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Enigmatic Side Hero Username: Enigmatic Post Number: 2119 Registered: 11-2010 Rating: N/A |
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Nisarga Comedian Username: Nisarga Post Number: 1736 Registered: 03-2008 Rating: N/A |
Hard problem of Consciousness revisited: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant -worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out â or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didnât realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life â perhaps the central mystery of human life â and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it. Why canât the worldâs greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? â podcast The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona â for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject â knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmersâs, hadnât proved thrilling. âQuite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring â I had no idea what anyone was talking about,â recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. âAs the organiser, Iâm looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.â He grew worried. âBut then the third talk, right before the coffee break â that was Dave.â With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like heâd got lost en route to a Metallica concert. âHe comes on stage, hair down to his butt, heâs prancing around like Mick Jagger,â Hameroff said. âBut then he speaks. And thatâs when everyone wakes up.â The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all âeasy problemsâ, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out. There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters â the Hard Problem of Consciousness â and itâs this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why arenât we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached? Advertisement What jolted Chalmersâs audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. âAt the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,â Hameroff said. âAnd everyone was like: âOh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! Thatâs why weâre here!ââ Philosophers had pondered the so-called âmind-body problemâ for centuries. But Chalmersâs particular manner of reviving it âreached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that weâre dealing with here?â Lose yourself in a great story: Sign up for the long read email Read more Two decades later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: you canât follow the news for a week without encountering at least one more tale about scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness, or love at first sight, or regret â and thatâs only the research that makes the headlines. Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence â which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to be one â has advanced stupendously. But like an obnoxious relative who invites himself to stay for a week and then wonât leave, the Hard Problem remains. When I stubbed my toe on the leg of the dining table this morning, as any student of the brain could tell you, nerve fibres called âC-fibresâ shot a message to my spinal cord, sending neurotransmitters to the part of my brain called the thalamus, which activated (among other things) my limbic system. Fine. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain? And what is pain, anyway? Advertisement Questions like these, which straddle the border between science and philosophy, make some experts openly angry. They have caused others to argue that conscious sensations, such as pain, donât really exist, no matter what I felt as I hopped in anguish around the kitchen; or, alternatively, that plants and trees must also be conscious. The Hard Problem has prompted arguments in serious journals about what is going on in the mind of a zombie, or â to quote the title of a famous 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel â the question âWhat is it like to be a bat?â Some argue that the problem marks the boundary not just of what we currently know, but of what science could ever explain. On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to be solved â but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too. Next week, the conundrum will move further into public awareness with the opening of Tom Stoppardâs new play, The Hard Problem, at the National Theatre â the first play Stoppard has written for the National since 2006, and the last that the theatreâs head, Nicholas Hytner, will direct before leaving his post in March. The 77-year-old playwright has revealed little about the playâs contents, except that it concerns the question of âwhat consciousness is and why it existsâ, considered from the perspective of a young researcher played by Olivia Vinall. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stoppard also clarified a potential misinterpretation of the title. âItâs not about erectile dysfunction,â he said. Stoppardâs work has long focused on grand, existential themes, so the subject is fitting: when conversation turns to the Hard Problem, even the most stubborn rationalists lapse quickly into musings on the meaning of life. Christof Koch, the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a key player in the Obama administrationâs multibillion-dollar initiative to map the human brain, is about as credible as neuroscientists get. But, he told me in December: âI think the earliest desire that drove me to study consciousness was that I wanted, secretly, to show myself that it couldnât be explained scientifically. