By Peter Hankins
Experiments where the subjects are tricked into mistaking a plastic dummy for their real hand (all done with mirrors), or into feeling themselves to be situated somewhere behind their own head (you need a camera for this) show that our perception of our own body and our own location are generated within our brain and are susceptible to error and distortion. According to Metzinger this shows that they are really no more than illusions (Is that right, by the way -- or are they only illusions when they’re wrong or misleading? The fact that a camera can be made to generate false or misleading pictures doesn’t mean that all photographs are delusions, does it?).
There are many interesting details in this account, quite apart from its value as part of the overall argument. Metzinger briefly touches on four varieties of autoscopic (self-seeing) phenomena, all of which can be related to distinct areas of the brain: autoscopic hallucination, where the subject sees an image of themselves; the feeling of a presence, where the subject has the strong sense of someone there without seeing anyone; the particularly disturbing heautoscopy, where the subject sees another self and switches back and forth into and out of it, unsure which is ‘the real me’; and the better-known OBE. OBEs arise in various ways: often detachment from the body is sudden, but in other cases the second self may lift out gradually from the feet, or may exit the corporeal body via the top of the head. Metzinger tells us that he himself has experienced OBEs and made many efforts to have more (going so far as to persuade his anaesthetist to use ketamine on him in advance of an operation, with no result -- I wonder whether the anaesthetist actually kept his word?). Speaking of lucid dreams, another personal interest, he tells the story of having one in which he dreamed an OBE. That seems an interesting bit of evidence: if you can dream a credible OBE, mightn’t they all be dreams? This seems to undercut the apparently strong sense of reality which typically accompanies them.
Interestingly, Metzinger reports that a conversation with Susan Blackmore helped him understand his own experiences. Blackmore is of course another emphatic denier of the reality of the self. I don’t in any way mean to offer an ad hominem argument here, but it is striking that these two people both seem to have had a particular interest in ’spooky’ dualistic phenomena which their rational scientific minds ultimately rejected, leading on to an especially robust rejection of the self. Perhaps people who lean towards dualism in their early years develop a particularly strong conception of the self, so that when they adopt monist materialism they reject the self altogether instead of seeking to redefine and accommodate it, as many of us would be inclined to do?
On that basis, you would expect Metzinger to be the hardest of hard determinists; his ideas seem to lean in that direction, but not decisively. He suggests that certain brain processes involved in preparing actions are brought up into the Ego Tunnel and hence seem to belong to us. They seem to be our own thoughts, our own goals and because the earlier stages remain outside the Tunnel, they seem to have come from nowhere, to be our own spontaneous creations. There are really no such things as goals in the world, any more than colours, but the delusion that they do exist is useful to us; the idea of being responsible for our own actions enables a kind of moral competition which is ultimately to our advantage (I’m not quite sure exactly how this works). But in this case Metzinger pulls his punch: perhaps this is not the full story, he says, and describes compatibilism as the most beautiful position.
Metzinger pours scorn on the idea that we must have freedom of the will because we feel our actions to be free, yet he does give an important place to the phenomenology of the issue, pointing out that it is more complex than might appear. The more you look at them, he suggests, the more evasive conscious intentions become. How curious it is then, that Metzinger, whose attention to phenomenology is outstandingly meticulous, should seem so sure that we have at all times a robust (albeit delusional) sense of our selves. I don’t find it so at all, and of course on this no less a person than David Hume is with me; with characteristically gentle but devastating scepticism, he famously remarked “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”
Metzinger concludes by considering a range of moral and social issues which he thinks we need to address as our understanding of the mind improves. In his view, for example, we ought not to try to generate artificial consciousness. As a conscious entity, the AI would be capable of suffering, and in Metzinger’s view the chances are its existence would be more painful than pleasant. One reason for thinking so is the constrained and curtailed existence it could expect; another is that we only have our own minds to go on and would be likely to produce inferior, messed-up versions of it. But more alarming, Metzinger argues that human life itself involves an overall preponderance of pain over pleasure; he invokes Schopenhauer and Buddha. With characteristic thoroughness, he concedes that pleasure and pain may not be all that life is about; otherr achievements can justify a life of discomfort. But even so, the chances for an artificial consciousness, he feels are poor.
