…and this is a 
When I critized Mary Midgley the other day for her sloppy critique of Nicholas Humphrey, I also pointed out that Humphrey had apparently indulged in some unfortunate hyperbole himself, saying "So successful has it been that many scientists would now say, and even fear, that there will soon be little left for them to do." Which is patently ridiculous, of course: every scientist I know is painfully aware of all the stuff that they don't know.
What I didn't take into account was that Midgley might have quote-mined him. I shouldn't have underestimated a woman who can discern the entire content of a book from a glance at the title! Humphrey has sent a letter to the Guardian pointing out a few specific problems with Midgley's article. It hasn't been published yet, but here it is anyway:
Mary Midgley has been attacking me in the Guardian for twenty five years or more. But her latest piece (Face to Faith, 28th August) takes the biscuit for misrepresentation. She quotes passages from my 1994 book Soul Searching about how science has sometimes claimed to be able to provide "a sufficient explanation for everything". What she fails to say is that in these passages I was describing how things looked to over-ambitious natural philosophers at the end of the 18th century, and how this set the stage for a romantic reaction and in particular for spiritualism and psychical research.
She goes on to say that, rather than trying to provide a scientific solution to the mind-body problem we should be trying "to understand the relation between our inner and outer life . . . and how to face life as a whole". If she had been paying attention she might have noticed that in my own more more recent writings, such as Seeing Red (2006), I have begun to argue that the solution to the mind-body problem lies in the very mysteriousness of consciousness and how this changes our world-view. Since she has quoted at such length from a book I wrote 17 years ago, let me answer with these words from the cover of my new book Soul Dust (Quercus, forthcoming): "Humphrey returns to the front-line with a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendant. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the 'soul niche'."
I'm making a mental note to treat everything I see coming from Midgley with even more doubt and cynicism in the future.
Comments
Posted by: Cosmic Snark
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August 30, 2010 11:59 AM
A woo-monger, quote-mining? Say it ain't so.
Posted by: masturbating monkey
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August 30, 2010 12:04 PM
Monkey always doubt stuff from Midgley, ever since that time at the Zoo. That and she writes for the Guardian in "face to faith".
Monkey avoids hyperbowls, too hard to eat out of, prefer a stick to poke into trees for bugs.
Posted by: alex.asolis.net
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August 30, 2010 12:05 PM
"in my own more more recent writings"
Ahh! Grammatical error! It burnsssss.
Posted by: KG
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August 30, 2010 12:12 PM
IIRC, Midgely managed an excoriating review of The Selfish Gene without, apparently, actually having read it. My guess is that she's pioneering a new sub-discipline: immoral philosophy!
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 30, 2010 12:14 PM
Can someone tell me what this means, in non-dust-jacket language? Is he saying that consciousness is an illusion?
And why is spirituality considered good?
More to the point: is this book worth reading?
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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August 30, 2010 12:16 PM
Gag, Humphrey's consciousness woo is about as bad as what Midgley wrote.
Glen Davidson
Posted by: Chuck
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August 30, 2010 12:17 PM
Sounds like an interesting book, but is it going to be any more substantial than Goddidit, or are we stuck with "it's just a mystery, so suck it."
Chuck
http://www.irreligiosophy.com
Posted by: A. Nuran
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August 30, 2010 12:17 PM
Have you sent a copy of this apology to Mr. Humphrey?
Posted by: Chgo_Liz
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August 30, 2010 12:18 PM
I wonder what the take-home lesson will be for the anti-science folks:
- scientist stays on top of subject, learns more, admits error publicly, makes changes to method moving forward;
- scientist is WRONG.
Hmmmm. I wonder.
Posted by: vanbeverningk
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August 30, 2010 12:20 PM
Richard Dawkins once wrote about Mary Midgley: "she raises the art of misunderstanding to dizzy heights"
Posted by: Chgo_Liz
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August 30, 2010 12:20 PM
A. Nuran @ #8:
The apology was published in the same format as the original post.
Posted by: vanbeverningk
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August 30, 2010 12:25 PM
#5: "And why is spirituality considered good?"
Before we get into that, can we first define what spirituality IS?
I always wonder what people mean when they say things like "I'm not religious, but I AM spiritual".
Somehow I suspect that, to most, it means: "I'm not religious, and I don't want to talk about it".
Posted by: blf
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August 30, 2010 12:30 PM
A sophisticated-sounding term for woo-woo?
Posted by: Epinephrine
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August 30, 2010 12:30 PM
I recently read I Am a Strange Loop, and I have to say that I found parts of it a bit woo-ful as well.
I do like what Hoffstadter is trying to do - to show that a simple system can develop complex phenomena due to feedback. The mystical elements of it, the idea that consciousness is somehow also distributed*, seems to me something one might wish for rather than something that is. Oh well, it's a tough subject to write about without getting a bit carried away, I imagine.
