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Consciousness and Logic

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Embodied, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments


Among the problems with which philosophy and the various sciences must deal, the mind-body problem is still the most intriguing”

Wolfgang Kohler, The Mind-Body Problem, Dimensions of Mind, Ed. Sydney Hook, 1960

Among the most difficult issues faced by humans in science and in philosophy is consciousness. The problem with consciousness is that is has many sides to it. On the one hand there is the very difficult problem understanding what it is. Is is a stuff like say an electron is something i.e. matter, or is it it’s own stuff? That is the problem of substance. Then there’s another problem, that is: how is it that we are conscious? We know we have brains, but how do we go from a brain, which is matter (like a rock), to consciousness which appears to be pervasive? There are many more problems, for example, do we all experience the world in a similar way? Is consciousness the same as attention? Is it the same as perception? Is it an epiphenomena? Does consciousness have an effect on the brain? How do we know, other than verbal report, that anyone else is conscious?

None of these questions seem to have straightforward answers. Nor are they the only problems of consciousness. Needless to say that there are great many minds pondering these and many other issues attached to consciousness in great detail. Here however, I thought it might be interesting to ponder just a few of these questions.

The first thing worth noting about consciousness is that it is bounded. In order that consciousness is understood at all, it is worth noting it’s limits. And it is limited in many ways. It’s limits are also the cause of very many of the problems associated with it. For example, you are most probably not conscious of the internet speed of the average computer in Uganda. Neither are you conscious of how long it takes do download a jpeg in Wyoming (unless you are downloading one there right now). In the same vein you are not conscious of the color of the walls in your bathroom unless your bathroom unless you happen to be in your bathroom looking at the wall. Most likely you are in front of a computer looking at a scree reading these words – these are the things in your conscious field right now. And by extension you are also not conscious of another mind beyond the description of its contents that mind may give you. One way or another your mind is limited to its contents and by virtue of that limitation it is fair to say that consciousness has a structure, a structure defined by its content.

Now the problem is that the content of consciousness; the items we can most readily identify with it’s structure have been dismissed as a valid source of evidence. The problem is first, that words are red herrings; we all know that people’s ability to describe their own minds vary. Second, that we don’t know that we’re not talking to an articulate zombie (maybe a computer program with exquisite language abilities). Third,  people who have studied phenomenology don’t seem to be able to agree on what the basic constituents of consciousness in fact are. These problems combined have left much to be desired from first person accounts of consciousness.

But that said there are a few glaring problems with these problems. The problem of the red herring is the first worth tackling. The red herring problem is based on the finding that what people report is not always what is found to be going on cognitively. In the words of Jonathan Schooler of the University of Pittsburgh “You can’t always say what you think or think what you say”. And that leads to a rather interesting problem, on the one hand we know that we just can’t report everything that goes on in our minds. There are very many things we experience that we don’t have words for, on the other hand there are very many things that we express that don’t reflect our thought. For example when people are primed with visual stimuli they may say things biased by the prime, even if it wasn’t exactly what they originally thought. Then there is an additional problem, this refers to thought, but a certain amount of our consciousness is not focal, we have a fringe of awareness; a periphery to our experience that, by virtue of focusing on it is no longer the periphery but the focus of the report.

In other words, words don’t seem to secure much certainty. But this may be a bit of a misnomer. First, we are fortunate that we know a enough about the mind to be able to asses which effects are causing inconsistencies with verbal report. Secondly, much of the problem is associated with cognition and thought, not consciousness. If we are studying consciousness we’re not exactly studying cognition, the two converge but are not the same in the same way that attention is not the same as consciousness. we may be conscious of what we think in the same we are conscious of what we attend to, but we are also have consciousness of much of what we don’t think or to that which we attend. The composites of consciousness include and go beyond these things. Not to mention that both thought and attention are cognitive processes, can be manipulated through controlled conditions and measured. It is in that way that we understand them, but it is also in that way that we can understand consciousness. For the most part when we engage in a study we don’t take one persons word for something, even qualitative studies approach peoples reports thematically across several participants in a study. These ‘themes’ are then examined for consistency. In addition, one of the most important bounds for consciousness is the body. We know that our consciousness is limited, not just by the body but by the brain, and in conjunction with verbal reports, the two provide a crux for the kind of consistency sought when we study the mind.

