Extra optional readings:
Harnad, S. (2011) Minds, Brains and Turing. Consciousness Online 3.
Harnad, S. (2014) Animal pain and human pleasure: ethical dilemmas outside the classroom. LSE Impact Blog 6/13 June 13 2014
Dennett, D. (unpublished) The fantasy of first-person science.
"I find it ironic that while Chalmers has made something of a mission of trying to convince scientists that they must abandon 3rd-person science for 1st-person science, when asked to recommend some avenues to explore, he falls back on the very work that I showcased in my account of how to study human consciousness empirically from the 3rd-person point of view. Moreover, it is telling that none of the work on consciousness that he has mentioned favorably addresses his so-called Hard Problem in any fashion; it is all concerned, quite appropriately, with what he insists on calling the easy problems. First-person science of consciousness is a discipline with no methods, no data, no results, no future, no promise. It will remain a fantasy."
Click here -->Dan Dennett's Video
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Week 10 overview:
Week 10 overview:
see also How/Why The Hard Problem is Hard: http://andara.uqam.ca/Panopto/Content/Sessions/e77674a1-a902-40e0-a9ac-7a96185c4399/78025b8e-68cf-4256-b663-3ac51c8ed100-f13e20f4-93f1-4af9-9ba0-8d2c221be233.mp4
and also this (from week 10 of the very first year this course was given, 2011):
Reminder: The Turing Test Hierarchy of Reverse Engineering Candidates
t1: a candidate that can do something a human can do
T2: a reverse-engineered candidate that can do anything a human can do verbally, indistinguishably from a human, to a human, for a lifetime
T3: a reverse-engineered candidate that can do anything a human can do verbally as well as robotically, in the external world, indistinguishably from a human, to a human, for a lifetime
T4: a reverse-engineered candidate that can do anything a human can do verbally as well as robotically, in the external world, and also internally (i.e., neurologically), indistinguishably from a human, to a human, for a lifetime
T5: a real human
(The distinction between T4 and T5 is fuzzy because the boundary between synthetic and biological neural function is fuzzy.)
A CHALLENGE
ReplyDeleteCan this reasoning, from Question 2 on the midterm (T2 vs T3 vs T4) be extended to explain feeling causally?
A. Searle showed that passing T2 through computation alone is not enough to produce cognition.
B. But T2 may nevertheless be a strong enough test of cognition by itself if it turns out that only a T3 robot (which cannot be purely computational) can successfully pass T2. T2 would then be an indirect test of T3.
C. For similar reasons, if it turns out that only a T3 robot with some of the properties of T4 can successfully pass T3, then T3 would be an indirect test of T4.”
Can this reasoning be extended to a causal explanation of feeling capacity if it turns out that only a robot with the T4 properties that are correlated with feeling can pass T3? Would this be an indirect test of feeling?
Or does it still leave an explanation of feeling as just a Just-So Story, dangling causally?
Amélie, I think every single one of your points is both relevant and correct.
DeleteSo I will just supplement them with a little more (vegan) food for thought, with a possible upgrade of Dennett’s heterophenomenology (though not necessarily one that he would endorse!)
1. The goal of cartesian certainty is only reachable in (a) mathematics, where the certainty is guaranteed by logical necessity, on pain of formal contradiction, and in (b) the Cogito: When you are feeling, you cannot doubt that you are feeling.
2. The scientific goal of causal explanation (e.g., explaining that apples fall down to earth because of gravitation) is not cartesian certainty, but just high probably on the evidence available so far. (Yes, this too is only an approximation, as in categorization; an underdetermined approximation that can be made closer and closer, but never certain, as in mathematics and the Cogito.)
3. Suppose the T4 features that are correlated with felt states (F+), and that distinguish them from unfelt states (F-), could be reliably identified (by trial and error, with feedback from the feeling “1st-person” verbal testimony and other behavior).
4. This would certainly not be a solution to the hard problem of causally explaining (reverse-engineering) feeling. But it would be a reliable enough solution to the other-minds problem, perhaps even more reliable than the everyday T2/T3-testing that we do with one another as we mind-read one another using our mirror capacities, including language.
5. Neither the T4-based solution to the other-minds problem, nor our practical T2/T3-testing in everyday life, would be certain – but the scientific explanation of how and why apples fall down rather than up is not certain either. Yet the causal explanation in terms of gravitational attraction has been good enough for science, so far.
6. Now consider quarks, which are unobservable, and thought to be much bigger than protons, which are observable. According to the best causal explanation (so far) of the observable properties of protons, each proton is made up of a combination of three unobservable quarks, inseparably bound together. The big unobservable quarks are part of the causal explanation of the small observable protons; without quarks the properties of protons are (so far) unexplainable.
7. Is the logic of this explanation of small observable protons in terms of big unobservable quarks similar to the logic of the explanation of feeling as something that is itself unobservable (except by the feeler), but without the observable T4 correlate of feeling, T3 cannot be successfully passed (and hence how and why cognizers can DO what they can DO cannot be successfully explained)?
8. After all, the identification of the T4 property that is correlated specifically with feeling, although the correlation itself would not be certain, would be based on the (“phenomenological”) report, by humans, of a state that we each know exists with cartesian certainty – a state that it feels like something to be in.
Just some (vegan) food for thought.
(“Stevan Says” this analogy is not sound.)
Hi Prof. Harnad, I am confused about your fourth point in which you say that “it would be a reliable enough solution to the other-minds problem.” From my understanding, the only way to penetrate the other minds barrier was through Searle’s periscope. Searle’s periscope is only applicable to T2 due to the computational property of implementation independence. In your example, we are discussing a T3/T4, so how are we able to relate this to the other-minds problem considering that T3/T4 are not necessarily implementation independent?
DeleteKimberly, you are right, and that's why I said this analogy was not sound. But remember that the OMP, like the rest of science, does not call for cartesian certainty. T3/T4 indistinguishability is the most we can ask for, or expect.
DeleteI agree with To Amélie's point that feeling correlates are not feelings, but not with the idea that these correlates "correspond to observable ‘doing’ capacities, not to the subjective experience of ‘felt states’ (ie feelings)". I think the cartesian certainty about our own felt states enables us to assert a correlation between felt states (our own) and externally observable correlates. It remains true that this argument doesn't scale to the level of experimental science, as I can only assert this about MY OWN felt states and their correlates, not about any other group of subjects. As such, in a very narrow sense, I do feel like T2 is an indirect test for feeling in the hypothesis outlined above. However, this represents yet another correlation, this time of T2/3/4 passing abilities to feeling correlates. We couldn't reasonably infer from this any causal relation between T2/3/4 passing ability and the presence of felt states, or even an explanatory account of feeling until we know what role feeling plays in T2 passing ability.
DeleteHadrien, you wrote:
Delete“I do feel like T2 is an indirect test for feeling in the [bootstrap] hypothesis outlined above.”
I think I understand what you are saying, but I’m not sure:
Private (1st person) science is not science.
