Causality, Reference, and the Mind/Brain Identity Theory (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

The philosophical distinction between sense and reference, which seems straightforward with a small handful of examples like "Cicero" and "Tully" or "The Morning Star' and "the Evening Star" is what underlies the idea that two domains of discourse can describe exactly the same entity. But too much focus on those examples have made it misleadingly easy to assume that the same individual described under two different descriptions would always have identical causal powers. From this it has been easy to conclude that describing a brain as a group of molecules would take nothing away from its causal powers, and that describing a mind as a brain would take nothing away from its causal powers. When we move away from the paradigm cases of Cicero and Venus, however, this is no longer obvious. Consider the following dialogue:

A: Is it true that Socrates' death was caused by drinking a cup of hemlock?
B: Certainly.
A: Is it true that Xantippe's becoming a widow was also caused by his drinking the hemlock?
B: That is also true.
A: Why were both of these events caused by drinking the hemlock?
B: Because they were the same event, so talking about "both events" is not really correct.
A: Consider a different example: the cup's being empty and Socrates' death were both caused by his drinking the hemlock, yet those are two separate events. That is a very different case from Socrates' death and Xantippe's becoming a widow, is it not?
B: Without a doubt. Socrates' death and Xantippe's becoming a widow are really two different descriptions of the same event, not two different events.
A: Excellent. We must therefore conclude that we could have saved Socrates' life by having him divorce Xantippe.

Here’s one way of describing what’s wrong with this conclusion. Each of these different descriptions presupposes a different causal nexus that makes it happen. Consequently, certain attributes will be genuinely causal under one description of an event, and only epiphenomenal under another description. Epiphenomenal properties are just “along for the ride” and have no causal powers of their own. Under the description "Socrates' death" the fact that Socrates is married to Xantippe is epiphenomenal. Under the description, "Xantippe's becoming a widow", the fact that Socrates is married to Xantippe is causal. Thus under the first description, we can have a causal impact on the event only by saving Socrates' life. Under the second description we can have a causal impact on the event by either saving his life or having him divorce Xantippe.

Physical descriptions and mental descriptions outline different nexa of responsibility, and therefore we can never completely substitute one for the other, even when they both refer to the same events. Physical causes are not the only "real" causes, and mental causes are not dismissible as mere epiphenomena. Under physical descriptions, physical attributes are genuinely causal, and mental attributes are epiphenomenal. But under mental descriptions, physical attributes are epiphenomenal and mental attributes are genuinely causal.

Let us assume that P is a neurological event taking place in a brain. Let us replace P with another physical event Q that takes place in a silicon module newly installed in Jones' brain, and which now performs the exact same functional role as did the neurological event P. Because the silicon event Q is functionally identical to the neurological event P, we still get mental state M resulting from Q just as we got it from P. This means that with respect to M's coming into being, the difference between P and Q is epiphenomenal, because it is only physical, and that physical difference has no causal effect on whether M occurs or not. Similarly, if Socrates had taken the hemlock in the public square, rather than in the prison, he would still have died. In the same way, when we change neurological state P to silicon state Q we still get M, and therefore the physical characteristics that differentiate P from Q are epiphenomenal with respect to the mental processes.

Which Machine Is Conscious? (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

The following thought experiment ended up in my online paper “The Hard Problem Is Dead, Long Live the Hard Problem”.

It was first sent out to the Cognitive Questions mailing list, and received the following replies from a variety of interesting people.

Let us suppose that the laboratories of Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks get funded well into the middle of the next century. Each succeeds spectacularly at its stated goal, and completely stays off the other's turf.



The Minskians invent a device that can pass every possible variation on the Turing test.

It has no sense organs and no motor control, however. It sits stolidly in a room, and is only aware of what has been typed into its keyboard. Nevertheless, anyone who encountered it in an internet chatroom would never doubt that they were communicating with a perceptive intelligent being. It knows history, science, and literature, and can make perceptive judgments about all of those topics. It can write poetry, solve mathematical word problems, and make intelligent predictions about politics and the stock market. It can read another person's emotions from their typed input well enough to figure out what are emotionally sensitive topics and artfully changes the subject when that would be the best for all concerned. It makes jokes when fed straight lines, and can recognize a joke when it hears one. And it plays chess brilliantly.



Meanwhile, Rodney Brooks' lab has developed a mute robot that can do anything a human artist or athlete can do.

