The Features
Take a moment to introspect. Examine a few of your conscious experiences. What features do they share -- and might these features be common to all possible experiences? Let's call any such necessarily universal features essential.
Consider your visual experience of this text. Next, form an image of your house or apartment as viewed from the street. Think about what you'd do if asked to escort a crocodile across the country. Conjure some vivid annoyance at your second-least-favorite politician. Notice some other experiences as well -- a diverse array. Let's not risk too narrow a sample.
Of course, all of these examples share an important feature: You are introspecting them as they occur. So to do this exercise more properly, consider also some past experiences you weren’t introspecting at the time. Try recalling some emotions, thoughts, pains, hungers, imagery, sensations. If you feel unconfident -- good! You should be. You can re-evaluate later.
Each of the following features is sometimes described as universal to human experience.
1. Luminosity. Are all of your experiences inherently self-representational? Does the having of them entail, in some sense, being aware of having them? Does the very experiencing of them entail knowing them or at least being in a position to know them? Note: These are related, rather than equivalent, formulations of a luminosity principle.
2. Subjectivity. Does having these experiences entail having a sense of oneself as a subject of experience? Does the experience have, so to speak, a "for-me"-ness? Do the experiences entail the perspective of an experiencer? Again, these are not equivalent formulations.
3. Unity. If, at any moment, there's more than one experience, or experience-part, or experience-aspect, are they all subsumed within some larger experience, or joined together in a single stream, so that you experience not just A and B and C separately but A-with-B-with-C?
4. Access. Are these experiences all available for a variety of "downstream" cognitive processes, like inference and planning, verbal report, and long-term memory? Presumably yes, since you're remembering and considering them now. (I'll discuss the methodological consequences of this below.)
5. Intentionality. Are all of your experiences "intentional" in the sense of being about or directed at something? Your image of your house concerns your house and not anyone else's, no matter how visually similar. Your thoughts about Awful Politician are about, specifically, Awful Politician. Your thoughts about squares are about squares. Are all of your experiences directed at something in this way? Or can you have, for example, a diffuse mood or euphoric orgasm that isn't really about anything?
6. Flexibility. Can these experiences, including any fleeting ones, all potentially interact flexibly with other thoughts, experiences, or aspects of your cognition -- as opposed to being merely, for example, parts of a simple reflex from stimulus to response?
7. Determinacy. Are all such experiences determinately conscious, rather than intermediately or kind-of or borderline conscious? Compare: There are borderline cases of being bald, or green, or an extravert. Some theorists hold that borderline experientiality is impossible. Either something is genuinely experienced, however dimly, or it is not experienced at all.
8. Wonderfulness. Are your experiences wonderful, mysterious, or meta-problematic – there is no standard term for this – in the following technical sense: Do they seem (perhaps erroneously) irreducible to anything physical or functional, conceivably existing in a ghost or without a body?
9. Specious present. Are all of your experiences felt as temporally extended, smeared out across a fraction of a second to a couple of seconds, rather than being strictly instantaneous?
10. Privacy. Are all of your experiences directly knowable only to you, through some privileged introspective process that others could never in principle share, regardless how telepathic or closely connected?
I've presented these possibly essential features of experience concisely and generally. For present purposes, an approximate understanding suffices.
I've bored/excited you [choose one] with this list for two reasons. First, if any of these features are genuinely essential for consciousness, that sets constraints on what animals or AI systems could be conscious. If luminosity is essential, no entity could be conscious without self-representation. If unity is essential, disunified entities are out. If access is essential, consciousness requires certain kinds of cognitive availability. And so on.
I'll save my second reason for the end of this post.
Introspection and Memory Can't Reveal What's Essential
Three huge problems ruin arguments for the essentiality of any of these features, if those arguments are based wholly on introspective and memorial reflection. The problems are: unreliability, selection bias, and the narrow evidence base.
