David Chalmers "The Meta Problem of Consciousness" IU Lindsey Distinguished Undergraduate Lecturer

thank you for joining me today for the first of two fantastic public lectures oriented towards undergraduates to be given by our distinguished undergraduate lecturer this year my name is Elizabeth Schechter I'm an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and the cognitive science program here just a reminder that there's going to be as you may have inferred a reception after today's lecture what's going to happen is that the talk will last for about an hour we will pause in case people need to leave and then there will be Q&A for half an hour and then the reception tomorrow there will be another talk same time same place a called the virtual and the real on virtual reality art oh and I should mention that both lectures are being made possible by the generous support of John Julia and Alice Lindsay and by the Office of the Bicentennial our distinguished undergraduate lecture this year is David Chalmers a philosopher at NYU and a university professor of philosophy and neuroscience and the co-director with net block of NYU Center from mind brain and consciousness Chalmers was one of those philosophers whose work is of truly interdisciplinary reach he has published on and this is only a partial list a I meaning computation mental content epistemology decision theory metaphysics modality and of course consciousness the work for which he's most famous I think his first love also and that's what he's going to be speaking to us speaking to us about today even if you've never read anything of Chalmers on consciousness you've probably still learned from him for instance if you've read about the hard problem of consciousness a term he coined or the neural correlates the search for the neural correlates of consciousness because his work has received a lot of uptake not just amongst philosophers but also from neuroscientists psychologists and other scientists tackling this great frontier his foundational writings on this topic and he is he has identified several of the core problems in consciousness studies what's most special about today's lecture is that while Chalmers apparently began talking and thinking about consciousness even as an undergraduate his writing on consciousness began right here at Indiana University Bloomington where he a dual PhD in philosophy and cognitive science this was actually after dropping the PhD in mathematics that he'd been pursuing at Oxford University and he writes of this decision in the acknowledgement to his dissertation titled towards the science of consciousness that he simply came to realize that he was too preoccupied by the science of consciousness to to focus on maths and that quote after some correspondence with Doug Hofstadter and a visit to Indiana I decided that Indiana University with the double attraction of its new cognitive science program and it's fine philosophy department was the best place for me his dissertation was co-chaired by Douglas Hofstadter and Mike Dunn Rob Goldstone was also on the committee I think all of them are here today so please join me not just in welcoming Dave Thomas but in welcoming him back [Applause] thanks so much Liz it's such a pleasure to be back here in Bloomington that I you it's been a it's really hard to believe it's been 30 years in fact 31 years since I since I started here in January of 1989 I think I'm not gonna come to terms with that of that with that length of time because I mean some things haven't changed it's a it's great to see see Hofstetter my thesis advisor sitting right there in the front row it still makes me feel like a grad students all over again and Mike Don Rob Goldstone who were really influential for me on my committee and you know campus is still beautiful and I gathered Bobby Knight was back in assembly hall the other night just like I remember it you know my time in uh in Bloomington it's like kind of incredible to me in in retrospect um and I was I you I just in that five year period I learned so much I mean I think no it feels to me as if there's no other five year period of my life where I learned where I learned that mattre mean I guess zero through five is supposed to be supposed to be okay it's a critical period for learning different things but I feel like the five years that are you were just another critical period for me I I learned philosophy I didn't know any philosophy coming in I learned I didn't know any cognitive science coming in I learned I learned cognitive science from the discussions in the in the lab with darg and the other grad students there I learned so much about Vicki about the mind from talking with fellow students from taking classes and philosophy and cognitive science from reading from thinking pretty much everything I've done since then was based on stuff I learned in those in those five years are you I wish I could have another maybe maybe it's time for a third critical period I think I can get mine at age 53 I don't know but anyway I know a lot of you who hear it you know you don't recognize these things necessarily at the time I'm not sure at the time so some of you were here studying it at IU I hope that you know I hope that you're managing to have a think of this as a critical period of your own where you're just soaking up so much that's on offer and this amazing program of this amazing the amazing programs of this amazing university so it's just a real a real pleasure to be back and the themes I'll be talking about today in some ways build on things I was thinking about working on my PhD here you know the problems some of the themes around the problem of consciousness remain the same but here I'll be approaching it from the meta perspective and of course you know the master of our meta is here in the in the front row I think the concept of meta is associated with dark Hofstadter more than more than with anybody else and so the the approach of going meta something I really learned from Doug about many many problems about many many questions and and issues there's actually this wonderful quotation out there anything you can do I can do matter I like this it's often attributed to Doug I mean that didn't ring true to me when I saw this attributed to Doug doesn't sound like the kind of dog would actually say it's kind of showy and in a way that the dog wouldn't wouldn't say but nonetheless I found that Dan Dennett attributes this to to Doug I like Douglas Hofstadter's wonderful Maxim quoted by dammit anything you can do I can do matter I gathered jag attributes this to too damn damn it but damn it denies this is one of those strange loops if you know what I mean but I had to I had to dig a bit further on this actually if you dig further on on the web there's an even more interesting attribution just attributing it to Rudolf Carnap any of you who know anything about Carnap will know that this is far more implausible than distributing it to dark hafsteinn he would never say anything so uh so so frivolous nonetheless it's out there on the web I even found this for those of you don't know that's Immanuel Kant and Allan did can't say this no okay okay so it's not yeah so this is attributed to everybody under the Sun I from my digging the most reliable attribution I could actually find was a discussion on language log the blog where they found that mentioned in an article in December 79 by a law professor at Yale Arthur Allen left who attributes it to his colleague also in the Yale Law School Leon Lipson around 1979 so as far as I could tell that's the earliest attribution of this but maybe we can go we can go anyway I like this idea of you know going meta jumping up a level that's certainly something I learned from Doug and today I'm going to be applying that perspective to the problem of consciousness well I'll start with just a statement of what I call the meta problem of consciousness and I'll explain why it's its relation to - you know other non meta problems so the meta problem of consciousness is explained why we think there's a problem of consciousness my meta problem when I was here at IU I remember someone gave a talk on meta something and they said that meta X is always X about X do you remember this one metacognition cognition about cognition meta theory a theory about a theory was like yeah that sometimes words made of ethics there's not ethics about ethics it's just jumping up a level but the meta problem is definitely it's a problem about a problem and the problem it's about is the hard problem of consciousness the hard problem of consciousness is explaining why and how physical processes give rise to conscious experience how it is the processes in the brain and maybe elsewhere give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and the world I was looking around on the web for illustrations of the hard problem and I found I found this one on there quite like it looks like someone's hair is catching fire but yeah it somehow does that you know how does the the matter of the brain give rise to the fire of consciousness more specifically the heart problem is concerned with phenomenal consciousness thought it's a philosopher's term from what it's like to be a conscious subject from the first-person point of view this this locution was made famous in a article by Thomas Nagel my colleague at NYU who back in 1974 wrote an article called what is it like to be a bat the thought is well we don't know what it's like to be about but it's like something to be a bat using its sonar to locate objects and hears it like vision isn't like hearing well we don't know is it like something else again it's very hard to tell but it's presumably like something there's some first-person experience of being a bat that is the bats phenomenal consciousness so we say a system is phenomenally conscious if there's something it's liked to be it so there's something it's like to be me I presume there's something it's like to be you something you like to be bats and cats but you know maybe there's not something it's like to be this lectern if not then the lectern is not phenomenally conscious and same for mental states a mental state is conscious in this sense phenomenally conscious if there's something it's like to be in that state you know we do have states of the cognitive system they're not conscious they don't like bubble up and make a difference to our experience maybe a lot of processes say in the cerebellum have that status or unconscious processing of linguistic structures but an awful lot of mental states are phenomenally conscious so visual experiences I look out in the audience and have an experience of colored objects in certain locations in my visual field other sensory experiences sound of my voice taste bodily sensations like pain and orgasm all of these have distinctive first-person qualities of subjective experience mental imagery I can think about you know how Bloomington look when I was here 30 years ago maybe that'll be associated with some emotional experiences happiness and anger and indeed a stream of a current thought as I'm reflecting about this deciding what to do next and so on all of these are part of the stream of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view and the hard problem is basically explaining that kind of subjective experience in terms of physical processes in the in the brain its contrasts with the so called easy