It has no language, neither spoken or internal language-of-thought, but it uses vector transformations and other principles of dynamic systems to master the uniquely human non-verbal abilities. It can paint and make sculptures in a distinctive artistic style. It can learn complicated dance steps, and after it has learned them can choreograph steps of its own that extrapolate creatively from them. It can sword fight against master fencers and often beat them, and if it doesn't beat them it learns their strategies so it can beat them in the future. It can read a person's emotions from her body language, and change its own behavior in response to those emotions in ways that are best for all concerned. And, to make things even more confusing, it plays chess brilliantly.

The problem that this thought experiment seems to raise is that we have two very different sets of functions that are unique and essential to human beings, and there seems to be evidence from Artificial Intelligence that these different functions may require radically different mechanisms. And because both of these functions are uniquely present in humans, there seems to be no principled reason to choose one over the other as the embodiment of consciousness. This seems to make the hard problem not only hard, but important. If it is a brute fact that X embodies consciousness, this could be something that we could learn to live with. But if we have to make a choice between two viable candidates X and Y, what possible criteria can we use to make the choice?

For me, at least, any attempt to decide between these two possibilities seems to rub our nose in the brute arbitrariness of the connection between experience and any sort of structure or function. So does any attempt to prove that consciousness needs both of these kinds of structures. (Yes, I know I'm beginning to sound like Chalmers. Somebody please call the Deprogrammers!) This question seems to be in principle unfalsifiable, and yet genuinely meaningful. And answering a question of this sort seems to be an inevitable hurtle if we are to have a scientific explanation of consciousness.

3 Science Stoppers (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

The most decisive criticism of the very idea behind “Intelligent Design” theory (ID) is that it is a “Science Stopper”. There is no such thing as evidence either for or against ID, because “God did it” is not an explanation. It is simply away of filling a gap in our knowledge with an empty rhetorical flourish. If there is a God, he created everything in the Universe, and thus to use this claim as an explanation for a particular occurrence is either trivially false or trivially true.

There are, however, two other science stoppers which are not acknowledged as such.

1) The concept of “direct awareness”, so beloved by positivists and other empiricists. To say something is directly given implies we have no explanation for how we are aware of it. I believe Hume refused to define experience, because its meaning was allegedly obvious. Ned Block made a similar claim for “phenomenal consciousness”. In this context, the word “obvious” basically means “any prejudice that is so widely accepted that no one feels a need to justify it.” The prejudice here is that because we are all familiar with experience, it does not require an explanation. However, once scientific explanations became available for how our experience arises, the idea of direct awareness was rejected. The essential point here is that this would have happened regardless of what explanation was discovered. Once there a mechanical cause-and-effect explanation for our experience, it would by definition no longer be direct. In much the same way, “God created Life” seemed plausible until Darwin showed us how Life was created. However, the God-referring explanation would have been rendered inadequate by any possible causal explanation. Because of the principle of sufficient reason, explanations like “we are directly aware of X” or “God created X” are both science stoppers waiting to be filled by causal explanations. Chalmers apparently rejects the principle of sufficient reason as a metaphysical truth, for he believes that “there is nothing metaphysically impossible about unexplained physical events”. If so, what criteria does he suggest we use for dismissing Intelligent Design?

2) The concept of “Intrinsic Causal Powers.” This concept stops us a little further down the road, but stops us nevertheless. Causal explanations always need to see certain properties as intrinsic, so they can map and describe the relations between those intrinsic properties. If causal explanations didn’t stop somewhere and start talking about the relationships between something and something else, they’d never get off the ground. But this pragmatic fact about scientific practice does not justify the metaphysical claim that there are certain causal powers which are “intrinsically intrinsic.” Paradoxically, intrinsicality is itself a relational property. A property which is intrinsic in one science (say chemistry or biology) must be analyzable into a set of relationships in some other science (for example, physics). To deny this is to limit us to descriptions, and stop us from finding explanations.

One brand of physicalism claims that only very tiny particles possess intrinsic powers, but this contradicts another “physicalist” claim that brains have intrinsic powers. Those who believe in the mind/brain identity theory claim that environmental factors may cause experiences, but brain states embody those experiences. This is a fancy way of saying that brains have the intrinsic causal power to produce mental states, just as knives are intrinsically sharp. But saying that knives are sharp is just short hand for saying that they can participate in bread-cutting events, cloth-cutting events etc. Talk of sharpness intrinsically inhering in knives, or mental states inhering in brains, is accurate enough for many purposes, but it mires us in an Aristotelian world of dispositional objects which limits scientific progress.

Why Zombies Are Impossible (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

Does it make sense to speak of creatures which behave exactly like conscious beings, but are not actually conscious? Such creatures are called Philosopher’s zombies, and they are very different from Hollywood zombies. Hollywood zombies are noticeably different from normal human beings, they drool, shuffle etc. However, when we use this definition of “Hollywood zombie” for philosophical purposes, we must remember that there are many Hollywood zombies who are not sufficiently behaviorally anomalous to land movie contracts. In this technical philosophical sense, if a zombie’s behavior deviates from the behavior of conscious beings in any way whatsoever, she (it?) is a Hollywood zombie.

