Summarizing the theories of consciousness
There's so many different lines of thought taken to understand consciousness. In my own line of thought I've intentionally taken a spell to form my own theories, free of priming/framing from the theories of others. It's a hard job to then try to get one's head around the different views available.
I just came across an effort to categories the different theories.
https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness
It seems like a good starting point.
I just came across an effort to categories the different theories.
https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness
It seems like a good starting point.
Comments (26)
It seems a big fail right after the first step of “approachable by science”. What is “representational qualia” being opposed to?
The very idea of qualia is reductionist and Cartesian. So that means the fork ought to be the “other” of that. Which for my money is neurobiological holism - the triadicism of a global systems viewpoint.
As a scientific problem, the broad options are monism, dualism and triadicism.
The first wants to claim the mental just supervenes on the physical - somehow. That collapses into incoherence pretty fast as an “explanation”.
The second wants to treat qualia as real rather than epiphenomenal or essentially unreal. That leads to the irresolvable riddles of dualism.
The third moves pass both camps in ways that finally become amenable to scientific theory.
So we can just have a switch after “approachable by science” which sends monism and dualism, along with their reductionist debate over representation and qualia, to the pseudo-science bin. Just leave the way clear for the varieties of triadic systems thinking that can do the job. :smile:
Oh. I've got some reading to do. Thanks.
The point about the Buddhist approach is that it never refines ‘consciousness’ as some kind of mystical whatever. It is dealt with straightforwardly in terms of the ‘five aggregates’ of form (or material image, impression) (rupa), sensations (or feelings, received from form) (vedana), perceptions (samjna), mental activity or formations (sankhara), and consciousness (vijnana). This is all grounded in the experiential awareness of the flow of sensations-ideas-perceptions as they arise and cease in the continuum of consciousness. Buddhism does have it’s mystical side but is basically grounded in a kind of ‘first-person empiricism’ (somewhat similar to William James’ generally neglected idea of ‘radical empiricism’).
Its interesting that it still treats consciousness as a separate thing from those other qualities.
My own opinion is that it will ultimately be proven to be merely an artifact of those other qualities (though I have no idea how we'll get there), but interesting just how much every society and ancient philosophy always seems to puzzle over it.
Artefact - an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest.
"gold and silver artefacts"
2.
something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure.
What would be a key text, or some key texts, for this approach please?
So for example, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225988428_The_Necessity_Of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity
Then for the neurobiological version, there is Karl Friston and his Bayesian Brain approach.
A social history of that, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51739007_The_history_of_the_future_of_the_Bayesian_brain
And a New Scientist account as an intro, https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Is%20this%20a%20unified%20theory%20of%20the%20brain.pdf
Hmm, yes. I see I'm going to have a hard time picking the right words.
Well, I was pointing out that 'artefacts' are by definition consciously designed, which suggests that consciousness ought not to be considered an artefact, as it's a circular or question-begging definition.
It seems that the reader is supposed already to accept the antecedent of the initial conditional, and "inferences about" seems to be a representational notion, and the notion of "models" in the consequent certainly is. (Leaving aside the question about whether talk about brains making inferences is supposed to be taken literally or metaphorically.)
I might be wrong about this, of course: maybe the position does not stand or fall on the basis of a representational theory of mind. I appreciate also that the references you gave are overviews written with a somewhat sympathetic audience in mind. I think what would help clarify things for me is something on the philosophical foundations of this approach. You used the word "triadicism", is it to Pierce that one has to look, and if so, where?
But Friston is talking of a generative or forward-modelling neural architecture. The game for the brain is to predict its inputs. And thus be able to ignore them! Rather than consciousness being about representing the world in some bright and vividly experienced fashion, instead it is an effort to be successful at not having to notice anything about the world.
Of course, by doing this, the brain sets itself up to be capable of being surprised. It’s predictions get contradicted. And then attention can take over from habit to figure out and learn how to be better at prediction the next time around.
So it is a truly radical flipping of how we conceive of cognition as a process.
On triadicism, Peirce certainly had trichotomania. But what I am talking about is hierarchical organisation. All complex systems have a triadic structure of relations. A cybernetic feedback story between a local set of degrees of freedom and a global state of constraint.
It’s the same thing behind all complexity, whether we are talking of condensed matter physics or neural network architectures.
The best place to start on the pure theory of this would be Stan Salthe’s two books, Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution. Or von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory as the classic.
If you tell me your actual project, I might be able to give you more relevant references.
I would consider two basic categories, which may be named as immaterialist and materialist, or something like that. The immaterialist perspective assumes an active, internal, and immaterial first principle, such as the soul, which is the cause of the conscious experience. The materialist perspective assumes that the consciousness is fundamentally passive, being acted upon by external forces and therefore caused to be what it is. The difference is best seen in the freewill/determinist debate, and the various attempts at compatibility.
What is consciousness?
