Can We Introspectively Test the Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness?

Global Workspace Theory is among the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Its central claim: You consciously experience something if and only if it's being broadly broadcast in a "global workspace" so that many parts of your mind can access it at once -- speech, deliberate action, explicit reasoning, memory formation, and so on. Because the workspace has very limited capacity, only a few things can occupy it at any one moment.

Therefore, if Global Workspace Theory is correct, conscious experience should be sparse. Almost everything happening in your sensory systems right now -- the feeling of your shirt on your back, the hum of traffic in the distance, the aftertaste of coffee, the posture of your knees -- should be processed entirely nonconsciously unless it is currently the topic of attention.

This is a strong, testable prediction of the theory. And it seems like the test should be extremely easy! Just do a little introspection. Is your experience (a.) narrow and attention-bound or (b.) an abundant welter far outrunning attention? If (b) is correct, Global Workspace Theory is refuted from the comfort of our armchairs.[1]

The experiential gap between the two possibilities is huge. Shouldn't the difference be as obvious as peering through a keyhole versus standing in an open field?

Most people, I've found, do find the answer obvious. The problem is: They find it obvious in different directions. Some find it obvious that experience is a welter. Others find it obvious that experience contains only a few items at a time. We could assume that everyone is right about their own experience and wrong only if they generalize to others. Maybe Global Workspace Theory is the architecture of consciousness for some of us but not for everyone? That would be pretty wild! There are no obvious behavioral or physiological differences between the welter-people and the workspace-only people.

More plausibly, someone is making an introspective mistake. Proponents of either view can devise an error theory to explain the other.

Welter theorists can suggest memory error: It might seem as though only a few things occupy your experience at once because that's all you remember. The unattended stuff is immediately forgotten. But that doesn't imply it was never experienced.

Workspace theorists, conversely, can appeal to the "refrigerator light error": A child might think the refrigerator light is always on because it's always on when they check to see if it's on. Similarly, you might think you have constant tactile experience of your feet in your shoes because the act of checking generates the very experience you take yourself to be finding.

[illustration by Nicolas Demers, p. 218 of The Weirdness of the World]

In 2007, I tested this systematically. I gave people beepers and collected reports on whether they were having unattended tactile experience in their left feet and unattended visual experience in their far right visual periphery in the last undisturbed moment before a random beep. The results were a noisy mess. Participants began with very different presuppositions, came to very different conclusions (often defying their initial presuppositions), plausibly committed both memory errors and refrigerator-light errors, and plausibly also made other mistakes such as timing mistakes, missing subtle experiences, and being too influenced by expectation and theory. I abandoned the experiment in defeat.

But matters are even worse than I thought back in 2007. I'm increasingly convinced that the presence or absence of consciousness is not an on/off matter. There can be borderline cases in which experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent. Although such borderline cases are hard to positively imagine, that might just be a problem with our standards of imagination. The feeling of your feet in your shoes, then, might be only borderline conscious, neither determinately part of your experience nor wholly nonconscious, but somehow in between -- contra both the welter view and the workspace view.

So there are three possibilities, not two. And if introspection struggles to distinguish the original pair, it fares even worse with a third. Arguably, we don't even have a coherent idea of what borderline consciousness is like. After all, there is nothing determinate it's like. Otherwise, it wouldn't be borderline. As soon as we attempt to introspect borderline consciousness, either it inflates into full consciousness or it vanishes.

If consciousness includes many borderline cases, that's probably also bad news for Global Workspace Theory, which generally treats experiences as either determinately in the workspace or determinately out of it. However, closely related broadcast theories, like Dennett's fame-in-the-brain theory, might better accommodate borderline cases. (One can be borderline famous.)

There's a profound experiential difference between a world in which we have a teeming plethora of peripheral experiences in many modalities simultaneously and a world in which experience is limited to only a few things in attention at any one time. This difference is in principle introspectible. And if introspective inquiry vindicates the welter view, or even the borderline view, one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness, Global Workspace Theory, must be false. The decisive evidence is right here, all the time, in each of our ongoing streams of experience! Unfortunately, we turn out to be disappointingly incompetent at introspection.

[Thanks to Bertille de Vlieger for a delightful interview yesterday morning which triggered these thoughts. Look for a written version of the interview eventually in the French philosophy journal Implications Philosophiques.]

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[1] Ned Block's well-known discussion of the Sperling display is similar in approach. We can't attend simultaneously to all twelve letters in a 3 x 4 grid, but it does seem introspectively plausible that we visually experience all twelve letters. Therefore, experience overflows attention. (I'm simplifying Block's argument, but I hope this is fair enough.) The problem with Block's version of the argument is that it's plausible that we can attend, in a diffuse way, to the entire display. Attention arguably comes in degrees, and the fact that you're looking at a 3 x 4 display of letters might be represented in your workspace. To move entirely outside of attention, it's safest to shift modalities and choose something far removed from any task -- for example the pressure of your shoes against your feet when that is the farthest thing from your mind. Is that part of your experience?

An Objection to Chalmers's Fading Qualia Argument

[Note: This is a long and dense post. Buckle up.]

In one chapter of his influential 1996 book, David Chalmers defends the view that consciousness arises in virtue of the functional organization of the brain rather than in virtue of the brain's material substrate.  That is, if there were entities that were functionally/organizationally identical to humans but made out of different stuff (e.g. silicon chips), they would be just as conscious as we are.  He defends this view, in part, with what he calls the Fading Qualia Argument.  The argument is enticing, but I think it doesn't succeed.

Chalmers, Robot, and the Target Audience of the Argument

Drawing on thought experiments from Pylyshyn, Savitt, and Cuda, Chalmers begins by imagining two cases: himself and "Robot".  Robot is a functional isomorph of Chalmers, but constructed of different materials.  For concreteness (but this isn't essential), we might imagine that Robot has a brain with the exact same neural architecture as Chalmers' brain, except that the neurons are made of silicon chips.

Because Chalmers and Robot are functional isomorphs, they will respond in the same way to all stimuli.  For example, if you ask Robot if it is conscious, it will emit, "Yes, of course!" (or whatever Chalmers would say if asked that question).  If you step on Robot's toe, Robot will pull its foot back and protest.  And so on.

For purposes of this argument, we don't want to assume that Robot is conscious, despite its architectural and functional similarity to Chalmers.  The Fading Qualia Argument aims to show that Robot is conscious, starting from premises that are neutral on the question.  The aim is to win over those who think that maybe being carbon-based or having certain biochemical properties is essential for consciousness, so that a functional isomorph made of the wrong stuff would only misleadingly look like it's conscious.  The target audience for this argument is someone concerned that for all Robot's similar mid-level architecture and all of its seeming "speech" and "pain" behavior, Robot really has no genuinely conscious experiences at all, in virtue of lacking the right biochemistry -- that it's merely a consciousness mimic, rather than a genuinely conscious entity.

The Slippery Slope of Introspection

Chalmers asks us to imagine a series of cases intermediate between him and Robot.  We might imagine, for example, a series each of whose members differs by one neuron.  Entity 0 is Chalmers.  Entity 1 is Chalmers with one silicon chip neuron replacing a biological neuron.  Entity 2 is Chalmers with two silicon chip neurons replacing two biological neurons.  And so on to Entity N, Robot, all of whose neurons are silicon.  Again, the exact nature of the replacements isn't essential to the argument.  The core thought is just this: Robot is a functional isomorph of Chalmers, but constructed of different materials; and between Chalmers and Robot we can construct a series of cases each of which is only a tiny bit different from its neighbors.

Now if this is a coherent setup, the person who wants to deny consciousness to Robot faces a dilemma.  Either (1.) at some point in the series, consciousness suddenly winks out -- between Entity I and Entity I+1, for some value of I.  Or (2.) consciousness somehow slowly fades away in the series.

