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How do we solve the 'easy' problems of consciousness? Questioning the relationship between mechanism & experience |
~ MA Philosophy :: Dissertation :: C.Coke-Smyth ccokes01 at student dot bbk dot ac dot uk ~ |
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MA PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION 13192167, 9400 words [1] "ما وسعني أرضي ولا سمائي ولكن وسعني قلب عبدي المؤمن" |
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Conscious experience is conventionally regarded as a mental phenomenon. There is an irreducibly subjective aspect of phenomena: Nagel's what it is like to be a bat; Jackson's epiphenomenal qualia. The taste of broccoli, personal feelings, or the colour of redness. McGinn suggests a property P of the brain that is responsible for consciousness, but simply beyond our ability to understand. Thinking about thinking. Chalmers isolates the irreducible subjectivity of experience as The Hard Problem, contrasting neurological, functional and systematic insights available through cognitive science and philosophy of cognitive science, with its fundamentally irreducible aspect as akin matter in physics. I support this distinction. But there is a problem. How does the hard problem relate to the easy problems? Are we really solving the easy problems of consciousness if we have not accounted for the role of the hard part? We have become increasingly adept within the domain of mechanical computation, but at what point should we expect conscious experience to arise? We can write a program that tells us how to navigate to Edinburgh, but we cannot write a program to physically get to Edinburgh. The map is not the territory.
I shall argue that this understanding of the arisal or generation of conscious experience is a misformulation. That conscious experience must instead be understood as an externality. By reformulating the hard problem into the physical domain, the role of cognition can then be understood akin a stomach digesting food. Experience as direct external content. Differentiating picture from process. This shift towards immediacy has implications to the possibility of physicalism, and of understanding the role of cognition. The knowledge argument supposes qualia problematic because we cannot sufficiently account for phenomena in informational terms. But informational terms are denominative of a mental domain. By supposing conscious experience externally we are re-positioning Chalmers explanatory gap. Experience a physical ‘analogue’ domain, information a mental ‘digital’ one. The irreducibility of experience then is reformulated as a substance of the world, a sort of divine analogue signal. Through cognitive mechanism we derive from this, attempting to encompass its complexity. Because of the irreducibility of experience, this necessitates a translation of phenomena over the gap into a subjectively rich 'digital' language. Mind complementing direct experience as opposed to generating it superfluously, in agreement with Jackson's later position on representationalism. Mechanism then problematically depends upon, is a function of, the hard problem. It doesn’t go away. Knowledge depends on experience, but how do we account for knowledge experientially? Is knowledge separable into the subjectively digital and objectively analogue truth, or does it bridge the divide? Is intelligence within?
McGinn (1989) challenges that we simply cannot solve the mystery of the mind-body problem, but that this doesn't pose a philosophical issue because the reason for this is a cognitive closure. That "there exists some property P, instantiated by the brain, in virtue of which the brain is the basis of consciousness."(McGinn, 1989 p.353). Chalmer's take on the mystery builds upon the foundation of Nagel in identifying 'the hard problem' (Chalmers, 1995) (henceforth THP), attempting to separate the irreducible nature of experience from more fathomable 'easier' problems of process, function and mechanism (henceforth mechanism). In doing so however this leaves an explanatory gap.
In this paper I shall argue that THP can be considered external to the cognitive system, and that we must be clearer about the explanatory gap, examining both sides of the divide. On the basis of P McGinn argues that theory T explaining P is simply inaccessible, cognitively closed, to human beings. "T is as natural and prosaic and devoid of miracle as any theory of nature; it describes the link between consciousness and the brain in a way that is no more remarkable (or alarming) than the way we now describe the link between the liver and bile." (McGinn, 1989 p.362) Experience arising from, and depending upon, mechanism. But what if we were to reframe the problem to avoid this dependency? Instead of experience arising from the process of cognition, generated like some sort of bile, what if experience is instead considered externally, being processed by as opposed to generated from mechanism. As such, a more aligned analogy would be that of a stomach. We can then separate the contents of the stomach, being experience, from mechanism, the process of breaking down and decomposing it. It will be suggested that the unusual, physical attributes of THP point towards success with this re-orientation towards externalising experience, positing it prior to as opposed to generated by the cognitive process. I shall remark on the difficulty posited by McGinn of thinking about thinking.
We are still left with the problem of subjectivity. Consciousness is an intimate phenomenon. The taste of broccoli or feeling of bat-ness. Jackson's knowledge argument (Jackson, 1982) is used in the case against physicalism (Stoljar, 2024), in that phenomenal content appears outside of the bounds of physical information, even though Jackson's own position on this subject changes. I shall suggest that physicalism is more problematic if we consider information to be an experiential phenomenon, but less problematic if information is appropriately categorised as an aspect of mechanism instead. A human construct. The nature of experience will thus be contrasted, posing problems of subjectivity and the objective. I shall argue there are grounds to question the distinction between information and knowledge, knowledge inclining to experiential but information on the opposing cognitive side of the divide. This has implications to my understanding of Jackson’s knowledge argument. I shall suggest the importance of recognising and exploding the explanatory gap, and the importance of reframing the issue, by clearly separating mechanism from experience as Chalmers set out to do. By separating experience as external content, as in a stomach, we may be able to turn the whole problem around. Instead of vexing ourselves with the explicit hard problem, we are then faced instead with Chalmers reduced but ambitious easy problems. But unless we recognize and bridge the explanatory gap, there is a danger of progressing further away from as opposed closer to understanding the difference between experience and cognition. If mechanism depends on experience, the ‘easy’ problems may pose the greater challenge.