The basis for the problem discussed here has a long history. The problem of other minds (do other people have minds we can know), the problem of zombies (are we speaking to an automaton) and the Chinese Room Argument (just because a computer answers the questions correctly doesn’t mean it understands Chinese) are all very similar to the problems discussed here. They are all based on the logical difference between a report of experience and that experience itself. Science avoids these issues by systematically examining the problems from the third person. But science, especially the science of the mind also relies on the reports of people, as it should.

Logically the philosophical problems have the same shape, and they can be tackled in about the same way, scientifically. We are free to doubt just about anything. We can justify doubt that a world other than the world we immediately perceive exists. But we would also be radically inconsistent if we did. After all the only clue we have that we make an error in something we perceive is perception itself. It is the more consistent perceptions that we have that inform us about the inconsistencies between other perceptions. Science is little more than a systematic version of this principle. By exploring both the structure of our descriptions and the consistencies between our perceptions (and within our theories) we develop systematic accounts of the world which are then formalized. That is the start of an account of consciousness. But best of all it demonstrates how important consciousness is to its own explanation.As Ned Block of New York University points out:

the starting point for work on consciousness is introspection and we would be foolish to ignore it

But it is ignored. That justifies the claim by Block. Daniel Dennet in his theory of  heterophenomenology is clear that we can’t rely on consciousness, and many have urged for a reduction to the brain in our exploration of consciousness. In somewhat less dogmatic words John Taylor has said;

It is necessary to have a solid information processing framework for the brain before we embark on such an ambitious project even at the qualitative level

In my opinion it’s not that these people are necessarily wrong, it’s that they miss the point of consciousness. Nagel in one of the most significant essays of the 20th century (What is it like to be Bat)has clearly pointed out that a reductionist program has to be based on what it seeks to reduce and that a reductionism that does not capture the subjective character of experience is compatible with its absence. In my opinion this is right, it’s not that we should stat with the brain, it’s that what we understand about the brain in relation to consciousness has to be limited by what we discover in experience. The two in other words are not just joined at the hip, they are essentially dependent if we are going to have a genuinely good characterization of consciousness at all.

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A Relationship With The World

in A Place For Thought, Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Humanism, Images, Logic, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

A tantalizing part of experience is the noise we don’t experience; both the visual and auditory noise in the environment is immense. The environment is an almost chaos. Light, shapes and sounds; all varied and complex. It is natural to think of shapes as formed, ready made for minds to acquiesce. We see ‘a table’ or ‘chair’ or ‘face’, and that is it. From the chaos we see an ordered world. That is amazing.

Furthermore within the order we can navigate, making sense of the fauna and flora of our environments. There is a degree to which the impressionists had it right however, there is a a sense in which their paintings are closer to the reality of perception than our very own eyes. After all we are closer to light than to objects (physically speaking).

Color perception offers a simple illustration. When we see a series of different colors the colors remain constant despite variability in environmental conditions such as luminance. This is known as color constancy and this is thought to be achieved because the brain reads the ratios of difference between the wavebands of light from one surface to the next. As wavelengths vary between the surfaces we are looking at, the brain ‘reads’ the ratio differences between light from surfaces (which stays the same irrespective of light variations) allowing the colors we see to remain constant. In other words the brain computes color properties from ratios which, when we think about the brain as fleshy stuff is just amazing.

We don’t just perceive and navigate, we order the world too. How many of us, moving into a new home hang up pictures ‘where they belong’? The world is not just a thing we receive, it is something we act on and try to control. Our brains, human brains that is, are immense in their ability to both make inferences from the available data and and then structure the world according to our needs. We are the only species known to use tools to make tools. That too is amazing.

Within evolutionary theory there is a not insignificant idea that the more variable a trait is the less likely it is to have adaptive value. The argument goes that truly adaptive changes quickly loose their variability as the remaining population have acquired them, thus leaving previously adaptive traits fully absorbed by a species; they become a part of the total makeup of the species. Although the assumption has been contested the overarching principle has held as a rule.

