” refers to as the thing which is hot. Then if we name the particular thing, we can see that fire causes different types of things to become hot in different types of ways, and that is a necessary part of understanding “hot”. It would be a similar situation with “randomness”.
I think your summary of Kant is accurate as far as it goes. I think it also highlights the main difference between the Kantian and the Aristotelian/Thomistic approaches to the relationship between knowing and Being.
For Kant the act of knowing is constitutive – Being is whatever is left-over once you strip away everything intuition and understanding applies to it.
For Aristotle/Aquinas, the act of knowing is receptive – Being is what the mind progressively (and incompletely) adequates itself to through understanding and judgment.
For my money, the Aristotelian/Thomistic thesis does a better job of (1) explaining the progressive and fallible nature of inquiry and (2) dismantling the dualism between knower and known. Particularly with regard to (2), Kant’s picture is that of a knower structurally cut-off from Being in-itself by the very representations she applies in the process of trying to understand it.
In my opinion, the Magee passage kind of gives the game away: he talks about raising “impossibly deep levels of presupposition” to self-consciousness, implying that the difficulty of accepting transcendental idealism is evidence of its profundity. But there is another explanation for why it seems counter-intuitive — it might just be wrong about what knowing is.
Consciousness is another thing I think everybody has all wrong. I’ve written a lot here (the old here) about what I think, so I’ll keep it short for the moment. I think consciousness is fundamental. I think it is felt experience. (Most usually call it subjective experience.) The famous “what it’s like”. I think everything is accessible to consciousness, and it’s impossible for anything to not be. So I don’t think that a mind is just conscious experience. I think the mind experiences its own existence.
I have a website where I’m trying to get all my thoughts together. I’m currently working on thinking and mind. Here’s some of what I have.
Thinking is a particular kind of information processing.
In Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam write:
Thinking is the process of turning the information from sensory input into action that does something for the body.
They go on to say a mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements: a sensor and a doer. The simplest hypothetical mind would have one sensor and one doer. Apparently, we are not aware of such a thing on the planet. The simplest mind we are aware of is the archaea, which has two sensors and two doers. I’m not going to pretend I know anything about this, and detail isn’t important for my point. The general idea is that a protein called rhodopsin changes shape when the light changes. This starts a chain of events that leads to the archaea’s archaella (flagella) moving, which moves the archaea. A little more detail is found starting at 3:00 of this video.
The archaella do not move because of the impact of the photons. Nor do they move because of a brute-force chain reaction, like dominos simply banging into each other. The archaella move because a series of chemical reactions carries the information that light with certain characteristics is in a certain direction. And that information directs the archaea, making it more likely to survive.
That is thinking.
Well… Not everyone agrees, and it’s difficult to argue with them with confidence. What an archaea does seems too simplistic to be called thinking. The series of chemical reactions is different than a brute-force chain reaction, but not by much. Each chemical reaction in the series is still a physical, cause and effect event.
The question is - What more is required for the activity to be considered thinking? What would everyone agree on?
In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, Patrick House writes:
That is in line with Ogas and Gaddam. House says the only output of a brain is the physical movement of the body, and Ogas and Gaddam say changing sensory input into bodily output for the entity’s benefit is thinking.
But that’s not the extent of human thinking.
Bach and Beethoven are my favorite composers. They are extremely different. I could go on for a long time comparing and contrasting them; examining the structure of their pieces; looking at chord progressions; comparing how they write fugues; who they worked for and the historical events of their times; on and on. In short, thinking about them, but not turning sensory input into action.
1 + 1 = 2 is a thought that doesn’t have anything to do with turning sensory input into action.
Could thinking be the activity in the brain that does not physical output? Activity that is not physical stimulus and response/cause and effect.
I would think that, if we are mistaken about any aspects of our consciousness, and we do not fully or completely experience everything under its umbrella, it must exist in order for us to have gotten that far. No?
I’m sure consciousness is self evident in the sense that nobody doubts they have it. Anybody who doubts they have it wouldn’t mind giving it up. Any takers? I don’t see how this would be preferable to death. Unfortunately, some people, even some here, see that as preferable. Or drugs to make it all go away.
Aristotle clearly distinguishes two senses of “form”. The forms in the mind of the knower, as universals, is one type, and the unique, particular form of the individual material thing is the other type. Based on this, Aquinas distinguishes between the forms known to human intellect, and the separate, independent “Forms”, which can only be known to an intellect not united with a body, like God and the angels.
No, its a distinction within a theory of knowledge specifically designed to explain how the mind and reality are united in the act of knowing. The whole point is that it’s the same form received in two different modes of existence — natural existence in the thing in-itself, intentional existence in the knower.
