Consciousness

[Lars Christian Smith (960310 19:15 CET)]

Bill Powers

You once said that one of the things PCT didn't have anything to
say about was consciousness. However, does a class of (control?) problems
exist that can only be solved if you have a sense of self,
or where you have to manipulate a self concept in relation to bringing an
existing state of affairs closer to a desired state?

What would be other defining characteristics of this class of problems?

Lars

···

Subject: Consciousness

Why Consciousness?

Kenneth E. Nahigian

Free Inquiry June/July 2007, p.43-45 http://www.secularhumanism.org

In the noisy and contentious debate between naturalism and religion, it
seems odd that religious believers rarely pose consciousness as a problem
for the loyal opposition. The most outspoken apologist hardly ever brings
this up. Yet, at first glance, the phenomenon of subjective cognition --
that private sense of "I" -- seems the chief critical problem, not just for
mechanistic biology, but materialism in general. I sometimes see it as the
Achilles' heel of naturalism.

If I were a religious believer, this is where I would aim my big guns. I'm
not, but I do see a wonderful landscape to explore here, much of it virgin
territory. Let me try a few shaky steps.

The question is: What is this "I," and how in a mechanistic universe can "I"
even be? Is private consciousness, subjective experience -- what
philosophers call qualia -- the ultimate sign of supernatural underpinnings?
Is naturalism incomplete? Have we materialists missed the point so long
merely because it is so damned obvious?

Let me clear up some possible muddiness. By consciousness, I mean the
private experience of self, "I think, therefore I am," not the behavior that
goes with it.

Modern psychologists who speak of consciousness tend to use the term
behavioristically -- an observed sensitivity to stimuli, a way some animal
bodies move and react, acquiring information and returning it. Psychologists
have good reasons for speaking so, but I'm using the word in the more subtle
sense, a sense that might be a bit more difficult to pin down. Conscious
behavior is not an obvious problem for naturalism. The older kind -- you
might call it the Cartesian kind -- just might be.

I am not assuming an independent duality of body and mind, nor questioning
the obvious link between them. The evidence connecting brain events to mind
events is compelling and strong. Drugs alter brain chemistry to induce
emotions; surgeons remove parts of the amygdala (a brain structure) from
violent criminals, who then become less violent; stroke victims suddenly
lose large portions of their personal identities; Alzheimer's patients
simply "melt away." And, at Stanford University, psychoneurologists have
analyzed EEG recordings to identify, with more than 91 percent accuracy,
what word or phrase a patient is thinking.

In September 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage had an accident-an
iron rod went through his skull. He healed and lived thirteen years after
the accident, but the injury produced a dramatic personality change,
including complete repudiation of his devout religious belief. "Gage was no
longer Gage," said his friends. For people of faith, his case might also
raise interesting theological questions. After the accident, was Phineas
still saved or was he damned?

None of this is my issue here -- mine is far simpler, and more elusive.
Naturalism simply gives no good reason why subjectivity of consciousness
should exist in the first place.

Suppose a billiard player offered to demonstrate a complex bank shot that
would involve a great many interacting balls on a very large pool table.
Suppose he bragged to you that the intricate careening and reciprocation of
the balls would somehow cause the billiard table to become self-aware, to
think private thoughts, to emote, and to achieve a unique subjective
identity. That would seem a bit crazy, wouldn't it? And you'd start edging
toward the door, wouldn't you? Yet this craziness is what is happening in
your skull, at this moment. Reflecting on this should convince you that
subjective consciousness, as I use the term, is a quite different kind of
thing. It is something unique, strange, beautiful, subtle -- and even
frightening.

Consciousness has traditionally presented slippery and compelling problems
for philosophers -- the mind/body problem, the free will problem, and
conundrums of unique identity. In the philosophy business, the core problem
I've outlined here is called the fundamental problem of psychology (FPP). It
is one of the two so-called Holy Grails of philosophy, the other being the
fundamental problem of metaphysics ("Why is there anything, and not just
nothing?").

