Perception, Evolution, and the Mind-Body Problem

1. Perception, Evolution, and the Mind-Body Problem Don Hoffman

2. Mind-Body Problem What is the relationship between biology and conscious experience?

3. ScienceTop Open Questions • What is the universe made of? • What is the biological basis of consciousness?

4. EdelmanWider Than The Sky There is now a vast amount of empirical evidence to support the idea that consciousness emerges from the organization and operation of the brain ... The question then becomes: What features of the body and brain are necessary and sufficient for consciousness to appear?

5. KochThe Quest For Consciousness The fundamental question at the heart of the mind-body problem is, what is the relation between the conscious mind and the electro-chemical interactions in the body that give rise to it? How do [conscious experiences] emerge from networks of neurons?

6. NCC • V1 • Extrastriate • V8 • V5 • Rivalry

7. Philosophical Theories • Type Physicalism • Token Physicalism • Reductive Functionalism • Nonreductive Functionalism • Representationalism • Eliminative Materialism

8. Scientific Theories • 40 Hz Oscillations • Claustrum • Information Integration • Tubulins • Neural Action Templates

9. Hints − Not Theories“... then a miracle occurs...” • Taste of garlic, smell of rose • 40 Hz? Claustrum? • Information Integration? • Tubulins? • Neural Action Templates?

10. McGinnMind We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so.

11. Thomas HuxleyMind How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.

12. PinkerHow the Mind Works Our thoroughgoing perplexity about the enigmas of consciousness, self, will and knowledge may come from a mismatch between the very nature of these problems and the computational apparatus that natural selection has fitted us with.

13. Question Key Assumptions • Perception as faithful depiction • Physicalist ontology

14. Hypothesis of Faithful Depiction A goal of perception is to match or approximate true properties of an objective physical environment.

15. Theories of Perception • Direct • Indirect

16. GibsonEcological Approach The environment consists of the earth and the sky, with objects on the earth and in the sky, of mountains and clouds, fires and sunsets, pebbles and stars ... the environment is all these various things − places, surfaces, layouts, motions, events, animals, people, and artifacts that structure the light at points of observation.

17. Purves’ Cube

18. Purves’ Cube

19. Purves’ Cube

20. Purves’ Cube

21. Purves’ Cube

22. Anderson’s Moons

23. Anderson’s Moons

24. Anderson’s Moons

25. Anderson’s Moons

26. Anderson’s Moons

27. Yuille and BuelthoffPerception as Bayesian Inference We define vision as perceptual inference, the estimation of scene properties from an image or sequence of images ... The brain...must make assumptions about the real world.

28. LeharBBS The perceptual modeling approach reveals the primary function of perception as that of generating a fully spatial virtual-reality replica of the external world in an internal representation.

29. Purves and LottoWhy We See What We Do ... what observers actually experience in response to any visual stimulus is its accumulated statistical meaning (i.e., what the stimulus has turned out to signify in the past)...

30. Noe and ReganVision and Mind Perceivers are right to take themselves to have access to environmental detail ... the environmental detail is present, lodged, as it is, right there before individuals and ... they therefore have access to that detail by the mere movement of their eyes or bodies.

31. PalmerVision Science Evolutionarily speaking, visual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate ... Indeed, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate. By and large, what you see is what you get. When this is true, we have what is called veridical perception ... perception that is consistent with the actual state of affairs in the environment. This is almost always the case with vision.

32. PinkerHow the Mind Works We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.

33. Multimodal User InterfaceMUI The conscious perceptual experiences of an agent are a multimodal user interface between that agent and an objective world.

34. Human MUI • Species-specific • Friendly formatting • Concealed causality • Clued conduct • Ostensible objectivity

35. VR Example • Virtual tennis • Friendly formatting • Concealed causality • Clued conduct • Ostensible objectivity

36. Objections • Veridical perceptions? • Public physical objects? • I make the moon? • Step in front of train? • Tables made of atoms? • Icons should do what I want?

37. Subjective Necker Cube

38. Conscious Realism The objective world consists of conscious agents.

39. Conscious Realism • Objective • Conscious agent • Why?

40. Conscious Observer

41. Mind-Body Problem • Physicalist: Describe precisely how consciousness arises from, or is identical to, certain types of physical systems. • Conscious Realist: Describe precisely how conscious agents construct physical objects and their properties.

42. Conscious Realist Progress • Objects • Color • Motion • Shape

43. Questions • Panpsychism? • Kantian idealism? • Causality? • Epiphysicalism

44. Perception, Evolution, and the Mind-Body Problem Thanks to Bruce Bennett and Chetan Prakash