Option (1) seems implausible.  Chalmers, presumably, has a rich welter of conscious experience (at least, we can choose a moment at which he does).  A priori, it would be odd if the big metaphysical jump from that rich welter of experience to zero experience would occur with an arbitrarily tiny change between Entity I and Entity I+1.  And empirically, our best understanding of the brain is that tiny, single-neuron-and-smaller differences rarely have such dramatic effects (unless they cascade into larger differences).  Consciousness is a property of large assemblies of neurons, robust to tiny changes.

But option (2) also seems implausible, for it would seem to involve massive introspective error.  Suppose that Entity I is an intermediate case with very much reduced, but not entirely absent, consciousness.  Chalmers suggests that instead of having bright red visual experience, Entity I has tepid pink experience.  (I'm inclined to think that this isn't the best way to think about fading or borderline consciousness, since it's natural to think of pink experiences as just different in experienced content from red cases, rather than less experiential than red cases.  But as I've argued elsewhere, genuinely borderline consciousness is difficult or impossible to imaginatively conceive, so I won't press Chalmers on this point.)

By stipulation, since Entity I is a functional isomorph, it will give the same reports about its experience as Chalmers himself would.  In other words, Entity I -- despite being barely or borderline conscious -- will say "Oh yes, I have vividly bright red experiences -- a whole welter of exciting phenomenology!"  Since this is false of Entity I, Entity I is just wrong about that.  But also, since it's a functional isomorph, there's no weird malfunction going on either, that would explain this strange report.  We ordinarily think that people are reliable introspectors of their experience; so we should think the same of Entity I.  Thus, option (2), gradual fading, generates an implausible tension: We have to believe that Entity I is radically introspectively mistaken; but that involves committing to an implausible degree of introspective error.

Therefore, neither option (1) nor option (2) is plausible.  But if Robot were not conscious, either (1) or (2) would have to be true for at least one Entity I.  Therefore, Robot is conscious.  And therefore, functional isomorphism is sufficient for consciousness.  It doesn't matter what materials an entity is made of.

We Can't Trust Robot "Introspection"

I acknowledge that it's an appealing argument.  However, Chalmers' response to option (2) should be unconvincing to the argument's target audience.

I have argued extensively that human introspection, even of currently ongoing conscious experience, is highly unreliable.  However, my reply today won't lean on that aspect of my work.  What I want to argue instead is that the assumed audience for this argument should not think that the introspection (or "introspection" -- I'll explain the scare quotes in a minute) of Entity I is reliable.

Recall that the target audience for the argument is someone who is antecedently neutral about Robot's consciousness.  But of course by stipulation, Robot will say (or "say") the same things about its experiences that Chalmers will say.  Just like Chalmers, and just like Entity I, it will say "Oh yes, I have vividly bright red experiences -- a whole welter of exciting phenomenology!"  The audience for Chalmers' argument must therefore initially doubt that such statements, or seeming statements, as issued by Robot, are reliable signals of consciousness.  If the audience already trusted these reports, there would be no need for the argument.

There are two possible ways to conceptualize Robot's reports, if they are not accurate introspections: (a.) They might be inaccurate introspections.  (b.) They might not be introspections at all.  Option (a) allows that Robot, despite lacking conscious experience, is capable of meaningful speech and is capable of introspecting, though any introspective reports of consciousness will be erroneous.  Option (b) is preferred if we think that genuinely meaningful language requires consciousness and/or that no cognitive process that fails to target a genuinely conscious experience in fact deserves to be called introspection.  On option (b) Robot only "introspects" in scare quotes.  It doesn't actually introspect.

Option (a) thus assumes introspective fallibilism, while option (b) is compatible with introspective infallibilism.

The audience who is to be convinced by the slow-fade version of the Fading Qualia Argument must both trust the introspective reports (or "introspective reports") of the intermediate entities while not trusting those of Robot.  Given that some of the intermediate entities are extremely similar to Robot -- e.g., Entity N-1, who is only one neuron different -- it would be awkward and implausible to assume reliability for all the intermediate entities while not doing so for Robot.

Now plausibly, if there is a slow fadeout, it's not going to be still going on with an entity as close to Robot as Entity N-1, so the relevant cases will be somewhere nearer the middle.  Stipulate, then, two values I and J not very far separated (0 < I < J < N) such that we can reasonably assume that if Robot in nonconscious, so is Entity J, while we cannot reasonably assume that if Robot is nonconscious, so is Entity I.  For consistency with their doubts about the introspective reports (or "introspective reports") of Robot, the target audience should have similar doubts about Entity J.  But now it's unclear why they should be confident in the reports of Entity I, which by stipulation is not far separated from Entity J.  Maybe it's a faded case, despite its report of vivid experience.

Here's one way to think about it.  Setting aside introspective skepticism about normal humans, we should trust the reports of Chalmers / Entity 0.  But ex hypothesi, the target audience for the argument should not trust the "introspective reports" of Robot / Entity N.  It's then an open question whether we should trust the reports of the relevant intermediate, possibly experientially faded, entities.  We could either generalize our trust of Chalmers down the line or generalize our mistrust of Robot up the line.  Given the symmetry of the situation, it's not clear which the better approach is, or how far down or up the slippery slope we should generalize the trust or mistrust.

For Chalmers' argument to work, we must be warranted in trusting the reports of Entity I at whatever point the fade-out is happening.  To settle this question, Chalmers needs to do more than appeal to the general reliability of introspection in normal human cases and the lack of functional differences between him, Robot, and the intermediate entities.  Even an a priori argument that introspection is infallible will not serve his purposes, because then the open question becomes whether Robot and the relevant intermediate entities are actually introspecting.

Furthermore, if there is introspective error by Entity I, there's a tidy explanation of why that introspective error would be unsurprising.  For simplicity, assume that introspection occurs in the Introspection Module located in the pineal gland, and that it works by sending queries to other parts of the brain, asking questions like "Hey, occipital lobe, is red experience going on there right now?", reaching introspective judgments based on the signals that it gets in reply.  If Entity I has a functioning, biological Introspection Module but a replaced, silicon occipital lobe, and if there really is no red experience going on in the occipital lobe, we can see why Entity I would be mistaken: Its Introspection Module is getting exactly the same signal from the occipital lobe as it would receive if red experience were in fact present.

It's highly doubtful that introspection is as neat a process as I've just described.  But the point remains.  If Entity I is introspectively unreliable, a perfectly good explanation beckons: Whatever cognitive processes subserve the introspective reporting are going to generate the same signals -- including misleading signals, if experience is absent -- as they would in the case where experience is present and accurately reported.  Thus, unreliability would simply be what we should expect.

Now it's surely in some respects more elegant if we can treat Chalmers, Robot, and all the intermediate entities analogously, as conscious and accurately reporting their experience.  The Fading Qualia setup nicely displays the complexity or inelegance of thinking otherwise.  But the intended audience of the Fading Qualia argument is someone who wonders whether experience tracks so neatly onto function, someone who suspects that nature might in fact be complex or inelegant in exactly this respect, such that it's (nomologically/naturally/scientifically) possible to have a behavioral/functional isomorph who "reports" experiences but who in fact entirely lacks them.  The target audience who is initially neutral about the consciousness of Robot should thus remain unmoved by the Fading Qualia argument.

This isn't to say I disagree with Chalmers' conclusion.  I've advanced a very different argument for a similar conclusion: The Copernican Argument for Alien Consciousness, which turns on the idea that it's unlikely that, among all behaviorally sophisticated alien species of radically different structure that probably exist in the universe, humans would be so lucky as to be among the special few with just the right underlying stuff to be conscious.  Central to the Fading Qualia argument in particular is Chalmers' appeal to the presumably reliable introspection of the intermediate entities.  My concern is that we cannot justifiably make that presumption.

