Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: kant (page 5 of 6)

Fun with Consciousness

29 October 2006 / / 3 Comments

I love the philosophy of consciousness. Is there any other field of philosophy that proceeds with so few objective reference points, where people spend so much time fighting over pure first principles? Yes, probably, but they aren’t as interesting to me as consciousness. Some (like a certain eliminativist I was arguing with earlier tonight) argue for its nonexistence; others (Descartes, anyone?) argue that it’s all that there definitely is. And throughout, language is thoroughly inadequate of providing referentiality to any of it. Late Wittgenstein isn’t the only one who would agree with that; early Wittgenstein would agree too.

Quick crash course for those who are not quite as obsessed with these things: consciousness = internal, subjective experience. It means that when I poke you, you don’t only react with behavior indicating pain (yelping, yelling, etc.), but you also have some internal, private sense of actual pain. These two things, as one can read over and over in later Wittgenstein, have no apparent necessary connection to one another. But at least for me, it’s a rather significant assumption I make that other people have rather similar private subjective experience to mine that matches up with their behavior in similar ways.

See also Thomas Disch’s Fun With Your New Head. “Taste, see, smell, and ‘pain’ with a HEAD. Every minute is different from the next minute in incredible thought-chaos of a HEAD.”

Steven Shaviro reviewed a new s-f novel called Blindsight by Peter Watts. It sounds a little pulpy, and it’s unlikely that I’ll get around to it any time soon, at least not until I finish Thomas Metzinger’s marvelous  Being No One. But Shaviro has conveniently described some of the consciousness aspects that come into play:

What really distinguishes the aliens is that they are zombies: not in the George Romero, living dead sense, but in the sense that the term has been used by cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. A zombie is a being who acts just as you or I do, who shows clear signs of language, intelligence, and so on; but who is inwardly devoid of sentience or consciousness. It’s the old Cartesian/solipsist dilemma: I know that I have consciousness, interiority, and a sense of self; but how do I know that you have all these things? For all I know–since all I really know (according to Descartes) comes from introspection, everyone else in the world may well be a machine, or an
automoton, only simulating consciousness. 

Now, there’s a caveat here, in that the aliens aren’t actually philosophical zombies, because these aliens don’t act like you or I do, or even as conscious aliens would. Watts provides clear behavioral indicators for what non-conscious intelligent beings would act like and how they would differ. I’ll get to those in a moment. A real zombie, in the sense that David Chalmers and all put it, requires the assumption that there are no behavioral or linguistic (or even neurological) cues that peg someone as having subjective experience or not. The Waggish-zombie would claim to be conscious, just as I do.

Given the possibility of true zombies, consciousness is epiphenomenal, i.e., it has no bearing whatsoever on physical events. Epiphenomenal consciousness lacks causal force, and it is superfluous to any causal chain of events. This leads to some fairly bizarre scenarios, like this one that Raymond Smullyan describes (he actually uses it against dualism, but it works against epiphenomenalism as well):

Then came the discovery of the miracle drug! Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely but to leave the body functioning exactly as before. Absolutely no observable change came over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a soul. Not the closest friend or observer could possibly know that the taker had taken the drug, unless the taker informed him.

Then a person who wishes to have no more subjective experience (to escape various pains and traumas), but not to hurt anyone by committing explicit suicide, takes the pill. And of course, he promptly says, “Damn, it didn’t work!”

Right then. Epiphenomenalism also leads to boring books! Reading about the difference between people who do and don’t have consciousness but act the same either way is not terribly exciting. (Actually, I can think of one way in which it would be interesting, but I’m keeping it a secret in case I write about it some day.) So Watts cooks up a few differences to keep things going:

By the end of the novel, the difference between conscious beings and zombies seems to be that only conscious beings possess aesthetics. The aliens in the novel are a bit like logical positivists: they have no aesthetic sensibility, and find aesthetic and affective statements to be, strictly speaking, meaningless. They can carry on complex conversations, despite not “understanding’’ what the words mean; but they can only regard non-functional expressions as a sort of spam. In this way, Watts’ Darwinism ends up confirming Kant: the defining attribute of the aesthetic is that it is unavoidably “disinterested,’’ that its purposiveness of structure serves no actual (empirical or utilitarian) purpose. In other words, an aesthetic sensibility — which at this point we can pretty much equate with consciousness tout court — is not an evolutionary adaptation, but mere nonadaptive byproduct.