Unreliability. Even experts disagree. Thoughtful researchers arrive at very different views. Given this, either our introspective processes are unreliable, or seemingly ordinary people differ wildly in the structure of their experience. I won't detail the gory history of introspective disagreement about the structure of conscious experience, but that was the topic of my 2011 book. Employing appropriate epistemic caution, doesn't it seem possible that you could be wrong about the universality, or not, of such features in your experience? The matter doesn't seem nearly as indubitable as that you are experiencing red, when you're looking directly at a nearby bright red object in good light, or that you're experiencing pain when you drop a barbell on your toe.
Selection bias. If any of your experiences are unknowable, you won't of course know about them. To infer luminosity from your knowledge of all the experiences you know about would be like inferring that everyone is a freemason from a sampling of regulars at the masonic lodge. Likewise, if any of your experiences fail to impact downstream cognition, you wouldn't reflect on or remember them. Methodological paradox doesn't infect the other features quite as inevitably, but selection bias remains a major risk. Maybe we have disunified experiences which elude our introspective focus and are quickly forgotten. Similarly, perhaps, for indeterminate or inflexible experiences, or atemporal experiences, or experiences unaccompanied by self-representation.
Narrow evidence base. The gravest problem lies in generalization beyond the human case. Waive worries about unreliability and selection bias. Assume that you have correctly discerned that, say, seven of the ten proposed features belong to all of your experiences. Go ahead and generalize to all ordinary adult humans. It still doesn't follow that these features are essential to all possible conscious experiences, had by any entity. Maybe lizards or garden snails lack luminosity, subjectivity, or unity. Since you can't crawl inside their heads, you can't know by introspection or experiential memory. (In saying this, am I assuming privacy? Yes, relative to you and lizards, but not as a universal principle.) Even if we could somehow establish universality among animals, it wouldn't follow that those same features are universal to AI cases. Maybe AI systems can be more disunified than any conscious animal. Maybe AI systems can be built to directly access each other's experiences in defiance of animal privacy. Maybe AI systems needn't have the impression of the wonderful irreducibility of consciousness. Maybe some of their conscious experiences could occur in inflexible reflex patterns.
Nor Will Armchair Conceptual Analysis Tell Us What's Essential
If you want to say that all conscious systems must have one or more of unity, flexibility, privacy, luminosity, subjectivity, etc., you'll need to justify this insistence with something sturdier than generalization from human cases. I see two candidate justifiers: the right theory of consciousness or the right concept of consciousness.
Concerning the concept of consciousness, I attest the following. None of these features are essential to my concept of consciousness. Nor, presumably, are those features essential to the concepts of anyone who denies their universal applicability. One or more of these features might be universally present in humans, or even in all animals and AI systems that could ever be bred or built; but if so, that's a fact about the world, not a fact that follows simply from our shared concept of consciousness.
In defining a concept, you get one property for free. Every other property must be logically proved or empirically discovered. I can define a rectangle via one (conjunctive) property: that of being a closed, right-angled, planar figure with four straight sides. From this, it logically follows that it must have four interior angles. I can define gold as whatever element or compound is common to certain shiny, yellowish samples, and then empirically discover that it is element 79.
Regarding consciousness, then: None of the ten purported essential properties logically follow from phenomenal consciousness as ordinarily defined and understood (generally by pointing to examples). None are quite the same as the target concept. You can choose to define "consciousness" differently, for example, via the conjunctive property of being both a conscious experience in the ordinary sense and one that is knowable by the subject as it occurs. Then of course luminosity follows. But you've changed the topic, winning by definitional theft what you couldn't earn by analytic hard work.
Could luminosity, subjectivity, unity, etc., covertly belong to the concept of consciousness, so that the right type of armchair (not empirical) reflection would reveal that all possible conscious experiences in every possible conscious entity must necessarily be luminous, subjective, or unified? Could subtle analytic hard work reveal something I'm missing? I can't prove otherwise. If you think so, I await your impressive argument. Even Kant held only that luminosity, subjectivity, and unity were necessary features of our experience, not of all possible experiences in all possible beings.
