The title is from a blog post by Brian Leiter. Leiter links to an article in the LA Review of books: Imitation and Extinction: The Case Against Reality. The article is written by Donald Hoffman.
We have discussed the general topic before, in several threads. So maybe this is a good time to revisit the topic.
Hoffman asks: “I see a green pear. Does the shape and color that I experience match the true shape and color of the real pear?”
My take is that there is no such thing as the “true shape and color of the pear.”
It is a common presumption, that there is an external standard of truth. Here, I mean “external to humans”. Truth is presumed to come from somewhere else. And our perceptual systems evolved to present us with what is true.
As I see it, this is backwards. Yes, our perceptions are mostly true. But this is not because perception is based on truth. Rather, it is because our human ideas of truth are based on what we perceive.
Open for discussion.
I’m just talking about feedbacks. You can find those in homeostatic systems.
Sure, it is about attributing purpose, and perhaps that makes it look similar to Dennett’s “Intentional Stance”. But then we attribute properties such as length and mass, and I really don’t think that’s what Dennett was discussing.
I’m suggesting that you could find an empirical basis for attributing purpose. But perhaps the term “purpose” is too tainted, and a more neutral term is needed.
petrushka,
Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Kanizsa triangle is an illusion — the contours are illusory and not present in the stimulus, after all — but that doesn’t mean that the construction of illusory contours isn’t useful to the organism.
It’s easy to think of scenarios in which the illusory contours would be beneficial.
Illusions are not automatically a bad thing.
Nobody is disputing this.
No good reason not to call them illusions, then.
Alan,
“IBE” = “inference to the best explanation”.
The contours are not illusions. they are incomplete. The kind of incomplete that we evolved to cope with. Like seeing a critter lurking in the bushes.
I ask again, what kind of drawing would not be a illusion, in the sense of being an incomplete representation of an object?
Is perspective in drawings real, or an illusion?
petrushka,
The completed contours are illusions. You won’t find them in the stimulus because they’re not there.
Contrast with the following drawing, in which the completed contours are present in the stimulus. They’re not illusory.
So what is that?
Is it a triangle?
It doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is that the contours are not illusory.
Meanwhile, here’s another well-known illusion, the Hermann grid:
The black balls are illusory. They aren’t present in the stimulus.
What does that mean?
You mean you believe it works. Because believing it works is a fitness advantage. That doesn’t tell you anything about it actually working right? Just that you believe it so, so that is a fitness advantage.
But somehow I don’t see you admitting that your belief that science works is just an artifact of evolution. Skeptics tend to pick and choose when they want to believe their theories.
The black squares, on the other hand, are not illusory.
I was recently listening to a Malcolm Gladwell podcast. He was talking about deception and why after millions of years of natural selection selecting we aren’t better at detecting it. It’s the same junk science talk that has become synonymous with discussions of modern society. Hunter gatherer blah nonsense. No respectable social sciences podcast would be complete without at least one mention of this. And it’s based on such pure bunk.
As if there are gene mutations for detecting bullshit , and if you got this accidental mutation you would mate more successfully. It’s suggested so often that we forget what a comical view it is. Are biologists searching for the bullshit genes right now? Can we find out if we have the mutation if we just send in a mouth swab?
Well, I don’t need any DNA test, because I definitely have the mutation. I think it comes from my fathers side. He comes from a long line of horseshit chasing nomads. So I know horseshit like its a wild turnip buried in the mud. . I can smell it from three continents over. Evolutionary theory is a giant rotten turnip.
But I guess a lot of people just don’t have the mutation to smell it.
I didn’t give it that much thought when I wrote it. I just used the phrase to contrast it with ants running into one another accidentally [*boink*].
But I don’t see why ants can’t act on (their own) purpose: They are conscious beings, and therefore most likely have desires. Doesn’t that suffice for attributing purpose?
Are they? Are bacteria conscious?
Do you consider air to be part of the surrounding environment? Then the answer is yes (because they will be oblivious of it). Otherwise: I doubt it for the ant, because of the difference in scale, but birds should be perfectly aware of it, because their visual system can register the difference in contrast and color.
It makes some sense: we share certain basic goals and an evolutionary history with most animals. Succesfully navigating terrain must be a pretty old skill, so why would humans use unique “conventions” to accomplish this?
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. I am still recovering from the “mysticism” bit though.
Do you doubt insects are conscious? Why? They have a nervous system and reasonably complex behaviour.
Well, from what I understand, plants also have a nervous system, so I am just trying to decide what we mean by consciousness.
Inference to the Best Explanation
The throwaway line naming you was a reference to your view that we are too complicated to ever be able to explain ourselves; at least when it comes to consciousness, this is McGinn’s mysterianism.
Another surprising thing I learned during my search for cool polymorphisms is that the frequency of people lacking depth perception, even if they have normal binocular vision, is quite high. It was around 2-3% if memory serves which you could demonstrate in reasonably large classes. Unfortunately the testing was too complex to perform in large groups.
