"it feels like something to have a mind, to think, to cognize; and that something does not feel passive."
But it could be passive. As Hume sees it, these feelings are nothing "but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
I think the specific feeling of agency requires particular attention. It would still be a hard problem without agency, but the fact that we feel ourselves, and that we worry about ourselves, that's special.
How many other species commit suicide? Maybe I'm speaking out of line here, but the ability to build hospitals, what causes us to do such a thing?
The paper Minds, Brains and Turing by Harnad really clears up a lot of things: summarize the materials we covered in class, make a connection among them and introduce what we are going to talk about right now: feelings.
I pretty agree with what Harnad says about feelings. As I said in my previous commentary on Dennett's paper, we feel something when we understand something. Harnad says also, that we feel something when we feel something and the feeling is not deniable; the feeling is there. Although it seems vague, but it is not hard to understand because thinking is similar: as Harnad says, we cannot doubt if we are thinking or not, because doubting is thinking. Feelings are similar, because we already feel something there.
Harnad links feelings with Turing Tests and explain more about why cognition is not computation. He expands it by saying Turing Test cannot account for feelings at all, no matter T2, T3 or T4, and it only accounts for causal mechanisms - whether they can do some or all the things that we can do, or do we have the same brain functions. I think Harnad is right here, because feelings are subjective. My feelings are only known by me and your feelings are only known by you, and how should we test feelings?
But one thing I do not understand is that, isn't cognitive science about causal mechanisms? We try to reverse-engineer and explain why we can do what we do. But if causal mechanisms fail to explain feelings, does that mean in the domain of cognitive science, explaining feelings is not really its obligation?
In the article Animal Pain and Human Pleasure: Ethical Dilemmas outside the Classroom, Harnad makes people aware that eating meat is actually doing harm to animals because animals have feelings.
As a meat eater, I feel a little uncomfortable reading this, but I will not discuss whether eating meat is right or not but rather on why people and animals feel. Harnad in this article seems to say that it is the nervous system that makes us feel. He says, "all animals with nervous systems feel" and that "Herbivores have to eat too, and they too are predators, but their prey – plants — though they are likewise living organisms, are not feeling organisms. They do not have nervous systems." So is this why we feel? Because of nervous system?
Regarding to what we have been talking about, it is possible.No Turing Tests include feelings, so no causal mechanisms. But what about T4? If a system passes T4, does it mean it has the same brain function as we do? If it passes T4, does it not mean it also has a nervous system? - or it still only means it has the same "functions", do what we are able to do and excludes feelings?
I thought I might try to contribute some thoughts to your questions.
“But one thing I do not understand is that, isn't cognitive science about causal mechanisms? We try to reverse-engineer and explain why we can do what we do. But if causal mechanisms fail to explain feelings, does that mean in the domain of cognitive science, explaining feelings is not really its obligation?” Cognitive science is about causal mechanisms…but I wouldn’t say exactly that “causal mechanisms fail to explain feelings.” Feelings do have a causal mechanism, it’s just that we have no way to test if we’ve ever found it because we can’t know for sure if anything we reverse engineer can feel, even if it tells us that it can. ‘Feeling’ is part of all the things that we can ‘do’, so it definitely would be on cognitive science to explain, if an explanation could be found. However, the problem is that maybe it’s impossible to explain, because we only know what it feels like for ourselves to feel and not for anyone else. “So is this why we feel? Because of nervous system? Regarding to what we have been talking about, it is possible. No Turing Tests include feelings, so no causal mechanisms. But what about T4? If a system passes T4, does it mean it has the same brain function as we do? If it passes T4, does it not mean it also has a nervous system? - or it still only means it has the same "functions", do what we are able to do and excludes feelings?” I think the nervous system allows us to feel, but it doesn’t cause us to feel. I thought that the question of whether T4 could feel was an interesting question, and I would be inclined to say yes. Our brain is what causes us to feel, so if a system has the same brain as we do, then I would think that it would be able to feel.