I think that philosopher’s zombies could not possibly exist, because they are as self-contradictory as round squares. The following argument is one reason why. The logic of the argument is unassailable, so it will thus stand or fall depending on the truth of the three premises, which I will now defend in turn.

1) Zombies are possible if and only if subjective experiences are epiphenomenal.

Philosopher’s Zombies are possible only if there are mental states, often called qualia, which have no causal impact on the physical world whatsoever. If these qualia have any impact at all on the behavior of the creature that possesses them, then in principle another person could detect that impact, and consequently that creature would be a Hollywood zombie, not a philosopher’s zombie. There can never be such a thing as objective evidence for this kind of purely subjective consciousness, which means it would be epiphenomenal.

2) Subjective experiences are epiphenomenal if and only if we have a direct awareness of them.

Descartes claimed we have direct awareness of our mental states. It supposedly gives us absolute certainty, but granting this kind of certainty to our awareness of mental states gives second class status to our knowledge of everything else (including the mental states of other people). If we don’t have a direct awareness of our subjective states, how else could there be any reason for believing that they exist? We have already stipulated that there must be no evidence for their existence in the external world. Everyone agrees that there is no such thing as what Dan Dennett calls a zagnet i. e. an object which behaves like a magnet but lacks some kind of inner “magnetismo”. The only difference between a zagnet and a zombie is that we supposedly have a direct awareness of these epiphenomenal states which we possess and zombies lack.

3) There is no such thing as direct awareness.

See Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given and Quine’s on the second of the two dogmas of empiricism. These arguments are too complex to summarize briefly, but most people who have carefully studied them find them to be decisive. Check them out, if you can find the time. Also, anyone who has studied the physiology of perception knows that there is nothing direct about how we become aware of our sensations. There is lots of complicated processing going on; they don’t just jump into our awareness and say “hi , I’m the color red.”

Therefore, (by hypothetical syllogism and modus tollens) subjective experiences are not epiphenomenal, and zombies are not possible.

For my argument, I only need conditionals (if. . .then) not biconditionals (if and only if). However, I think the standard argument for zombies flips these conditionals around, (which is only possible with a biconditional), adds a modal operator, and creates an argument that looks like this.

A) If we have a direct awareness of our subjective experiences, then they could be epiphenomenal.
B) If our subjective experiences are epiphenomenal, then Zombies are possible.
C) We do have a direct awareness of our subjective experiences
Therefore, (by hypothetical syllogism and modus ponens), Zombies are possible.

The punchline of all this is that the best way to settle the zombie controversy is to refocus on the question of direct awareness. That is the only premise in this argument that both sides disagree on, and the two classic papers by Quine and Sellars, linked above, pretty much finished off the concept of direct awareness, as far as many of us are concerned. I hear it’s coming back, though, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of its supporters also think that zombies are possible. Let’s redirect the zombie problem to the question of whether there is direct awareness. If direct awareness goes, zombies go with it.

Why there is No Magic in the Harry Potter Books (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

Philosophers and psychiatrists both use the word “magic" as a term of abuse. Intelligent Design Theory is accused of relying on magic. Psychiatric patients are accused of “Magical Thinking” when they believe that they can get what they want by simply wishing for it. Magical Thinking is often seen as the enemy of reason or science, but I think it would be more accurate to say that what Magical Thinking really rejects is causality. Knowledge and skills are dependent on knowing, and/or having a “grip” on, some causal factor that produces an effect we want. When defenders of Intelligent Design say that God interacts with the world “directly”, and that no further explanation is possible, they are renouncing causality itself. When people try to get what they want by just wishing for it, without bothering to find out how to get what they want, they are also renouncing causality, and putting their faith in magic.

Most people think that magic is just theories that aren’t true. By this definition, Newton would be a magician, because we now know that there is no such thing as absolute space. In fact, Newton also believed in Alchemy, which is often called a branch of magic because it is so different from what scientists believe today. However, none of this detracts from Newton’s credentials as a scientist, which rest not on the content of his beliefs, but on his methods of doing research. The basic ideals of the scientific method rest on principles like causality, the principle of sufficient reason, and the search for abstract unity to account for perceived regular patterns. Anyone in the past, present, or future who rigorously adheres to these kinds of ideals has a right to be called a scientist, even if much of what they “discover” is eventually revealed to be wrong.