They do, plants? Citation please!
Anyway, we both agree that plants nor bacteria are likely to have consciousness. But I bet that we both agree that mammals, birds and reptiles do. So why draw the line at insects. Do you view them as small bio-robots?
This is another categorical discussion BTW: I cannot offer you anything to conclusively prove that ants are conscious.
I think you are asking the right questions.
First: What does it take to attribute purpose?
In philosophy, this is studied as a part of the topic of agency. According to the SEP article, there is a range of views on the nature of agency, with the standard view being that the entity has to have mental representations of end states (desires) that it acts to bring about. However, the entity need consciously reason as part of that process. But there is also a view more like Neil’s, which is that all living entities have purposes of a sort:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/
With that in mind, we can look to how the relevant sciences apply the concept of purpose, agency, or something in that neighbourhood. That is the second question: do entities like ants have purposes under some agreed view of agency. For that, we should look to the relevant science and to how it uses the concept in its theories.
I did not do that, however. I simply assumed the standard approach and that ants did not have any sort of mental representations. So if someone brings the science to the discussion, I’d defer to any consensus there.
This issue relates to a discussion in Gregory’s thread on Methodological Naturalism. As I finally saw it, Gregory thought that the naturalism in MN excluded any scientific discussion of personal agency or purpose (teleology) and so excluded sciences like psychology, sociology, anthropology. I thought that those topics could be discussed scientifically using naturalized mental representations. So I took Gregory’s concern to assume the standard approach to agency, ie the one that depends on the agent having beliefs or at least something corresponding to them in the science.
OK, thanks. As I said to Corneel in my reply to his point, it turns out that there are views of agency in philosophy that are closer to how I understand yours.
Have you asked the current publisher to allow you to distribute limited copies of the book electronically? I’m assuming the current publisher owns the copyright.
If you want a break from your onerous reading schedule, does this short paper do justice to the issue you raised in your previous note on ideal languages etc:
Wittgenstein On Russell’s Theory Of Types
https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ndjfl/1093891616
I am pretty sure you would have seen the following, but just in case:
https://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/katrina-forrester-future-political-philosophy
Of course, Predictive Processing Theory (PPT) can explain this. Surprising that the paper does not reference Friston.
NB Alan: Please add PPT (sometimes PP) to your dictionary of acronyms for my posts.
I don’t know anything about insect cognition either, but it seems reasonable to assume that insects lack mental representations and conscious reasoning. So I agree that under the standard view insects do not have (personal) purpose. I will add that the standard view does seem a tad anthropocentric though (I note that that gets discussed extensively in the SEP article as well).
Corneel,
I think the definition of consciousness is you have to be able to laugh at something funny.
I think that disqualifies ants.
The philosopher Michael Tye claims bees are conscious but caterpillars are not.
The relevant stuff starts with the interviewers phrase “You think that qualia are the heart of the mind body problem.”
https://316am.site123.me/articles/thinking-fish-zombie-caterpillars?c=end-times-archive
Me, I’ll wait for the science to catch up to and replace the philosophical forays before deciding. In the meantime, the philosophy is fun, at least to me.
“conscious reasoning” is not needed according to the standard view as I understand it. Reasoning about we should believe and desire is something that applies just to us, I agree, as far as we know.
Yes, when we examine individual areas and organs then we cannot attribute awareness of anything to them. It is the person as a whole who is aware. Who, by means of interactions with the environment and combining all the separate data and organic processes cognizes what is perceived.
A quick look at Science Daily gave me these links:
New research has discovered why our brain might be so good at perceiving edges and contours.
and
How Does the Brain Recognize Faces from Minimal Information?
and
How Our Brains Can Form First Impressions Quickly
and
The human brain can select relevant objects from a flood of information and edit out what is irrelevant. It also knows which parts belong to a whole.
How can the brain recognise anything, have impressions or know anything? The human brain does not have the abilities here attributed to it. The reality is that it is the human being that has these abilities. Granted that the brain is a major player in allowing the individual person to have these abilities.
More interesting links from Science Daily
Zapping between channels in the retina
I like the way the cells are given a sense of self 🙂 Of course it will be the higher self which receives the bigger picture.
And:
Researchers measure the basis of color vision
Further complexity
And:
First glimpse into disc shedding in the human eye
Discussions about the evolution of the eye usually give us simple steps from simple light sensitive spots to the mammalian eye. They don’t go into the finer details of what must also develop in this evolution as in the example above.
And more details coming to light:
Nerve cells, blood vessels in eye ‘talk’ to prevent disease
Lower life forms and plants do not have the problem of needing to have accurate sense perception. Higher animals such as us primates do. But no matter how integrated, complex and difficult to maintain our senses are, evolution will always find a way to provide these systems. The necessary mutations will always be available to select in order to achieve these abilities.