I had a hard time going through this reading, before and after class is still confusing, and still after reading the comments. What are the methods of heterophenomenology? Recording first person responses? How is it that it is trying to predict or forecast, what we are going to do, or think? And does this imply that it can predict when we will feel? That still won’t tell us how and why. “these internal states have contents, but not conscious content, only pseudo-conscious contents. The Zombie Hunch, then, is Chalmers’ conviction that he has just described a real problem. It seems to him that there is a problem of how to explain the difference between him and his zombie twin.” When I first read this, I identified the Other’s mind problem right away, which we have established refers to only being able to know within yourself how you feel, the minds of others are inaccessible to us. We “solve” this issue, by assuming, that based on similarities we can assign to others the felt states that are only accessible to us. I’m still confused as to how heterophenomenology (“…and then I’ve given it an unwieldy name.” -.-) addresses this problem, does it simply not acknowledge it like the hard problem? How and why we feel? In class I had the idea that it maybe had to do with something innate, along the same lines of the UG discussion that we had, but we quickly changed to the animal discussion, and I remembered well animals also feel (and they don’t have UG(Harnad has said that primates think, can we say this about other animals?)), so maybe thinking that the capacity (?) to feel simply evolved in our genes is too much of a stretch, but I still want to try to decompose this idea. The ability to feel, and I refer to all kinds of feeling: it feels like something to see red, it feels like something to snowboard, it feels like something to be hungry, if feels like something to be in love etc. permitted our species to form more efficient (?) bonds, and it allowed our species to survive more within the frame of a social structure. Doubtfully this will settle how and why, but maybe it could say something about the origins of feelings (then again we have equated feeling with experiencing, (so if to experience is to feel how could we experience without feeling)) , and why it exists anyways? Would we be able to survive without our capacity to feel? I’m so confused.
These are some really good questions! I'll try and add something that may help (but it may not!)
"In class I had the idea that it maybe had to do with something innate, along the same lines of the UG discussion that we had, but we quickly changed to the animal discussion, and I remembered well animals also feel (and they don’t have UG(Harnad has said that primates think, can we say this about other animals?)), so maybe thinking that the capacity (?) to feel simply evolved in our genes is too much of a stretch..."
I think we can look at thinking, feeling, and communicating (as a form of doing) as part of cognition but they're not all the same. So it's possible to have the capacity for one but not another.
"Would we be able to survive without our capacity to feel?"
This is really interesting. I think that it's impossible to answer because a) we wouldn't be human. But if we have a thought experiment where by some virus or other infection we all suddenly lost our capacity for feeling (sort of like in the Walking Dead where zombies have activity in the brainstem but nowhere else, and therefore presumably no consciousness and no cognition other than the vegetative cognition) then yes, I suppose we could survive for a little while without the capacity to feel.
As for the evolutionary explanations for why we may have developed feeling - I think that there's more to feeling than just emotions and feelings about other people. So I think the social aspects are important but there is more to it. There are all the sensory aspects, and the feelings we have about our feelings - so the analyzing and decision-making that can be independent of the minds of others.
"Now faced with these failures of overlap–people who believe they are conscious of more than is in fact going on in them, and people who do not believe they are conscious of things that are in fact going on in them–heterophenomenology maintains a nice neutrality: it characterizes their beliefs, their heterophenomenological world, without passing judgment, and then investigates to see what could explain the existence of those beliefs. "
"Heterophenomenology is nothing but good old 3rdperson scientific method applied to the particular phenomena of human (and animal) consciousness. Scientists who were interested in taking the firstperson point of view seriously figured out how to do just that, bringing the data of the first person into the fold of objective science."
I have issues with the premise that science is at all objective - I don't think there is a such thing as total objectivity, and of course there are methods that are less objective than others, especially when claims are made without explanation or without reason. However Dennett asserts that heterophenomenology is neutral and a 3rd-person method - I say, how can it be when it has been created in the 1st person? Taking the first-person view seriously is a step in the right direction but the tests used to do this and the conclusions made are still implicated in 1st person points of view.
I also take issue with the way belief is equated with consciousness - I think beliefs are part of feeling which is part of consciousness, but there is so much more to consciousness than beliefs.
"Although he says the zombie lacks that evidence, nevertheless the zombie believes he has the evidence, just as Chalmers does. Chalmers and his zombie twin are heterophenomenological twins: when we interpret all the data we have, we end up attributing to them exactly the same heterophenomenological worlds. Chalmers fervently believes he himself is not a zombie. The zombie fervently believes he himself is not a zombie. Chalmers believes he gets his justification from his “direct evidence” of his consciousness. So does the zombie, of course."
This critique of Chalmers is used by Dennett to argue for heterophenomenology - but I kept thinking, as I re-read the passage, that I can't leap over the Zombic Hunch and that heterophenomenology does nothing to address the hard problem!
"First person science of consciousness is a discipline with no methods, no data, no results, no future, no promise. It will remain a fantasy."