Dancing Qualia

Chalmers pairs the Fading Qualia argument with a related but more complex Dancing Qualia argument, which he characterizes as the stronger of the two arguments.  Without entering into detail, Chalmers posits for sake of reductio ad absurdum that the alternative medium (e.g., silicon) hosts experiences but of a different qualitative character (e.g., color inverted).  We install a system in the alternative medium as a backup circuit with effectors and transducers to the rest of the brain.  For example, in addition to having a biological occipital lobe, you also have a functionally identical silicon backup occipital lobe.  Initially the silicon occipital lobe backup circuit is powered off.  But you can power it on -- and power off your biological occipital lobe -- by flipping a switch.  Since the silicon lobe is functionally identical to the biological lobe, the rest of the brain should register no difference.

Now, if you switch between normal neural processing and the backup silicon processor, you should have very different experience (per the assumption of the reductio) but you should not be able to introspectively report that different experience (since the backup circuit interacts identically with the rest of the brain).  That would again be a strange failure of introspection.  So (per the rules of reductio) we conclude that the initial premise was mistaken: Normal neural processing should generate the same types of experience as functionally identical processing in a silicon processor.

(I might quibble that you-with-backup-circuit is not functionally isomorphic to you-without-backup-circuit -- after all, you now have a switch and two different parallel processor streams -- and if consciousness supervenes on the whole system rather than just local parts, that's possibly a relevant change that will cause the experience to be different from the experience of either an unmodified brain or an isomorphic silicon brain.  But set this issue aside.)

The Dancing Qualia argument is vulnerable on the introspective accuracy assumption, much as the Fading Qualia argument is.  Again for simplicity, suppose a biological Introspection Module.  Suppose that what is backed up is the portion of the brain that is locally responsible for red experience.  Ex hypothesi, the silicon backup gives rise to non-red experience but delivers to the Introspection Module exactly the same inputs as that module would normally receive from an organic brain part experiencing red.  This is exactly the type of case where we should expect introspection to be unreliable.

Consider an analogous case of vision.  Looking at a green tree 50 feet away in good light, my vision is reliable.  Now substitute a red tree in the same location and a mechanism between me and the tree such that all the red light is converted into green light, so that I get exactly the same visual input I would normally receive from looking at a green tree.  Even if vision is highly reliable in normal circumstances, it is no surprise in this particular circumstance if I mistakenly judge the red tree to be green!

As I acknowledged before, this is a cartoon model of introspection.  Here's another way introspection might work: What matters is what is represented in the Introspection Module itself.  So if the introspection module says "red", necessarily I experience red.  In that case, in order to get Dancing Qualia, we need to create an alternate backup circuit for the Introspection Module itself.  When we flip the switch, we switch from Biological Introspection Module to Silicon Introspection Module.  Ex hypothesi, the experiences really are different but the Introspection Module represents them functionally in the same way, and the inputs and outputs to and from the rest of the brain don't differ.  So of course there won't be any experiential difference that I would conceptualize and report.  There would be some difference in qualia, but I wouldn't have the conceptual tools or memorial mechanisms to notice or remember the difference.

This is not obviously absurd.  In ordinary life we arguably experience minor version of this all the time: I experience some specific shade of maroon.  After a blink, I experience some slightly different shade of maroon.  I might entirely fail to conceptualize or notice the difference: My color concepts and color memory are not so fine grained.  The hypothesized red/green difference in Dancing Qualia is a much larger difference -- so it's not a problem of fineness of grain -- but fundamentally the explanation of my failure is similar: I have no concept or memory suited to track the difference.

On more holist/complicated views of introspection, the story will be more complicated, but I think the burden of proof would be on Chalmers to show that some blend of the two strategies isn't sufficient to generate suspicions of introspective unreliability in the Dancing Qualia cases.

Related Arguments

This response to the Fading Qualia argument draws on David Billy Udell's and my similar critique of Susan Schneider's Chip Test for AI consciousness (see also my chapter "How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot" in A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures).

Although this critique of the Fading Qualia argument has been bouncing around in my head since I first read The Conscious Mind in the late 1990s, it felt a little complex for a blog post but not quite enough for a publishable paper.  But reading Ned Block's similar critique in his 2023 book has inspired me to express my version of the critique.  I agree with Block's observations that "the pathology that [Entity I] has [is] one of the conditions that makes introspection unreliable" (p. 455) and that "cases with which we are familiar provide no precedent for such massive unreliability" (p. 457).

The Disunity of Consciousness in Everyday Experience

A substantial philosophical literature explores the "unity of consciousness": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately experiencing the sound of music but rather having some combined experience of music-with-beer. You might be sitting next to me, sipping the same beer and hearing the same music. But your beer-tasting experience isn't unified with my music-hearing experience. My beer-tasting and music-tasting occur not just simultaneously but in some important sense together in a unified field of experience.

Today I want to suggest that this picture of human experience might be radically mistaken. Philosophers and psychologists sometimes allow that disunity can occur in rare cases (e.g., split-brain subjects) or non-human animals (e.g., the octopus). I want to suggest, instead, that even in ordinary human experience unity might be the exception and disunity the rule.

Suppose I'm driving absentmindedly along a familiar route and thinking about philosophy. Three types of experience might occur simultaneously (at least on "rich" views of consciousness): visual experience of the road, tactile and proprioceptive experience of my hands on the wheel and the position of my body, and conscious thoughts about a philosophical issue. Functionally, they might connect only weakly: the philosophical thoughts aren't much influenced by the visual scene, and although the visual scene might trigger changes in the position of my hands as I adjust to stay in my lane, that might be a causal relationship between two not-very-integrated sensorimotor processes. (Contrast this with the tight integration of the parts of the visual scene each with the other and the integration of the felt position of my two hands and arms.) Phenomenologically, that is to say experientially, must these experiences be bound together? That's the standard philosophical view, but why should we believe it? What evidence is there for it?

One might say it's just introspectively obvious that these experiences are unified. Well, it's not obvious to me. This non-obviousness might be easier to grasp if we carefully separate concurrent introspection from retrospective memory.

In the targeted moment, I'm not introspecting. I'm absorbed in driving and thinking about philosophy. After I start introspecting, it might seem obvious that yes, of course, I am having a visual experience together with a tactile experience together with some philosophical thoughts. But this introspective act alters the situation. I am no longer driving and thinking in the ordinary unselfreflective way. It seems at least conceptually possible that the act of introspection creates unity where none was before. Our target is not what things are like in (presumably rare) moments of explicit self-reflection, but rather in the ordinary flow of experience. Even if experiences are unified in moments of explicit reflective introspection, we can't straightaway infer that ordinary unreflective experiences are similarly unified. To move from one type of case to the other, some further argument or evidence is necessary.

The refrigerator light error is the error of assuming that some process or property is constantly present just because it's present whenever you check to see if it's present. Consider a four-year-old who thinks that the refrigerator light is always on because it's on whenever she checks it. The act of checking turns it on. Similarly, I suggest: The act of checking to see if your experience is unified might create unification where none was before. It might, for example, create a higher-order representation of yourself as conscious of this together with that; and that higher-order representation might be the very thing that unifies two previously disparate streams. Concurrent introspection cannot reveal whether your experience was unified before the act of introspective checking.

[illustration by Nicolas Demers, p. 218 of The Weirdness of the World]

Granting this, one might suggest that we can check retrospectively, by remembering whether our experiences were unified. However, this is a challenging cognitive task, for two reasons.

First, you can't do this easily at will. Normally, you won't think to engage in such a retrospective assessment unless you're already reflecting on whether your experience is unified. This ruins the test; you're already self-conscious before you think to engage in the retrospection. If you reflect retrospectively on your experience just a moment before, that experience won't be representative of the ordinary unselfconscious flow of experiences. Alternatively, you might reflect on your experiences from several minutes before, when you know you weren't thinking about the matter. But retrospective reflection over such an extended time frame is epistemically dubious: subject to large distortions due to theory-ladenness, background presupposition, and memory loss.

The best approach might be to somehow catch yourself off-guard, with a preformed intention to immediately retrospect on the presence or absence of unity. One might, for example, employ a random beeper. Such beeper methodologies are probably an improvement over more informal attempts at experiential retrospection. But (1.) even such immediately retrospective judgments are likely to be laden with error; and (2.) I've attempted this myself a few times over the past week, and the task feels difficult rather than obvious. It's difficult because...

