From Aaron Sloman Sun Aug 17 05:57:10 BST 1997 To: PSYCHE-D@LISTSERV.UH.EDU Subject: Re: References and causal linkage Henry Stapp, in his usual lively and provocative way, wrote, in response to things I've not had time to look at: > Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 13:24:03 -0700 > From: STAPP@THEORM.lbl.gov > Mind-Matter Synthesis. > > Thesis: Mind is not reducible to matter; it does not logically supervene > on matter. > Antithesis: Mind is reducible to matter. > > ...... > The apparent inability of the proponents of the contending views to > communicate to each other suggests that the time is ripe for an > Hegelian synthesis. Not necessarily. Both sides may be so deep in muddle (e.g. due to shared, but unacknowledged and confused assumptions) that the best thing is to ignore the issue and get on with real problems. Compare Thesis: the time on the moon is the same as GMT Antithesis: the time on the moon is not the same as GMT When a question is confused, two apparently contradictory answers, far from exhausting the possibilities or providing a basis for a synthesis, may be equally unacceptable, due to shared confused presuppositions buried in the question. Sometimes it is best to reject over-simplistic questions, and attend to deeper problems, e.g. clarifying notions of reducibility, supervenience or implementation, and clarifying what we are talking about whose reducibility, supervenience, etc. is at issue, instead of just assuming we know what we are talking about ("consciousness", "experience", or whatever). It's commonplace in these discussions to distinguish mysterians who think consciousness cannot be explained from functionalists and others who think it can. I believe there's a deeper distinction between (a) those who believe they know what questions they are asking and blithely go ahead presenting answers and (b) those who realise that the questions are full of confusion, which must be sorted out before answers can be considered. (It will be a far more complex task than Einstein's clarification of the notion of "simultaneity" which people previously thought they all understood, before he showed them that they didn't. This needs to be done with notions like "consciousness", "subjective", etc..) [henry] > I merely list here the essential points of this synthesis: > .... > 3. But some of the events are associated with human beings, and some of > latter are human conscious experiences: orthodox pragmatic quantum theory > is built precisely upon events of this latter kind, and the very > essence of the orthodox interpretation is that we MUST build our basic > physical theory on the conscious human experiences, in order to have > a rationally coherent theoretical framework. The founders of quantum > theory, all famous and renowned physicists, were DRIVEN to this > radical (for physicists) conclusion. All sorts of famous people in the past (e.g. Aristotle, Newton....) have been driven to conclusions that we now know are false. Arguments from authority are worthless. (I know Henry would never simply argue from authority, but some of his readers may need to be warned.... In any case my conversations with physicists show that there's nothing like unanimity on these issues.) Anyhow, it seems pretty clear that 1. physics is a study of the nature of matter and processes involving matter (i.e. it is not a study of physicists nor a (second-order) study of the study of the nature of matter, as in psychology of physics, sociology of physics, philosophy of physics) 2. in principle matter and processes involving matter could, and in most places do, exist without any conscious human experiences, and, but for what is probably a minor accident in a small part of the universe, they might have existed in toto without any conscious human experiences. THEREFORE any claim "that we MUST build our basic physical theory on the conscious human experiences" is just false (unlike the claim that we must build our theory of the human study of physics on the nature of human conscious experience, which has some truth!) This is a confusion of (a) what physics (the study of matter etc) is about with (b) what the study of physicists is about. I know there are people who believe (a) essentially involves (b), and not only quantum physicists. E.g. it's an aspect of all idealist philosophies claiming some variant of "to be is to be experienced". But that's not the only possible philosophical view, and not all modern physicists share it. (In fact I think it's incoherent.) No doubt physics as we know it would not exist without conscious human experiences, but that says nothing more than the trivial truth that the human study of the nature of matter could not exist without conscious human experiences. Likewise the study of botany, meteorology, number theory, geology, entomology as we know them each depends on conscious human experiences. It does not follow that the subject matter of any of those studies has anything to do with conscious human experiences. Psychologists are not needed in departments of mathematics or geology. Nor are they needed in deparments of physics, as they would be if the subject matter of physics included conscious human experience. What is true is that any adequate physical theory must not rule out the possibility of states and processes in matter that are adequate to support all the things that happen to exist in our world. Thus a theory whose consequences rendered it impossible for plants, thunderstorms, rock formations, insects, social deprivation and conscious human beings to exist would be inadequate, for all these things do exist. But that does not imply that physicists "MUST build [their] basic physical theory on" plants, thunderstorms, rock formations, insects, social deprivation. All that is required is that if and when we have an adequate account of what the physical requirements are for the existence of plants, thunderstorms, rock formations, insects or human conscious experience, then it is appropriate to check whether accepted physical theory explains how those requirements can be met. A physics that ruled out those mechanisms would be as much in need of repair as a physics that ruled out the possibility of hydrogen and oxygen combining to form water, or one that ruled out the possibility of insect societies. As far as human consciousness is concerned, we are nowhere near being able to carry out any such check because there is so much muddle and confusion about what people mean by "consciousness", "experience", "subjective" etc. that there's no hope, at present, of