I haven't given up hope yet. Maybe we will someday develop a cognitive tool, or be able to tease apart consciousness to the point where there is a breakthrough. But this hope is very much grounded in sci-fi-cog-sci. I do think that "first person science of consciousness" is a dead end.
“Our inescapable uncertainty about wether T2, T3 or T4 succesfully capture and axplain cognition turns out to reduce to the question of whether causal explanations only capture and explain know-how or they also explain feeling.”
At the start of the class it was said that consciousness is feeling and I completely agree with this statement. It has been suggested in this paper that there is a possibility that a fully functional T3 robot could or couldn’t have feelings and therefore consciousness. I am going to take Descarte’s side on the fact that I can only be sure that we are feeling (apart from the mathematical proofs) and that I assume that other people who act and behave as we do are also feeling. It has been noted in this paper that this assumption is strengthened by the fact that people also have a brain like myself. I don’t really agree with the fact that because we all have brains that we should assume that we all feel. What I don’t agree with is that we need a brain in order to feel and I don’t think that by reverse engineering our cognition into a robot that is able to do all that we can do that it will also have feelings. I base myself on the fact that is has been shown by Dr Parnia and his colleagues that awareness, consciousness, is present in absence of brain activity. This phenomenon occurs in near death experiences where people have reported being aware and conscious after being declared dead. I am not dismissing the brain completely there is a very interesting relationship between the brain and our consciousness and this relationship is at the base of how this world gets translated into our consciousness. For what is of my opinion I consider as a holder or receiver for consciousness rather then it's emiter.
As a believer in the uncapturability and importance of felt experience when reverse-engineering the mind, it's good to read someone who is highly skeptical of this position. I've realized that I don't have good reasons to ground my position. Hopefully that will change with the discussion next class.
Heterophenomenology sounds promising, but might not be actually possible. Dennett says that "every blush, hesitation, and frown, as well as all the covert, internal reactions and activities that can be detected, are included in our primary data". I struggle to see how such things could be analyzed objectively. I don't believe it's possible to extract a person's mental states from behavioral data to the point where we could infer their feeling-states. How can we even describe a feeling? If we had this data for a lifetime, it might be possible, but we are nowhere near having any type of framework for the analysis of such a massive quantity of varied and multi-modal data.
Even if we did, I can't shake the intuition that we would still be failing to capture something about the heterophenomenological subject's mental state. "Third-person belief attribution" fails to capture something about mental states that we know from our own first-person experience of having mental states. We don't just have beliefs—we have feelings!
“In an insensate world there would still be natural laws (laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism) but no such thing as morality, or laws of conduct, or right or wrong, because if nothing feels, nothing matters.”
This is why the biological trait of feeling is so important. Even if the hard problem is unsolvable (Dennett’s heterophenomonology certainly doesn’t solve it), and we never find out how and why we feel, the worlds of organisms with nervous systems will always be structured around feeling (assuming this trait stays adaptive and isn’t selected out of the genome).
When I read that ethics and law are predicted by feeling I immediately started trying to find exceptions and was unable to. Stealing is wrong because it is painful for the organism that you take from (I say organism because this definitely applies to animals too). Playing soccer in the library is wrong because it causes those who are studying and reading to become frustrated and angry (Presumable if they could be frustrated and angry without feeling those states, playing soccer in the library wouldn’t be a problem). Harvesting vital organs from a living human to save a relative’s life is wrong because a. it causes the original organ-owner pain and b. it causes pain to their family and friends. Drunk driving without a seatbelt is wrong because it increases the chances of causing pain to others and to yourself. It is puzzling that murder of other humans is considered unquestionably wrong while committing this same crime against members of a different species of animal is accepted in society. I can’t see a reason why species boundaries would justify ignoring the fact that we are causing pain to others that is not essential to our own survival.
"remember that heterophenomenology gives you much more data than just a subject’s verbal judgments; every blush, hesitation, and frown, as well as all the covert, internal reactions and activities that can be detected"
The difference between introspection and heterophenomenology is the latter uses a larger array of output, not just limited to verbal statements. In fact, the output should include everything that can be observed from a human being, including brain wave, of course. But just like introspection, it cannot answer how what its trying to explain--consciousness/feeling--works. Even if you know everything about heterophenomenology, the best you can do is predicting the human's output(T3/T4 output), but how/why do we do it? How and why we have feelings is the hard problem. It is particularly hard because of the other mind problem: You can never know if someone else has feelings at all. Unlike other cognitive abilities such as logic reasoning, memory, etc., feelings cannot be tested by computation modeling. If we build a robot that seems to have feelings: it says it has feelings and behave as if it has feelings, but still we can never know if it really has feelings or if it is faking it. The only thing we can be sure of is that we have feelings.
