 |
Comments |
|
 | Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 12:49:09 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Ryan M
For those who don't know what heterophenomenology is (like me):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 12:59:27 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: New-Be
E-mail: SteelJaw22(at)yahoo.com
I read the Wiki entry on heterophenomenology too but I'm uncertain what Dennet is getting at. Is this part of his argument against free will? Also, is he saying that the subject does not perceive the object correctly? At all? Off hand, it sounds Kantian but I really don't know. I'm curious to hear what Objectivists think of Beenfeldt's critique of Dennet. |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 13:12:31 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Steve D'Ippolito
As a side note, Daniel Dennett is one of the "New Atheists" (along with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins). |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 15:23:16 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
Sounds weird. I think it is an axiom (or at least a corollary) that the only consciousness one has direct access to is one's own, and that anything one says about another person's consciousness is at best an inference from his or her statements and/or actions.
Reminds me of a story I once heard about two behaviorists having sex. After the act, one behaviorist says to the other: "It was good for you; how was it for me?" |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 21:25:52 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Per-Olof,
Actually, I believe you have it completely backward. I think a proper, nonmystical understanding of consciousness has to reject the view of knowledge of other minds as inferential.
Now, I don't think I can present a completely rigorous argument for this view in the space I can reasonably take in a comment. So instead I'm going to offer some suggestions as to how I arrive at that view. If you want to ask focused questions about specific ones, I'll try to answer as far as I can without sinning against brevity.
* The appeal to "inference" ought to set off alarm bells. Remember that logical positivists held that the only observational knowledge we had direct access to was our own sense-data, the private sensations in our own minds, and that material objects and causality were at best inferences from the statistical regularities of series of sense-data.
* One of the fundamental themes of Rand's philosophy is the rejection of skeptical positions: the treatment of logic as a convention of human language, the Humean denial of causality, Berkeleyan idealism, and so on. But there are also skeptical arguments against other principles, such as the validity of memory and the existence of other minds. Randian arguments can be advanced against those forms of skepticism also.
* An axiom is a statement identifying the basis of knowledge and affirming it; the denial of an axiom implies the denial of any claim to knowledge, and therefore invalidates any claim to know that the axiom is false. But no one, especially in a civilized society, relies totally or predominantly on knowledge that they have produced or verified for themselves. Societies have a cognitive division of labor, in which I accept, say, the findings of evolutionary biologists as valid because I have satisfied myself that the general method of investigation and the basic theoretical concepts they rely on are sound, and that they are in fact checking each other's finding. That whole process requires that there be other minds capable of reason. If I assume that everyone else is an elaborate automaton that's just producing cognitive claims based on a pre-recorded script, I can have no basis for reaching any conclusions about such matters as the philosophy of mind or the history of philosophy.
* Indeed, anything beyond the barest minimum of conceptual thought requires the medium of language, to give it a specific form and to enable us to access our memories at will. But it's inherent in the grammar of human languages that they assume dialogue between two speakers who are both aware of what they are saying (embodied in first and second person grammatical forms).
* On the usual philosophical account, the question "Is X conscious?" is a question that could only be answered by X himself, through introspection, and any claim that X made to that effect would be incorrigible. But suppose X has been in an automobile accident. One of the first things the paramedics will do is determine whether X is conscious. And they can do so by observation, without resorting to philosophical discussion. In ordinary life, another person's consciousness is perceivable.
* It makes sense that this should be so. Consider an animal with a moderately sophisticated nervous system, such as a vertebrate or cephalopod. A vitally important question for many such animals is "Is another animal aware of me?" Prey need to know if a predator has seen them; predators need to know if the prey has seen them and taken alarm. Neural mechanisms for detecting consciousness from outward behavior exist in many animals. Consciousness is not identified solely by philosophical discussion in the medium of language; it is perceived.