Contrast this with Kant, where form is entirely the contribution of the knower. That’s not a distinction between two modes of existence — it’s a principled barrier between Being as-known and Being in-itself.
This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of ‘depth’ with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices.
As it happens, I first encountered Kant through the lens of Eastern philosophy, in a book called The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, by T. R. V. Murti (1955). Murti makes extensive comparisions between Kant and the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Buddhist philosophy. The book has its critics due to its perceived euro-centrism but it was a formative text for me, as at the time I was in the discovery phase of Buddhist meditation and I saw the connections. I’ve since read considerably more of Kant. Regardless of the criticisms, what Kant and Madhyamaka do have in common, is a grasp of the constructive activities of the mind, it’s role in building our world. (There’s an appendix in Magee’s book on Schopenhauer about this topic.)
I’m very much aware of that, within the considerable limits of my reading about it. I’m very much persuaded by Thomist logical realism. I’m also aware that there have been Thomist scholars (e.g. Marechel) who have written on Kant, although much of the literature is arcane.
My sketchy thoughts about it were laid out in the essay Idealism in Context.The argument there is that Berkeley (in particular) was reacting against the whole notion of a ‘mind-independent object’. I say that even though Aquinas was realist, he was not realist in the modern sense, because his epistemology was assimilative. The advent of nominalism and empiricism severed this kind of ‘mind-world’ relation. That is what Berkeley, and later Kant, were protesting.
I don’t think that’s correct. Aristotle clearly distinguish two very distinct senses of “form” in his Metaphysics. Since form is actuality this implies two senses of actuality, and substance dualism. Further, he distinguishes “substance” in the primary sense, as the individual, and “substance” in the secondary sense as the species.
In his Metaphysics he distinguishes two very different ways that we use “actual”. One refers to the activity which occurs at the present time, the other is what we designate as what is ‘actually’ the case. The two are shown to be incompatible because what is the case is expressed as states of affairs (being), what is, while activity (becoming) cannot be captured by this.
So I would argue that the whole point is that “existence in the knower”, and “natural existence”, (what is assumed to be independent), cannot be expressed as the same form in two different modes of existence. Aquinas builds on this separation, between the forms of the human intellect, and the independent Forms, to insist that the human soul cannot adequately grasp the independent Forms, so long as it is united with a body.
If the in-itself were open to us by default, why is wisdom so rare? If Being were ‘unveiled’ to the common gaze, then every person would be a sage. The fact that we struggle with illusion, bias, and suffering suggests that Kant wasn’t creating a barrier, so much as acknowledging the inability of the untrained mind to discriminate the real from the illusory.
I accept the idea that the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition was better equipped to address this inability, because the A-T school possess a sapiential dimension that is arguably lacking in later philosophy. And it may well be true that Kant lacked what the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain called ‘the intuition of Being’. Nevertheless I’m sure the earlier philosophers would agree with Kant, that the untrained mind is not able to natively access the truth of ‘Being in-itself’. But they would add that this is not where the inquiry ends.
To first comment on it, you must also be verbal. That wasn’t a convincing argument for the old idea that all comprehension being entirely verbal, and I’m not convinced by it here. Because having something as a prerequisite not only doesn’t make it fundamental, it doesn’t even guarentee it’s part of the process.
Take the old joke about scientist who trained a frog.
“Jump!” said the scientist, and the frog jumped. “Jump” said the scientist, and the frog jumped. He then took a knife and cut off both the frog’s legs. “Jump” said the scientist and the frrog just lay there, bleeding to death. “And so we can see,” said the scientist, “that removing the legs makes a frog entirely deaf!”
That seems more resonable. But following Descartes’ cogito does not establish consciousness as self-evident, it establishes something that does the functional job of consciousness as self-evident.
Maybe that’s close enough for horseshoes?
But how do either of these establish consciousness as ‘absolute’?
That’s like saying pain isn’t real or colour isn’t real, or the concept of P>=0.05% isn’t real. They’re also phenomena that get experienced, but that doesn’t divorce them entirely from the physical, or put them in a special category. They’re just examples of nonphysical things, along with logic, most mathematics, linguistics, nation-state borders, and so on.
I don’t see any issue with treating subjective experience as a subject of study, just like we study other non-physical things. But self-evident and absolute seem like stronger claims.
Is it though? Baby monkeys understand concepts like 1+1=2. Baby humans understand them within minutes of birth. That suggests that at least some objective concepts, such as ‘objects’, or basic mathematical principles, are hard-wired and unconcious. That they don’t arise from concious thought. Indeed it’s hard to imagine how consciousness could work without at least a few ‘starter’ concepts to get the ball rolling. Unless you can have consciousness without content?
