Disassembling "you" (or "I")

(This is another post in a series, starting with this and continuing with this,on the so-called "explanatory gap" in any current, or perhaps any possible, theory of consciousness and the reality of conscious experience.)

In the first post in this series, I used the phrase "the view you get" in referring to a particular perspective on the phenomenon of experience, namely that from within the phenomenon. This has the less than fortunate effect, however, of appearing, yet again, to support that old homunculus image of a little person inside your head monitoring a bunch of screens. So perhaps it's time to tackle that image head-on -- and ask, where exactly is this "you" (or "I")? We seem to be inside our own heads at least, correct? After all, we can see, if indistinctly, the edges of some facial features. But then, too, when we touch something it's clearly we who do the touching, so in that sense it seems as though we extend throughout our bodies as well. But we don't exactly think of ourselves as some kind of mental fluid nor do we think that if we lose a part of our body we really lose a part of our selves -- rather, it's more like spatial location, while limited to our bodies, is somehow just not a pertinent or appropriate consideration for our selves beyond that. If we have an implicit intuition about the nature of our self, it's more likely something without spatial dimension, like a point of view, or a point-source of agency. In fact, I think, this intuition is itself the source of much of the intuitive power of that notion of an "explanatory gap" -- a point-source of agency seems something inherently at odds with the very basis of mechanistic (aka "reductive") explanation of any sort.

But what if "you" were not such a point-source at all? What if in reality this "you" and "I" were an intricate assemblage of parts, components, and functions? Few people doubt that such mechanisms play a role in the self, of course, but even fewer, I think, believe that that role exhausts the self -- even most philosophers, it seems to me, cling at least implicitly to the notion of a core of selfhood, or "you"- and "I"-ness, that lurks like a ghost or homunculus in the heart of the machine. But look at what happens to the "you" if you suffer some brain damage or impairment -- unlike with bodily impairment, the "you" itself is degraded in some degree, in ways that the "you" may or may not be aware of. As illustrated in the writings of Oliver Sachs, for example, some of these damaged versions of "you" exhibit strange or bizarre impairments, and certain kinds of damage can alter the personality, character, and essence of "you". Beyond some point, "you" not only lose cognitive function, but the sense of self as subject is gone as well, and after that point consciousness itself is gone. (It's interesting, in this context, to think of the scene in 2001 in which HAL's component parts are, one by one, deactivated.) So it would seem that there really is no core or essence of "you" that is distinct from the machinery that makes up the "you".

In ordinary speech, of course, we use such pronouns casually, as simple indexicals, and can safely ignore these complications. But we should be cautious of such language habits when we come to talk about experience, where casual intuitions can become an obstacle to understanding. Taking "you" to mean a functional assemblage of component parts, for example, will change significantly the meaning of the phrase that initiated this post: "the view you get" as a part of the phenomenon of experience -- we're no longer speaking of a dimensionless agent secreted in the heart of the phenomenon, then, but rather of a complex piece of machinery in its own right, specialized to detect signals of a particular kind (e.g., qualia), and that is itself a component of a larger mechanism. For that sort of mechanism, it evidently makes sense to speak not only of the "point of view" of a machine, but of its feelings as well.

UPDATE: Here's the conclusion to this series [see "The 'explanatory gap' series: a summary and a Q and A" above].

Light and darkness: consciousness and reflex

(This is another post in a series, starting with this one, on the so-called "explanatory gap" in any current, or perhaps any possible, theory of consciousness and the reality of conscious experience.)

"Why is the performance of these functions [that are 'in the vicinity of experience'] accompanied by experience?" Chalmers asks, in the paper that re-introduced the idea of an "explanatory gap" in all attempts to construct an explanation of consciousness. A little later he puts the same question a bit differently: "Why doesn't all this information-processing go on 'in the dark', free of any inner feel?" It was, presumably, his inability to find an answer to such questions that lay behind his use of the "zombie" thought-experiment to argue against a materialist, and in favor of a dualist, approach to comprehending consciousness as a phenomenon. My argument here, however, is that he gave up too quickly.

In asking why there is experience, as in an "inner feel", Chalmers appears to be asking for a functional reason for experience, not necessarily for a mechanism (which may or may not be the case, but let's assume so). With that understanding, then, we can compare a conscious response to a stimulus with another type of response which really does go on "in the dark", as Chalmers puts it -- and then ask what additional functionality does consciousness or feeling supply? That other type of response is the reflex: if you accidentally touch a hot surface, for example, your hand moves away before you're able to feel anything -- a very simple instance of information-processing "in the dark", as it were. Yet, slightly later, you still do feel the pain as well -- why? Because the feeling is an essential component of a more sophisticated kind of response-generator or behavior control. It is the bearer of necessary information, about the location, type, and severity of the injury, for example, but it also provides that information in a significantly passive form -- i.e., simply as feeling, not as a direct connection to a response -- that is the key to the functional adaptability of consciousness as a control mechanism. Of course, any sort of pain is a form of feeling that, unlike sight, say, or hearing, has a built-in motivational component of varying strength, but the point of the feeling is precisely that, while it may motivate a response, it doesn't direct one, and so the motivation may be over-ridden under dire enough circumstances -- conscious experience, in other words, is a vital component of a behavior control mechanism of astonishing flexibility, without which we would be "in the dark" in a more than just literal sense.

