Consciousness is thermodynamically acausal

[Alferd_Packer]

My theory has a cat.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

That sounds like empty semantics to me. And if it's an "epiphenomenon" (whatever that is), why would one expect to be able to apply physics to it?

I think that may be exactly it: You can't, so it can't be causal.

That just sounds wrong. Why can't mental events exert physical forces? They involve electrical and chemical impulses, both of which can exert forces. And if it's again a question of philosophical semantics - if "mental event" is supposed to be something separate from the physical process it corresponds to - why would you expect to be able to apply thermodynamics to it? Is justice thermodynamically acausal too?

Yes, I suspect he might say it is.

It seems like an empty statement to me, too. It also seems like a cop-out. I'm more intested in how we would evolve to talk of phenomenology if it is actually acausal.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Thinking about this some more, I'm not sure I can imagine how phenomenal experience itself could be causal. All the neural processes that produce experience can certain have other effects, too, but how could the experience itself cause anything?

Brain: complicated.

~~ Paul

 

[quarky]

In a retarded universe, the retard is most likely to excel.


(Mcquarky; double cheese w/ bacon)

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

According to that link: "Edelman argues that mind and consciousness are wholly material and purely biological phenomena which occur as highly complex cellular processes within the brain."

If so, one should be able to apply standard physics to it, and then I think my objections are quite pertinent.

What makes consciousness inherently different from defecation, apart from its complexity?

Sorry, I'm not sure what attributes of defecation you're comparing with consciousness. What exactly is your objection?

~~ Paul

 

[Philosaur]

Sorry, I'm not sure what attributes of defecation you're comparing with consciousness. What exactly is your objection?

~~ Paul

Sounds to me like sol is assuming identity between mental states and brain states, which, FWIW, I agree with. If this is the case, it makes sense to wonder how *any* process could have no physical effects.

 

[!Kaggen]

This is how I understand him, too.

Which brings up the interesting question: How did we evolve to speak of phenomenal experience when the experience itself is epiphenomenal? This requires some very interesting speculation about the evolutionary purpose of the brain's representations of self, non-self, knowledge of self-representation, emotion, etc. All these things had to evolve zombie-like to allow us to speak of phenomenal experience without it having any effect on the content of our speech.

For example, we evolved to say:

My experience of the redness quale is indirectly related to the wavelength of red light.

Without the experience of redness having any selective advantage whatsoever, nor having any effect on the content of the statement.

~~ Paul

Edited to add: So there must be some evolutionary advantage to representing the "experience of red" even without the experience being causal.

I suggest you read this

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Baby-Childrens-Minds-Meaning/dp/0374231966

Modern Psychological Developmental Research has shown experimenting with counterfactuals as children (e.g. fantasy play) is what gives us humans the evolutionary advantage of being able to predict the future or do science.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Sounds to me like sol is assuming identity between mental states and brain states, which, FWIW, I agree with. If this is the case, it makes sense to wonder how *any* process could have no physical effects.

I'm not sure how to interpret the word "identity." Are there special brain states that are phenomenal experience, and others that do all the rest of the work? Or do the states doing the work also produce the experience? Edelman appears to be saying the latter, then goes on to say that the experiences are epiphenomenal. Does he mean entirely epiphenomenal, or only epiphenomenal regarding such things as motor response? At one point in his lecture he says that experience is acausal but informational. What the hell does that mean?

Perhaps we could consider the train whistle analogy. The train produces the power for the whistle, but the whistle noise has no effect on the train itself (assuming the train has no microphone). Does it make sense to call the whistle noise an epiphenomenon?

~~ Paul

 

[Miss_Kitt]

In re your comments on the 'evolutionary value' -- don't get too tied up in that. Remember, selection occurs on populations over the long haul. Just because something exists does not mean it was selected for; it just means it hasn't been selected against enough to remove it from the population.

In a larger view, the ability to talk about things that are not directly happening here-and-now is arguably the biggest advantage mankind has as a species. We can pass on knowledge about situations that no one present has seen; we can predict and guess and question and hypothesize. We can deal with entities and events that are physically and temporally distant from our experiences. The ability to think at this abstract level is crucial to human development beyond the lowest-level hunter/gatherer tribes.

MK

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Let me quote Edelman, just in case terminology is getting in the way:

"The relation of entailment that makes C [phenomenal experience] a property of C' [neural processing] is an accurate track of the relationship of C' to causal efficacy. ... The only contradictions that might arise derive from the contrary assumptions: that C' states can lead to identical effect without entailing C, that C can exist without C', or that C itself is causal."