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I could say: OK, here, God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people.â Koch assured me that he had long ago abandoned such improbable notions. Then, not much later, and in all seriousness, he said that on the basis of his recent research he thought it wasnât impossible that his iPhone might have feelings. In all seriousness, Koch said he thought it wasn't impossible that his iPhone might have feelings Advertisement By the time Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson, science had been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. The source of the animosity dates back to the 1600s, when René Descartes identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. On the one hand, Descartes realised, nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that youâre conscious. In theory, everything else you think you know about the world could be an elaborate illusion cooked up to deceive you â at this point, present-day writers invariably invoke The Matrix â but your consciousness itself canât be illusory. On the other hand, this most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. It doesnât seem to be physical. It canât be observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It canât even really be described. The mind, Descartes concluded, must be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didnât abide by the laws of nature; it had been bequeathed to us by God. This religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism, remained the governing assumption into the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an increasingly secular scientific establishment that took physicalism â the position that only physical things exist â as its most basic principle. And yet, even as neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing alternative explanation was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became taboo. Few people doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked: if you question this, try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and see what happens to your consciousness. But how they were linked â or if they were somehow exactly the same thing â seemed a mystery best left to philosophers in their armchairs. As late as 1989, writing in the International Dictionary of Psychology, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland could irascibly declare of consciousness that âit is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.â It was only in 1990 that Francis Crick, the joint discoverer of the double helix, used his position of eminence to break ranks. Neuroscience was far enough along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with Christof Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored. âIt is remarkable,â they began, âthat most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousnessâ â partly, they suspected, âbecause most workers in these areas cannot see any useful way of approaching the problemâ. They presented their own âsketch of a theoryâ, arguing that certain neurons, firing at certain frequencies, might somehow be the cause of our inner awareness â though it was not clear how. Illustration by Pete Gamlen Illustration by Pete Gamlen Advertisement âPeople thought I was crazy to be getting involved,â Koch recalled. âA senior colleague took me out to lunch and said, yes, he had the utmost respect for Francis, but Francis was a Nobel laureate and a half-god and he could do whatever he wanted, whereas I didnât have tenure yet, so I should be incredibly careful. Stick to more mainstream science! These fringey things â why not leave them until retirement, when youâre coming close to death, and you can worry about the soul and stuff like that?â It was around this time that David Chalmers started talking about zombies. As a child, Chalmers was short-sighted in one eye, and he vividly recalls the day he was first fitted with glasses to rectify the problem. âSuddenly I had proper binocular vision,â he said. âAnd the world just popped out. It was three-dimensional to me in a way it hadnât been.â He thought about that moment frequently as he grew older. Of course, you could tell a simple mechanical story about what was going on in the lens of his glasses, his eyeball, his retina, and his brain. âBut how does that explain the way the world just pops out like that?â To a physicalist, the glasses-eyeball-retina story is the only story. But to a thinker of Chalmersâs persuasion, it was clear that it wasnât enough: it told you what the machinery of the eye was doing, but it didnât begin to explain that sudden, breathtaking experience of depth and clarity. Chalmersâs âzombieâ thought experiment is his attempt to show why the mechanical account is not enough â why the mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain. âLook, Iâm not a zombie, and I pray that youâre not a zombie,â Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, âbut the point is that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures â and it didnât!