Which is the problem with Chalmers' hypothetical zombies -- without the "light" of experience, such entities lack the form of information that provides consciousness with the free play needed for its flexibility. Now Chalmers, of course, starts out by viewing experience as something inherently different from a mechanism of any sort, and so will always return to his insistence that, given any mechanism, even one of an allegedly "conscious" kind, one can always view it's processes as "dark", or without feeling, which therefore always makes the feeling (for him) appear as an addition to the mechanical, causal processes, or as an "epiphenomenon". In fact, Chalmers must insist not just that you can view any possible mechanical process as dark, but that you must so view it, since feeling and mechanism are fundamentally distinct.

And this, despite everything I've said to this point, might be considered to be half right -- it accurately reports one's intuition from one of two possible perspectives on a phenomenon. Consider, for example, a researcher studying the difference between reflex and conscious response in another organism, and who doesn't, obviously, have direct observational access to the experience itself, but must rely on proxies of one sort or another (e.g. verbal report, other behavioral signs, neural activity, etc.) -- from her perspective, even if she could trace every single neural signal involved in the two different processes, and even though one might be more complex than the other, both would be as apparently "dark", since no trace of "feeling" would ever be observed. As soon as the same researcher studies her own reactions to the same stimulus, on the other hand, it's immediately evident that, while the reflex is as dark as before, the conscious response is inextricably connected with feeling -- indeed, "feeling" is the very meaning of such a response. The difference between the two cases is solely one of situation or perspective -- in the first case she was external to the phenomenon; in the second, "she" was a part of the phenomenon. What Chalmers does, to generate the intuition of an "explanatory gap", is to superimpose the two perspectives, in effect, which produces a rather odd and puzzling sort of double vision, certainly, but which has nothing in itself to do with an explanatory deficiency.

UPDATE: Here's the conclusion to this series [see "The 'explanatory gap' series: a summary and a Q and A" above]..

That "explanatory gap" again

(This is the first of what may -- but may not -- be a series of posts on the so-called "explanatory gap": the supposed gulf between any current, and perhaps any possible, explanation of conscious experience and its reality.)

Without question, conscious experience (aka qualia, phenomenal experience, etc.) presents special problems of interpretation and explanation. On the one hand, we can't doubt that it exists (despite some philosophical quibbling over exactly what that's supposed to mean), nor does anyone seriously doubt that it's a characteristic of other human beings than oneself. Virtually all ordinary people (i.e., non-philosophers), in fact, also think it's a characteristic of a number of other animal species as well, but those same people are also likely to want to draw a line somewhere down the phylogenetic chain, and pretty certainly will wish to exclude things like rocks and machines from the class of conscious entities. So from a scientific (i.e., physicalist or naturalist) perspective, in other words, conscious experience appears to be an entirely natural phenomenon, that's evolved in certain organisms but not others, that's localized in time and space, and that's as subject to cause and effect as any other phenomenon. Yet on the other hand, out of all phenomena, and in a very odd sort of way, it seems to be alone in being inherently unobservable -- not unobservable because it's too small or too quick or too slow, in other words, but because it's not something that can be observed, even in principle. We can see the effects of the phenomenon, in the sense of the behavior it generates, and we can see something of the underlying mechanisms that themselves generate the phenomenon, but we can't see "seeing" itself ... or see "hearing", or "tasting", or "hurting", etc. Experience itself, in other words, can only be experienced, rather than observed, and each conscious entity can only experience its own experience.