problems of consciousness which is not easy in any sense in the sense that they're trivial you know that they may well take decades or centuries to get to the to get to the bottom of but they're easy in the sense that we have a paradigm for explaining them and the easy problems of consciousness serve roughly the problems of a sandy of explaining certain behaviors or behavioral cognitive functions associated with consciousness how do we discriminate information discriminate things in the environment so that we can now react to them differentially how do we integrate information from different sources say from a from vision and from audition how do we bring those things to bear in our control of behavior so I can say point at certain people and indeed how can we produce verbal reports about goings-on in the environment and a hot mental state all of these are often associated with that with consciousness but there's a sense that none of them are the central the central mystery in part because we have a paradigm for explaining those things it's the paradigm of functional explanation we explain or address the easy problems by finding a neural or computational mechanism that performs the relevant functions say this responsible for our verbal reports or our pointing or our integration or Al discrimination very very non-trivial task we have a sense of what we need to do and gradually through the progress of neuroscience cognitive science its looks like we have a path to finding those mechanisms for phenomenal consciousness on the other hand there seems to be a kind of explanatory gap that's not present in the other cases for the hard problem looks like when you explain these behavioral functions you know what how is it the discrimination or the integration or the control or the rapport happens it leaves open a further question why is all that accompanied by conscious experience why doesn't all this processing go on in the dark as it were without without consciousness and too many people including me there seems to be an explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience because that standard paradigm of explaining things by explaining associated functions doesn't seem to get a grip so here's somebody here's someone's depiction of the explanatory gap again how does a there's some kind of magic synthesis that seems to take place between the brain and consciousness that we have to figure out now there are many many this is all on the first order problem of consciousness not the meta problem there are many many approaches to the hard problem just to the first order hard problem of consciousness we can divide them into roughly two classes some of which take consciousness is irreducible say two processes two physical processes and some of which take it as reducible so on the side of irreducibility you've got views like dualism where consciousness is non-physical separate from the brain but interacting with them you've got views like can psychism that says consciousness is everywhere even in very very simple systems maybe even in say elementary particles and the whole world is somehow or at least our consciousness is somehow made up of our constituted by consciousness at that level that's a view which recently has been getting a lot of play there are even more extreme views like idealism the physical world as a whole is somehow wholly mental and minds at the bottom level make up the entire physical world these are all views which are interesting in which I've explored in some other work my sympathies tend to be on this side although the views also have a lot of problems to be dealt with but on the other side the coin there's views on which consciousness is reducible to say physical or maybe computational processes in line with the fairly standard approach of cognitive science of trying to explain everything in terms of neural computational processes that reviews like functionalism which very broadly speaking might try to explain to consciousness in terms of associated computational processes biological materialism which try and explain tries and explains it in terms of specific biology and even quantum mechanical materialism that tries to get it all from quantum mechanics my own view is that each of these leaves open an explanatory gap but nonetheless I think they're all worth pursuing anyway but that's just all the boring first-order hard problem of consciousness that's that's pretty familiar my approach today is not going to be to look at one versus two here but to postulate to take approach three which which relies on a principle I learned from from my adviser dark sometimes you need to jump out of the system or Jutes as I as dr. Jake over TS jump out of the system instead of trying to address this problem directly go matter about the problem you can go matter in different in different directions but here I'm gonna go matter by asking the question why do we think consciousness poses a problem why do we say consciousness poses a problem and one way to kind of to approach this issue which is the matter problem is to think about one behavioral one bit of behavior is very closely related to the hard problem of consciousness and this is the bit of behavior that we make phenomenal reports or verbal reports of conscious experiences we talk about our consciousness I've been standing up here for the last 10 minutes or so talking about my consciousness and the problems it poses that's a bit of behavior that's something that ought to be explainable by the methods that explain behavior including your neuroscience computational cognitive science and so on so I say things like I'm conscious I'm feeling pain now in principal those are bits of behavior those seem to imprints will fall with the easy problems we ought to have a paradigm for explaining them as bits of behavior they ought to in principle be explicable by neural computational mechanisms the same goes to focus we can focus down more specifically from our from phenomenal reports to what we can call problem reports reports expressing our sense or the consciousness poses a hard problem so here are some things that's say at least someone like me might say there's a hard problem of consciousness explaining behavior doesn't explain consciousness consciousness seems non-physical and intuitions like these although not universally shared or I think fairly widely shared they can be found in many many people looking that's a bit of behavior about us again open to functional explanation so the matter problem of consciousness is roughly the problem of explaining these problem reports in principle again that's a puzzle about behavior so it falls officially with the easy problems or to be open to standard functional explanation in terms of reductionist mechanisms but at the same time the meta problem is closely tied to the hard problem on the one hand it's an easy problem it's more tractable than the hard problem it looks like you know there's a in principle a straightforward empirical research program here of explaining those reports at the same time it seems obviously so close to the hard problem that's solving it ought to shed light on the hard problem of consciousness there's a number of different ways in which you might take it to shed light on the hard problem and I'll explain or look at some of those towards the end of the talk but but for now I just want to introduce you to the to the problem as kind of a useful somewhat neutral way of making some progress I mean you might in a way the matter of problem can be viewed is what philosophers sometimes called genealogical analysis which involves you know explaining certain phenomena via the genealogy of what we think about those you know the historical way those judgments were brought about shedding light on a domain by analyzing how our judgments about that domain are formed so you can do that with religion say think about why do I take a genealogical approach to religion by thinking why did we make the judgments we do about why do we believe in God and so on maybe someone can tell an evolutionary story or a psychological story about why beliefs like that would to be expected because they helped comfort us I'll provide us with certain motivations that played an evolutionary role we can also do this for morality why do we believe the things we do about what kind of actions are right and wrong and many people try to tell say evolutionary stories about why we make those judgments that often not always but often leads to debunking our beliefs about those domains if we can explain why are we believing God without postulating God then some people say you don't need to take our beliefs in God so seriously explain our beliefs in morality without postulating morality we don't need to take those beliefs so seriously so many people my colleague Sharon Street and while you for example has done a lot of work on debunking arguments in that domain you might well think one role the meta problem might play for you would be to debunk beliefs about consciousness by somehow explaining them without postulating this special thing called consciousness if you went that way that would lead you to the philosophical view that's come to be known as illusionism illusionism to a first approximation it's the view that consciousness is an illusion we think we're conscious somehow we judge we're conscious we say we're conscious but in fact consciousness does not exist this also sometimes gets called strong illusionism weak illusionism says consciousness exists but we make some mistakes about what it involves at the very least you might think somehow the sense that consciousness poses a problem could turn out to be an illusion so explain the illusion and we dissolve the problem that's a very common thing for illusionists to think and on that view roughly solving the meta problem will disallow problem and that's I think one view of the relation between the meta problem and the hard problem the the illusionist viewing that's become I mean that kind of line has been popular for a while associated with people like Dan Dennett and others but it's become particularly popular recently Keith Frankish a British philosopher has tried to develop illusionism as a theory of consciousness it's also a view that you can find elements of throughout the history of philosophy and thinking about the mind-body relation or the self and so on even Kant and thinking about I guess in the part of the critique of Pure Reason solid isms talks about the transcendental illusion of the self which he uses to explain away at least certain intuitions about the self in the 20th century that the Australian philosophers UT place and David Armstrong in the 50s and 60s tried to diagnose how non reductionist intuitions about consciousness as coming from something which replace he called the phenomenological fallacy Armstrong talked about the headless woman illusion something I'll get to in a bit Dan Dana talks about a user illusion and Keith Frankish as I mentioned develops illusionism as a theory of consciousness so one way you can go with the meta problem is to motivate illusionism and I'll come back to that particular route towards the end of the talk but I also think the meta problem is interesting if you're not an illusionist about consciousness I am NOT an illusionist about consciousness I think consciousness is real you know I've got some sympathy with her with