In fact, to be completely fair, we should not deny this honorific even to our colleagues in alternative possible realities. That is why, by the definition described above, there is actually no magic in the Harry Potter books. What Harry and his friends are studying at Hogwarts are the causal principles of an alternative reality very different from ours. The intellectual rigor required of a Hogwarts-style magician is essentially the same as that required of a scientist. Or perhaps more accurately, an engineer. The Weasley twins do some original research while developing their joke shop wares, and Dumbledore probably worked in something resembling a laboratory when he discovered the twelve new uses for dragon’s blood. But students in Hogwarts classes learn what was discovered by research outside their classrooms, and like engineers, they learn how to use these skills and facts to produce practical results.

Also like engineers, if Hogwarts students don’t fully learn the intricacies of the causal order, they don’t get the results they strive for. When Hermione Granger tried to transform herself using polyjuice potion, it was not enough to wish to be transformed. She had to get all the ingredients and procedures right, and one mistake (using a cat hair instead of a human hair), turned her into a cat instead of a Slytherin girl. In fact, almost every chapter shows examples of what happens when a student doesn’t fully understand the causal order of this alternative reality. Bones get completely removed instead of healed, teacups grow fur but refuse to turn into hamsters, and naïve people ignore the principles of evidence and believe in “non-existent” creatures like crumpled-horn snorkacks. Ironically, the Harry Potter books could be a child’s best cure for what psychiatrists call Magical Thinking. They might even be good introductory material for a class in scientific method.

How to Make a Rabbit’s Nose out of Electric Jello (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

We’ve all seen patterns created by causal forces “pushing” against each other (whether that description is literal or metaphorical depends on your metaphysics). Sometimes these patterns endure with a repeating persistence that makes them seem more like objects than events: waterfalls, tornados, rainbows. It seems a major accomplishment for these forces to coalesce into patterns that are solid enough to superficially resemble simple inanimate objects. But some argue that living organisms are more like interacting forces than they are like rocks. Unlike rocks, organisms do not passively endure. They must constantly interact with their environment, taking in matter, and transforming it from energy into motion, or they destabilize and settle into a more enduring equilibrium. In other words, they die.

Advocates of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) argue that this might mean that we would do a better job of understanding minds if we saw them as more like events than objects. Instead of building computers out of hard silicon modules, perhaps we should “build” them out of events. These events would endure much longer than waterfalls and rainbows, but they would not be discrete objects like the modular circuits in computers. Furthermore, I believe that these events could interact with each to produce cognitively sophisticated behavior. Does this sound like a crazy speculation? That’s because it is. But thought-experiments, like science fiction, enable us to dream of things that never were, and say “why not?”. Neurobiologist Walter Freeman sees dynamic events as the primary cognitive factor in the olfactory brain of the Rabbit (colloquially referred to as “rabbit’s nose” in the title). Perhaps if we had the right sort of hardware, we could create dynamic patterns that had the cognitive sophistication of computer modules.

Imagine a large colloidal suspension surrounded by oscillators, which send electrical charges and/or acoustic vibrations into that colloid. Let’s call this colloid “Electric Jello”. Imagine a keyboard that controls the amplitudes and frequencies of those oscillators to create what Dewey called a “System of Tensions” - i.e. conflicting forces of various kinds which interact, then resolve into some kind of semi-equilibrium. A system of this sort would be neither stable nor unstable, but rather multi-stable. It could settle into different oscillating patterns, depending on the causal pressures it received from the oscillators. A system of this sort could in principle function like a decision tree in a computer program, and thus be arguably cognitive.

There are systems in nature, such as Freeman’s olfactory rabbit brain and the ambulatory system of horses, which perform the function of the decision trees mapped by computer languages like LISP. (For more on this, see my Minds and Machines paper “Attractor Spaces as Modules”. If DST is correct, hard-wired computer modules are only a brittle mechanical metaphor for these multi-stable systems. Until we come up with a new kind of hardware, however, these hard-wired computer systems will be the best that we can do. Electric Jello, however, might be a form of hardware that could duplicate both the cognitive complexity and the dynamic flexibility of real embodied cognitive systems. In a Jules Verne-like spirit, I confess that I see this machine with both typewriter keys and sliders, that enable the programmer to adjust the parameters of numerous input oscillators until representations of tornado-like repeating patterns begin to emerge on a video screen. These tornado-like patterns would be what DST theorists call attractor spaces, and eventually it would be possible to flip from one space to the other by manipulating the input oscillators. Somehow we would use the resulting changes in this system of tensions to manipulate outputs of some sort, and then we would have the functional equivalent of a computer control system. It would be, however, a system with unprecedented flexibility, because its “parts” would be events in multidimensional space, not hardwired modules.