Little wonder, then, that all attempts at an explanation of conscious experience have left at least an appearance of an "explanatory gap" -- as David Chalmers says, in his seminal paper on this topic:

... even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open. [emphasis his]

This sense of a gap or inadequacy, that remains even after all attempts at explanation, is a persistent one, to an almost surprising extent, and in what follows I want to look at some of the reasons for that. A start would be to notice that not all gaps are explanatory gaps -- some "gaps" may be a sign not so much of a lack or absence but rather simply of a difference, in the same ordinary way, for example, that categories are different (failing to recognize such difference leading to the familiar notion of the "category mistake"). Here are some examples of simple differences that might appear, wrongly, as an "explanatory gap":

• There's a difference between an explanation of function -- which is an answer to the "why" question -- and an explanation of mechanism -- which answers the "how". In particular, it may be possible to answer why there is experience -- because experience just is the information necessary for behavior control, for example -- without, yet, being able to answer how there is experience.
• There's also a difference between any sort of explanation of a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself. This may seem obvious, and indeed it is in almost any other instance, but there often seems to be an element of this difference implicit in complaints along the lines of: "but that explanation still doesn't give us the experience of red, say", even if both the function and the mechanism of experience had been explained. Part of the problem may be that both explanation and experience are phenomena of consciousness, and we may have an expectation that the latter should be contained somehow in the former (partly at least for reasons given in the next point).
• And then there's a difference in perspective, between the view of a phenomenon from the outside, as it were, and the view from inside -- the view you get when you're not just a part of the phenomenon yourself, but when the "view" itself is the phenomenon. With this difference in perspective, of course, we're getting closer to the nub of the real problem here -- it's as though explanation, in the unique case of this particular phenomenon, is trying to wrap back on its own origins, and baffling itself with its own reflection.

Now, I don't expect any of this to dispel the appearance, at least, of an "explanatory gap", an appearance that has a very powerful grip on our intuitions. But what I hope these kinds of reflections might begin to suggest is that much of the philosophic problem of conscious experience is located not necessarily in the phenomenon itself but rather in the particular, and peculiar, nature of that "gap".

UPDATE: Here's the conclusion to this series [see "The 'explanatory gap' series: a summary and a Q and A" above].

Against evolutionary psychology

This too one might think an odd topic for a blog that describes itself as "devoted to the 'naturalist' explanation of the related phenomena of consciousness and culture", a phrase that could almost serve as a succinct characterization of Evolutionary Psychology* (often abbreviated as EP) itself. But "natural", even when speaking of biological organisms, is not limited to "genetic", and my argument with EP has to do precisely with that implied limitation. Like social constructionism, of course (which we might as well abbreviate as SC), EP comes in a range of varieties, from "weak" to "strong", and, just as with SC, the weak versions are largely unexceptionable: there's no doubt that mental and cultural phenomena are products of biological -- meaning genetic -- evolution, and as such exhibit features that derive directly from such evolution. But, also as with SC, there's a "strong" version of the school as well, which implies that the most adaptive and significant features of mind and culture are genetically derived, and that what is not so derived is merely conventional, or more or less arbitrary and random. And this is to make a profound mistake -- it misses or ignores the fact that culture is itself a natural phenomenon that has broad influence on human psychology and society, and that responds to the same kinds of environmental selection pressures that biological evolution does, only more rapidly. A little more specifically, the school of EP exhibits three main sources of error, as I see it:

• It fails to understand culture itself as a wholly natural phenomenon, as physical in its basis in neural structure as genetics is in its basis in DNA.
• It therefore fails to appreciate that culture itself is susceptible to a general Darwinian process of natural selection (though different, obviously, in its mechanisms) -- and that, in adapting to environmental challenges and opportunities far more rapidly than biology, culture can not only come into conflict with biology but can be a source of biological selection pressure itself.
• And that failure in turn leads to an under-appreciation of the idea that the most important contribution of biological evolution to human environmental fitness has been to cede psychological and social ground to culture, precisely by reducing the role of instinct and other genetic factors on human behavior.

It's instructive to put social constructionism and evolutionary psychology side by side, actually, and then to see them both as twin expressions of an undercurrent of ideological/political struggle that's been a feature of the culture for a while now. The former is aptly characterized as a type of anti-essentialism, and the latter, more recent school (in its contemporary versions), as perhaps an anti-anti-essentialism -- with each, depending on its degree of politicization, repelling the other toward increasingly untenable extremes. But even in their weaker, less political versions, both these schools simply miss the most salient fact about culture: that it too, just like DNA, is embedded in the natural, physical world. So, contrary to social constructionism, cultural concepts are driven by the real, natural environment; and contrary to evolutionary psychology, cultural concepts are themselves the primary evolutionary response to that environment.

*Here's the Wikipedia article (a start, but badly written even by Wikipedia standards); here's an FAQ by one of the important names in the field; and here's a "Primer" by Cosmides and Toobey, the two at the start of the recent surge in interest.