Posted by: SteveM
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August 30, 2010 12:31 PM
re 5:
That's how I understood it. More specifically that consciousness as something separate from the body is an illusion. That it is simply a result of the way the brain is categorizing experience. And, then, once you have convinced yourself that consciousness is something separate from the body in which it operates, it becomes easy to imagine it existing completely independant of the body.
But that could just be me overinterpreting a single "dust jacket" paragraph.
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 30, 2010 12:36 PM
Okay. I just wanted a second opinion. The whole "spirituality" non sequitur kinda threw me. And don't even get me started on "soul niche."
Posted by: Sastra
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August 30, 2010 12:42 PM
Nigel the Bold, Captain Smug #5 wrote:
Yes and no, I think. Consciousness maybe is an "illusion" the way a reflection in a mirror is an "illusion." They're both real, and have reasonable explanations when taken for what they are. Our brains, though, have an unfortunate tendency to want to conceptualize them as if they're what they resemble -- and then the alternatives seem to be that either we're only making them up, or there is a Mirror World in some other dimension of reality. The truth is more nuanced.
I read Humphrey's Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation and enjoyed it a lot. In the forward, his colleague Daniel Dennett points out that Humphrey puts his finger on the "confidence trick" our culture plays on us:
"This has been to persuade people that there is a deep connection between believing in the possibility of psychic forces, and being a gracious, honest, upright member of society."(Humphrey)
So I don't think Humphrey has been arguing that spirituality is good. It's a con. But, I probably need to pick up some of his more recent books.
Posted by: mikewilliams64
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August 30, 2010 1:00 PM
By a strange coincidence I was reading Humphrey's Seeing Red, as this item surfaced on Pharyngula. He doesn't argue anything about spirituality in Midgley's sense but that the development of selfhood through consciousness confers a selective advantage through the boost to human self-importance (including by empathic extension other humans'lives).
Our remote ancestors would have seen the "mysterious and magical" qualities of consciousness as making them more significant in the universe.
I took the one reference to the s-word - "we now have a Self...that seems to inhabit a different universe of spiritual being" - as being a reference to those hominids who started dealing with this newly rich subjective life. It's interesting to read this in conjunction with Robin Dunbar's theories on the development of higher-order intentionality and religion.
Posted by: Lynna, OM
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August 30, 2010 1:04 PM
Thanks for that quote from Humphrey, Sastra. Excellent, and worth adding to my stash of insightful quotes.Posted by: blf
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August 30, 2010 1:07 PM
The Grauniad has a reader's editor to which complaints can be sent:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/page/readerseditor
The Grauniad's Editorial Code says:
Based on what Pee Zed has quoted from Nicholas Humphrey's letter, it seems very likely Mary Midgley has adhered to neither the letter nor the sprite of the Grauniad's editorial code. A complaint to the reader's editor may be order, albeit I presume/suggest that is for Humphrey to decide.
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 30, 2010 1:28 PM
@Sastra:
I guess that answers my question on the worthiness of reading the book. Sounds like it would be a worthy read.
I'm not sure when I'll get to it, but it's on my list.
Posted by: irenedelse
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August 30, 2010 1:33 PM
But, but... PZ, the poster boy for "dick atheism", apologizing to someone and acknowledging a mistake? Shocker!
Posted by: beyondbelief007
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August 30, 2010 1:36 PM
Quick, get someone over to PZ's house. There's something wrong. First, conciliatory thoughts about Francis Collins, now this apology!!
Clearly the heart issues have affected his... well, er... metaphorical "heart"?
Posted by: Tulse
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August 30, 2010 1:53 PM
"Illusions" are only illusions to a perceiving agent -- they are only possible in beings who are already conscious. There is no such thing as an "objective" illusion -- you can't deceive a rock, and trees don't experience mirages. So calling consciousness "an illusion" makes no more sense than saying we all have a homunculus in our heads controlling our actions (indeed, it pretty much boils down to the same thing).
Whenever any says "consciousness is an illusion" (and this is a popular thing to say), always ask "it's an illusion to whom"?
Posted by: InfraredEyes
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August 30, 2010 2:11 PM
To itself, surely? Speaking of infinite loops...
Posted by: jay.sweet
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August 30, 2010 2:12 PM
Well, maybe Midgley was wrong this time... but when she pointed out that Dawkins was all wrong for saying how we should just give up and behave selfishly, since that's what our genes tell us, I think she was right on the money!
Oh wait...
Posted by: ophelia.benson
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August 30, 2010 2:20 PM
Monkey always doubt stuff from Midgley, ever since that time at the Zoo. That and she writes for the Guardian in "face to faith".
You mean Comment is Free Belief. Well so do I! I give the unbelief view, and I'm not the only one who does, so writing for that is not necessarily a reason for extra doubt.
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 30, 2010 2:33 PM
That's part of the reason I was asking. But as Sastra pointed out in #17, the proposition is that our self-perception of our consciousness does not accurately represent our actual consciousness. The illusion is not consciousness itself, but the perception of consciousness.
