Many people see predictive processing , one of today’s central approaches in neuroscience, as fitting within a broadly Humean framework. Hume’s basic picture is that the mind acquires habits of expectation from repeated experience. When A is regularly followed by B, we come to anticipate B when A appears. The expectation is not rationally grounded in any necessary connection in the world; it is a psychological disposition produced by experience.
Predictive processing looks like a sophisticated version of this. The brain continuously extracts statistical regularities, it generates expectations based on past experience, it updates those expectations when prediction errors occur and knowledge becomes adaptive expectation rather than access to intrinsic essences or necessary truths.
Hume denies that we directly perceive causality. We perceive sequences and correlations, then form expectations. Predictive processing similarly treats perception as probabilistic inference under uncertainty. The organism learns patterns and regularities rather than directly apprehending necessary structures.
There are philosophical alternatives to the Humean foundation of predictive processing. Thinkers like Evan Thompson, Hanne De Jaegher, and Shaun Gallagher have tried to reinterpret predictive processing in a more enactive direction. Influenced by philosophical movements like pragmatism, hermeneutics and phenomenology, they keep Friston’s mathematics, but reject representationalist readings. They understand prediction as embodied skillful engagement with the world. That move moves predictive processing closer to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
I always try to understand you, but never know if I do well enough to know how much I agree. We are the universe becoming aware, and becoming able to understand itself. I can’t help but wonder if the universe will one day be one giant mind. Or if that’s possible.
I don’t get the impression that this is the point of your approach. I get the impression that you are saying we are already there. Reminiscent of the Brahman/Atman relationship, perhaps.
I suggest that “consciousness” is best understood to indicate the “presence” of the world itself from the “bodily point of view” of the “conscious” organism.
I don’t believe in the ghost story of the “physical” that is fundamentally concealed from experience. Experience is not “inside consciousness stuff.” Experience is world-from-organism’s-POV.
This approach is not idealism ( tho it may be understood that way ) but rather ontoperspectivism. There is only the shared world, but only from POV.
“The self exists independently of physical reality, and the observer is fundamental.”
They said what appeared to be a complete isolation of a particular individual did not take into account to how tightly we were married to our life, happening for a brief time, before the lights went out.
So, that leads to trying to see the soul as something owned by nobody. One version:
Probably it is better not to say that the soul pities, or learns, or thinks, but to say rather that the soul is the instrument whereby man does these things; that is to say, that the movement does not take place in the soul, but sometimes penetrates to it, and sometimes starts from it.
—Aristotle, De Anima, 408 b, translated by W.S. Hett
I basically agree with this quasi-Hegelian idea. I’d frame this in terms of a larger and more self-referential vocabulary.
In your language, I might say that consciousness is the “being” or the “presence” of the universe. This “being” of the world is not a stuff in the world. The “being” of the world is the “being here” of various kinds of things.
A “conscious” human organism as organism is “meat in nature.” But that organism as “consciousness” is the presence of the world from the point of view of that “meat.”
What obscures this is a tendency to understand “being” to point toward as a special kind of stuff that the world is made of. A so-called “physical” object is invented that is placed “behind” the manifest and genuinely physical object that is “there in its quality.”
“Qualia” tries awkwardly to point at this “thereness of quality.” But it’s still stuck in “substance metaphysics.” Instead of investigating the structure of genuine qualitative objects — which is also the issue of consciousness — it loses itself ideological “names” for “being as sacred stuff.” I say “sacred stuff” because this stuff functions as “truthmaker” for ideological claims on authority. I bring up this ideological distortion to encourage a more sober and direct investigation of what we already mean by saying that our moms are “conscious.”
My mom is “conscious” because the furniture is also there for her. The furniture is “physical” because it is “there as quality” for anyone around. To me this isn’t the whole story but the sketch of a strategy for spelling out the mundane but weirdly elusive structure of our basic situation. Instead of starting with “objective reality” ( as if we know what that means ), we might try something assumed by science in the first place — public objects.
I was trying to explore how what we experience as realify might plausibly emerge from components or multiple drafts.
If there isn’t an internal editor something needs to stabilise a single account of reality.
The architecture of prediction evaluation and reward may provide this because it is claimed that it is rewards in the form of dopamine that strengthen neural connection. So the theory goes.
However if there are other plausible mechanism then I am open to them.
An illusion requires a subject to be deceived. If the self is entirely an illusion generated by distributed processes, what is experiencing the illusion?