Again, though, this is ultimately an arbitrary and suppositional distinction. There’s no necessary reason why beings without consciousness and subjective experience couldn’t have an aesthetics, just as there could well be an aesthetics amongst a group of people who each saw a different color of the spectrum. Under Wittgenstein, aesthetics remains a series of rule-application speech acts, wholly independent from private subjective experience.

Shaviro hypothesizes that it is putatively nonadaptive behavior like aesthetics that constitutes “human-ness,” but I’m frankly surprised that a Marxist like him would claim that aesthetics ever indeed is disinterested. (He may simply be playing this out as a consequence of Watts’s views.) Yet the moment consciousness becomes more than purely epiphenomenal, it is completely up for grabs as adaptive, precisely because it must manifest itself in particular types of behavior, but without any contingent restrictions on what those behaviors could be. To imply a particular link between consciousness and certain types of behavior (such as the href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test>mirror test, which
proves self-awareness but hardly indicates anything about subjective experience) is wholly speculative. The epiphenomenalists go too far in the other direction by saying that there cannot be any necessary connections between behavior and consciousness; the answer is that we simply don’t know yet.

Now, the book is speculative fiction; my issue is that the speculation assumes too much. This is no worse a sin than many consciousness philosophers and neurologists, but as a hypothesis for behavioral differences, I don’t find the aesthetics argument particularly compelling at first glance. If there were general behavioral differences between beings with and without subjective experience, my intuition suggests that they would be far greater than mere aesthetics, and I’m all for the next writer who wants to take a shot at guessing what they would be.

Note on Merleau-Ponty’s “Cogito”

8 October 2006 / / 0 Comments

But, it will be asked, if the unity of the world is not based on that of consciousness, and if the world is not the outcome of a constituting effort, how does it come about that appearances accord with each other and group themselves together into things, ideas and truths? And why do our random thoughts, the events of our life and those of collective history, at least at certain times assume common significance and direction, and allow themselves to be subsumed under one idea? Why does my life succeed in drawing itself together in order to project itself in words, intentions and acts? This is the problem of rationality.

Phenomenology of Perception (475)

(I’m using Merleau-Ponty here because he’s more lyrical and because Husserl is just too damn hard.)

The value of phenomenology for me is in the destruction of the subject-object construction. Descartes sets it up, then Hume and Kant and their compatriots develop it and refine it until there’s a nice movement from the world through the structure of the mind (the categories, the senses, whatever) to perception to mind. It’s that last jump, the most ethereal one, that the phenomenologists rip apart. They think about the little subjective pixie in the mind (aka, the “What-it-is-like-to-be” pixie) who just perceives all these perceptions, and the whole thing falls apart. The pixie gets smaller and smaller until it’s not capable of doing much of anything, and then you’re stuck figuring out (1) what it does, and (2) how it does it, both of which no longer have any positive answer.

By making the perceptual primary and denying any subjective unification beyond that perception, Merleau-Ponty and co. don’t necessarily solve this problem, but they at least avoid the contradiction. Perception is ego is subject. Then Merleau-Ponty specifically pushes the other way and connects experience back to into the world until our bodies are our minds reaching into the world and merging with it.

Erich Auerbach: Mimesis 1

12 December 2005 / / 2 Comments

Auerbach on the Iliad and the Old Testament:

We have compared these two texts, and, with them, the two kinds of style they embody, in order to reach a starting point for an investigation into the literary representation of reality in European culture. The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand [Iliad] fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand [Old Testament], certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.

Auerbach lays out all of this schema very quickly in the first chapter, yet so much of it falls so easily from the juxtaposition of the two texts. What struck me was the combination of factors, how Auerbach associates the linear with the behavioral with the well-defined in the Iliad; and in the Old Testament, how he associates the psychological with the tentative and the inchoate, and the problematic. To rephrase his summation, the Iliad presents people as permanently established beings, and the Old Testament portrays them as torn between (religious) ideals for themselves and an uncertain ego/self.

Two associations come to mind. The first is Julian Jaynes and his portrayal of the split, pre-conscious mind devoid of self-conscious doubt, versus the unified mind with an uncommitted consciousness. Utterly implausible as a theory, I still find the analogy compelling.

The second is Alasdair MacIntyre’s version of Nietzsche’s critique of post-Kantian Enlightenment ethics, and MacIntyre’s deployment of it to make an argument in favor of Aristotelian teleological ethics, or (even better!) neo-Thomist ethics. MacIntyre places the starting point of ethical false consciousness at Kant, who, MacIntyre claims, separated the ethical imperative from the concept of “the good life” (cf. Aristotle) and “the good” (cf. Aquinas). In After Virtue he chiefly proposes Aristotelian ethics as a solution, suggesting that the embrace of a defined “good life” as a telos engenders ethical behavior. Elsewhere he seems to find this just as problematic and moves to Aquinas, but I’m more concerned with the Aristotle/Kant distinction.