Second, the judgment is subtle and structural. Subtle, structural judgments about our own experience are exactly the type of judgments about which -- as I've argued extensively -- people often go wrong (and about which, in conscientious moments, many people appropriately feel uncertainty). How detailed is the periphery of your visual imagery, and how richly colored, and how is depth experienced? Many introspectors find the answers non-obvious, and the answers vary widely between people independently of cognitive performance on seemingly-imagery-related tasks. Another example: How exactly do you experience the bodily components of your emotions, if there are bodily components? That is, how exactly is your current feeling of (say) mild annoyance experienced by you right now (e.g., is it partly in the chest)? Most people I've interviewed will confess substantial uncertainty when I press them for details. Although people seem to be pretty good at reporting the coarse-grained contents of their experiences ("I was thinking about Luz", "I was noticing that the room was kind of hot"), regarding structural features such as the amount of detail in our imagery or the bodily components of emotion, we are far from infallible -- indeed we are worse at such introspective tasks than we are at reporting similar mid-level structural features of ordinary objects in the world around us.

To get a sense of how subtle and structural the unity question is, notice what the question is not. The question isn't: Was there visual experience? Was there tactile/proprioceptive experience? Were there conscious thoughts about philosophy? By stipulation, we are assuming that you already know that the answer to all three is yes.

Nor is the question about the contents of those visual, tactile/proprioceptive, and cognitive experiences. Maybe those, too, are readily enough retrospectable.

Nor is the question even whether all three of those experiences feel as though they belong among the immediately past experiences of my currently unified self. Presumably they do. It doesn't follow that at the moment they were occurring, there was a unified experience of vision-with-hands-on-the-wheel-with-philosophical-thoughts. There's a difference between a unified memory now of those (possibly disunified) experiences and a memory now of those experiences having been unified then. Analogously, from the fact that there are three balls together in your hand now it doesn't follow that those balls were together a moment ago. Your memory / your hand might be bringing together what was previously separate.

The question is whether those three experiences were, a moment ago when you were engaged in unselfconscious ordinary action, experienced together as a unity -- whether there wasn't just visual experience and tactile experience and philosophical thought experiences but visual-experience-with-tactile-experience-with-philosophical-thoughts in the same unified sense that you can presumably now hold those three experience-types together in a single, unified field of consciousness. What I'm saying -- and what I'm inviting you to set yourself up (using a beeper or alarm) to discover -- is that the answer is non-obvious. I can imagine myself and others going wrong about the matter, legitimately disagreeing, being perhaps too captured by philosophical theory or culturally contingent presuppositions. None of us should probably wholly trust our retrospective judgments about this.

Is there a structural, cognitive-architecture argument that our experiences are generally unified? Maybe yes. But only under some highly specific theoretical assumptions. For example, if you subscribe to a global workspace theory, according to which cognitive processes are conscious if and only if they are shared to a functional workspace that is accessible to a wide range of downstream cognitive processes and if you hold that this workspace normally unifies whatever is being processed into a single representational whole, then you have a structural argument for the unity of consciousness. Alternatively, you might accept a higher-order theory of consciousness and hold that in ordinary cognition the relevant higher-order representation is generally a single representation with complex conjoined contents (e.g., "visual and tactile and philosophical-thought processes are all going on"). But it's not clear why we should accept such views -- especially the part after the "and" in my characterizations. (For example, David Rosenthal's higher-order account of phenomenal unity is different and more complicated.)

I'm inclined to think, in fact, that the balance of structural considerations tilt against unity. Our various cognitive processes run to a substantial extent independently. They influence each other, but they aren't tightly integrated. Arguably, this is true even for conscious processes, such as thoughts of philosophy and visual experiences of a road. Even on relatively thin or sparse views of consciousness, on which only one or a few modalities can be conscious in a moment, this is probably true; but it seems proportionately more plausible the richer and more abundant conscious experience is. Suppose we have constant tactile experience of our feet in our shoes, constant auditory experience of the background noises in our environment, constant proprioceptive experience of the position of our body, constant experience of our levels of hunger, sleepiness/energy, our emotional experiences, our cognitive experiences and inner speech, etc. -- a dozen or more very different phenomenal types all at once. You adventurously outrun the currently available evidence of cognitive psychology if you suggest that there's also constantly some unifying cognitive process that stitches this multitude together into a cognitive unity. This isn't to deny that modalities sometimes cooperate tightly (e.g., the McGurk effect). But to treat tight integration as the standard condition of all aspects of experience all the time is a much stronger claim. Sensorimotor integration among modalities is common and important, yes. But overall, the human mind is loosely strung together.

Here's another consideration, though I don't know whether the reader will think it renders my conclusion more plausible or less. I've increasingly become convinced that the phenomena of consciousness come in degrees, rather than being sharp-boundaried. If we generalize this spirit of gradualism to questions of phenomenal unity, then it's plausible that there aren't only two options -- that A, B, and C are either entirely discretely experienced or fully unified -- but instead a spectrum of cases of partial unity. Our cognitive processes of course do influence each other, even disparate-seeming ones like my philosophical thoughts and my visual experience of the road (if there's a crisis on the road, for example, philosophy drops from my mind). So perhaps our ordinary condition, before rare unifying introspective and reflective actions, involves degrees of partial, imperfect unity, rather than complete unity or complete disunity. (If you object that this is inconceivable, my reply is that you might be applying an inappropriate standard of "conceivability".)

The arguments above occurred to me only a week ago. (As it happened, I was absent-mindedly driving, thinking about philosophy.) So they haven't had much time to influence my phenomenological self-conception. But I do find myself tentatively feeling like my immediate retrospections support rather than conflict with the ideas expressed here. When I retrospect on immediately past experiences, I recall strands of this and that, not phenomenologically unified into a whole but at best only loosely joined. The introspective moment now strikes me as a matter of gathering together what was previously adjacent but not yet fully connected.

If you know of others who have expressed this idea, I welcome references.

[for helpful conversation, thanks to Sophie Nelson]

New Paper in Draft: Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons

I have a new paper in draft, for a special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies.  Although the paper makes reference to a target article by Francois Kammerer and Keith Frankish, it should be entirely comprehensible without knowledge of the target article, and hopefully it's of independent interest.

Abstract:

Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection, and mentality in general, beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a technologically possible "ancillary mind" modeled on a system envisioned in Ann Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between an intimately communicating group of individuals and a single, unified, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a gray zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither determinately one person or conscious subject nor determinately many persons or conscious subjects. Advocates of a Phase Transition View of personhood or Discrete Phenomenal Realism might reject the possibility of indeterminacy concerning personal identity and subject individuation. However, the Phase Transition View is empirically unwarranted, and Discrete Phenomenal Realism is metaphysically implausible. If ancillary minds defy discrete countability, the same might be true for actual group minds on Earth and human cases of multiple personality or Dissociative Identity.

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Full draft here.  As usual, comments, questions, objections welcome, either as comments on this post or directly by email to my academic address.

On the Apparent Inconceivability of Borderline Cases of Consciousness

Let's call a state or process a borderline case of consciousness if it is in the indeterminate gray zone between being a conscious state or process and being a nonconscious state or process. Consider gastropods, for example. Is there something it's like to be a garden snail? Or is there nothing it's like? If borderline consciousness is possible then there's a possibility between those two: the possibility that there's kind of something it's like. Consider other vague predicates or properties, such as greenness and baldness. Between determinate baldness and determinate non-baldness is a gray zone of being kind of bald. Between determinate greenness and determinate non-greenness there's a range of kind of greenish shades, with no sharp, dichotomous boundary. Might consciousness be like that? Might some organisms in that in-betweenish zone?