At least, assuming I understand any of this.
Posted by: tyrannogenius
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August 30, 2010 2:48 PM
As some already intimated, the issue of dualism and properties of subjective experience is not as simple as "is there something extra operating inside the brain." After all, we don't get reality just "shown" to us, our investigations involve the results of interactions, which we take and make conceptual models out of etc. And note the strange loop that we look at the evidence, which means that in turn creates experience; representations and models, and so our attempt to understand anything is conditioned by what happens inside us.
If you're confused about qualia, think of the difference between how red, green, blue look (not the EM wavelengths) and that's what it's supposed to be about. I think you'd at least agree you can't "describe" the difference the way you could a checkerboard v. a honeycomb pattern. So they are structureless yet intrinsically different. Dennett and others complain, but once again the irony of philosophers thinking and then telling us we're wrong to accept what we're (well, many of us at least) quite sure is the way things are. I'm not insisting on right perspectives at this point, just noting framings and ironies of the field.
So e.g. it is silly to complain that it doesn't make sense for people to have phenomenology, qualitative experience etc, because "we don't find that in the brain" when we study other people's brains. It doesn't follow that such interactions would reveal the nature of things as we find them, so to speak, happening inside us. It's a matter of relative features and context, but I do mean something "real" and not just ways of talking. You can't find the Lorentz contracted length inside a rod by cutting it open or looking for shorter rods "made of other stuff" etc. You have to have the relative velocity in order for the relative contraction to show. My processes are one way for me, another way when you interact with one type of instrument, another way relative to other instruments.
BTW I notice the curious irony of people complaining about philosophers thinking inside their heads as if a substitute for finding out in the world. Yet the ordinary language philosophers / analytical school did that (and using dubious methods of semantic challenge, see my takedown of Putnam's argument re brain in a vat in the previous Midgley thread) will tell me I cannot possibly have a representative imagery of the world, or qualitative experiences, etc., because of their arguments about the issue. OLP is the ultimate armchair indulgence.
Spirituality: as a Unitarian Universalist I am well aware of developing attitudes and ways of relating to things, that have value, that do not require theories of things beyond the world, causes of the world, more than we know about now, etc. If you reject spirituality of such forms, would you also reject ethics? Really?
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 30, 2010 2:54 PM
No.
Really.
Posted by: tyrannogenius
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August 30, 2010 3:02 PM
Also, here's a little puzzle about consciousness "being an illusion." DD et al will usually say, yes we - hence presumably including themselves - have "the illusion" of subjectivity, qualitative experience etc. Dennett wrote e.g. approx: "There certainly seems to be a phenomenology ...." Well, "seems" is a tricky concept and here, suspiciously doubles up on itself and rips off the conventional usage of the perception making the external source "seem" this way or that. But in any case, such cognitivists will often say this is a "cognitive illusion." I find that hard to believe anyway, especially as for why it makes sense to get relief from pain etc.
But the kicker is, Dennet does not believe the same things about the mind that dualists, mysterians (believe in special properties, like David Chalmers of zombie fame) and "folk psychology" victims do. So how can he and the like minded have the same cognitive illusion that other people do? If he knows better, he doesn't think it's like that, and it's odd to imply that there can even "seem" to him to be a phenomenology, for his experience to "seem the same" to him after all! Is his mind literally different then? (As Jaron Lanier implied in clever piece.)
Wrong to think about a special sort of thing going on, not the same as experimental observations? But we can't see wave functions, just their results. (And MWI still doesn't tell how to find the WF spread around in e.g. an interferometer, just claiming that both "outcomes" are existent. And where, may I ask? Maybe my imagery can hide there too ...
PS re qualia: I really don't like it if someone pretends both to not understand the concept, and to deny it is true. If you really don't get the distinction, then maybe it's something you shouldn't be objecting to in particular.
Posted by: Epinephrine
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August 30, 2010 3:07 PM
Hoffstadter is fond of recursive loops, and starts his book off with descriptions of a video camera/monitor combination, and the strange results when the video camera is turned so that the monitor is in its field of view. The video feedback doesn't resemble the camera or monitor, and is a complex whose elements may exist, but the infinite tunnels or pulsing spirals only exist as an artefact of having looked back on itself.
In one sense, those patterns are illusory, in that they don't exist independently of the system that generated them. In another sense they are real, though they exist only within the system (we can see them by virtue of having a window into the system by virtue of the monitor). Hoffstadter uses this as a way of discussing consciousness, how a system designed to predict the behaviour of other entities guided by sets of rules might create a complex system when trying to model its own behaviour.
It's a little odd, but I can see how the illusory label can apply. The whole thing does have a bootstrapping sort of feel to it.
Posted by: daniel.lavine83
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August 30, 2010 3:07 PM
You could say essentially the same thing about "free will is an illusion." The problem is that we don't have a word for what sort of "thing" consciousness or free will might be. I think this can be rather neatly resolved by noting that the "selection" in "natural selection" is a metaphor, and there's no reason not to treat "illusion" in "free will is an illusion" or "consciousness is an illusion" similarly.
