He raises the question in the New York Times Sunday Review:
I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do…
How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong…
You might object that this is a paradox. If awareness is an erroneous impression, isn’t it still an impression? And isn’t an impression a form of awareness?
But the argument here is that there is no subjective impression; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience. The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience.
I agree that our intuitions about consciousness are likely to be faulty, but I don’t think that Graziano has resolved the paradox he mentions. My brain models other people as having subjective experiences, but this obviously has no bearing on whether they really do, or don’t, have those experiences. Given that, why should the fact that my brain models me as having subjective experiences suddenly become magically relevant to the question of whether I really do, or don’t, have those experiences?
I noticed that. And I agree with him on that point, though I also have my disagreements.
If consciousness is defined as a kind of homunculus (a squirrel in the head) then that definition is silly.
If consciousness is defined as a process or activity, like swing a bat or eating, then it can be studied like any other observable phenomenon.
Very nice of Professor Graziano to respond so quickly.
petrushka:
That’s not at all what he’s saying.
From the Aeon essay:
And as he explained in his email to Alan, he is saying that awareness is unreal in the same way that the squirrel is unreal:
In short, there is no squirrel and there is no subjective experience, according to Graziano.
Bruce,
He actually is denying that we have subjective feelings. According to him, there is only information processing. Awareness is a fabrication, just as the squirrel is a fabrication.
If you keep that in mind, everything falls into place:
1. He thinks the Hard Problem vanishes, because if we don’t have subjective experience, then there is nothing mysterious to explain. It’s all just data processing.
2. It explains why he took care to emphasize the following in his Times piece:
3. It explains why he doesn’t see the Aeon or Times articles as contradicting his book. He meant the same thing in all three, and the Times article was not, as you put it, “likely worded with controversial tone to attract readership.” He was being completely honest about his views, not exaggerating them to attract readers.
To put it as succinctly as I can:
Graziano is saying that we don’t have subjective feelings, but that our brain attributes them to us — and that the attribution itself is not a subjective feeling. Subjective feelings are a fiction, like the squirrel.
I’m not sure how to interpret that, because to me it makes no sense.
B.F. Skinner preferred the term “covert behavior” to describe consciousness (and all the corollaries, such as awareness and thinking and hallucinating and such). I think he assumed that the neurons involved might be the same ones involved in objectively visible behavior, or in sensing something immediately. I don’t know what he really thought about this, because he didn’t think it was an answerable question. Perhaps that is changing.
But the black box man didn’t deny covert behavior. He merely denied that it was worthwhile to talk about what it really is.
http://sciencealert.com.au/news/20141710-26359.html
Keith: I don’t know if he is taking followups, but before I check, I want to make sure we have the same understanding of the issue.
When I read your above, I take you to be saying that, according to him, there are no subjective experiences. Is that what you thinks he means? In other words, do you think he is saying we are all really philosophical zombies?
If you think that, then I would like to ask him if that is a fair description of his position.
Or do you mean that subjective experience is not what we think it is, which is closer to how understand him.
In that second case, the first question I want to ask is why he takes time to explain why our personal awareness is different from that we attribute to others, if subjective feelings are not real. Why does he think he needs to explain subjective experience if people do not feel them.
I also want him to ask him about his denial of epiphenomenalism which I’ve just read more closely in his book. I understand him to say our awareness causes things and gains that causal ability by being realized to or being identical to underlying brain processes. But if he denies epiphenomenonalism, then to me that means awareness is real: it is another way of referring to a brain process but still our conscious decision have causal impact (otherwise he would be an epiphenomenalist).
ETA: If we do ask followups, I would want to let him know that the people having the disagreement about the book’s message are physicalists and both expect that subjective feelings would be explained by brain processing. So he can assume that. The question is more about whether people even have subjective experiences, not whether they are explainable by some kind of brain processes (at least that is my understanding of the question).
I’d probably ask him one more thing if he has time: I did find a reference to Dennett’s view of qualia in the book: he says Dennett thinks qualia are incoherent and Searle thinks they must exist by definition and cannot be explained away. He then says his position is half way in between. There is a longer paragraph where he tries to explain that; it says its existence is philosophically murky (no kidding!). So I’d ask him if he wanted to expand on that and possibly relate his position to standard philosophical ideas like type supervenience versus token supervenience.