For a human case, consider waking from anaesthesia or dreamless sleep. Before you wake you are (let's suppose) determinately nonconscious. At some point, you are determinately conscious, though maybe still feeling confused and hazy-minded, still getting your bearings. Must the transition between the nonconscious and the conscious state always be sharp? Or might there be some cases in which you are only kind of conscious, i.e., there's only kind of something it's like to be you?

We need to be careful about the concept of "consciousness" here. You might be only half-aroused and not fully coherent, responsible, or knowledgeable of your location in time and space. Such a confused state has a certain familiar phenomenal character. But that is not a borderline case of consciousness in the intended sense. If you are determinately having a stream of confused experience, then you are determinately conscious in the standard philosophical sense of "conscious". (For a fuller definition of "conscious", see here.). An in-between, borderline case would have to be a case in which it's neither quite right to say that you are having confused experiences nor quite right to say that you aren't.

It is commonly objected that borderline cases of consciousness are inconceivable. (Michael Antony and Jonathan Simon offer sophisticated versions of this objection.) We can imagine that there's something it's like to be a particular garden snail at a particular moment, or we can imagine that there's nothing it's like, but it seems impossible to imagine its kind of like being something. How might such an in-between state feel, for the snail? As soon as we try to answer that question, we seem forced either to say that it wouldn't feel like anything or to contemplate various types of conscious experiences the snail might have. We can imagine the snail's having some flow of experience, however limited, or we can imagine the snail to be an experiential blank. But we can't in the same way imagine some in-between state such that it's neither determinately the case that the snail has conscious experiences nor determinately the case that the snail lacks conscious experiences. The lights are, so to speak, either on or off, and even a dim light is a light.

Similarly, as soon as we try to imagine the transition between dreamless sleep and waking, we start to imagine waking experiences, or confused half-awake experiences, that is, experiences of some sort or other. We imagine that it's like nothing - nothing - nothing - something - something - something. Between nothing and something is no middle ground of half-something. A half-something is already a something. Borderline consciousness, it seems, must already be a kind of consciousness unless it is no consciousness at all.

I'm inclined to defend the existence of borderline consciousness. Yet I grant the intuitive appeal of the reasoning above. Before admitting the existence of borderline cases of consciousness, we want to know what such a borderline state would be like. We want a sense of it, a feel for it. We want to remember some borderline experiences of our own. Before accepting that a snail might be borderline conscious, neither determinately lights-on nor determinately lights-off, we want at least a speculative gesture toward the experiential character of such in-betweenish phenomenology.

Although I feel the pull of this way of thinking, it is a paradoxical demand. It's like the Catch-22 of needing to complete a form to prove that you're incompetent, the completing of which proves that you're competent. It's like demanding that the borderline shade of only-kind-of-green must match some sample of determinate green before you're willing to acept that it's a borderline shade that doesn't match any such sample. An implicit standard of conceivability drives the demand, which it is impossible to meet without self-contradiction.

The implicit standard appears to be this: Before granting the existence of borderline consciousness, we want to be able to imagine what it would be like to be in such a state. But of course there is not anything determinate it is like to be in such a state! The more we try to imagine what it would be like, the worse we miss our target. If you look through a filter that shows only determinately bald people, you won't see anyone who is borderline bald. But you shouldn't conclude that no borderline bald people exist. The fault is in the filter. The fault is in the imaginative demand.

In another sense, borderline cases of consciousness are perfectly conceivable. They're not like four-sided triangles. There's no self-contradiction in the very idea. If you're unhappy with your inability to imagine them, it could be just that you desire something that you can't reasonably expect to have. The proper response might be to shed the desire.

A philosophically inclinded middle-schooler, on their first introduction to imaginary numbers, might complain that they can't conceive of a number whose square is -1. What is this strange thing? It fits nowhere on the number line. You can't hold 3i pebbles. You can't count 3i sheep. So called "imaginary numbers" might seem to this middle-schooler to be only an empty game with no proper reference. And yet there is no contradiction in the mathematics. We can use imaginary numbers. We can even frame physical laws in terms of them, as in quantum mechanics. In a certain way, imaginary numbers are, despite their name, unimaginable. But the implicit criterion of imagination at work -- picturing 3i sheep, for example -- is inappropriate to the case.

We can conceive of borderline cases of consciousness, in a weaker sense, by forming a positive conception of clear cases of consciousness (such as regular waking consciousness and such as the experience of feeling disoriented after waking) and by imagining in a different way, not from the inside, cases in which consciousness is determinately absent (such as dreamless sleep), and then by gesturing toward the possibility of something between. There is, I think, good reason to suppose that there are such in-between, borderline states. Nature is rarely sharply discontinuous. On almost every theory of consciousness, the phenomena of consciousness are grounded in states of the brain that aren't sharp-boundaried. (I'm working on an article that defends this view at length, which I hope to have in circulating shape soon.) This is fairly abstract way of conceiving of such states, but it is a conception.

If borderline cases were common enough and important enough in human life, we might grow accustomed to the idea and even develop an ordinary language term for them. We might say, "ah yes, one of those jizzy states, in the intermediate zone betweeen consciousness and nonconsciousness." But we have no need for such a concept in everyday life. We care little about and needn't track borderline cases. We can afford to be loose in talking about gradual awakenings. Similarly for nonhuman animals. For everyday purposes, we can adequately enough imagine them either as determinately conscious or as nonconscious machines. There has never been a serious linguistic pressure toward an accurate heterophenomenology of nonhuman animals, much less a heterophenomenology with a dedicated label for in-between conditions.

Thus, if we accept the existence of borderline cases of consciousness on general theoretical grounds, as I'm inclined to think we should, we will need to reconcile ourselves with a certain sort of dissatisfaction. It's incoherent to attempt to imagine, in any determinate way, what it would be like to be in such a state, since there's nothing determinate it would be like. So first-person imaginative transportation and phenomenological memory won't give us a good handle on the idea. Nor do we have a well-developed science of consciousness to explain them or an ordinary folk concept of them that can make us comfortable with their existence through repeated use.

It's understandable to want more. But from the fact that I cannot seize the culprit and display their physiognomy, it does not follow that the jewels were stolen by no one.

[image source]

Why Are We Such Bad Introspectors?

Sahar Joakim interviewed me earlier this week for her philosophy video series.  Thanks, Sahar!  We discussed the nature of consciousness, the unreliability of introspective reports of conscious experience, and how sparse or abundant consciousness is, both across animal species (e.g., are snails conscious?) and in your own mind (e.g., do you have constant tactile experience of your feet in your shoes?).

At one point Sahar asked, if it's true that people are bad introspectors, why is that so?  What makes introspection so difficult?  I have a theory about this, but I've never published an article directly on the topic.  So here's a brief discussion (some of the below is adapted from Chapter 3.3 of my 2007 book with Russ Hurlburt).

Before getting into the details, let me briefly sketch my target.  The principal target of my skepticism about introspection concerns large-to-medium-sized structural features of currently ongoing conscious experience.  An example of what I'm not skeptical about is this: If you think you're thinking of a banana, probably it's true that you are thinking of a banana.  The introspective judgment "I'm thinking of a banana" might even contain within it the thought of a banana, making it automatically self-fulfilling.

However, what you don't know so well, I've argued, are the structural features of that thought, for example, whether it is in inner speech (words you silently speak to yourself), or inner hearing (auditory imagery that is experienced as being more passive than inner speech), or whether it is to some extent also, or instead, an imageless/wordless "unsymbolized thought", or....  Even if you might rightly be confident about the coarsest-level distinction here -- for example, that it's a thought specifically in inner speech as opposed to some other modality -- the basic structural features of that inner speech experience can be difficult to know.  Is the speech at a normal pace relative to ordinary speech or does it transpire more quickly?  Is the speech experienced as located somewhere, e.g., in the center of your head, versus somewhere else or nowhere?  Is there some distinctive feeling of understanding that accompanies the inner speech?  (See Chapter 4 of my book with Hurlburt for discussion of these issues in the context of an actual sampled instance of reported inner speech by an introspective research participant.)