I'm trying to think of a simpler way to sum it up. So from a philosophy of mind point of view, monism would say either all is physics or all is mind.
Physical monism has to then invoke epiphenomenalism, eliminativism, or other arguments that explain away the rather primary fact what we do experience the world. Consciousness remains a thing.
Idealist monism then says all is mind, but has to find ways to account for the fact the physical world also appears to remain a thing.
Dualism is thus always lurking in the monistic approaches. Unless we are willing to just be eliminativist, or just be idealist, we are stuck with a fundamental dichotomy of some kind. And so we might say there are two kinds of stuff (as in Cartesianism), or matter has two inherent aspects (as in panpsychism).
Triadicism - as in Hegelian dialectics, or the tradition of the Unity of Opposites generally - says fine. We can't get away from the fact that Nature always seems to divide into its poles of being. This has been the story for metaphysics on every question ever asked.
Is reality deterministic or probabilistic, stasis or flux, form or matter, discrete or continuous, one or many, part or whole, organic or mechanical, etc, etc? We always end up being pulled strongly in two opposite directions when we try to drill down to the fundamental.
A triadic way of thinking then takes that familiar fact and turns it back on itself to say that this then tells us Nature is the product of emergent process, of systematic structure. A synthesis or unity of the opposites.
The oppositions are instead complementary states of being. Each is related to its other by a reciprocal or inverse relation. Continuity is measured by the degree to which it is not discrete. And the discrete to the degree it is a lack of the continuous.
So a metaphysical-strength dichotomy is not reality split into dualistic halves. It is reality becoming divided towards the opposing limits of the possible. And then the actuality of reality is that which now stands as the third thing - the relation that is defined by that complementary state of affairs.
A metaphysical contrast has been produced. And now a spectrum of states inbetween two bounding extremes has been revealed.
Triadicism is thus this general way of thinking. It arrives at the desired goal of a unity - a "monism" - by accepting the inevitability of duality and showing how dichotomies are what actually allow a world of complex relations.
Simplicity is arrived at not by identifying the right fundamental substance (ie: matter or mind), but by accepting that all existence is based on the irreducibly triadic logic of a systematic relation.
This is the Peircean point. He showed how it was a logically irreducible relation. He showed how to put an end to substance-based ontology and move on with the holism of a triadic relational model.
Now we come to applying that triadicism to the problem of mind specifically.
The problem becomes to identity the right dualism - the one that is complementary in a fashion that can result in a formal unity. And following the lead of biology, neurology can also view the two halves of this whole as a semiotic interaction between information and dynamics. Physics controlled by symbols. A modelling relation.
So life and mind are made part of a continuum. But also, the steps in terms of the semiotic machinery - from genes, to neurons, to words - are pretty major divisions.
What persists all the way through a full-on triadic metaphysics is the agreement that all reality is founded on the logical irreducibility of a triadic, or systematic, or hierarchical, relation. The only monism that makes sense is one based on a unity of opposites. And dualism simply speaks to the fact that opposites must arise so as to construct that unity as an actualised state of being.
To wrap it up, we have to wind up having something concrete to say about qualia, the explanatory gap, the feeling of what it is like to be conscious, the ineffability of experience, the reality of freewill, etc. All the usual problematic that obsesses folk.
My position there is that neurobiology explains "consciousness" fairly straightforwardly at a neural level. The brain models the world from a selfish organismic perspective. It is no surprise that such an elaborate exercise in modelling would feel like something. It would feel exactly like being a self in pragmatic and regulating interaction with a world.
Life embodies that interaction between information and dynamics. Genes are a model of the body. And a regulation of metabolism is that body getting made.
The nervous system allows the organism to then extend that regulation of physics out into the environment. Neurons encode our surrounds in terms of its physical potentials and effects. That way we can weave them into our ongoing state of being.
But humans then have the further social level of semiosis that comes with language. And this is where the social construction of the human mind kicks in. We don't just nakedly experience the world through our own eyes. We learn to see ourselves as others see us. We learn to see ourselves as "selves", with "consciousness", and "freewill", and "qualia", and "spirit", and "thoughts".
A further categorisation is forced upon us in a sharp distinction between the objective reality "out there" and the subjective reality "in here".
An animal mind just lives in its world. And that world is a semiotic umwelt. It is essentially a subjective world - the world as the animal learns to construct it for itself.
But humans - for functional social reasons - learn to distance themselves from their subjective umwelts. We are taught to regard our perceptions as veridical representations of the actual world (especially once backed up by the mathematically encoded ideas of science :grin: ). And then by the same token, see even our selves as split off into their own metaphysically objective sphere of being. The ghost in the machine. The spirit or res cogitans.
A crazy dualistic metaphysics gets invented as a cultural meme. But this dichotomy exists because it is pragmatically useful. It becomes the basis for a new level of social complexity. Human societies could get organised so that information now regulates physics as agriculture and then technology.