[1] The heavens and the earth cannot contain Me, but the heart of a true believer can (Hadith Qudsi)
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"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable." begins Nagel's seminal paper 'What is it like to be a bat?' (Nagel, 1979 p.165). The paper is a critique against applicability of conventional reductionism in the case of the mind-body problem. The paper offers several clues to the elusive attributes of consciousness, arguing that "Without some idea of .. what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required for a physicalist theory" (Nagel, 1979 p.167). The subjectivity of experience appears to be irreducible. We cannot identify an underlying DNA-like 'atom', as applicable in genetics, or an H2O type substance as relates to water. By the nature of the problem we cannot express a unit of mind in terms of body. Furthermore, the reduction of an objective phenomenon like lightning as electrical discharge also offers the problem of perspective. Lightning "can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by the same organisms or by others" (Nagel, 1979 p.173). Contrastingly, "In the case of experience.., the connexion with a particular point of view seems much closer."
We are invited to imagine how it feels to be a bat. The bat example suggests, "We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like. For example, we may ascribe general types of experience on the basis of the animal's structure and behaviour." Bat consciousness is simply a different flavour to our own. However, for Nagel, "There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is." This objectivity is dependent however upon "someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription." (Nagel, 1979 p.172) I can't discuss the cinema with a bat. We are limited by our experience what we can imagine. By the same token, we have a method of transmitting 'qualia'.
Is there room for criticism? Firstly, using the type argument. We are similar to bats to a degree both subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, we have in common an underlying biological structure. We are both living creatures undergoing experience. Objectively, bats do not occupy a different universe, we share a common aggregate environment. We are both living beings undergoing experience. Secondly we can potentially bridge the remainingly exclusive middleground . In 'Subjective facts', Tim Crane (Crane, 2003) uses the notion of 'indexical knowledge'. "Consider, for example, Vladimir lost in the forest; he consults his compass and a map and remarks with relief 'I am here!' pointing to a place on the map. When Vladimir exclaims 'I am here!' pointing at the map, this is something he learned. He now knows where he is, and he didn't before." (Crane, 2003 p.16). As explored below, we can use this Orientalist perspective of indexical knowledge to perhaps trivialise the difference between bats' experience and our own.
We can demonstrate indexical knowledge with an experiment. Suppose we are presented with two doorways, both of which lead through a single room to a shared destination. One room is black and the other is white. Because we are both alive, but our DNA is different, the experience of being a bat shares that we begin, experience life, and die. This difference can be substituted entering a room, and reaching our destination. It is different only in the details of the nature of the experience inbetween. By extension, we can suggestively understand something of the nature of experience without necessarily having to experience both rooms. Male and female is a similar 'type' example. We are still faced with identifying a reductive unit which enables us to think, but this notion should be addressed by turning firstly to McGinn, and secondly Chalmers, for the substance of the first half of this paper. McGinn in investigating the difficulty of posing a solution to the mind-body problem within the brain, and Chalmers in identifying ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness, attempting to separate this from the ‘easy’ problems of cognitive mechanism instead.
Whilst it is clear that conscious states relate to brain states, I would rather suggest 'technicolor phenomenology' arises from the world. Furthermore, the problem of thinking about thinking can be avoided if we suppose that thinking instead depends upon experience. The erroneus attempt to secure a hypothetical DNA and close the case entirely for the mind-body problem leads to Chalmers, 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness'. I intend to show that Chalmers too implies consciousness arises from the process of cognition, but that this hampers his own argument of separating the 'easy' problems of consciousness with the irreductivity identified by Nagel. Chalmers paper emphasizes that the neccessity to account for the irreductivity is essential.
We have explored some extent of the problem with identifying a DNA of consciousness with McGinn. I now want to compare consciousness to lightning. Returning to the two rooms argument, there are objective properties to the experience. We enter a room, experience its colour, and leave. If we imagine instead a cinema, then it seems fair to suggest that we enter the cinema, we experience the film, then we leave again. The experience doesn't depend upon the brain, it depends upon the phenomenal encounter with reality. If the film is very good, we might well get lost in the story. Instead of the difficulty of intensely personal subjective feelings, our superficial sum experience of sitting in the cinema is to an extent objectively shared by the audience. This is a different type of sharing than Nagel's 'transmitting of qualia' indicated above. There may be a cough here and there, an uncomfortable seat, or a bad back, but essentially the experience of the film is shared, like lightning. We may not be fully receptive to the film, if we are a woodlouse, or a bat, or only speak Russian, but it seems fair to say that this position of experience is to a degree objective.