Alternatively, consider your current visual experience.  How stable is it?  How clear and distinct are shapes and colors in the periphery?  It is in some respect flat, like a photograph, or does it have some real depth beyond what is possible in a photograph?  If the latter, does the depth of it change dramatically when you close one eye?  (See here, here, and here for more discussion of these issues.)

You might not be convinced that introspection of the large-to-medium-sized structural features of your ongoing conscious experience is as difficult as I suggest.  But hopefully you at least have a sense of what my position is.  Now, to Sahar's question.  Why is it so difficult?  In the interview, I listed three reasons.  Here, I'll expand those reasons into five.  None of these reasons, by itself, needs to make introspection super difficult.  But combined, they create quite a set of obstacles to good self-knowledge.

First, experience is fleeting and changeable – or so it seems to me right now as I reflect, introspectively, upon it.  The screen of text before me, as I reread these paragraphs, is relatively steady; but my visual experience as I look at the text is in constant flux.  As my eyes move, the portion that’s clear, the portion that’s hazy, constantly changes.  I blink, I glance away, I change my focus, and my experience shifts.  My eyes slowly adapt to the black and white of the screen, to the contrast with the surrounding desk, to the changing light as the sun goes behind a cloud.  I parse some bit of the page into familiar words as my eye scans down it; I form a visual image, reflecting the content of the discussion; my attention wanders.  All this, it seems, affects my visual experience.

Consider your own experience as you read this paragraph.  The text in your hands changes not a whit, but your visual phenomenology won’t stay still a second, will it?  (Or will it?)  The same is true, I’m inclined to think, for our auditory experience, emotional experience, somatic experience, conscious thought and imagery, taste, and so on: Even when the outside environment is relatively steady, the stream of experience flies swiftly.  It won’t hold still to be examined.

Second, we’re not in the habit of attending introspectively to experience.  Generally, we care more about physical objects in the world around us, and about our and others’ situation and prospects, than about our conscious experience, except when that experience is acutely negative, as with the onset of severe pain.  This may seem strange, given the importance we sometimes claim for “happiness,” which we generally construe as bound up with, or even reducible to, emotional experience – but despite the lip service, few people make a real study of their phenomenology.  We spend much more time thinking about, and have much subtler an appreciation of, our outward occupations and hobbies.  And when we do “introspect,” we tend to think about such things as our motives for past actions, our personality traits and character, our desires for the future.  This is not the sort of introspective attention to currently ongoing (or immediately past) conscious experience around which my skepticism turns (though I am also skeptical of much of this purported knowledge, on different grounds).  Introspective attention to experience is hardly a habitual practice for most, perhaps any, of us, except maybe a few dedicated meditators of a certain sort.

If accurate introspection requires a degree of skill, as I suspect it does, in most people the skill is uncultivated.  Furthermore, relatedly, experience is difficult to remember: Generally what we remember are outward objects and events – or, rather, outward objects and events as interpreted, and possibly misperceived, by us – not our stream of experience as we witness those objects and events.  We remember, usually, that the boss said the work wasn’t up to snuff, not that our visual experience as he said it was such-and-such or that we felt some particular sinking feeling in the stomach afterward.  These conscious experiences fade like dreams in the morning unless, as with dreams, we fix them in mind with deliberate attention within a very short space.  

Third, in part due to our disinterest in conscious experience, the concepts and categories available to characterize conscious experience are limited and derivative.  Most language for sensory experience is adapted from the language we use to describe outward objects of sensation.  Objects are red or square or salty or rough, and usually when we use the words “red” and “square” and “salty” and “rough,” we are referring to the properties of outward objects; but derivatively we also use those words to describe the sensory experiences normally produced by such objects.  That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s prone to invite confusion between the properties of objects and the properties of experiences of those objects.  The practitioners of certain specialties – for example, wine tasting and sound engineering – have refined language to discuss sensory experience, but even here our conceptual categories are only rough tools for describing the overall experience.  And, anyway, isn’t the gustatory experience of eating a burrito as complex as that of tasting a mature wine, and the auditory experience of sitting in a restaurant as complex as that of hearing a well-played violin?  We almost completely lack the concepts and competencies that would allow us to parse and think about, talk about and remember, this complexity.

Fourth, the introspection of current experience requires attention to (or thought about) that experience, at least in the methodologically central case of deliberately introspecting with the aim of producing an accurate report.  Problematic interference between the conscious experience and the introspective activity thus threatens.  Philosophers and psychologists going back at least to August Comte have complained that the act of introspection either alters or destroys the target experience, making accurate report impossible.  Much of experience is skittish – as soon as we think about it, it flits away.  Suppose you reflect on the emotional experience of simple, reactive anger, or the auditory experience of hearing someone speak.  Mightn’t the self-reflective versions of those experiences – those experiences as they present themselves to concurrent introspection – be quite different from those experiences as they normally occur in the unselfconscious flow of daily life?  A number of psychologists have attempted to remedy this difficulty by recommending immediate retrospection, or recall, of past experience rather than concurrent introspection as the primary method (e.g., James, 1890/1981).  However, deliberately poising oneself in advance to report something retrospectively may also interfere with the process to be reported; and if one only reports experiences sufficiently salient and interesting to produce immediate spontaneous retrospection, one will get a very biased sample.  Furthermore, retrospection is likely to aggravate the fifth problem, namely: 

Fifth, reports of experience are apt to be considerably influenced, and distorted, by pre-existing theories, opinions, and biases, both cultural and personal, as well as situational demands. The gravity of this problem is difficult to estimate, but in my opinion it is extreme (and considerably larger than the influence of bias and preconception now generally recognized to permeate science as a whole).  Given the changeability and skittishness of experience, and our poor tools and limited practice in conceptualizing and remembering it, we lean especially heavily on implicit assumptions and indirect evidence in reaching our introspective and immediately retrospective judgments.  One major source of such error is what the introspective psychologist E. B. Titchener called “stimulus error”: We know what the world, or a particular stimulus, is like (we know for example that we are seeing a uniformly colored red object), and we are apt to infer that our experience has the properties one might naively expect such a stimulus to produce (e.g., a visual experience of uniform “redness”).  We’re much better accustomed to attend to the world than to our experience, and the difference between sensory attention to outside objects and introspective attention to the sensory experience of those objects is a subtle one; so the former is apt to substitute for the latter.  Even when experience isn’t so easily traceable to an outside object, I’m inclined to think our theories can profoundly affect our reports.  If we think images must be like pictures, we’re more apt to instill reports of imagery with picture-like qualities than if we don’t hold that view.  If we think cognition takes place in the brain, we’re more apt to locate our cognitive phenomenology there than if we think it takes place in the heart.  If we think that memories must be imagistic, we’re more apt than those who don’t think so to report memory images.

Experience is a fast-moving chaos -- a tornado whipping through a magnet factory.  If we approach it without practice and skills, with derivative, second-hand concepts, and with our attention split between the experience itself and the act of trying to figure out what that experience is, no wonder we make a mess of it.  We end up describing at least as much what we expect to be there as what is actually there.

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection

Wesley Buckwalter has a new podcast Journal Entries, in which philosophers spend 30-50 minutes walking listeners through the main ideas of one of their papers, sometimes adding new subsequent reflections or thoughts about future research in the area.

Today's Journal Entry is my 2008 paper, "The Unreliability of Naive Introspection".

I make the case that Descartes had it backwards when he said that the outside world is known better and more directly than our experiences. We are often radically wrong about even basic features of our currently ongoing experience, even when we reflect attentively upon it with sincere effort in favorable conditions.

New Podcast Interview: How Little Thou Can Know Thyself

New interview of me at the MOWE blog.

Topics of discussion:

Our poor knowledge of our own visual experience,

Our poor knowledge of our own visual imagery,

Our poor knowledge of our own emotional experience,

The conscious self riding on the unconscious elephant,

Can we improve at introspection?

Our poor knowledge of when and why we feel happy,

The amazing phenomenon of instant attachment to adoptive children.