ETA: Later he talks more about reality. So I’d ask if he has any further thoughts on this sentence: “the attention schema does not even seek to answer the question of its existential reality but instead tries to describe what is constructed by the brain” (p 57)
Hopefully he will be flattered by all the attention and answer.
Just to make things very clear: if Graziano agrees that the best description of his position is that we our philosophical zombies, then for sure I misunderstood him.
keiths:
Bruce:
Yes, that’s what he’s saying (though he wisely avoids using the z-word in his articles). The psychiatric patient’s brain computes a model of a squirrel, but there is no actual squirrel corresponding to that model. Likewise, our brains compute a model of subjective experience, but there is no such thing in reality.
The computation is real, of course, but the model refers to something — subjective experience — that does not actually exist.
No, because if he thought subjective experience were real (though erroneous), then he would still be faced with the Hard Problem. He also wouldn’t say things like this:
Bruce:
We report having subjective experience (as all good philosophical zombies do), so our reports are real behavioral phenomena that need to be explained. Graziano’s explanation is that the brain models itself as having subjective experience, and it can’t tell that the model is wrong because it has nothing but the model to go by. It consults the model and reports what the model erroneously tells it. The model is useful but incorrect.
Being a good physicalist, he acknowledges that there is a real brain process, but the brain process is not awareness. The brain is accessing a model of awareness, not awareness itself.
This is important, because if subjective experience is epiphenomenal, then it is causally inert. Under epiphenomenalism, whenever someone describes a phenomenal experience, their description is not causally related to the phenomenal experience itself. It’s paradoxical, to say the least. That Graziano and Dennett manage to avoid this problem is a point in favor of their theories.
I take that to mean that although he personally has an opinion on the question (expressed forcefully in the Times article), the attention schema theory itself does not depend on the answer. It focuses on the mechanics of the computation, not its philosophical entailments.
He says:
Of course it is. That’s the whole point of it. It’s a reductio as absurd as if he said at the close of his article
…..and by the way, I haven’t actually written anything and you haven’t actually read anything!”
The claims of skeptics that there is no past, no external world, no other minds, no right and wrong, are themselves paradoxical enough not to be believed by the vast majority of people. And many of we scoffers will doubt that the skeptic really believes any of that stuff himself–based on his behaviors 99% of the time, anyhow.
But this We ARE zombies! claim takes the cake.
At least we wouldn’t have to worry about maybe being a brain in a vat anymore–because, appearances to the contrary, we couldn’t really be worrying, (there being neither us nor worry).
Keith:
OK, that is good, because my understanding of him is different. If he does think we are zombies, then you are right, I got him wrong.
It’s not the reported instances of experience that I’d want to ask about, it’s the unreported ones. Perhaps he will answer that we always have internal reporting. But I don’t think so, since he talks about phenomenal versus access consciousness, and it seems only the second involves reporting. Whether there is also a “feeling” associated with access consciousness and reporting is controversial and not worth muddying the waters with here. So I’d stick with unreported, phenomenal consciousness in any followup questions.
He does talk about that separation in his model in the book and says that it corresponds to different aspects of his model (p 53-54).
I’ll reply separate to Alan to see if he want to try a followup after a day or two. I’ll post some of the questions I’d like to see in it if Alan agrees to try for you and he to add to or comment on.
On further thinking, I don’t think his comments on epiphenomenalism are relevant to the core issue. I do agree with you that awareness/consciousness/mental contents get their causal powers from the brain states. But I take that to mean that subjective experience simply IS (or maybe is realized) in those brain states. Not to mean that subjective experience does not exist or at least that we do not have subjective experience, if the two things are different somehow.
By the way, do YOU think we HAVE subjective experiences? If so, do you think that is a different question from whether subjective experiences EXIST?
Another interesting question is whether brain states exist. (I mean the states in his model, not the lump of stuff we see at autopsies or in brain surgery). After all, aren’t they just biochemical/electrical configurations, that is fermions and bosons in the right organization, that is some emergent properties of the quantum state of the universe? But that question is probably more the topic of your reduction thread.
