High Order Thoughts

This will hopefully be a quick post to finish my ideas on David M. Rosenthal.

Opinions culled from 'Consciousness and Mind'

To recap he’s a philosopher who figures that verbally expressed thoughts must be ‘High order thoughts’ (HOT’s). These HOT’s are literally an agent thinking about a mental state he or she is in. ‘Desire, doubt, anticipation’ inclination, expectation wondering etc.’ all constitute high order thoughts. 

Here is a useful distinction: The sensual experience of ’coldness’ is a mental state whereas the desire to be warm constitutes a HOT (semi-intentional pun). This means we can imagine a ‘dumb’ animal feeling cold and doing its best to find warmth by implementing other mental states all without out ever actually having the HOT of desire to be warm. While Rosenthal’s theories are materialist they leave room for all kinds of qualia and jigger pokery among humans (or less dumb animals!)

As detailed before, Rosenthal breaks mental states into two positions with a third (potential) conditional feature.

1.      1. State consciousness, which refers to a mental states being conscious.

2.      2. Transitive consciousness, which refers to an individual being conscious of something.

3.       3.The Magic ‘Transivity principle’. This is where mental states are conscious by virtue of one being in some way conscious of them.

This transivity principle is the clause whereby Rosenthal can establish that verbally expressed thoughts are automatically conscious. Meaning the process of a certain reception of stimuli becomes consciously available because you somehow perceive their results. Think bootstrapping your mind.

Here I gave an analogy with a cat and mouse that went like this:

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 our exo-orifice kitty cat. We would not assume the mouse is in possession of a HOT that inveigles a sense of expectation that there is a Tom to his Jerry lucking outside the hole. We assume the mouse is reacting, the way natural selection intended, to the smell or other signals that signify the presence of a predator. 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 attempts to establish that when thoughts are expressed verbally this questions answer becomes conclusive. A hungry human in the predatory role of our cat could easily prove its possession of HOT’s by merely verbalising it.

So what happens in the verbalising human mind?

Let’s imagine a more passive scenario:

Here we have a not-so hungry human named Sarah sitting on a chair looking out a window. Her visual system (eyes, sensory cortex and all that gunk) perceives dark clouds on the horizon. The ensuing data is managed by neurological structures causing a first order thought; an incommunicable nonconscious sense of ‘yuck rain’. The High order thought now may brew (depending on circumstances, attention span etc.) to activate a desire to avoid getting wet. At this juncture Sarah, by virtue of a desire to avoid rain, may express the first order thought with a shake of the head and statement ‘it’s going to rain’. This means the verbally expressed (first order) state of ‘yuck rain’ is conscious while the HOT may or may not be. Equally if Sarah sincerely pronounces ‘I think it’s going to rain’ she has effectively proven that she comprehends that her mental state is occupied by a high order thought and that she knows about it. In both cases the agent desires to avoid getting wet and is therefore state conscious and having a HOT. In the second case the state is transitive not because of the illocutionary performance of ‘I Think’ but because it is an illocutionary performance i.e. the transivity principle has been engaged by the illocutionary force of ‘I think’.

Think about it! It actually does make sense. Just try not to get hung up on the word ‘conscious’ which has far too much semantic wrigglness to it. ‘Consciousness’ is a stinking and slippery wet fish.

Now we can also establish that expression, not just verbal, encourages transitive states. These states allow analysis of one’s own thoughts and perceptual systems. It seems communicative action is pretty much the cornerstone of the Cartesian proposition.

Fred Dretske (1993) wanted to tackle the idea that what makes a state conscious cannot be consciousness of the state. His idea went something like this:

Sam meets Tom on Monday. They chat for a while in clear view of each other. They meet again on Friday in similar circumstances. On Monday Tom was sporting a moustache which he had shaved off by the time of their second meeting. After the second encounter it turns out that Sam hasn’t noticed that Tom has shaved. However we know that he has seen the moustache on Monday and seen none on the Friday (he just hasn’t noticed what his eyes have seen). The second encounter did not include a moustache but despite this conscious difference Sam is unaware. 

I’m not concerned with Dretske’s conclusions here, what interests me is the weakness of the transivity principle in the prescribed interaction. Remember that the transivity principle is what allows you to become aware that you are actually having a HOT. In the Sam/Tom moustache story there was no occurrence of the transivity principle to make Sam notice the disappearance of facial hair.

So Sam doesn’t consciously notice the moustache but it still constituted a mental state; his eyes saw it! This mental state of moustache viewing may become a HOT of inclination that one is superior to those sporting the moustachioed aesthetic (Sam doesn’t have to notice the tache, he might just walk away feeling superior without realising why). It would be unlikely for one to glean self-judging awareness of one’s own shallow apprehensions about facial hair i.e. reach a transitive state of inclined superiority. Hence, even more unlikely to have ones consciousness sufficiently raised to notice the absent moustache at a later meeting i.e. purely on the weight of a transitive awareness of the HOT of superiority.

I started to think how we might amend the scenario so that Sam is fully aware of Tom’s tache. What if the transivity principle is extended by communicative action (i.e. talking, writing, pictograms, morsecode, cave paintings etc.)?

From the ground up let’s imagine Sam’s sensory activity which allows him to appreciate the visual contrast of the moustache. Let’s decide that based on the relevant socio-psychological factors Sam visual reception of the moustache conjures up a first order thought of negativity; ‘yuck moustache’. Sam now has a HOT of jealousy because he feels socially threatened by Tom who it turns out looks good with the moustache! From this point on any semantic segment of Sam’s HOT of jealousy (or related HOT’s) may be raised to a transitive state by the transivity principle. Let’s imagine two such scenarios remembering that it’s this principle that is the potential deliverer of phenomenal awareness of the downstream cognition that eventually amounted to jealousy.

In a first scenario Sam verbalises his HOT of jealousy by poking fun at his appearance when he’s not around. Haha have you seen Sam recently?  He has a shit moustache. Depending on the social backlash it is unlikely that this will serve to make Sam aware of his jealousy it will however make him aware of the first order visual experience and when they meet again Sam will almost definitely notice that Tom has shaved.

Let’s us imagine a second scenario where the scope of the transivity principle is extended. In this version Sam refers to Tom and his new facial hair in a written note to a colleague. Haha have you seen Sam recently?  He has a shit moustache. In jest the colleague posts it on a bulletin board. Wouldn’t the likelihood of Sam noticing the petty intent he has shown increase the potential of his jealousy reaching a transitive state? Imagine the slight became a viral email; wouldn’t this further empower the transitive principle? On viewing the note on a social networking site it’s plausible that Sam would acknowledge his own shallow behaviour and maybe even perceive his socio-psychological prejudices.

So it seems that when we externalise our high order thoughts it increases our chances of became existentially aware!

I have to admit I’m cautious about this, surely inane facebook comments aren’t key to a qualia riddled sense of self-awareness!? My intuition leaves me thinking something different. It may come off as cryptic (at least till I make some more posts) but here goes...

The more we outsource the calculations inherent to metacognitive awareness into the epigenetic niches of culture the more we relax selection on the innate cognitive architectures that allow us to appreciate phenomenal awareness without the cognitive scaffold which culture reciprocally gifts us.

I’m too tired to simplify that brute of a sentence.