With regards to FPP in particular, the big mystery wells from a sense that,
if consciousness is "just" another function of a mechanical universe, then
it is a unique function -- the only process in the machine's operation that
seems unnecessary. How wonderful and singular this is, to find at the center
of the mechanistic model and the heartbeat of our daily lives a fundamental
process in apparent excess to all the rest.

Mechanism is the model or paradigm that explains things in terms of matter
and energy, particles bumping together, or waves of probability interfering
across quantum space. I do not denigrate this model. History has vindicated
it again and again. It works; it is coherent, has parsimony and predictive
integrity, and, within it, is a dizzying beauty that unfolds like an
infinite flower. Moreover, it hands us results accurate to many decimal
places, something no magical system, no theology, has ever done.

But mechanism also depends very much on how its parts fit together. Like a
house of cards, knock out one card and the rest come tumbling down.
(Hard-core science-fiction author Larry Niven expressed it succinctly:
"Changing one law is like trying to eat one peanut.") That, in fact, is the
chief strength of mechanism: the way parts dovetail and "click."
Philosophers call it "consilience." Try to scratch one part from the big
picture -- like electromagnetism, nuclear force, x-rays, helium, amino acids
-- and, immediately, problems are storming at the door.

But consciousness, ah! That is something else. Pry it from the big picture,
and ... what? Well, we stop being aware. Not much else happens. The wheels
of the mechanistic model seem to continue to whirl on, at least with respect
to all the basic laws we've learned so far. In short, nothing in the basic
laws of chemistry or physics requires this subjective ghost in our heads. As
far as physics and chemistry are concerned, we might as well be soulless
robots. Consciousness seems like an extra added attraction, like peanut
butter spread on a bran muffin.

The wonderfully apparent nonnecessity of consciousness has always astonished
and delighted me, and I expect that it will continue to do so. Though a
freethinker and evolutionist, I feel almost compelled to give a nod to
mysticism, unable to evade a suspicion that mind/self/subjectivity
represents a kind of crack in the cosmic egg, a deep enigma sitting right on
our doorstep, a clue pointing to something mysterious leaking up through the
underside of things.

Speaking as a whimsical materialist, I find this wonderful, something to
take me down a peg in my materialistic hubris. If creationists or Christian
apologists now want to grab this ball and run with it, bringing up the FPP
in their debates, they are welcome to. Certainly, it makes more sense
overall than the warmed-over nonsense about fossil gaps and moon dust.

But I urge caution. The problem is both larger and smaller than you might
think. It is smaller, because it is easy to argue that FPP is not a problem
for science, which concerns itself with objective events. The FPP, such as
it is, relates to subjective consciousness. The objective/behavior type of
consciousness, as observed earlier, is not a critical problem. The
mechanistic model can easily explain that kind, at least in principle. It
can explain why we talk to each other, why we smile or frown, why we weep,
blush, remember childhood nightmares, why we use words like consciousness in
the first place and even why we discuss the "problems of consciousness."
from the outside, looking in, no real difficulty exists. The mechanistic
model only seems to falter on the subjective side, that is, explaining the
way consciousness feels from the inside, looking out.

Dwell on this long enough, and you will be nudged towards an eerie paradox.
The problem of pure subjective consciousness seems to exist only for you,
the observer. You can never really get inside someone else's mind, never
really see another as he or she claims to see him- or herself. Everything
you perceive is from your point of view, by definition. So, in a surprising,
ineluctable, logical sense, you are alone in your universe. "Other" people
are black boxes that move and speak and posture. And, when you talk of their
thoughts or desires, it seems to be a kind of shorthand for modes of
goal-oriented, information-returning behavior. You seem to speak of the will
and desires of others much as you speak of the "desires" of a chess-playing
computer (e.g., "It wants to keep its king behind the pawns," or "It likes
to get its knights out early").

If this kind of solipsism bothers you, good. It should. But you will be
drawn to it as you pursue the idea of consciousness as a purely "private"
process.

The FPP is also smaller in the sense that it doesn't really contradict the
mechanistic model -- it just seems oddly superfluous in comparison. While
the model seems to fail to explain or predict consciousness, nothing in it
tells us that consciousness cannot occur.