Alan: I was very pleasantly surprised by him responding at all, let alone so quickly. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
As per the detailed posts I made to Keith, would you be willing to do a followup if we don’t hear from him at the site?
No problem.
I’m somewhat concerned that recent juvenile exchanges will be discouraging but I forwarded the link to this thread to Professor Graziano.
I have not gone back to read it again to confirm, but my impression is that this thread was better than many here in terms of signal to noise ratio. I think it gets a low score on the Monty Python’s Argument Sketch scale.
But there are a lot of posts to wade through, some talking about other issues like the self, so he may find that tiresome. Then again, I’m constantly amazed by the effort Dr Felsenstein makes to wade through and respond in detail to posts on evolution threads.
After sleeping on it, I’ve decided that a followup post is not going to be helpful to me should Dr Graziano choose not to repond. The book is interesting as a theory about what awareness could be, regardless of whether he believes we are all philosophical zombies.
If you are interested in a book with more philosophical and neurobiological meat, but which also posits that consciousness is an interaction between attention and certain types of repesentations of perception, then I recommend Prinz’s the Conscious Brain
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was referring to another thread, starting around here.
Alan,
And:
I’m sure that Professor Graziano has encountered people like walto before. You’ll get that sort of thing on a non-censoring site, but it’s a price worth paying in exchange for an open discussion.
Besides, to those of us interested in human minds in all their variety, performances like walto’s are fascinating source material.
Bruce,
By the “unreported ones”, are you referring to reportable experiences that happen to go unreported, or to unreportable aspects of experience, like the ineffable blueness we experience when looking at the sky?
He also suggest that the distinction between phenomenal and access is not clearcut, and that it forms a continuum more than a dichotomy. (I’ve begun reading his book, so going forward I’ll be able to comment on it as well as on the two articles.)
It all comes back to the squirrel. To Graziano, the psychiatric patient’s model of the squirrel in his head is real, but the squirrel itself is not. Likewise, our model of subjective experience is real, but the subjective experiences themselves are not.
It’s a real model of an unreal phenomenon. We are philosophical zombies who think that we aren’t zombies.
I do think we have subjective experiences, but I acknowledge the strength of the epiphenomenality objections of Graziano and Dennett. An epiphenomalist like me has to acknowledge that causality is restricted to the underlying physical system, and that phenomenal experiences themselves are causally inert. So when we report a phenomenal experience, the phenomenal experience itself is not causally relevant to the report!
This is a somewhat awkward position, but it’s not untenable if phenomenal experience reflects the state of its physical substrate in the right way. However, I’m not fully satisfied with it either, which is why I find theories like Graziano’s so fascinating.
Thanks, but I personally think the main value in that thread will always be getting another look at one of your “arguments.” They’re almost always a crack-up. That one has everything, non-sequitors, pointless premisses, even “depends”! Keep up the good work!
Keith:
the blue sky stuff, but leave out the “ineffable” (as per my understanding of Dennett, see below).
As per my last post to Alan, I’ve decided that arguments about what he might mean on a topic are not helpful to me. So I’m going stay away from trying to interpret him. But I’m happy to discuss the ideas themselves, regardless of whether they are exactly what he thinks.
I can see where such a concept might be logically non-contradictory, but I cannot see how it could be true of me. From your following, I assume you do not think of yourself as a philosophical zombie.
I do think that an explanation of qualia may result in me rejecting intuitive ideas I would have of what needs to be explained.. Similarly for most other people, I suppose.
Can you explain (without quoting him at all, if at all possible, please!) why you think Dennett is an epiphenomenonalist about qualia. I understand his position to be that subjective experience exists but does not have the properties that most philosophers assign to it. But qualia do exist in the sense that heterophenomolgical methods in science can be used to study and explain them.
I ‘m not sure why you call yourself an epiphenomalist. I see your last paragraph as suggesting an alternative based on either reductive or non-reductive physicalism.