clarifying precisely what the physical requirements might be. Thus we can't check whether any physical theory does or does not explain them. So sensible physicists should get on with their physics while people attempting to study minds of various kinds and the many intricate and diverse processes that can occur in them assemble a better and deeper picture of what sorts of mechanisms might be required, or might be sufficient, if there are alternative implementations are possible. In parallel with this, brain scientists may of course investigate whether there are neural phenomena that require particular kinds of physics to support them. But even that sort of discovery leaves open the question whether mental phenomena in general require those particular sorts of neural phenomena. (Specific physical mechanisms MAY be required in humans, or cats, given the context of the rest of their brains, but that leaves open the possibility of some totally different implementation of essentially the same type of thing, e.g. consciousness in robots. Of course, there are people who don't like the idea of conscious robots, for religious or other ideas, but in a serious discussion forum like this such personal preferences can be ignored.) [Henry] > 4. Although orthodox quantum theory eschews ontological commitment, > the de facto ontology is one of a mind-matter stuff that > manifests human conscious experiences under appropriate physical > circumstances---namely a properly functioning human body/brain--- > and manifests these experiences within a mathematical structure > that is in full accord, insofar as we have been able to check > the theory empirically, with the actual structure of our experiences. Apart from the truism that physics is done by human physicists who are conscious, I don't believe this. The actual structure of my experiences include things like itches, tingles, awareness of my fingers interacting with keys, perceived characters on a screen which change as I type, a feeling of being overheated this muggy summer night, much puzzlement about why people hold the strange views they do, concern about not having prepared a paper I have to present next week, sleepiness, indecision regarding whether to finish this or go to bed, enjoyment of the string quartet being played on the radio, a desire to play my violin better, etc. etc. I don't believe there's ANY mathematical structure in ANY current physical theory that has anything remotely to do with any of these experiences, let alone being "in full accord" with their "actual structure", as Henry claims. A proper theory would have to account for consciousness in many types of animals, in newborn infants, in people with various kinds of brain damage and so on. Unfortunately, too many people think they can ignore all this complexity, write down a few lines saying what consciousness is and then produce their theory of what makes it possible. Henry's mathematical structure may be in full accord with some postulated structure which happens to be someone's (distorted) theory about consciousness. Most theories of consciousness which I have read have little to do with the actual structure of human experiences, whose richness and depth and diversity far outstrip ALL the formal theories I've ever come across. (Of course, if you look at something through nearly opaque lenses then you won't see much actual structure -- and your task of producing a theory that accords with what you think the actual structure is, will be much simplified.) > 5. This framework permits our conscious experiences to influence the > course of physical/mental events, and to emerge in quantum > mechanically governed universe by a process of natural selection. This implies that only in the framework of quantum physics can concscious experiences influence physical events. Fortunately I think my own conscious experiences are capable of influencing the course of physical and mental events via other routes. (How? It's a long story, which cannot be fully told without a proper analysis of, among other things, the notion of "influence", or "causation", which is all too often assumed to be a simple and clear concept, when it isn't. Roughly --- such influence is intimately bound up with the truth of various if...then propositions linking conscious events and physical events, including some counterfactual ones. I've seen no convincing argument that ONLY quantum mechanical processes could possibly support such conditionals and the associated causation. The existence of information processing systems in which virtual machine events (i.e. non-physical events implemented in physical mechanisms) play a crucial role in the control of a very physical factory is one of many clear counter examples to all versions of such arguments I have ever seen, which ultimately depend on the claim that ONLY physical events can be "real" causes. Many people believe this when they engage in philosophical discussion. This is why some of them feel that consciousness must somehow be there in physical reality at the bottom level, or it can't get any causal foothold. But, like information technology. our ordinary life is full of counter examples. I've a half-baked paper with a partial analysis of what supervenience and implementation might involve. It's accessible at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/supervenience Unfortunatley I've not been able to work on it much recently, but I welcome comments, criticisms, suggestions. There's much overlap with topics in the middle of Brian C. Smith's 1996 book on the Origin of Objects (MIT Press), though our conclusions are partly different. ) [henry] > We must resist allowing unmentioned and fundamentally false classical > intuitions about `matter' to block progress toward a philosophically, > mathematically, and scientifically sound synthesis of the mathematical > and experiential aspects of the natural world! We must resist allowing unmentioned and fundamentally false philosophical theories about the nature of consciousness, based on inadequate analysis of our ordinary concepts of mentality and causation, to close our minds on questions which are still wide open! Sorry Henry, I couldn't resist. I hope at last to meet some of the contributors to this list at Elsinore next week. I wonder whether we'll come home any the wiser? Cheers. Aaron ==== Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs ) School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK EMAIL A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk Phone: +44-121-414-4775 (Sec 3711) Fax: +44-121-414-4281