The point is that there is a base level at which we all operate on the world with the same bodies. Each an agent coming to the world ready to make something meaningful of it with the same demands. It was Darwin who noticed that across cultures facial reactions to emotions have an invariance. To the extent that we as a species have invariant demands, we too have structured responses. In short, we see and act on a world we see that is, in part at least, not just composed of the world, but of our response to it. In as much as that is the case, the world in which we live is our construction.

For me personally, it is not just that we are conscious that is amazing, it is that we are conscious agents with a bid to our futures. We live in reciprocity with the environment in such a way that the environment serves a function in an almost Hegelian dialectic, but rather than being an historical and transcendental metphysic, the relations are immediate and physical. Rather than being governed by an end point that is teleological in some as yet unperceived way, it is itself evolving between the myriad minds that people the world, somehow finding solutions to life as it emerges. In all its detail, that is magical.

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An anatomy of the idea

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Art, Belief, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Logic, Psychology, Science, Sleep, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

Liv­ing day to day we some­times for­get the sig­nif­i­cance of our brain are with respect to the ideas that make up our worlds. In our brain are a con­sid­er­able num­ber of neu­rons with sig­nif­i­cantly more con­nec­tions. Odd as it may sound, there is noth­ing like the world in the brain, nor are there any clear ideas, just some gray and white mushy stuff. How your brain and my brain know a table is a table or an idea is an ideas is there­fore puzzling.

Of course as sci­ence has pro­gressed the ques­tions have been framed dif­fer­ently. The way in which the ques­tions have been framed has become and index for under­stand­ing how we relate to mean­ing in the world; under­stand­ing thought and the rela­tion­ships ideas have to each other is impor­tant if we want to under­stand how we relate to our cul­tural envi­ron­ment. Know­ing how our brains work will help us to frame our­selves in the con­cep­tual world of memes and archetypes.

A good place to start to think about our dreams. In our dreams our expe­ri­ences bear lit­tle resem­blance to the actual world. But when we dream we are as good as con­science. For all intents and pur­poses we see, move and exist in a world, albeit a dream world. The ques­tion is how? A lot of work has gone into try­ing to explain ‘how mat­ter becomes imag­i­na­tion’ (to bor­row a phrase from one of my favorite scientists).

To start to under­stand we must return to when we are awake; there is dis­tri­b­u­tion of activ­ity going on in our heads. Mem­o­ries encoded across regions of the brain are acti­vated, not just to explic­itly remem­ber some­thing, but to relate what we hear to the bank of infor­ma­tion already encoded in our brains. Those seman­tic net­works that become active rec­i­p­ro­cally influ­ence the way in which we encode the envi­ron­ment, we thus fur­ther per­ceive the world and our rela­tion to it in rela­tion to the meme­ories already banked up in our brains.

Prim­ing offers a rather good illus­tra­tion. If we are asked to study a list of words, and we are then given syl­la­bles and asked to com­plete them we are more likely to com­plete the syl­la­bles as the words that were in the list we stud­ied. On a seman­tic level, if we are ‘primed’ with a word like doc­tor, we would be more likely to think ‘nurse’ than say ‘tele­phone’, why, because they are seman­ti­cally related. Sim­i­larly, researchers have found that ‘prim­ing’ peo­ple with aggres­sively related stim­uli will get peo­ple to inter­pret oth­ers behav­ior dur­ing com­pet­i­tive games as more aggres­sive and will sim­i­larly trig­ger a more aggres­sive response than one would oth­er­wise have seen.

One other impor­tant things about sleep­ing is that when we sleep our minds have a chance to encode and rehearse infor­ma­tion that was impor­tant dur­ing the day, that is as well as process things that may have been on our minds. The same seman­tic net­works that are active dur­ing the day are active in our sleep minus the real world to order them. Of course this is a rather sim­ple account. But it’s the prin­ci­ple that’s impor­tant. The prin­ci­ple is that the world that we expe­ri­ence is related to active con­stel­la­tions of infor­ma­tion in our brains, formed by the activ­ity between neu­rons that struc­ture and encode that infor­ma­tion. That activ­ity has an impact on how we act on the world, and of course that has an impact on our expe­ri­ences, which fur­ther influ­ences the world that influ­ences us.