â We were drinking espressos in his faculty apartment at New York University, where he recently took up a full-time post at what is widely considered the leading philosophy department in the Anglophone world; boxes of his belongings, shipped over from Australia, lay unpacked around his living-room. Chalmers, now 48, recently cut his hair in a concession to academic respectability, and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever. The zombie scenario goes as follows: imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this â as opposed to a groaning, blood-spattered walking corpse from a movie â is what philosophers mean by a âzombieâ. Such non-conscious humanoids donât exist, of course. (Or perhaps it would be better to say that I know Iâm not one, anyhow; I could never know for certain that you arenât.) But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could. Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside. As Chalmers explained: âIâm talking to you now, and I can see how youâre behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly whatâs going on in your brain â yet it seems it could be consistent with all that evidence that you have no consciousness at all.â If you were approached by me and my doppelgänger, not knowing which was which, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell us apart. And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness canât just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra â an additional ingredient in nature. Chalmers recently cut his hair and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever Advertisement It would be understating things a bit to say that this argument wasnât universally well-received when Chalmers began to advance it, most prominently in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. The withering tone of the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci sums up the thousands of words that have been written attacking the zombie notion: âLetâs relegate zombies to B-movies and try to be a little more serious about our philosophy, shall we?â Yes, it may be true that most of us, in our daily lives, think of consciousness as something over and above our physical being â as if your mind were âa chauffeur inside your own bodyâ, to quote the spiritual author Alan Watts. But to accept this as a scientific principle would mean rewriting the laws of physics. Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining. Above all, critics point out, if this non-physical mental stuff did exist, how could it cause physical things to happen â as when the feeling of pain causes me to jerk my fingers away from the saucepanâs edge? Nonetheless, just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that this spooky extra ingredient might be real. In the 1970s, at what was then the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, the neurologist Lawrence Weiskrantz encountered a patient, known as âDBâ, with a blind spot in his left visual field, caused by brain damage. Weiskrantz showed him patterns of striped lines, positioned so that they fell on his area of blindness, then asked him to say whether the stripes were vertical or horizontal. Naturally, DB protested that he could see no stripes at all. But Weiskrantz insisted that he guess the answers anyway â and DB got them right almost 90% of the time. Apparently, his brain was perceiving the stripes without his mind being conscious of them. One interpretation is that DB was a semi-zombie, with a brain like any other brain, but partially lacking the magical add-on of consciousness. Chalmers knows how wildly improbable his ideas can seem, and takes this in his stride: at philosophy conferences, he is fond of clambering on stage to sing The Zombie Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousness. (âI act like you act / I do what you do / But I donât know / What itâs like to be you.â) âThe conceit is: wouldnât it be a drag to be a zombie? Consciousness is what makes life worth living, and I donât even have that: Iâve got the zombie blues.â The song has improved since its debut more than a decade ago, when he used to try to hold a tune. âNow Iâve realised it sounds better if you just shout,â he said. Pete Gamlen Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen The consciousness debates have provoked more mudslinging and fury than most in modern philosophy, perhaps because of how baffling the problem is: opposing combatants tend not merely to disagree, but to find each otherâs positions manifestly preposterous. An admittedly extreme example concerns the Canadian-born philosopher Ted Honderich, whose book On Consciousness was described, in an article by his fellow philosopher Colin McGinn in 2007, as âbanal and pointlessâ, âexcruciatingâ, âabsurdâ, running âthe full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely badâ. McGinn added, in a footnote: âThe review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it. The editors asked me to âsoften the toneâ of the original [and] I have done so.â (The attack may have been partly motivated by a passage in Honderichâs autobiography, in which he mentions âmy small colleague Colin McGinnâ; at the time, Honderich told this newspaper heâd enraged McGinn by referring to a girlfriend of his as ânot as plain as the old oneâ.) Advertisement McGinn, to be fair, has made a career from such hatchet jobs. But strong feelings only slightly more politely expressed are commonplace. Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with â making the whole debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isnât anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesnât actually give rise to something called consciousness. Common sense may tell us thereâs a subjective world of inner experience â but then common sense told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. Consciousness, according to Dennettâs theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named âfictoplasmâ; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying. To Dennettâs opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest. (Chalmers has speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself might be a zombie.) Itâs like asserting that cancer doesnât exist, then claiming youâve cured cancer; more than one critic of Dennettâs most famous book, Consciousness Explained, has joked that its title ought to be Consciousness Explained Away. Dennettâs reply is characteristically breezy: explaining things away, he insists, is exactly what scientists do. When physicists first concluded that the only difference between gold and silver was the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, he writes, people could have felt cheated, complaining that their special âgoldnessâ and âsilverinessâ had been explained away. But everybody now accepts that goldness and silveriness are really just differences in atoms. However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do. âThe history of science is full of cases where people thought a phenomenon was utterly unique, that there couldnât be any possible mechanism for it, that we might never solve it, that there was nothing in the universe like it,â said Patricia Churchland of the University of California, a self-described âneurophilosopherâ and one of Chalmersâs most forthright critics. Churchlandâs opinion of the Hard Problem, which she expresses in caustic vocal italics, is that it is nonsense, kept alive by philosophers who fear that science might be about to eliminate one of the puzzles that has kept them gainfully employed for years. Look at the precedents: in the 17th century, scholars were convinced that light couldnât possibly be physical â that it had to be something occult, beyond the usual laws of nature. Or take life itself: early scientists were convinced that there had to be some magical spirit â the élan vital â that distinguished living beings from mere machines. But there wasnât, of course. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually, neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states. Churchland said: âThe history of science really gives you perspective on how easy it is to talk ourselves into this sort of thinking â that if my big, wonderful brain canât envisage the solution, then it must be a really, really hard problem!â Advertisement Solutions have regularly been floated: the literature is awash in references to âglobal workspace theoryâ, âego tunnelsâ, âmicrotubulesâ, and speculation that quantum theory may provide a way forward. But the intractability of the arguments has caused some thinkers, such as Colin McGinn, to raise an intriguing if ultimately defeatist possibility: what if weâre just constitutionally incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known as âmysterianismâ â after the 1960s Michigan rockânâroll band ? and the Mysterians, who themselves borrowed the name from a work of Japanese sci-fi â but the essence of it is that thereâs actually no mystery to why consciousness hasnât been explained: itâs that humans arenât up to the job. If we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be physical, maybe thatâs because we are, to quote the American philosopher Josh Weisberg, in the position of âsquirrels trying to understand quantum mechanicsâ. In other words: âItâs just not going to happen.â Or maybe it is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is âpanpsychismâ, the dizzying notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he has written, âI often encounter blank stares of incomprehension.â But when it comes to grappling with the Hard Problem, crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard. Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too â well, where does it stop? Illustration by Pete Gamlen Illustration by Pete Gamlen Growing up as the child of German-born Catholics, Koch had a dachshund named Purzel. According to the church, because he was a dog, that meant he didnât have a soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured â âhe certainly gave every appearance of having a rich inner lifeâ. These days we donât much speak of souls, but it is widely assumed that many non-human brains are conscious â that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. The problem is that there seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks. Since we donât know how the brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming itâs only the brains of mammals that do so â or even that consciousness requires a brain at all. Which is how Koch and Chalmers have both found themselves arguing, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, that an ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle be conscious. The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality â such as space, mass, or electrical charge â just do exist. They canât be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too â and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter. Kochâs specific twist on this idea, developed with the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, is narrower and more precise than traditional panpsychism. