Why Are Verbally Expressed Thoughts Conscious?

This is a seemingly innocuous question which David M. Rosenthal attempts to answer in a paper of the same name. I decided to look at this because of my suspicions that intentional communication is key to our conscious perception of mental states (and our intuitions that in itself is metaphysical or irreducible).

Beware treacherous waters ahead!

I've had a lot of trouble with this one. The man starts of easy but once the ball starts to role he uses the most convoluted rhetoric arguments. Maybe it's me that's been unusually dense these last few days but this stuff had me dizzy and frustrated; rereading every second line and generally uncomfortable from end to end. Anyhow I'll dig in:

I'm going to quickly explain Rosenthal's definition of so called 'High Order Thoughts' (HOTs), these play a big part and are integral to his explorations of consciousness. Basically a HOT is thinking about thoughts. Put differently it is the examination of sensually perceived information. So desire, doubt, anticipation, inclination, expectation, wondering etc. all constitute high order thoughts in Rosenthal's model.

When we think of a mouse and his perception that a cat lies in wait outside his hole we would assume that the mouse is responding to sensory stimuli which point to the presence of a cat outside the hole. We would not assume the mouse is in possession of a high order thought that inveigles a sense of expectation that there is a Tom to his Jerry lucking outside the hole. At a push however, would we be so sure that Tom doesn't harbour a HOT of desire that the mouse might wander out? Rosenthal doesn't put so fine a point on it, but the possibility of non-humans high order thoughts are not written off.

At this point I feel the need to point out my reservations of the definition of HOT. Obviously there is a separate order of intentionality between response to stimuli and a critical appraisal of that response but I can't see this as being how cognition works. Surely there is a spectrum of intensity attaching my HOT (desire) of food and the cat's lower order thought that its prey is present in is hole. Now you'd expect Rosenthal might be inclined to place a threshold of consciousness upon my suggested spectrum as the signifier or even the cause of these high order thoughts. But no, consciousness plays a different peripheral role in proceedings.

In Rosenthal's work consciousness is not just the phenomenon being investigated it also serves in the explanation. The delineation is as follows; an individual may be conscious of something and sometimes a mental state may be conscious. In other words a mental state may be conscious but you may not be conscious of it! Rosenthal refers to the conscious mental state as 'state consciousness' and to an individual conscious awareness of something as 'transitive consciousness'.

After these Rosenthal has one more condition on his use of the term consciousness, the 'transitivity
principle'. This is where 'mental states are conscious only if one is in some way conscious of them'. Meaning the process of a certain reception of stimuli becomes consciously available because you somehow perceive their results. I might be inclined to think of this in terms of 'pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps' an implausible act of levitation that seems an easy metaphor for this transivity principle. These are tricky principles and definitions but it seems Rosenthal has gone to arduous lengths in order to fit them in with his wide ranging theories of consciousness. For now I'll assume their unwieldiness s necessary!

Now I'm ready for the original premise of this post but it seems my will to type has left maybe tomorrow..

Property Dualism, De Selby and a Neuroscientist Named Fred.

A few quick few words (hopefully) on a plausible kind of Dualism. Opinions formed reading John R. Searle.

So what is property dualism?

To begin, the original brand of dualism (Cartesian) was a theory of mind which suggested that what we experience as consciousness is not a physical property of the universe. Hence the duality.., Mind separate from body. As can be surmised, this fits with all kinds of theological arguments and was prevalent in many guises for a long time.

Property dualism came along and reframed this intuition in light of the 20th century’s acceptance that the brain is a biological mechanism. Consciousness still had to be something ‘over and above’ mere biology. This savvy dualism proclaimed the existence of a singular physical realm that had two properties, one physical, the other an irreducible mental property. So we can say that the lynchpin of this argument is that this ‘mental property’ of matter is irreducible to physical components while being manifest in them. This weird little effect coined by Donald Davidson is called ‘supervenience’ (I think it’s like intervention except with ‘super’ hack-sawed onto the front). For property dualism it means that all the molecules and bits and pieces that make up your brain amount to the phenomenal property of consciousness which then has the power to supervene upon what it is manifest in, namely in the magical result: agent causation (you consciously making something happen).

Generally property dualism amounts to two divergent world views. One which finds the universe causally closed. Outside of pure philosophical sophistry this means only physical things can make things happen in the physical world therefore the magic mental properties in your mind can’t actually make things happen i.e. causally closed. The other kind of property dualism sees the physical domain as causally open. Meaning that what feels like self-awareness allows you to make things happen.