Against social constructionism

Which might seem like an odd title for a post in a context that has repeatedly stressed the point that "symbols", aka "concepts", are in fact "socially constructed", and has maintained that "language-based consciousness is an inherently social phenomenon". If you compare that with, for example, the Wikipedia's rather bland characterization of "the focus" of social constructionism -- "to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived reality" -- you could certainly be forgiven for assuming that the stance of this blog is implicitly social constructionist. But that assumption would be wrong, in all but a rather weak sense. In fact, of course, there are a number of different varieties of this school, as there are for most, but it's possible, here as elsewhere, to distinguish two general strains or strengths. One is a relatively "weak" version that simply isolates a particular phenomenon as a focus of sociological investigation -- knowledge as a social construct; the other is a stronger, more sweeping, and usually political version that makes claims, or at least has implications, about the nature of the phenomena -- knowledge is a social construct. The former version seems fairly innocuous in that it seems clear enough that knowledge, whatever it may be, is in fact socially produced and disseminated. And even the latter isn't inherently wrong -- it accords, in fact, with at least a portion of the "epistemological inversion" I've been proposing, in which "knowledge" or explanation is seen not as congruence with an external reality but rather as a more or less effective structure (i.e., construction) built out of phenomenal experience. But the problem is that social constructionism is a sociological theory, and as such, its followers have, understandably, tended to set aside epistemological and philosophical issues generally in order to concentrate on the purely sociological issues involved. This setting-aside of epistemology, in combination with a strong claim about the nature of knowledge, and -- it needs to be said -- with an obvious political and ideological temptation, has lead social constructionism into serious difficulties and a kind of hubristic error. For some of its practitioners, I think, and at least for a time, it began to seem as though sociology (particularly in a politicized form) could provide a critique of all knowledge, scientific as well as popular. And then came the Social Text debacle, aka "Sokal's Hoax", and a quiet, chastened retreat.

So what, after all, is the real problem with social constructionism? It's that, in neglecting epistemology, it's neglecting half the equation, so to speak. That other half is what gives meaning to the term "objectivity" -- the immersive environment that's independent of any human construction. Without that as a backstop -- that is, as long as we stay solely in the realm of social interactions -- it can appear as though concepts and knowledge are indefinitely plastic. And then, within a political or ideological context, it can seem as though "reality" has been constructed merely for political ends, and so can be re-constructed at will to serve different political ends. But the fundamental and ultimate criterion for knowledge, given its constructed nature, is its effectiveness within a natural environment, a criterion which goes far beyond politics. Social constructionism is correct to note that, as opposed to versions of platonism, abstractions are cultural constructions (though in this they are already well beyond politics alone), not objects inhering in nature ("nature" itself being just one of those constructions). But it goes fatally wrong in failing to see that, as Marx said of history (and as I've noted before), we do not make such constructions just as we please. It ends up, ironically, becoming a kind of cultural idealism.

Freedom, determinism and Indeterminacy

Disputes over free will and determinism are old ones, and here I just want to sketch in some of the ways in which such debates might be affected by the notion of culture, or language-based consciousness, that's been developed here.

My position on the issue can be described as "compatibilist" -- the at-first-sight odd idea that free will and determinism can go hand-in-hand. Determinism, of course, is pretty much required by a naturalistic or physicalist account of consciousness and culture (leaving aside quantum indeterminacy, which wouldn't affect the argument here in any case). But free will is another matter -- it's bound up with notions of agency, culture, and that cultural Indeterminacy Principle that was the topic of the previous post. As we'll see, I think free will and determinism are compatible simply in the sense that both are indispensable in their particular ways.

Compatibilism is a philosophical position that goes back a fair way, but it's never really surmounted the common intuition that the two are fundamentally incompatible, an intuition well captured by the so-called "Consequence Argument" (quoting from SEP):

1. No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
2. No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail that only one future is possible (i.e., determinism is true).
3. Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

But the tack I want to suggest here is that, in situating an agent in the midst of a causal sequence, this argument is in fact conflating two properly distinct orientations or "modes of discourse", one that deals with causation and one that deals with agency.

This might be seen as a version of "Multiple Viewpoints Compatibilism", for philosophical categorizers. Within the perspective of causation -- what I'll call the mechanistic orientation -- the notion of "freedom" is either meaningless or pointless, since the only alternative to saying that our behavior and our will is caused is to say that they're uncaused or random. And within the perspective of will -- i.e., the agency orientation -- the notion of cause appears simply as reason or intention, which is always present no matter how minutely we examine ourselves (or others, to the extent we're able). In the latter orientation, freedom does indeed have meaning, but it means precisely that our will, our behavior, and the facts that result from that, are determined by our own reasons/intentions, rather than by some other force or agency (e.g., "fate", as Sartre suggested some while back*) that might be manipulating them. Given different facts (that is, counterfactually), from the mechanistic orientation our present behavior would be different and so, therefore, would the future facts -- and from the agency orientation, our reasons/intentions would be different, and so, therefore, again, would the future facts.