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and dogs, though their consciousness probably doesnât resemble ours. But in principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. (The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals? Koch, for his part, tries to avoid stepping on insects as he walks.) Unlike the vast majority of musings on the Hard Problem, moreover, Tononi and Kochâs âintegrated information theoryâ has actually been tested. A team of researchers led by Tononi has designed a device that stimulates the brain with electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organised â how âintegratedâ â its neural circuits are. Sure enough, when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients suffering âlocked-in syndromeâ â who are as conscious as the rest of us â levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma â who arenât â it doesnât. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, Koch argues and in theory you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious. But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? Koch shrugged. âItâs like black holes,â he said. âIâve never been in a black hole. Personally, I have no experience of black holes. But the theory [that predicts black holes] seems always to be true, so I tend to accept it.â Peter Gamelen Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Pete Gamlen It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to vanquish the Hard Problem. On the one hand, it wouldnât require a belief in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldnât need to accept the strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesnât exist, when itâs so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, itâs everywhere. The universe is throbbing with it. Last June, several of the most prominent combatants in the consciousness debates â including Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett â boarded a tall-masted yacht for a trip among the ice floes of Greenland. This conference-at-sea was funded by a Russian internet entrepreneur, Dmitry Volkov, the founder of the Moscow Centre for Consciousness Studies. About 30 academics and graduate students, plus crew, spent a week gliding through dark waters, past looming snow-topped mountains and glaciers, in a bracing chill conducive to focused thought, giving the problem of consciousness another shot. In the mornings, they visited islands to go hiking, or examine the ruins of ancient stone huts; in the afternoons, they held conference sessions on the boat. For Chalmers, the setting only sharpened the urgency of the mystery: how could you feel the Arctic wind on your face, take in the visual sweep of vivid greys and whites and greens, and still claim conscious experience was unreal, or that it was simply the result of ordinary physical stuff, behaving ordinarily? The question was rhetorical. Dennett and Churchland were not converted; indeed, Chalmers has no particular confidence that a consensus will emerge in the next century. âMaybe thereâll be some amazing new development that leaves us all, now, looking like pre-Darwinians arguing about biology,â he said. âBut it wouldnât surprise me in the least if in 100 years, neuroscience is incredibly sophisticated, if we have a complete map of the brain â and yet some people are still saying, âYes, but how does any of that give you consciousness?â while others are saying âNo, no, no â that just is the consciousness!ââ The Greenland cruise concluded in collegial spirits, and mutual incomprehension. It would be poetic â albeit deeply frustrating â were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that nothing else could ever matter more â since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Yet thereâs no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that weâd found it | ||
Nisarga Comedian Username: Nisarga Post Number: 1735 Registered: 03-2008 Rating: N/A |
https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Reason-Hugo-Mercier/dp/0674368 304 Scott Young's wonderful review summary: The basic puzzle is this: If reason is so useful, why do human beings seem to be the only animals to possess it? Surely, a lion who had excellent reasoning abilities would catch more gazelles? Yet human beings seem to be alone in the ability to reason about things. If reason is so powerful, why are we so bad at it? Why do we have tons of cognitive biases? Reasoned thinking is supposed to be good, but we seem to use it fairly little as a species. Unraveling the Enigma The answer to both of these puzzles, which has far-reaching implications for how we think and make decisions, is that weâve misunderstood what reason actually is. The classic view of reason is that it is simply better thinking. Reasoned thinking is better than unreasoned thinking. Being able to reason means being smarterâa kind of universal cognitive enhancement that is good for all types of problems. Sure, we donât always use it and it can be slower than intuitive judgements, the classic view goes, but reasoning is always good. Sperber and Mercier, argue, in contrast that reason is actually a very specialized cognitive adaptation. The reason other animals do not possess reason is because they donât have the unique environment human beings exist in, and thus never needed to evolve the adaptation. The reason human beings often donât use reasoned thinking is that our faculties of reason are actually much more restricted in their use. We use it only when necessary, and otherwise adopt the same strategies animals use to make intelligent behavior. Whatâs the Point of Reason? According to Sperber and Mercier, the purpose of reason, as a faculty, is for generating and evaluating reasons. This may sound almost tautological, but these two words, reason and reasons, actually refer to very distinct things. image Reason is a faculty. An ability we possess. Near-synonyms might include logic, critical thinking or analysis. Reasons, in contrast, are explanations, usually given in the form of