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Academian comments on Physicalism: consciousness as the last sense - Less Wrong
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Comments (14)
To anyone who really suffers from doubt about the physical nature of consciousness (...only sometimes, and I'm not proud of it) this line of thinking is pretty exasperating. Yes, the easy problem is easy, and most responsible dualists are happy enough admitting that the mind operates through physical means detectable on an MRI and we gain information about our own mental states through physical neural function...
...none of which makes any difference to the question that non-physicalists actually worry about, the so-called hard problem. Even calling consciousness a "sense" is admitting the lack of a solution to the hard problem: senses are the modalities by which objects are perceived. So our inner states are the objects, consciousness is the modality, and then who's doing the perceiving? More consciousness? Who's perceiving that? Hofstadter's solution of the strange loop is interesting but so nontechnical as to be useless.
Calling consciousness a sense, insofar as it's not just an equivocation on the term "consciousness", passes the recursive buck. The subjective level at which the senses bottom out remains just as poorly understood as before. This is more of an argument that thinking is purely physical (and a good one). I'm hoping you'll get to what I think of as "consciousness" later on in the series.
On the other hand, thanks for that link to the voice recording made in 1860. Getting to hear the oldest accessible human sound in the world? Pretty neat.
I was hoping to pre-empt this sort of confusion in my paragraph starting with
The point is that if physics is right, the distinction between senses and the "objects of sensation" is really just the distinction between the physical phenomenon of sensing and the penultimate causes of such phenomena, outside our bodies.
Think of it this way: of course senses are physical phenomena... you can sense them! At some point when you were a child, being able to sense something is what it meant for it to be physical. I think that's still the right idea.
You're talking about three things - object of sensation, sense, and mental representation of sensation. I'm talking about four things - object of sensation, sense, mental representation of sensation, and subject. I think we both agree on everything about the first three and that all of them are physical and inter-convertible, but I'm not sure whether you're even acknowledging the existence of the fourth.
A friend goes to Africa and sees an elephant. He takes a photograph and sends it to you in .ZIP format via email. You download it, unzip it, and you see the image.
In this case, the elephant is the object of sensation. Your friend is the sense of vision. The photograph is the sensory representation of the elephant, the email is the optic nerve, and the unzipper is the visual cortex. The thesis of this post is that your sense of vision (within the metaphor) is equivalent to your sense of consciousness (outside the metaphor), and that's fine, but then what's the equivalent of you? (wow that metaphor came out badly)
And I know that the answer in a neurological sense is that different features of the elephant activate various forms of mental processing which result in actions like saying "Wow, great elephant photo" and the like, but that's an answer that works equally well for humans and p-zombies. The philosophical answer that explains the subjective sensation is harder to come by.
Subjective sensation of perceiving a photo is explained by an event in your brain of perceiving the photo in the same sense e-mail with a photo of an elephant is explained by the elephant. With e-mail and the elephant, the map-territory distinction is easy to make. With experience of perception and perception itself, it's harder, because the same neurons in the same brain are involved in both, over overlapping periods of time. Change the elephant analogy to a crowd of people, all of which are taking pictures of each other and e-mailing them to each other's phones.
Thanks for posing the question so clearly; and roughly speaking, yes, I see no need to separate the notion of "subject" and the last phases of the sensation process in the brain. I am the phenomenon of my perceptions and behavior. What else would I call "me"?
That you ask your question with an analogy is no coincidence: what leads one to ask for a subject is precisely a misapplication of metaphor. You are mapping an event chain of length N into an event chain of length N+1, and demanding that the first chain is therefore missing something: An object is like an object, a sense is a like a transmission about it, so what's like the recipient of the transmission?
Well, no... at the end, at the visual cortex or wherever visual perception happens (as mind-state "playback" technology might help us verify), the perception is not a transmission... it's the recipient of it. And "you" are just a collage of such recipients (and subsequent phenomena if you identify with your thoughts and actions too).
I hope that this series will eventually progress to an explanation of what it means for a perception to be its own recipient or for a subject to be a collage of such perceptions. It sounds promising, and I have lowered my probability that you are secretly a p-zombie (see the paragraph here starting with "He kind of took this idea and ran with it"), but I definitely want to know more.
There's no causal loop... input is a previous brain-state, and output is a subsequent brain-state.