So he is saying that neural processing entails phenomenal experience, which is thus a property of neural processing. The phenomenal experience is not causal, only the neural processing is, but the correspondence is perfect.

So does it make sense to talk of a causal process that has a property, but to consider that property to be acausal? Is there some other example of this that we can use to understand what he is saying?

For example, computing the sum of some numbers and displaying the result: The result is a property of the computation, but is acausal as far as the computation is concerned. It is not completely acausal, however. Perhaps this is what Edelman means when he says it is acausal but informational?

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

In re your comments on the 'evolutionary value' -- don't get too tied up in that. Remember, selection occurs on populations over the long haul. Just because something exists does not mean it was selected for; it just means it hasn't been selected against enough to remove it from the population.

Right.

In a larger view, the ability to talk about things that are not directly happening here-and-now is arguably the biggest advantage mankind has as a species. We can pass on knowledge about situations that no one present has seen; we can predict and guess and question and hypothesize. We can deal with entities and events that are physically and temporally distant from our experiences. The ability to think at this abstract level is crucial to human development beyond the lowest-level hunter/gatherer tribes.

Yes, but Edelman is suggesting that we can talk accurately about something that has absolutely no effect on anything, and so certainly no selective advantage at all. He is saying that zombie-like brain processes lead us to talk about the subtleties of qualia, even though the experience of the qualia is acausal. This is quite difficult to imagine, which is why I've always laughed at epiphenomenalism.

But now that I'm thinking about it more, I wonder if it is possible.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Here is another paper on the subject:

http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Gomes.pdf

"If consciousness as it exists happens not to be distinct from some sort of neural processing, then Pockett’s ‘consciousness per se’ has no causal effect simply because it does not exist."

It's a short paper and gets to the heart of the matter.

~~ Paul

 

[sol invictus]

Sorry, I'm not sure what attributes of defecation you're comparing with consciousness. What exactly is your objection?

~~ Paul

I meant that if he's talking about the purely physical aspects of this - so that physics can be applied - then I don't see any real difference between consciousness and any other biological function. Specifically, "thermodynamically acausal" is either simply meaningless or applies to nearly every process we perform.

 

[sol invictus]

Perhaps we could consider the train whistle analogy. The train produces the power for the whistle, but the whistle noise has no effect on the train itself (assuming the train has no microphone).

But it does affect it. It makes it vibrate. It reduces the energy stored in its batteries. It exerts a force on it. If you ignore effects like that because you consider them small or irrelevant, you will indeed come to the (mistaken) conclusion that things are acausal.

Does it make sense to call the whistle noise an epiphenomenon?

No.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I meant that if he's talking about the purely physical aspects of this - so that physics can be applied - then I don't see any real difference between consciousness and any other biological function. Specifically, "thermodynamically acausal" is either simply meaningless or applies to nearly every process we perform.

It seems the same way to me, too. I'm just not sure I've grasped the real meaning of what he's trying to say.

But it does affect it. It makes it vibrate. It reduces the energy stored in its batteries. It exerts a force on it. If you ignore effects like that because you consider them small or irrelevant, you will indeed come to the (mistaken) conclusion that things are acausal.

Do you feel comfortable saying that there is, in fact, no whistle-like device that we could design that would have to be causal? What about the wind that the train causes? Well, it vibrates the train, too.

It really sounds like he has to make himself a dualist to pull this off. And we all know what that means.

~~ Paul

 

[blobru]

This is how I understand him, too.

Which brings up the interesting question: How did we evolve to speak of phenomenal experience when the experience itself is epiphenomenal? This requires some very interesting speculation about the evolutionary purpose of the brain's representations of self, non-self, knowledge of self-representation, emotion, etc. All these things had to evolve zombie-like to allow us to speak of phenomenal experience without it having any effect on the content of our speech.

For example, we evolved to say:

My experience of the redness quale is indirectly related to the wavelength of red light.

Without the experience of redness having any selective advantage whatsoever, nor having any effect on the content of the statement.

~~ Paul

Edited to add: So there must be some evolutionary advantage to representing the "experience of red" even without the experience being causal.

Yes; it's going to come back to the hard problem of consciousness: why is there consciousness at all? what's the point of experience? The ability to discriminate between colors, especially where a color implies danger, as in "red --> hot", should be selected for. But as a survival algorithm, if we were to code for color-discrimination, we'd simply measure the wavelength and process the measurement straightaway as data; no need for an experience of that color.

But then humans, even if we are "computers", aren't designed by programmers. Which is why I suspect consciousness, that is, integrated phenomenal experience, may be tied to our biology, having evolved as a sort of felt language of the nervous system, a private abstraction of our environment that we then organize into spoken and written languages so we can compare our experiences. Then it makes sense in evolutionary terms.