That is, they're illusions inasmuch as they are experiences that people think of as real things, but which probably aren't actually real things. Strictly speaking, they're different in important ways from what we'd usually call illusions, but if we're trying to get across the idea that there is no entity called "free will" or "consciousness," maybe "illusion" is as good as we can do for now.
Or you can make up your own word, but no one will know what you're talking about.
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 30, 2010 3:11 PM
That's funny. L. Ron Hubbard says something similar at the beginning of Scientology.
Posted by: tyrannogenius
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August 30, 2010 3:12 PM
nigelTheBold, so you're accepting the validity of propositions about right and wrong, that aren't ordinary matters of fact (descriptions of properties like that science measures etc.) Prescriptive truths in addition to descriptive truths. Or is believing in ethics like being a dualist? Some philosophers deny ethical truths, in similar vein (typically, verificationists.) So does it make sense to reject ideas of spirituality that don't require you to believe in "nonphysical entities." Seems like a double standard.
Posted by: https://openid.org/cujo359
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August 30, 2010 3:15 PM
A rule I always apply to politics applies here, too, I think. That rule is that I never believe something that a politician says about his opponent(s) position. Such assertions are nearly always one-sided, and often misleading. It's a rule that should apply to folks like Ms. Midgley, too. Their arguments are almost inevitably misleading.
Posted by: tyrannogenius
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August 30, 2010 3:18 PM
Fallacy of guilt by association, so Hubbard says something similar, he's a crank, so even one quote you can find from him that's similar to what I say is a bad sign. And I'm not going to deny you can't make some vague criticisms in the midst of a concept you don't understand (from e.g. "there's no other than X" - but even then, how are you sure it really isn't the acceptable X after all? etc.,) just that it's a suspect line of attack.
Posted by: Vicki, Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
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August 30, 2010 3:23 PM
Daniel:
If we're basically in agreement here, I think what we need is a short way of saying that consciousness is a perceived whole that the brain puts together from separate parts. Memory, yes. Vision, yes. Responses to adrenaline and other hormones, yes. But they aren't actually a unitary and continuous thing. (Didn't we just do this on one of the spinoffs of the Kurzweil thread?)
Maybe "mirage" is closer. It doesn't imply that someone/something is trying to fool us. The light really is reflecting off the sand, and our brains, which are pattern-finding organs, do the rest. (No, the brain isn't only a pattern-finding organ, but it does that, and does it scarily well.)
Posted by: Tulse
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August 30, 2010 3:23 PM
If that's the case, then how does such an illusion explain consciousness?
Boy, is he ever...
OK...so where's the consciousness? Many systems "model their own behaviour", but we wouldn't consider them conscious. And how does such recursion/modelling lead to subjectivity? All I see from Hofstadter is hand-waving -- his use of "recursion" is no different than Penrose's use of "quantum", a magic term that sounds complicated but really offers no explanation.
The problem is that they are supposed to explain the whole "people think" bit. It's circular, and boils down to "people just think they have minds" -- you can't even state it without question-begging.
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 30, 2010 3:23 PM
Why are propositions of right and wrong not ordinary matters of fact? And if they were not ordinary matters of fact, how does spirituality solve the dilemma?
Posted by: Mrs Tilton
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August 30, 2010 3:29 PM
KG @4,
Midgely managed an excoriating review of The Selfish Gene without ... having read it
I don't think that's true, actually. Dawkins apparently had thought that, based on a misunderstanding of what he'd heard Midgley had told a third party. The third party told Dawkins he was mistaken, and Dawkins withdrew the accusation.
The truly astonishing thing is that Midgley managed to misunderstand Dawkins's book so badly even though she had read it.
Posted by: Riptide
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August 30, 2010 3:40 PM
At what point does quote mining descend into libel?
Posted by: j-brisby
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August 30, 2010 3:58 PM
Mary Midgley would be better advised to focus her efforts on living life as a hole. Asshole, that is.
Posted by: Vicki, Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
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August 30, 2010 4:21 PM
Nigel:
Propositions of right and wrong are matters of fact only once you accept/agree on axioms (and possibly definitions). A lot of the deep arguments come down to that. My axioms include that individuals and individual happiness are important, and that all humans count as people. There are people out there whose axioms include that the community/group is important, and thus any individual can and should be sacrificed if necessary for group success. And plenty of people whose ideas of people—people whose interests, rights, and opinions matter—are limited to members of their own group, or to one gender, or both.
To me, and probably most Pharyngulites, the axioms I have stated as mine are self-evident. Many people manage not to see them, blinded by religion, warped ideas of self-interest, and other illusions.
Feminism is the radical idea that women are human beings. There are people whose axioms won't let them accept that, or accept it only in a very limited sense (the right-wingers who fulminate that gay rights will lead to bestiality clearly consider women and men to be of the same species in some sense).