Bacteria and plants demonstrate very well that knowledge and awareness are not necessary for survival and yet we have an evolutionary path to beings that do have this gift of knowledge. Why is that? Is it a satisfactory answer to say, “well that’s just the direction evolution took”?
We are each free to make up our own minds but this answer doesn’t satisfy me.
This is slightly off-topic from whether selection would favor veridical perceptual processes, but relevant to the more general question of how we might think about consciousness in naturalistic terms: The Consciousness Illusion. Frankish makes a compelling argument for illusionism: our introspective awareness of phenomenal properties does not correspond to any objective features of the world or our brains.
I’m not completely convinced yet, because it seems to me that a version of qualia realism could be made consistent with naturalism if one took phenomenal features as more or less reliable maps of affording features. This is a question of (perhaps) how much or little homomorphism is required to salvage qualia realism. But this is an empirical question; there is probably a range of cases, from very high homomorphism (the phenomenal features are tracking the affording features with accuracy and precision) to very low homomorphism (very little reliable tracking).
I particularly liked how clearly Frankish put the following point:
That’s crucial for understanding how the use of “representation” by cognitive scientists doesn’t involve any of the familiar tangles about “representation” (“idea”, “impression,” “sensation”) that vexed the history of modern epistemology from Descartes to Kant.
What black balls? (Seriously, I don’t see any black balls.)
Again, the false dichotomy. Consciousness is a slippery term, anyway, so try “awareness”. Then it is easy to see there are levels of awareness. I’ve mentioned the run-and-tumble strategy of E. coli before, where by choosing to swim in a random straight line or randomly re-orientating, a bacillus can swim to optimum nutrient concentration. The information it needs is provided by sensory pores that detect changes in nutrient concentration. The whole process is chemical but I would suggest this amounts to a minimal level of awareness of its environment.
I’d agree with that!
Here is a site with loads of optical illusions. You can scroll down to “luminance & Contrast” and the Hermann Grid is first on the list. Click on it and you can read an explanation of what you should see.
Ah, there’s a difference if Wikipedia is correct in quoting McGinn:
. I say human consciousness is a mystery humans can never unravel. In the future, if humans evolve to be more intelligent, they could be capable of understanding human consciousness as it stands today.
CharlieM,
Thanks, Charlie, i’ll have a look but I’m really more interested as to the mechanism. How does the brain creat the illusory model and to what purpose. As I said, I can’t but think if these illusions are widely experienced, there has to be a reason and a mechanism.
I think the scintillating grid is more impressive.
The site I linked to does give an explanation for the Hermann grid illusion and it has to do with ganglion cell spike rate.
Here
Why expect that.
Yes, natural selection could improve our ability at detecting deception. But it could also improve our ability at deceiving. So that gives you an arms race between the best deception skills and the best deception detection.
Even for us, I suspect that what we see as separate from the environment has a significant social component. That is to say, there is peer pressure for us to see things roughly the same ways as others in our society.
I think Frankish does a much better job of explaining the nature of the illusion in illusionism than Dennett does. Here’s his full article from Journal of Consciousness Studies that has more detail than the Aeon gloss:
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/kf_articles/blob/master/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
See in particula 3.2 and 1.6.
Dennett has a commentary in JCS supporting Frankish’s portrayal.
Here is an article that may interest you . It provides another approach to reconciling cognitive modelling and the embodied/enactive approaches; the Beni book I’m reading cites it.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00612/full
ETA: This one tries to do the same but with PPT specifically:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11229-016-1239-1
Do you have any reasons to support you claim? The bald statements in this thread and others do sound profound in a Chopra-atic way, but why believe them?
When you say that if we were smarter we could figure it out, it sounds like an evolution-of-the-gaps argument to me.
I’m sure I’ve pointed out before the consequence of being able to reconstruct an entity more intelligent than the entity doing the constructing – it’s runaway to the Skynet scenario.
Apologies to others who have posted and that I should respond to. The political situation both sides of the Atlantic is extremely distracting and the database connection error plus false starts in updating to the current Windows10 have contributed to lack of responses from me.
Couild you help me tie this to you argument about the limits to current human intelligence?
That post seems more like the type of concerns of people who warn about superintelligent AIs. Who I am guessing would be able to fully explain us and could even get some yuks from contemplating us in that light, although I guess we mere (unevolved) humans would not get the joke. But then an even more intelligent AI could explain those first generation superintelligences, and have the last laugh. Or maybe not the last laugh but rather one laugh in the chain of being.
ETA: Critical assessment of the concept of superintelligence here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artificial-intelligence/#Futu
David Deutsch makes the case for unlimited human explanatory abilities here:
It could be that cooperating AIs with access to quantum computers will be much faster than us at explaining things, even though we would get there eventually.
DB issue seems fixed. Good for you in doing the upgrade to take advantage of latest MS (MicroSoft) security: we would not want TSZ to be hacked, leading to a bunch of OPs which were incoherent or full of personal attacks.