"He says that the zombie doesn’t have the same beliefs as us “because of the role that experience plays in constituting the contents of those beliefs,” but I don’t see how this can be so. Experience (in the special sense Chalmers has tried to introduce) plays no role in constituting the contents of those beliefs"
There's perfectly correct to say that Chalmers could exhibit the exact same behavior as zombie if he were to be "zombified". But the difference between live Chalmers and zombified Chalmers is consciousness/feeling. The zombie that Chalmers describes has no conscious experience, in other words, if it was to come back to human, it won't feel like anything had happened. But for live Chalmers, he does. He can tell you that how angry he is when you tried to zombify him, but still, you cannot know for sure(by means of heterophenomenology) if he is being Chalmers or still a zombie. A zombie could still be faking it.
I found this article slightly difficult to understand because it used a series of weasel words for “feeling”, making it convoluted and complex. Nevertheless, I will attempt to address the following quote:
"Of course it still seems to many people that heterophenomenology must be leaving something out. That’s the ubiquitous Zombic Hunch. How does the A team respond to this? Very straightforwardly: by including the Zombic Hunch among the heartfelt convictions any good theory of consciousness must explain. One of the things that it falls to a theory of consciousness to explain is why some people are visited by the Zombic Hunch. Chalmers is one such, so let’s look more closely at the speech acts Chalmers has offered as a subject of heterophenomenological investigation."
The author is implying that feeling is simply a belief that people have. My first thought after reading this passage was that it’s a circular claim. If we can hold such a belief then this means that we feel these things called beliefs. And this comes down to the Hard Problem we are trying to explain. It seems Dennett is avoiding and underestimating the Hard Problem. He does not explain how we feel what we feel but rather, explains it as a “belief” to avoid it altogether. So the search for a causal mechanism for feeling is never tackled.
“This speech act is curious, and when we set out to interpret it, we have to cast about for a charitable interpretation. How does Chalmers’ justification lie in his “direct evidence”? Although he says the zombie lacks that evidence, nevertheless the zombie believes he has the evidence, just as Chalmers does. Chalmers and his zombie twin are heterophenomenological twins: when we interpret all the data we have, we end up attributing to them exactly the same heterophenomenological worlds.”
I understand Dennett’s point; he is claiming that the Zombic Hunch is not justified because just as Chalmers can have direct evidence of his own experience, so can the zombie. Once again, this boils down to the other minds problem. If he is in fact saying that anything in the world could have its own subjective experience of being what it is, and in no way can one’s experience or consciousness be proven (or disproven), then he is referring to the other minds problem- a problem which interferes with the solution to the hard problem.
''We move that is, from raw data to interpreted data: a catalogue of the subject's conviction's, beliefs, attitudes, emotional reactions... (together with much detail regarding the circumstances in which these intentional states are situated), but when we adopt a special move, which distinguishes heterophenomenology from the normal interpersonal stance the subject's beliefs (e.t.c) are all bracketed for neutrality.
While it seems clear to me that Dennett has outlined the ideal and scientific way of investigating consciousness and subjectivity, his methodlology entails too many variables which we know very little or nothing about. The problem of understanding the nature of certain things is still there. For example, he gives a small list of the contextual factors of subjectivity, such as hormones, behavioral reactions, visceral reactions, yet assumes that we understand them fully and what they mean for a human body/brain. What I men to say here is that Dennet is right - All of these factors like hormones, beliefs, visceral reactions etc. (ie. the conscious and the unconscious aspects of living) are crucial to understanding why we feel a certain way, but that doesnt give us any more asccess to answering the question. I don't think the other minds problem can be surpassed because I don't think its possible to find out the system which produces consciousness. It encompasses everything about us, and it goes down to the smallest detail. We can make robots which can functionally (ie. seemingly) do everything we do, but we can know for certain they are not conscious precisely because it is only the things we can understand which has produced this, leaving out whatever fundamental mechanisms of consciousness which underlie our being and knowing. Why do we think we can create ourselves from ourselves?
"it feels like something to have a mind, to think, to cognize;
ReplyDeleteand that something does not feel passive."
But it could be passive. As Hume sees it, these feelings are nothing "but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
I think the specific feeling of agency requires particular attention. It would still be a hard problem without agency, but the fact that we feel ourselves, and that we worry about ourselves, that's special.