Cartesian certainty applies only to the fact that I am feeling when I’m feeling. It does not apply to what I feel causes my feelings, or anyone else’s.
And there is no cartesian certainty in science.
No solution to OMP can solve HP.
So the bootstrapping hypothesis does not work.
But maybe I’ve misunderstood you.
I think solving the OMP is a necessary step in establishing "Passing T2 -> Passing T3 -> Passing T4 -> feeling", in the scenario above (unless we want to prove this with cartesian certainty, in which case your summary is right). It would allow us to say pretty convincingly that testing feeling correlates would in fact test for feeling itself, which Amélie's warns us is not an assertion we can make in general. So solving the OMP seems necessary for the final link in the hypothesis: "Passing T4 -> feeling".
DeleteThat said, I don't see how "Passing T2 -> Passing T3 -> Passing T4 -> feeling" gives us a causal account of feeling, or solves the HP. Let's assume we've proven "Passing T2 -> Passing T3 -> Passing T4 -> feeling". What does this tell us about the role of feeling in cognition? It doesn't tell us feeling->T2, and even if it did, it still doesn't tell us why.
Thanks for the reply. That helps! Also, yes, this was posted in the wrong section; it was supposed to be in 11a. Since I started reading week 11 readings, I am going to do those this week and week 10 the next. I'll repost this one in the correct place.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with pretty much everything Dennett says in this paper, but I think his conclusion about the prospects of 'first-person science' is correct: "First-person science of consciousness is a discipline with no methods, no data, no results, no future, no promise. It will remain a fantasy."
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it is even difficult to understand what this 'first-person science' is supposed to be. It seems to inevitably collapse back into good-old cognitive science with its 3rd person methods (in which case the problem of explaining feeling from causal/functional mechanisms remain), or become a form of introspection, which explains very little (maybe nothing) and just brings us back to where we were before cognitive science was created.
I also wonder to what extent Tom Nagel's paper 'What is it like to be a bat' bear on this discussion. Does it matter for a theory of consciousness that there are facts about phenomenology (e.g. what does it feel to be a bat) that we cannot know 'from the outside', but only by having those experience (e.g., by actually becoming a bat)? I think not, but I would like to hear your thoughts on this.
Gabriel, yes, “1st-person science” is just mentalistic hermeneutics.
DeleteNagel’s bat paper – which should have been titled “What does it FEEL LIKE to be a bat?” rightly drew attention to sentience, but the decades wasted on “point of view” and “perspective” were all just hermeneutic hubbub too. (I was there, as a grad student, when he first gave that talk at Princeton, by the way.)
The other-minds problem is more about whether others feel rather than what they feel; with people, language does a pretty good job of transmitting that, mirroring phenomenology in words; the real problem is other species, especially when we believe – or want to believe -- that they don’t feel pain, and they do. (Week 11.)
(A bat specialist at the time, Jim Simmons, pointed out [since] that you can get a faint sense of what echolocation feels like if you walk in an empty pitch-dark room with a stone floor, tapping it with a stick, as you approach a wall. But of course the perceptual resolution of bat echolocation is almost as detailed as the eye.)
I would be interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the impact of Nagel's paper on cognitive science, if you're interested/have the time to elaborate.
DeleteI just did elaborate, in my reply to Gabriel above.
DeleteYes, "IS like" -- instead of just "FEELS like" -- is weaselling" (as is Descartes "I" and "exist" instead of just "sentitur"); and so is all of the "perspectival" hermeneutic hocum of TN and his lesser disciples, as well as that of all the perplexed and pensive "1st-personalists." Nagel could have fast-forwarded us to sentience if he had just used the F-word instead of the E-word ("is").
But the real mischief was done by Ned Block, the Wunderkind of Weaselling, with his "access consciousness" vs "phenomenological consciousness" koans. De-weaselled, it's just "felt feelings" vs. "felt feelings."
(De-weaseling is an excellent exercise, highly recommended for those at risk of being taken in or getting carried away. Try it out on a random sample of philosophy-of-mind articles in the past century. Don't get me started on "representation"...)
(I'm partly to blame for NB's influence, by the way, for having accepted it for publication; the referees, as usual, are the real culprits; especially since I'm not a philosopher, nor aspire to be one --although methinks I protest too much... But you deserve an A+ if you can follow all of this... You shouldn't have asked!)
In this paper, Dennett argues for the usefulness of the heterophenomenology method to study beliefs/subjective experience from the 3rd person point of view. He advocates for this method in stark opposition with Chalmer’s argument that consciousness should be studied through first-person science.
ReplyDeleteJust looking at the claim made by Dennett about belonging to ‘team A’, meaning that he believes that Turing’s test addresses (and solves) Kant’s (and Descarte’s) questions on thought (ie consciousness) seems to contrast with what we have discussed in this course. Indeed, we have already mentioned that the methodological approach to the TT used by Turing himself was that it was the best way to reverse-engineer ‘doing’ capacity without having to address the hard problem of consciousness. Chalmer’s ‘team B’, which believes that the TT leaves out ‘experience’ (ie consciousness), seems to be more in line with our understanding of the TT. However, Chalmer’s claim that first-person science should be used instead to study consciousness, and that this method can help us address the hard problem, seems to diverge from the idea that the hard problem of consciousness is not one that can be resolved. Whether it is intractable or not remains to be seen, but it is clear from Dennett’s arguments that Chalmer’s first-person science is not the key (but neither is heterophenomenology).
Mathilda, good summary. Heterophenomenology is not solving the hard problem, just denying there is one; and Chalmers is just giving it a name, not giving a hint of whether and how to solve it. (There is no such thing as "1st-person science.”)
DeleteChalmers’ Zombic Hunch tells little about how to resolve the science of consciousness, since our subjective experiences can only be understood through our “first-person access to them.” Dennett claims heterophenomenology is a study of recorded raw data including verbal reports and internal conditions that allows us to interpret that subjects beliefs on all topics. Such a science could not solve the Hard Problem, because feelings cannot simply be attributed to any subject that claims to believe to feel. Heterophenomenology is said to conquer failures of overlap–which call for false negatives and positives–by creating a heterophenomenological world that is free of judgement and that considers the conscious experience itself, but contenders of team B assert that the first-person data cannot be explained by third-person data. Can the subjective feeling of the color red really be explained by someone not living that conscious experience of feeling the color red? That is where qualia comes into play. We do not even have first-person access to our own qualia to be interpreted by third-person science!
DeleteJosie, I think you might have succeeded in de-conflating them: but be vigilant for relapses!
DeleteTess, forget about “1st/3rd person” access (to what? by whom?) and “qualia.” They’re weasel-words. Qualia are just feelings. Only a “1st person” (I, the feeler) can feel. And there are only a bunch of 1st persons, their feelings and their doings (which includes their sayings, propositions, and whether they are True or False about the world, if they are about the world).
Josie, sorry, I mistakenly reposted my 10b reply to you above. Here, you are still conflating HP and OMP.