Help Me Choose Posts for My Next Book: Belief, Desire, and Self-Knowledge

As I've mentioned, MIT Press will be publishing a book of my selected blog posts and op-eds. I've narrowed it down to a mere (!) 150 posts, in seven broad categories, and I'd love your input in helping me narrow it down more.

moral psychology

technology

belief, desire, and self-knowledge (live as of today)

culture and humor

cosmology, skepticism, and weird minds

consciousness

metaphilosophy and sociology of philosophy

Every week I'll post a poll with about twenty posts or op-eds to rate, on one of those seven themes. No need to rate all of the listed posts! Just rate any posts or op-eds you remember. Each poll will also contain links to the original posts and op-eds so you can refresh your memory if you want.

It would be a great help if you could answer some of these polls -- if only just to click "a favorite" next to a few you remember fondly. I will take this input seriously in selecting what to include in the book.

Today's poll, 11 selected posts on belief, desire, and self-knowledge.

Although I've written more on self-knowledge and belief than any other topic, this is my shortest list among the seven categories -- maybe because so much of my work on this is already in longer papers? Or maybe because my positions on these issues were already well worked out before I started blogging, so I had less of an impulse to toss out new ideas about them? Hm.....

[image source]

Rationally Speaking: Weird Ideas and Opaque Minds

What a pleasure and an honor to have been invited back to Julia Galef's awesome podcast, Rationally Speaking!

If you don't know Rationally Speaking, check it out. The podcast weaves together ideas and guests from psychology, philosophy, economics, and related fields; and Julia has a real knack for the friendly but probing question.

In this episode, Julia and I discuss the value of truth, daringness, and wonder as motives for studying philosophy; the hazards of interpreting other thinkers too charitably; and our lack of self-knowledge about the stream of conscious experience.

Is Consciousness an Illusion?

In the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Keith Frankish argues that consciousness is an illusion -- or at least that "phenomenal consciousness" is an illusion. It doesn't exist.

Now I think there are basically two different things that one could mean in saying "consciousness doesn't exist".

(A.) One is something that seems to be patently absurd and decisively refuted by every moment of lived experience: that there is no such thing as lived experience. If it sounds preposterous to deny that anyone ever has conscious experience, then you're probably understanding the claim correctly. It is a radically strange claim. Of course philosophers do sometimes defend radically strange, preposterous-sounding positions. Among them, this would be a doozy.

(B.) Alternatively, you might think that when a philosopher says that consciousness exists (or "phenomenal consciousness" or "lived, subjective experience" or whatever) she's usually not just saying the almost undeniably obvious thing. You might think that she's probably also regarding certain disputable properties as definitionally essential to consciousness. You might hear her as saying not only that there is lived experience in the almost undeniable sense but also that the target phenomenon is irreducible to the merely physical, or is infallibly knowable through introspection, or is constantly accompanied by a self-representational element, or something like that. Someone who hears the claim that "consciousness exists" in this stronger, more commissive sense might then deny that consciousness does exist, if they think that nothing exists that has those disputable properties. This might be an unintuitive claim, if it's intuitively plausible that consciousness does have those properties. But it's not a jaw dropper.

Admittedly, there has been some unclarity in how philosophers define "consciousness". It's not entirely clear on the face of it what Frankish means to deny the existence of in the article linked above. Is he going for the totally absurd sounding claim, or only the more moderate claim? (Or maybe something somehow in between or slightly to the side of either of these?)

In my view, the best and most helpful definitions of "consciousness" are the less commissive ones. The usual approach is to point to some examples of conscious experiences, while also mentioning some synonyms or evocative phrases. Examples include sensory experiences, dreams, vivid surges of emotion, and sentences spoken silently to oneself. Near synonyms or evocative phrases include "subjective quality", "stream of experience", "that in virtue of which it's like something to be a person". While you might quibble about any particular example or phrase, it is in this sense of "consciousness" that it seems to be undeniable or absurd to deny that consciousness exists. It is in this sense that the existence of consciousness is, as David Chalmers says, a "datum" that philosophers and psychologists need to accept.

Still, we might be dissatisfied with evocative phrases and pointing to examples. For one thing, such a definition doesn't seem very rigorous, compared to an analytic definition. For another thing, you can't do very much a priori with such a thin definition, if you want to build an argument from the existence of consciousness to some bold philosophical conclusion (like the incompleteness of physical science or the existence of an immaterial soul). So philosophers are understandably tempted to add more to the definition -- whatever further claims about consciousness seem plausible to them. But then, of course, they risk adding too much and losing the undeniability of the claim that consciousness exists.

When I read Frankish's article in preprint, I wasn't sure how radical a claim he meant to defend, in denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness. Was he going for the seemingly absurd claim? Or only for the possibly-unintuitive-but-much-less-radical claim?

So I wrote a commentary in which I tried to define "phenomenal consciousness" as innocently as possible, simply by appealing to what I hoped would be uncontroversial examples of it, while explicitly disavowing any definitional commitment to immateriality, introspective infallibility, irreducibility, etc. (final MS version). Did Frankish mean to deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness in that sense?

In one important respect, I should say, definition by example is necessarily substantive or commissive: Definition by example cannot succeed if the examples are a mere hodgepodge without any important commonalities. Even if there isn't a single unifying essence among the examples, there must at least be some sort of "family resemblance" that ordinary people can latch on to, more or less.

For instance, the following would fail as an attempted definition: By "blickets" I mean things like: this cup on my desk, my right shoe, the Eiffel tower, Mickey Mouse, and other things like those; but not this stapler on my desk, my left shoe, the Taj Mahal, Donald Duck, or other things like those. What property could the first group possibly possess, that the second group lacks, which ordinary people could latch onto by means of contemplating these examples? None, presumably (even if a clever philosopher or AI could find some such property). Defining "consciousness" by example requires there to be some shared property or family resemblance among the examples, which is not present in things we normally regard as "nonconscious" (early visual processing, memories stored but not presently considered, and growth hormone release). The putative examples cannot be a mere hodge-podge.

Definition by example can be silent about what descriptive features all these conscious experiences share, just as a definition by example of "furniture" or "games" might be silent about what ties those concepts together. Maybe all conscious experiences are in principle introspectively reportable, or nonphysical, or instantiated by 40 hertz neuronal oscillations. Grant first that consciousness exists. Argue about these other things later.

In his reply to my commentary, Frankish accepts the existence of "phenomenal consciousness" as I have defined it -- which is really (I think) more or less how it is already defined and ought to be defined in the recent Anglophone "phenomenal realist" tradition. (The "phenomenal" in "phenomenal consciousness", I think, serves as a usually unnecessary disambiguator, to prevent interpreting "consciousness" as some other less obvious but related thing like explicit self-consciousness or functional accessibility to cognition.) If so, then Frankish is saying something less radical than it might at first seem when he rejects the existence of "phenomenal consciousness".

So is consciousness an illusion? No, not if you define "consciousness" as you ought to.

Maybe my dispute with Frankish is mainly terminological. But it's a pretty important piece of terminology!

[image source, Pinna et al 2002, The Pinna Illusion]

Introspecting an Attitude by Introspecting Its Conscious Face

In some of my published work, I have argued that:

(1.) Attitudes, such as belief and desire, are best understood as clusters of dispositions. For example, to believe that there is beer in the fridge is nothing more or less than to be disposed (all else being equal or normal) to go to the fridge if one wants a beer, to feel surprised if one were to open the fridge and find no beer, to conclude that the fridge isn't empty if that question becomes relevant, etc, etc. (See my essays here and here.)

And

(2.) Only conscious experiences are introspectible. I characterize introspection as "the dedication of central cognitive resources, or attention, to the task of arriving at a judgment about one's current, or very recently past, conscious experience, using or attempting to use some capacities that are unique to the first-person case... with the aim or intention that one's judgment reflect some relatively direct sensitivity to the target state" (2012, p. 42-43).