As human beings, as minds a sig­nif­i­cant part of that activ­ity is ideational. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of our expe­ri­ence is formed through ideas, con­cepts and seman­tic activ­ity. Things mean things (if I am per­mit­ted a circularity).

And that is the sig­nif­i­cance of mean­ing. The mean­ing we find in things dri­ves us. We relate to mean­ing of things. Jung in his book The Sci­ence of Mythol­ogy drew this point out (albeit psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cally), and if we think of the way in which we use rep­re­sen­ta­tional medi­ums, like deserted islands (Deleuze), or the sig­nif­i­cance of a Brand in the mod­ern world, we come close to under­stand­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of ideas in our lives. But they run deeper.

The con­cept of a schema is impor­tant in under­stand­ing the same point. Schema, or pat­terns that rep­re­sent some part of the world don’t come in-​​built like the abil­ity to rec­og­nize faces (or like the struc­tures that con­tain the schemata). The con­cept of the arche­type is of this form as is the con­cept of the meme. They share enough sim­i­lar­i­ties to be syn­onyms for each other. That is they are both ref­er­ents for ideas.

Com­bin­ing all of the ele­ments in this pic­ture we can begin to form an under­stand­ing of our rela­tion­ship with the world of ideas. Ideas, rep­re­sented often as objects, have sig­nif­i­cance by virtue of our rela­tion to them. The rela­tion­ship between the objects we encounter, the ideas that we form them and the ideas we get learn in soci­ety act as ref­er­ents, pro­vid­ing the envi­ron­ment with a sense of sig­nif­i­cance. That sig­nif­i­cance dri­ves our rela­tion­ship with our envi­ron­ment: press­ing for­ward en-​​mass the devel­op­ment of ideas con­tained in that envi­ron­ment shape a she­matic of ideational con­tent press­ing us with mean­ing. Thank­fully this is a par­tial pic­ture. One I hope devel­ops the impor­tance of ideas in the world as fac­tors in our rela­tion­ship with it. One that can help us bet­ter con­cep­tu­al­ize why some ideas work and some don’t as we cre­ativ­ity develop an image of the world we’re in.

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Society

in Broken Postcard, Cities, Consciousness, Fear, Frailty, Humanism, Philosophy, Psychology, Stories, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

“Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.” George Bernard Shaw

Madness, the very idea of insanity, it is itself a term that is worth checking. It’s use has not remained consistent throughout history. Clinical definitions of insanity tend to be statistical, that is they are normative; if you don’t fit into the normal population then you’re not sane. Of course that’s not complete; some self harm, some are unhappy and some really wouldn’t cope in ‘this’ world without some intervention. However, few have stopped to check the ’sanity’ of society; the society that for the most part chooses who’s in and who’s out of the clinic.

The system we have works for most of us most of the time. But it is a system, and that means it’s going to miss something out. It doesn’t always work for all of us all of the time. Some groups have historically been more likely to be admitted as hysterical.

Study after study has confirmed that, but nothing is done. How would you feel if your depression wasn’t just neuro-chemical; how would you feel if a part of how you felt, part of what you experienced in your unhappiness was your brain’s reaction to the world you live in? It’s not improbable, in fact it’s more than likely. It’s well known that people in different cultures have different prevalence rates for mental illness. It’s also known that relapse rates are lower in other cultures for mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Self harm has a cultural orientation as does anorexia, why can’t we see the mind in part as an expression of the world it lives in, expressing itself in part as a reflection to the context in operates in?

That is, to what extent is our own mental health a reflection of our societies sanity? Social factors do have an influence; isolation in Western cultures is thought to be one causes of depressive symptoms (it’s not for nothing that there are higher rates of mental illness in poorer inner city communities, and amongst them women have the highest rates – men drink more).

In early societies there is no doubt that life was hard. There is less doubt that people’s lives were shorter, more was expected of them and the consequences of not submitting to the group was, without doubt, severe. There is no question that the freedoms we have in the modern world are wonderful when we have them. Within cities that are worlds unto themselves live and breath forests of people, all interwoven, disconnected and striving for survival within the forest.