Now for the criticism:

(Because I’ve been consistently thinking in terms of a materialist consciousness it’s actually taken me ages to force my head through the wringer and actually accept property dualism’s arguments without just thinking ‘this is quasi religious muck, maybe I’ll make some tea..’. In the end however I’ve started to see the merits in particular with the ontology of consciousness and the irreducibility of same.)

Why ‘dualism’ specifically? Why not trio-ism or quadrology? Why break consciousness into ontological categories at all? Its only duality in consequence to the linguistic hangover from enlightenment philosophy. To me it seem to come from a time when the universe was constituted of four elements and humours took care of your mental wellbeing (Makes me think of De selby in The Third Policeman , ‘accretions of black air as an explanation of darkness’). Our modern property dualist thinks ‘well I intuitively know my consciousness is special but I can equally see that neuron firings can amount to motor skills, therefore I must amend the philosophy of the mind (Cartesian Dualism) that conforms to the former while tweaking it in reaction to the latter’. It’s actually a little annoying that philosophy is still banging about with this kind of language, doffing its cap to a historic education. In the intervening period the other sciences got to quarks and bosons while philosophy still plays scrabble with the same old concepts and words. The worst part is that these scrabble players are often geniuses but because of the language they use, philosophical consensus upon theories of mind always run into dialectic dead ends.

Once I finally get round to biting my indignant (materialist) tongue we can get to the real bones of the theory. Consciousness has no causal super powers that can’t be assigned to neurobiological factors. BUT this reduction does not lead to a proof where the neuroscientist (let’s call him Fred) can say that the patient who’s he’s just scanned is conscious in the same way that Fred feels he is. Fred’s patient could still be a Chalmersesque Zombie. This means consciousness is causally reducible but it appears to be ontologically irreducible. Fred knows that being Fred can’t be reduced into something that can be communicated and phenomenologically experienced by someone other than Fred.

Now if we take a leaf out of Dennett’s work we might stray into hypotheticals. Imagine we could quantify all the information (as it occurs during a singular moment) in Fred’s brain; imagine too that we could quantify the very neural architecture of Fred at that very moment. Now imagine that we upload this transcendental string of binary into a suitably large computer of silicon switcheroos (or whatever). Dennett would say that what we have is a mirror image of Fred courtesy of an ontological reduction. Maybe we could even run the program and have carbon based Fred talk to silicon based Fred; they would both at least retrospectively understand on an existential level what it was like to be Fred before the moment of replication.

Can you guess what happens next? Turns out Carbon based Fred is a property dualist and what does he go and do, but doubt silicone based Fred has any qualia! Bang! Dialectic dead end. Dennett’s argument is screwed, maybe unfairly but screwed none the less. If Fred doesn’t believe the new Fred then consciousness is ontologically irreducible. In fact if you are dualistically inclined at all this whole thought experiment is useless. The fact that carbon based Fred can be right or wrong kind of proves ontological irreducibility. On a curious aside it’s actually frighteningly like superposition (or even transubstantiation depending on your taste).

In Wittgenstein-ish terms you can’t experience pain in someone else’s body. In order to do it you’d have to get inside their head which is made of their neurobiology and nerves so you would in fact be them. So Instead you carry over your own Neurobiology in some kind of transplant but then your reception of the pain would be processed the way you process pain; the premise is absurd.

So it seems if you accept the terminology you have to accept ontological irreducibility. But if we try to retrace the steps of the argument up to a conclusion of property dualism you realise it doesn’t work that way. The whole thing was built from the top down. Irreducibility does not lead to any kind of metaphysics or duality. For the sake of comprehension lets say that the qualia of ontological irreducibility have a special colour assigned to them (lets say blue)  alternatively the zombic lack of qualia is signified by a a different colour (green). Now within this analogy the middle ground of turquoise is where all the philosophical debate should occur, i.e.when does one stop and the other begin. Lets decide that the question of causality (not whats its like but what it is) is analogized numerically x+x=y. What dualism does is decide to give the y value a colour (y),(y)or (y) which wrecks the equation and if you play by the rules renders it unsolvable. I guess it kind of an apples and oranges thing.

If we were to look at things a little more cynically this irreducibility becomes a free standing tenet that’s only purpose was to hold up a statue of Descartes. René’s been knocked off It since, but modern dualists can still dodge the rude pot-shots of materialists and teleofunctionalists by standing behind it. Materialists can stand behind it too; one can’t know what it’s like to be someone else and with the same unproductive sentiment one can’t know what it’s like to not be a ‘one’. Nothing is achieved just a sort of stalemate that Augustine or some clever theologian would’ve thrived upon.

John Searle seems to be a man in the middle. Here is a quote from a paper of his which sums up what is increasingly becoming a minefield of tautology.