DeleteDD denies that there is any HP. So his heterophenomenology (which is really just a part of EP) is only a (part of the) solution to OMP, which is part of the EP, not the HP. (Please say something to reassure me that you understand!)
Thank you for the clarification! As I understand it now, the OMP is a part of the EP because our solution to it (through using our mirror capacities) is part of our doing capacity. And the OMP is not part of the HP but it is related to the HP, since we must know whether organisms can feel to ask how and why they can feel.
DeleteAfter reading this article, it seems to me that Dennett does his best to eliminate any "subjectivities" associated with a phenomenon. Although I believe that his goal is noble in attempting to "neutralize" 1st person experiences by turning them into 3rd person ones instead (thus making them more "scientific").
ReplyDeleteI do not think that completely eliminating all aspects of subjective feelings is the way to go. Because if we were to eliminate all of them, the only thing left would be correlates. And correlates do not tell us anything about causality.
Dennett is arguing for the use of heterophenomenology to study consciousness. This method requires verbal recordings, turned into transcripts, turned into interpretations of the individual's verbal acts. These interpretations are meant to be used as the individual’s beliefs. The distinguishing factor, is that these interpretations are made neutral - this is because of the false negative/positive issue. Dennett argues that with these neutral interpretations, you can derive what it is like to be the individual. I am having a hard time understanding how by neutralizing the interpretations, you can know how and why we feel.
DeleteHello Alexei,
DeleteI do not think Dennett is trying to eliminate subjectivities through heterophenomenology. On the contrary, neutralizing in this case refers to accounting for both cases in which subjects report being consciously unaware of their experience and in which subjects falsely report what they feel. It attempts to construct a person’s world of feelings from a third person perspective, including what they accurately and inaccurately feel, as both are a part of the subjective experience. Dennett says that, according to Chalmers, this isn’t enough to describe first-person conscious experience, but Dennett reaffirms that there is no better way to objectively account for first-person experience. Unfortunately, third-person science does rely on correlates. Of course, this fails to address the hard problem, and Dennett would support that Turing indistinguishability is a sufficient criterion for consciousness.
I think Melis began to discuss the false positive and false negative argument that Dennett makes and I agree that this is where the reasoning lies against 1st person science. I think what was meant by this is to establish a standard of scientific investigation in line with other “real” sciences which is not quite in line with how we have approached cognition in this course. I think in taking this route he looks to almost belittle the importance of feelings in cogsci and tries to alter their “subjectivity” (which they have to be) and this takes away from the problem that cogsci is trying to solve. That is not to say 1st person science is the way either because that leads up back to why introspection is not credible.
DeleteI found it interesting as Dennett talks his way into circumventing the hard problem. As the self-proclaimed “captain of the A team,” he leads the pack in arguing for the idea that Turing showed that only doing matters, the first-person perspective can be eliminated and replaced by affirming objective third-person science (heterophenomenology) can “answer all the questions.”
ReplyDeleteThis implies that the question of why and how we feel (the hard problem defined by Chalmers) can be answered, even though he seems to reject it as a valid question to ask all together. Searles’ Chinese room argument does not come into the discussion here at all even though it helps contextualize Turing’s test and hints that something is missing, something more than basic engineering and computation when it comes to passing T2, T3 or T4.
Dennett’s arguments to “make the leap” over the ~distracting~ question of feeling (or conscious experience) are not sufficient or well-founded enough in my opinion.
I feel similarly about this reading.
DeleteDennett uses signal detection theory to point out that people are unreliable sources, and goes on further to bring up illusions and deja vu as examples of instances where people claim to have had experiences that weren't really there or never actually happened.
It's an interesting thought to consider that, although we know we feel, we don't know if those feelings are "reliable." But I don't see the relevance, because the hard problem only cares about the fact that feelings do happen, and doesn't care about what kind of feelings they are.
It's like Nietsche's addendum to Descartes "Cogito" because Descartes is begging the question by referring to himself as "I" etc. etc. I won't get into the whole thing....eventually it's asserted that instead of "I think therefore I am", we can really only say "thinking happens." I feel like Dennett is really caught up in the particularities of feelings, but the hard problem persists so long as "feeling happens", which we know it does, for example through Searle's CRA.
Kayla, it boils down to whether DD is right that feeling is just doing.
DeleteTeegan, feelings are only unreliable about their causes, not about the fact that they are being felt, while they are being felt.
Why do you think it is because of Searle's CRA rather than the Cogito that we are sure that feeling happens?
Here is Chalmers' main point in the paper Dennett is responding to:
ReplyDelete"The job of a science of consciousness... is to connect the first-person data to third-person data: perhaps to explain the former in terms of the latter, or at least to come up with systematic theoretical connections between the two."
To me this doesn't appear to be a demand for 'first-person science', whatever that's supposed to mean. Rather, it is asking for a scientific explanation of experience, which seems to me one of the basic motivating points of cognitive science.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but Dennett seems to be getting very worked up over a strawman. Furthermore, he seems to be missing the basic point that a correlative T3-model still fails to address how subjective experiences are structured on an individual level, which is particularly important if we want to reverse-engineer an individual robot.
Jacob, what DD misses, or denies, is that there is a Hard Problem of explaining how and why organisms can FEEL rather than just DO, because he believes feelings are just “beliefs,” i.e., observable, measurable internal (T4) and external (T2/T3) doings.
DeleteI don’t know what you mean that DD "fails to address how subjective experiences are structured on an individual level.”
I find it interesting how Chalmer argues that his Zombie twin lacks the "evidence" of consciousness, but Chalmer himself does. "There will be no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a Zombie." As Dennett explains, "although he says the zombie lacks that evidence, nevertheless the zombie believes he has the evidence, just as Chalmers does. " To my understanding, this is where Chalmer falls into the trap of the Other Minds Problem, where we don't know how others feel or if they feel at all. However, I am confused by Chalmer's assumption that the Zombie will have the pseudo-conscious contents of the internal states on p.464. If the Zombie has internal states and can describe internal states, shouldn't that be accounted as "feelings," or is that a "pseudo-feeling" just by Chalmer's definition?
ReplyDeleteHi Jenny, I agree. Since a zombie believes it can feel and can describe its “feelings”, doesn’t it mean that zombie should have phenomenal properties like Chalmers? Since phenomenal properties are about what makes experience like something. At the same time, I also feel like there is no point in discussing qualia/none qualia zombies. If we discuss qualia zombie because we experience it, a twin zombie would not. They would be distinguishable from conciseness people. Under this
Deleteinterpretation, the zombie would be externally distinguishable, which contradicts its definition.
Jenny, there are internal states (e.g., the internal states of a pot, boiling, an airplane, flying, of a computer, computing, of a heart, beating, or a comatose human, breathing). And there are felt internal states, like seeing, hearing, touching, moving, wanting, thinking, understanding, believing, meaning, referring, imagining.