Now, Dennett has put forth a version of "Multiple Viewpoints", with "Intentional" and "Personal" Stances contrasted with a Deterministic one, and arguing that the former are simply more pragmatic when dealing with certain complex systems. My feeling is that, while the idea of the "stance" is a good one, this isn't quite right, nor sufficiently far-reaching. The "Intentional", in fact, isn't really a "stance" at all, but applies literally to all conscious or aware entities (and is only metaphorically, or, worse, sentimentally applied to non-conscious mechanisms like thermostats). And the "Personal Stance", or what I'm calling the agency orientation, hasn't to do with the complexity of an entity, but rather simply with the fact that we're in communication with it. If we encountered an alien species that was without language, for example, it wouldn't make sense (and certainly wouldn't be practical) to adopt a Personal Stance toward it regardless of how "intelligent" or complex individual organisms appeared to be (they might, in fact, even be manufactured rather than evolved entities). If we're able to establish communication, on the other hand, then, regardless of the "natural" status of the beings involved, the agency orientation comes into play and a moral dimension comes into being. And what enforces this is precisely that cultural Indeterminacy Principle mentioned above -- because they cannot deal with one another in a purely instrumental fashion, beings in mutual communication are in an inherently moral as opposed to instrumental relationship with one another (and the attempt to deal with one another instrumentally or manipulatively is itself widely viewed as an immoral act).

Thus, the notion of an "agent" -- the "one" assumed in the Consequence Argument above -- has meaning only within a particular orientation, in which "causation" has, at best, only a secondary significance, after "will" or "purpose". Within the mechanistic orientation, on the other hand, the notion of an "agent", in the true sense of the word, simply vanishes, to be replaced by causal sequences. Both orientations are needed --mechanism because of its obvious practical benefits, and agency because of the inescapable moral dimension. But trying to conflate the two, as the Consequence Argument does, is just a mistake -- and the result is often the sort of confusion and mystification that we find in the unfortunate, homunculus-like image of the "ghost in the machine".

* "So, contrary to what could be believed, the imaginary world occurs as world without freedom: nor is it determined, it is the opposite of freedom, it is fatal." The Psychology of Imagination, Washington Square Press, 1966 (1948), p. 221.

An Uncertainty Principle for culture

This blog is, as the short blurb on the upper right indicates, focused on the "naturalistic" explanation of consciousness and culture, meaning that I view those phenomena as part of the natural world, and therefore as subject to causal processes as any other part of that world. (Here, "that world" simply refers to the physical or material world, and so is distinct from notions of a separate mental world, realm, aspect, or orientation, regardless of whether or not any of the latter "supervene" on the physical.) Both consciousness and culture are viewed as mechanisms, in other words. So, given that, and supposing that we continue to make progress in understanding those mechanisms, the question is whether we could eventually come up with a truly predictive science of psychology and sociology/anthropology? That is, would we at that point be able tocalculate individual and social behavior?

I think the answer is no. And that's because I think, in fact, that there's a fundamental obstacle to such predictive calculations when made by those who are themselves part of the phenomena being calculated -- which is that such predictions become themselves part of the phenomena. If I try to predict your behavior and communicate this prediction to you, then that prediction itself becomes a factor in your subsequent behavior, that the original prediction hadn't incorporated. I might try to keep my prediction from you (or incorporate my telling you as part of a subsequent prediction which I don't tell you about, etc.), but just by having access to the same calculations I use, you'd be able to, in a sense, predict my predictions, and then decide whether or not to behave as predicted. And the same sorts of considerations would apply society-wide or culture-wide -- any such predictions, or indeed any such techniques for making predictions, would themselves tend to alter the society or culture in ways external to the predictions themselves. (In some cases, it's true, the predictions might be made recursive and the alterations may converge to a stable configuration -- and then, and to that extent, a predictive science of psycho-cultural phenomena is possible -- but there's no indication that that would happen at all, much less to what extent.)

In this way, then, I think it's appropriate to speak of a cultural Uncertainty Principle, analogous to (though of course not as rigorous as) Heisenberg's physical Uncertainty Principle (see also the brief remark at the end of this post)-- both involve the unavoidable disturbances introduced by observer/predictors, and the limits those disturbances present to precision. In the case of cultural Uncertainty, though, because of the nature of the phenomena, those limits also have moral implications, but I think I'll need another post to get to that.

The platonists and the aliens: a science fiction fable

In an interesting debate in the comments to this post, Steve Esser made an assertion to the effect that, while the tokens we use to represent mathematical objects are arbitrary and conventional, the "logical and mathematical relations" we use are not, and, were it possible to "replay the tape" of (presumably cultural) evolution, those would be replicated. His point in making this hypothetical statement is that it illustrates that such relations are, as he puts it, intrinsic to reality and not merely human inventions or conventions. And that in turn may buttress the case for the existence of abstract objects -- i.e., for platonism, of at least a mathematical variety.