illusionism I think it's absolutely fascinating view if I was to develop broadly reductive approach to consciousness I'd probably go that way that said I think that the consciousness is real and not an illusion so I think solving the meta problem does not on its own dissolve the hard problem of consciousness that said I think nonetheless the meta problem should be a tractable problem to solve and solving it should shed much light on the hard problem even if it doesn't solve the hard problem I think it's almost certain that if we can find a good solution to the meta problem why we think about consciousness in these ways this is almost certain to give us some clues so for example the underlying basis of consciousness and which ought to provide at the very least interesting constraints on the form of a solution okay so that's the introduction now I want to say some things about the general research program of the made a problem before going on to look at talked a little bit about potential solutions impact on theories of consciousness and some upshots for issues about illusionism so this meta problem opens out in principle a tractable empirical research program for every one reductionists non reductionists illusionists non illusionists i think we can try to solve it in some relatively neutral way and then think about the philosophical consequences and the upshot for issues like the mind-body problem so what is the meta problem well one way I when I wrote I wrote a long article about this recently and a bunch of people replied and I'm working on now my replies to the replies in that article I tried to cast the meta problem more specifically I won't go into all the details now but the rough idea is to topic neutrally explain what I'll call problem intuitions or to explain why this is impossible and I'll unpack the different parts of that one part is what's an intuition here well as well regarded here for current purposes problem intuitions are dispositions to make problem judgments and problem reports which are judgments and reports reflecting the underlying sense of a problem of consciousness forces sometimes require intuitions to be non inferential if something is formed by reasoning or inference it's not an intuition that constraint would matter here I'll understand intuitions more broadly but I do think plausible that the most important problem intuitions about consciousness are not formed by reasoning and inference they're somehow more direct and immediate than that so what are some of the core problem intuitions I mean there's a lot I divide them into a few classes there's what we might call metaphysical intuitions that our consciousness is somehow seems to be in yet intangible non-physical explanatory intuitions consciousness is hard to explain in terms of physical processes that seems to me this explanatory gap there are more specific things many of you will know the thought experiment of Mary and the black and white room who's never seen the color red she knows all about physical processes from reading about it man welcome life textbooks and so on but she seems like there's one central thing she doesn't know what it's like to see red and then she leaves the room and she sees red many people think she gains new knowledge that she could never have gotten from that physical knowledge bringing rise to the giving rise to the sense again of a gap between knowledge of the physical knowledge of consciousness there's also modal intuitions intuitions about what's imaginable or conceivable or possible one of these is the thought experiment of the philosophical zombie some of you may be familiar with these he's actually played a central starring role in my PhD dissertation to dogs horror there's a wonderful chapter about zombies by the way in the dogs book I am a strange loop that I recommend to all of you I don't I don't agree with everything in there you won't be surprised to hear but there's many interesting things to say a philosophical zombie is someone that is roughly and some ways of understanding it is a physical is a functional or behavioral duplicate of a normal human being but isn't conscious no one's home there's no no conscious experience or in the extreme version it's a physical duplicate of a normal human without consciousness so imagine me here with all this physical structure and a brain but no consciousness I hope you don't actually think that's that's the way I am but too many people at least seems conceivable say when you're talking to another person they might not have consciousness even once we fill in all the physical facts so that's one way of the very idea that zombies are conceivable even if not actual it's one way of getting at intuitions about the gap between physical processes and consciousness because then there's an explanatory problem we're not zombies but why are me zombies anyway so many people find zombies conceivable or if not they find that the very least say if there was a computer behaving like us that would be an open question whether it was conscious intuitions like that or at least fairly widespread there are related intuitions intuitions about the distribution of consciousness where the robots or groups are conscious intuitions about the value of consciousness that matters morally for example just had a great discussion of this with some of the students about the you know the role that consciousness plays at least in our intuitions about whether our system matters morally roughly if a system is conscious it seems to have some kind of moral status at least enters the arena of our moral calculations if not then it seems that maybe it doesn't matter morally any more than a lecturer or an iPhone does we have intuitions about the self persisting through time we gain intuitions about qualities anywhere there's a lot of intuitions here and sometimes as philosophers we just think about these things in a first-order way are these intuitions correct if they're correct what follows and so on but if you take the meta perspective you can see these intuitions themselves as an object of analysis that we can study as objects and try to find their genesis and what explains them so here we have an interdisciplinary research program an empirical research program of trying to explain to understand and explain these intuitions in principle it involves on the one hand experimental psychology and what people call experimental philosophy which involves psychological studies of people's intuitive judgments but I mean psychologists have done this for years philosophers have started really focusing on these questions about intuitions in general for the last 20 years by doing for example psychological experiments to study and analyze people's judgments and to figure out what they covary with what best explains them in principle that can be computational and neurobiological models of intuitions and reports about consciousness and there's been a little bit of work in both of these directions so far and indeed there's philosophical analysis of what's going on so this is this fairly neutral empirical program now of course it's a it's an empirical question how widely these intuitions are shared you know I have them pretty strongly in my experience an awful lot of people share these intuitions about consciousness but they're you know by no means absolutely universal there are some people who reject them there are some people who deny having them in the first place it's a really interesting empirical question how widely they're shared of in principle I think that's going to take a lot of everything from experimental philosophy and psychology to cross cultural anthropology and linguistics to get out of the moat one of the really interesting things to come out of this meta problem process so far for me is getting responses from people who are engaged in that kind of work experimental work anthropological work and so on to make cases about precisely how widespread these intuitions are those issues get very subtle about what you mean by what it is to have the intuitions what it is for them to be universal and so on nonetheless my sense I think it's brought out by all I've even done a little bit of work here in experimental philosophy collaborating with people I'm testing intuitions my sense so far as the intuitions are pretty widely shared at least as dispositions or intuitions sometimes they're overridden by theory but at least as dispositions and intuitions my senses there had probably by a majority of people at least but you know the data we need to get better data on just how widespread they are part of the meta problem will be explaining you know why the intuitions are widely shared if they are if they're not universally shared find out why they're not sure I shared when they're not you know there is quite a lot of empirical work on intuitions about the mind and very field is very broadly called theory of mind in psychology and cognitive science it tends to focus in certain areas belief you know wind if for example when two kids acquire the idea that beliefs about the world can be can be false there are in traditions about the self when is a system the same over time when can when could a system for example survive its death and so on what work there is on consciousness in this perspective is tended until recently mostly to be about the distribution of consciousness can a robot be conscious can a group be conscious so you know Paul Bloom has written this beautiful book on the science of child development actually argues that people are kids are intuitive Julis they treat the mind intuitively as distinct from the body which i think is very much other of a piece with this kind of meta problem perspective although his focus tends to be more on intuitions about the self then on consciousness per se for example about whether beings can survive the death of the physical body so that much empirical work at least until recently directly on the core problem intuitions this very nice piece by Sarah Gottlieb and Tania Lombroso they came out just a couple of years now a couple of years ago called can science explain the human mind or people's judgments about when various mental phenomena are hard to explain and they find out and they find that when things are introspectively accessible I have some kind of privileged access than our intuitions about difficulty of science explaining them go up a lot but I think there's room for a lot more here so part of this is a call to arms for this mutual empirical research program of trying to explain the empirical basis of intuitions and judgments here topic neutral neutral neutral tea plant is really an epi cycle here to make sure that these explanations don't mention consciousness you might think the best explanation of why we say the things we do about consciousness is we're conscious we accurately detected we report it might be true nonetheless even if that's true it's also possible to give it looks like it ought to be possible to give say a computational or algorithmic explanation of our judgments here that doesn't mention consciousness or maybe a neurobiological one that doesn't mention consciousness the Wegener stipulate that the kind of explanations were interested in or topic neutral in this way that's basically required to turn the meta problem into an easy problem that doesn't require figuring out the basis of consciousness first it's consistent with a