Treating it as an accidental by-product, as epiphenomenalism does and Edelman appears to, leads to all manner of implausibility.

Thinking about this some more, I'm not sure I can imagine how phenomenal experience itself could be causal. All the neural processes that produce experience can certain have other effects, too, but how could the experience itself cause anything?

Brain: complicated.

~~ Paul

If experience itself isn't causal, we should be able to ignore its properties, swap experiences without changing an organism's behavior. Swap, say, the intense pleasure of orgasm with the intense pain of being trampled in a rhinoceros stampede. That seems absurd: surely the pleasure or pain of an experience is a principal cause for our avoiding or seeking it out.

I'm not sure how to interpret the word "identity." Are there special brain states that are phenomenal experience, and others that do all the rest of the work? Or do the states doing the work also produce the experience? Edelman appears to be saying the latter, then goes on to say that the experiences are epiphenomenal. Does he mean entirely epiphenomenal, or only epiphenomenal regarding such things as motor response? At one point in his lecture he says that experience is acausal but informational. What the hell does that mean?

Perhaps we could consider the train whistle analogy. The train produces the power for the whistle, but the whistle noise has no effect on the train itself (assuming the train has no microphone). Does it make sense to call the whistle noise an epiphenomenon?

~~ Paul

Or the color of the train (a blue choo-choo's as fast as a red one) -- an epiphenomenon if it's accidental to how the train functions. He seems to want to argue that all experience is accidental, as indifferent to us as the whistle is to the train. But surely the human point of experience is to have them, for their own unique phenomenal properties, not merely functional, to get us from one station to the next.

(These are such obvious objections I have to wonder if I'm not misrepresenting Edelman and the epiphenomenalists.)

Let me quote Edelman, just in case terminology is getting in the way:

The relation of entailment that makes C [phenomenal experience] a property of C' [neural processing] is an accurate track of the relationship of C' to causal efficacy. ... The only contradictions that might arise derive from the contrary assumptions: that C' states can lead to identical effect without entailing C, that C can exist without C', or that C itself is causal.

So he is saying that neural processing entails phenomenal experience, which is thus a property of neural processing. The phenomenal experience is not causal, only the neural processing is, but the correspondence is perfect.

So does it make sense to talk of a causal process that has a property, but to consider that property to be acausal? Is there some other example of this that we can use to understand what he is saying?

For example, computing the sum of some numbers and displaying the result: The result is a property of the computation, but is acausal as far as the computation is concerned. It is not completely acausal, however. Perhaps this is what Edelman means when he says it is acausal but informational?

~~ Paul

He seems to mean we can describe its properties, but those properties, the phenomenal expression [C] of a particular cluster of neurons firing [C'], will only ever tell us which cluster fired; they won't figure as a cause in determining the next cluster of neurons to fire, etc.

Again, I find this incoherent, because if C = pleasure, then one of the next clusters of neurons to fire should equate to a desire to prolong C, and that desire will influence our behavior; because we aren't indifferent to C, it must be causal.

Right.


Yes, but Edelman is suggesting that we can talk accurately about something that has absolutely no effect on anything, and so certainly no selective advantage at all. He is saying that zombie-like brain processes lead us to talk about the subtleties of qualia, even though the experience of the qualia is acausal. This is quite difficult to imagine, which is why I've always laughed at epiphenomenalism.

But now that I'm thinking about it more, I wonder if it is possible.

~~ Paul

Unless I'm completely in the dark (wouldn't be the first time) about what he's saying, I don't think it's a plausible position; laughable seems more like it (at least as I understand it).

Here is another paper on the subject:

http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Gomes.pdf

"If consciousness as it exists happens not to be distinct from some sort of neural processing, then Pockett’s ‘consciousness per se’ has no causal effect simply because it does not exist."

It's a short paper and gets to the heart of the matter.

~~ Paul

Haven't read this. Could be it counters some of my prima facie criticism.

 

[quarky]

Its times like this I wish I didn't have blobru on ignore, because I 'intuit' that he just wrote something really good.


(No, the MDC doesn't interest me. All the rich people I know are dicks.)

 

[blobru]

Its times like this I wish I didn't have blobru on ignore, because I 'intuit' that he just wrote something really good.


(No, the MDC doesn't interest me. All the rich people I know are dicks.)

Stay the course, quark! Better for all you take Edelman's advice and treat me as an epiphenomenon.

 

[quarky]

Dale Earnhardt rules.

(Sr., of course. The dead guy.)

 

[si_fzz]

if consciousness was thermodynamically acausal, then how do neuro-philosophers manage to attend conferences to support the idea?