To return to Chalmers, the central mystery now becomes the apprehension of the film, not the more-deeply-derived inner narrative. I feel it would be a mistake to suggest that the film is now in my head, much as a potato now be in my stomach. Furthermore, it does not seem necessary to indicate that there must necessarily be any trace of seeing the film (or more simply briefly entering a black or white room). Suppose I take an orange and put it through either room. Others would be hard pressed to judge which room the orange had been through, because it can't express its experience. The difference is physical. By a similar token, reductio ad absurdum, if every experience we have is tallied up inside our heads, we would all become very different biologically at death. My stomach is not full of potatoes. Dissecting my brain might not be the shortest route to learning my film history. Evolution requires stability, accumulating films in our experience doesn't necessarily suggest accumulating films in our head. The experience of the cinema occurs without depending upon the process of cognition, and we can also see that the experience of the film occurs even without an audience. I am incidental to the cinema. It is outside, of reality. The difficulty is in the comprehension that we indeed did experience the film. THP. This is what I mean when I state that the problem of experience is greater than the problem of the role of the brain. There appears to be an objective encompassing state of experience.
I have used the cinema example to approach the subjectivity of the problem from a different slant. I suffer conscious experience, and as indicated by its irreducible nature it is difficult not to bring to the film my own subjective history to date. There is a subjective depth to the experience, but superficially there is something in common. By suggesting objective experience of the cinema, we seem closer to recognising a discrete unit, albeit one that is physical, as opposed to being within the brain. Of course, the unit is arbitrary, but by separating out an object or event of experience (that we participate in) it becomes easier to detach from the purely subjective view of accumulated experience. The film experience, or the room, is a shared experience, but prior and post event we inevitably lead our own individualistic paths, complicating the identification of commonality. Consciousness perhaps is like lightning in that there is a beautiful flash of shared external picture that seems experiential prior our more-refined cognitive appraisal of it.
I am suggesting that we view experience as external content, prior to the process of cognition. As such it is less like McGinn's mysterious bile, but more like the contents of a stomach. I consumed the film at the cinema, then proceed to break it down cognitively. What happens to the film is more problematic, do I store anything internally? This remains to be understood, but if raw consciousness is experiential and differentiated from thought we have begun to separate out the content of experience from cognitive mechanism itself. To my mind this leaves us in a better position with which to bridge Chalmer’s explanatory gap.
[2] See, for example, today’s Financial Times:-
OpenAI launches AI models it says are capable of reasoning
https://on.ft.com/47mZxPP
[3] Preferred use of grammar
[4] A representative token is perhaps sufficient
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Following the stomach analogy, we have viewed conscious experience as an external content, being digested by our cognitive mechanism. The cinema example suggests the possibility of an arbitrary, reducible, external physical unit of experience. This agrees with Nagel and Chalmers to the extent we acknowledge conscious experience is irreducible mentally, but differs in that I am rejecting McGinn’s problematic notion of conscious experience as (exclusively) an arisal inside. I am suggesting instead mechanism necessarily dependent upon conscious experience, reframing the problem in order to account for THP’s alien attributes. Mechanism then is reformulated, in a mathematical sense, as a function of experience. I am a product. Without a domain of experience there’s simply nothing for a thinking thing to think about. We shall look at these implications below in assessing Jackson’s knowledge argument. Externalising THP as a domain is also suggestive of evolutionary argument. Whereas for Nagel, “Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon occurring at many levels of animal life though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms” (p.166) and “if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all.” (p.168) And McGinn, “consciousness arises early in evolutionary history and is found right across the animal kingdom.” (p.363) Chalmers stating simply, “It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience.” (p.3). Because I am externalising conscious experience from mechanism, I posit it fundamental to living organisms. In a sense, the cinema predates (even formulates) its audience. Consequently, not only does a thinking thing necessitate a domain of experience, but a domain of experience exists prior thinking things. We emerge into experience. This is perhaps a radical position . Mechanism evolves, experience just is. |
Although this radical ‘simplification’ is suggestively amiable to physicalism, in that experience is physically explainable in terms of itself, we are still left with the problem of accounting for the mental and physiological in subjective experience and the intangibility of the external. I shall argue against a neural correlate of conscious experience in favour of a pointing towards, but how does this account for mental content? One way or another humans represent matter immaterially. Furthermore, we entertain a train of thought.
A physical definition of conscious experience can be provisionally formulated from this perspective as the substance of the world. Experience being at root inexplicable. Our inner narrative, like a SATNAV calculation, becomes instead an agent in a complex dimensional space. We don’t know enough about ‘arisal’ in computational experience, but the domain considered by the SATNAV is ‘mental’, in that it takes a set of informational parameters, and the calculation is a journey through a mathematical algorithm to a clear digital solution. This SATNAV calculation corresponds to Chalmers easy side, whereas the ‘information space’ our ‘program’ relates to, contrasted against this parameter matrix, is a rich, analogue, ‘physical’ field. The universe is our input. It simply doesn’t seem to make sense to suggest we continuously represent our rich external environment in correspondingly mental terms. It makes sense instead to use an informational economy to assist with our given representations.
