Here
is a short piece in the Atlantic by Michael Graziano, who I have talked about
before. Also see Michael Smith's take on the piece at Self Aware Patterns. At the Atlantic there are 600 comments on the piece, so
Graziano's brand of eliminativism rankles a few feathers. A few
thoughts on the article:
In
general I follow Graziano's thinking. He claims that we misconstrued the qualities of white light because of the information we took in of it. It seemed white, so to speak. Likewise, he claims, we have developed poor concepts about consciousness because of the limited information ("consciousness) that presents itself to us, to our other self-reflecting, self-perceiving aspects. And thus we endlessly get really bad conceptions about that entity that we have labeled consciousness, including that it is something outside of information or representation.
I do wonder at the idea that
“this is the way consciousness seems to us.” By the time of, say,
Locke, Kant, Descartes, or later in 20th century batty-qualia-philes,
it becomes difficult to claim that we are forming our ideas about
what our consciousness is by just searching our inner world.
Obviously, the Greeks, given that they were the first formalizers,
transversed some ground rather naively. Perhaps their analyzing of
their own consciousness was rather unadulterated, so to speak. But
certainly any later thinker has already been thoroughly fed societal
and philosophical conceptions about their “consciousness” as they
go in search of knowledge about such. Or in Graziano's terms, their
reflecting on the information of their consciousness already has
included in it information about what consciousness is supposed to
be, along with other endless ideas about the general working of the
world.
Now,
maybe most of that historical lead-up to any particular theory will
be inundated by any individual's conscious experience, and this leads
to the continuous poor interpretation of that information, given the
general structure of that relationship (transparency, for one).
However,
I do wonder if a few different turns, perhaps a lucky strike of ten
obvious Phineas Gage-like cases in the 17th century, would have led
to a vastly different analysis of what consciousness is. Even without
20th century instruments, perhaps all the explanations and posits of
“what consciousness is” may have been very different. Maybe we
never come close to postulating a hard problem in the manner that we
have done, or think that this subjective versus objective divide is so
much a problem.
And
speaking of subjectivity, which a lot of people espouse as a guard
against scientific pontification on consciousness and qualia, see
some of those 600 comments, I still find it a confusing mess.
The
exact arrangement of the atoms/molecules of any given tree may be
necessary to explain that tree's interaction within an environment.
Think of thoroughly exploding a tree. To explain where every part of
that tree ends up requires (I assume) a very particular (subjective?)
analysis of that exact arrangement. The fact that such a singular
analysis, given that this is the only exact arrangement of these
particles in the world, is necessary to explain the future of these
particles, seems banal to me. But it also seems like we are not doing
anyone any favors by talking about the subjectivity of the tree as
opposed to the objective way those particles will play out. There is no
reason to divide the world into subjective and objective. What
science aims for is a general analysis of why a thing happens. Say, why, generally speaking, all those tree parts will end up where they
will. If humans care about exploding a particular tree in a certain
way to send those parts to exact spots, they will have to particularize that tree. Hence engineering.
Following
a Graziano like account above, I find people arguing over this about
consciousness or first person subjectivity to be baffling. There is
often this claim that the first person world is private and therefore
science cannot measure it. Or that consciousness and qualia resides
in a first person realm and science resides in a third person, and
therefore the two shall not ever mix. This only has significant
weight if you have posited some realm of consciousness that holds
information in a way outside the way other materials, say computers,
hold information. Let's say a computer runs a program with influence
from external components. Yes, in order to measure everything that
that computer engages in, you will have to provide a full account of
the internal structure of that computer. But that should give you the
full “subjectivity” of that computer. The same has to hold for
brains, unless you posit some mental realm, some consciousness or
qualia-like entity that is beyond science.
As
in my previous parlance, if an experience you have is just
information, it will be a unique representational structure. Only you
are representing the information of “John, in NYC, my dog Shaggy is
on the floor, I am reading the Huffington Post.” That is a very
particularized set of information, and it is subjective in that
sense. But there is no reason to think that information is outside of
science anymore than information in the computer that you are reading
this on has a unique array of information, or whose RAM is processing
an unique array of information. In order to predict the exact behavior of
that computer, or explain all its qualities, we will have to know
everything about that particular object. That is just
particularization, which is a form of subjectivity, I suppose, but
only in a rather banal sense. People who think subjectivity or the
first person means something different have not convinced me that
there is something useful there. Of course, agreeing with Graziano, I
believe they are likely to still be holding some poorly
conceptualized idea of what consciousness is.
So,
the idea that there is a subjective realm and an objective realm that
science is going to have a difficult time parsing still baffles me.
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