Consciousness Without Subjectivity

1. Consciousness Without Subjectivity Pete Mandik Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy Coordinator, Cognitive Science Laboratory William Paterson University, New Jersey USA

2. John Locke • “…we see nobody gets the relish of a pineapple, till he goes to the Indies, where it is, and tastes it” • - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

3. David Hume • “A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds. ….A Laplander or Negro has no notion of the relish of wine.” • - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

4. The Experience Requirement • there’s • an intuition • about • mary Never having experienced red before, Mary cannot know what it’s like to have such an experience.

5. Intuition or bullshit? • No matter how popular an “intuition” is, the obligation remains to distinguish saying things for a reason from just making stuff up.

6. My main point • Phenomenal consciousness is not actually subjective.

7. There’s no support then… • …for dualists and their “knowledge argument” • …for physicalists embracing so-called “phenomenal concepts”

8. OUTLINE • The Knowledge Argument and the Experience Requirement • The Experience Requirement is False • The Experience Requirement is Relevant • Conclusions

9. Subjectivity • The alleged subjectivity of qualia is identical to the one-way knowability of certain aspects of conscious experience. • The one-way of knowing is (or is at least partially) constituted by having had an experience relevantly similar to the target experience. • Ways excluded as ways of knowing subjective stuff are ways that would involve deducing the target facts from objective physical facts.

10. Knowledge Argument • Premise One: If physicalism is true then Mary, knowing all physical facts, would also know what it’s like to see red, even though she’s never experienced red before (it will be useful, for brevity’s sake, to count hallucinations and afterimages of red as episodes of seeing red). • Premise Two: However, Mary must necessarily be surprised and learn something new upon seeing red for the first time; she can’t have pre-experiential knowledge of what it’s like to see red.

11. Two responses to the knowledge argument • Paul Churchland: The premises equivocate on ‘knowledge’ and Premise Two (necessarily ignorant Mary) is plausible only on a non-propositional reading of ‘knowledge’ (“Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson”) Pete Mandik: The only plausible and relevant readings of ‘knowledge’ in the premises are unequivocally “conceptual” and Premise Two is just plain false. (“The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity” in Bickle, in press)

12. The no-experience-necessary attack on the knowledge argument • Premise Two (necessarily surprised Mary) needs an explanation to be true • The Experience Requirement is the only plausible candidate • But the Experience Requirement is false; deviant knowledge is possible.

13. Deviant knowledge • Knowledge of what it’s like to have red experience without having ever had a red experience (perceptual or hallucinatory). • The possibility of deviant knowledge = the falsity of the Experience Requirement

14. OUTLINE • The Knowledge Argument and the Experience Requirement • The Experience Requirement is False • The Experience Requirement is Relevant • Conclusions

15. Two kinds of consideration against the Experience Requirement • Thought experiments concerning Swamp Mary and other deviants • The “Churchlandik” Conceptualist Model of phenomenal knowledge.

16. Meet Some Deviants • SwampMary (Gabriel Love) • RoboMary (Dan Dennett) • HyperbolicMary (Pete Mandik)

17. The Conceptualist Model of Phenomenal Knowledge • THE GIST: Knowing what it’s like to have a phenomenally conscious experience is constituted by having concepts that are reliably deployable to adequately represent phenomenally conscious experience.

18. Further Details (1) Perception (2) Introspection (3) Concepts (4) Consciousness PERCEPTION - The automatic conceptual exploitation of information carried by sensory inputs about environmental and bodily events INTROSPECTION - The automatic conceptual exploitation of information carried by sensory inputs about themselves

19. Further Details (1) Perception (2) Introspection (3) Concepts (4) Consciousness CONCEPTS - dispositions (or the categorical bases thereof) to endogenously trigger states of activation in relatively high levels of sensory processing hierarchies; such neural activation patterns individually constitute (spatially, etc.) invariant representations

20. Concepts as Attractors in Hidden-unit Activation Space • (figure from Churchland 1989) (figure from Bickle, Mandik, & Landreth 2006)

21. Churchland v. Mandik Attractors in hidden-unit activation space Attractors in high-level hidden-unit activation space (figure from Churchland 1989) (figure from O’Reilly and Munakata 2000)

22. Further Details (1) Perception (2) Introspection (3) Concepts (4) Consciousness CONCEPTS (cont’d) - • The having of a concept is the having of such-and-such synaptic configuration in high-levels of processing hierarchies • The application or deployment of a concept is an instance of a pattern of activation in a population of neurons in high-levels of processing hierarchies • Thus are concepts themselves abeyant representations even though their applications in perception and introspection are occurrent representations. (see Churchland and Sejnowski 1992 p.142)

23. Further Details (1) Perception (2) Introspection (3) Concepts (4) Consciousness CONSCIOUSNESS - a state of recurrently sustained activation at relatively mid-levels of sensory processing hierarchies

24. Mandik 2005 “Phenomenal Consciousness and the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface” Amodal Category knowledge The Allocentric-Egocentric Interface Limited viewpoint invariance Body-centered The reciprocally influencing representations jointly comprise a conscious state Retinocentric • Pure Allocentric Pure Egocentric

25. The Conceptualist Model model may be adapted for dualism • With only minor modifications, the aforementioned account of concepts and consciousness may be reformulated as an account of the neurofunctional supervenience base upon which non-physical qualia etc nomologically supervene. • Thus, the ensuing arguments against dualism won’t be question-begging.