sentences. âBecause it is raining,â is a reason for bringing an umbrella outside. Reasons, such as this one, do not refer to the general capacity of human beings to decide to take umbrellas when it rains, but rather the explanations that justify such behavior to other people and oneself. What Sperber and Mercier argue is that the human faculty of reason largely isnât to create intelligent behavior. Instead, it serves to justify and explain that behavior. In short, we have Reason to create reasons. Those reasons arenât mostly for ourselves, but to make our behavior comprehensible and justifiable to other human beings. Animals donât need this faculty because, without language, there is nobody to hear the reasons they might have. Human beings donât use reason all the time, because, our decisions about what to do are mostly generated by other, intuitive processes, and reasoning is added after. Mental Modules and How You Think About Things A popular view of the brain is the modular theory of mind. This view says that rather than being a unified whole, the brain is better thought of as broken down into distinct modules. Each module takes inputs from other parts of the brain, and gives outputs to other parts of the brain, and each module specializes to its own specific functions. One metaphor for this might be to imagine comparing a big factory that makes gadgets from scratch, on a big conveyor belt. Now compare this to a bunch of separate companies that each make parts of the gadgets, and they get put together only at the end. Mental modules are more like this last picture, with each separate company being somewhat separate from the others, rather than a big unified conveyor belt of thinking. image Fitting in with this view, reason, according to Sperber and Mercier, is a separate mental module. This module has two functions: It takes situations and generates reasons for them. So if you were standing with your umbrella, and someone asked you âWhy are you carrying that?â your reason module might generate a few candidate answers, before arriving on, âItâs raining outside,â as being a good one. It evaluates the reasons of others. In this way, you can also take the reasons given by other people and decide whether they are good or not. If I asked you why youâre carrying an umbrella and you said, âBecause itâs Monday today,â that would not seem to be a good reason. Important in this theory is that the decision to carry an umbrella itself neednât be decided by the reason module. This might be a different module of the brain, that through past conditioned experience, generates the motor commands to grab your umbrella before leaving the house. The reason for why to carry the umbrella, in terms of an actual sentence or thought, may only occur later, upon being asked by someone (or anticipating being asked by someone). Opaque Processes and Reasoning One coincidence I find very persuasive in terms of arguing for this view of reason comes from machine learning. A common critique of machine learning is that it is not introspectable. Meaning, if an algorithm decides to approve a loan, change a price or order a drone strike, human beings often donât know why it made that choice. Even the designers of the algorithm itself often donât know what were the causes of its decisions, even if it tends to make them accurately overall. One proposed solution to this problem has actually been to make two systems. One makes the decision, the other trains itself on the patterns of the first system to generate âexplanationsâ of the former. This way, a complete machine learning system could justify its choices. The coincidence here is that this is exactly what Sperber and Mercier argue is how human brains actually work! We also have a bunch of opaque algorithms that may be trained in ways not dissimilar to the machine learning algorithms. The fact that machine learning algorithms often describe themselves in terms of âneuralâ networks, uses their superficial similarity to the brain as a metaphor for their operation. We too, also need to justify our behavior to outsiders so that it appears in keeping with how our society works. If we appeared to do things without any apparent reason, or worse, a reason that is not valid for that social situation, we may be seen as crazy or evil. Thus, evolution fashioned us too with a second module, that takes our intuitively-arrived-at decisions and generates something that we can communicate with language to outsiders so that they can try to evaluate why do what we do. Implications of Sperber and Mercierâs Theory There are too many implications of this idea to easily fit into a blog post. Best to read the book itself. However, I want to showcase a few of the most important implications of this theory, if it is true. 1. Reasoning isnât a big part of intelligence or (potentially) consciousness. One common view of psychology is described as the elephant and the rider. We are the riders, loudly proclaiming where we want our behavior to go, yet it is really the elephant, the unconscious mind, that is the driving force. image This view has often been used to disparage the idea that we have much control over our lives or decisions. Although the essence of consciousness is still debated, I think this new theory upends some of this view of the mind. In this view, there is no rider. Reason itself is just another module in the mind, providing specialized support for specific tasks. In other words, itâs intuitive, opaque processes all the way down. A better metaphor might be of starlings. These birds fly in amazing patterns, but the behavior emerges out of each bird doing a smaller part. There is no bird who dictates the pattern of flight to others, like a rider might tell an elephant where to go. There is also no cohesive whole to ignore this order, like a willful elephant might ignore its rider. Instead, thereâs a bunch of smaller parts (modules), all doing their own purposes, contributing to a more intelligent behavior at a larger level. 