* It's possible to give an analytical account of what processes are involved in this perception, such as noticing attentive movements of the other entity's sense organs. But that's not what we perceive; that's the means by which we perceive. WHAT we perceive is that another entity is conscious. This is an automatic integration of sensory input, by which our brains tag certain physical entities as having consciousness and others as lacking it. |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 22:08:56 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Mike Hardy
E-mail: hardy(at)math.umn.edu
Very nice posting, William H. Stoddard. I remember Kurt Keefner taking a similar position in about 1998 or 1999 on one of the WeTheLiving lists. Is there a body of literature associated with this position? |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 22:08:57 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Mike Hardy
E-mail: hardy(at)math.umn.edu
Very nice posting, William H. Stoddard. I remember Kurt Keefner taking a similar position in about 1998 or 1999 on one of the WeTheLiving lists. Is there a body of literature associated with this position? |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 22:48:49 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Within Objectivism, I don't know of one. I have been influenced by some contemporary writers on philosophy of mind, including Paul Churchland and Nicholas Humphreys, and also by Ludwig Wittgenstein's "private language argument," but I don't attribute the view I've sketched here to any of them; their contributions were more in getting me to think about questions than in providing me with answers.
The concept of "mindblindness," developed by researchers on autism and Asperger syndrome, could be relevant as well. |
|
| Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 22:57:23 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Timothy Sandefur
E-mail: tmsandefur(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sandefur.typepad.com
This paper sounds very interesting to me (being an admirer of Dennett, but very interested in Objectivist critiques of him). Is there any way to get a copy of it for less than thirty freakin bucks? |
|
| Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 0:11:54 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/areed2
Re heterophenomenology:
It is also defeated by methods for scalar (therefore objective) introspective measurement of subjective intensities using the d' metric of detection theory (SDT). I've discussed, in other fora, a specific experimental design in which an introspective scalar measurement is completed before any externally observable behavior has taken place.
Re the postulate presented by William H. Stoddard above:
Where does this postulate put the line between perception and cognition?
I ask because the belief that perception is limited and unreliable, central to Kant but going back to Plato's "cave" metaphor, hung on the belief that so-called "perceptual illusions" (which the Greeks already knew about in Plato's time; the design of the columns of the Parthenon compensates for one such "perceptual illusion") are perceptual. One of Rand's breakthroughs was to limit the extent of perception to sensation over time, so that she understood so-called "perceptual illusions" as errors, due to complexity of perceived data, in cognitive identification subsequent to perception. This means that measurement, as a simple, directly perceived comparison between an attribute and a standard, does not involve perceptual data complex enough to cause such errors - and therefore, given a focused mind, measurement can be objective and reliable.
Now the idea that the consciousness of others is directly perceived moves the line between perception and cognition farther out, beyond even the complexity that is known to be involved in co-called "perceptual illusions." And as we know, the "perception" of external consciousness can be illusory (see the protocols of early naive-turing-test experiments using PARRY with computer-naive subjects.) And that leads to errors in the style of Plato and Kant. |
|
| Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 9:05:24 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
Stoddard: I do not understand your objection at all, and I think you must simply have misunderstood what I wrote.
If you have direct access to other people's consciousness, it would have to mean that you're telepathic. I can, of course, only speak for myself, but I am definitely not telepathic. Maybe the rest of the world is, but I seriously doubt it - if for no other reason, that everybody who has tried to read my mind has failed miserably. (People do try that sometimes: it is called "psychologizing".)
Besides, I have "authority on my side" here:
"Your consciousness is that which you know - and are alone to know - by direct perception. It is that indivisible unit where knowledge and being are one, it is your 'I', it is the self which distinguishes you from all else in the universe. No consciousness can perceive another consciousness, only the results of its actions in material form, since only matter is an object of perception, and consciousness is the subject, perceivable by its nature only to itself. To perceive the consciousness, the 'I' of another would mean to become that other 'I', - a contradiction in terms; to speak of souls perceiving one another is a denial of your 'I', of perception, of consciousness, of matter. The 'I' is the irreducible unit of life." ("Journals of Ayn Rand", p. 663.)
(Not that I think one should have to appeal to Ayn Rand's authority on this issue; the point is too obvious.)
One simple example to show what I mean: suppose someone make one or a few confused utterances. I then infer that the person has a confused mind. But this is as far as I can go without a lot of probing; I don't know the source of his confusion - much less what to do to cure him of his confusion.
(Conversely, of course, if someone makes clear and lucid utterances, I infer that he has a clear and lucid mind.)
