Explaining the Qualitative Dimension of Consciousness: Prescission Instead of Reification: Dialogue

This paper suggests that it is largely a want of notional distinctions which fosters the “explanatory gap” that has beset the study of consciousness since T. Nagel’s revival of the topic. Modifying Ned Block’s controversial claim that we should countenance a “phenomenal-consciousness” which exists in its own right, we argue that there is a way to recuperate the intuitions he appeals to without engaging in an onerous reification of the facet in question. By renewing with the full type/token/tone trichotomy developed by C. S. Peirce, we think the distinctness Block calls attention to can be seen as stemming not from any separate module lurking within the mind, but rather from our ability to prescind qualities from occurrences

Brain-inspired conscious computing architecture

What type of artificial systems will claim to be conscious and will claim to experience qualia? The ability to comment upon physical states of a brain-like dynamical system coupled with its environment seems to be sufficient to make claims. The flow of internal states in such system, guided and limited by associative memory, is similar to the stream of consciousness. Minimal requirements for an artificial system that will claim to be conscious were given in form of specific architecture named articon. Nonverbal discrimination of the working memory states of the articon gives it the ability to experience different qualities of internal states. Analysis of the inner state flows of such a system during typical behavioral process shows that qualia are inseparable from perception and action. The role of consciousness in learning of skills, when conscious information processing is replaced by subconscious, is elucidated. Arguments confirming that phenomenal experience is a result of cognitive processes are presented. Possible philosophical objections based on the Chinese room and other arguments are discussed, but they are insufficient to refute claims articon’s claims. Conditions for genuine understanding that go beyond the Turing test are presented. Articons may fulfill such conditions and in principle the structure of their experiences may be arbitrarily close to human

The meta-problem and the transfer of knowledge between theories of consciousness: a software engineer’s take

This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly, the ability of sophisticated agent architectures with a purely physical implementation to support certain functional forms of qualia or proto-qualia appears to entail the possibility of machine consciousness with qualia, not only for reductive theories but also for the nonreductive ones that regard consciousness as ubiquitous in Nature. Secondly, analysis of introspective psychological material seems to hint that, under the threshold of our ordinary waking awareness, there exist further ‘submerged’ or ‘subliminal’ layers of consciousness which constitute a hidden foundation and support and another source of our phenomenal intuitions. These ‘submerged’ layers might help explain certain puzzling phenomena concerning subliminal perception, such as the apparently ‘unconscious’ multisensory integration and learning of subliminal stimuli

WHERE EXPERIENCES ARE: DUALIST, PHYSICALIST, ENACTIVE AND REFLEXIVE ACCOUNTS OF PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Dualists believe that experiences have neither location nor extension, while reductive and ‘non-reductive’ physicalists (biological naturalists) believe that experiences are really in the brain, producing an apparent impasse in current theories of mind. Enactive and reflexive models of perception try to resolve this impasse with a form of “externalism” that challenges the assumption that experiences must either be nowhere or in the brain. However, they are externalist in very different ways. Insofar as they locate experiences anywhere, enactive models locate conscious phenomenology in the dynamic interaction of organisms with the external world, and in some versions, they reduce conscious phenomenology to such interactions, in the hope that this will resolve the hard problem of consciousness. The reflexive model accepts that experiences of the world result from dynamic organism-environment interactions, but argues that such interactions are preconscious. While the resulting phenomenal world is a consequence of such interactions, it cannot be reduced to them. The reflexive model is externalist in its claim that this external phenomenal world, which we normally think of as the “physical world,” is literally outside the brain. Furthermore, there are no added conscious experiences of the external world inside the brain. In the present paper I present the case for the enactive and reflexive alternatives to more classical views and evaluate their consequences. I argue that, in closing the gap between the phenomenal world and what we normally think of as the physical world, the reflexive model resolves one facet of the hard problem of consciousness. Conversely, while enactive models have useful things to say about percept formation and representation, they fail to address the hard problem of consciousness

The Real Combination Problem : Panpsychism, Micro-Subjects, and Emergence

Panpsychism harbors an unresolved tension, the seriousness of which has yet to be fully appreciated. I capture this tension as a dilemma, and offer panpsychists advice on how to resolve it. The dilemma, briefly, is as follows. Panpsychists are committed to the perspicuous explanation of macro-mentality in terms of micro-mentality. But panpsychists take the micro-material realm to feature not just mental properties, but also micro-subjects to whom these properties belong. Yet it is impossible to explain the constitution of a macro-subject (like one of us) in terms of the assembly of micro-subjects, for, I show, subjects cannot combine. Therefore the panpsychist explanatory project is derailed by the insistence that the world’s ultimate material constituents (ultimates) are subjects of experience. The panpsychist faces a choice of abandoning her explanatory project, or recanting the claim that the ultimates are subjects. This is the dilemma. I argue that the latter option is to be preferred. This needn’t constitute a wholesale abandonment of panpsychism, however, since panpsychists can maintain that the ultimates possess phenomenal qualities, despite not being subjects of those qualities. This proposal requires us to make sense of phenomenal qualities existing independently of experiencing subjects, a challenge I tackle in the penultimate section. The position eventually reached is a form of neutral monism, so another way to express the overall argument is to say that, keeping true to their philosophical motivations, panpsychists should really be neutral monists.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Mental Database

