tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post3589917882207367994..comments2024-03-28T19:14:33.619-07:00Comments on The Splintered Mind: Slippery Slope Arguments and Discretely Countable Subjects of ExperienceEric Schwitzgebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-39554743354982755582018-07-06T14:20:45.357-07:002018-07-06T14:20:45.357-07:00Sorry about the very slow reply, folks! I stopped...Sorry about the very slow reply, folks! I stopped getting comments alerts in my inbox, and then I was traveling and didn't think to look.<br /><br />Anon Jun 14: Split brains is one interesting case -- as are craniopagus twins!<br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniopagus_twins<br /><br />Sparro: I agree that amount of consciousness can vary, but I'm not sure about your claims about functional identity. Problematizing that supposed threshold is part of my aim in this post.<br /><br />Michael: If I can get my head around (d), that would be my preference. I'm not sure I can, though.<br /><br />David: Maybe that's a slippery slope, but not from conscious to non-conscious, right? So I'm not sure how it's relevant?<br /><br />James: Maybe so. I bet that we can create gray zones between your discrete numbers too, though.<br /><br />John: I agree about money. I meant it only to convey the idea, on a certain simple way of thinking about money. If it's not helpful, toss out the analogy!Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16274774112862434865noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-8962687463027821942018-06-19T11:49:56.710-07:002018-06-19T11:49:56.710-07:00I don't find Searle's consciousness/money ...I don't find Searle's consciousness/money analogy very convincing. Here are some edge cases where there's no straight answer whether a person has money or not:<br /><br />- someone with no money apart from a foreign denomination coin<br />- someone with no money apart from a Roman denarius<br />- someone who is heavily in debt but believes they will be able to pay it back<br />- someone who is heavily in debt and doesn't believe they will be able to pay it back<br />- someone without any money of their own who is holding onto a coin for someone else<br />- a cult leader who is provided with everything they need by their followers<br /><br />I agree you can't say things like 'two-and-a-half streams of consciousness', but if consciousness was a vague property you wouldn't expect to be able to say them. If the six people in the examples above were gathered together in a room, you couldn't say "so-and-so many people here have money"; all you could do would be to describe their individual situations.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07475890135632392787noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-7369862922954431212018-06-18T23:25:03.131-07:002018-06-18T23:25:03.131-07:00What if “Consciousness” was related to a class of ...What if “Consciousness” was related to a class of processes in the same way digestion (digestiveness?) is related to a class of processes? <br /><br />What if these conscious-related processes could be described as processes wherein there is an agent (or mechanism, or constructor) such that when the agent is presented with a given input it generates a given output and the Agent itself is relatively unchanged so that it remains capable of repeating the process? <br /><br />Input —>[agent]—> Output. Let’s call such a process a “task”<br /><br />What if such agents could be linked, outputs from some tasks becoming inputs to others, creating higher order agents? <br /><br />What if various properties relative to the inputs and outputs “emerge” as agents are combined in particular ways?<br /><br />What if there were a hierarchy of tasks that looked something like this:<br /><br />1. Lowest level: at least one task. Example Agent: proton<br /><br />2. A task which can sensibly be described as having a functional purpose. Example Agent: cell surface receptor? Single cell? Virus?<br /><br />3. A task whose purpose is to generate an essentially arbitrary signal intended to be used as input to a subsequent task. Example Agent: neuron<br /><br />4. A task wherein the input constitutes semantic information (I.e., an arbitrary signal created by a previous task) and the output constitutes a valuable response to the meaning of the input. Example Agent: [here be dragons. ]<br /><br />5a. A task wherein the valuable output to semantic input includes memory<br /><br />5b. A task wherein the valuable output to semantic input includes system-wide influences, aka, emotions.<br /><br />6. A task wherein the valuable output constitutes the establishment of a concept.<br /><br />7. A task wherein the input is semantic information whose meaning references a concept.<br /><br />8. A task wherein the valuable output constitutes an abstract (non-physical) concept<br /><br />9. A task wherein the input is two or more concepts and the output is a single concept of the combination<br /><br />10. A task wherein the input concepts are incompatible and the output concept is self-contradictory, eg., complex numbers, “John the married bachelor”, “philosophical zombies”<br /><br />What if we gave a name to the task which had the minimum necessary requirement for consciousness? What if we called that task a psychule (like a molecule is the minimal unit of a given substance)? Thus a panpsychist could say that the level 1 task was the psychule. A functionalist might say the level 2 task is the psychule. Many psychologists and neuroscientists might choose level 3. I, personally would choose level 4. Those requiring an awareness of self (mirror test) might choose level 6 or higher. [There’s conceptual work to be done here.]<br /><br />If the above is correct, then it would be easier to pinpoint where on the slide from one anchor to the other one loses the capability of performing psychules, depending on what level one has placed the psychule.<br /><br />Quick notes: <br />— you would not say the Agent is conscious. The agent would be part of a system which is conscious. As Dennett would say, the Agent has competence without comprehension.<br />— it’s perfectly acceptable to refer to the consciousness of composite agents, such as the United States. You would simply be referring to the repertoire of psychules available to that agent.<br />— the consciousness of sub agents would not be changed when they are considered part of a composite agent.<br /><br />*James of Seattlehttp://jamesofseattle.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-40259333495131120192018-06-16T20:37:08.660-07:002018-06-16T20:37:08.660-07:00If you asked the question instead in terms of move...If you asked the question instead in terms of movement (specifically self powered movement), would it be as hard to pin down?