Or is the issue: how do we know that other people are conscious at all? Well, it has never entered my mind to doubt this - the alternative is simply too odd to consider. (Btw, the same goes for dogs, cats and other animals - that they possess a form of consciousness is simply too obvious.) But we do not know this "telepathically", by directly perceiving their consciousness. We know it by observing such simple things as that they seem to see you, that they sometimes seem to listen to what you are saying, etc. (and in the case of dogs and cats, that they seem to take pleasure in being caressed or hurt when you treat them badly).
(When I say "seem to listen", I am of course slightly sarcastic.)
And btw, why did I have to write such a long post about this? |
|
| Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 9:34:21 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Dana H.
In his first comment, Per-Olof wrote "...anything one says about another person's consciousness is at best an inference from his or her statements and/or actions."
If you remove the "at best" (which makes the statement sound a bit skeptical), then I agree. I take knowledge derived "by inference" to simply refer to any non-axiomatic or non-self-evident knowledge. The conclusion that others are conscious certainly falls into this category, while the claim of your own consciousness is axiomatic. |
|
| Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 9:52:19 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
Dana H.: Thanks for your comment.
I thought of writing: "at best a valid inference, at worst psychologizing", which would have made my meaning clearer. When you judge another person's state of mind, you can go only as far as the evidence permits, and if you go farther, it becomes psychologizing.
(Btw, are you the same "Dana H." that I remember from the old "Objectivism Study Group"?) |
|
| Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 15:36:11 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: Dana H.
> (Btw, are you the same "Dana H." that I remember from the old "Objectivism Study Group"?)
Yes, I am. And thank you for not revealing my last name publicly. (I use the semi-anonymous handle so that those who know me will know it's me. But the internet being what it is, I still want to keep my full identity private to the extent possible.) |
|
| Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 17:22:27 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Timothy Sandefur
E-mail: tmsandefur(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sandefur.typepad.com
I think the article makes a very good and convincing argument. (But why, oh, why, do these articles always have to be so riddled with typos and spelling errors?) I'm so happy to see Objectivists taking Dennett on. I see Dennett as in general a very positive influence, in the direction of (a) REASON, for godsake, and (b) the fact that human beings really do have minds that really do do things. When I read Consciousness Explained, I took his argument re. hetereophenomenology to be for (b)--that is, that he was trying to attack behaviorists and defend at least some degree of the authenticity of selfhood (which is an awful phrase, but not as bad as "heterophenomenology"). But Beenfeldt makes a very good argument that it doesn't go nearly far enough. A great contribution to what appears to be a real flowering of serious, hard-hitting philosophical writing by Objectivists. (That issue of Social Philosophy & Policy that you pointed to a while back was another excellent example--the Darryl Wright article was especially fine.) |
|
| Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 23:31:09 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Per-Olof,
I'm going to start by commenting on a peripheral part of your response, reserving comment on the core issue to a separate post.
I don't think the comparison of perception of others' consciousness to telepathy is well conceived.
The usual conception of telepathy is as direct awareness of the content of another person's consciousness, or as sharing of content between two consciousnesses. But consciousness is not defined solely by its content. Indeed, because the primary function of consciousness is to perceive reality ("existence is identity; consciousness is identification"), the primary content of consciousness is existence, and if consciousness could be equated to the content of consciousness, then consciousness and existence would be the same thing. But they're not. Consciousness is something more; its other attribute is action.
My cat is lying on the coffee table. Suddenly she sits up, her ears become erect and point forward, and she looks at the front door. I have heard nothing, and don't know what has attracted her attention; I don't perceive the content of her consciousness. But I do perceive the action of her consciousness: I perceive that she has perceived something and that she is directing her attention toward what she perceives. I can be aware of the action of her consciousness, without being aware of the content of her consciousness.
I wouldn't describe that as "telepathy." |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 0:03:16 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Per-Olof,
Now as to the core point, as I see it.
In Objectivism, we can distinguish truths that are axiomatic from truths that are not axiomatic. It is axiomatic that reality follows the laws of logic; that actions have causes; that the senses are valid. It is not axiomatic that there are eight planets, or that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, or that human beings evolved from other primate species, or that the human cerebral cortex has four lobes. All of those were determined, not by identifying the fundamental relationship between existence and consciousness that makes knowledge possible, but by systematic investigation of particular facts. In the course of that investigation, we may have occasion to say, "Suppose that things are otherwise," and to investigate what would follow from their being otherwise, and, if that supposition leads to a contradiction with observed facts, to reject it.