2. Itâs possible to have smart decisions, but not be able to have reasons for them. In a classic view of reason, having no reason for an action makes it almost certainly a bad one. Unless it happens to randomly be correct, thereâs no reason to trust it if there is no reason behind it. Sperber and Mercier, in contrast, completely flip this view. If reason exists to generate reasons, then there are potentially tons of smart decisions that we struggle to generate good reasons for. Therefore, ignoring oneâs reason and acting without it, is not necessarily maladaptive (unless you get confronted about your behavior by others). I donât think this implies we should make every decision on intuition alone, but it does put a big hole in the project of ârationalityâ as a self-improvement goal. If rationality is really mostly about rationalization, then the idea of working hard to make more of your behavior in line with your âreasonsâ is a fundamentally flawed one. 3. We are smarter when we argue than when we think alone. Sperber and Mercier call their theory the âargumentative theoryâ of reason. This is because they claim that the function of reason is to provide socially justifiable reasons for beliefs and behaviors. This also explains why we have a strong my-side bias, looking to justify our beliefs rather than challenge themâthis is what reason is actually for. However, the power of reason, and why reason produces such wonderful things as technology, science and human progress, is that collectively, our individual weaknesses cancel out. You may not persuade your opponent in a debate, but the audience is listening. In the end, good reasons win out over bad ones in the broader sphere of discussion. 4. Feedback loops may explain the role of classical reason. This explanation may seem like it dismisses too easily the focal example of classical reasoning: smart people thinking carefully to arrive at a hard-won, but brilliant, insight. However, when we see that reason can both generate and evaluate reasons for things, this forms a potential feedback loop. You can take the reasons you generate yourself and then evaluate them. If you expect push-back, you may reject those initial reasons and dig deeper to try again. This may even push you to change your intuitive beliefs, if you are unable to come up with a suitable justification. This actually happens all the time when you have to explain something to a skeptical audience. You may rehearse several different explanations before settling on the one you think is the most justifiable reason. This back and forth, combined with the ability for a reason module to override intuitively-made decisions, provided they canât be sufficiently justified, may explain, in a dynamic sense how Sperber and Mercierâs theory of reason flowers into the classical reason under specific circumstances. 5. You will reason better if reasons are harder to provide. Better, this theory also explains why this kind of deep thinking is so rare: normally we arenât dealing with such a skeptical audience! Weâre satisfied with sticking with the first reason that pops up, not searching and evaluating and possibly even changing our beliefs when those first intuitions are shown to be unjustifiable. This may also explain why scientific communities reason so well. The audience is extremely skeptical, and sets narrow constraints as to what kinds of reasons count. This makes such narrow wiggle room, that often it is easier to override an intuition, than to provide an acceptable reason for a bad intuition. This may also give a potential improvement tip for performance in reason-based domains. The higher standards you imagine your audience will have, the better your thinking will be. It will force you to go over and over your thoughts with a fine-toothed comb, rather than simply state your intuitions and leave it at that. A corollary for this, however, might be that if the constraints are too narrow for reason, it may lead to rejecting âgoodâ answers, that donât fit the reasons they contain. Dogmatism may be an inevitable side-effect of reason as the structures that force reasoning into specific channels may ultimately divert it from the truth. Concluding Thoughts In the end, our minds are not separated into a war between a ruling, but often frail and feeble, reason, and a willful unconscious. Instead, it is split between many, many different unconscious processes, each with their own domains and specialized functions, with reason standing alongside them. In some senses, this is a demotion of reason, from being a godlike faculty that separates us from animals, to being just one of many tools in our mental toolkits. But in another sense, this is a restoration of reason, since instead of appearing like sloppy, feeble and poorly-functioning faculty, it appears as if reason does exactly what it was designed to do, and it does so very well. Although there are many implications of this idea, it is how it changes how we conceive of ourselves that matters to me most of all. If we are not the rider on the elephant, but the murmuration of starlings, then our selves are both more powerful and also more mysterious than they first appear. |