Posted by: Ichthyic
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August 30, 2010 4:51 PM
If you reject spirituality of such forms, would you also reject ethics? Really?
no, we reject your mangled definition and attempt at false equivalence.
Posted by: daniel.lavine83
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August 30, 2010 5:09 PM
1. Qualia DO have (mathematical) structure. There's quite a bit of material on the science of sight and specifically of color perception available at your local library if you're still uncertain about this.
1a. It's trivial to create optical (really, cognitive) illusions in which a person identifies two different patches colored identically as "black" and "white." This is just one bit of evidence that qualia (specifically, black, white, and gray) are not metaphysical objects in and of themselves -- they are actively constructed by the perceptual system in the course of perceiving. So it's at least conceivable that "black" is only as real as, e.g., a "char" data type in C programming.
2. Have you read Dennett's "Quining Qualia"? I'd love to see your rebuttal.
@Tulse
I disagree that when I say, "consciousness is an illusion" that I'm trying to explain "people think."
I agree that it's impossible to make precise statements that could possibly be true about the mind/brain dichotomy. This is because there is no universal objective scientific language in which we can talk about it. What I'm saying I don't like it when people make arbitrary rules about what sort of language I do use to describe it. If you went through the vocabulary we use to talk about subjective experience and cross out every word that can't be applied precisely, you will have 0 words on your list at the end.
Yes, problems of circularity crop up a lot in philosophy of mind. There's some pretty obvious reasons for that. The problem doesn't get any better just because you outlaw statements that are in some sense circular.
Posted by: jack.rawlinson
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August 30, 2010 5:21 PM
Yes, Midgeley is startlingly immoral for a "moral philosopher". She's incredibly given to blatantly misrepresenting the positions of the targets she chooses for her myopic and transparently agenda-driven attacks. Not an uncommon trait in religious apologists, of course.
Posted by: daniel.lavine83
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August 30, 2010 5:23 PM
I don't believe in dragons. However, I currently have the impression that I am seeing a dragon -- it seems to me that I see a dragon. It does not follow that I believe in dragons. I am free to doubt the reality of my experience -- of what seems to me. And sometimes, it's a really good idea to do so.
You seem to be intentionally missing the point of the "illusion" metaphor -- that we can experience consciousness and still have doubts about its structure and content. We can't deny the fact that we experience, but we can certainly doubt specific elements of that experience. Or, as brain-in-a-vat shows, we can doubt every element of that experience.
Posted by: echidna
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August 30, 2010 5:24 PM
Now that's just irritating. A simple counterfactual: I don't really "get" the concept of elves, whether they are undead spirits, or simply another race. Tolkien draws on both traditions. But I deny they are "true", that is I deny they exist.
Posted by: daniel.lavine83
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August 30, 2010 5:39 PM
echidna@49:
He's just trying to get around the totally valid criticism that if he can't state precisely what he means by "qualia" then he can't use them to mount a coherent critique of materialism. See how that works? "I'm not being clear what I mean about 'ghosts,' so if you don't believe in ghosts you're being inconsistent."
Posted by: KG
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August 30, 2010 5:39 PM
They are not structureless at all. Colours have (this is not a complete account) intensity, hue, and saturation. There are also metallic colours - gold, silver, copper - which have a common feature other colours do not share. We can describe colours as "clear" or "muddy", as "acid" or "pastel", as "loud" or "soft" - in the last case, linking visual qualities to those of another modality. Perception of colours is also context-dependent - the nearest we get to "pure colour" sensations is probably in after-images. We can test whether two people's colour perception is different in various ways - can one make finer distinctions than the other (the ability to distinguish colours declines with age)? Is the overall topology of their colour-space similar (in the case of colour-blindness, it isn't).
Mrs. Tilton@41,
Thanks for the correction - I withdraw the implication of immorality. Midgley was presumably just a prisoner of her preconceptions: she "knew" what Dawkins was saying, so couldn't see that he wasn't saying that. Just like tyrannogenius with respect to Dennett.
Posted by: A. Noyd
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August 30, 2010 6:36 PM
nigelTheBold (#28)
That's my take as well. And sometimes that illusion breaks down just a little and we get what we think is a glimpse of something "beyond" ourselves when really we're just looking behind the curtain into a part of ourselves we don't normally notice. I think it can be interesting to observe those states, like being tipsy or when you slowly lose the ability to deliberately control your thoughts as you fall asleep into a dream. (Not so fun are the times when such states are brought on by something you don't know if you'll get back from, like a traumatic experience.)
~*~*~*~*~*~
Tulse (#39)
Uh, who's saying it does?
No, it's, "people have minds and those minds aren't able to see themselves for what they really are, so they invent an inaccurate self-image and convince themselves that what they see is how they really are." How is that circular?