If experiential content is external to mechanism as food is to a stomach, this supposes some sort of digestion. Derivatives from experience, essential mental units, or ‘energy’. Chalmer’s explanatory gap is reframed in that we are not looking for how the cinema experience arises as a picture within the mechanism, a sort of specific ‘neurons-firing’, but instead how the cinema experience differs from the mental representation of the cinema experience. This poses an interesting duality. Given a certain experiential state, what level of this is explicitly encoded by mechanism? It doesn’t make sense for mental representation to mirror the outside world, or project our output as we would with a computer. The map is not the territory. I argue we are less mechanically generating experience, but instead digesting the externality. I shall use a digital analogy: experience as a primal, irreducible, analogue type; mental ‘content’ by contrast transmittable and digital. The role of mechanism, the set of problems Chalmers believes can be reducible to function, is a management of this abstraction of external content.
My contention with ‘securing a theory of physicalism’ is that the physical world and the events that occur within it are far stranger, beyond our comprehension, and different to our limited ability to representation them. Leaving for a moment the role of mechanism in providing a subjective inner narrative, accessibility to the world is through a sensory receptivity. We can ascertain truths beyond sensory receptivity through intuition, aligning our mental domain with awareness. But in composing language we necessarily approximate. That the term ‘black’ represents a certain experiential attribute of the room, ‘white’ another. In this sense the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ denote a range of experiential phenomena, based upon our receptivity and derivative position. The bird who is hungry cannot fly with the birds who are full. Immaterial mental ‘content’ is digital in being a net we throw onto our present analogue experience. An intuition. I refer The Mona to my own subjective feminine ideal. Information is a currency corresponding subjectively, through mechanism, with experience. Perfect knowledge of Ideal is full knowledge of the experiential field, self within environment. Location within the grand scheme of things. If experience is a white room, I can encompass this. But if experience is more complex, like the cinema example, not only is the information apprehended and derived potentially unbounded, but also reflected upon with a rich mechanical faculty of prior intensional (sic) ideas and concepts. Whilst analogue content is appreciated sensorily - direct, pervasive, irreducible and external; digital content is contrastingly relational, composite and malleable; somehow achieved through cognitive mechanism. Digital can only ever approximate analogue, no matter granularity, but direct access to analogue signal eases this dilemma. THP of experience provides a rich accompaniment we unconsciously rely upon. Furthermore, syllogism is possible between types - direct experiential ‘content’ against abstracted composed ideas. You may have never seen Star Wars, but you can substitute this by reading Hero with a Thousand Faces. Access to and ability to contrast types differentiates us from machine intelligence. Two differentiated domains to their input-driven one. Experience is primal. Mechanism, particularly human representative information, appears later.
Suggesting the mental as digital also has advantages in accounting for complexities of processing unavailable from direct physical experience. Because we can reduce units with mechanism they fit Chalmers ‘easy’ side. Non-physical representation may ‘arise’, but this seems more reducible than experience. As such, arisal through mechanism seems more accurately a workspace of derived and associated ‘facts’ from experience. We do not need to reproduce experience itself. Differentiation between information as mechanical mental unit versus conscious experience as irreducible externality raises the question of knowledge. Whilst information is digital, knowledge appears to cross our explanatory gap. Information may be mechanically retrieved to relate to experience through cognitive faculty. We can experience information, but it is essentially derived from experience.
Considering conscious experience as substance of the world, subjective conscious experience can be thus formulated as a subset of this aggregate: the substance of the world as represented in terms of my own conscious experience. The recursion is, as indicated by McGinn, internal but the experiential content less problematically externalised. There is an explanatory gap because phenomenal experience is of a different type to the subjective mental contents of thought.