So the argument here is that we find ourself with all this philosophy of mind dualistic bullshit. The neurobiologist has to wonder why wider society is so stuck on humans being lodged halfway between the animal and the divine. Yet the reason why the basic problems of philosophy of mind persist is that it is functionally necessary for humans to think that way about themselves. It has become the basis for the modern technological way of life and the romantic reaction that that mindset must engender as the "complementary balance".
The scientific revolution was the birth of a still further level of semiosis - one based on number. We learnt to view the world as objectively a machine. And that was an excellent way to think about reality. It led to the industrial revolution pretty smartly. Engineering was the way to unlock the vast resources of buried fossil fuels. Life's story - information regulating physics - could vault to a whole new scale of being.
But if all physical reality is a machine (and no longer the Aristotlean notion of a holistic, triadic, system) then now "the mind" becomes a real ontological problem. There is no longer any place in this imagined objective world for the other half of things. So that has to now have its own spiritual realm ... or something.
Anyway. My point is that a triadic perspective is logically basic. Peirce in particular showed how complexity is irreducible. We can't actually arrive at something simpler, such as a dualism or monism.
And this same demonstration that reality has a triadic irreducibility was there in Aristotle or even Anaximander. It remains the key thing linking modern systems theorists - the hierarchy guys, the cyberneticians, the neural networkers, the condensed matter physicists, the biologists and ecologists, the enactive psychologists, the social constructionists and semioticians, etc, etc.
But culturally we remain mired in the wrangles between realists and idealists, monists and dualists, because that is a functional viewpoint for modern society. Not because they are real scientific problems.
It is easy to see how the dualist framing arises as a meme with social payback. It constructs the individual as "a free agent" operating in a liberal "open market". New levels of "world construction" and "physics regulation" can flow from such a mindset.
And of course that then brings its discontents. There is the Romantic backlash that asks "is that all there is"?
So a mathematical level of semiosis feels rather dysfunctional in fact for us humans. We no longer feel so seamlessly embedded in our world in terms of our latest version of a socially constructed level of "consciousness".
From a philosophy of mind perspective, there is thus something actually worth talking about. What can we learn from the earlier grades of semiosis - genes, neurons, words - to make better sense of this latest transition to a numerical interaction with nature?
But fat chance while philosophy of mind generally fails to move past the simplicities of monism and dualism, realism and idealism. :meh:
That leads to the obvious question, arise out of what? The Peircean answer would be out of vagueness. Out of pure indeterminacy itself.
This isn’t a perfect answer. But it certainly begins things in the most minimal possible notion of a set of initial conditions. And the causes of the development of structure can be considered to be finality acting from the future.
Another way of looking at this is spontaneous symmetry breaking. The breaking always formally demands a fluctuation that triggers the change. But absolutely any and every fluctuation would suffice to trigger the avalanche or rock the ball off the apex of the dome.
So as an efficient cause, it is the least special imaginable. On the other hand, the fact that things were so poised that they would break so easily means that the finality was mighty strong. The change really wanted to happen. The future was beckoning.
However, ‘vagueness’ is not ‘nothing’. It’s still something - just something not very definite. Maybe something like a range of possibilities, out of which something definite condenses.
They themselves were just then assimilating the new scholarship on Peirce and realising he had got it in an even more basic way a century earlier.
Funny how these things work out. :up:
Anyway, I hope at least I have made some sense to you of what my issues are with triadicism, and perhaps you will have some kind of response.
Not just something but everything. And everything is nothing by another name.
The metaphor I use is the white noise static of a TV screen. A state of everything and nothing at the same time. But start to constrain the static, turn the noise into a signal, and it potentially contains every TV program ever made, or which ever could be made.
For reference, this is a standard poser - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton%27s_dome
Quoting jkg20
You can see that in this example, once the ball starts to accelerate under gravity, it is not going to be able to fluctuate back. So the point is really that given a state of perfect symmetry, even the most infinitesimal asymmetry is going to get massively amplified.
So a deterministic view of the physics says the ball can’t move. It ought to be stuck where it stands forever. Thus strict determinism shows itself to be incomplete. Some element of chance must be introduced into the metaphysics. A clinamen or swerve as the Atomists put it.
But the point of mentioning this example is to illustrate the principle of making the material/efficient cause - the first triggering event - so trivial, so random, that it barely seems like any proper cause.
The system was ready to tip. So “anything” was going to tip it.
Quoting jkg20
Again, this particular example is only mentioned to show the way the future was already built into the initial state as a potential - a gravitational potential in this case.
It is the same as with an entropic gradient. An ordered state is inevitably going to arrive at a messy state. The future is ordained in that sense.
To understand spontaneous symmetry breaking, we are shifting the burden of causal explanation as much as we can from the initial conditions to the final outcome. That was the take home message I meant. That is the contrast with normal causal stories.