My position is a different one, though, as I said in a response, it may look similar up to a point -- I think that the mathematical entities and relations we use are indeed human inventions, but useful inventions as opposed to mere conventions, and this usefulness would lead to the reappearance, in some form, of at least the simpler and more basic ones -- that is, there would be at least some degree of convergence, based upon practical utility, in any replay of the tape. But it's interesting that the " tape" metaphor was famously used by Stephen Gould in Wonderful Life to make just the opposite assertion -- in his hypothetical, the replay of the evolutionary tape would be very unlikely to replicate the same biological forms we see today (such as ourselves). The point he was concerned to make was that we commonly fail to appreciate just how varied are the options that evolutionary processes have before them -- nature, for Gould, is no platonist.

In any case, with that as setup, here's the fable:

Imagine that we finally encounter technological aliens. I think we underestimate the problems involved in translating the communicative processes of radically dissimilar life forms, but let's say that those problems are mutually ironed out and communications are established. At that point there was some consternation on the human side when we had a hard time even detecting, in the alien culture, anything that looked like mathematics as we understand it, and what we did find seemed to bear little resemblance to the concepts, objects, or relations that we use. Now, platonism had long since won the day within human culture, and so this seemed puzzling to say the least, particularly in understanding how they could have developed a space-warp drive without even discovering complex numbers. But human mathematicians were in any case happy to share such insights into the intrinsic nature of reality with their alien counterparts, and in doing so they even learned from the aliens a few computational tricks, involving some fictitious "entities" and highly dubious "relations", but which nevertheless turned out to greatly simplify certain crucial calculations.

The aliens, as it happened, were as puzzled by our own "mathematics" and our own technological success as we were of theirs, but, since the idea that "abstract objects" might have an actual existence hadn't occurred to them, they took a more pragmatic approach to the problem. Complex numbers, it turned out, weren't really of much use to them, though they were polite about it, but they too found that other human abstractions and relations did work better than their own, and these they simply incorporated into their version of mathematics quite readily, since they didn't feel that they were in any way thumbing their noses (they did have noses) at intrinsic reality in doing so.

Eventually, though, a human-alien team working on the problem of reconciling the two versions announced a fairly comprehensive revision of mathematics/[rough alien equivalent] which brought together the most efficient and useful concepts, objects, and relations from both traditions. Humans, working within their platonist assumptions, were torn -- some were scandalized by the revision, and felt that, in its alien-inspired portions, it really amounted to little more than an assortment of cheap tricks; some even began to have doubts as to whether mathematical abstractions really did exist in nature, rather than being just a handy and practical way of organizing our thoughts about nature. Others, however -- the more progressive platonists -- hailed the revision as a fundamental change in our understanding of the true nature of reality. For these people, our old mathematics, though appearing to provide us with a grasp of the abstract objects inherent in the universe, had actually mislead us in certain subtle but critical ways, which the revision had fixed -- and this now was the new, the really real, intrinsic reality.

And then, just as this progressive view was taking hold, and platonism had regained its old confident self within the airy reaches of human higher learning, another technological alien race was discovered....

The moral: Oh, something like -- "Even platonists need to be elastic" (which is admittedly a bit limp).

Fractal culture

Having gotten back into what I've sometimes called "special consciousness" (meaning language-based consciousness) lately, in talking about abstraction and concept formation, I thought it would be useful to look again at the proper framework or context for that kind of consciousness, which is culture. And the question I want to raise here is, when we refer to a culture -- i.e., not the concept of "culture", but a particular instance or example of it -- what do we mean by that? In particular, how do we determine what or whom it includes, and how do we establish its boundaries?

Well, an obvious sort of boundary might be a political one -- "a culture", in that sense, refers to a national culture, and extends to the borders of a state. But it's clear that the notion of a culture is, or can be, larger than a political entity. Another, and at least potentially larger, boundary would be a language, and this also seems like a "natural" boundary since a culture depends upon communication, and a common language clearly defines a cultural space that includes its speakers, excludes its non-speakers. The evolution of different languages, in fact, might seem to resemble a kind of cultural "speciation" in the way it impedes further influence external to the language speakers. But there's another, and potentially even larger type of cultural boundary to be considered, and that would be religion (or religion-like ideology) -- so that all of "Christendom", for example, can be considered a culture, or all of Islam or others, that include not just a number of states but different languages as well.

But now the idea of "a culture" starts to seem complicated, if not confusing. Because, while a religion can include multiple states and languages, it's also true that a language area can include multiple religions, a state can include multiple languages as well as religions, and so on. There doesn't seem to be any neat hierarchy of boundaries that would allow us specify a culture in a simple or unambiguous way. Furthermore, this complexity/confusion extends downward from these larger formations as well, so that we can and often do speak of the culture of regions, of cities, of organizations, of neighborhoods, of cliques, even of meetings, and the boundaries of these "cultures" seem to be nested or overlapping in many different ways.