causal role for consciousness but a topic neutral explanation is going to specify the role of consciousness structurally so you know we eventually got some kind of structural Network say the producers to get some inputs produces these outputs it may be the consciousness is playing a role inside this network but we're going to cast the explanation in structural algorithmic term okay but that detail is not going to matter too much in what follows okay now I want to get to say just a little bit about potential solutions to the meta problem I shadowed do not have a solution to the meta problem if any of you do please let me know I'd love to I'd love to hear there are a lot of ideas bubbling around even since I started thinking about this a year or two ago there have been a few articles coming out saying here's a potential solution to the meta problem in terms of this mechanism and that and I don't I think they made our problem not to be solvable so I think there ought to be a solution within sight but I don't think we have it yet so there's a goal here in the in the middle distance but here are some I want to at least go over some things which I think might be components of a solution to the meta problem there being ideas here and there although there's no unified literature here are a few but just would go over a few promising ideas one is the idea that there are one central component of any solution any solution to the meta problem has to be the idea that the mind has models of itself just as our you know we've got an intuitive physics of the external world building bottles of the X well the mind also builds models of itself this is an idea that's played a really central role in Doug's work we have internal self models modeling our own cognitive processes and Michael Graziano more recently has picked up on this kind of idea and tried to argue we've got models of our own processes of attention he thinks these explain might explain how since there is a problem of consciousness I find this very very plausible this has got to be part of her of a solution it was like them back in gödel Escher Bach Doug used this wonderful our print gallery from MC Escher as a way of sort of illustrating this point this somehow has an inevitable consequence of having models of ourself there's always going to be some kind of hole in our sense of ourselves in our explanation and that's kind of if you think of that as the hole where the problem of consciousness gets in some house it's a beautiful explanation of you know this guy is modeling a world that contains the guy and someone you can't fit all the pieces together beautifully there's always going to be some hole at the center somehow the problem of consciousness gets you know I think there's got to be something right about that still embarrassed ill the question is how why is there this how does this give rise to the specific intuitions about consciousness that we have you know what is it about the models and I don't think so far you know more needs to be said to to explain that another idea which I think has to be central here is that we have special introspective concepts of our mental states they're independent of physical concepts people sometimes talk about phenomenal concepts here or we can also do this in terms of symbols so dog talks a lot about the need for self symbols where does the self come from well we have this summer any cognitive system is going to end up having a giant symbol representation for the self that stands for the self and maybe many of our intuitions about the self can be explained in terms of the way that the self symbol works I mean Doug's I think Doug's focus in these questions there's always very much been on the self and of the sense of self which is related to consciousness but not exactly the same issue but I think these ideas can be put into the key of consciousness by talking about the need for a consciousness symbol in any rep in a representational system or an intelligence system there's reasons to think it might represent itself is being conscious in certain ways being consciousness conscious of the world there might be a consciousness concept or a consciousness symbol that somehow gives rise to our problem report so maybe there's what reasons to think the consciousness symbol will be interestingly independent of the symbols for the physical world there by explaining the sense of a gap I think that's got to be right as well although it's still much more remains to be explained why is it that we have this consciousness symbol and why does it function in just the way that it does there's also this idea due to David Armstrong and others of introspective opacity Armstrong's ideas we don't see that consciousness is physical introspection doesn't reveal the physicality of consciousness so instead we see it as non-physical and his analogy is with this so-called headless woman effect from you know from like 19th century circuses we don't see the person's head so we see her as having no head so here's a this rather gruesome exhibit from from circuses is it there's a woman with a just bring a veil over the head I guess from certain angles if you look at this it looks like she has no head and I'm strong as ideas well you don't see the head therefore you see her as having no head I don't know I think I'm not sure I really get the effect that's strongly and yeah and you know it takes very very special circumstances to get that effect yeah things everything has to be lined up yes so so I don't think we're at all I mean I'm now I'm not seeing a bunch of you as having heads I certainly don't see you as lacking heads so it takes very special circumstances to make that inference think those would need to be explained likewise there are many things we don't see their physicality I deal with my iPhone there are computer processes and in there I don't see their physical basis I don't suddenly infer my iPhone has some special non-physical essence so there are questions then but there are also questions I get old for all of these explanations about why we get this distinctive gap for consciousness we don't get it nearly so strongly for mental states like belief you know I believe that Bloomington's in entirely obvious how to explain those in physical terms but you don't get as strongest you don't get that strong distinctive sense of gap enos you get will say the experience of red or the sensation of pain so there's some differences to be explained there too we want an explanation that doesn't generalize too strongly to predict an equal gap in all these cases let's go a little bit further I think there's something to the idea that you know when it comes to colors there's a sense that color experience somehow presents colors as primitive elements of the world you know redness and and greenness they seem to be these simple primitive properties now they're not they're complicated physical properties in the environment that affect us in certain ways numberless phenomenology presents them as primitive why maybe that's useful I'm in some work I've called these identities where the idea is back in the Garden of Eden things really had those primitive properties we fell from Eden nothing has those properties but still the identic qualities are a useful model of a non-identical that's just for Carlos in the external world so far while we get primitive qualities there but one thought is maybe we do something like that with the mind we simplify the mind to ourselves we present it as involving primitive qualities and maybe even primitive relations that makes the mind seemed somehow primitive to us in the way that colors do so maybe they say a primitive you don't just get say it you don't just atribute primitive qualities of red in the state of the world but you attribute a primitive relation of awareness of those qualities in you more your model of the mind is just simpler whatever things seems simple and primitive so maybe that's a way to move things forward and associated with that is the idea I think this is very key to many intuitions about consciousness our internal models give us a sense of being acquainted both with these concrete qualities and with our awareness on them the sense of acquaintance I think it's very many people who are really bothered by the problem of consciousness there's this sense that consciousness is right there you're acquainted with its qualities in a way which is peculiarly direct so if we can explain that sense that will go a long way okay so this is really just to get on the table maybe some elements I don't even think of what's laid out so far is really potential explanation it's just a way of getting clearer on what needs to be explained but here's a possible summary at least of the kind of approach to the meta problem that I find at least potentially potentially helpful another thing I like about whatever it in here is good this has all been written neutrally to be both available both to an illusionist and illusionist will regard this as an explanation of the illusion of consciousness why we think all those false things about consciousness because our mental models make us think so a realist like me someone thinks consciousness is real can read this as an account of what's going on with our real contact with consciousness and but this should be phrased in of topic neutral weights so as both readings are available so we have introspective modal's deploying introspective concepts of our internal states that are largely independent of our physical concepts these concepts are introspectively opaque not revealing any of the underlying mechanisms our perceptual models perceptually attribute primitive perceptual qualities to the world and our introspective models attribute primitive mental relations to these qualities these models produce the sense of acquaintance both with those qualities and with our awareness of those qualities and again illusionist will see this as an explanation of the illusion a realist will say but if you're a realist here that's the realest way if your illusionist here this the illusionist way like I said I think this is just a very intermediate step on the way to a solution much of this remains to itself to be explained more explain and amines to be explained than exponents things that does the explaining still like we can put forward I'd use of this form and then test them in principle in this meta problem research program we can test potential explanations with psychological studies and computational models this is a developing area but the one nice computational model alone I know is a little simple software agent designed by two AI researchers Luke mule Hauser and buck vulgaris who took some things I've written about the meta problem and from Spock camera a French philosopher I had written I said okay we can make computation out of that and they built a little little AI system that started with certain you know axioms of its beliefs about the physical world and about consciousness that didn't build in non reductionism about consciousness so they say and then they put a little theorem prover to work with those axioms and they go down some some conclusions like ah consciousness is not physical consciousness there's my certain is my algorithm and there's my consciousness and those are distinct things so it's their little computer program turned into an intuitive juist now I'm not sure this model proves