Consciousness à la Chalmers

1. Consciousness à la Chalmers • Chalmers (1991) talks about consciousness and takes two different approaches 17. Mental or psychical being or faculty. • The third-person approach regards consciousness as a scientific problem, consciousness is considered as a problem in science, like heat, life, or nuclear physics, and subject to the same methods. This approach, he says, leads to psychology, the study of behavior; to neuroscience, the study of brain functions; and to artificial intelligence, the study of cognitive modeling. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

2. Consciousness à la Chalmers • Its essence is functionalism, that is, it understands mental processes by revealing the underlying abstract causal structure behind brain function. This structure can be understood objectively and duplicated in different materials—in computers, for example—in addition to carbon-chain chemistry. Thus Chalmers comes out explicitly for the possibility of artificial minds. • Third-person consciousness is to be understood as an aspect of a complex system perhaps as that process by which "the system scans its own processing." U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

3. three hard problems concerning consciousness • they lie within the first-person • sensory qualia: - Why does red look like red? Why does red look like anything at all? • mental content: - thoughts are about something, say white elephants. By our physicalist assumption, thought arises from neural firings. But what should neural firings have to do with white elephants? • existence of subjective experience: - Why should subjective states exist in the first place? U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

4. Consciousness à la Chalmers • Chalmers : According to the basic assumption of the physicalist view of mind, the third-person approach is sufficient, in principle, to yield a complete explanation of human behavior • Claims about consciousness are facts of human behavior? U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

5. Three problems unexplained by third person approach • Qualia : A future scientist, living in a time when neuroscience is completely understood, might learn everything there is to know about physical brain processes. But if she has lived all her life in a black-and-white room, she will still not know what it is like to see red; when she sees red for the first time, she will learn something. While a scientific approach cannot even in principle substitute for actual experience, it could allow for some explanation of that experience. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

6. Three problems unexplained by third person approach • mental content : Chalmers points out that thoughts have subjective content, that thinking about a lion has something to do with lions. Brain states must thus carry intrinsic content, not merely arbitrary attribution. Thoughts of a lion seem more like shared pattern than like reference, more like a picture of a lion than like the word "lion." This may well be because some of the same neural mechanisms are activated when thinking of a lion as when looking at one. Chalmers infers that "a completed theory of subjective mental content may end up having very little to do with reference." U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

7. Three problems unexplained by third person approach • mental content : The rational mind surely employs reference, but most of the rest of mind must get along quite well without it. Reference is needed for symbolic representation. Is this an argument against our using mental symbolic representations? Very much so. We certainly use them sometimes, but how much? Some people (Agre and Chapman 1987, 1988; Brooks 1990c, 1991; Chapman 1987, 1991; Freeman and Skarda 1990) claim that the rational mind is a thin veneer on top of all of the nonreferential, nonrepresentational activity that goes on in minds. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

8. Three problems unexplained by third person approach • subjective experience: Why do I experience anything at all? Why don't I just go ahead and do what I'm doing without any experience? The epiphenomenalists maintain that subjective experiences are inconsequential, that only the physical processes really count. According to them, subjective states are purely epiphenomenal; they don't do anything. Chalmers doesn't subscribe to this view. Few people believe in zombies, that is, people exhibiting normal behavior but without any subjective mental states. However, functional zombies, androids with human functioning but without consciousness, are some-how more acceptable (Stan Franklin’s View) U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

9. Pattern-Information and Information Access • The key to Chalmers's beginnings of an answer to the problem of consciousness is his identification of pattern and information. - Pattern and information, if they occur, always occur together. - All information is carried by some pattern in the physical world. - All patterns carry some information. Patterns and information are two aspects of the same thing, PATTERN-INFORMATION. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

10. Can any machine experience a subjective state? • A pattern may carry different information, depending on the process that accesses that information. A text file may carry information about a new product for me, but quite different information for a word-processing utility program that simply counts the words. • This observation led Chalmers to speak of information as a difference that makes a difference, 11 that is, a way things are to which some process is causally sensitive, leading to consequences that depend on that information. Thus information must be relative to a choice of process (to access that information). U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

11. Different information makes a different difference. (Different Subjectivity) • Here's a synopsis of Chalmers's proposal for a step toward a solution to the mind–body problem. - Third-person (objectively understandable) mental events are patterns of neural firings in the brain not all of which are conscious. - Any corresponding subjective (first-person) mental events are information. - Qualia are just information. Information is what pattern is like from the inside. - The conscious mentality arises from the one big pattern that One is. This is a dual-aspect theory of mind–body. The aspects are information and pattern. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

12. To conclude Chalmers’s viewpoint… • Any agent that uses information derived from pattern is conscious to some degree. This would be true even of a bacterium following a gradient in its ambient solution, or of a computer running a program. • The one–many relationship between pattern and information—that is, the same pattern providing different information to different agents—seems to account for the difference in subjective experience (information) of different agents when confronted by the "same" stimulus. Here "the 'same' stimulus" must refer to two equivalent stimuli according to some relevant notion of equivalence. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

13. Free Will à la Sloman • An agent creates information according to its needs and goals. • What if there are goal conflicts? Does our agent exercise free will? • One of the central issues for a mind is how to do the right thing. Does a mind exercise free will in deciding what is the right thing to do? • All this is rationalization. • Slomandisposes of the freewill problem by showing it to be a pseudoproblem. He refocuses our attention away from the question "Does this agent have free will or not?" by exposing us to all sorts of degrees of free will. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

14. Free Will à la Sloman • Sloman maintains that the basic assumption behind much of the discussion of free will is the assertion that "(A) there is a well-defined distinction between systems whose choices are free and those which are not." • However, he says, if you start examining possible designs for intelligent systems IN GREAT DETAIL you find that there is no one such distinction. Instead there are many "lesser" distinctions corresponding to design decisions that a robot engineer might or might not take—and in many cases it is likely that biological evolution tried . . . alternatives. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

15. Free Will à la Sloman • free will is "What kinds of designs are possible for agents and what are the implications of different designs as regards the determinants of their actions?“ • What does Sloman mean by "agents"? He speaks of a "behaving system with something like motives." An agent, in this sense of the word, 13 operates autonomously in its environment, both perceiving the environment and acting upon it. U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad

16. Free Will can be understood as Sloman'smany design distinctions for Agents • Compare - (a) an agent that can simultaneously store and compare different motives as opposed to (b) an agent that has only one motive at a time. • (a) agents all of whose motives are generated by a single top level goal (e.g., "win this game") to (b) agents with several independent sources of motivation (e.g., thirst, sex, curiosity, political ambition, aesthetic preferences, etc.). • (a) an agent whose development includes modification of its motive generators in the light of experience to (b) an agent whose generators and comparators are fixed for life (presumably the case for many animals). U S Tiwary, Indian Institute of Information Technology , Allahabad