[5] Seven Clues to the Origins of Life (Cairns-Smith, 1990) suggests replicating life may originate from a cave wall to the rhythm of the ocean. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect (Davidson, 1992) suggests intellect as an externality
Jackson’s Epiphenomenal Qualia (Jackson, 1982) begins with broad brushstrokes towards a notion of physical information. "It is undeniable that the physical, chemical and biological sciences have provided a great deal of information about the world we live in and about ourselves." The thought experiments begin by suggesting the possibility of acquiring all information to the point of mastery. Medical knowledge of the nervous system is an example, that I could pertain all knowledge of medicine known to man of how I function in this state. That the sum of information is the physical. This poses no explanatory gap between types - the differentiation above of information as mental content against the irreducible physical. Jackson points out that "there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially.. which no amount of purely physical information includes." I do not disagree that physical information is a paucity of expression of qualia, but I argue Jackson's perfect set of information must be subjectively compiled, and cannot equate with representational physical knowledge. A perfect physical view depends on an internal matrix that necessarily differs subjectively. Experience is irreducible and asymptotic, but there is a sense we can contain its content. Black can describe the room at one level, or a gradation of darkness at another. Information functions as substitute for knowledge. "The tough-minded slugists hold that the restricted terms (or ones pretty like them which may be introduced as their sciences progress) suffice in principle to describe everything without remainder"(Jackson, 1982 p.136). Jackson's concluding tough-minded slugists are suggestively physicalists. I am torn in disagreement between the absurdity that everything could possibly be described without remainder, and with an ever-more-appealing notion in favour of materialism, that everything that we could possibly apprehend in the cosmos could in fact be physical. It doesn't seem balanced to suggest that physicalism requires categorical computational datum on everything, because experience is irreducible and information is a malleable mental content. Experience is not a computational matrix so a computational matrix cannot represent experience. There seems to be a relational problem between perspective and level of abstraction. A white horse is not a horse . Jackson posits the grey area not covered by physical information as qualia, the taste of broccoli, or the phenomenon of distinguishing pain or red. This seems reasonable. Jackson's paper uses thought experiments of hypothetically full information, illuminating qualia as the remainder of sensational states and the knowledge posited by them. But I think we must be careful of the role of information as it relates to knowledge. I may not know the entire works of Shakespeare but I can point to an informational source that does. Even if I do know something I must retrieve this knowledge. Knowledge always a journey from A to B. There is a process between having the information and assimilating it. |
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Let’s begin with the Shakespeare objection. Suppose we were to ask the question ‘who killed Macbeth’. I either know ‘who killed Macbeth’ or I do not. It seems reasonable to suppose ‘who killed Macbeth’ is both information, derived from the entire works, and knowledge - it is explicitly stated in there as so. If I do not know ‘who killed Macbeth’, I could be presented with information [the entire works of Shakespeare], and I now have means to answer. But, with the full set of information, it must be processed. This is an experiential task involving reading, making notes, associating or at minimum searching an online database to discover ‘Macduff’ . One way or another, the information must be derived experientially. Furthermore, it must then be compiled, and retrieved. The entire works of Shakespeare is an external content. I process it through mechanism, resulting in knowledge. It is dependent upon me being receptive to its presentation, as in Nagel’s bat example, ie. in this case being able to parse Shakespeare’s English. The full information is available in the library, but this does not suppose direct experiential access to full contents. Knowledge is relational.
Whereas discrete knowledge can be identical with information if we know something, information can be reduced and transmitted, but knowledge appears to require an experiential process and must therefore be compiled. Again, we are in agreement with the digital analogy in that I can transmit what I don’t know, binary ones for known information, zeroes for unknowns. A C# programmer compiles programs which become irreducible applications. Similarly we compile derived information from experience through cognitive mechanism (including compilation of unknowns) to form our own irreducible subjective knowledge. We dream,..
We have seen above mechanism being stated a function of experience. Knowledge, by extension, appears to be a function of mechanism and experience. In separating experience from mechanism, we have separated information as mechanical derivatives, but come full circle with an emergent output, knowledge. This compliments immediate knowledge from sensory experience with the refined, emergent knowledge of thought. Clearer focus.
Knowledge becomes experiential through mechanism. Knowledge can be transmitted to the extent it can be translated, compiled and conveyed. A unit of thought can also be expressed through an absence. It differs from a physical unit of experience. I know The Mona Lisa and The Louvre, but these are representative parameters. Over time increasingly refined information about these parameters suggests my knowledge of them increases holistically, but at a reference level I either know the object The Mona Lisa or I do not. To know is to bridge thought with experience.
Having somewhat differentiated information and knowledge how does Jackson’s knowledge argument relate to experience. The knowledge argument against physicalism hinges on our inability to express certain phenomenal aspects of the world informationally. Specifically, colour is very phenomenological. Furthermore taste & smell refer to very primal sensations offering poor analogues. Jackson introduces us to Mary, a hypothetically brilliant scientist who has never experienced colour. Despite this, she is an expert on the phenomenon. All available documentable information on colour has been presented to her, and she has meticulously compiled and assimilated this. Because however we cannot explicitly document colour in terms of anything other than phenomenal experience, there is a problem. How do we account for a full physical description of the world if we cannot express colour in informational terms? If we cannot transmit the taste or smell of something must we reject physicalism?
We have seen above in discussing Nagel, that sufficient similarity enables us to communicate regarding qualia. If Jane and Mary know broccoli, this perception need not be identical, but they can economically communicate. The taste is known by pointing towards a common phenomenon.
Perhaps a better example of this perspective is the phenomenon of pain. Suppose you experience a sharp pain in your finger. We know that there is a journey of this aggravated sensation to the brain. What I am arguing is that the brain’s reaction to this pain is incidental to it. I am arguing against McGinn’s P. The brain’s reaction is not a correlate of this sharp stabbing pain. The pain is a correlate of itself and its journey through my nervous system. It is like the story of the Seeker, crossing the Himalayas in search of a wise Yogi in the wilderness. Upon reaching the Yogi, and presenting his question, the wise Yogi offers some banal response and the seeker returns dejected. He later realises however that it was the journey that was his spiritual reward not the banal response of the yogi up the mountain. Similarly, the brain’s reaction to pain I am suggesting is a complex, holistic assessment of everything going on: a wise Yogi. The calculation of pain is the Seeker or the computational experience of a SATNAV. The details of the phenomena of pain coming from your finger is best represented by the journey itself, not the hypothetical binary neural correlate at the end of it. I am arguing against an experiential D.N.A. we can reduce to. This externality of experience is why I must reject the cognitive closure argument of McGinn.