Posted by: Tulse
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August 30, 2010 6:43 PM
That's true, but if it is the case that there is no objective language that can be had to talk about it, then even stating scientific theories in this domain may be problematic. (While I am a thorough-going materialist, and have no doubts that subjective experience arises because of material interaction, I'm not sure if such subjective experience can ever have an objective account. I suppose that makes me a reluctant mysterian.)
I didn't think my claim was arbitrary -- it was about circularity. Using terms that implicitly require consciousness (such as "illusion" and "mirage") in explanations of consciousness is simply question-begging.
Posted by: tyrannogenius
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August 30, 2010 7:53 PM
@#48: very muddled here. Sure, if you're "having an experience" of dragons that doesn't mean there are, but you already admitted to "having an experience" so there's some subjective content, "phenomenology" you're admitting to. So it's not the case that you doubt that the experience really exists, you only doubt (or find out) that it isn't caused by the sort of external stimulus we'd expect.
But if you try to double that same idea up inside of yourself, you get the problematical notion of having an impression of your having an experience, and is that in turn also an experience? Of what kind? I can't identify whatever should count as a perception of perception (c.f. Tulse.)
OTOH, you could say that we have a misleading cognitive "take" on consciousness, imagining the nature of it wrongly. You might claim that is the effective equivalent of "seeming" applied to the experiences themselves rather than referred as relation between the experience and something else it is about (as usually expressed, "seeming to be dragons ...")
What about your original example: what if I doubled up on your awareness of experience and denied that there seemed to you to be dragons, it only seemed to you that you had a perception of dragons! Then what, how do you defend your "actually having" the experience itself? What of "seeming of seeming"? I myself think experiences themselves are "given" in some sense (sloppy as may be) but such regressions are an issue for those, like Dennett, who don't take phenomenology as a specific (enough) subjective content.
But if someone has a different opinion about consciousness (as some philosophers do) then we can't apply the same "cognitive illusion" to them - they don't have the same attitude or notion. Hence it's odd for them to say, it seems the same to them as to people who think differently.
/Color sensations: no, the structure you're referring to is the relational arrangement of the colors to each other and their mixing etc. I'm talking about each one by itself, like "red" not having a structure. Red is not subjectively defined by a structure defining "how it looks."
Those talking about elves etc. don't understand "meaninglessness" in philosophical discourse. You may not have a complete idea of what believers in such things mean to refer to. But if you didn't comprehend the idea at all, you wouldn't even know to say "there aren't any". Aren't any "what"? - what are you even using as a yardstick about considering things to distinguish? If I gave you something in a foreign word, you wouldn't know whether to believe there were any or not. You do get "elves" enough to know that you don't find "them" around, otherwise what did you mean? You falsely imagined they were conceptually opaque.
Posted by: Michael Kingsford Gray
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August 30, 2010 8:14 PM
For me, that action is impossible, much in the same way that temperatures below absolute are impossible.
Posted by: DLC
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August 31, 2010 12:46 AM
So, does Nicholas Humphrey also get a Leica camera body ?
Posted by: philosopher.animal
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August 31, 2010 8:12 AM
About both Hofstadter and the "illusion" of consciousness: he says somewhere something like "Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind. This is perhaps circular but not vicious or paradoxical." The self-perception thing is only an issue if you still hold to a cartesian like, maximally unified self.
Posted by: Birger Johansson
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August 31, 2010 9:33 AM
Previous book by Humphrey: Depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on, it may be titled "Soul Searching" or "Leaps of Faith"
In it, he makes a convincing link between modern miracle-makers (Uri Geller et al) and ancient ones (Jesus and countless others).
“Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation” http://www.amazon.com/Leaps-Faith-Miracles-Supernatural-Consolation/dp/0387987207/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283260872&sr=1-1
Take note: The fathers of modern "miracle maker" children often help the supposedly gifted child along, cheating to help him get the intended result without telling it to the child, to "help his self-confidence". The child -who may have started doing miracles to get attention- suddenly sees his tricks work, and gets convinced he is the real thing! This process may actually have convinced Uri Geller that he was the real thing (although he was cheating to compensate for the "erratic" nature of his "gift") and may have convinced jesus and other ancient workers of miracles that their skills were the real thing.
Posted by: echidna
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August 31, 2010 9:54 AM
No, but I certainly understand what meaningless philosophical discourse is.
No. I correctly asserted that there are multiple contradictory conceptions of elves, none of which have any basis in reality.
Posted by: poke
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August 31, 2010 3:38 PM
There's two uses of the world "conscious" that make sense: (1) intransitive consciousness - i.e., being conscious rather than unconscious, being awake rather than asleep; and (2) transitive consciousness - i.e., becoming conscious of somebody looking at you or becoming conscious of your own breathing. Everything else is a meaningless bastardisation of this concept.