Most definitions of sanity have the terms ’soundness of mind’, again, a normative definition. I wonder though, is it so wonderfully normal? In a society so wealthy we can’t care for our poor except by charity. That seems neither equitable nor sane when we are richer than we’ve ever been.

In the world we created from the forests, we haven’t lost the struggle, just the forest. Our virtues are not defined by our humanity nor our community.

The footsteps found in Africa are still walked, but they walk fragmented realities. We live in cities of millions, and by necessity. However, that same necessity has brought with it a ferocity en-mass. The faces of strangers are not the faces of people, and so we can laugh with cruelty.

But, a suffering person is still a person suffering. In a blind drive to ease our own suffering further we escape the banality and ennui of existence in entertainment. And it seems quite justified; life is hard after all. Worse than that is that by our own standards we are far from neutral. It is not just as Jonathan Glover puts it so well in his book ‘Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century’ that psychological distancing is part and parcel of the greatest evils of our time, but, as Hannah Arendt also makes the point, distancing is done by us, in the banality of our own normal society and in a guilty cover for truth we are capable of every rationalization.

This post is not an indictment. It is a question. In our quest for happiness the conditions of the best and most pervasive happiness must be considered. And a signifiacnt part of that is, are we in our own society happy despite the comforts of what we know..

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Resonance and Recognition

in A Place For Thought, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Humanism, Psychology, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 2 comments

“Living for ones own pursuits, surrounded by others doing the same is not community”

Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil

I don’t know at what age we become conscious of ourselves as agents in the world. I remember being a child passively. Things happened, and somehow, even if I was the cause of something happening I had no sense of agency. The world happened around me and I was a part of it, but I don’t remember thinking that I played any part in what was happening.

Somehow as you get older however, there’s a time, maybe a moment when that changes. As adults we not only become conscious that choices we’ve had in the past are antecedent to where we are now, we have a responsibility for the consequences. But worst of all, the harder I think the more I can draw lines dating to a time where I was still unaware of the responsibility I would feel now.

These thoughts can weigh heavily on most of us. I doubt that many of us can attest to complete satisfaction with everything in our lives. And by no means do I mean the house we live in or the job we have. Life is just a bit more than that for us. Who we are, the confidence we feel and the power that we feel we have over the future seem intrinsically linked to our past in much the same way.

For me personally it is for exactly these reasons that I value my education and the achievements I’ve made in life. Whatever can and will be taken away from me the past can never be removed. But I value even these things because I know that they are valuable, not just to me but to the people who have recognized them. As far as that is the case I am reminded that my achievements don’t always stand on their own. They also stand in relation to the people who have made me feel that they are achievement.

What am I getting at? A good question indeed.

That one can value one’s achievements is an achievement in life. There are many of us who continue to fail to recognize the value in ourselves. Worries of adequacy as ridiculous as they may be are also all to human. And that is in effect the point. Irvin Yalom once wrote the wonderfully acute observation that falling in love was akin to death. Better to stand in love with another, to stand in a relationship of partnership through life that bring each-other down with a suffocating fall. That relation of support through life I don’t think stands only for a couple, it stands for each of us and is an exquisite metaphor for the relation of support and recognition that each of us aspires to within our community. Despite my achievements, despite my personal confidence in the existence of my own humanity I seek to have that humanity seen in a community of friends. Why? Because it is in the reflection of their eyes that I can see myself.

Looking around the world it is clear that it is the reciprocity of affection, the recognition of being and substance in us all that bears significance as a species. We are born, it is true, into a world of strangers. The world and all it’s competition manages to strangle the essence of humanity through its mechanism. However, like many unanswered questions it also ought to be remembered that there are many things that we have in common as people that are more fundamental than our differences. It is in that respect that the gesture recognition is a significant force in all our endeavors.

The world as it is will continue to arm us. That is natural enough. However, when one thinks about all of the characters that have managed to unite people through conflict it is the men and women who have seen past transient and insignificant differences and found resonance across the divide who continue to inspire our values beyond cynicism and constraint. It seems to me that to aim for the same values, as unattainable as they may prove to be is a good starting place for all of us individually.

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