This is surely too bleak. I see no convincing reason to think that pain outweighs pleasure in general (certainly the Buddhist case, based on the perverse assumption that change is always painful, seems a weak point in that otherwise logical religion), and I see some reasons to think that a conscious robot would be less vulnerable to bad experiences than we are. It’s millions of years of evolution which have ingrained in us a fear of death and the motivating experience of pain: the artificial consciousness need have none of that, but would surely be most likely to face its experiences with superhuman equanimity.
Of course caution is justified, but Metzinger in effect wants us to wait until we’ve sorted out the meaning of life before we get on with living it.
His attempt to raise this and other issues is commendable though; he’s right that the implications of recent progress have not received enough intelligent attention. Unfortunately I think the chances of some of these issues being addressed with philosophic rationality are slim. Another topic Metzinger raises, for example, is the question of what kinds of altered or enhanced mental states, from among the greatly expanded repertoire we are likely to have available in the near future, we ought to allow or facilitate; not much chance that his mild suggestions on that will have much impact.
There’s a vein of pessimism in his views on another topic. Metzinger fears that the progress of science, before the deeper issues have been sorted out, could inspire an unduly cynical, stripped-down view of human nature; a ‘vulgar materialism’, he calls it. Uninformed members of the public falling prey to this crude point of view might be tempted to think:
“The cat is out of the bag. We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone… I get the message.”
Gosh: do we know anyone vulgar and unsophisticated enough to think like that?
(Read part one in this series here.)
Peter Hankins is author of the Conscious Entities weblog.
Nice review
> are they only illusions when they’re wrong or misleading?
Good point! And WHO is it being deluded, that's what concerns me. Like you say, Sue Blackmore says much the same thing. If consciousness is an illusion, there must be someone there to be deceived by it, surely? Which sounds rather like begging the question to me. I think therefore I am; I am deceived, therefore I am. I've met Sue several times but never really had the nerve to ask, to be honest: I feel like I must be stupidly missing the point, somewhere. How can consciousness BE an illusion - the whole concept of illusion has no meaning outside the context of observers, so I don't see how the word can be used in such a sentence, because consciousness is already a given. It reminds me of the way physicists frequently talk about extra dimensions being "curled up inside" the three dimensions we are aware of. What??? Just because a sentence is grammatical, doesn't mean it has semantics. There is absolutely no valid definition of the word "dimension" that allows it to be "curled up" or "inside" anything at all. It's as meaningless as saying "I'm afraid I've broken your poverty", or "have a slice of blue". I can see how we conscious beings are under the illusion that we are aware of the physical world, when in reality we're aware only of a simulation of the world, but that doesn't seem to be what they're saying. If consciousness is an illusion then they seem to be saying it doesn't really exist. So who is being fooled by it, then? Do you know what they mean, Peter?
And I agree with you about the misery or otherwise of future conscious artifacts. But even if they are doomed to a painful existence I think we can still feel justified in attempting to make one - it's our best hope of finding out what consciousness really is, and once we do that we'll be better equipped to reduce suffering overall.
Dimensions
Well, Steve Grand, as for dimensions, mathematicians use a lot more than the three you are accustomed to, and certain physical processes can't be explained except using mathematic models that involve up to 11 (or was it 13?) dimensions. That humans can't perceive more than three dimensions doesn't mean there are no more than three dimensions if there is enough evidence for it - as seems to be the case.
Nothing to do with the article. I share your overall opinion on it.
Consciousness as an illusion? No. But no free will.
I don't think consciousness is an illusion. However, I am under no illusions about it being fundamental: It is just an emergent property of certain physical systems.
If anyone wants to say consciousness is not real, it raises the question of what is real? As I said previously, trees, cats, etc. are now pretty much known to be patterns of matter. If arranging matter in the right way to cause the appearance of consciousness does not cause real consciousness, then I fail to see how arranging matter in the right way to cause the appearance of a cat should be expected to cause a real cat. People who claim the self is an illusion are actually making a special case. They are dismissing a particular emergent property of a system as "illusionary" when (presumably) they accept all the other ones.
(and this, by the way, is nothing to do with my own views on the scope of emergent properties and their algorithmic descriptions: Anyone who thinks that things are made of more basic things arranged the right way should be able to agree with this.)
I also agree with Steve's point: If it is an illusion, who is supposed to be having it?
One answer to what I have said here would be to declare all emergent properties "illusions", but if we do that we have no place left for the word "real". It seems to me that, whatever the ontological status of "real" things is, "real" is a perfectly good word. Whatever the ontological status of cats, trees and rocks is, we attach the word "real" to them. We should therefore attach the word "real" to anything that shares the same ontological status - and consciousness does, existing in the same emergent way as anything else.