If each commissioner already generates a “self,” then how does this explain the self; It has just multiplied it into a committee of homunculi. Add to that, if they generate complete accounts, who or what binds these accounts into a singular conscious experience? If we reject a “central editor,” how do multiple complete accounts compete or compliment without a common neural shared arena to compete or compliment in?
I prefer answers rather than questions because we are still at the stage of looking for answers. But yours are good questions so I will do my best to answer them.
I dont know. In fairness to me, I haven’t claimed that there is an illusion. Dan Dennett does in his book Consciousness but that was published in 1991. I think that it has been slightly overtaken. I have suggested that the first person is constructed by a self organising biological processes.
Commissioners generate an account of reality. They are not homunculli anymore than a film studio is.
I set out a descriptiion of an integrative process which concluded that “networks of neurons stabilise around coherent patterns of activity” and the “account that becomes most stable is experienced as the present moment”
You’re welcome.
I think it is important to at least ask ones self questions as a means of then pushing forward with any answers which honestly address said questions.
I dont know. In fairness to me, I haven’t claimed that there is an illusion. Dan Dennett does in his book Consciousness but that was published in 1991. I think that it has been slightly overtaken. I have suggested that the first person is constructed by a self organising biological processes.
Both a “self” and “organising” require sentience. Otherwise we need to explain how an automated non-sentient process achieves this “first person” either by putting forth the idea that this first person isn’t really sentient or putting forth the idea that the process itself is sentient (both idea which will naturally produce more questions)
Commissioners generate an account of reality. They are not homunculli anymore than a film studio is.
Likely then the use of the word “they” is misleading?
A film studio is of little use as an analogy for the role of the Commissioners as Commissioners roles are, without sentience.
I set out a descriptiion of an integrative process which concluded that “networks of neurons stabilise around coherent patterns of activity” and the “account that becomes most stable is experienced as the present moment”
Yes you did. I pointed out that something is doing the experiencing and in order to experience, that something has to be sentient.
I think a sentient self can be produced by biological processes. If we’re trying to explain how sentience and a first-person self arise, then requiring sentience to already be present within that process—or to guide or organise it—introduces a circularity. It would be using the thing we’re trying to explain as part of the explanation.
I am grateful to @BestGuessYet and @Patterner to directing my attention to Thomas Metzinger. Just watched his Ted talk and found it fascinating. Quite a lot to think about.
BGY gets all the credit. I don’t know Metzinger at all. I just started watching that Ted Talk, and I’m not happy with his premise:
That is the self. The nature of the self may not be what any given person thinks it is, or even vaguely assumes it is. It may not be what the majority of people think or vaguely assume it is. But instead of saying, “There is no self, it’s really this…”, I prefer, “This is how the self is achieved”.
And do you think that the biological process might also be a sentient thing?
If we’re trying to explain how sentience and a first-person self arise, then requiring sentience to already be present within that process—or to guide or organise it—introduces a circularity. It would be using the thing we’re trying to explain as part of the explanation.
So? Perhaps the sense of circularity derives from a conscious disconnect? After all, we are trying to explain something we are not entirely sure what it is.
The thing is, there is nothing else which CAN be used to supply explanation about itself. Without consciousness existing, how is anything explained, or acknowledged as even existing?
Is the argument presented that we don’t exist? Is the argument saying that whatever is creating this illusion of self, is itself not a self? what is the argument actually providing? And what are those participants in creating the experiments? Illusions of selves showing illusions of self?
My initial impression about what the experiments might be showing is that human brains may not be as individual as we are told they are…
The idea that there is not a “self” or “you” which is real - it is a fabrication of many different things - not just physical - has some merit in that it is true we all start out from the blank slate default - and for the most part are subjected to a great variety of influences which largely determine how that self is shaped…and therein the unreal is produced…
Why, we are even informed that we are the body - the form and we adapt to that information and accept it as true but I don’t think this group of experiments really show us anything more than that. After all, what is “owning” the phantom limbs? Is it really the brain? Or is it something beyond the brain which is still in the process of working itself out?
So, is Prof Dr.Thomas Metzinger unknowingly showing us that the transparency is seeing through the constructed “self” to find something very real and very misunderstood?
What is to say that it is no already that? A mind which created temporal forms for the specific undertaking of experiencing said forms through the perspective of the forms themselves…and consequently getting lost to it’s “mind-self” in the process - not as a permanent loss but a rather long but still temprorary one?
We are the universe becoming aware, and becoming able to understand itself. I can’t help but wonder if the universe will one day be one giant mind. Or if that’s possible.