How many other species commit suicide? Maybe I'm speaking out of line here, but the ability to build hospitals, what causes us to do such a thing?
Why are you posting this in the Overflow section when the regular section is only at 40 comments?
DeleteWhat I mean by thinking not feeling passive is that it feels as if it is something we are doing, rather than just having it happen to us.
The paper Minds, Brains and Turing by Harnad really clears up a lot of things: summarize the materials we covered in class, make a connection among them and introduce what we are going to talk about right now: feelings.
ReplyDeleteI pretty agree with what Harnad says about feelings. As I said in my previous commentary on Dennett's paper, we feel something when we understand something. Harnad says also, that we feel something when we feel something and the feeling is not deniable; the feeling is there. Although it seems vague, but it is not hard to understand because thinking is similar: as Harnad says, we cannot doubt if we are thinking or not, because doubting is thinking. Feelings are similar, because we already feel something there.
Harnad links feelings with Turing Tests and explain more about why cognition is not computation. He expands it by saying Turing Test cannot account for feelings at all, no matter T2, T3 or T4, and it only accounts for causal mechanisms - whether they can do some or all the things that we can do, or do we have the same brain functions. I think Harnad is right here, because feelings are subjective. My feelings are only known by me and your feelings are only known by you, and how should we test feelings?
But one thing I do not understand is that, isn't cognitive science about causal mechanisms? We try to reverse-engineer and explain why we can do what we do. But if causal mechanisms fail to explain feelings, does that mean in the domain of cognitive science, explaining feelings is not really its obligation?
In the article Animal Pain and Human Pleasure: Ethical Dilemmas outside the Classroom, Harnad makes people aware that eating meat is actually doing harm to animals because animals have feelings.
DeleteAs a meat eater, I feel a little uncomfortable reading this, but I will not discuss whether eating meat is right or not but rather on why people and animals feel. Harnad in this article seems to say that it is the nervous system that makes us feel. He says, "all animals with nervous systems feel" and that "Herbivores have to eat too, and they too are predators, but their prey – plants — though they are likewise living organisms, are not feeling organisms. They do not have nervous systems." So is this why we feel? Because of nervous system?
Regarding to what we have been talking about, it is possible.No Turing Tests include feelings, so no causal mechanisms. But what about T4? If a system passes T4, does it mean it has the same brain function as we do? If it passes T4, does it not mean it also has a nervous system? - or it still only means it has the same "functions", do what we are able to do and excludes feelings?
Hi Jie Zhao,
DeleteI thought I might try to contribute some thoughts to your questions.
“But one thing I do not understand is that, isn't cognitive science about causal mechanisms? We try to reverse-engineer and explain why we can do what we do. But if causal mechanisms fail to explain feelings, does that mean in the domain of cognitive science, explaining feelings is not really its obligation?”
Cognitive science is about causal mechanisms…but I wouldn’t say exactly that “causal mechanisms fail to explain feelings.” Feelings do have a causal mechanism, it’s just that we have no way to test if we’ve ever found it because we can’t know for sure if anything we reverse engineer can feel, even if it tells us that it can. ‘Feeling’ is part of all the things that we can ‘do’, so it definitely would be on cognitive science to explain, if an explanation could be found. However, the problem is that maybe it’s impossible to explain, because we only know what it feels like for ourselves to feel and not for anyone else.
“So is this why we feel? Because of nervous system?
Regarding to what we have been talking about, it is possible. No Turing Tests include feelings, so no causal mechanisms. But what about T4? If a system passes T4, does it mean it has the same brain function as we do? If it passes T4, does it not mean it also has a nervous system? - or it still only means it has the same "functions", do what we are able to do and excludes feelings?”
I think the nervous system allows us to feel, but it doesn’t cause us to feel. I thought that the question of whether T4 could feel was an interesting question, and I would be inclined to say yes. Our brain is what causes us to feel, so if a system has the same brain as we do, then I would think that it would be able to feel.
I had a hard time going through this reading, before and after class is still confusing, and still after reading the comments. What are the methods of heterophenomenology? Recording first person responses? How is it that it is trying to predict or forecast, what we are going to do, or think? And does this imply that it can predict when we will feel? That still won’t tell us how and why.
ReplyDelete“these internal states have contents, but not conscious content, only pseudo-conscious contents. The Zombie Hunch, then, is Chalmers’ conviction that he has just described a real problem. It seems to him that there is a problem of how to explain the difference between him and his zombie twin.”