DeleteIf you ignore all the weasel-words (“consciousness,” “phenomenal,” “pseudo-conscious contents,” “pseudo-feeling”), all you are left with is DOing and FEELing.
One of the things Siri can DO is say “I’m on now!” That is a true description of an internal state. An unfelt internal state. Anyone who interprets that as a felt state is not referring to a “pseudo-feeling.” They are simply making a mistake.
Nadila, if an entity cannot feel anything, it cannot believe anything. Believing is a felt state.
Please read the rest of the replies on this. It will help you if you ignore all the weasel-words that make it seem as if there’s more to it than DOing capacities and FEELing capacities: “phenomenal properties,” “experience,” “qualia,” “conscious” [which your spell-checker garbled!]
ReplyDeleteI think Dennett has a misunderstanding of what qualia are and how they contribute to our conscious feeling. From my understanding, a qualia is a specific subjective state in which the person is perceiving and feeling in a certain way. Whatever it is that they are experiencing, is their qualia. For example, what it feels like to see the colour red can be described as the qualia of red. Dennett argues if we put someone in a scanner, and deceive them in their perceptions, for example, subtly changing the background of a photo insofar that the subject does not consciously notice it. They report their qualia did not change, but their brain state changed. According to Dennett, this is evidence that people can be wrong about their qualia. From my understanding, this would be evidence of the opposite, regardless of the stimulus that the person is observing, if their qualia didn't change, then it didn't change. Yes the person may be seeing something different, but if their feeling did not change, neither did their subjective experience. If their brain state changed, then is this not just evidence that the brain state is not correlated with qualia? They are two different things, and to me it seems impossible to describe qualia with strictly 3rd person science.
Sophie, you’re right, but look at how much more obvious (and trivial) it all becomes if we replace all the weasel words with “feeling” (or “felt”):
Delete“I think Dennett has a misunderstanding of what FEELINGs are and how they contribute to our FELT feeling. From my understanding, a FEELING is a specific FELT state in which the person is perceiving and feeling in a certain way. Whatever it is that they are FEELING, is their FEELING. For example, what it feels like to see the colour red can be described as the FEELING of red. Dennett argues if we put someone in a scanner, and deceive them in their perceptions, for example, subtly changing the background of a photo insofar that the subject does not FEEL it. They report their FEELING did not change, but their brain state changed. According to Dennett, this is evidence that people can be wrong about their FEELING. From my understanding, this would be evidence of the opposite, regardless of the stimulus that the person is observing, if their FEELING didn't change, then it didn't change. Yes the person may be seeing something different, but if their feeling did not change, neither did their FELT FEELING. If their brain state changed, then is this not just evidence that the brain state is not correlated with FEELING? They are two different things, and to me it seems impossible to describe FEELING with strictly 3rd person science.”
If something changes your brain state when you are viewing something, and it keeps looking the same to you (i.e., what it FEELs like to look at it it feels the same) then part of your brain activity has changed, but not the part that makes it FEEL like what it feels like to look at it. There’s lots going on in our brain, all the time. Most of it is not felt, and not related to or correlated with what is felt. Also, there can be lots of feelings going on at one time. If you look at a red dot on a white ground, which is the result of your covid test, and it looks red, and then someone tells you that if the dot is green it means you don’t have covid and if it’s red you have covid, it will still look red to you, but a lot of other feelings will have changed…
This does not mean that brain states and felt states are “not correlated.” Felt states are brain states. But which of the ongoing brain states are the felt ones may be complex and hard to determine (from the “3rd person view” of the person or machine scanning your brain and analyzing the correlations). That does not mean T4 reverse-engineering could not eventually sort it out. But the bad news is that the correlations still would not explain how or why any of it is felt. They would just do the correct OMP prediction of what you are feeling.
And this “3rd person” OMP prediction could also give a pretty good verbal description of what the feeling feels like. That’s like what you are doing when you are walking outdoors and talking to someone on your cellphone, and you describe to them the sunset you are looking at. From your verbal description (depending on how detailed it is) the person you’re talking to on the phone could even draw a picture, not having seen what you were describing. As long as all your words are grounded, for both of you. Your respective grounded feature categories and mirror capacities (which are encoded in both of your brains) will take care of the rest.
No reason why one day a brain scanning algorithm will not be able to generate both a verbal description and a visual depiction of what you are feeling based on the scan (if you are looking at or imagining something.)
But all that’s just OMP heterophenomenology. It neither solves nor dissolves the HP!
**CHALLENGE**:
DeleteWhat does “a picture is worth more than a thousand words” mean?
And how is it related to categorization, symbol grounding, mirror capacity, pantomime, propositions, underdetermination and approximation?
(That’s about 2/3 of the course right there! and good practice for the final exam)
One thing that comes to mind especially in the example where Dennett mentions deceiving someone under a scanner is in discussions of cognition, why does it matter to us what the brain states are exhibiting. Sure, you can say that cognition is attributed to some structural element in the brain but can't it just be separate from the one that does register the change. Perhaps the area that registers the change does so as an automatic response mechanism and is unrelated to what gives rise to our cognition. I just really don’t think that this means that we can be wrong about our "qualia" or feelings. If anything, feelings are the only thing we can be sure of because feelings don’t have to correlate to the factual state of the world. For example, a couple years ago when everyone was debating the color of the gold dress illusion, it didn’t necessarily matter what the actual colour of the dress was to a viewer because they would still insist on what they saw regardless of whether their brain registered the actual colour of the dress.
DeleteI think the answer to what "a picture is worth a thousand words" means can be approached in many different ways. In order to verbalize or even begin to think about words, there has to be some intention attached to it or some goal that a user wants to execute (and this is also done in pantomime) which necessitates a level of consciousness. On the other hand, the deception example that Dennett mentions reveals that we may in fact register so much more than what we are consciously aware of and our brain somehow categorizes the information we receive from a picture into things that we are conscious of, and things that we are unconscious of. How this categorization is made reveals so much about the practical and evolutionary mechanisms that we rely on in order to build our perceptions as well as guide our feelings. Since its vital for the brain to be able to filter out the information we don’t need, that categorization (between conscious versus unconscious) in itself is valuable information and information that is not available to us when we use words. I think there are many more angles to explore this prompt from but this is just my two cents.
Deleten this reading, Dennett explains his faith in the practice of heterophenomenology as a way to measure and observe consciousness. Heteroph. aims to systematize subjective accounts of experiences, or feelings, by recording verbal accounts of what the subject experiences in accompany with biological measures such as changes in heart rate, bodily temperature, etc to capture physical aspects of said experience. From these accounts, the data is then interpreted and “bracketed” for interpretability as some of the subject's verbal accounts may or may not be true (Still kind of confused what he means here). From this, Dennett argues that we can obtain a 3rd person, objective, and scientific method to study consciousness. He then does on to critique his opponents' perspectives by suggesting that they too believed in heteroph. But just don’t know it.
ReplyDeleteOverall, this method seems like a complexified version of introspection with the addition of physical measurements like blood flow and brain activity. I am confused how this answers any of our questions about consciousness, and evidently, it doesn’t.