Some argue, for example, that all consciousness is one entity and that each
of us is an individual manifestation of it. The brain in itself is not
consciousness and does not manufacture its subjectivity, but it somehow
"tunes into" universal self-awareness, adding conditionalized particulars
such as memories, personality, desires, and knowledge. When we die,
consciousness does not end. Rather, we let it go-and like wave froth or
spindrift, it falls and melts into a vast ocean, some sort of abstract
ur-consciousness which subsists in the very dance and weave of atoms. What
this would be like I can't imagine. Obviously, the hypothesis is pure fancy,
as impossible to disprove as to prove. But I like to indulge in the
mysticism of it.

On the other hand, the FPP is a larger difficulty than you might think,
because it is as much a problem for theology as it is for science. When a
theologian tries to face down the problem of mind or subjective identity,
the tendency is to "explain" it as an expression of God's love and grace.
This sort of explanation simply nudges the mystery around in a little
circle. "We are conscious because God made us so." Why? "Because he loves
us." Then why didn't God make the rocks and trees conscious? "He doesn't
love them -- not as he loves people." Why doesn't he love them as much? "Why
should he? They aren't conscious beings."

More seriously, a theologian might say that we are conscious because we have
souls. But what is a "soul"? Why are souls conscious? (And, if animals do
not have souls, does that mean animals are unconscious, without feeling?
Descartes thought so!) For that matter, is God conscious? If so, why? Must
we postulate a Supergod? Or if God is simply conscious by his own nature,
why not just say people are conscious "by their own natures"? Simplify the
model -- achieve parsimony.

Moreover, is the soul equivalent to subjective consciousness, or is
consciousness simply one attribute of a soul, where the soul itself exists
objectively, publicly, and in relation to other souls? If so, why not strip
off a layer of language and just say that consciousness is an attribute of
the body?

But if the soul is equivalent to consciousness, and one-dayold embryos have
souls, are they conscious? Are souls indivisible the same way consciousness
is supposedly indivisible? If so, what happens when a zygote fissions to
form identical twins -- does this condemn one of the twins to life without a
soul (a walking robot)? (And then could we ever know which one?)

Suppose you lost your soul one day, but the particles in your body and brain
continued to interact as before, in answer to the same physical laws. Would
your body ever admit it had lost its soul?

These questions have an impudent tone, but I pose them sincerely. They are
not trivial. And, mind you, they don't pertain just to Christianity. They
come part and parcel with the Hindu notion of atman, Scientology's thetan,
and Rosicrucianism's ego. To my knowledge, religion has made no progress on
them, except to cloud them in a haze of semantics. The only religion that
sidesteps the problem of consciousness is Zen.

Western religion and Western philosophy often offer a kind of
ghost-in-the-machine model of consciousness. I'm not sure that explains much
or has much to do with the real problem. Nobody has the full truth of it
yet. And it leads us right to legitimate, indeed, vital questions about the
nature of identity, cognition, freedom, and will.

Certainly, it is important to ask such questions and to try to answer them.
And I have nothing against supernatural answers in principle, except I have
never been quite sure what "supernatural" is. The "answers" supernatural
explanations provide tend to be so vague, so equivocal, that nothing ever is
solved. Like the old saw about Chinese food, an hour later my mind (my
brain?) is hungry again.

···

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Freethinker Ken Nahigian is a part of a Sacramento-based philosophical think
tank consisting of him, four cats, and some shrubbery.

Ted Cloak

[From Rick Marken (2007.06.01.1310)]

Why Consciousness?

Kenneth E. Nahigian>...

What a delightful essay. Thanks for posting it Ted.

Why consciousness, indeed. PCT provides no answers, of course, but I
do think it helps frame the question. The hierarchical control model
of PCT is an effort to explain what organisms do without
consciousness, and it's a lot. In principle, the control model is the
architecture of a physical machine that could imitate all of the
controlling done by an organic living system: controlling low level
things like the position of its limbs and high level things like the
kind of religion it practices (secular humanism being one option; I'm
proud to say that, when asked to say her religion when she was in 4th
grade -- my darling little daughter, now a PhD candidate at Stanford,
said "secular humanist"; obviously she gets her brains from her
mother).