When I first read this, I identified the Other’s mind problem right away, which we have established refers to only being able to know within yourself how you feel, the minds of others are inaccessible to us. We “solve” this issue, by assuming, that based on similarities we can assign to others the felt states that are only accessible to us. I’m still confused as to how heterophenomenology (“…and then I’ve given it an unwieldy name.” -.-) addresses this problem, does it simply not acknowledge it like the hard problem?
How and why we feel? In class I had the idea that it maybe had to do with something innate, along the same lines of the UG discussion that we had, but we quickly changed to the animal discussion, and I remembered well animals also feel (and they don’t have UG(Harnad has said that primates think, can we say this about other animals?)), so maybe thinking that the capacity (?) to feel simply evolved in our genes is too much of a stretch, but I still want to try to decompose this idea. The ability to feel, and I refer to all kinds of feeling: it feels like something to see red, it feels like something to snowboard, it feels like something to be hungry, if feels like something to be in love etc. permitted our species to form more efficient (?) bonds, and it allowed our species to survive more within the frame of a social structure. Doubtfully this will settle how and why, but maybe it could say something about the origins of feelings (then again we have equated feeling with experiencing, (so if to experience is to feel how could we experience without feeling)) , and why it exists anyways? Would we be able to survive without our capacity to feel?
I’m so confused.
These are some really good questions! I'll try and add something that may help (but it may not!)
Delete"In class I had the idea that it maybe had to do with something innate, along the same lines of the UG discussion that we had, but we quickly changed to the animal discussion, and I remembered well animals also feel (and they don’t have UG(Harnad has said that primates think, can we say this about other animals?)), so maybe thinking that the capacity (?) to feel simply evolved in our genes is too much of a stretch..."
I think we can look at thinking, feeling, and communicating (as a form of doing) as part of cognition but they're not all the same. So it's possible to have the capacity for one but not another.
"Would we be able to survive without our capacity to feel?"
This is really interesting. I think that it's impossible to answer because a) we wouldn't be human. But if we have a thought experiment where by some virus or other infection we all suddenly lost our capacity for feeling (sort of like in the Walking Dead where zombies have activity in the brainstem but nowhere else, and therefore presumably no consciousness and no cognition other than the vegetative cognition) then yes, I suppose we could survive for a little while without the capacity to feel.
As for the evolutionary explanations for why we may have developed feeling - I think that there's more to feeling than just emotions and feelings about other people. So I think the social aspects are important but there is more to it. There are all the sensory aspects, and the feelings we have about our feelings - so the analyzing and decision-making that can be independent of the minds of others.
Also, on feeling nothing: http://mashable.com/2015/03/03/flotation-therapy/
Delete"Now faced with these failures of overlap–people who believe they are conscious of more than is in fact going on in them, and people who do not believe they are conscious of things that are in fact going on in them–heterophenomenology maintains a nice neutrality: it characterizes their beliefs, their heterophenomenological world, without passing judgment, and then investigates to see what could explain the existence of those beliefs. "
ReplyDelete"Heterophenomenology is nothing but good old 3rdperson scientific method applied to the particular phenomena of human (and animal) consciousness. Scientists who were interested in taking the firstperson point of view seriously figured out how to do just that, bringing the data of the first person into the fold of objective science."
I have issues with the premise that science is at all objective - I don't think there is a such thing as total objectivity, and of course there are methods that are less objective than others, especially when claims are made without explanation or without reason. However Dennett asserts that heterophenomenology is neutral and a 3rd-person method - I say, how can it be when it has been created in the 1st person? Taking the first-person view seriously is a step in the right direction but the tests used to do this and the conclusions made are still implicated in 1st person points of view.
I also take issue with the way belief is equated with consciousness - I think beliefs are part of feeling which is part of consciousness, but there is so much more to consciousness than beliefs.
"Although he says the zombie lacks that evidence, nevertheless the zombie believes he has the evidence, just as Chalmers does. Chalmers and his zombie twin are heterophenomenological twins: when we interpret all the data we have, we end up attributing to them exactly the same heterophenomenological worlds. Chalmers fervently believes he himself is not a zombie. The zombie fervently believes he himself is not a zombie. Chalmers believes he gets his justification from his “direct evidence” of his consciousness. So does the zombie, of course."
This critique of Chalmers is used by Dennett to argue for heterophenomenology - but I kept thinking, as I re-read the passage, that I can't leap over the Zombic Hunch and that heterophenomenology does nothing to address the hard problem!