My knowledge of The Mona Lisa, or lack of it, remains a function of experience. Where knowledge and/ or experience is lacking I substitute missing co-ordinates. He is talking about a famous painting. Information enables transmission but does not contain experiences. Some experiences seem to be straightforward to transmit but others do not, depending on referential analog & complexity. Qualia initially seem problematic, but only because transmission depends upon a common foundation of knowledge. If we both know A, I can explain vaguely how to get to B.
I will return to the analogue-digital analogy in suggesting experience a waveform. We can approximate trajectory towards position C, but as if encoding mp3s from an original recording, we cannot avoid compression of signal. In absence of specific experiences, I compile approximate co-ordinates from available, compiled information. As Lewis (Lewis, 1999) writes, I may not have experienced vegemite, but if have tasted marmite, I can approximate. Qualia, like the smell of skunk, are representations limited by having poor analogue. By amassing derivatives, we approximate many correlates and unknowns. Science Fiction. The knowledge argument encapsulates this because colour has poor analogue.
Mary’s subjective knowledge is constrained by experience. Information is a currency of subjectivity, but compiling full information suggestively cannot account for missing co-ordinates. Mary’s perception prior revelation appears intuitively monochromatic. But isn’t the issue not that there are aspects of the world unexplainable physically, but that Jackson’s subjective representation of the world cannot encompass and is necessarily different from our collective world?
Lewis suggests phenomenal information as an initial bridge towards how we can account for Mary’s informational knowledge differentiated against the experiential, but information is (problematically) still information. I am attributing ourselves a matrix of informational association through the derivative process of mechanism, but this is necessarily contrasted to raw objective phenomena. It does not seem fair to suggest objective phenomena as an encompassable matrix nor ‘information’. Phenomenal information suggests a different type of information to that Mary hypothetically compiled. What is missing however is Mary’s experience as referent. According to the synthetic attribute I assign to information, Mary’s supposed experience is key. The problem with phenomenal information remains type difference between digital information and analogue phenomena. Information derives from phenomena, but we aren’t comparing like with like. Abstraction doesn’t mirror reality. Information, no matter how fine-grained or where it comes from, is derived from an irreducible physical type.
Any reproduction of the Mona Lisa is not the painting painted by the painter. Phenomenal experience is physical. What Mary knows cannot be isomorphic to what is in front of her, nor need it be so . The relationship is non-linear. The issue with phenomenal information is not the problem Lewis identifies of non-physical properties of what Mary is representing, but instead the non-informational properties (of what is being represented) as a parameter. It is to suppose a matrix of external phenomenal information against a matrix of Mary’s knowledge. This simply doesn’t make sense. The outside world does not seem perceivably ‘digital’. Information is a (human) mental construct. A currency for representing the world. By differentiating, we posit an explanatory gap. Lewis’ rejects the hypothesis of phenomenal information, after wrestling quite hard but never fully pinpointing why, but the underlying reason I surmise to be the type difference outlined above.
Knowledge appears to show experiential qualities, both via immediate sensory experience and, if distinguished from experience, as a compiled emergent derivative of processing experience. Once compiled, it is experiential, therefore, I argue for simplicity’s sake, irreducible. Thinking occurs when we do not know, where we instead assemble available information from our workspace. To return to the agent in space, information can point towards certain co-ordinates, like Atlantis, but knowledge is of our co-ordinate position itself. Mary’s experience is pointed towards. So is Jackson in error by equating information with knowledge?
Jackson begins the introduction of the paper with physical information. But knowledge itself appears conditional. "if a medical scientist tells me enough.." but also .."if I am clever enough to fit it together appropriately". I struggle with understanding the appeal of Shakespeare, but to others it appears sublime. They are both receptive, and competent in interpretation. Boundless subjective information can be derived from a fixed source. Similarly I could study medicine, or persist at DIY, but singularly fail to be clever enough to fit it together. There is a discrepency between the information I am presented with and the transformation of said information into knowledge. "If I am clever enough,..".
I concede that our scientific knowledge is documented in information, but it has also to be parsed and understood and relational to experience. It is like missing Goethe’s treatise on Light. Again, Jackson offers, "Nothing you could tell of a physical sort captures the smell of a rose" (Jackson, 1999 p.127). The process of telling is a transmission, denoting information. It is possible to point to perfume, and exclaim "this smells of rose!". Knowledge can be conveyed, but it seems absurd to suggest it is conveyed inside information. Smell is transmitted physically, through experience. Information is simply a common library of signposted phenomena. We can substitute knowledge with approximating information, but knowledge demands a corresponding experiential workspace between at least two parties.
I struggle with Jackson's conclusion because there is a mechanical process differentiating propositional information from compiled experiential knowledge. Faced with the contents of the whole library, we have access to information, but not without a retrieval process. Furthermore, because experience is fundamental and information is internally subjective, information necessarily depends upon consensus. A physical experience may remain fixed, but subjective expressions of meaning transmitted by ‘the taste of broccoli’ depends on namespace and context. Even if we assume a shared library of information, subjective experience denotes a necessarily different journey pointing towards ‘MacDuff’.