Laura, see above for more on what heterophenomenology is.
DeleteIt’s mostly just EP T-testing, T4, and correlating people’s descriptions of what they are thinking with their T4 brain activity, trying to do OMP mind-reading. It treats feelings as if they were “beliefs” and does not touch the HP.
Dennett argued that one’s qualia can be essentially ‘wrong’ in that it doesn’t correlate with subjects’ changing brain activity. If our brain notices some change in the environment, but it doesn’t make it into our qualia, what does this mean for qualia? Does it mean that there is an appraisal process in the brain and that certain things are just unnecessary to perceive? I learned something along these lines in a cognition class; I don’t quite remember the pathways, but it had to do with how information can be sent up to the brain in different ways, where we either perceive it (making it into conscious awareness) or it gets somewhere, and the brain decides not to perceive it. This also brings up the topic of just-noticeable differences, where our qualia will be affected by the intensity of the stimulus, and there may be no experience if the stimulus intensity of the change is too low for humans to pick up on. Nonetheless, our qualia can never be ‘wrong’ because nobody can say it is wrong or right except the person experiencing it. An example is a longitudinal study done with shy reactive people, in which researchers measured their brain activity in response to novel stimuli when they were children and then again when they were adults. The study shows that most of the shy reactive individuals were able to shed the behaviour by the time they were 25, but all of them that had this disposition still had the physiological response in their brain. So their subjective experience was different than their physiology, and they didn’t feel what their brain was telling them.
ReplyDeleteAlexander, please see the reply to Sophie.
DeleteThere should be a difference in brain activity correlated with every JND difference in feeling. But the correlations are hard to find – and there is also a lot of brain activity unrelated to feeling.
From what I understood, Dennett says that the best way to study consciousness in other people - therefore to bypass the other mind problem - is to use Heterophenomenology, which consists of applying the scientific method by taking into account not only the person’s self-reports, but also other measures to determine their mental states. To make it simple, it is using the 3rd party to assess someone’s mental state. I tend to agree with him since so far, it looks like it is the best method since using the first person (the subject’s self reports) is not considered very scientific because often unreliable. However, even though we might be able to associate a particular feeling to, for example, a certain pattern on an EEG, it will never really tell us how it feels to be inside the person’s head because Heterophenomenology doesn’t answer the question “how / why we feel”.
ReplyDeleteI sort of had the same understanding as you. I think his overall argument is just trying to find a way to implement traditional scientific procedure in a way that is dangerous to what it is we actually study in cognitive science. I think it is also dangerous to say bypassing the other-minds problem… “Ramachandran and Gregory predicted this motion capture phenomenon, an entirely novel…” this quote very much embodied the top down approach that Dennett described here.
DeleteI agree with the earlier point that it seems that Dennett is in favour of using traditional scientific methods to research cognitive science and reverse-engineering cognitive capacities. I agree that his approach is probably more reliable than solely using first-person reports. I can understand why he wants to neutralize these reports by making them third-person, but that would mean the data would just be correlates and could not explain causality.
DeleteDennett advocates for a heterophenomenological approach for studying consciousness, which consists of examining all possible physical manifestations of a person's 'felt experience,' including verbal output, to arrive at conclusions about their feelings. Importantly, these statements are not treated as truthful representations of what is going on in the mind or brain, but rather, the task is to explain why people or their reactions suggest that such claims are true. Dennett argues against Chalmer's suggestion of using first-person science, or relying on one's intuition of one's feelings, by showing that there is nothing that first-person science can accomplish that heterophenomenological approaches cannot. However, he makes an important distinction between the origins of the two approaches at the beginning of the reading, which is that he believes that it is possible to account for conscious feeling with only physical responses. In contrast, Chalmers believes that two beings can differ only in the lack or presence of felt experience (Chalmer's zombies). In this paper, he fails to provide adequate reasoning for his perspective, as heterophenomenology is possible and preferable even under the later perspective.
ReplyDeleteThe heterophenomenological approach that Dennett argues for fails to circumvent the hard problem on consciousness, as it merely provides evidence on the correlates of what is happening in the brain in terms of felt states. This reminds me of the similar discussion we had when discussing Fodor's paper in response to the discovery of mirror neurons whereby he argues that neural correlates of behavior fail to tell us exactly how doing capacities arise. Even if Dennett's approach got us closer to solving the easy problem (how doing capacities arise), the doing capacities that give rise to feeling would not be able to explain the feelings themselves (as Amelie states above).
ReplyDeleteDarcy, that's right. Bur Fodor is very doubtful about T4 whereas DD is not.
DeleteThis reading was particularly intriguing to me because Dennett voices some of the opinions I had before taking this course… From what I gathered, he argues that (for the study of cognitive science) heterophenomenology is a neutral method, a third-person scientific method that can allow us to objectively experience someone else’s conscious and unconscious experiences/feelings. In other words, to feel what others feel… His proposal is to solve the Hard Problem with third-person science rather than “first person.” As many have pointed out, the problem with his argument is that it is based solely on feeling correlates… heterophenomenology is merely a study of predictions and correlations. But in other realms of science, isn’t most of what we know just correlations and predictions? Most of all the information we have about the world (like the example of gravity and the falling apple) is uncertain– according to Cartesian certainty. Why can’t cognitive science accept an approximation like the one Dennett proposes to solve the Hard Problem?
ReplyDeleteI want to quickly edit something I wrote in my post. The Hard Problem is not related to WHAT others feel– it is the question of HOW and WHY we feel what we feel… I understand now why Dennett’s proposal fails to answer the Hard Problem: knowing anything about the correlates of feeling tells us nothing about how and why feeling occurs. But I don’t know how we’ll ever be able to CERTAINLY answer the Hard Problem… I’d also argue that perhaps his approximations can be enough to answer the Easy Problem? Like other scientific approximations we’ve made to explain our world, heterophenomenology could be the same for the Easy Problem of CogSci…
DeleteAnaïs your second thought is right. But please see the reply to Sophie (and other replies). OMP (and hence HPHNL) is part of EP, but DD denies that there is an HP because he believes feelings are just beliefs. (What are beliefs? Why can’t feelings be beliefs?) Neither cogsci’s eventual solution to EP nor any other science requires certainty. (Why?) Yes, all scientific explanations are provisional approximations based on evidence so far. But there really are feelings, and HPHNL does not explain how or why. (See other replies about “beliefs.”