I think some of the confusion that causes people to go for the "illusion" view is the idea that there is some qualitative difference between the "physical" and the "abstract" - or between "hardware" and "software". In reality, everything both are just patterns of matter. We might describe a program in very general terms. For example, if I describe a chess playing algorithm, it could be run on electronic computers, on photonic computers, on mechanical computers, on wood and string, etc. This may lead us to think I am describing something "non-physical". In reality, when I describe the chess algorithm I am merely describing a very general set of different physical arrangements of matter that all share this common "chess algorithm" property. Everything is physical. There is no added layer on top of computers where what they do becomes "abstract" or ontologically different in any way. Of course, we act like there is - even I do - for convenience in programming, business or everyday life, but in a philosophical sense there is no such distinction. When people can't appreciate that, they fall for the flawed idea that the "self" is some kind of "software illusion" floating above a physical, ontologically different brain.
None of this salvages the idea of "free will" in any strong sense. If anything, it confirms that it is incoherent. We are physical, and we are trapped in that physicality. However much we may run, or turn this way or that to escape it - even if we tried to escape our own brains into some other system, there is no escape from our physical nature and it goes with us everywhere. It is that physical nature that compels us to act in a particular way, and we can never be free of it. There is no escape from what we are.
Ego Tunnel
Steve -
Yes, indeed - as Descartes might have said, a non-existent self can't doubt its own existence. I think that people who emphatically deny the reality of the self often want to deny the existence of an immaterial soul, or an homunculus inside the brain that does all the thinking for us; and then they sort of overshoot. On the other hand some probably only use it as an emphatic way of saying 'your inner self isn't really what you think it is', but Metzinger seems to want to say more than that.
On the conscious robot, I'd be tempted to go a little further and say that adding new kinds of things to the world is ethically meritorious, so that it's almost a duty to do it if we can - but perhaps that's over-egging it.
Paul -
Very interesting argument. I must admit I have a job getting my head round the set of different physical arrangements of matter that would constitute chess algorithms.
Chess algorithms...
But would you accept that there is such a set, that the description of a chess algorithm describes this set (at least in principle) - as we can compare any configuration of matter with the chess algorithm to see if it is running it - and that therefore a chess algorithm can actually be viewed as describing a very broadly defined set of physical objects?
Incidentally, this way of thinking causes some issues for Searle's views on semantics and minds - as it would mean that thinking that any system running a computer program is conscious and thinking that just brains and similar kinds of systems can be conscious is just the same kind of view - except that one is restricting consciousness to a smaller set of systems. At no stage do we need to start thinking that "software has some special ability to make minds appear" - we can just regard everything as sets of physical objects defined with varying degrees of specificity. Searle accuses the AI community of dualism. While I disagree with Searle on the really important things, I sort of almost agree with him on this. This idea of software as "something else" that a lot of people have, together with a lack of precision in how things are described, may wrongly give the appearance that AI needs dualism - but this is just due to sloppy language.
When we describe computers in this way, much of Searle's argument fades away. What is left is merely an argument about specificity of physical systems - and in such an argument Searle is just left drawing fairly arbitrary lines between physical systems. I have written an argument against Searle's position based on such an approach, and I will send the link to you by private message, Peter. I hope this will make this seem more attractive.
To put it another way:
If we say "This computer is running a chess algorithm?" what exactly do we mean. I suggest that the statement is actually incoherent unless we regard it as really meaning "This physical object is in some physical configuration such that what it is physically doing shares some physical property in common with a class of other physical systems - and we regard all these systems as "running chess algorithms"."
Chess algorithms - the Nutcase convention
There are two reasons I have a job agreeing wholeheartedly. One is that the set of physical arrangements which realise a chess algorithm seems to be infinite. That might be alright, but then I'm not sure how you could definitely exclude any physical arrangement at all. A set of physical symbols only represents an algorithm in the light of a given convention (the alphabet, some formal rules, etc etc). But we can have any convention we like.