26. The Conceptualist Model against the Experience Requirement • A concept that applies to x (and all things qualitatively identical to x) can be acquired without ever having experienced x (or anything qualitatively identical to x) • For all x, an experience of x can be had w/o the experience being conscious (so whatever experiences might be needed for acquisition need not be conscious experiences). • A concept can be possessed at a time without one having any conscious experiences at that time.

27. 1. A concept that applies to x (and all things qualitatively identical to x) can be acquired without ever having experienced x (or anything qualitatively identical to x) • Paul Churchland: “A network may live out its entire life and never encounter, not even once, a perfectly prototypical instance of any of of any of its categories. Accordingly, it may never produce an activation pattern at exactly the activation-space position of any of its internal prototype points. But it will be a conceptually competent network just the same” (Neurophilosophy at Work p. 145)

28. 2. For all x, an experience of x can be had w/o the experience being conscious (so whatever experiences might be needed for acquisition need not be conscious experiences). • Perceptual categorization learning requires merely that the information get in there, not that the information reverberate in the recurrent circuits giving rise to consciousness • More cautiously, “all relevant x…” • Plausible counterexamples to the more general claim concern learning that puts a load on short-term memory. (There is evidence from fear conditioning studies that trace learning but not delay learning depends on consciousness. In the trace learning, there is a time gap between the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus and in delay learning the two stimuli overlap. See Carter, R., Hofstotter, C., Tsuchiya, N., and Koch, C. (2003))

29. 3. A concept can be possessed at a time without one having any conscious experiences at that time. • Standing knowledge may be retained during periods while one has no occurrent mental states • More cautiously, standing knowledge may be retained during periods while one has no conscious occurrent mental states • General anesthesia knocks out consciousness, not knowledge

30. How to imagine Mary • Mary’s knowledge is analogous to: • Knowing what 11-sided regular polygons look like without ever having seen or even imagined one • Knowing the grammaticality of “Regular polygons with odd numbers of sides have no parallel sides in the Euclidean plane” without ever having heard or uttered it.

31. 4 bad reasons for believing the Experience Requirement • BANDWIDTH • SPECIFICITY • COMPLEXITY • CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE

32. Bandwidth estimates

33. How long would it take a deviant to learn what it’s like to see red?

34. Blind Mary isn’t hearing red …but she is learning whatever is to be learned by seeing red. The information acquired about red may enter sensory systems without giving rise to conscious experience

35. 4 bad reasons for believing the Experience Requirement • BANDWIDTH • SPECIFICITY • COMPLEXITY • CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE

36. Is there more specificity or determinateness to experience than can be conceptualized? • Maybe the Experience Requirement is true because conceptually encoded knowledge cannot be phenomenal knowledge.

37. 3 Specificity Considerations

38. Raffman’s Rainbow • There exist color pairs sufficiently similar to be indiscriminable across a memory delay while sufficiently distinct to be discriminable when presented simultaneously (e.g. Pérez-Carpinell et al., 1998; Raffman 1995) • If the conceptualized = the remembered and the recognized, then experience outstrips our concepts.

39. DEMO

40. DEMO MASK!

41. DEMO

42. DEMO

43. DEMO

44. Raffman’s Rainbow cont’d • It won’t do to say that our experience is only as determinate as we have determinate concepts for (the unique hues), and merely determinable otherwise (the non-unique hues). • There’s no introspectible difference between the ways in which unique and non-unique hues appear with respect to their ‘determinateness’ despite the radically different ways we have to conceptualize them. (Raffman 1995 pp. 301-302)

45. Heck’s Grid • Whereas it is available to introspection that I believe of both my car and computer that they are gray, I cannot introspect the determinate contents of my perceptual phenomenology concerning the upper left and lower right patches of a 10 x 10 grid, even though my phenomenology has such determinate contents. (Richard Heck 2007, pp. 129-133)

46. Prinz’s Guava • “Suppose you have never eaten guava before, but now, at this moment, have a first taste of guava …you might not recognize it if you tasted it again, but it might be true that you know what guava is like, nevertheless. […] Because you would not recognize the flavour again, it would be wrong to say you have a concept of the flavour, but it would certainly be appropriate to say that you know, then and there, what it’s like. This shows that concepts used to categorize phenomenal states are not necessary for phenomenal knowledge.” (“Mental Pointing: Phenomenal Knowledge Without Concepts”, 197-198)

47. 3 lines of thought against this specificity stuff • The non-conceptualists are assuming determinateness beyond the evidence, even first-personal • Connectionism allows for the acquisition of “complex” concepts prior to any acquistion their conceptual “simples” • Non-conceptualists underestimate the work that can be done by a non-determinate concept of determinateness

48. Unweaving Raffman’s Rainbow • The non-conceptualist conclusion seems to depend on assuming that the colors are present to the mind in the same way regardless of mode (simultaneous vs serial) of presentation • But differences in presentation often result in differences in color perception

49. Unweaving Raffman’s Rainbow • Simultaneous and serial presentations of stimuli are different contexts that give rise to differences in how stimuli are perceived. Compare the blue areas on the top of the left cube and the yellow areas on the top of the right cube.

50. Color and Context • Dale Purves Lab http://www.purveslab.net/research/explanation/color/color.html