Now, one of the vital functions of axioms is to defeat skepticism: to block claims that knowledge is impossible by identifying and affirming the basis of knowledge. So, for example, if the senses are not valid, then let the skeptic show that this is so without relying on any knowledge they gained from their senses. Rand affirms causality, against skeptical rejection of causality, and the validity of the senses, against skeptical claims that the senses mislead us.
But there are other skeptical arguments, as well. For example, skeptics have denied that memory can be relied upon, and that other minds exist. And I say that the skeptics are wrong, and that both the validity of memory and the existence of other minds are axioms.
What if they're not axioms? Then they are not inescapable truths; they are truths that must be established by systematic investigation, and in the course of that investigation, it is legitimate to suppose that they are false.
Well, what if the existence of other minds is false? What follows from the nonexistence of other minds?
If you are conscious, and the rest of us are not, including me, then any statements we make do not reflect our perception of reality; they have, at best, the character of programmed responses from a voice mail system. You cannot rely on them epistemologically. Any knowledge you gained from relying on the statements of other people is unfounded; only the knowledge that you gained directly from the effort of your own mind has real substance. At best, this leaves you cognitively impoverished. I don't see how you could possibly have learned enough about human psychology, or about the history of philosophy, to be engaging in this discussion. And following from that, any general principles you believe in based on your examination of that secondary knowledge are also not to be trusted.
But it's worse than that. We are communicating (I believe) in language. And inherent in the structure of language is the assumption that both participants in a conversation are conscious. This is why we have first and second person grammatical forms: the pronouns I and you, the verb forms am and are, and so on. If you reject other minds, then language is founded on a systematically false view of the world, and any knowledge you express in language is flawed. And without language, only the barest minimum of conceptual thought is possible. Note that Rand's list of anathemas in John Galt's speech includes not only the person who denies logic, or the senses, or causality, but the person who denies grammar. But in assuming grammar, we are assuming other minds.
Or, more briefly, you cannot use language without another consciousness to use it with. There are cases of pairs of children inventing a language to use in communicating with each other; there is no recorded case of a solitary child inventing language.
Language itself embodies and condenses a vast sum of knowledge, more than we are normally consciously aware of, more than any one mind can contain. This is particularly true of the languages of societies that have advanced beyond tribalism, which have vast vocabularies, with every word capturing an increment of knowledge. If you reject other minds, you reject language.
So the denial of other minds amounts to the denial of conceptual thought, and thus of knowledge in its distinctively human form. We can say, "Let the madman who supposes that he alone is conscious prove it without using knowledge that he learned from other minds, or a language that is organized as a process of communication between different minds." The existence of other minds is axiomatic. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 8:27:30 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: Vic P
William,
Great post. So we can say language is a necessary evil and our spoken language is like a computer high level language which interacts with other bio"logical" conscious human entities. We also have our own personal inner language which is programmed by personality, life experience, educational background, ethnic background etc. Little wonder that politics which is really a high level art and high level social science of language requires so much political correctness along with all of the scientific polling data and focus group studies etc. Like product marketing, it's the classical social science based on other minds. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 8:57:02 mst
Comment ID: #19
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Adam,
To complete my comments on this issue, I think Rand got that aspect of perception wrong. I think this for several reasons.
* If perceptual errors are the product not of perception itself, but of cognitive identification of perception, that seems to predict that perceptual errors should be limited to human beings and a very small number of nonhuman species. The great majority of animals do not have any measure of volition or conceptual thought, and thus do not do anything that could be called cognitive identification of perception. Is that borne out by the psychological research finding? I would not think it could be; if animals could not engage in perceptual errors, evolution would not have produced camouflage, mimicry, or threat behavior.
* Rand says that perception, not sensation, is the starting point for human knowledge; that perception is the given. And in this, she appears to be defining perception by its automatic, nonvolitional character. But the process of "cognitive identification of perception" appears to be equally nonvolitional; treating it as not part of perception seems to change the definition.