MacIntyre’s dichotomy between Enlightenment ethical imperatives and Aristotle’s teleological life parallels loosely with the two sides Auerbach identifies in the two ancient works. In the Iliad, characters live out their lives–good and bad–as though by divine force, their characters established by the continued ease with which they fulfill our expectations of their behavior. In the Old Testament, characters are continually struggling with and against the dicta they mystically receive. While these may not be ethically imperative, the characters only avoid the logical gap that MacIntyre identifies in Kant by appealing to the universality of God. Otherwise, they are potentially just as alienated from their ideals as a post-Enlightenment ethicist.

It’s a tenuous connection. But I want to ask why Auerbach identifies such a split in ancient texts while MacIntyre and to some extent Nietzsche locate it at the dawn of modern ethics. Does it have something to do with the fields of literature vs. philosophy? I suspect that the difference in their viewpoints originates in Auerbach’s ability to deal in character and description (and its relation to the foreground/background of literature), while MacIntyre is dealing in intangible imperatives and universals (including the universal of the human and the life).

Both sides are dealing in abstractions, but Auerbach’s abstractions (i.e., characters) are by definition more pluralistic and implicit. It forces him to do more heavy lifting to synthesize a unified thesis, which he accomplishes mostly through an intimidating amount of cross-referencing. MacIntyre gets the philosophical theses for free, but he is consequently more prone to identify single authors as nexuses.

I won’t speculate yet on how this gets them to their respective positions, but I’ve got a few hundred pages left of Mimesis to read. But it’s always inspiring to see someone making a case for literature showing philosophy, even if it takes a book devourer like Auerbach to process it all.

A la Fin Du Temps Perdu

4 October 2005 / / 1 Comment

I’ll try not to give away too much here, but the multiyear Proust reading has come to an end, even if the blog hasn’t. Since this isn’t an in-depth analysis but only my own reaction on finishing what is the longest book I’ve ever read (I can’t think of anything else that even comes close), I’m putting it on the main page. For you all who haven’t finished it, I don’t think there is much in the way of spoilers below, but it’s about finishing the book, so caveat emptor.

This is a very personal book. Towards the end, Proust describes a work of literary art as being an edifice built around the writer, to be seen and interpreted by visitors from the outside. There are works of fiction that don’t take this stance, works that attempt to generalize over all of life and speak in universals. In this view, the author is merely a conduit for a noumenal world. Shakespeare, of course, falls into this category, as do Dostoevsky, Homer, Melville, Faulkner. But Proust is very explicit that the vision he is projecting is a mirror of his own mind and little else, not that he needs to be explicit about it. In many ways Proust is as hermetic as Kafka or Kleist in his unshakeable devotion to his own perspective. It’s apparent that the problems he faces–and the ultimate answers he arrives at–are ones quite specific to himself and his own situation; i.e., that of a brilliant writer in active society.

That Proust’s excavation is so complete and so brilliant makes the work paradoxical. As I had been told by friends, Proust ends on a high, bringing together many threads from earlier in the work, and the feeling on finishing is one of satisfaction and completeness. It is the opposite of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which embraces the world and everything in it only to shatter and fall apart, because Musil’s world expanded and mutated faster than his book. But the paradox makes leaving Proust an ambivalent experience. On finishing his work, I did not feel as though I was carrying the entirety of the book with me in my head (though I have assimilated parts of it quite thoroughly). Rather, it was like leaving a cathedral and having the doors shut behind you.

I held off reading the end for about a week, precisely because I knew that finishing it would mean leaving Proust’s world. Proust never had to deal with that problem; even having written the end, the refinement of the gigantic middle could have easily been stretched to accomodate far more days than he had. The polar emotions that greeted me at the end were comfortable satisfaction at being at the brilliant summit of the end of the book, followed by the blinding readjustment that you have on walking out of a dark theater into the sunlight. And then the question, “Well, what do I read next?” (A: I think it has to be Beckett.)

Is it, in the words of an old professor, the greatest thing ever written? I can’t say that it is, because part of me feels that admitting that would be to narrow the scope of my world to that of Proust’s. But is it the greatest success ever written, a book that sets out very specific terms and fulfills them beyond any expectation, comparable to Joyce or Kant? Possibly.