I always find it very difficult to explain things which I consider self-evident.
All that is being said is that the fact of one’s own existence is indubitable.
It is sometimes commented that St. Augustine anticipated Descartes ‘Cogito ergo Sum’ by millenia, when he said:
In the face of these truths, the quibbles of the Skeptics lose their force. If they say: ‘What if you are mistaken?’—well, if I am mistaken, I am. For, if one does not exist, he can by no means be mistaken. Therefore, I am, if I am mistaken. Because if I am mistaken, how can I be mistaken that I am, since it is certain that I am, if I am mistaken? ~ The City of God
So, to anyone who says ‘but your existence might be an illusion’, the answer then is, ‘for whom is it an illusion? An illusion can only occur to a subject.’
But it very much does! That is the whole point of the David Chalmer’s argument that started this thread. And why? Because for instance, pain can only be known first person. You cannot see pain, measure it, or locate it from a third-person perspective (other than saying ‘it looks like that is painful’). Whereas for the subject in pain, the pain is both apodictic and highly specific.
As for concepts, such as the one you have given - strictly speaking, concepts are not phenomena. The word ‘phenomena’ is nowadays applied loosely, as meaning almost anything, but strictly speaking ‘phenomena’ means ‘what appears’. And concepts don’t appear in that sense. They’re what classical philosophy would call noetic or noumenal, as distinct from phenomenal. They are not sensory objects or appearances.
I do agree that human conceptual ability is innate. But, as you well know, h.sapiens are unique in the period of time required for extra-somatic learning and enculturation - around 18 years - whereas it is practically instantaneous for many animal species, who have to be able to run or cling as soon as they’re born.
You seemed quite clear that our conscious sense experience, or if you prefer, the “holisitic experience of the system as a whole while operating”, was seperate from the algorithm you described, even suggesting that it might be time-delayed from it.
The point I’m making is that if it feeds back into the algorithmn, it’s no more or less seperate from it than memory, or sensory input.
I don’t think that’s accurate. For example, studies like Libet’s from the 1970s, no longer support the conclusions they were once thought to. Given how much evidence in this specific area has been altered or overturned in the last 15 years or so, I’m going to ask for an actual example.
Which you probably don’t have to hand, this being a philosophy discussion. If you do have one I’d love to see it, if not then just note that we disagree on the facts.
Yes, and I’m disagreeing with you. Not even all predictions in the brain use the predictive coding you describe. So to suggest that the entire brain uses predictive coding all the time seems not just a bit of an overreach, but also in stark contradiction to what we know to be true.
Now maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe you’re using the specific process of predictive coding as an anaolgy for a broader point, that all of the brain could be using processes similar to or in the same manner as predictive coding.
And I understand that point. I just don’t agree with it, and don’t agree that what we know about how the brain works supports it.
Yes, so did I. When I said that the human brain does not operate in a similar manner to AI, what I meant was that the way AI operate and the way human brains operate are not even similar. Note, that’s not saying that actually there are a few differences to distinguish them. I’m saying they are not even similar to each other.
That immediate reactions, short-term operations, and long-term operations involve different physical areas of the brain, and possess difference performance characteristics. That they are different in location, character and function.
As do several of your previous comments, including the one I was replying to.
Let me put to you the same thing I put to Wayfarer… why wouldn’t the entire operation of our brain be the result of CIA mind control lasers? What proves that we have agency outside of that?
The answer of course is that there is no reason for such a proposition. You’ve come up with a suitable explanation that marries our apparent ability to make decisions with the idea of a determined universe, so that we can both be determined and yet still feel like we make causally effecitve decisions.
I have no reason to embrace this framework, because I’m not a determinist, don’t believe in a determined universe, and so don’t need to incorporate the principles of determinism into my understanding of the brain. As a result, I can avoid the entire area of undetectable systems in the brain that are both causally null and yet somehow vital to our functioning, and just focus on obervable facts.
So you say. I see that as a article of faith.
That’s not to say it’s necessarily wrong, of course. But it’s not proveable, even in theory. And like most non-falsifiable beliefs, I tend to disregard them until there is a reason to take them seriously.
I’ve written a lot here (the old here) about what I think, so I’ll keep it short for the moment. I think consciousness is fundamental. I think it is felt experience. (Most usually call it subjective experience.) The famous “what it’s like”. I think everything is accessible to consciousness, and it’s impossible for anything to not be. So I don’t think that a mind is just conscious experience. I think the mind experiences its own existence.