Now it also seems correct that (3.) dispositions, or clusters of dispositions, are not the same as conscious experiences. One can be disposed to have a certain conscious experience (e.g., disposed to experience a feeling of surprise if one were to see no beer), but dispositions and their manifestations are not metaphysically identical. Oscar can be disposed to experience surprise if he were to see an empty fridge, even if he never actually sees an empty fridge and so never actually experiences surprise.

From these three claims it follows that we cannot introspect attitudes such as belief and desire.

But it seems we can introspect them! Right now, I'm craving a sip of coffee. It seems like I am currently experiencing that desire in a directly introspectible way. Or suppose I'm thinking aloud, in inner speech, "X would be such a horrible president!" It seems like I can introspectively detect that belief, in all its passionate intensity, as it is occurs in my mind right now.

I don't want to deny this, exactly. Instead, let me define relatively strict versus permissive conceptions of the targets of introspection.

To warm up, consider a visual analogy: seeing an orange. There the orange is, on the table. You see it. But do you really see the whole orange? Speaking strictly, it might be better to say that you see the orange rind, or the part of the orange rind that is facing you, rather than the whole orange. Arguably, you infer or assume that it's not just an empty rind, that it has a backside, that it has a juicy interior -- and usually that's a safe enough assumption. It's reasonable to just say that you see the orange. In a relatively permissive sense, you see the whole orange; in a relatively strict sense you see only the facing part of the orange rind.

Another example: From my office window I see the fire burning downtown. Of course, I only see the smoke. Even if I were to see the flames, in the strictest sense perhaps the visible light emitted from flames is only a contingent manifestation of the combustion process that truly constitutes a fire. (Consider invisible methanol fires.) More permissively, I see the fire when I see the smoke. More strictly, I need to see the flames or maybe even (impossibly?) the combustion process itself.

Now consider psychological cases: In a relatively permissive sense, you see Sandra's anger. In a stricter sense, you see her scowling face. In a relatively permissive sense, you hear the shyness and social awkwardness in Shivani's voice. In a stricter sense you hear only her words and prosody.

To be clear: I do not mean to imply that a stricter understanding of the targets of perception is more accurate or better than a more permissive understanding. (Indeed, excessive strictness can collapse into absurdity: "No, officer, I didn't see the stop sign. Really, all I saw were patterns of light streaming through my vitreous humour!")

As anger can manifest in a scowl and as fire can manifest in smoke and visible flames, so also can attitudes manifest in conscious experience. The desire for coffee can manifest in a conscious experience that I would describe as an urge to take a sip; my attitude about X's candidacy can manifest in a momentary experience of inner speech. In such cases, we can say that the attitudes present a conscious face. If the conscious experience is distinctive enough to serve as an excellent sign of the real presence of the relevant dispositional structure constituting that attitude, then we can say that the attitude is (occurrently) conscious.

It is important to my view that the conscious face of an attitude is not tantamount to the attitude itself, even if they normally co-occur. If you have the conscious experience but not the underlying suite of relevant dispositions, you do not actually have the attitude. (Let's bracket the question of whether such cases are realistically psychologically possible.) Similarly, a scowl is not anger, smoke is not a fire, a rind is not an orange.

Speaking relatively permissively, then, one can introspect an attitude by introspecting its conscious face, much as I can see a whole orange by seeing the facing part of its rind and I can see a fire by seeing its smoke. I rely upon the fact that the conscious experience wouldn't be there unless the whole dispositional structure were there. If that reliance is justified and the attitude is really there, distinctively manifesting in that conscious experience, then I have successfully introspected it. The exact metaphysical relationship between the strictly conceived target and the permissively conceived target is different among the various cases -- part-whole for the orange, cause-effect for the fire, and disposition-manifestation for the attitude -- but the general strategy is the same.

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Susan Schneider on How to Prevent a Zombie Dictatorship

Last week I posted "How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot", discussing Susan Schneider's recent TEDx-talk proposal for checking whether silicon chips can be conscious. Susan has written the following reply, which she invited me to share on the blog.

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Eric,

Greetings from a café in Lisbon! Your new, seriously cool I,Brain case raises an important point about my original test in my Ted talk and is right out of a cyberpunk novel. A few initial points, for readers, before I respond, as Ted talks don’t give much philosophical detail:

1. It may be that the microchips are made of something besides silicon, (right now, e.g., carbon nanotubes and graphene are alternate substrates under development). I don’t think this matters – the issues that arise are the same.

2. It will be important that any chip test involve the very kind of chip substrate and design as that used in the AI in question.

3. Even if a kind of chip works in humans, there is still the issue of whether the AI in question has the right functional organization for consciousness. Since AI could be very different than us, and it is even difficult to figure out these issues in the case of biological creatures like the octopus, this may turn out to be very difficult.

4. For relation of the chip test to intriguing ideas of Ned Block and Dave Chalmers on this issue, see a paper on my website (a section in “The Future of Philosophy of Mind”, based on an earlier op-ed of mine.)

5. As Eric knows, it is probably a mistake to assume that brain chips will be functional isomorphs. I’m concerned with the development of real, emerging technologies, because I am concerned with finding a solution to the problem of AI consciousness based on an actual test. Brain chips, already under development at DARPA, may eventually be faster and more efficient information processors, enhance human consciousness, or, they may be low fidelity copies of what a given minicolumn does. This depends upon how medicine progresses...

Back to my original “Chip Test” (in the Ted talk). It’s 2045. You are ready to upgrade your aging brain. You go to I,Brain. They can gradually replace parts of your biological brain with microchips. You are awake during the surgery, suppose, and they replace a part of your biological brain that is responsible for some aspect of consciousness, with a microchip. Do you lose consciousness of something (e.g., do you lose part of your visual field)? If so, you will probably notice. This would be a sign that the microchip is the wrong stuff. Science could try and try to engineer a better chip, but if after years of trying, they never could get it right, perhaps we should conclude that that kind of substrate (e.g., silicon) does not give rise to consciousness.

On the other hand, if the chips work, that kind of substrate is in principle the right stuff (it can, in the right mental environment, give rise to qualia) although there is a further issue of whether a particular AI that has such chips has the right organization to be conscious (e.g., maybe it has nothing like a global workspace, like a Rodney Brooks style robot, or maybe it is superintelligent, and has mastered everything already and eliminated consciousness because it is too slow and inefficient).

Eric, your test is different, and I agree that someone should not trust that test. This would involve a systematic deception. What kind of society would do this? A zombie dictatorship, of course, which seeks to secretly eliminate conscious life from the planet. :-)

But I think you want to apply your larger point to the original test. Is the idea: couldn’t a chip be devised that would falsely indicate consciousness to the person? (Let’s call this a “sham qualia chip.” ) I think it is, so here’s a reply: God yes, in a dystopian world. We had better watch out! That would be horrible medicine…and luckily, it would involve a good deal of expense and effort, (systematically fooling someone about say, their visual experience, would be a major undertaking), so science would likely first seek a genuine chip substitute that preserved consciousness. (Would a sham qualia chip even clear the FDA :-) ? Maybe only if microchips were not the right stuff and it was the best science could do. After all, people would always be missing lost visual qualia, and it is best that they not suffer like this....). But crucially, since this would involve a deliberate effort on the part of medical researchers, we would know this, and so we would know that the chip is not a true substitute. Unless, that is, we are inhabitants of a zombie dictatorship.

The upshot: It would involve a lot of extra engineering effort to produce a sham qualia chip, and we would hopefully know that the sham chip was really a device designed to fool us. If this was done because the genuine chip substitute could not be developed, this would probably indicate that chips aren’t the right stuff, or that science needs to go back to the drawing board.

I propose a global ban on sham qualia chips in interest of preserving democracy.

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I (Eric) have some thoughts in response. I'm not sure it would be harder to make a sham qualia chip than a genuine qualia chip. Rather than going into detail on that now, I'll let it brew for a future post. Meanwhile, others' reactions welcomed too!