* The goal of the distinction, moreover, seems to be to make it possible to say that perception cannot ever produce errors or invalid data, so that the errors can be assigned entirely to what human beings volitionally do with perception. And this looks like a form of foundationalism, the philosophical quest for a basis of knowledge that is infallible and never subject to doubt or question. Foundationalism was seen, for example, in Descartes' cogito, ergo sum and in the logical positivists' reduction of human awareness to isolated sense data that assert nothing more than "there seem to be three roughly circular red patches in the lower left part of my visual field." Rationalists thought to develop all knowledge from foundations by deductive logic and thus to have infallible certainty for everything; empiricists thought to develop all knowledge from foundations by induction and probability and thus to have at least exact probabilities for everything. But Objectivism does not equate certainty with infallibility.
* Imagine, for example, that you are a radar operator in the navy, looking at a display. You can track objects on it, and say "That's an airplane" or "that's a helicopter" or perhaps, under some circumstances, "that's a missile." And the processes in the radar system that produce those tracks are completely nonvolitional and thus cannot be choosing to do anything erroneous. But it is not the case that the radar system cannot produce errors. It may have a component break down; it may be subject to an external force that interferes with its operation, such as overvoltages or spikes in its power supply, intense magnetic fields, electromagnetic interference, or improper operating temperatures; it may be sending out microwaves into an unsuitable medium, such as atmosphere filled with small reflective particles; it may even have to deal with deliberate creation of such problems by an enemy of the operator's force.
But it does not follow from this that radar can never be a source of valid knowledge, or that you should turn off your set because you cannot trust it, or that you should reject any particular finding on the ground that radar is not infallible and so this particular aircraft may not really be there. All of those come under the "maybe you're wrong" argument that Peikoff identified years ago. The proper response to the known fallibility of radar, or any scientific instrument, is to rely on it, but to carry out routine minor checks of its operation, and to be ready to respond to actual evidence of error (such as inconsistent readouts or readouts that conflict with evidence via other channels) by fuller checking.
Now, I don't simply equate the senses to, say, radar. We are not required to use radar, or any constructed scientific instrument, to gain knowledge in general; they are tools that increase our knowledge. We are required to use our senses to gain any knowledge. But our senses are parallel to radar in that they are both physical channels for information about the environment we occupy, and, as physical mechanisms, are capable of failure. And that failure can be dealt with in similar ways. The claim of infallibility is not necessary to validate knowledge; what is needed is the rejection of the arbitrary, including arbitrary doubt. That is all that was ever needed to validate the senses, and Rand's attempt to make the senses and perception incapable of error was never actually needed in the first place. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 9:07:22 mst
Comment ID: #20
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
William Stoddard: Your replies have no connection to what I actually wrote, much less then to what I actually think.
Dana H., on the other hand, understood me correctly and made a perfectly valid comment on it. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 9:55:11 mst
Comment ID: #21
Name: Steve D'Ippolito
Timothy Sandefur: "A great contribution to what appears to be a real flowering of serious, hard-hitting philosophical writing by Objectivists."
Objectivist philosophers--by this I mainly mean the "professionals" ARI is helping to create--are eventually going to have to go out and specifically take on and refute other philosophies, in detail and in an academic realm. That is ultimately the only way to demonstrate it is the better philosophy. Up to now I've seen very little of this--Objectivists have mostly concentrated on elaborating Objectivism, which of course is a necessary prelude to fighting the good fight (it does little good to attack without having a better alternative to present).
I find this an encouraging sign. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 10:00:00 mst
Comment ID: #22
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Per-Olof,
If you are referring to Dana's statement that "I take knowledge derived "by inference" to simply refer to any non-axiomatic or non-self-evident knowledge. The conclusion that others are conscious certainly falls into this category, while the claim of your own consciousness is axiomatic." then I certainly agree with you that that is what you think, and that Dana correctly understood that that is what you think. And I agree that what I said is not what you think. But it wasn't intended to be. What I was doing was disagreeing with you. I am saying that what you think is wrong, and presenting my reasons for believing this.
Though I don't think I'd agree that they have "no connection." The statements in a debate are connected, by a common premise or assertion that one debater affirms and the other denies. That's what's going on here.