too much just yet it's a very very massive lead over simplified in all kinds of ways and it's not clear that it's doing anything like what we were doing still there's a research program suggested of testing refining these models until you've got something which is a good model of our processes and then that will raise the question is that really at the basis of our sense of the problem of consciousness one question by the way if a machine issues the same sorts of problem reports as us in a really systematic way caused by similar mechanisms then is that machine itself conscious I mean a few people have suggested um Erin Sloman has suggested this kind of thing as a Turing test potential Turing test for machine consciousness and Susan Schneider and Ed Turner have picked up on this more recently basically the best way to find out whether a machine is consciousness well first of all you ask it you know is it conscious and so on but secondly you probe its concepts if you see is it puzzled by consciousness does the Machine Satan you know just find the machine saying things like principal I'm just a bunch of silicon circuits but from the inside I feel like so much more then you know maybe you'll have a some reason to think the machine is conscious that's my perspective on the other perspective it's just the machine has just gone to all this trouble to have to fool humans into believing in all that consciousness nonsense just to get admitted to their moral circle it's like the machine that had to take the talk like a human cause to pass the Turing test that went through its shirring test study guide and the machine has to demean itself by reproducing all of a dumb philosophical intuitions so I'll leave that question about impact on AI artificial consciousness open but what I talked a little bit before I end about impact on theories of consciousness if there's a couple of different ways in which a solution thinking about the meta problem has impact on theories first on scientific theories of consciousness and then on philosophical theories of consciousness so I mean I think that as I mentioned a solution to the meta problem and a solution to the hard problem will be very closely connected here's one way of articulating a connection whatever explains consciousness they've got a theory of consciousness explains it say in terms of processes in the brain or whatever computational processes whatever explains consciousness should also partly explain our judgments about consciousness why at least of these judgments are correct if you're a realist who thinks our judgments about consciousness are correct be very strange if the basis of consciousness played in a role in generating our judgments about consciousness would be a weird coincidence for example though they ended up being correct so if a theory of consciousness says that mechanism M is the basis of consciousness then M should partly explain our judgments about consciousness so you know we can apply this two different theories one famous one very well-known scientific theory of consciousness right now is Giulio Tony's integrated information theory - no need to finds up a certain mathematical measure of integrated information that he calls Phi you basically apply it network systems and it's a complicated network properties very hard to calculate but calculated in principle of Phi and he says basically the higher fire you have the more consciousness you have and it's a very controversial theory there's a lot to say about it but it is a currently very popular approach which has had a lot of influence in neuroscience and psychology as well as you know philosophy and and AI just say that your approach to consciousness you integrated information as the basis of consciousness here's a challenge how does integrator that information really help explain problem reports and there's a worry that integrated information seems kind of dissociated from the report processes not just that you can have not just as more goes into report processes it's kind of hard to see how integrated information is pushing those report processes around one issue is that you have simulations with the same tendency to report with 0fi it turns out on IRT a similar computer simulation of a process won't have the same fire tones I can also have hi-fi without the report tendency so there's at least a potential challenge there a kind of dissociation I don't say this is anything like a knockdown argument against IIT I think it's a challenge for many theories to explain about explaining how it is that these bases of consciousness have the effects that they need to have maybe you can apply similar critiques to other theories both scientific and philosophical but I won't go into that here the other kind of impact I'm interested in is impact on illusionism remember I introduced a better problem in introducing the metal problem I brought out the idea that somehow the metal problems solving the metal problem might dissolve the hard problem this is the program that Keith Frankish has been pushing this is the idea that a solution to the meta problem might lead to debunking our beliefs about consciousness and here's the very rough idea if we can explain why we think we're conscious independently of consciousness then those beliefs aren't justified that's meant to be like an instance of a model you find in many domains if you'd explain our belief in God independently of God then maybe those beliefs aren't justified if you could explain our beliefs in morality without postulating genuine moral facts and maybe a belief in genuine moral facts sound justified and so on so that kind of approach tends to lead to illusionism about consciousness because if our beliefs about consciousness are not justified there's my belief that I'm conscious isn't truly justified that you might think ok why not just get rid of consciousness altogether the same way somebody might get rid of God in that circumstance that's what philosophers call to banking argument one way which I like to give out this is kind of through the lens of coincidence if our judgments about consciousness are explained algorithmically consciousness is not maybe it's something extra there's just seems to be some kind of very weird coincidence that our judgments about consciousness should be correct could be made true by this extra element somehow and that can start to seem rather bizarre you know one way I think so interesting think about how realists should resist the debunking argument I think the most promising approach is to make the case that consciousness somehow realizes and realizes and underlies the processes that explain our problem intuitions and plays some key role there then the challenge is to make that work maybe a pen cyclist for example could argue that consciousness is somehow underlying the process or a duelist could say something to one of the more interesting things to come out of the recent welcome the meta problem for there's a symposium in the journal of consciousness studies is a couple of realists actually developing specific models here to respond that out of time to go into that but it kind of goes with this idea that maybe yeah there's a structural explanation of the reports but consciousness is playing a role in getting it getting it all to go if you like and then in a way that makes consciousness essential to the best underlying explanation but I I want to close by talking about illusionism liver illusionism says consciousness doesn't exist we just think it does stronger a solution to the meta problem dissolves the hard problem and here the kind of illusionism I'm interested in is what people call strong illusionism phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist there's also weak illusionism that says they exist but we're wrong about some of its properties but I'll just focus on the strong version so here's a one common view is that strong illusionism doesn't even make sense strong illusionism about consciousness is contradictory why because the moment you have an illusion that's itself a conscious experience the illusion of consciousness is it self conscious and that's a tempting thing to say I think the best reply for the illusionist is to say well no consciousness doesn't exist illusions are not themselves conscious states they're judgments they like representations or judgments that control our behavior the illusion itself is a judgment not the conscious experience and somehow our brain is got these little self modal's that make it make these judgments I'm conscious I'm conscious unconscious the conscious part is just attributed to ourselves as part of the illusion that's not part of reality but you think there's a very very flat-footed argument against illusionism which is not the most subtle one but but it's you'll skip the parts on on weak illusionism here's a very very flat foot of the argument against strong illusionism not of all subtle but I think it's probably you know captures a sense of why many people find illusions I'm just frankly unbelievable it goes like this people sometimes feel pain if strong illusionism is true no one feels pain therefore strong illusionism is false I mean pain is just the conscious experience here pain talked about the feeling of pain seems absolutely undeniable if the strong illusion this really says nobody is phenomenally conscious then they have to deny their any conscious experiences and deny there's a genuine feeling of pain now it says it sounds like you know I'm making them caricature in the illusionist position to make it sound sound ridiculous but that's the kind of thing you have to say if you want to deny that there is conscious experience you have to deny there is anything it's like and this this moment there's always a temptation to water down the illusionism to make it say something less strong yeah maybe there is a feeling of pain it's just not quite what we thought I think that's a mistake I think it's absolutely essential to making strong illusionism work that it says something totally crazy and counterintuitive because it's just saying that you know we have these built-in models inside our head that make us believe with absolute strength that there is these these special properties of conscious consciousness it makes something seem introspectively obvious that is not so the best form in the most powerful form of illusionism will deny has to deny something which is introspectively obvious and requires them to say something like this but this does of course leave them open to this kind of argument analogous to what philosophers it's a bit like GE Moore's famous argument in philosophy proves external reality but here is one hand here is another therefore there is an external world we do the same thing for here is a pain therefore a consciousness exists not a subtle argument but it is a very hard one to respond to it the very least at least of this kind of unbelievable 'ti it seems to many people unbelievable that no one feels pain and that no one is conscious so therefore strong illusionism seems unbelievable now I think what the illusion is should now say that's a virtue of my of my view looses my view predicts that my view will be unbelievable you know you have these self models that make you believe in this stuff it's just impossible for you to believe otherwise and some of the more consistent illusionists have come out that way but it turns out not