“The property dualist wants to say that consciousness is a mental and therefore not physical feature of the brain. I want to say consciousness is a mental and therefore biological and therefore physical feature of the brain. But because the traditional vocabulary was designed to contrast the mental and the physical, I cannot say what I want to say in the traditional vocabulary without sounding like I am saying something inconsistent. Similarly when the identity theorists said that consciousness is nothing but a neurobiological process, they meant that consciousness as qualitative, subjective, irreducibly phenomenological (airy fairy, touchy feely, etc.) does not even exist, that only third person neurobiological processes exist. I want also to say  that  consciousness is nothing but a neurobiological process, and by that I mean that  precisely because  consciousness is qualitative, subjective, irreducibly phenomenological (airy fairy, touchy feely, etc.) it has to be a neurobiological process; because, so far, we have not found any system that can cause and realize conscious states except brain systems. Maybe someday we will be able to create conscious artifacts, in which case subjective states of consciousness will be “physical” features of those artefacts.”

That’s it, we’re done with the criticism. Here’s a little coda on the kind of property dualism that suggests that anathema causally closed world.

Property dualism has lots of different proponents and hence many different kinds of itself. One that has been around for a long time, and one that (despite being generally derided) I find surprisingly compelling posits epiphenomenalism. I think Thomas Huxley is the progenitor of this one; he has referred to consciousness as being akin to the whistle that comes from a steam train, it has no bearing or effect upon the actual functioning of the locomotive. Imagine that! Imagine all that clamour in your head amounting to a little ineffectual existential flatulence. My last post outlined something similar except I tried to imbed a little causation. I even came up with a grandiose phrase for it since, Epiphenomena with Asymmetrical Causation. Roles of the indignant tongue, eh? This sits well with the Modular stuff and the idea that social intelligence is running the cognitive show.

If I were to be very ambitious I might even say that the externalisation of information in culture and art might be the factor that allows epiphenomena to supervene in what in almost real time decisions. Of course it must be stated that the very architecture of our brains is in flux so epiphenomena of a reflexive social intelligence module are of course modulating the physiological properties of a mind in what would otherwise be a causally closed world.

That took longer than I expected...

Consciousness and the Modular Mind.

I have found myself increasingly reading contemporary theories of the mind. (Self awareness, free will, consciousness etc...) Along with this I've been exploring heaps of paleoanthropological stuff upon the evolution of the human animal. So I now find myself in a position where I should soon commit and tentatively suggest which theories of the mind fit with the anthropological material.

What follows is unchecked, unreferenced and pretty much brain spew. In fact it's pretty much my overdue opinions following a glut of semi-digested information.

So here we go:

On the Mind.

It seems to me that all the good theories upon the mental functioning of us spine-having life forms, (our cognition and ensuing 'consciousness' from which it springs), point towards what is generally referred to as 'The Modularity of the Mind'. (Jerry Fodor is the touchstone of this kind of thinking.) Basically this modularity simmers down to say that the brain is kind of like a mechanics tool box. Different brain tools are isolated and assigned to different tasks. Some academics even attempt to designate which areas are cognitively isolated such as 'Natural History Module', 'Technical intelligence module' and 'Social intelligence module'.

Humans are the only animal that seems to be able to operate less like a toolbox and more like a Swiss Army Knife. We routinely overlap our modules using knowledge from natural history modules to solve problems that are usually assigned to the tech intelligence module. In prehistory this would amount to Cro-Magnon man using bone to make certain delicate tools where his proto-human forbearers would have used precision lacking shards of stone. Following this it's plain to see that in modern times we shuttle happily between modules without even realising. This seems normal and a fundamental process of thinking (in fact it's quite hard to imagine what thinking would be like with these cognitive barriers still intact.) However, it can be seen that our high order problem solving, facilitated by this Swiss army knife effect, is a hugely perplexing anomaly among life on this planet.

With this in mind, the big question becomes; what causes or allows our modules to overlap? One might even ask what does this entail for our strictly domain specific problem solving.

Simply put, why is our cognition so blatantly different from all the other animals??

Here I think it helps to veer into the field of evolutionary cognitive psychology. In this area researchers from an eclectic array of sciences often try to catch a peek into the obscure history of the minds evolution. They look at the intellectual development of children as a window into the Pleistocene human mind. Similarly and possibly more fruitfully they look at our closest genetic contemporaries, the great apes. Decades of experimentation and observation have shown that it is the module of social intelligence that is the most developed and frighteningly powerful in our primate cousins. This suggests a similarly massive social intelligence domain calling the shots among our good self's.

It's important to note the characteristics of social intelligence. It is dominantly reflexive, as in the engaged subject uses it after the social interaction upon which it muses. It is primarily concerned with selfish information transfer i.e. communication (selfish because misinformation is just as prized in evolutionary terms as truth.) Social intelligence becomes definitional upon actions that are in effect calculated and executed by the other modular domains. So in a perceptual sense it possesses the practical modules.

