Multisense Realism

Great interview that brings up many insights that I have talked about in relation to Libet and free will. I think that Dr. Schurger successfully decouples the readiness potential from the assumption that it is the cause of decisions. In Multisense Realism, I have also talked about different modes and scales of causality. Just because we are not personally conscious of, or paying attention to each voluntary action that we take with our bodies doesn’t mean that those actions are not ours in some sense. I propose instead that the sense of will exists as part of a spectrum of conscious experience that ranges from the impersonal to the subpersonal, intrapersonal, personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal. The ranges of awareness beneath the personal range will appear ‘unconscious’ to us personally (such as a reflex), but that doesn’t mean that the reflex isn’t caused by conscious experience and voluntary participation at a subpersonal or intrapersonal level.

A reflex may arise in a way that is in some sense willful, and still be ‘our’ will in the sense that it doesn’t belong to anyone else’s body and it could be argued that we bear at least some personal responsibility for the consequences of those actions. When actions arise from beneath our personal awareness, I propose that they may occur intentionally in a universe of emotional and sensory conditions, but that they do not include an awareness of those conditions related to our personality in the world. A reflex doesn’t know who we are, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an expression of experiential conditions that serve as a foundation for personal experience, or perhaps more accurately, envelop personal experience.

I liked the detailed examination of statistical noise in brain data in the video, although I think that it can be a distraction to the larger question of will, qualia, and consciousness.

AST

Where my views diverge strongly are when Schurger gets into Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory, starting around 55:25. From the start, Schurger puts forth an informal definition of the hard problem of consciousness as “How is it that something that is built up from matter can be responsible for a subjective experience?”. Already this imposes an arbitrary association of consciousness with subjectivity, implying either that some experience is objective, or that all experience is subjective. In my understanding, neither of these possibilities are valid.

In my view, 1) all experience must by definition be both subjective and objective to some extent, or neither, and 2) the distinction between subjective and objective can only exist in conscious experience (not physics or math, for example). This is critically important because assuming experience is identical to subjectivity sets up a false assumption from the very beginning of considering the hard problem as one about subjective experience rather than experience in general. This gives consciousness a diminished role and limits our consideration only to certain types of appearances within conscious experience rather than appearances themselves, which as far as we know, rely on specific modalities of sense and sense-making within consciousness. It also allows us to falsely project “models” outside of consciousness, as if there were objects that have the power to unconsciously ‘seem like’ something else. If consciousness is subjective then models are too. Subjectivity itself can’t be a model or based on a model, since models aren’t a property of unconscious physical conditions.

It should be recognized that all physical appearances are smuggled in from our personal awareness. Perceptions on a human scale of size and time give matter a tangible feel and visible shape. Physical theory does not acknowledge the dependence on these objectifying sense modalities (touch and sight), nor does it acknowledge the arbitrary and limited scale of size and time at which such appearances of tangibility arise. If you look at matter with an instrument that accesses it on a small enough and fast enough scale, tangibility dissolves into quantum paradox and probability. I call this layer of physicality hemi-morphic as it is only half-tangible. Classical mechanics would be the study of morphic appearances and scales where objects appear as concrete shapes moving from one definite position to another through linear time. Quantum has no concrete location or context-independent appearance, and by ‘context’ we are talking about experimental conditions that depend on what can be known with certainty by those interpreting the results of the experiment. The result depends on what can be known about the result. The experiments reveal that at the quantum scale, ontology is inseparable from epistemology. Likewise, relativity reveals that on the largest scales of astrophysics, appearances are also dependent on frames of reference. Reference, like model, is a tricky word that allows us to smuggle intangible properties of conscious experience into physical theory. The idea of emergence obscures the fact that consciousness appears not only be the experience of privacy, but the parent of all appearances as well as their qualification as being ontological or epistemological.

Unlike Schurger, I am not impressed by AST’s prediction that AST will seem unsatisfying. This to me just seems like an expression of an intuition toward counter-intuition. He talks about Graziano’s question “Why are we so convinced that there’s something else in our brains other than matter?” (59:50). This is a loaded statement from the start as it forces us to see the brain as the source of consciousness rather than an appearance in consciousness. He goes on to tell Graziano’s story about a patient with brain damage who is certain that there is a squirrel inside his head to give support to the idea that just because we are certain that subjective experience exists, we could be wrong. While it is certainly true that we misinterpret some specific contents of experience, it is not true about experience itself. An unconscious brain can’t imagine anything in the first place, so imagination cannot be a figment of itself. It’s likely true that there isn’t anything else in the brain but matter, but that doesn’t prove that matter and the brain are the source of consciousness.

The pragmatic question that Schurger gets into – should he ask for a grant to study the squirrel versus a grant to study why the patient believes in the squirrel appeals to a straw man fallacy that conflates conscious experience to specific appearances within conscious experience. Of course it isn’t plausible that there is a literal squirrel in the patient’s head, and of course we should spend our time and effort studying plausible appearances first, but that doesn’t mean that the existence of appearance in general could be plausibly doubted. It makes no difference whether it is a patient perceiving a squirrel in their head or a doctor perceiving a patient talking about squirrels, they are both undermined equally by AST. If we say that we cannot be sure that there is a difference between tangible and intangible appearances, between objects colliding and the flavor of sweetness, then we undermine our entire ability to study anything in the first place. AST seems unsatisfying not because it makes sense that we can be wrong about our own experience, but because it gives itself the authority to disqualify any appearances that contradict the theory. My theory (Multisense Realism) predicts that some people won’t like it also, but not because people can’t be trusted to interpret their own experience correctly. Interpretations can be wrong, but they can’t exist in the absence of experience. Right and wrong are qualities of thought within conscious experience, not conditions that could be applied to the existence of experience itself. To the contrary, it is the absence of conscious experience that should be subjected to AST’s skepticism. Conscious experience is the one and only thing that we know we can know exists.