DeleteHey Melis! I like your connection of Chalmers' "zombie" to a TT-passing mechanism, except I disagree with your classification of it as non-feeling. I think that the "zombie", which is "molecule for molecule" identical to Chalmers, CAN feel. Dennett arrives at this point, but uses the weasel-word "believe" (instead of "feel") to make his argument: since both Chalmers and the zombie believe they have "direct evidence" for their conscious experience, they are "heterophenomenological twins". From the PSYC 538 perspective, this makes them both equally capable of feeling because we cannot BE either Chalmers or the zombie, so the fact that they're Turing-indistinguishable is the closest we can get to penetrating the other minds barrier and telling whether they can feel. Thus, they are both equally capable of feeling.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that Dennett is attributing the study of consciousness to an understanding of beliefs. A cause vs effect misattribution seems to be what Dennett is arguing. The cause for our conscious experiences (feelings) to Dennett, lies in the fact that we BELIEVE we are having those experiences. A question could go- (1) is this flower inherently beautiful or (2) do we BELIEVE flowers are beautiful and that is why this flower seems beautiful- to which Dennett would argue for (2). The prescribed “heterophenomenology” approach would record these beliefs and attempt to see what could explain the existence of them. Adding additional measures of “all other manifestations of belief…” and “all internal conditions (e.g. brain activities…)” in my opinion are simply a means to ward off CRA counterarguments. My counterargument however is that the method of heterophenomenology seems to provide only a grocery store of SAUCEs (as Gabriel love called it- Subjective Aspect Unique to Conscious Experience; or Feelings), rather than the recipe for SAUCE or any SAUCEs for that matter. I do believe there are certain obstacles (possibly my misinterpretation) that are not fully overcome such as introspection/homunculus and a methodological framework that directly tests for a causal explanation rather than effect.
ReplyDeleteSepand, what are beliefs? Why can’t feelings be just beliefs?
DeleteCRA-like arguments and counterarguments are only relevant to computationalism.
I didn’t understand what the point about SAUCE was about.
Beliefs are related to propositions, the type of linguistic utterance that we can assign a truth value to (so we can call beliefs a sort of propositional attitude). Feelings bear more directly on the hard problem - I might ask Kayla what colour an apple is, and receive the same answer (red) I might give, but I don't know that Kayla is "seeing" ("feeling") the redness the same way I am when she does her visual processing and reports her belief (assuming she isn't somehow lying). I don't know that she is feeling at all. This is of course the Other Minds Problem.
DeleteAll beliefs, like all thoughts, are felt. It feels like something to believe that P, or to think that P. On the other hand, the foregoing two sentences, and this one too, displayed on a screen, are not felt -- unless someone reads (and understands. hence interprets) them (which Searle, in the Chinese Room, couldn't do, in Chinese).
DeleteThe OMP is not just about whether Kayla is feeling the same thing as I am, but about whether she, or a fish, is feeling anything at all.)
All "beliefs" are feelings; but not all feelings are "beliefs." And an amphioxus who can only feel "ouch" -- not think the proposition "that this is hurting me" -- is still feeling.
(Some days it feels like even "believe" and "think" are weasel-words, and only feel "says" it all. Beliefs and thoughts and meanings are really just the jargon and hermeneutics of verbalizing, propositionizing species.)
. In this reading, Dennett pushes the idea that heterophenomenology as a better solution to the hard problem: which is how and why we feel. He argues it against the first-person science, defining this method as a third person science applied to the particular phenomena of human consciousness. From what I understood, this method would consist in recording raw data including the vocal sounds made by people and adding all internal conditions detectable by objective means. They get transcripts and translate them into expressions of individual’s beliefs, to construct one’s heterophenomenological world. The point here being that considering both what seems to be for the subject and the environmental measures allows this data to be submitted as empirical evidence. Dennett states that heterophenomenology maintains its neutrality as it accounts for both false positives and false negatives. False positives are beliefs that individuals have about their conscious states that are false. False negatives are mental phenomena and state that individuals are unconscious of.
ReplyDeleteI understand how removing all these “false” neg/pos would retain the most objective record of one’s state, as well as the importance of recording environmental cues from the subject. I agree in principle with Dennett’s theory. As many of my peers have said above, the intention behind removing these false subjective experiences are good in the sense that it could bring us closer to identifying the causal mechanisms behind feelings. However, it seems like removing them leaves us only with feelings correlates which are not the feelings themselves. This doesn’t actually give us any insight in explaining the causal relation of the phenomena whatsoever.
Polly,
ReplyDeleteI am unsure of whether or not your conclusion that they are both equally capable of feeling is correct. We identified early in the lectures that to be conscious is to feel like something. When replacing the word feeling with consciousness in your last statement, we reach an unverifiable conclusion. I may have misinterpreted your point, but am wanting to continue this thread of thought to better understand your point.
After reading Dennet's paper, I watched the video you linked below. Personally, I found the afterimage experiment performed in the lecture more effective than SDT as a means of conveying the unreliability of human sources and emphasizing 'feeling.'
ReplyDeleteThe after image experiment also helped me take the concepts of false positives and false negative and apply them to different phenomena (e.g., the gold/white dress).
Emma, but what does it show, other than that feelings can be misleading about causes, and can me influenced?
DeleteDoes this not just reinforce the fact that heterophenomenology is not a solution to the hard problem (as previously mentioned on the board)?
DeleteMy take on qualia is that we can't prove qualia or any of those things, but we can show that there does not need to be a deep and unsolvable hard problem of consciousness. We cannot prove there isn't, but we probably shouldn't worry about it, so we could use that time for a more fruitful research program. My question is would it be possible for something (e.g. zombie) to realize he has no qualia? In other words, would being able to realize that you lack certain qualia differ from actually realizing it?
ReplyDeleteNadila, “qualia” and “consciousness” are just weasel-words for feelings.
Delete“Prove”? Prove what, about what?
The only “zombies” are rocks and mountains and atoms and planets, and (probably) plants and (maybe) sponges and jellyfish, and dead or brain-dead animals. Also lawn-mowers, vacuum-cleaners, cars (including Teslas), planes, computers, all of today’s t0 robots, and purely computational T2s.
But, as Turing says, when it comes to noncomputational T2, T3 and T4 robots – and real people and other animals, starting with invertebrates, T-testing and our mind-reading mirror-capacities are probably good enough for cogsci; in any case, they are all the evidence there is to be had.
If you ask about “zombies” you are stipulating, by definition, that they are insentient: they do not feel. So what does it mean to ask “do they realize they don’t feel”? What could unfelt “realization” of not-feeling possibly mean (except that it’s best to stay away from weasel-words!)
I think Polly makes a good point. Essentially what seems to have been described was a T5 robot, which is termed a zombie. An entity that is “functionally identical” to him is said to have no “direct evidence” thus no "real conscious experience". It seems to me that Chalmers disregards the OMP with a T5 to deem it as not a feeling entity. This must mean that Chalmers believes that reverse engineering human doing capacity to a T5 would not make any headway to answering the hard problem. I think it is a granny argument to attribute “direct evidence” as what the T5 is lacking in order to feel because the whole reason the entity has robotic functions is to ground symbols directly. Cog sci’s best hope right now is to reverse engineer doing capacity (maybe to a T3 level) and HOPE that feeling comes with the territory… so although it was courageous to go after a T5 (although overkill), no argument was produced to even denounce the feelings of a T3.