So, a vase of flowers is not a chess algorithm. But there is presumably a list of all chess algorithms written out in a standard way and listed in alphabetical order (allow me a bit of slack over the details). If I want, I can come up with the Nutcase Convention for writing algorithms, which specifies that all algorithms are to be written the same way as in the list, except that the fourth entry is to be replaced by a vase of flowers, which indicates the algorithm which would be there in the sensible list. Now, it seems, there is a clear sense (the Nutcase sense) in which a vase of flowers is a chess algorithm, and we can obviously slot in any physical thing whatever instead of the flowers. That being so, how can any arbitrary state of physical affairs be excluded from the set of physical affairs that belong to the set of chess algorithms?
Hope I'm making sense (and not missing your point), though I'm far from sure I am!
Reply to Peter
I understand this point. Now, I deal with it in a fairly extreme way, which I have debated about with Steve before, but I am not trying to push any position here on what constitutes an implementation of a given algorithm.
Could we not agree that there is [i]some[/i] way of deciding whether or not a particular physical configuration corresponds to a particular algorithm? If point out that, if we can't, we have to ask how you have a mind according to the computational view of AI. Suppose we decide that we can't say whether a particular physical system is running something or not. We would then not be able to say for sure whether your brain was running you (or whether it was doing the right sort of things to cause you) and we would not be able to say whether it made sense to say that you have a mind - yet you know you have a mind so it is not all just subjective to you.
What I am saying is that for any understanding of minds in relation to algorithms we must assume that we can clearly say, in principle, what is running an algorithm. If we can't, computation is purely subjective and Searle would actually be right. I highly doubt that you want to go that far.
I am not trying to solve that problem of "what interpretations are valid" here, although I can state what my own approach on it is if asked - so I am not trying to evade the issue. Rather, I am simply saying that if we think of minds as having anything to do with algorithms at all, we can only coherently do this by saying that algorithms correspond to sets of physical configurations. Any such set will be infinite of course, but that is not a problem. A worse problem, as you have pointed out, is the way in which it would be infinite - such a set would seem to allow, in principle, an interpretation to find an algorithm in any physical system. That problem - how we decide what interpretations are valid - is a separate problem and one that faces anyway. It is not one that is introduced by what I have said here. If you want to think that algorithms are somehow some kind of abstraction on top of a physical system, and not just very general physical properties of physical systems, you have exactly the same problem. In fact, the physical understanding of algorithms would allow, at least in principle, the possibility of tightening up the definition of an algorithm to exclude "silly" cases. The abstract definition wouldn't.
Chess algorithms
Thanks, Paul; yes, agreed - and well put.
Fakeness and Minds
Thank you Peter. So this is where I think this leaves us, and I would be interested to see how much of this you would agree with:
If we have such a view, it makes little sense to talk of the self being fake. The self would be a physical object, which exists due to its underlying components being in a particular configuration, just as trees, cats and rocks exist. The fact that the set of physical objects corresponding to a particular algorithm is much more general and hard to get a grip on than, say, the set of physical objects corresponding to an oak tree is merely a distraction. The ontology of minds and oak trees is the same.
Furthermore, objections by Professor Searle about how AI is based on some kind of dualism fade away, as do his objections that AI is based on some idea that "algorithms have causative power". They would fade into incoherence, because we would not be taking such a view. Saying "Such and such a computer has a mind" would merely mean "We regard such and such a system as belonging to a set of physical objects described in a very general way". Strong AI and Searle's view would differ, then, merely by the size of the set they assume for minds. Searle would claim that minds need to be caused by specific physical processes - but the same applies for here too. You could define a physical process in such general terms that the same process occurs in a human brain, an alien brain or a computer - in fact that is really what we are doing when we define an algorithm. We are defining a classification of physical process in a very general way. It only seems different and "abstract" to us because descriptions of everyday things are much more specific.
In other words, saying "This system is doing chess calculations" is philosophically no different, in a qualitative sense, from saying "This system is digesting food" - there is only the difference that the set of physical processes corresponding to food digestion is much more specifically defined - but this is just a matter of degree and deprives Searle's argument of much of its import. (By the way, I have written a more detailed version of this objection to Searle, which is here: http://machineslikeus.com/news/searles-argument-against-ai-and-emergent-...)
This does not remove the serious problem of "What interpretations are valid?" that you mentioned, but that problem faces anyway - unless we decide that algorithms are utterly capricious human constructs, with no relationship to anything in the physical world, which we don't want to do - but how we resolve that is a different issue.
Dimensions shmentions
I don't want to break the fascinating thread between Peter and Paul but I just noticed MycroftH's comment about dimensions and I wanted to explain what I meant.