"First person science of consciousness is a discipline with no methods, no data, no results, no future, no promise. It will remain a fantasy."
I haven't given up hope yet. Maybe we will someday develop a cognitive tool, or be able to tease apart consciousness to the point where there is a breakthrough. But this hope is very much grounded in sci-fi-cog-sci. I do think that "first person science of consciousness" is a dead end.
“Our inescapable uncertainty about wether T2, T3 or T4 succesfully capture and axplain cognition turns out to reduce to the question of whether causal explanations only capture and explain know-how or they also explain feeling.”
ReplyDeleteAt the start of the class it was said that consciousness is feeling and I completely agree with this statement. It has been suggested in this paper that there is a possibility that a fully functional T3 robot could or couldn’t have feelings and therefore consciousness. I am going to take Descarte’s side on the fact that I can only be sure that we are feeling (apart from the mathematical proofs) and that I assume that other people who act and behave as we do are also feeling. It has been noted in this paper that this assumption is strengthened by the fact that people also have a brain like myself. I don’t really agree with the fact that because we all have brains that we should assume that we all feel. What I don’t agree with is that we need a brain in order to feel and I don’t think that by reverse engineering our cognition into a robot that is able to do all that we can do that it will also have feelings. I base myself on the fact that is has been shown by Dr Parnia and his colleagues that awareness, consciousness, is present in absence of brain activity. This phenomenon occurs in near death experiences where people have reported being aware and conscious after being declared dead. I am not dismissing the brain completely there is a very interesting relationship between the brain and our consciousness and this relationship is at the base of how this world gets translated into our consciousness. For what is of my opinion I consider as a holder or receiver for consciousness rather then it's emiter.
As a believer in the uncapturability and importance of felt experience when reverse-engineering the mind, it's good to read someone who is highly skeptical of this position. I've realized that I don't have good reasons to ground my position. Hopefully that will change with the discussion next class.
ReplyDeleteHeterophenomenology sounds promising, but might not be actually possible. Dennett says that "every blush, hesitation, and frown, as well as all the covert, internal reactions and activities that can be detected, are included in our primary data". I struggle to see how such things could be analyzed objectively. I don't believe it's possible to extract a person's mental states from behavioral data to the point where we could infer their feeling-states. How can we even describe a feeling? If we had this data for a lifetime, it might be possible, but we are nowhere near having any type of framework for the analysis of such a massive quantity of varied and multi-modal data.
Even if we did, I can't shake the intuition that we would still be failing to capture something about the heterophenomenological subject's mental state. "Third-person belief attribution" fails to capture something about mental states that we know from our own first-person experience of having mental states. We don't just have beliefs—we have feelings!
“In an insensate world there would still be natural laws (laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism) but no such thing as morality, or laws of conduct, or right or wrong, because if nothing feels, nothing matters.”
ReplyDeleteThis is why the biological trait of feeling is so important. Even if the hard problem is unsolvable (Dennett’s heterophenomonology certainly doesn’t solve it), and we never find out how and why we feel, the worlds of organisms with nervous systems will always be structured around feeling (assuming this trait stays adaptive and isn’t selected out of the genome).
When I read that ethics and law are predicted by feeling I immediately started trying to find exceptions and was unable to. Stealing is wrong because it is painful for the organism that you take from (I say organism because this definitely applies to animals too). Playing soccer in the library is wrong because it causes those who are studying and reading to become frustrated and angry (Presumable if they could be frustrated and angry without feeling those states, playing soccer in the library wouldn’t be a problem). Harvesting vital organs from a living human to save a relative’s life is wrong because a. it causes the original organ-owner pain and b. it causes pain to their family and friends. Drunk driving without a seatbelt is wrong because it increases the chances of causing pain to others and to yourself. It is puzzling that murder of other humans is considered unquestionably wrong while committing this same crime against members of a different species of animal is accepted in society. I can’t see a reason why species boundaries would justify ignoring the fact that we are causing pain to others that is not essential to our own survival.
"remember that heterophenomenology gives you much more data than just a subject’s verbal judgments; every blush, hesitation, and frown, as well as all the covert, internal reactions and activities that can be detected"
ReplyDeleteThe difference between introspection and heterophenomenology is the latter uses a larger array of output, not just limited to verbal statements. In fact, the output should include everything that can be observed from a human being, including brain wave, of course. But just like introspection, it cannot answer how what its trying to explain--consciousness/feeling--works. Even if you know everything about heterophenomenology, the best you can do is predicting the human's output(T3/T4 output), but how/why do we do it? How and why we have feelings is the hard problem. It is particularly hard because of the other mind problem: You can never know if someone else has feelings at all. Unlike other cognitive abilities such as logic reasoning, memory, etc., feelings cannot be tested by computation modeling. If we build a robot that seems to have feelings: it says it has feelings and behave as if it has feelings, but still we can never know if it really has feelings or if it is faking it. The only thing we can be sure of is that we have feelings.