I do not consider my knowledge that other people are conscious to be inferential, though my knowledge of specific aspects of their consciousness certainly may be. I consider that the existence of other minds is axiomatic. I recognize the denial of other minds as a classic skeptical position, and one that, if carried through consistently by its adherents, would entail general skepticism. And I consider that the existence of other minds is initially known, like the existence of physical objects, by perception.
It appears that you aren't persuaded by my views, and that you don't find them plausible enough to consider the possible case for them in detail. So I won't take up your further time with more discussion. Let's agree that this is a point on which we hold different views. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 10:56:38 mst
Comment ID: #23
Name: Sajid
I am not really sure whether Dennet's grand scheme of completely understanding and predicting a foreign consciousness is even possible. But imagine if it were? Not to make a totally baseless attack but does not this obsession with other people seem a little Tooheyesque (as in trying to find out what exactly motivates someone else)? In any case I wonder what the possible applications are for a machine that can completely understand and predict a consciousness.
1. To help "troubled" people understand who they are and how they are different from "normal" people. This seems to be the most worthwhile application.
2. Create a machine that understands and predicts your own consciousness. Then give that machine a computer, a connection to the internet and tell your consciousness to desire to be a stockbroker or a writer or a computer scientist. The machine will then predict what work you would do and you are free to do other things all day. However, what if the machine, since it is after all your own consciousness, comes up with the exact same idea? Will it try to build another machine like itself so it is also free to pursue other interests? HMMMM... At the very least you could put some limitation on the machine and turn it into a great science fiction character. Build like 5 of these machines and you could live life 6 times over.
3. Create the machine but don't reveal the secret to anybody. Voila, you can now predict human beings. Global domination? No problem.
On a more serious note I actually find Dennet's ideas quite fascinating. As others have pointed out in these comments I do think that knowledge about other people's consciousness can be inferred from their actions. And even though Ayn Rand correctly said (See # 11) that the only way to completely understand a foreign consciousness is to "be" that consciousness, note that there is an entire industry devoted to trying to "be" someone else--the acting industry. I think understanding the relationship between values and action at a physical level is huge. However, there are two big concerns:
1. Privacy. I am not letting random people into my mind. Among other reasons, If I am totally predictable then I am totally vulnerable.
2. This is the really interesting part as I'm not sure its a concern. On the face of it it seems that Dennet is a determinist. How can you predict the actions of human beings? On the other hand the actions of human beings are conditional on the experiences they have and the information they have been exposed to. You could only predict their actions if you had access to that information too. Of course there are too many variables involved. You would need to monitor the mind in question exactly and constantly. Perhaps this system of mind understanding would give meaningful and practical results on larger issues and at a probabilistic level. Also, I think it would be great on a therapeutic level. If you trust your counselor enough to give her total access to your mind, just hook up a "Dennett human consciousness understanding machine" to your mind and voila--your counselor has total access to your mind 24-7. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 11:57:30 mst
Comment ID: #24
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
Stoddard: "Let's agree that this is a point on which we hold different views."
Well, fine. Could you just enlighten us as to what your view is on the quote from Ayn Rand I gave in an earlier comment? Because I don't think I wrote anything that is not implicitly contained in that quote. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 12:06:29 mst
Comment ID: #25
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
Or maybe I should have chosen a better term than "inference"? The point I was trying to make (which is a very simple point) was that we do not know that other people are conscious by directly perceiving their consciousness, but by observing some obvious effects of the fact that they are conscious. Maybe "inference" is the wrong word for this process? |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 12:15:14 mst
Comment ID: #26
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/areed2
William,
But Ayn Rand did not "attempt to make the senses and perception incapable of error," because error as such is a cognitive category, and as such can only result from cognition. Perception is what one is aware of directly; to identify what it is that one is aware of, is an exercise of cognition. Also, you seem to mistake the automatic (albeit sometimes quite complex) operation of mechanistic systems, such as target-acquisition by computer processing of data from radar, or the behavior of the nervous systems of lower animals, for cognition. It isn't, and I recommend the work of Hubert Dreyfus (not an Objectivist, but he's done good work on those questions) if you need this distinction explained in more detail. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 14:57:46 mst
Comment ID: #27
Name: Dana H.
William writes: "I consider that the existence of other minds is axiomatic."