ReplyDeleteIn this paper Dennett pictured a way to study the human mind from a so-called third-person perspective: The heterophenomenological approach. The raw data comes from recording the person's verbal actions and body states - basically everything that can be recorded; and then, researchers interpret it, so that they can reconstruct that person's psychological state externally.
ReplyDeleteDennett states that the fact that one feels can be just integrated in the verbal reports as something like merely one sentence: 'I feel.' But, is this enough? Is this what people do? Can one even reflect on the 'feeling of feeling'? Or 'feeling of feeling of feeling'?
I disagree with Dennett’s take that “I feel” statements are enough because I do not consider how feelings are not easy to convey through verbal responses alone or how/why we have feelings. These reports would partially explain the easy problem by associating feelings with particular phenomena but not how/why we feel.
DeleteMelis, a “philosophical zombie” – a T5, identical to us in every respect, except that it does not feel – is a philosophers’ fiction.
ReplyDeleteThe only nonphilosophical “zombies” are rocks and mountains and atoms and planets, and (probably) plants and (maybe) sponges and jellyfish, and dead or brain-dead animals. Also lawn-mowers, vacuum-cleaners, cars (including Teslas), planes, computers, all of today’s t1 robots, and purely computational T2s.
But, as Turing points out, when it comes to noncomputational T2, T3 and T4 robots – and real people and other animals, starting with invertebrates, T-testing and our mind-reading mirror-capacities are probably good enough for cogsci (and for everyday life); in any case, they are all the evidence there is to be had. (Why?)
Polly “Turing-Indistinguishable” refers to indistinguishable generic doing-capacities, not to identical individuals. That’s why the OMP is about whether other people feel, not about whether a particular person X is identical to another particular person Y (if that metaphysical question makes any sense at all…).
The goal of cogsci is not to duplicate individuals but to explain cognitive (DOing) capacities by reverse-engineering them and T-testing the result.
So if there could be a T3 or T4 that did not feel, that would be a “real zombie,” like our Kayla, not a philosophical zombie.
However, as Turing points out, we could never know for sure whether a T3 or T4 feels. Turing-indistinguishable DOing capacity is the closest we could ever get. It’s also as close as we can get with real people. So it’s close enough. (There is no “Searle’s Periscope” for anything except the special case of a [hypothetical] purely computational T2; and all that would show would be that computationalism was wrong: cognition is NOT just computation.)
Emma, “consciousness” is just another weasel-word for feeling.
Sepand, the only “direct evidence” of FEELing to the feeler is feeling (as in the cartesian Cogito). The feeler doesn’t just “believe” it feels, it feels, therefore it “knows” it feels.
The only ones with “indirect evidence” of feeling in some other entity are Turing-testers, and the indirect evidence for the testers’ belief that the entity feels is based on the entity’s DOings (T-testing).
If something feels, it “has the evidence” that it feels; if it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t feel. “Believing” is a felt state, a state it feels like something to be in, just as understanding, knowing, meaning and wanting are felt states. Feelers can have beliefs. But if they are not feelers, they don’t just lack beliefs about feeling; they lack feeling. And if they are not feeling they are not believing anything at all, because beliefs are felt states.
Yes, T5 is “overkill.” And, yes, T-Testing (and all hypothesis-testing) is based on “hope.”
Karina, please see the reply to Melis about T5 zombies.
ReplyDeleteWhat is a Turing Machine? What is the difference between a Turing Machine and a Turing Test?
It remains an interesting question what a T3 or a T4 zombie could be referring to when it speaks of “feeling.” Maybe that means there could not be a T3 or T4 zombie. But remember that we could no more know whether a T3 or T4 was a zombie than we could know whether a T3 or T4 could feel. Either way it is indistinguishable from any of us.
Hi Karina,
ReplyDeleteI think a Turing machine with feeling capacity can exist for the same reason that we accept Kayla’s existence. The problem is that even if it does, there is no way we can confirm whether or not it has feelings (OMP). This is because the only entity that has access to the “direct evidence” of feelings is the T5 passer itself. The T5 passer’s behavioural/functional/structural indistinguishability is just indirect evidence that correlates with feeling states. That said, regardless of how strong the evidence (indirect) is, we will not be absolutely certain whether it FEELS the same way we are about ours (which is cartesian).
As you mentioned, functional/behavioural output indistinguishability does not guarantee the existence of internal states or feelings (though the correlation is strong, correlation is not causation). That said, even if we have the causal explanation for our doing capacities (i.e., if a T5 passer exists -- EP solved), the fact T5 passer cannot offer us any direct evidence of feelings (due to the OMP) suggests that we still don’t have the answer to our feeling capacities (HP, why? how?). All that is to say that a feeling-T5-passer could exist; however, there is no way that we can know for sure it feels, just like there is no way you can know for sure I feel. In other words, thanks to my Turing indistinguishability as a T5 passer, the indirect evidence available to you would prompt you to interact with me as if I have feelings. And as a T5 passer (a walking EP solution), I tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that I FEEL is also just a part of my “doing capacities” (again, correlation). That said, even with the existence of an EP solution, the incertitude about my feelings (as a T5 passer) due to the OMP adds on to the alleged unsolvability of HP.
So, as long as you accept that everyone besides you also exists (which is a perspective backed by strong evidence), you automatically accept the existence of a feeling-T5-passer.
Yucen, here are some questions you can use to test your understanding:
ReplyDeleteWhat is a Turing Machine?
What is a computer?
What is computation?
Distinguish what is a Turing Machine from what can be simulated by a Turing Machine. (What is simulation?)
Distinguish what is computation from what can be simulated by computation.
What is the OMP?
Do we solve OMP with one another (real biological humans)?
Do we need cartesian certainty about OMP with one another (real biological humans)?
What is Turing’s point about Turing Testing and (Turing) Indistinguishability?
What do you mean by a “T5”? A real person? Or a molecularly reverse-engineered biological machine? (Cloning is not reverse-engineering and a cloned human is not reverse-engineered. Why not?) We would all be T5-passers if we had been successfully reverse-engineered, but we were not.
What is the EP? What does it mean to successfully reverse-engineer a T2-passer? Does a successfully reverse-engineered T2-passer solve EP? Even if it is purely computational?
Does a successfully reverse-engineered T3-passer (Kayla) solve EP?
Do we need to successfully reverse engineer a T4 to solve EP? Or a T5?
What is causal explanation?
What is the HP? What is the difference between HP and OMP?
What are the two cases in which we can have certainty?
Do we need certainty to solve EP? OMP? HP?
What is Turing’s methodology for solving the EP?
Following last Friday’s lecture, I had a question regarding the experiment of Dennett playing chess with a computer. Indeed, in class, it was said that Dennett tried to play chess against a computer, and he gained insight into intentionality. He mentioned, “I am getting better at chess because I am doing mind-reading”. This got him to believe that there is no hard problem (how and why we feel what we feel) because feeling is just doing. Feelings are broken down into beliefs. When playing against this computer he apparently understood that the program thinks it is a good idea to get his queen out early. Once he deciphered this strategy, he was able to get better at playing against the computer and adopt an intentional stance.
