Just read (listened to)
Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, by Annaka Harr. Looked like it would be a nice introduction to things. Which I still need. Enjoyed it tremendously. There's some discussion of various physical/brain functions, and what they say about the mind, like binding and split-brain stuff (which we've probably all heard before, but which never fails to absolutely fascinate me).
Despite this:
Annaka Harr wrote:My own sense of the correct resolution to the mystery of consciousness, whether or not we can ever achieve a true understanding, is still currently split between a brain-based explanation and a panpsychic one.
she makes some very good points for panpsychism. It seems to be a major point of the book, in fact.
Although she doesn't suggest she is disagreeing with Nagel about anything, it seems to me she is in one way. She spends a lot of time discussing experiments that show consciousness is not responsible for decisions. "Consequently, findings about how decisions are made at the level of the brain - and the milliseconds of delay in our conscious awareness of sensory input and even of our own thoughts - have caused many neuroscientists, Gazzaniga included, to describe the feeling of conscious will is an illusion." The idea is that consciousness is just "along for the ride". Binding shows that our awareness of things is delayed until our brains can put all the pieces together. Another delay can be found between our thought to move our finger and our awareness of our thought to move our finger in that famous experiment.
Further, a couple of things reveal that people only think they did something out of conscious will, when the decision they thought they made was actually the result of manipulation. One is a series of studies conducted by Daniel Wegner and Thalia Wheatley:
We have a participant in the experiment put their hands on a little board that's resting on top of a computer mouse, and the mouse moves a cursor around on a screen. The screen has a variety of different objects, pictures from the book I-Spy-in this case little plastic toys. Also in the room is our confederate; both of them have headphones on, and together they are asked to move the cursor around the screen and rest on an object every few seconds, whenever music comes on. . . . Most of the time they hear sounds over the headphones they're wearing, and some of these are names of things on the screen. The key part of the experiment occurs when, in some trials, the confederate is asked to force our subject to land the cursor on a particular object, so the person who we're testing hasn't done it, but has been forced. It's just as though someone was cheating on a Ouija board. We play the name of the object to our participant at some interval of time before or after they're forced to move, and we find that if we play the name of the object just a second before they're forced to move to it, they report having done it intentionally. . . . The feeling of agency can be fooled-and yet, we go about our daily lives feeling the opposite.
Here's another:
The split-brain literature contains many examples suggesting that two conscious points of view can reside in a single brain. Most of them also topple the typical notion of free will, by exposing a phenomenon generated by the left hemisphere that Gazzaniga and his colleague Joseph LeDoux dubbed "the interpreter."18 This phenomenon occurs when the right hemisphere takes action based on information it has access to that the left hemisphere doesn't, and the left hemisphere then gives an instantaneous and false explanation for the split-brain subject's behavior. For example, when the right hemisphere is given the instruction "Take a walk" in an experiment, the subject will stand up and begin walking. But when asked why he's leaving the room, he will give an explanation such as, "Oh, I need to get a drink." His left hemisphere, the one responsible for speech, is unaware of the command the right side received, and we have every reason to think that he does in fact believe his thirst was the reason he got up and began walking. As in the example in which experimenters were able to cause a feeling of will in subjects who in actuality were not in control of their own actions, the phenomenon of "the interpreter" is further confirmation that the feeling we have of executing consciously willed actions, at least in some instances, is sheer illusion.
Something else she says is something I tried to express once when I discussed my choice between two desserts that I love. She says:
A distinction between the brain's intentional behaviors and behaviors that are caused by brain damage or other outside forces ("against one's will") is valid and necessary, especially when structuring a society's laws and criminal justice systems. But the claim that conscious will is illusory still stands-in the sense that consciousness is not steering the ship-and can be maintained alongside these other distinctions of intentionality and responsibility. The experiments described in this chapter are in fact not necessary to prove the point. Our experience alone reveals the illusion, and you can gain insight into this with a simple experiment. Sit in a quiet place and give yourself a choice-to lift either your arm or your foot-that must be made before a given time (before the second hand on the clock reaches the six, for example). Do this over and over again and observe your moment-to-moment experience closely. Notice how this choice gets made in real time and what it feels like. Where does the decision come from? Do you decide when to decide, or does a decision simply arise in your conscious experience? Does a free-floating conscious will somehow deliver the thought, Move your arm, or is the thought delivered to you? What actually made you choose arm over foot? It may suddenly seem that "you" (meaning your conscious experience) didn't have any part in it.