to be not to be like dialectically awesome for advertise let's say for marketing purposes it's good as that view has its downside so anyway I think we're left I am really a sympathizer in some ways with illusionism although I find it unbelievable I think we're left with an interesting kind of standoff here here on went to different kinds of absurdity of two different views his Strawson Galen Strawson well articulating one kind of absurdity the apparent absurdity of illusionism he said there occurred in the twentieth century the most remarkable episode of the whole history of ideas the whole history of human thought a number of thinkers denied the existence of something we know with certainty to exist consciousness so that's yeah that's the view that illusionism is unbelievable and absurd on the other on the other side we've got the rationalist thinker eliezer yudkowsky writing about consciousness and the mind-body problem and he was actually responding to some stuff of mind making the case that dualism is absurd in particular epiphenomenalism the view where consciousness doesn't play a causal role he says the zombie argument was part of my arguments maybe a candidate for the most deranged idea in all of philosophy the causally closed cognitive system of China's internal narrative is about functioning in a way not by necessity but just in our universe miraculously happens to be correct okay there's a lot to be said about that but that's I think is a wonderful articulation of this one's calling the debunking argument the view that realism about consciousness threatens to make our judgments true by coincidence now there's middle ground here I mean these are two very extreme views there's middle ground but it tends to slide back to the same problems like other forms of illusionism weaker forms don't help with a hard problem you can make the case that other forms of realism not just epiphenomenalism a still subject to this kind of miraculous correctness critique so I think somehow here we have to get beyond one or both of these forms of absurdity illusionists need to explain how having a mind can somehow be like this even if it's not exactly the way that it seems it's neat gonna make the cases it's not somehow phenomenologically blocked completely blind to have a mind realists need to explain how mental problem processes could be essentially grounded in consciousness even if it's possible for them to occur without consciousness and a couple of people have been thinking recently in that direction so anyway I'm inclined to think that if we can arrive at a solution to the matter problem on one side or the other that meets these ambitions as possible not certain but possible that could end up solving the hard problem of consciousness in the mean time even short of a solution to the hard problem the meta problem is a potentially tractable research project for everyone and what I'd like to recommend to you so thanks okay we're going to go ahead and start with questions and I see this side of the room is very ambitious but this side is not oh good we got someone over here so since that's a short line and that is a is that a line over there that's wait a minute okay so we'll start in this side hey Dave great talk just just a question about something you said near the end so you were really kind of plumping for the realist and the illusionist to go extreme yeah I was a little bit skeptical about that because I'm thinking in both cases the less lesser extreme variety of Kanaly ante reduction or illusionism are going to be a little more easy to believe because the the weaker illusionist that says look your your talk of consciousness answers to something it's just there we can give some kind of explanation why you're tempted to say certain things about it that just aren't true I don't know that's that's a much easier thing to say then just say all of our talk is pointing at nothing on the one hand and then I take it the weaker variety of realism is something that says no consciousness is actually going to play a integral role in that and it seems like if you're saying I'm not sure why we should go towards the extreme because then we're saying no it's just kind of contingently associated with these processes but it's not involved it does look like an accident so why wouldn't I if I'm a realist bet on some kind of interactionist kind of view and why if I'm an illusionist wouldn't I be happy if I could just give a view that kind of Chasen's what what I need to give an explanation yeah good maybe I'll turn this thing I realized I didn't have the the whole time you guys can hear me fine like this with these mics yeah we collision ism my view is it doesn't really remove the hard problem I mean many weak illusionists try and say things like yeah we get fooled into thinking you know Denis's our consciousness is intrinsic or it's not intentional and then people say ah it's still consciousness exists I think the trouble with weak illusionism is that you don't need those properties to generate the hard problem I think all you really need to generate the hard problem is this what it's like idea you don't it doesn't turn on there being further properties like in assuming consciousness has to be intrinsic assuming it has to be non-physical and so on even without those things I think you can get the whole explanatory gap going so you know we'd have to play this out in given cases all you really the only property you need is like phenomenality what it's what it's like and denying that I think really is tantamount to rejecting phenomenal consciousness so that's why I think weak illusionism doesn't really help close the gap as for interactionism I think interactionism is a is an interesting option here but I don't think interactionism is the view consciousness is non-physical but interacts with the physical plays a causal role in generating brain processes and behavior I mean even if you're an interactionist there's still the thought that you know then maybe that that yellow dot is consciousness playing a non-physical role the blue dots are all physical stuff it's affecting there still will be a structural potentially a structural topic neutral explanation of our behavior maybe even an algorithmic explanation depending on your views about how the non-physical consciousness plays its role just say it's an algorithmic explanation then I think you know at least some element of the debunking of wirey still arises for the interactionist there's this algorithmic explanation of consciousness doesn't mention consciousness now as a matter of fact consciousness is playing some role in making the algorithm happen and one of the nodes we could have had that algorithm possibly without consciousness I feel like there's still an element of the coincidence to banking worry there unless you can make the case that consciousness is playing a causal role that could only and be best played by consciousness the best proposal along this line by a interactionist there's a recent paper by Brad Saad I know if you know I'm replying to my paper on the meta problem where he argues for a certain kind of special psychophysical law of interaction that it's kind of a teleological law says consciousness roughly consciousness causes what it justifies and this gives a kind of a special explanatory role to consciousness but anyway I think there were interesting challenges there at least I'm not saying that there's a not that they can't be overcome but I think those are the kinds of challenges that an interactionist would need to meet I thank you um I really liked your argument against illusionism I think it was the most compelling I've heard so far actually right that you know even if even if we think intellectually this makes sense on some level it's just so counterintuitive I can never have more warrant for believing that rather than simply you know being a mysterious or something Oh consciousness must be physical somehow but we just won't be able to figure out exactly how so I really like that that said I wanted to ask you to respond to what I consider maybe the strongest argument for illusionism so and I think this argument originates with my friend buddy DK actually so she's talking about philosophical zombies they're supposed to be molecule for molecule identical to us and therefore not just behave exactly as one of us behaves but have the same mental life except stripped of its phenomenology right so form the same you know judgments understood in functional terms so therefore a philosophical zombie will have the intuition that Mary would learn something the first time she saw something red would have the intuition that there's an explanatory gap problem and would find illusionism absurd in the same way than any of us find it absurd so therefore I mean it could be that any of us actually is a philosophical zombie right we would you know thinking and and saying all the same things even if we weren't so how do you respond to that argument for illusionism one way of articulating the debunking worries in terms of yeah Sambi would say the same things just with the physical processes so the physical processes explain why we say these things and therefore those things and justified it was that this was all done just from the third person point of view you know you saw a bunch of other people who are talking about this thing called consciousness you saw the algorithms in their head that make them say this all the self models absolutely that would seem like the the most natural response I guess I mean it's in a way I guess away the I mean deal the response on the other hand is gonna be the thing you called the strong argument for illusionism which is does that really accommodate the first person data it might explain why it is that we respond and say certain things but my data and not just that I respond and say certain things my my data I think include that I am conscious now there's this weird dialogue I'm a little dialog being a realist and an illusionist in the written version of this I say these are my data the illusionist says you just think those are your data really this explains why you think those are your data I'm saying no no you don't you don't just need to explain why I think these are did he go to explain the data and so there is this complicated back-and-forth of it we're not rewriting this dialogue I mean I can't feel I felt some sympathies for the illusionist side because there's much more interesting yeah cuz it is supposed to capture something with the first person I mean the zombie wouldn't just say I'm conscious the zombie would powerfully believe that the zombie was conscious powerfully believe in the sense of belief which means you know regulate its I don't know that it's not powerful II believe in the sense it brings in our intuitions about conscious conscious belief so you know believe in a deflationary sense and again for explaining somebody else I'd find that very convincing does it actually explain my situation I mean I could certainly get into the intellectual frame of mind yeah where does but there's still fundamentally and I'd like this move of saying that yeah we should expect but we should expect this for you to be unbelievable so maybe this is just an articulation of what happens I don't believe it all right thank you you ask a question if you think that the double-slit experiment does that rule out anything of the possibilities