Of those two, my quick take is that, using the usual philosophical frameworks, I lean towards Kim’s arguments about the causal impotence of mental events in non-reductive frameworks (like realization), especially when those arguments are applied to actions in the physical world like the typing I am now doing. . So that would make me a reductive physicalist with regards to mental events. (However, I should say that a lot of those arguments do come down to how one defines “cause” in those situations. )
On the other hand, L&R say Kim and all the people who argue against him in that framework are doing modern day scholasticism in ignorance of what physics tells us about the world. They provide a different approach to non-reductive physicalism from what I can see so far. Given their evident scientific sophistication, I could change my mind when I understand their approach better.
ETA: And I don’t know enough to understand what KN says here except to say that KN is working in frameworks that don’t show up in the Kim papers I have read and also claiming that Kim’s framework (which might be close to Dennett’s?) cannot solve intentionality.
I think its amazing that people would care what other philosophers think, as if they have some knowledge of the subject that you yourself can’t access. Dennet thinks its this, but Searle thinks its that, and Graziano thinks its somewhere in between…as if they know anything.
Are you a zombie? I think its a question anyone can answer themselves.
You posted this right after one of my posts, so I’ll respond once.
Of course anyone can answer anything.
But I personally am interested in have more that an answer. I’d like to have a GOOD answer.
And to me that involves trying to understand what other well-informed and intelligent people have said about the subject.
That does involve a judgement about who the “well-informed and intelligent people” are. YMMV.
BruceS,
Yes, I can agree with you. But what about someone like Daniel Dennet makes one believe he is a well informed person? Because he has a degree? Because he sells books?
It is my belief that a lot of stupid (but motivated) people are successful, or well known. I have never seen one thing that Dennet has written or said that makes his opinion valuable. Have you?
Yeah, and likewise authors too! I can write a book so why do I need to read books other people have written?
If he had two degrees, well, that would be different!
For me, the pleasure of reading Dennett comes from the challenge he poses to ideas I take seriously. Taking the time to understand his ideas and respond to them has helped make me a better philosopher. One would have to judge for oneself, on the basis of one’s own intellectual encounter with Dennett, whether he’s worth the time and energy.
In particular, Dennett’s challenge to someone like me is this: if you accept that Sellars was right in criticizing the Myth of the Given, then you’re not entitled to the concept of “experience” as distinct from “judgment”.
That puts me in a bit of a pickle, because I do think that Sellars’s criticism of the Myth of the Given is exactly correct: in order for any utterance to have cognitive significance, there must be shared norms that govern its inferential relationship with other cognitively significant utterances. There is no “normative magic,” nothing Given — nothing that has cognitive significance Just Because. Both the illuminatio of Augustine and the data of the positivists are illusions.
And yet I do think that experience is real, and that we can’t just eliminate experience in favor of judgments, as Dennett does. Doing away with the Given might well do away with “qualia,” which tells us that we shouldn’t think about conscious experience along those lines. My own approach is to pick up on the hints in Dewey and the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, in order to show how we can, indeed, talk about conscious experience as emerging from a complex pattern of brain-body-world interactions, and so not the kind of Cartesian interiority that Dennet criticizes.
phoodoo:
The quality of his ideas, as expressed in his writings.
Neither of those. Deepak Chopra has a degree and sells lots of books, but he’s not worth reading, to put it mildly.
Which of his books have you read?
P.S. It’s “Dennett”, not “Dennet”.
keiths,
So now, after having read Dennet (I like spelling his name wrong-he is not noteworthy enough to deserve precision) , you understand what is consciousness?
Of course not, because Consciousness Explained is a lie to sell a book. You have given no examples of anything of quality he has said, whereas I have given you a very clear example of the kind of stupidity he preaches (His occupation is being a preacher).
Apparently Chopra gives comfort to a whole lot of people, so already he is way ahead of anything Dennet has contributed to the world.
So which books of Dennets have I read. The answer to that question is-Its the wrong question. Which of his books has actually taught you anything. No one here has presented even one example of an insightful or clever idea that Dennet has added to the world of human knowledge. Consciousness Explained-Ha. Is that what he will be remembered for?
phoodoo,
So that’s a “none”, then?