I think we're only willing to accept bizarre, and obviously meaningless, assertions like "consciousness is an illusion" because we've been told that consciousness is one of the great mysteries so we expect people to say equally mysterious things about it. They're more like Zen koans than assertions. Say this kind of stuff about any other subject (except, of course, religion) and people will roll their eyes at you. Being conscious isn't particularly mysterious though. Conscious people are the ones who walk around, do stuff, act and respond. The unconscious ones don't.
Whether a person is conscious is, in fact, so obvious from their behaviour that it's difficult to even come up with scenarios outside of philosophy where a person would need to say "I am conscious." Perhaps if you're on the operating table and you're drowsy but the general anaesthetic hasn't been affective you'd say, "wait, I'm still conscious!" But most of the time it's so obvious it would be absurd to do so. This is the mundane reality that contrasts with philosopher's zombies.
Posted by: Paul W., OM
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August 31, 2010 7:20 PM
Poke:
I don't think that's right. I agree that "consciousness is an illusion" is one of those obnoxiously vague statement that one shouldn't use without a lot of explanation to disambiguate it, but it can be quite meaningful.
One version is that consciousness as we intuitively understand it is an illusion---what we think we directly experience isn't actually what we experience in real time.
One specific version of that is the homunculus idea---that there's a little point-like you in your head that's watching what's going on in your head, which is a sort of movie of what's going on in your environment.
One of Dennett's points is that that point-like observer does not exist, and is largely an artifact of how we retrospectively reconstruct our experiences---we (think we) remember them happening to a point-like observer who has a continuous picture of what's going on, when in fact it didn't happen that way at all.
As a computer scientist, that makes perfect sense to me. I'm familiar with superscalar and pipelined processors, which do a lot of stuff in parallel---executing parts of one instruction in parallel with each other, and in parallel with a "previous" instruction that hasn't actually finished executing yet. The way things execute in serially overlapped and otherwise parallel ways is mostly equivalent to a simple sequential execution of indivisible instructions, and usually looks that way when examined with a debugger stepping through instructions "one at a time," but that's just not what's really going on in the hardware during normal operation. (This is how most "serial" processors work now, in your PC or even your phone.) There is no serial processor, really---just a gang of parallel processing units put together in such a way as to preserve the illusion of a single serial processor. (Mostly the hardware preserves that illusion, but sometimes you have to trap to software to fix up the ways that the illusion would otherwise show through at the software level.)
It's reasonable to say that serial processing in computer CPU's is an illusion. It's not that there isn't anything real about it---there's limited parallelism, and it's mostly equivalent to serial processing---but the strict seriality is in fact an illusion.
With human cognition, there are several important respects in which how we think we perceive and remember things just isn't how we actually perceive and remember them.
One is that memory is largely reconstructive. Apparently, the brain only records a modest amount of relatively interesting information, and unconsciously fills in a lot of detail that it didn't actually record. A lot of that detail is right---it's a good unconscious guess---but a lot of it is wrong and nonetheless seems like a clear and reliable memory.
There was a lot of research in the 1970's and 1980's (IIRC) that shows that memories are way less reliable than they intuitively seem to be. People are sure they remember things that they don't in fact remember, and in certain cases, couldn't possibly have actually witnessed. (Eyewitness testimony is actually quite unreliable, which is a problem for the court system. Likewise "flashbulb" memories, where people think they have clear memories of where they were when important things happened, like hearing about the JFK assassination, watching Armstrong walk on the moon, or the 9/11 reports---are vastly less reliable than they introspectively seem.)
More recently, various psychologists have shown that people are far less aware of what's going on while it's going on than they think.
A classic example is showing people a picture of a skyline, or a group photograph of people, and changing the picture when people blink---removing a large building or one of the ten most salient poeple in the picture.
People usually don't notice. You can make an entire large building appear and disappear every time somebody blinks, and they usually don't notice the first few times.
That even works on people who are in on the trick---they're looking for a change, but don't see it if it happens when they blink.
Clearly, people maintain a much less detailed and more schematic model of their environment, even in real time, than we used to think. The sense that we see what's actually out there is largely an illusion. Even in real time, we mostly see a simplified, schematized version of our environment, which seems richly detailed, because any particular place we look, we can see detail. We don't notice how much we don't see, and that even our basic visual field consists mostly of big "blind spots" by our intuitive standards of "seeing."
Likewise, people have done experiments in which the replace whole people in an actual real-world environment with somebody who doesn't look a lot like them, and they don't notice.
(E.g., having some workmen haul a sheet of plywood between two strangers having a conversation, e.g., somebody asking for directions on the street, and substituting a different person with vaguely similar physical characteristics while the line of sight is obscured, to continue the conversation. The subject doesn't typically notice that they're talking to an "obviously" different person than they were a few seconds ago, and continue the conversation as though nothing at all happened.)
There's also the issue of self-consciousness vs. straightforward environment-consciousness. We often think we are aware of ourselves and our environment, with a fairly rich, continuously updated impression of each.