for consciousness or narrow anything down yeah for a long time it was very very skeptical about you know trying to explain consciousness in terms of quantum mechanics or vice-versa although I'm very interested in the interpretation of quantum mechanics but gradually over the years I found myself getting kind of sucked into this this area just say you think you know how did my whole approach to the problem of consciousness is to think try and think especially recently if you're trying to be think constructively about the different places you might try and push forward on this problem whether on the illusionist side or that the realist side or the penstock aside but here on the jeweler side just say you read your list and you think consciousness is non-physical but affects the physical world interaction is Julis then the place to look many people say that's inconsistent with physics there are no big causal gaps in physics for consciousness to fill but there is this one place in physics that seems to be crying out for a potential role for consciousness nets the so-called collapse of the quantum wave function that at least in standard traditional quantum mechanics happens on certain occasions of measurement what's measurement no one knows that's the quantum mechanical measurement problem it at least seems to have some time prima facie to human observation hypothesis it's precisely consciousness that brings about acts of wavefunction collapse that's an old idea goes back to Eugene Wigner and others never really made rigorous so lately I've been kind of playing with this with a former student Kelvin McQueen who now teaches at Chapman University in California we've been trying to see if we could make that idea rigorous through the physics trying to build up a model where consciousness does actually could play a role I mean we had an idea and it didn't turned out the dynamics got very complicated it comes up against the quantum Zeno effect which causes problems for our rough idea was originally consciousness or its neural correlates never enter into quantum superpositions so resist resist superpositions one produced the interference effects and so on but that runs up against the quantum Zeno effect it turns out consciousness different--it superposition consciousness can never change bad effect bad consequence consciousness never starts in the early universe and now we're playing around with this to see if we can come up with another version of it the net effect is made it's been to make me actually a little bit more skeptical about the connection but we're still trying to see where we can where we can push it to go I think in particular yeah if your interaction is dualist who thinks consciousness plays role in the physical world this is one of the places you should be looking hi dr. Thomas Lee thank you so much for coming here to speak I really appreciate it I with that being said I was a little critical of the framing of consciousness from the meta perspective you start off by talking about these two camps of having consciousness that is irreducible and consciousness that is reducible and you framed the meta problem is something that exists outside of these two camps in particular I was kind of curious about topic neutrally explaining the these problem intuitions or why it's impossible without using the term consciousness itself isn't that fundamentally reducing consciousness so to suggest that you can have an explanation of the problem of consciousness through the meta problem aren't you implicitly either undermining it as solely in effect of a deeply underlying of a deeper underlying force or over mining it as something that is there's nothing underneath consciousness or you know it's all socially constructed hmm I see so the idea is if we solve the meta problem we'll either deflate consciousness on the one hand that's under money what was the over mining side where I guess on the other hand you see that there is nothing like there is nothing underneath the ego or what is in the mind and it's all ends up being socially constructed I say socially constructed is is interesting why will end up being I think is if we saw one possible solution to the meta problem I think you're right one possible solution is to say it's actually sociological we just all have this belief about consciousness because I don't know Descartes was so influential and we're all stuck with Descartes ridiculous legacy now or maybe somebody came along you know Nagel or who knows Huxley 150 years ago and convinced us there's a problem of consciousness or maybe there's just a mistake that a bunch of philosophers are making and I guess you know there are views where it's socially constructed and one or two people have tried trying to take this line in response I'm and I think that's worth that's worth exploring my own view is the problem of consciousness runs much deeper than that and it does look like you can find these intuitions in very different cultures and so on so I think yeah there's the potential of once a land route to the through the met a problem will lead to social construction one route will lead of reaction to the meta problem will lead to illusionism and therefore undermining consciousness but I do think there that is having a solution to the meta problem is going to be consistent with straightforward realism about consciousness where it exists where it's not deflated and it's not it's not undermined but somehow the meta problem tells us something about how it yeah for example just say you gave which Tim was talking about interaction this problems consciousness it turns out consciousness plays a role the only consciousness can play then we'd have a picture of how it is that consciousness can genuinely exist and play a certain play a certain role so I guess that's the narrow path that I would like to navigate the path between what you were calling undermining and over mining but I agree that I have not yet made the case so that can be done thank you maybe that's my challenge hi so I'm still a bit puzzled about what the bearing on the meta problem is supposed to be on the problem and the way I was trying to get my head around it was to use an analogy to a philosophical problem I think about a little bit more which is about the problem whether say numbers exist right and to think about whether the meta problem of people asking why do people think that numbers do exist why do some people think the numbers don't exist have a bearing on the problem whether they do exist and it seems to me there's a that they don't seem very much connected right so for example if I think numbers exist which I do if somebody says they don't think that exist I could sort of explain to them why they say that because they have a restricted existence concept or when I walk them through the fact that if they believe that 2 plus 3 equals 5 that commits them to the exist something which added at 3 equals 5 right and all these seems to be very theoretical things that don't seem quite connected to the question of bearing on the the how we're gonna figure out the problem of whether numbers exist so this is just a broad just you know ask from sort of clarification you see analogies or dis analogies between this and other sort of connections between problems and meta problems other areas of philosophy and how might they be different from say you know the problem I'm bringing up about numbers exist so just to sort of throw that out for it there for you yeah it's a great question I think there are a lot of analogies and a lot of dis analogies with other domains philosophers have explored this the most I think in in the case I mentioned the cases of morality and God I think the recent literature has been a lot of morality and actually quite a lot of numbers people trying to there's this whole banasura problem of explaining where we have the mathematical beliefs we do if numbers are abstract objects that don't play a role in that and people have tried to make debunking cell arguments against say platonism about mathematical objects it says numbers are non physical objects but and say well mathematical beliefs are not sensitive for those things wouldn't it be a weird coincidence if there were these non physical objects that make our beliefs true so in some ways there are some some analogies there in the case of consciousness it's gonna there's a broad structural analogy there that's very clear a couple of differences between the cases one that makes the problem even more robust in the collection this case is something like me thinks that you know zombies are you know zombies physical person most people who believe in mathematics and mathematical objects things mathematical truths are necessary enough mathematical objects exist they exist necessarily maybe you can't even conceive of them not existing you don't quite get a zombie problem there'll be a mathematical universe with brains like ours but no numbers at least if you think numbers exist necessarily but for consciousness there's a danger there'll be yeah don't be worlds of no consciousness that makes consciousness more open to a debunking argument at the same time there's also the strong sense that with consciousness there's this direct knowledge of direct unshakeable knowledge of consciousness that simply can't be denied that's a sense of acquaintance and maybe we don't have such a strong sense for for for numbers that's a sense in which debunking arguments for consciousness may have a higher bar to meet so I've had a little Justin clock down who works on debunking arguments and morality and mathematics brought a response to my meta problem T's and now we've been having a bit of a back-and-forth about the issues I'm at least inclined to think there I mean certainly the structural analogies are a strong Hawtree field has made versions of this - mocking I give in a way that's really quite a lot like this coincidence style argument I don't think there's a uniform solution to your demanding arguments always work or they fail I think they can be resisted but resisting them requires certain certain conditions so yeah say more than that pre have to go to find details about the mathematical case I so I just had a question about so if we all recognize that like consciousness is well not everyone obviously illusionist and others excluded but if we recognize that each human is like inserted with consciousness or pan psyche it's they recognize like everything has a conscious but but we all recognize in a sense that it's non-physical so and for example like we couldn't really explain like our bodily processes unless we could see them and now we recognize that they are like like seeing is believing in a sense so and with neuroscience how it progressed is kind of with the progression of Technology so do you think our understanding of this non-physical consciousness could be subverted to that to where it becomes like consciousness becomes like this almost tangible or like seeable or thing and then that suddenly like reforms like it becomes from non-physical to a physical thing through like possibly technology or some other source yeah that's that's really interesting I mean I guess I do think in the in the first-person case consciousness is tangible and in its way in my own case I know my consciousness directly when it comes to anybody else yeah you can take it yeah so we have this problem of other minds and