Which of his papers have you read?
keiths,
I don’t know, is it a “NONE”? I guess if you can’t give one example of any quality idea he has presented to the world, than it must be a “NONE”.
phoodoo,
Okay. So you haven’t read any of Dennett’s papers or books, including the one you are criticizing.
Did you wave your hands over it and feel the wrongness emanating from it?
keiths,
So you don’t have any examples of any quality ideas he has presented to the world, is that what you are saying?
Well, let’s see here.
In my assessment, Dennett’s distinction between personal-level explanations and subpersonal-level explanations has been quite helpful in clarifying how neuroscience does and does not contribute to (or undermine) our self-understanding. And he has one of the best worked-out theories of compatibilist free will that there is, first developed in Elbow Room and then taken further in Freedom Evolves.
One of the things I admire most about Dennett is the balance he strikes between taking science seriously — many philosophers are afraid to learn any science at all — and criticizing the inflated claims made by some scientists as to what they supposedly show. Along these lines, see his judicious “Are We Free?“.
The part of Consciousness Explained that made the deepest impact on me was his debunking of the “Cartesian theater” picture of consciousness, though I’m sure I’d read it differently today — I read it when it just came out in paperback, many years ago, before I knew that much philosophy.
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea didn’t do much for me — the hagiographic tone put me off — though I liked the comparison between “cranes” and “skyhooks”. I didn’t bother reading Breaking the Spell, since it struck me as being too similar to Boyer’s Religion Explained, which I thought was fantastic at the time.
Another point in Dennett’s favor is that he’s willing to be a public intellectual. Most philosophers rarely venture outside of academia, and most of them only talk with other philosophers. Dennett not only talks with neuroscientists and computer scientists, but he contributes to public discussions. That’s why anyone who isn’t a professional philosopher knows who he is at all.
phoodoo,
Oh, I have plenty of examples. I just thought it was useful to establish that you haven’t read a single paper or book of Dennett’s, including the book you are criticizing.
That’s pitiful, phoodoo.
So neuroscience can both clarify and undermine our self-understanding, and by distinguishing between a personal level explanation and a sub-personal level explanation we can then know in what ways neuroscience either helps or hinders our self-understanding? So thank goodness to Dennet for distinguishing between personal level explanations and sub-personal level explanations, because otherwise we would never be able to know how neuroscience is helping (and hurting) our self-understanding.
I wonder how many people now know how neuroscience has helped their understanding of themselves, because of Dennet. There must be many people that can now understand themselves (and understand themselves less) , because Dennet has told them the ways that neuroscience makes them understand themselves (and also not). Because if you don’t have the distinction of the personal level explanations and the sub-personal explanations, it would be most difficult to know the ways in which neuroscience has helped you to know who you are (and hindered your ability to know who you are, of course).
So thank goodness for that.
And some people think philosophy is nonsense, can you believe that?
keiths,
Keiths,
Do you mean to say that if I tell you, “Its the wrong question”, that this is the equivalent of answering in the negative?
Well, that’s just shocking, I guess you believe in Dennet, so when HE says “Its the wrong question”, its ACTUALLY the wrong question, because , you know, he is like a philosopher and all, but if others says, “Its the wrong question” they are actually just dodging the question. I see your distinction!
It must be like the distinction between personal level explanations and sub-personal level explanations. Only philosophers get to experience it. I really need that degree, so I get to decide what the wrong questions are and have you accept it.
phoodoo,
If you want to criticize Dennett, why not read something he’s written, quote the parts you disagree with, and explain what you think his errors are? You could even do an OP.
Please supply exact quotes and not paraphrases, though. I’d like to see your criticisms of Dennett, not of Phoonnett.
keiths,
When are you going to actually say something, instead of demanding everyone else do so?
I told you its the wrong question, Are you saying its wrong to answer that its the wrong question?
What has Dennet ever said that is of some quality and uniqueness? You said you know plenty of examples but have given none.
I’ve started reading Graziano’s book, and it’s reinforcing what I gathered from the two articles. He is definitely saying that we don’t have subjective experiences.
Here’s a longer version of the squirrel analogy, taken from Chapter 2 of the book:
phoodoo,
The fact that you’re too lazy to look doesn’t mean that I haven’t given any.