So the PCT model explains non-conscious behavior (controlling), which
does help us see where consciousness _might_ fit in. PCT shows that
consciousness, whatever it may be, is not the same as intentionality.
We behave intentionally all the time without being consciousness of
our intentions. Controlling is intentional behavior so when we control
our posture or the movements of the steering wheel that we make while
driving we are behaving intentionally without consciousness of out
intentions -- although we can bring these intentions into
consciousness at will.

I think of consciousness as something that is outside the hierarchy of
control; consciousness observes the hierarchy (this is called
awareness in B:CP) and it also acts on it (this is called "volition"
in B:CP). So consciousness observes and acts on the hierarchy of
control, which suggests that it is there for maintenance purposes. The
hierarchy of control is the "motorcycle" of our being and
consciousness is the "zen" that is involved in the art of maintaining
that motorcycle. So I think consciousness is there in living systems
-- all living systems -- as the internal "god" that maintains one's
own motorcycle. But what consciousness is -- how it fits into the
nervous system -- I have no clue. But I think it is definitely
associated with the nervous system in some very intimate way -- for
the reasons given by Nahigian in his article. And, of course, if you
have ever been given anesthesia you know that consciousness can be
taken away by chemical effects on the nervous system.

There is actually quite a lot of scientific work that has been done on
consciousness. But I think there is a lot of confusion in the area,
mainly a result, I think, of conflating intentionality and
consciousness. Work on consciousness would be manifestly improved, I
think, if it were based on a control rather than an input-output model
of non-conscious behavior.

Best

Rick

···

On 6/1/07, Ted Cloak <tcloak@unm.edu> wrote:

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
Lecturer in Psychology UCLA
Statistical Analyst VHA
rsmarken@gmail.com

[From Bill Powers (2007.06.01.1530 MDT)]

Ted Cloak (2007.06.01) –

Thanks much, Ted, for the reference to Nahigian. He goes through all the
same ideas, thoughts, experiences, whatever they are, that I went through
when first exploring this stuff with Kirk Sattley. It’s good to know that
so many others have been this way, too – I never much wanted to join in
with philosophers in this area because it seemed to me that the most
important thing was to keep looking. I forgot that I wasn’t going to live
forever.

I haven’t formed any final conclusions, but there are some possibilities
I’ve come across. One of the early realizations was that there is no
point in looking for the Observer in the same way we look at experiences
and thoughts. Experiences and thoughts are what the Observer looks at,
and that’s not where the Observer is. What we really see are thoughts
about the Observer which are attempts to represent that Being by
manipulating thoughts. It’s like using paint and canvas to make a
self-portrait, knowing that the painting is not the self being portrayed.
The thoughts about the Observer are not the Observer. They are being
observed by the Observer.

Anyway, Selves. No matter what characterstic you describe about yourself,
it turns out to be a characteristic of something other than the Observer.
That was the other big aha and came early. The self is just a product of
the hierarchy; it’s not the Oserver. It’s just a window through which the
Oserver looks at other things. When the Observer, or awareness, becomes
identified with a particular self, it sees the world as that self sees it
– but it doesn’t have to do that.

One of the chains of observations that comes up arises when you look at
thoughts, and think to yourself, “That’s a thought.” After a
while something jogs and you realize that “That’s a thought” is
also a thought, and so on. And then the whole infinite series converges
to a finite whole, and you’re looking at thought itself from another
point of view which is not a thought. About there is where I lose it –
or else there’s nothing more to do.

As I say, forming all these experiences and observations into some sort
of coherent picture – installing it in the hierarchy – is far from
finished and may not even be very important. The main thing, I think, is
to break loose from the strong identifications with this or that self and
to become freer to move around. Or maybe this is all just a lot of idle
chatter (says that thought).

Best.

Bill P.