Strawson on Consciousness

23 June 2005 / / 3 Comments

For those of us like me who can’t help wondering about the physical reality of subjective mental events, here’s a passage from the ever-excellent Galen Strawson, from a review of Antonio Damasio:

The standard formulation of the “mind-body problem” rests on a huge and wholly unjustified assumption (this assumption, in fact, is Descartes’s deepest error). It is not content with the obvious truth that matter and consciousness seem to us to be utterly heterogeneous things. It slides on to the claim that matter and consciousness are in fact utterly heterogeneous things, in such a way that it is mysterious how one could ever be the basis or “realization” of the other. It shifts from a harmless and true epistemological claim about how things seem to us to a mega-therial metaphysical claim about how things are in reality.Why? Why indeed? The root cause of the mistake is the unsupported assumption that current physics – or indeed ordinary experience, in its own modest but compelling way – gives us a pretty good fix on the fundamental nature of matter, and shows it to be utterly qualitatively unlike consciousness. It is only relative to this assumption that the existence of consciousness in a material world seems in any way mystifying, for there is nothing particularly puzzling about consciousness as it is in itself. We know just what it is like – or at least what certain forms of it are like. Consider an experience of blue or of giddiness. Consider it as it is in itself. You know what it is. So, if our best picture of matter makes it seem incomprehensible that matter should be the basis of (or simply be) conscious experience, all this shows is the inadequacy of our best picture of matter. Locke, Hume, Priestley, Kant and others were very clear about this, but few understand it today. Many now make Descartes’s deepest error, in fact, with far less justification than him – while condemning him for his errors.

It is not in any way anti-scientific to claim that we do not have a good fix on the fundamental nature of matter. Current physics instructs us daily in how foolish it is to assume that we do (while providing a magnificent theoretical framework in which to express and exploit a great deal of information about the behaviour of matter). It is widely agreed that the current “Standard Model” is unsatisfactory; the old quarrel between relativity theory and quantum mechanics remains unresolved; there is turmoil in general cosmology; and String Theory, after the “second superstring revolution”, is again pressing obscurely at the door.

The first problem of consciousness, then, the mind-body problem or qualia problem, is just a vivid proof of our ignorance of the nature of matter, and of the difficulty – seeming impossibility – of reconciling first-personal and impersonal data. There is no metaphysical mind-body problem, only an epistemological one.

I like this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the conclusion, which takes the most appealing aspects of several consciousness theories–Colin McGinn’s “new mysterianism” (that we are not set up to understand consciousness and never will), Gerald Edelman’s neurological theories (correlates exist, but only go so far in dealing with the problem), David Chalmers’ panpsychism (consciousness as a different kind of property), and John Searle’s anti-functionalism (consciousness as a material-specific property)–while avoiding many of their glaring defects and leaps of faith. Tossing out the metaphysical problem by dismissing it as based on faulty assumptions, and thereby dismissing all linguistic constructions thereof (so long to Kripke’s proof of dualism, e.g.), he leaves open an unbounded epistemological space that is on first glace far more counterintuitive, since it’s far easier to believe that mental and physical events are heterogeneous than homogeneous. And yet to envision an answer that encompasses a homogeneity of the physical and the mental without denying qualia or intuitions of “folk psychology,” intuitions which Daniel Dennett and the Churchlands have hardly managed to tear down successfully, is quite inspiring. For the anti-qualia gang have had the burden of denying the experience of qualia as well as qualia themselves, and thus the experience of the experience of qualia, etc., etc., and this infinite regress does not go down so easily.

Strawson’s approach reminds me of Stanislaw Lem in Golem XIV (read the entire text of Golem XIV), where his panopticon of a computer alludes to Wittgenstein’s unmooring of language while firmly binding an evolutionary etiology of such language:

If one who is thinking could perceive this horizon – his intellectual range – in the same way that he perceives the limits of his body, nothing like the antinomies of Intelligence could arise. And what in fact are those antinomies of Intelligence? They are the inability to distinguish between transcendence in fact and transcendence in illusion. The cause of these antinomies is language, for language, being a useful tool, is also a self-locking instrument – and at the same time a perfidious one, since it tells nothing about when it becomes a pitfall itself. It gives no indication! So you appeal from language to experience and enter well-known vicious circles, because then you get – what is familiar to philosophy – the throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. For thought may indeed transcend experience, but in such a flight it encounters a horizon of its own and gets trapped in it, though having no idea that this has happened!

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