Yes, I know physics requires multiple dimensions for its current models. But firstly this is using the term 'dimension' in a fundamentally different way than the way it is used spatially. I'm a programmer and I frequently define systems with multiple dimensions, but the mathematical use of the word dimension just means 'degree of freedom'. My brain's current state can be defined as a point in a hyperspace of n dimensions, where n is an extremely large number, but that doesn't mean my brain *extends* into more than three dimensions, simply that to describe it we need more than three variables. In the case of physics we need multiple "space-like" variables to describe the color fields, etc. but they don't need to point perpendicular to x, y, z - they can exist (if indeed they do exist - after all, physics is aiming for a *unified* field theory) in the same space as the metric field that defines space itself. Only mathematically do they need considering as 'dimensions'.
Secondly, I reassert my point: You CANNOT under any meaningful use of language "curl up" a dimension nor put it "inside" another. These are contradictions in terms. They form grammatical sentences with no semantics. Curling up is itself a dimensional statement. A dimension is not a THING and only things can be curled up. A dimension is an axis. If you curve it, it's no longer an axis but a line described by two or three other axes. It's no more meaningful than trying to put love in a bottle. Physicists need to get a better grip on language, because they talk gibberish sometimes. And so do consciousness researchers. We're all struggling to get across difficult intuitions using words, and as we know, language is even more logically incomplete than mathematics. But poor choice of words can mislead and cause erroneous deductions, which is what I think happens when someone says "consciousness is an illusion".
Ok, as you were. I just wanted to clear that up.
Thanks for clearing that up, Steve
I stand corrected.
Extra Dimensions
It is no problem Steve - we can accomodate multiple discussions here.
I understand what you were saying about extra dimensions and I agree. I think the problem here is just one of sloppy language being used - and in this case the sloppiness is so bad that the statement starts to become incoherent.
This is my understanding of what they mean they talk about "the extra dimensions being curled up inside the other three".
What they mean is:
The universe has three "obvious" spatial dimensions - and it has a huge size in these dimensions.
The universe has extra, "less obvious" dimensions. The size of the universe is much smaller - microscopic in fact - in these dimensions, and you can't reach the end of the universe in one, as they "wrap around" - and because the size of the universe is so small in these dimensions you would only be able to travel a microscopic distance in one of them before ending up back where you started.
This means you can designate any point in space by three numbers, which can be very large, and some extra numbers which have to be very, very small. For most practical purposes, you can ignore the extra degrees of freedom afforded by anything except the usual three dimensions.
I think "curled up" is just a way of thinking about these dimensions being "wrapped around" - which is also crude language. When people talk about them being "curled up" in the other three I think they are trying to imagine that any 3D object we see, or any event we observe happening in space, sort of implies all these extra degrees of freedom in it.
It is hardly ideal language though.
I think this might be a better model:
Imagine we live in 2D space. We don't know of any "third dimension". One day, some scientist comes up with a theory that there is an extra "third" dimension. We are, in fact, between two sheets of glass, but the sheets of glass are so close together, and the gap between them so small, that the freedom provided by movement in the third dimension does not even show up in everyday physics. Imagine the sheets of glass are a microscopic distance apart.
Now, imagine that we make the third dimension "wrap around", so that there is no edge. When you move up, instead of hitting the glass, you arrive back where you started - like when you go off the edge of the screen in Pacman or Asteroids - although, of course, this means that you can't say there is an edge anywhere.
How many dimension?
The first dimension is viewable through the prints we can see.
The second dimension being the mirror image.
The third dimension being x, y and z axis (cube, view from the corner of a house).
The fourth dimension is only available through x-ray, MRI scan.
The fifth dimension is microscopic? (atom)
The sixth dimension is sound?
The seventh dimension is time?
The eight'th dimension only exist in our dream?
The ninth dimension is 'time-space'?
All these dimension is personal opinion. Some may disagree. There's been talk time travelling for many years but is it possible? Logically, if a person was born 20 years ago, there's no way that he can go back to 500 years ago because he did not exist in that time-space.
Therefore it's not possible. However, it might be possible to speed up time and travel forward, just like travelling from US to Asia and lost one day. Then again we might be able to travel back in time in this manner. That however we can only be constantly living in the same day. *LOL*
The most important element that is affecting time travelling is our 'decaying body'. If we can counter this problem, the idea of time travelling might be possible. Then again, we might be able to travel in time whilst in our dream. We can leave our body and go anywhere we wanted.