Google Dennett’s “two-bitser” example. We’ve been discussing it for days, if not weeks. Also, see his latest book Intuition Pumps. It’s full of good stuff presented in short chapters, and is thus more likely than his other books to be suitable for someone of your attention span.
Bruce,
Okay, but since the topic of the thread is Graziano’s ideas, questions of interpretation will inevitably arise and are completely appropriate.
keiths:
Bruce:
Right. I agree with Graziano that we model ourselves as beings with awareness, but I’m not (yet, anyway) persuaded that subjective awareness itself is a fabrication, although its contents might sometimes be.
keiths:
Bruce:
I don’t! When I mentioned Dennett and Graziano’s “epiphenomenality objections”, I was speaking of their objections to epiphenomenality, based on the causal inefficacy of epiphenomena.
keiths:
Bruce:
No, because I don’t see subjective experience as part of the causal chain. I see it as being off to the side but linked very tightly with, and correlated to, its physical substrate.
The dilemma is that epiphenomenality is obviously less parsimonious than a Dennett/Graziano-style explanation, so I would prefer to jettison it if I could; but on the other hand, the D/G explanation isn’t fully satisfying as an explanation for subjectivity, so I hang onto the epiphenomenality.
The causal problem is D & G’s main objection to epiphenomenality, but it loses its force if the correlation between substrate and epiphenomenon has the right character. Then the causality reverts to the physical substrate, where it belongs.
I’m comfortable with the idea that subjective impressions might be mistaken, but I’m less comfortable with the idea that their subjectivity itself might be illusory. As Graziano put it:
He says no, but I can’t quite follow him there. Not yet, anyway.
Keith:
If it is off to the side, don’t you worry that would let in the modal worlds type arguments about there being philosophical zombies and hence that qualia disprove physicalism.
In other words, if it is off to the side, it seems quite easy to have metaphysically possible worlds where everything stays the same but there is no subjectivity.
A different problem with epiphenomenonality would be that (the subjective experience which is) awareness has no role in human agency.
There is nothing objectively wrong with that, but it does not feel right to me. (*)
———————-
* only partially humorous
I would say that if subjectivity must be off to the side, then one’s description of physical process is incomplete. Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to say I don’t know how it works?
I heard a Dennett talk the other day where he described a personal experiment: he went to the dentist to have work done and refused to have anesthetics during the process.
He wanted to analyze in detail the variations of his felt pain.
He complained that he was sorry when the work was done because he had not finished his analysis.
I did that as a teenager, just to see if I could.
Been there, done that, didn’t like it.
I do, perhaps, have an idiosyncratic view of pain. I can put pain aside if it is not accompanied by fear.
The thing that disturbs me is not so much the sensation of pain, as it is the dread of my body deteriorating or rotting. When I am being treated by a doctor or dentist, i can tolerate more pain than I would like to in an uncontrolled situation.
I had a professor once–Diana (now Felicia) Ackerman–who thought the best way to respond to Christian Scientists (who claim that pain is an illusion) would be to sneak into a meeting house before a service and put thumbtacks on every seat.
People may be overlooking that Graziano has done some hard science here and has a candidate for the “awareness centre” in the brain. He goes into some detail in chapter 13 of his book.
I recommend the book Being Mortal . But it can only give some more perspectives; it cannot remove that dread.
At least that has been my experience after reading about 1/2 of it.
I’ve had several major surgeries and have not taken the prescribed pain pills. They upset my stomach and do nothing for the pain.
A few years ago I had emergency surgery. I was given an injection of morphine while waiting. I recall thinking it did nothing at all for the pain, but made me talk silly. That relieved my family. From my point of view, opiates are mainly for the benefit of bystanders. Aspirin does more for pain, at least for me.
But pain and dread reinforce each other. that’s why doctors are supposed to develop a good bedside manner. It works.
I’ve been given morphine post-operatively (it was an automatic doser that was adjusted according to how your pain level felt on a scale from 1 to 10). I was surprised to notice how quickly I realised if I accidentally blocked the drip by kinking it or leaning on it. Worked for me.