(This is an odd one, because people are often aware that when they're "self-conscious," it's hard to focus on the task at hand and do it well. And often they're aware that when they're unselfconscious, and just doing what comes naturally, they forget to keep their various bad tendencies in check. Well, they're right, but even more than they know.)
To a large extent, we're even less self-aware than we think, and even less aware of our environments than we think, even when we think we're paying close attention to our selves, or our environments. The bandwidth of information being communicated from our perceptual systems to conscious awareness is simply much lower than it seems, and we do a lot of (unconscious, highly fallible) filling-in, in real time, as needed.
The model we maintain of our situation is actually much cruder than we typically realize.
The bandwidth from awareness to memory is even lower, and we do a lot more (unconscious, fallible) filling-in when we recall things. (We just don't remember nearly as much or as well as we think we do.)
Our consciousness is just not as rich and detailed as it subjectively seems---we notice the rich detail right where we are looking, and not the vast amount of detail that isn't really there where were not looking; the kind of rich and detailed consciousness we think we have is largely an illusion, even if "consciousness" per se is not. (Once you realize that's what our consciousness is really like.)
Metaphorically, our consciousness is like a searchlight that only seems like a floodlight, because we can only see where it's currently pointed, and don't even notice that everything else is mostly dark. To the extent you assume that "consciousness" is like a floodlight, consciousness is "an illusion"; the reality is something much, much narrower.
Posted by: Ichthyic
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August 31, 2010 7:31 PM
But the kicker is, Dennet does not believe the same things about the mind that dualists, mysterians (believe in special properties, like David Chalmers of zombie fame) and "folk psychology" victims do. So how can he and the like minded have the same cognitive illusion that other people do? If he knows better, he doesn't think it's like that, and it's odd to imply that there can even "seem" to him to be a phenomenology, for his experience to "seem the same" to him after all! Is his mind literally different then?
you might be interested in the recent discussion on WEIT:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/did-freedom-evolve/
Posted by: echidna
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August 31, 2010 8:01 PM
Thanks, Paul, for a very nicely put together comment.
Posted by: poke
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August 31, 2010 9:39 PM
Paul W., OM (#61):
The experiments you cite are real and interesting but I think the interpretation rests on a philosopher's fiction. We do not normally think or say we possess a "rich and detailed" consciousness. The description "rich and detailed" presumes the philosophical idea that what we see is an image created in our mind or brain rather than the world. (What would it mean to say the world appears to us rich and detailed but is not? Would we say the world appears to us rich and detailed but this appearance is really not rich and detailed although the world is?) On our naive account of perception we do not see a mediating image, rich and detailed or otherwise. We simply open our eyes and see the world.
The research on change blindness and inattentional blindness is fascinating but I think it's important not to over-interpret it. Not noticing aspects of our environment is a normal part of our everyday perception, and one that doesn't disturb us at all. The shock of these experiments comes from the novelty of the changes. We're shocked that a building disappeared or that a car changed colour or that a gorilla walked by, but nobody would be equally shocked if you told them they failed to notice a car drive away or a plane pass by or the light go off in a window, even though many of these mundane changes could be equally as large. I think most people would simply say that they didn't notice and for the obvious reason that they were busy counting passes or that their attention was elsewhere. They might even be tempted to protest, "Why on Earth would I have noticed that?"
Our naive discourse on what we see covers noticing and not noticing aspects of the environment, paying attention to this and not that, looking here and not there, and so on. We even say something caught our attention or stood out. That is, we have words for describing the parts of the scene that we would have expected not to notice or pay attention to but found ourselves doing so against our expectations. If I ask you to recall all of the ties you saw today you would probably be equally happy saying you didn't notice many as you would saying you don't remember many and of those you did notice and do remember you could likely give explanations as to why you noticed them. This one was garish, this one was ugly, this one I particularly liked. But you'd probably be equally happy to say, "I just don't go around looking at ties," although surely ties are frequently within the bounds of your perceptual field.
Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkGTItDa5q2cbStaX_oLThrLZyDKiomUtw
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September 20, 2010 4:43 AM
You may have been wondering why Mary Midgley popped up at all, to repeat her misunderstandings of various scientists. It turns out she has a book to sell, and it's all about attacking Richard Dawkins yet again, and his use of the phrase 'Selfish Gene'. Yes, after 25 years, she still doesn't understand that 'selfish' is being used metaphorically, and she blames Dawkins for what Thatcher did from 1979 onwards.
The BBC has just had her on (programme link here), and the interviewer tried to explain that it was a metaphorical use, and here reaction was roughly "it can't be, it's in the title". She went straight on to say genes cooperate (ie she used a metaphor), and make all the mistakes she's made for decades. Why the BBC gives her airtime for this I don't know. Really, she is just not intelligent enough any more to be able to understand other people's arguments.
The book is "The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene". The blurb for the book explicitly shows she thinks "the selfish gene" is an "account of human motives". Won't someone take her to one side and explain gently she hasn't understood this area for decades, and it's time for her to stop embarrassing herself?