ReplyDeleteMy question relates to his capacity to the capacity to actually mind-read the computer, I don’t really see it as obtaining extra information related to intentionality because it is a computer program with rigid instructions. The algorithm was probably programmed to get his queen out early because in most cases it maximizes the win ratio. So how can Dennett say that he gains an insight when the insight is explicitly stated in the instructions? And in addition, how can this generalize to human beings who do not follow rigid programs to solve diverse tasks? It might be easy to mind-read here as the program always produces the same output.
Maybe I misunderstood something, please let me know.
In this paper, DD presents a well-rounded argument that sound sensical the first time reading through it. After giving some thoughts to it, the very beginning of the paper is questionable. The fact that heterophenomenology lies in verbal reports is truly just denying the hard problem exists as some of you had mentioned above, which at this point of the course we have a comprehensive understanding of what that is and why it is the hard problem. Words do not always serve well in describing what's happening inside the mind and it seems like DD is trying to avoid the path of really examining the HP.
ReplyDeleteBased on the reading, lecture and comments above, here is what I have understood, and my take on Dennett's paper. I think Dennett’s heterophenomenological method has some strong points. Surely, Dennett does provide a set of empirically methodology to study consciousness, and it might be the best methodology we have right now if we want to study consciousness from an empirical stand point. We cannot simply discard empirical methods to jump into some first-person science. It might turn the whole discipline into mere speculations. However, it seems like heterophenomenology is still not enough to explain consciousness as Dennett has hoped. His whole effort here is still confined to the easy problem of cognitive science. By restricting himself to what he called “3rd person science”, Dennett’s hope is to solve the whole "mystery behind consciousness" within the easy problem, that is to say, to answer why and how we can do what we can do. But being conscious feels like something. The point is that we need an explanation of why we feel as conscious beings. But by limiting himself to the scope of the easy problem, such problems as why we feel goes gets left out in the explanation.
ReplyDeleteI prett much agree with your point of view from the readings, lecturee and such. I found it interesting the use of Zombies to try and explain the internal states and pseudo-consciousness versus actual consciousness.
DeleteOut of all the things that Dennett claims in this article, the part that I disagree with the most is probably his claim that we, as humans, are robots, because all of our cells are basically little, mindless robotic entities that comes together to create our conscious experience. Basically, he is saying that the non-conscious computation that is done by our cells simply means that cognition is just computation, completely disregarding any other mechanism, biological or otherwise, that gives rise to our unique conscious experience. Although Turing may have answered Kant’s question of how one could have thoughts, he raised the more complex problem of how we define intelligent thoughts, which we as humans have, which we know we have because we can report them and explain them. A machine cannot do this.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the way in which Dennett described the ego breakage that humans have when it comes to making scientific discoveries that are out of their comfort zones, yet disguised as intuition. I found that it was a nice way of saying that we need to look at things more objectively and less selfishly, especially when it comes to those rather major philosophical questions that Descartes and Kant had - Turing stood outside of the box and rephrased it in an engineering manner. It is also true that it is not an easy thing to do and there is a complicated path to understanding how Turing found a way to answer Kant’s question, as it isn’t obvious: ‘It takes a rather remarkable exercise of the imagination to see how it might even be possible’.
ReplyDeleteI, like many people in this thread, have some doubts about Dennett’s emphasis on heterophenomenology and avoiding the hard problem. In trying to create a neutral, scientific way to allow for the expression of subjectivity, it does seem to glaze over the other minds problem. In assuming that internal states are beliefs, not feelings, as has been reiterated here, he also reduces the other minds problem to, as I understand it, something that can be solved simply by the fact of one’s ability to participate in hetereophenomenology. If someone is able to self report their mental states, then they must be feeling (believing, rather). I think I’m quite skeptical about this.
ReplyDeleteAlthough in class we want to for the most part not get too deep into philosophical concepts it is still interesting to see some relation. Regarding what it can provide “other than that feelings can be misleading about causes, and can be influenced” seems to hold many similarities.
ReplyDeleteIn relation to Skepticism which focuses on the possibility of doubt, i.e., if it’s possible to doubt that one knows the external world, then one does not really know/knows for sure. In this case, in relation to Dennett, he mentions “ if some of your conscious experiences occur unbeknownst to you (if they are experiences about which you have no beliefs, and hence can make no “verbal judgments”), then they are just as inaccessible to your first-person point of view as they”. In other words, if you do not have any beliefs about a past experience, then those past experiences are non-existent.
Though, based on this, I’d like to say what Dennett claims is illogical. How could someone truly claim that they did not have an experience based on not having beliefs. We have many past experiences when we are younger, however, we don't hold any beliefs of these experiences occurring as our brains are not developed enough to recall. However, we have other people who can attest to these experiences [ex: parents].
In this paper, Dennett makes a distinction between two forms of studying consciousness. The first, the one that he pushes forwards with this article, is studying consciousness as 3rd person. Heterophenomenology, a new term to me, is the main point that the author is trying to use in order to deny the existence of the hard problem. Dennet claims that through recording raw data including verbal responses and internal reactions, there would be nothing left out that one could not explain (aka consciousness). I think he is wrong in saying that there is nothing being left out but I do think that heterophenomenology is partly the solution to the easy problems.
ReplyDeleteIn Dennett's paper "The Fantasy of First Person Science," he argues for the use of heterophenomenology, a method involving converting verbal recordings of an individual's subjective experiences and converting them into third-person interpretations, to study consciousness. He believed this method can help to solve the other minds problem, or the problem of understanding and justifying the existence of minds in others besides oneself. However, it is worth noting that heterophenomenology only measures "doing" capacities that are correlated with feelings, and does not necessarily provide any insight into the causality of feelings. As a result, while this method may be useful in understanding the behaviors that are correlated with feelings, it does not offer any insight into the underlying cause of those feelings (the hard problem).
ReplyDeleteIn this paper, Dennett argues that heterophenomenology could be a possible solution to the hard problem. However, heterophenomenology would only be able to partly solve the easy problem. Heterophenomenology relies on using raw data from verbal reporting because Dennett argues that the transcripts would have enough information to reverse-engineering how understanding and feelings occur. While this method can help associate certain feelings with particular psychological adaptations, it would not be able to explain how and why.
ReplyDeleteDennett’s attempts at measuring our capacity to feel using his heterophenomenological approach fall short in offering any value towards solving the hard problem. He falsely sees our ability to feel as just another one of our doing capacities; which can be observed and measured in our behaviors and in our internal make-up. DD is completely right though when he asserts that the first-person science of consciousness that Chalmers advocates for is an unscientific system that should be discarded. The heterophenomenological approach beats out first person science but can only take us so far and cannot address the hard problem because our behaviours & internal T4 make up are correlates of feeling at most and not the ability to feel itself.
ReplyDelete