What it’s like (again)

In my own criticism of the What it’s like idiom, I see the same problem of association (like = appears similar to something else), but the larger problem is with the it. In What it’s like, the it already refers to an appearance in conscious experience. It’s a completely circular idiom. Yes, appearances in conscious experience have qualities that are unique, universal, and everything in between, but those degrees of mereological inclusion refer to appearances within conscious experience. In a universe of unconscious physics it would have no appearance at all, and there would be nothing to qualify any physical event as being associated with or dissociated from any other such physical event. Parsimony compels us to doubt the existence of any such unnecessary physical property of association, similarity, likeness, etc. Physical forces are the explanation in physics. Qualification, similarity, etc, are all smuggled in from direct aesthetic acquaintance in conscious experience, not from math or physical theory. We cannot import what we need from consciousness to conveniently prop up neuroscientific theory while discarding the rest and then deny that we have fallen into motivated and circular reasoning.

The whole notion of an attention schema of information processing is being projected onto the brain by our inferences, not from anything that the brain is physically doing. All that any physical structure or process does is modify physical properties, which all are ultimately nothing but geometries of physical force. Shapes in motion. Appearances of tangibility and visibility. There is no evidence of any ‘information’ or ‘models’ in the brain. The brain ostensibly works by chemistry alone. Chemistry has no use for models and it has no physical way of using some effect as a model for something else…not unless we assume it is conscious in the first place…which is the same circular reasoning fallacy that underwrites all of physicalism (especially Dennett’s confident, but confused philosophy). Unconscious physics, whether viewed at the scale of particles, cells, organs, bodies, or groups of bodies physically evolving over time, has no entry point for any such thing as a model. Information is imaginary. Bits and bytes do not exist physically – they are not concrete tangible objects moving in public space, they are abstract, intangible concepts manipulated in private thought.

It is encouraging that Jaimungal recognizes that qualia such as feeling (or any other sensation/experience that is an it in what it’s like) need not be perceived as being ‘like’ anything else to be perceived. Sure, blue is like green and it is like all colors, and its like all sensations, but that doesn’t actually explain anything about what blue or color or sensation is or how it could ’emerge’ from unconscious physical effects. It is also encouraging that Schurger admits that we don’t know what that ‘it’ is yet. He does still seem to be stuck on the what it’s like idiom, even though he seems to agree with Curt’s reasoning about why it is a misleading distraction at best. I agree with Aaron’s conservative approach to epistemology in general, saying it’s better to “walk around thinking you’re ignorant and end up later being right than the opposite”, but it is a double edged sword when applied to conscious experience itself. It is a strategy that unintentionally introduces a false possibility of doubting conscious experience from within conscious experience and sets consciousness as equivalent to other phenomena/appearances that we might study scientifically – which are all ultimately only knowable as appearances within consciousness.

Consciousness, being the source and sink of science itself, cannot be doubted without doubting science also. At some point we must acknowledge that not only is conscious experience the only given we can ever access, the whole idea of a given can only exist within conscious thought. We should not be so humble and skeptical that we disqualify our own ability to make qualifications. Doing so is not only selling consciousness and ourselves short, it is really more of a false, or performative sense of humility. We don’t really take the denial of conscious experience seriously, it just feels intelligent and scientific to tell ourselves that because science is rooted in skepticism. Skepticism, however, cannot rationally be skeptical about its source in consciousness.

If consciousness doesn’t exist, then neither does science. If perception doesn’t exist, then neither does the appearance of the brain. The brain does not appear to be thinking about science, it appears to be moving particles around just like any other organ, tissue, cell, or molecule. Even electromagnetic fields and charge are ultimately theories that are abstracted from our observations of the movements of matter. As far as we can see, matter just moves matter because it can. Properties like force, charge, energy, mass, velocity, density, spin, and gravity all reduce to relationships we infer between changes in the shape and position of objects that we can detect with other objects. We symbolize these relationships and find them informative, but that doesn’t mean that any such thing as information is present in them. Neither formation nor information have any parsimonious association with each other outside of conscious interpretation. A hammer doesn’t need to learn or model anything to fall to the ground. It doesn’t matter how many hammers there are or how complicated their movements appear to be in some perceptual grouping of place and duration, there is no known way for formations to become informed without assuming consciousness. Consciousness makes models, but models don’t make consciousness and physics doesn’t make either one…unless by physics we mean consciousness.

As far as we can ever know, all possible appearances are created by, for, and within conscious experience – including those feelings of certainty about how and when consciousness could arise. I disagree that AST is a viable approach to solving the hard problem. It is actually a harmful distraction. It may be satisfying to feel that our view is ‘objective’ and that it is somehow therefore not a feeling and not biased by seeking satisfaction, but this is an illusion. It’s an ideological choice to assume objective-seeming appearances to be authoritative while disqualifying other appearances as merely subjective. Science is a feeling too, even if we feel that it must be more than that.

P.S.

Toward the end, talking about blindsight and the idea that consciousness is necessary for initiating new movement…isn’t that contradicted by sleepwalking? It would appear that people can do things like get food from the refrigerator or drive a car even though they aren’t awake or personally aware of what their body is doing, or at least not aware in the same way that we expect to be aware while awake.