She ends this line of thinking with this:
It seems clear that we can't decide what to think or feel, any more than we can decide what to see or hear. A highly complicated convergence of factors and past events-including our genes, our personal life history, our immediate environment, and the state of our brain-is responsible for each next thought. Did you decide to remember your high school band when that song started playing on the radio? Did I decide to write this book? In some sense, the answer is yes, but the "I" in question is not my conscious experience. In actuality, my brain, in conjunction with its history and the outside world, decided. I (my consciousness) simply witness decisions unfolding.
Next, she gives examples of various parasites controlling the behavior of various critters.
And the point of all this - I mean
my point, about her seeming to disagree with Nagel - is in these two quotes:
With so many behind-the-scenes forces at work-from the essential neurological processes we previously examined to bacterial infections and parasites-it's hard to see how our behavior, preferences, and even choices could be under the control of our conscious will in any real sense. It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride-watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it.
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Another potential source of erroneous arguments against panpsychism is based in evolution, as most scientific and philosophical support for the idea that consciousness is confined to the nervous systems of living things relies in part on the assertion that consciousness is a product of biological evolution. The logic is understandable, given that our most sophisticated methods of survival seem to us to require consciousness. But if consciousness doesn't determine our behavior as we have traditionally assumed, the evolution argument doesn't hold up. How can consciousness increase the likelihood of survival if it doesn't affect our behavior in the typical sense?
IIRC, Nagel suggests something along the lines of consciousness like ours being the point of evolution. Teleological. That seems opposed to her thinking that consciousness doesn't actually do anything, or isn't anything, other than experience - that conscious will is an illusion.
She does, however, point out this:
...it's hard to see how conscious experience plays a role in behavior. That's not to say it doesn't, but it's almost impossible to point to specific ways in which it does.
However, in my own musings, I have stumbled into what might be an interesting exception: consciousness seems to play a role in behavior when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness. When I contemplate "what it's like" to be something, that experience of consciousness presumably affects the subsequent processing taking place in my brain. And almost nothing I think or say when contemplating consciousness would make any sense coming from a system without it.
But she does not think consciousness is an illusion. Only conscious will. She clearly thinks consciousness is real:
Some philosophers go so far as to suggest that there isn't a hard problem of consciousness at all, reducing consciousness to an illusion. But as others have pointed out, consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion-by definition. An illusion can appear within consciousness, but you are either experiencing something or you're not-consciousness is necessary for an illusion to take place.
She supports panpsychism in these ways:
The natural tendency f scientific exploration is to arrive at as simple an explanation as possible, and the concept of consciousness emerging out of nonconscious material represents a kind of failure of the typical goal of scientific explanation.
Skrbina walks the reader through more than three hundred years of contemplations by scientists-from Johannes Kepler to Roger Penrose-who take a scientific approach to panpsychism, many of whom arrive at the conclusion that the simplest explanation of consciousness is in fact a panpsychic one. About thirty years after Haldane, in the 1960s, the biologist Bernhard Rensch asserted that just as there is a blurring of categories when we examine the evolution of one life-form to another at the level of microorganisms and cells, the stark division between living and nonliving systems is blurred, and a mistaken distinction likely carries over to the boundaries of conscious experience as well.
I like this moment, when she's discussing panpsychism:
Once again, it's important to distinguish between consciousness and complex thought when considering modern panpsychic views. Postulating that consciousness is fundamental isn't the same as suggesting that complex ideas or thoughts are fundamental and magically result in a material realization of those ideas (a common misinterpretation of panpsychism). The claim is just the opposite-that if consciousness exists as a fundamental property, complex systems, built from that-which-is-already-streaming -consciousness, could eventually give rise to physical structures such as human minds. David Skrbina addresses the problem of anthropic projections, in which we "place the demands of human consciousness on inanimate particles," and he explains the necessity of distinguishing between consciousness and
memory:
Certainly anything like the human mind requires a human-like memory, but this is relevant only for complex organisms. It is not reasonable to demand that atomic particles have anything like the memory capability of the human being, or even any physical instantiation of something like memory. Minds of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience.
That last sentence is excellent! A great bit of thinking about something in a different, and amazing, way!
But I feel pretty safe. In any case, I won't be proven wrong.
Couldn't decide if it should go here, or in the Simulation thread though...
... so much here. 