Now, one response to this kind of usage is just to throw up one's hands and say that "culture" is a vague and general word with different applications, and let it go. But, as I've indicated in earlier posts (see the list at the top of this recap), I think that the concept actually has a reasonably precise and fundamental meaning -- one that clarifies the confusion above, accounts for this apparent diversity or complexity of usage, and provides the basis for understanding how culture functions as well. And this is the idea that "culture" really does exist, and really only exists, as a structural imprint in the mental apparatus of each language-using individual -- an imprint acquired in the course of learning a native language, and developed and maintained in the course of social interaction through the rest of a person's life. Each such imprint or memotype is unique, as I've said, because of its dependence on the unique individual experiences that it's made from. But when such individuals associate, however few and however briefly, their interactions bring their cultural imprints into greater semantic alignment, and this group harmonization, as long as it persists, can then be said to constitute a kind of micro-culture. In this way, any one individual is typically a member of a number of such micro-cultures (family, workmates, friends, etc.), which overlap in ways that are sometimes quite fluid or changeable, but also comprehensible. And these "memotypes" will also display similarities on the largest scales of tribe, nation, language/ethnicity, and religion/ideology as well, which is what underlies the sense of referring to these groupings as cultures. The encultured individual, in other words, constitutes a kind of cultural atom, out of which particular cultures of various sorts, on different time scales, and on varying levels, are built. "Culture" becomes a fractal-like phenomenon.

What is an abstraction?

This question occurred to me as I was reading a little more about the supposed platonism revival mentioned in the previous post, and alluded to by Steve Esser in a couple of recent posts. Platonism makes what I think to be the "classic" (so to speak) mistake of reifying at least certain kinds of abstractions (mathematical and geometric, principally, but also possibly property-like) -- that is, it makes "things" out of abstractions, and then, having done that, it has the problem of determining the ontological status of the things, including where they exist, etc. Without going any deeper into platonism itself at this point, I'll just say that I don't think abstractions as such, of any kind, are things at all, and so have no ontological status, special realm, etc., to worry about. Apart, that is, from their existence as concepts, or psychological/cultural constructs, in which sense they are part of each individual's cultural imprint and exist as physical states in each individual's brain. Thinking about that, however, made me wonder about how such concepts are formed in the first place, and what that might say about the nature of abstraction itself?

For example, consider what happens when a child is learning to speak (or, for that matter, when an anthropologist is learning a language in another culture) -- someone points to something and utters a word, "dog" say. The pointing is an action that directs or focuses attention, but there's no indication from that alone what the utterance is supposed to "mean" -- within the field of attention, it might refer to a particular object (a proper name), a type of object, a property of an object, or a behavior or a process. In the early stages of language-learning, in fact, these distinctions themselves would be meaningless, and the very notion of an "object" might be unclear (though this might also be hard-wired in some fashion, giving rise to "natural objects", e.g., mama and dada). But after repeated pointing-acts accompanied by the same utterance, it's noticed that there is something in common in the phenomenal field to which attention is directed, and a generalization is made and tested -- the child herself does the pointing action and utters the sound whenever a dog-like object presents itself, and then looks for confirmation. But this "noticing" can't be a simple observation, it has to involve some kind of structuring -- that is, the repeated uttering of a sound in different circumstances generates, in a sense, a commonality to those circumstances. This is because the elicited structure will almost certainly be wrong initially ("wrong" as defined by the ones doing the pointing) -- "dog" will need to be distinguished from "cat", for example, or "squirrel" (or maybe "pillow"), "red" from "orange" or "pink" (or "ball"). So it isn't that the sound simply links to, or labels, a pre-existing structure, it's more like the pointing-and-uttering behavior as a whole has forced experience to take on a structure. And then, in an iterative and essentially social process of generalization and distinction, the structures will be aligned -- the "meaning" of the utterance will be brought into semantic harmony with everyone else (a process that continues all through life, though not with such major adjustments).

After some initial concepts have been formed in this way, more sophisticated abstractions of abstractions can be formed, so that "animal" can be used for both dog and squirrel (but not pillow), or "color" for both red and orange (but not ball), etc. And at some point after that, it starts to become possible to use words themselves to shape experience -- generalizations and distinctions can be made into verbal rules, and both communication and thought can come into being. But initially, and essentially, an abstraction is just a named common feature, element, or aspect of experience -- experience that may include other, already-formed abstractions. This sort of ability to create a semantic structure out of experience is also a linguistic capability just as syntax is, and its potential must be as built-in or hard-wired.