Experience can only be represented by information, never replaced by it. Information can be shared but knowledge can only be pointed towards. The subjective experiences of Jane and Mary point towards an externality. Mathematics is an example of more rigorous knowledge, language more fluid. The knowledge argument stems from a comparison of a unit of experience with a unit of missing information. An analogue type against binary. If we substitute colour with a physical location we can see: the representation of Edinburgh prior to a visit is necessarily different to the visit itself. At no point do I confuse my anticipation of the city with knowledge of the city itself, no matter how refined my mappings. No amount of information on Edinburgh can substitute the city. The map is not the territory. This brings us back to indexical information. Crane (2003) suggests the knowledge argument doesn’t beg the question against physicalism, but does necessitate subjective facts.
Crane criticises the ability hypothesis as supposing an equivocation of knowledge, propositional knowledge against ability knowledge. As outlined above, my take on the knowledge argument differentiates propositional information from compiled experiential knowledge. The argument of information as a lack of knowledge suggests subjective knowledge as the limitations of my knowledge (ie. ignorance) as contrasted against an objective, pure knowledge. Objective pure knowledge may be expressible as information, but paradoxically it is unlikely we are receptive enough to grasp its full import. Subjective information comprises the extent of information I have derived from experience (including gaps). I am in agreement with Crane that Mary’s knowledge increases on seeing red, because I am defining knowledge as a function of experience. Mary’s knowledge necessarily increases (the extent of this change may vary).
However, “Few physicalists wish to challenge the first premise, that in the story as told, Mary knows all the physical facts about colour vision. For suppose a physicalist did deny this. Then they would have to accept that there are some physical facts which in principle cannot be known without having certain experience.” (Crane p.8) I am not directly challenging Mary’s knowledge of all the physical facts, but I am challenging that physics necessitates a certain underlying common consensual conscious experience, because I argue experience is ultimately objective and external as substance of the world . I am considering experience an objective fact. There persists the type duality between experience and subjective mechanism because an objective fact must be subjectively derived (dependent on Nagel’s bat-like receptivity) as information.
Crane suggests that the type of knowledge learned by Mary prior seeing colour as ‘book knowledge’. The difference between Mary’s internal repository of accumulated knowledge, and objective facts appears that between a map and a territory. Crane’s subjective facts find their place in my thinking in that we each hold a subjective repository or map. This is our subjective facts. This is necessarily different to experiential reality, our territory. In binary terms, Mary’s knowledge of the objective property ‘colour’ is 0. She approximates this with her amassed incidental knowledge that expresses the phenomenon in terms of her monochromatic subjective experience. But Mary’s knowledge does not equate with the physical simply because the map is not the territory. She may have colour receptors, but these are initially deprived. I am claiming information is a mental content derived from experience. I am differentiating information from knowledge, in that knowledge is either experiential or if derived, requires processing and compilation. By contrasting experience with mechanism, information appears to be on the subjective, mechanical side of the explanatory gap. That we can accumulate shared experiences of objective reality enables this shared information.
If there were no explanatory gap between experience and mechanism, we could consider conscious experience, as the substance of the world, being reducible to information. Lewis explores this to an extent with the problematic notion of physical information. I am questioning our ability to do so based upon Chalmer’s reasoning of separating THP. By positing THP as external, I argue that physical experience is necessarily approximated, not reducible to information; but that this is not necessarily a problem because of Crane’s argument in that information is a subjective content, a transmittable mental derivative from experience. A fishing net . The Ability Hypothesis manages to bridge the requirements of subjective experience in developing knowledge, but it does not necessarily make the fullness or reason for this separation clear. From my reasoning it is because experience is a necessity, and our subjective knowledge is a dependent of our experience, that Mary learns something new. We have no choice but to continuously learn from experience. Each of us possesses a unique subjective map.
I agree with Jackson that “perceptual experience represents”(p.10), but the difference in syntax is a subtle one. From Moore, Jackson writes “experiences are composed of an act of awareness directed to an object or sense datum which bears the qualities”[emphasis added](p.10). Based on my position, representation of experience is ‘composed’ but experience itself is necessarily external and uncomposable except by the divine. We compose from experience.
Jackson comes close to cognitive maps as a representational feature of experience with, “there is a marked contrast between, on the one hand, the way representational devices like maps and sentences represent, and, on the other, the way perceptual experience represents. There is a gap between vehicle of representation and what is represented in the first case that does not exist in the second.” The problem with our representation of perceptual experience is that it is contained, as in a stomach, but external, therefore our containment of its properties seems full, yet expression of it limited. Maps and sentences agree with mechanism. Importantly however, Jackson’s representationalism indicates that experience can be used as propositional content. Although I may make the claim ‘This is hotter than it was last January”, it is interesting to note the cognitive affect of the comparison. I can derive aspects of experience as a representation on the one hand, but in comparing January, it necessitates a pointing towards and reference to a ‘digital’ representation I summon contrasted with experience. I am forced to consider a mental imagining of what it was like in January last year in experiencing the extent of my comparison. There is a difference between the imaginal representation I can retrieve [the digital] and the properties of experience [the analog] that gives rise to it. I simply cannot compare like-with-like, experience appears to be incomparable. Nevertheless, the point is simply that syllogism may compare types. The problem of intangibility of experience is treated more fully in the philosophical literature as non-conceptual content (Bermúdez, and Cahen, 2024), but this is necessarily out of the scope of the current exposition re-contrasting mechanism from the experiential.