What other metaphysical state is covered by these characteristics? Self-awareness! Therefore, I would ask is a burgeoning and grossly mutated domain of social intelligence the key to the way our consciousness differs from that of your average domestic pet?

Here I'm going to stray into Philosophy of the mind. I recently came across a book by Nicholas Humphrey where he suggested some interesting conclusions to the oft referenced experiments of Benjamin Libet (outline here). He tackles the problems of Free will versus Determinism head on (I'm kind of putting words in his mouth here as I haven't got the leabhair in question at hand). Humphrey argues that consciousness is in fact entirely reflexive, occurring outside the decision making process altogether. And as Libet's work suggests human action and agency occur outside directly perceptual consciousness. WOW! That's a big deal, and one which chimes sweetly with the modular theories of the mind which cognitive anthropologists tout as a consequence of the empirical data they accrue.

This doesn't mean Determinism is the answer, nor does it mean free will is in jeopardy. In fact it frames these auld belligerents as kind of moot positions. I guess this type of argument might be considered Compatibalism but Humphrey's work suggests a solution where you have free will. Paradoxically you don't really know about it until afterward.

Following Libet when you or I decide to pick up or move an object the decision has already been made by our subconscious just milliseconds before we perceive the decision. Our conscious thoughts are merely monitoring the object-moving proceedings. That sounds like an extreme lack of free will with a small helping of innocuous and neutered self-awareness.. Yum yum. That's not really the full picture though. Our little side order of sentience is in actuality a de-facto retrogressive kind of free will. The act of musing over your actions (during the illusion of real-time decision making and after) actually augments the subconscious for future decision making. This operates in the same way as thinking of your actions afterward and deciding to do different next time. I've come up with a little analogy to illustrate this which I'll unveil shortly.

First some monkey brains and Venn diagrams.

Obviously no one can do a CAT/MRI scan of a brain and see these patterns in a kind of cranial-topography, (yet!) but I'm now going to suggest a visual arrangement of our minds. The theory of modularity is often graphically displayed with each module or domain assigned a relatively proportioned oval (like Venn diagrams in mathematics). The mind of a chimpanzee would show an extra large social intelligence module followed by the other domains. Each module is largely distinct from each other with the areas of overlap amounting to a small area of 'General intelligence'. This diminutive section allows for rudimentary problem solving of the kind that sees a clever Chimp moving away from his peers, placing nuts on a hard surface and using a suitably heavy object to prepare the nuts for consumption. Natural history, social and technical intelligence combine for our ape to have a clandestine undisturbed meal.
Let's imagine now the common Hominin (that's not a typo H-o-m-i-n-i-n) ancestors between us and the contemporary apes. Imagine the ovoid module for social intelligence growing incrementally larger as our modes of communication diversify and complicate as genetic selection aggressively favours larger social cohesion. Imagine it growing amorphous and slowly encroaching upon the other more modest modules. Imagine the new cognitive abilities of our proto-humans as they can, through inter -communication and raw individual cognition flit between domains. This white hot flux where our mass of social intelligence spills into the other domains is, I think, effectively what we call high order self-awareness. The interchange where Descartes thinks and figures that he is. I've read Dennett's tidy phrase 'fame in the brain' and I think this is where it hides.

Now for the ubiquitous analogy:

(This took me ages to think of and it's not what you'd call elegant but it serves me for the moment.) The human mind is a structure like a church. Let's say a Catholic church.

Lots of people come to the church to listen to the charismatic, bossy and conservative priest (the people are the assorted, mental modules the priest is the powerful social intelligence module). Our flock, one by one, meet the priest and confess their sins and actions. Our bossy priest beats his Alter telling the flock what to do, his sermon informed by confessions of the past. Of course the priest has no direct control over what the flock do in their everyday lives, they make their own choices, but his words will tweak their future actions and he is convinced of his own importance. Between them the priest and his followers make up consciousness (sub and otherwise).

So where is the human mind's navel-gazing, heady self-awareness? The flock collectively have an idea of our priest's moral compass; they have an inclination what his sermon will be. Similarly the priest has inklings as to what the people think he will say and of how to manipulate them accordingly. This slight ineffectual and mutual insight, I think, makes for a reasonable metaphor of where high order consciousness comes from. It doesn't directly make anything happen it does however powerfully, albeit subtly, infer the discourse between our modules metaphorically in the priest and his followers.

Whew.., that was tough. Hope it's not complete shite when I read over it tomorrow. For the record this written and posted on a bus. (That's my disclaimer)