The existence of other minds is certainly NOT axiomatic. The axioms are those fundamental identifications implicit in your first awareness on which all other knowledge rests. The consciousness of others is not in this category.
Sense perception is also axiomatic, in the sense of being self-evident. So if I say, "This brick is red," and you ask me how I know, I just say, "Look!" But as Per-Olof already indicated, the consciousness of others is not accessible at the perceptual level; only its effects are. The consciousness of others is a conceptual conclusion, not a perceptual self-evidency.
You seem to be concerned that if other's consciousness is non-axiomatic that it is somehow in doubt, which would then open the door to skepticism. But this is simply not true. The great majority of what we know with absolute, iron-clad certainty -- i.e., all of our conceptual knowledge -- is non-axiomatic. |
|
| Friday, November 14, 2008 at 23:26:27 mst
Comment ID: #28
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Per-Olof,
I think that adequate presentation of my views would clearly require more bandwidth than I consider it justifiable to use, and more systematic effort to organize my ideas than I can spare the time for just now. So I will let things stand at a quick sketch, and not attempt to present a detailed argument for my position, recognizing that I cannot expect you to adopt my views without such an argument.
However, one of your requests is only fair to attempt to grant, in parting. You requested comments on the following passage by Ayn Rand: "Your consciousness is that which you know - and are alone to know - by direct perception. It is that indivisible unit where knowledge and being are one, it is your 'I', it is the self which distinguishes you from all else in the universe. No consciousness can perceive another consciousness, only the results of its actions in material form, since only matter is an object of perception, and consciousness is the subject, perceivable by its nature only to itself. To perceive the consciousness, the 'I' of another would mean to become that other 'I', - a contradiction in terms; to speak of souls perceiving one another is a denial of your 'I', of perception, of consciousness, of matter. The 'I' is the irreducible unit of life."
This doesn't read as if Rand had thought out her formulation carefully. She distinguishes between matter and consciousness, she states that only matter is an object of perception, and then she says that consciousness can perceive itself. But if consciousness is not matter, then by her own formulation, it cannot be an object of perception. Her formulation about consciousness being the subject does not really rescue this, because the subject is the agent that performs an act, not the patient that undergoes it; the role of consciousness as the subject is TO PERCEIVE, not TO BE PERCEIVED.
But the passage does reveal a key assumption of Rand's, and I believe of yours: that consciousness is not matter and cannot be perceived by perceiving matter.
In a trivial sense, of course that's true. Consciousness doesn't have mass, or volume, or any of the other usual attributes of "matter." But that is so restricted a sense of "matter" that it would banish nearly all of physics as well. We can in fact perceive more than matter and material objects. We can perceive states of material objects, such as being hot or cold; we can perceive attributes of material objects, such as color, and attributes of substances, such as taste; we can perceive movements of material objects; we can perceive relations among material objects, such as spatial position; we can perceive complex processes carried out by material objects, such as speech or melody. We can even perceive energy as distinct from matter, in such forms as visible light and radiant heat. And when we open things up that far ontologically, it is far less obvious that perceiving consciousness is not one of the modes in which we can perceive matter.
By making the separation between the two, Rand seems to be assuming a specific constitution of the world: one in which consciousness exists apart from matter. In other words, a form of mind-body dualism.
I am not a mind-body dualist. I regard consciousness as a form of information processing; and I don't believe in information without a physical medium. And therefore I believe that when I am aware of my own consciousness, I am being aware of certain processes taking place within a physical medium, which is my own nervous system. Introspective awareness is the form in which this physical process presents itself to my awareness, just as sweetness and bitterness are the forms in which certain chemical structures present themselves to my taste buds. But there is not a separate realm of taste apart from matter, and there need not be a separate realm of consciousness apart from matter.
And consciousness is not a process that takes place purely within the brain. The nervous system's primary function is to guide the movements of the body, and that includes the movements of the sense organs that direct them to specific objects in the environment, enabling us to pay attention selectively to things that are important to us. It's no more strange to look at a cat's pricked up ears and say, "She hears something outside," then it is for a hiker to hear a noise outside and say, "There's a blue jay in those trees," or for a doctor to apply his stethoscope and say, "Your right lung is full of fluid."