I will merely close with the remark that physicalism does beg the buddhist parable of the poison arrow (Wikipedia, 2024). The details of the journey are less significant than (a) the quality of the map and (b) the appreciation of the quality of the experience, however mundane.
[6] A devil of a philosophy from a Chinamen
[7] In this case I outsource the cognitive legwork
[8] A treatment of The Theory of Colour by Goethe can be found in (Bortoft, 1996)
[9] Euler Method of Integration (Wikipedia, 2024) is instructive of approximating complex decision spaces
[10] Isomorphism between awareness and consciousness is included in one of Chalmers three potential accounts of nonreductive theory he suggests in the second half of his paper, in embracing the The Hard Problem. Unfortunately, because of our differences in distinction between where THP lies, it is difficult not to get confused with Chalmers ideas, such as his double-aspect theory of information. This has therefore been excluded from the present account
[11] Referenced and credited by (Lewis, 1999)
[12] Although treatment of process doesn’t really cover the problem of forgetting
[13] “The history of science is science” Attributed to Goethe in (Bortoft, 1996)
[14] It is unclear whether it should be substance of the world or the substance of the world. This very much depends on linguistic interpretations. I have therefore used the distinctive particle the only where it feels intuitively appropriate
[15] Or Indra’s net to the romantically inclined
What is implicit in my argument is that the hard problem is central, and cannot be avoided. Thinking has curiously been seen as a deviation from experience, to find knowledge. Missing co-ordinates are either sought or, with information, substituted.
I have avoided directly contrasting knowledge, but the difference between experience and mechanism can be illuminated with names. I could know perfectly well who Elon Musk is, yet be utterly unable to recall his name. To my reading, as a student of Freud, this Psychology is far more important to us than an anally retentive physicalism.
The extent of the digital-analogue analogy has not really been encompassed, but it has seemed a suitable vehicle to accomplish this voyage. The sad fact of the matter remains, that though adept at computational mechanism, science hasn’t to my mind situated THP accurately enough to date to progress significantly in the domain of consciousness .
An exasperated McGinn laments, “Perhaps we simply have yet to produce the Einstein-like genius who will restructure the problem in some clever way and then present an astonished world with the solution?” (McGinn, 1989 p.354). Nagel’s objective phenomenology graal. For my money, perhaps if we continue searching for our keys in all the wrong places they will never be found.
Finally, it is clear enough to me that there is an outer analogue. I have not yet really expressed the inner narrative, other than a Cartesian account of a trajectory of thought, from A to B (or C). Perhaps a future avenue of investigation might be to suggest whether there is an inner analogue, and furthermore perhaps even an outer digital, despite revolt at the idea.
16:18 15/09/2024
[16] As Sutherland wrily puts it “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.” Stuart Sutherland, The International Dictionary of Psychology, 1989
[0] *All Sketches written & scanned by the author.
[1] Ahmadiyya.org (n.d.) “Hadith Qudsi” Anwar-ul-Quran Ch. 105: The Elephant Retrieved 20/07/2024 from https://ahmadiyya.org/islam/anwarqur/ch105.htm.
[2] Nagel, T. (1979) “What is it like to be a bat?” in Mortal Questions. Canto edition. Cambridge University Press.
[3] McGinn, C. (1989) “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem” Oxford University Press.
[4] Chalmers, D. (1995) “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3):200-19.
[5] Jackson, F. (1982) “Epiphenomenal Qualia” in The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 32, No. 127 (Apr.1982), pp. 127-136. Oxford University Press.
[6] Crane, T. (2003) “Subjective Facts” in Real Metaphysics. Routledge 68-83.
[7] Lewis, D. (1999) “What Experience Teaches” in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 262-90.
[8] Stoljar, Daniel, "Physicalism" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2024/entries/physicalism/>.
[9] Cairns-Smith, A. G. (1990). Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. Cambridge University Press.
[10] Davidson, Herbert A. (1992). Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect. Oxford University Press.
[11] Bortoft, Henri (1996). The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science. Floris Books.
[12] Wikipedia contributors. (2024, September 8). “Parable of the Poisoned Arrow”. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:44, September 13, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow&oldid=1244630982
[13] Wikipedia contributors. (2024, July 19). “Euler method”. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:45, September 13, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Euler_method&oldid=1235429673
[14] Jackson, Frank (2003). “Mind and Illusion” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53:251-271.
[15] Bermúdez, José & Arnon Cahen, "Nonconceptual Mental Content" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), forthcoming URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/content-nonconceptual/>.