Set aside purely conceptual arguments, then. If we hope to defend the essentiality of any of these ten features, we'll need an empirically justified universal theory of consciousness.
That brings me to the second reason I've presented this feature list. I conjecture that universal theories of consciousness, intended to apply to all possible beings, instead of justifying the universality of (one or more of) these features circularly assume the universality of (one or more of) these features. Developing this conjecture will have to wait for another day.
12 comments:
If we agree today...consciousness is learning about one's own being...
...then we can say we might find ourselves emerging/balancing between introspection and extrospection...
Do you think this means the only road forward is to try to think of some kind of transcendental-like argument where we figure out what the necessary features of phenomenal consciousness must be for it to be as we take it to be? Is the starting point the issue? And when would it be enough to say the concept of phenomenal consciousness is itself the problem, that the challenges in both saying anything empirically generalizable or conceptually necessary that integrate with our broader understanding of consciousness and the mind ought to lead us to abandon the concept (even if not the phenomenon)?
Thank you for the interesting blog post.
Another direction we might be able to show from Arnold, maybe his remark is correct - maybe consciousness comes from the balancing tension between the need for both inner and outer observation or knowledge and that this need for both types of knowledge and of their integration generates the form of consciousness we are familiar with ourselves which includes phenomenal consciousness (but which, if really understood properly, would entail that phenomenal consciousness if it were to be attempted to be understood in isolation from any observation of an environment, ceases to become intelligible, perhaps even because of its deep connection to sensation...)
I know privacy is thought of an indubitable property of consciousness, but it is really essential? It is probably one we could discard most easily. And memorability seems to me that it must come in here somewhere. We are all self- or meta-consciously (eg ToT) aware that this must be the case for access, even if only to immediate recall. Some of our most relevant experiences are sleep and anesthesia, especially twilight states of both. One interesting one is having complete amnesia for earlier mental states where everyone around us at that time is quite sure we were conscious.
Lots of stuff to get to here. I need to read, more carefully, before offering comment. No worries.
I will keep this short, for several reasons, primarily because this topic is beyond my formal education experience. Edelman laid newer groundwork with his idea regarding primary and higher order consciousness. Yet, prior to this, the Swiss researcher, Piaget, talked about levels of development in human children. (It seems to me if we want to examine consciousness in human beings, we ought to focus on what we know about human beings, rather than what we speculate of regarding primary conscious life forms and artificially intelligent machinery.) Ergo, I hold that consciousness is emergent(Jaynes), and, developmentally dependent (Piaget, et. al.). Jaynes said early humans could not make decisions; could not make up their bicameral minds.
Piaget noted and claimed children developed mental capacity in stages which he labelled operational. There is pretty good evidence of that, even though we see prodigies who are extraordinary. So, IMHO, if we are to do meaningful assessment of what human consciousness entails, we need to decide what human consciousness boils down to, based on what we have and know of humans. Not AI. Not Rattlesnakes. Primates, maybe...I'm sorta primitive, sure.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I agree-- whenever I see arguments based around these features they seem to me to be missing the whole point. It seems to me there could be a phenomenally conscious entity without any of these features, and a robot could have all of these features without being phenomenally conscious. "what it is like to be looking at the color red" is the whole thing.
Right, I don't think that aiming to discovering essential features through conceptual reflection is likely to be a useful way forward. Something more modest, something more empirically-grounded will have to suffice -- but there are major challenges there too! I don't think we can or should do without the concept of consciousness. That would just be to ignore the problem because it's too hard (maybe impossible). We must learn to live with doubt.
I agree with your doubts, but I'm not so sure that meta-consciousness is genuinely universal/essential. How would we know that, except by circular reasoning from the fact that we have knowledge of the experiences we have knowledge of?
Jaynes is pretty far out there!
On Jaynes: Yes that was why so many loved him, And, still do...
What is doubt..is it place-dependent-balance...not likely ever be boring...
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