I believe conscious but I can't measure it directly we just say we came to have a theory of consciousness understanding the relationship between consciousness and physical processes then maybe in principle that could be used to develop a kind of technology say you know we've got a brain scanner that can you know measure the states of people's brains then we can apply our theory of consciousness to that then maybe you know in principle that might give you uh you know be able to get some kind of readouts of people's consciousness okay there's all kinds of like horrific horrific political consequences I want to give a talk at the the CIA this to the CIA but you have some of the stuff and there we go boring boring them but I mentioned the idea of this could be used for a consciousness meter and then they were like okay there's something there's something we can use but yeah but you get you can just imagine if we had a theory of consciousness they could at least in principle be used in this way isn't one could in principle forgetting the ethical worries get some kind of readout of what's in people's consciousness and that might make other people's consciousness somehow seem more tangible to us would it automatically make consciousness physical I don't think we're necessarily do that but it might somehow make it at least seem more within the remit of our understanding and likewise knowing you know the things in our own brain to connect to our understanding those correlations well enough so we could know that just we want to you know just say understanding the neural basis of depression well enough that you could manipulate the brain and you know no longer be no longer be depressed people right now do that with drugs imperfect you'd imagine somehow they get much more exquisite sensitivity to and control of one's own consciousness I would argue that still wouldn't Intel reducing consciousness to something physical what it would do is really bring us strongly within the purview of science and indeed as you say of technology and that might make it you know that might actually lead to something tangible and that we could use in our lives hey well I'm a neuroscientist and so maybe some people in this room might think I'm a philosophical zombie but I'm going to ask a question anyway and it's about trying to really try and have a more global explanation for the idea of consciousness and it seems to me that we as human primates are stuck you know gymnastics mode what about animal cognition animal consciousness and how do you get your head around that and how do you test for that and how do you explore that consciousness yeah it's a it's a great question we had a conference on animal consciousness at NYU that I helped to organize maybe two years ago now and yeah this stuff here is very much focused on the human case because after all these verbal reports and meta problem intuitions they seem very much in the domain of complex cognizes like humans but in other contexts I've thought a lot about consciousness in animals my own inclination is to think that I mean again just as with other people we have no direct measure of consciousness in animals we have indirect measures I'm inclined to think that at the very least most arguments that you know consciousness is restricted to the human case can be rebutted pretty straightforwardly people say maybe consciousness requires a language well we know there there are people that kind of lose capacities for language and it looks like this pretty strong reason to believe they're their conscious and reasons there's not much reason to believe consciousness requires language the trend I would say over the last 30 odd years I've been in this field is to be in to ascribe consciousness much more broadly among non-human animals I mean maybe 30 years ago there was still some debate about whether if you've been primates or or conscious and people would then say once it gets down to I don't know two birds who's to say where these days there's a much stronger sense among most researchers in the field that yeah there was even it something called the Cambridge declaration for consciousness saying yeah probably all mammals are conscious and I kind of Robards and there's some saimin about I kind of exactly what I said about birds and fish it was inclined to be optimistic about those two there still a debate is not going in our conference it was some debate over fish where the fish can really genuinely consciously feel paying the fisheries are very heavily invested in the idea they don't so there are there are philosophers and cognitive scientists arguing arguing that but it seems like the trend is in the other direction fish certainly seem to have nociception that that goes along with pain experience and now some now actually there the biggest argument among philosophers has over insects or insects conscious the trend has been towards a more liberal view here it's interesting question just why that is pop is that a partly it's it may be partly discovering that some of these creatures are more sophisticated than we thought I don't think that's all of it though it may be partly that people have changed what they mean in the old days when people said consciousness they meant self-consciousness and reflective consciousness now the focus is very much moved to phenomenal consciousness I think it's least in part though of you that phenomenal consciousness itself is now taken to be more the trend has been just see it as widespread more widespread more primitive and not requiring these complicated mechanisms having met a problem processes to have that you've got a you know and maybe only humans have those but consciousness itself is something much more much more basic so my own view is that consciousness is likely to be very very very widespread and you know really speculated about the possibility of pan-turkism which means it's everywhere but even short of pants sarcasm I think it probably goes a long way and I think these are important questions to figure out because you know my own view is again consciousness and moral status they're very closely connected consciousness brings you into the into the ring of moral status and therefore creature there's conscious that we've got at least somehow factored in to our to our calculations course the more widespread you make consciousness if everything is conscious then suddenly it can't just be consciousness it's got to be the kind of consciousness that matters you know just suffering matter more just thinking matter more so those are all hard questions but there are a lot of I could point you to a lot of interesting work on consciousness this actually is a journal now called animals wholly devoted to the issue of consciousness and animals with arguments back and forth there's one really great book by the philosopher Peter Godfrey Smith called just called other Minds actually and it's all about the octopus it's about the case for consciousness and the octopus that would be a very place to start and it also extends to pre verbal human prior oh absolutely actually this is the this is the specialty of of my own partner of Claudia pesos who who does research on on animal trait on infant consciousness infant self-consciousness infant sense of agency and she's been doing a lot of great work in in in this area and I've pretty strongly believe that that even newborn infants or have conscious experience um thank you for your speech all right so the psychological phenomenon of perceptual blindness and illusion may being it being an example of this um perhaps more notably sensory blindness my question is is there something analogous to this with consciousness call itself blindness where one would be where one would have an experience be in an experience without being made aware that one is in fact having said experience yeah there are at least some tantalizing possible cases of this his one to say there's what we are attending to at a given time and we're conscious then there's like what's outside our attention and it kind of fuels at least phenomenologically like yeah there's what I'm attending to and there's what's outside is my there's things or some conscious or there's some kind of sensory feeling but it's outside my attention how do I come to know about that well the most obvious way I come to know about it is by attending to it okay now I actually attend to the margins I'm looking at you but I'm attending to the margins of my visual field and yeah it seems to be some consciousness there but that's not the right thing right that's now now I'm attending to it was I conscious of it before I attended to it you get this kind of refrigerator light effect like well once I attended there as I open the door the lights on so the light was always on some people argue that we're not conscious we don't have consciousness there but I'm we there's a good chance we have consciousness there but that may be a kind of consciousness in principle consciousness outside attention is at least a kind of consciousness that it's impossible by definition to attend to once you attempt to it its conscious inside attention could you have some kind of basic background awareness more basic than attentional maybe and maybe it kind of feels like that but it's at least not a cut cognitively articulated kind of attention that's one kind of self blindness there are other kinds I think you can get in various pathologies there people have all kinds of you know there are pathologies of awareness of your of your body and this pathology is of a way in your mind this young Anton syndrome which is blind this denial people you know think that they can see when they when they can't and that seems to involve a pretty serious failure of our introspective mechanism so I'm a good I guess I'm inclined to very least in you don't that pathological cases and disease there's pretty good reason to think just as our perceptual models can go wrong our introspective models can go you can go badly wrong and maybe even in some of these normal cases of course somebody like Dan Dennett might say no in fact that's actually what's happen to us all the time we think we're having all these wonderful states of consciousness none of them are real you're actually we're massively self blind self blind desert it's that's the illusionist view but I guess you were saying short of short of illusionism addict yeah even short of illusions and pretty well everyone should admit that we at least sometimes make mistakes about consciousness the path between consciousness and judgment there are things that can go wrong I mean there's that case of potentially where at least initially many people release initially inclined I think we experienced the whole world like a picture you know with equal levels of detail at every point I don't know 20 maybe we don't feel like exactly like that but we know that can't quite happen because the amount of detail in the in the retina doesn't support it doesn't support that but maybe that it's easy to see why one would be led to to be wrong at least in some ways about our conscious experience and once you've gone that far and it's at least tempting to go further and see if one can push it all the way to illusionism but you know maybe there are also some interesting stopping points in between you

Channel: IU Philosophy

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Published: Fri Jun 12 2020