This article uses database, evolution and physics considerations to suggest how the mind stores and processes its data. Its innovations in its approach lie in:- A) The comparison between the capabilities of the mind to those of a modern relational database while conserving phenomenality. The strong functional similarity of the two systems leads to the conclusion that the mind may be profitably described as being a mental database. The need for material/mental bridging and addressing indexes is discussed. B) The consideration of what neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) between sensorimotor data and instrumented observation one can hope to obtain using current biophysics. It is deduced that what is seen using the various brain scanning methods reflects only that part of current activity transactions (e.g. visualizing) which update and interrogate the mind, but not the contents of the integrated mental database which constitutes the mind itself. This approach yields reasons why there is much neural activity in an area to which a conscious function is ascribed (e.g. the amygdala is associated with fear), yet there is no visible part of its activity which can be clearly identified as phenomenal. The concept is then situated in a Penrosian expanded physical environment, requiring evolutionary continuity, modularity and phenomenality.Several novel Darwinian advantages arising from the approach are described

(WP 2011-02) The Change in Sraffa\u27s Philosophical Thinking

The availability of Piero Sraffa’s unpublished manuscripts and correspondence at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, has made it possible to begin to set out a more complete account of Sraffa’s philosophical thinking than previously could be done with only his published materials and the few comments and suggestions made by others about his ideas, especially in connection with their possible impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later thinking. This makes a direct rather than indirect examination of Sraffa’s philosophical thinking possible, and also shifts the focus from his relationship to Wittgenstein to his own thinking per se. I suggest that the previous focus, necessary as it may have been prior to the availability of the unpublished materials, involved some distortion of Sraffa’s thinking by virtue of its framing in terms of Wittgenstein’s concerns as reflected in the concerns of scholars primarily interested in the change in the his thinking. This paper seeks to locate these early convictions in this historical context, and then go on to treat the development of Sraffa’s philosophical thinking as a process beginning from this point, arguing that his thinking underwent one significant shift around 1931, but still retained its early key assumptions. Thus the approach I will take to Sraffa’s philosophical thinking is to explain it as a process of development largely within a single framework defined by his view of how modern science determines the scope and limits upon economic theorizing

On the primacy and irreducible nature of first-person versus third-person information

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The Change in Sraffa\u27s Philosophical Thinking

The availability of Piero Sraffa\u27s unpublished manuscripts and correspondence at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, has made it possible to begin to set out a more complete account of Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking than previously could be done with only his published materials and the few comments and suggestions made by others about his ideas, especially in connection with their possible impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein\u27s later thinking. This makes a direct rather than indirect examination of Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking possible, and also shifts the focus from his relationship to Wittgenstein to his own thinking per se. I suggest that the previous focus, necessary as it may have been prior to the availability of the unpublished materials, involved some distortion of Sraffa\u27s thinking by virtue of its framing in terms of Wittgenstein\u27s concerns as reflected in the concerns of scholars primarily interested in the change in his thinking. This paper seeks to locate these early convictions in this historical context, and then go on to treat the development of Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking as a process beginning from this point, arguing that his thinking underwent one significant shift around 1931, but still retained its early key assumptions. Thus the approach I will take to Sraffa\u27s philosophical thinking is to explain it as a process of development largely within a single framework defined by his view of how modern science determines the scope and limits upon economic theorising

The Turing Test and the Zombie Argument

In this paper I shall try to put some implications concerning the Turing's test and the so-called Zombie arguments into the context of philosophy of mind. My intention is not to compose a review of relevant concepts, but to discuss central problems, which originate from the Turing's test - as a paradigm of computational theory of mind - with the arguments, which refute sustainability of this thesis. In the first section (Section I), I expose the basic computationalist presuppositions; by examining the premises of the Turing Test (TT) I argue that the TT, as a functionalist paradigm concept, underlies the computational theory of mind. I treat computationalism as a thesis that defines the human cognitive system as a physical, symbolic and semantic system, in such a manner that the description of its physical states is isomorphic with the description of its symbolic conditions, so that this isomorphism is semantically interpretable. In the second section (Section II), I discuss the Zombie arguments, and the epistemological-modal problems connected with them, which refute sustainability of computationalism. The proponents of the Zombie arguments build their attack on the computationalism on the basis of thought experiments with creatures behaviorally, functionally and physically indistinguishable from human beings, though these creatures do not have phenomenal experiences. According to the consequences of these thought experiments - if zombies are possible, then, the computationalism doesn't offer a satisfying explanation of consciousness. I compare my thesis from Section 1, with recent versions of Zombie arguments, which claim that computationalism fails to explain qualitative phenomenal experience. I conclude that despite the weaknesses of computationalism, which are made obvious by zombie-arguments, these arguments are not the last word when it comes to explanatory force of computationalism