Science and its discontents

Steve Esser has a very good blog relating to philosophy, of mind and other matters, in which he approaches things from a somewhat different point of view than I do here. As the description of this blog indicates, I'm interested in what I call a "naturalistic" explanation of consciousness and related issues, or what's often called "physicalist" (or, a somewhat older term, "materialist"). Steve, on the other hand, in a recent post on what he sees as a renewed interest in platonism, writes in a concluding paragraph about a "meta-theme" he's been pursuing:

These metaphysical questions are difficult, and simple solutions obviously don’t work or the debates would have ended long ago. What this means to me is that the common presumption that something like physicalist monism should be the "default" metaphysical position is unfounded. More "extravagant" metaphysical systems need to be weighed in the quest to find a better mousetrap for explaining how the world works.

I think that's well expressed -- but I also find it a sign of a disturbing tendency (or at least a possible tendency) to simply or effectively abandon the goal of understanding consciousness in a scientific sense. We can see something like that tendency again in a recent blog post by David Chalmers that interpreted Jaegwon Kim as backing away from physicalism, and adding: "... this makes at least three prominent materialists who have abandoned the view in the last few years". And, with a certain irony, I think we can also see this in the repeated hopes that maybe a "new physics" or some quantum oddity will be needed to cope with consciousness (see Conscious Entities, Nov 10/05) -- these hopes may appear to rely on science, but really, in their invocation of mysterious, unknown theories, become a way of effectively obscuring the problem.

This, of course, is making the assumption that resort to non-physicalist accounts of consciousness (or, generally, anything) represent a form of abandonment of science. I think that's the case, since I think that terms like "physicalist" or "naturalistic" really take their meaning from science -- that is, they can include anything that science itself includes. But it may be that some of this apparent tendency is not so much a reaction against science itself but really against over-reaching by some proponents of a scientific approach, particularly against the sometimes blustery defensiveness that such proponents can display when their grand claims are questioned. This isn't to question real or actual projects in neuroscience or cognitive science as such, in other words, but rather some philosophical stances that are influenced by the goals of such sciences, but are driven to make claims or denials that appear more ideological than scientific. And one of the more egregious illustrations of that is the claim, by Dennett, for example, and some of his more excitable "computationalist" followers, that "qualia" as such don't exist*. Now, qualia, as we've seen, have famously been called "the hard problem of consciousness" (Chalmers), and rightly so, I think, because, for all of Dennett's long-winded hard work manning his various "intuition pumps", the simple fact of phenomenal experience (call it what you will) leaves it still fundamentally ineffable, private, and immediate**. But Dennett's reason for trying so hard to deny this is made evident by just inverting the motivations he attributes to the defenders of qualia:

I suspect, in fact, that many are unwilling to take my radical challenge seriously largely because they want so much for qualia to be acknowledged. Qualia seem to many people to be the last ditch defense of the inwardness and elusiveness of our minds, a bulwark against creeping mechanism. They are sure there must be some sound path from the homely cases to the redoubtable category of the philosophers, since otherwise their last bastion of specialness will be stormed by science.

No doubt this is true for many, as we've seen from the revivals of dualism, panpsychism, platonism, and quantum mysticism. But the reverse wishes also exist: people who want so badly for "mechanism" to triumph that they're anxious to banish, deny, ignore, or "explain away" any phenomena that seem conceptually difficult for a mechanistic orientation -- even phenomena that are quite literally right before their eyes. But "ineffable, private, and immediate" experience, while problematic, doesn't equate to mystic, and certainly doesn't imply "non-physical" -- in an obvious sense, in fact, what we see, hear, touch, etc., is the very essence and basis of the physical. These "computationalists" concede too quickly and too much to the anti-physicalists in accepting their inferences, in other words, and their rigid defenses make their position more a matter of doctrine than of either science or philosophy -- in both ways, they hurt more than help the physicalist program.


*He either denies qualia exist, or, for him equivalently, claims that, for example, a sufficiently sensitive or discriminating machine for analyzing the chemical composition of wine (and, I guess, emitting the results using canned wine-snob phrases) would actually experience the taste of the wine.

** I've left out "intrinsic" from Dennett's list of deniable attributes since I'm unclear what he means by it.
I won't try to make a counter-argument for the other three attributes here -- I would say that I think Dennett mounts a good critique of a number of assumptions that have often gone along with qualia, and a more modest aim might have led to a better result. As it is, he's left with a reluctant late admission that there may indeed be "primary or atomic properties of what one consciously experiences" that are set by "one's current horizon of distinguishability", which in my view pretty much re-admits the core of what he's been arguing against (while clinging, a bit forlornly, to "current" to save face).