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Will we ever have a physical science of conscious experience?
John Matthewson
Friday, 17 July 2009 10:09 UTC
If the world were simple we would be able to solve the problem of conscious experience by describing it in physical language and then making hypotheses about how physical events create this conscious experience. We could then poke instruments into brains (or wherever) and check whether the events in the brains were linked to events in experience according to the theory. So all we need is a physical description of conscious experience – its length, breadth, mass, charge, temperature etc….
Of course, obtaining an acceptable physical description of conscious experience appears to be well nigh impossible. There are two main obstacles.
The first obstacle is that the whole enterprise is rejected by those who believe that we cannot know our own experience because there is no time to know it. This problem with the timing of experience is expressed as various types of “regress” argument and by the homunculus paradox – if a person has conscious experience at one instant then this experience could only be known by something looking at that experience in the next instant and so on.
The second obstacle is that it seems impossible to distinguish between the “real world” and “conscious experience”. If a tape measure reads one metre it does so in the real world but also, falsely, appears to measure a metre of experience. A related problem is that it also seems we cannot use instruments to reliably measure our experience itself, say in imagination or lucid dreams, or even use subjective reporting for this purpose without serious doubts.
I am not convinced that these obstacles are insurmountable. It seems to me that two questions need to be answered:
1. Can we ever have a science of conscious experience without a physical description of conscious experience?
2. Is there a fundamental limitation that prevents us from describing conscious experience in a scientific manner?
The nearest that I have seen to an answer to this problem of obtaining an empirical, physical description of consciousness was in an internet paper by Green(2002). The way our conscious experience is extended in time was used to tackle the first obstacle and the second obstacle was tackled by limiting reports of the nature of conscious experience to enumerating the independent directions in which things can be arranged.
Green, A. (2002). A Testable, Geometrical Theory of Consciousness. http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/alex-greens-original-paper.html
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Dear Arnold,
I absolutely agree with you about pages 3-5. Marr did us a huge disservice by inventing these three levels. It allows the White Queen functionalists to justify their nonsense. (The White Queen knew she had a functional role in the world of being pained by a needle before she knew the pain that for a functionalist determines that role, which itself determines the experience of pain, which determines…. and on and on through the looking glass into Bigtime Wonderland.) Where we agree is on all levels having to be congruent and causally coherent. But that is a different issue. The bit about the elements of the final percept acting like adjectives in the hands of the novelist is part of the good empirical stuff. Nevertheless, I agree that just like Barlow in the 1972 Perception paper, he leaves it hanging in the air unexplained.The critical aspect of the way words are integrated into a sentence for Barlow was economy. If you want to signify five red roses you can do it without even five words. For Marr I think it was the fact that each element qualifies other elements, rather than just adding to them. Imagine a face. Imagine an angry face. Everything has changed. Words are like matrix operators, not numbers.
Jo
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John Matthewson wrote:
1. Can we ever have a science of conscious experience without a physical description of conscious experience?[S.P.] For there to be “a science of conscious experience”, there must be a method appropriate for studying conscious experience. A method of study is scientific only when it corresponds to the object of study. The methods of study used in Physics are inappropriate in this case.
The hard problem of consciousness appears when we do not want to see the difference between the brain functioning and consciousness functioning, between the physical models (which include such elements as “signal”, “retinae”, “optic nerve”, “brain”, “neuron”, “living organism”, “body”, etc.) and informational models (which include such elements as “experience”, “increment of information”, “point of view”, “subject of cognitive activity”, “object of cognition”, “system{organism}”, “conceptualization”, “self”, “self-subject”, “self-object”, “person”, etc.). When theorizing about the mechanisms of consciousness we will be switching properly between the physical and informational models/descriptions, there will be no problem in explaining how the physical sensory signal transforms into the increment of information or the element of subjective experience.
John Matthewson wrote:
2. Is there a fundamental limitation that prevents us from describing conscious experience in a scientific manner?[S.P.] “Scientific manner” means the usage of the appropriate methods of study. To construct such a method, we have to come from the presently dominating meta-theory called “The Modern Materialistic/Physical Picture of the World” to a meta-theory which holds that consciousness (being understood as an ability of making a life-sustaining profit on dealing with information) is one of the three equally important factors (together with matter and energy) that influence the existence and development of our Reality. If there are “fundamental limitations”, they are in the heads of those scientists who prefer to ignore the informational aspects of the object of study.
Arnold Trehub on 18 Jul 2009 wrote:
“First law of conscious experience: For any instance of conscious experience there is a corresponding analog in the biophysical state of the brain.”[S.P.] This law is rather correct and it has a prototype in other theories. For example, in my version, it sounds thus: every change to the mental state of the organism causes the change to the biophysical state of the organism provided the effectiveness of bio-mental interaction stays unchangeable (I mean that in contrast to Arnold’s approach, I regard not only two elements: the mental organization and biophysical organization, but also a third element called the effectiveness of bio-mental interaction; also I regard any living organism — even the brainless protozoan — as possessing consciousness).
But the question here is: are we looking for a correspondence between the instance of conscious experience and biophysical state, or between the content of conscious experience and biophysical state? The problem here is that one and the same physical signal may cause different sensory data and different increments of information (or contents of experience) for the different subjects of cognitive activity.
Therefore, the science of conscious experience cannot be without the informational description/modeling of conscious experience which has to be used together with the physical description/modeling.
Kindly,
Serge Patlavskiy
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