<br /><br />Perhaps the issue is what movement does can be understood fairly readily. So what does consciousness do? Really?Callan S.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-74298705088279440432018-06-16T03:33:20.448-07:002018-06-16T03:33:20.448-07:00This reminds me of the genera of arguments Dennett...This reminds me of the genera of arguments Dennett argued against in the 90s. Do you know / remember the "is consciousness the leading edge of memory" or "consciousness more like fame than TV"? They're classic Dennett intuition pumps to try and stop us from expecting that intentional stance discriminations (conscious / not-conscious) have to have neurological correlates. And without them I'm not sure your SSAs slip. <br /> Maybe Searle is wrong about consciousness? Jon Rubinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15480775218855513853noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1331974538891409542018-06-16T02:53:40.907-07:002018-06-16T02:53:40.907-07:00How about inner speech in bilinguals? Once one be...How about inner speech in bilinguals? Once one becomes fluent, thinking (and dreaming) in the second language becomes the usual experience, but recollections of one's earlier life might be in the first language, as well as auditory verbal hallucinations. Is there a slippery slope between the two? (younger children, creoles)David Duffynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-45053566291649595982018-06-15T17:04:04.660-07:002018-06-15T17:04:04.660-07:00(Apologies if this is a duplicate. First attempt t...(Apologies if this is a duplicate. First attempt to post it got no type of confirmation, so I'm assuming that it failed...)<br /><br />Surely (a) cannot be the answer for all slippery slopes*, (b) is unacceptably magical without some explanation of *what* might be so crucial at, eg, the ethologist's toads/frogs frontier, and (c), even if you were to accept its strangeness in the group consciousness case, doesn't extend to slopes of other kinds.<br /> <br />(d) FTW! What is so strange about it actually? Everything we know about consciousness suggests a systems phenomenon, so it wouldn't be surprising if the slippery slope for consciousness turned out to be similar to the slippery slope for making a system simpler and simpler: it doesn't cross a boundary into non-system-hood, it just gradually becomes trivial.<br /> <br />Doesn't it seem likely that the notion of "unitary subject / binarily conscious or not" is an artifact of how we've evolved to represent other actors in the environment, projected back onto ourselves?<br /><br />*Perhaps a panpsychist could say, "No, no: (a) is my answer for all slopes, because there's just never a non-conscious anchor for any of them." But I'd claim she's stuck with (d) anyway; otherwise it's death by the combination problem.<br /> Michael Brian Orrhttps://twitter.com/Metaseminoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-64016755974242040152018-06-15T10:50:15.112-07:002018-06-15T10:50:15.112-07:00Let me see if I can give you a bit more fodder for...Let me see if I can give you a bit more fodder for option (d).<br /><br />I believe we can agree that not all streams of consciousness are of equal quality - that if you consider a person to have a stream of consciousness, and a person who is in a vegetative state (functionally brain-dead) to NOT have a stream of consciousness, that there will be situations where a person can waver between the two, such as someone going in and out of a coma. It could be argued that every time we go to sleep, there is an interruption in our stream of consciousness anyways... which raises some interesting questions about continuity of person from day to day. Are we even the same consciousness as yesterday, or are we each a brand new consciousness, only gifted with the memories of the person we were before?<br /><br />Similarly, there is a qualitative difference between someone who is in the late stages of Alzheimer's, whose stream of consciousness is fragmented.<br /><br />I would posit that the same qualitative differences exist within the spectrum of the animal kingdom as well; a toad does not have the same depth and breadth of consciousness as a human does. Perhaps as a tadpole they exist primarily on instinct, but then rise out of it to gain a consciousness with some continuity as an adult... but not a very strong continuity.<br /><br />A slightly dumber toad, however, would be <i>functionally identical</i> to the conscious toad while perhaps not meeting what your ethiologist claims to be the threshold for consciousness. But in the same way that our quality of consciousness varies from day to day (there are definitely days I go more on autopilot than others), a toad might actually dip below and above that arbitrary threshold from day to day... but be on the whole, functionally identical on those days.<br /><br />The "functionally identical" part is the critical part. If there is no practical difference, is there a difference that actually means anything?SparroHawchttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05263058482228432453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-76955416676488363322018-06-15T10:20:18.033-07:002018-06-15T10:20:18.033-07:00good stuff, see what you make of:
http://newbooksn...good stuff, see what you make of:<br />http://newbooksnetwork.com/edouard-machery-philosophy-within-proper-bounds-oxford-up-2017/Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-8678678984694625812018-06-14T10:47:27.029-07:002018-06-14T10:47:27.029-07:00Hasn't the slippery slope been on-going since ...Hasn't the slippery slope been on-going since we left Socratic here-ism for Platonic there-ism...<br />...That we seem to forget we are conscious--forgetting we have the only means at our disposal--our consciousness--with which to Be conscious...<br />...Perhaps we have--just so much attention towards consciousness because everything else on this planet is so interesting that we set aside our consciousness--as though it does not need attention...Arnoldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02580641063222662041noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-65362684848889755792018-06-14T10:19:24.504-07:002018-06-14T10:19:24.504-07:00Would split brains give us a way of imagining that...Would split brains give us a way of imagining that there are no discrete subjects of experience? I think that's my preferred way of understanding things. When it's not clear whether there are two minds rather than one, maybe that's because there's just no answer. (Why do we think that subjects are countable anyway? Is it because the unity of consciousness is supposed to imply *a* unified consciousness?)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com