Yes, we are detecting consciousness by the actions it gives rise to. But that's not inferential. Very young infants are able to identify other entities around them as conscious, and to recognize when they are being paid attention to, long before they have the use of language. Many animal species are able to be aware of the states of the consciousness of other animals; research on primates, for example, has shown that they can act in a way that takes into account information that they have and that other members of their social groups do not. And yet animals are not volitional, or rational, or conceptual. Their awareness of each other's consciousness must be in the form of perception; it can't be the product of inference, because animals don't have logic and can't infer things. Their nervous systems are "wired" to detect consciousness and its actions. And so are ours. |
|
| Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 2:06:14 mst
Comment ID: #29
Name: Per-Olof Samuelsson
E-mail: per-olof.samuelsson(at)swipnet.se
URL: http://www.nattvakt.com
William Stoddard: "This doesn't read as if Rand had thought out her formulation carefully. She distinguishes between matter and consciousness, she states that only matter is an object of perception, and then she says that consciousness can perceive itself. But if consciousness is not matter, then by her own formulation, it cannot be an object of perception.ยค
Yes, I noticed this too. But I don't think the formulation is much to quibble about. OK, she could have put in a phrase like "with the exception of" to avoid misunderstanding.
It is a fact that we *do* perceive our own consciousness. (Or should I be overly careful here and speak only for myself? No, I'm joking.) And this is one of the things that set man apart from the lower animals. We have self-consciousness and the ability to introspect. Dogs and cats do not engage in introspection (at least not the ones I have talked to...) |
|
| Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 8:20:30 mst
Comment ID: #30
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
Per-Olof:
Actually, I don't think I agree that "It is a fact that we *do* perceive our own consciousness." But my disagreement is on terminological grounds. Rand has established the use of "perception" to refer to the process of automatic integration of the material provided by the senses. But whether consciousness is, as I believe, a process taking place primarily within the brain, or, as Rand's comments suggest she might have believed, a nonmaterial process of some sort, we don't have sense organs able to detect it. So calling it "perception" is ambiguous. I suppose it's acceptable as a metaphor, but there is always a danger of taking metaphors literally. I think it would be better to use the more general term "awareness."
Note that I've said that consciousness takes place "primarily" within the brain. That phrasing is deliberate. I see the primary function of the nervous system as being control of the movements of the body. One aspect of that control is attentive movement: reaching out to touch something, shifting one's grip to better feel an object, turning the head to catch sounds, shifting one's gaze to put an image on the part of the retina with high resolution, and so on. This is not just peripheral to consciousness; there are experiments in which an image is projected onto the retina, and as the eye shifts to scan different parts of the image, the projection is countershifted so that the same pattern falls constantly on the same part of the retina . . . and, after a short time, the subject stops seeing the image. Consciousness involves the exploratory movement of the body through the environment. I don't know if we could say that an isolated brain with no sensory input or motor output would be conscious in any meaningful sense.
Of what does our self-awareness consist? Given that consciousness regularly gives rise to bodily movement, and that that movement includes attentive movements that help to maintain and re-create consciousness, part of our self-awareness is awareness of the movement of our own bodies. And we can be aware of other people's consciousness through awareness of the movement of their bodies. The perception of consciousness in other people is the automatic integration of sense data that reveal such characteristic movements. It's what enables us to say "he's awake" or "she hears something" or "are you listening to me?"
In relation to our own consciousness, there seems to be a different process going on as well: we seem to have some awareness of our own internal brain states. For example, psychologists talk about the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon, where you are trying to think of a word (for example, someone's name), and you have a sense of knowing what you want to say, and of readiness to say it, before the actual word comes into your mind; that seems as if it may be awareness of your own brain state. Or, if you are looking for an object you have mislaid, your gaze may travel about the room, primed to focus on the missing object if it comes into view, and you can experience that readiness to see a given thing before you actually experience seeing the thing. We feel these things as a sort of tension. I don't know if that self-awareness is actually direct awareness of the inner states of our own brains, or awareness of our own bodily stance and movements to which those inner states give rise. Either way, this seems to be an aspect of self-awareness that we have for ourselves but not for other people. And I think this is probably what you are talking about as "self-awareness." |
|
|
Post Your Comment |
|
|
|
E-mail Diana Hsieh
Comments