"He says that the zombie doesn’t have the same beliefs as us “because of the role that experience plays in constituting the contents of those beliefs,” but I don’t see how this can be so. Experience (in the special sense Chalmers has tried to introduce) plays no role in constituting the contents of those beliefs"
There's perfectly correct to say that Chalmers could exhibit the exact same behavior as zombie if he were to be "zombified". But the difference between live Chalmers and zombified Chalmers is consciousness/feeling. The zombie that Chalmers describes has no conscious experience, in other words, if it was to come back to human, it won't feel like anything had happened. But for live Chalmers, he does. He can tell you that how angry he is when you tried to zombify him, but still, you cannot know for sure(by means of heterophenomenology) if he is being Chalmers or still a zombie. A zombie could still be faking it.
I found this article slightly difficult to understand because it used a series of weasel words for “feeling”, making it convoluted and complex. Nevertheless, I will attempt to address the following quote:
ReplyDelete"Of course it still seems to many people that heterophenomenology must be leaving something out. That’s the ubiquitous Zombic Hunch. How does the A team respond to this? Very straightforwardly: by including the Zombic Hunch among the heartfelt convictions any good theory of consciousness must explain. One of the things that it falls to a theory of consciousness to explain is why some people are visited by the Zombic Hunch. Chalmers is one such, so let’s look more closely at the speech acts Chalmers has offered as a subject of heterophenomenological investigation."
The author is implying that feeling is simply a belief that people have. My first thought after reading this passage was that it’s a circular claim. If we can hold such a belief then this means that we feel these things called beliefs. And this comes down to the Hard Problem we are trying to explain. It seems Dennett is avoiding and underestimating the Hard Problem. He does not explain how we feel what we feel but rather, explains it as a “belief” to avoid it altogether. So the search for a causal mechanism for feeling is never tackled.
“This speech act is curious, and when we set out to interpret it, we have to cast about for a charitable interpretation. How does Chalmers’ justification lie in his “direct evidence”? Although he says the zombie lacks that evidence, nevertheless the zombie believes he has the evidence, just as Chalmers does. Chalmers and his zombie twin are heterophenomenological twins: when we interpret all the data we have, we end up attributing to them exactly the same heterophenomenological worlds.”
ReplyDeleteI understand Dennett’s point; he is claiming that the Zombic Hunch is not justified because just as Chalmers can have direct evidence of his own experience, so can the zombie. Once again, this boils down to the other minds problem. If he is in fact saying that anything in the world could have its own subjective experience of being what it is, and in no way can one’s experience or consciousness be proven (or disproven), then he is referring to the other minds problem- a problem which interferes with the solution to the hard problem.
''We move that is, from raw data to interpreted data: a catalogue of the subject's conviction's, beliefs, attitudes, emotional reactions... (together with much detail regarding the circumstances in which these intentional states are situated), but when we adopt a special move, which distinguishes heterophenomenology from the normal interpersonal stance the subject's beliefs (e.t.c) are all bracketed for neutrality.
ReplyDeleteWhile it seems clear to me that Dennett has outlined the ideal and scientific way of investigating consciousness and subjectivity, his methodlology entails too many variables which we know very little or nothing about. The problem of understanding the nature of certain things is still there. For example, he gives a small list of the contextual factors of subjectivity, such as hormones, behavioral reactions, visceral reactions, yet assumes that we understand them fully and what they mean for a human body/brain. What I men to say here is that Dennet is right - All of these factors like hormones, beliefs, visceral reactions etc. (ie. the conscious and the unconscious aspects of living) are crucial to understanding why we feel a certain way, but that doesnt give us any more asccess to answering the question. I don't think the other minds problem can be surpassed because I don't think its possible to find out the system which produces consciousness. It encompasses everything about us, and it goes down to the smallest detail. We can make robots which can functionally (ie. seemingly) do everything we do, but we can know for certain they are not conscious precisely because it is only the things we can understand which has produced this, leaving out whatever fundamental mechanisms of consciousness which underlie our being and knowing. Why do we think we can create ourselves from ourselves?