A Sense or Usage of the phrase "Becoming conscious"

So to recap once again this saga began with The Ramblings of a Rutgers Philosophy Student. . . In that post I looked back at a Philosophy of Psychology class I had back in 1990, and a Meetup I recently encountered  in New York focused on Analytical Philosophy. That group or Meetup was reading a paper written by  David Chalmers reviewing the literature regarding theories of consciousness. The paper and that Meetup, which I never made it to, brought me back to that class and the lessons I missed back in 1990. In short, the meetup and paper brought me to some ideas of my own on the matter, and likewise to the writings of Daniel Dennett. He is an author who has been on the periphery of my thought for sometime now.

I continued this theme in, From One Story To The Next. In that post I quickly summarized Chalmer's paper and at the end offer a hint of my own thoughts on the topic of consciousness. In this post I want to continue on that project, hopefully elaborating on that last paragraph of the above post and likewise, connect those thoughts to what I see in Daniel Dennett's work. Specifically, in his book Consciousness Explained.

In that last post, I suggest that one becomes conscious the moment something does not go according to plan. To borrow from AI, the mind is like a computer in that it has a range of scripts and programs allowing us to get through the day and much of that is performed unconsciously. It is not until the heart stops beating, or we do not see the taxi as we cross the street until it is too late, or the one that most intrigues me, the fact that we navigate through a crowd place such as Grand Central during rush hour not thinking, until we do almost walk into somebody.  It is not until the near-miss or in fact the collision that our attention is focused. It is at such moments that we become conscious of something.

Way back when I took Philosophy 101 with a Professor Gerri Jones at Somerset County College, he introduced to us the concept of a 'sense', of how a word was used or made sense in a sentence versus its meaning. I later was introduced to Wittgenstein and Austin, and Frege. I am not sure where or who Professor Jones was coming from in his exploration of the sentence. I know the class spent its time analyzing the sentence, "The sun rises in the east". Regardless, his focus on how a word is used, it's sense is useful here. My offering regarding consciousness is focused on "being or becoming conscious" in a particular situation or moment, a particular usage of the word "conscious".

Before I return to that, I also want to highlight a second point I touched upon in that earlier post. That second point is regarding my question of how far removed is life as a bat? I suggest that there is as much of a gap between a bat as between our fellow man or woman. It seems we ultimately do or we do not know as much about their internal lives as we do the bat. We can infer about each but in the end we do not know with certainty what any of them truly think, feel, or experience. We do know enough about each to inform us and allow us to live with them and ideally thrive with them.

This question of what we know of the internal lives of others, bats and humans, however, brings me to ask what is required of knowledge in our lives versus the what is required in epistemology to be classified as knowledge. In short, philosophy offers one view of knowledge, our daily lives another, and the methodologies of our various sciences both hard and soft offer yet other variations. In short, it is largely in philosophy that we have an issue of qualia. And this issue is more an issue of epistemology, of what we know and what is sufficient to say that we know. That topic, I want to deal with in my posts embracing the terminology of Beavis and Butthead. (Not my finest work no doubt. . .)

So let us return to the first issue, the sense of being or becoming conscious. Those moments where we recognize an issue or problem and ideally correct it. That for me is the key to consciousness. Not qualia, which I want to classify as an epistemic issue. Consciousness is our ability to override a routine or stop doing something and experiment or try something different - that is what consciousness is. It is the perception of difference, and with that the adaptation of new or old routines.

I have in these posts relied on two or three examples or cases. The situation where you are walking across the street, not paying attention to the fact that there is taxi coming right at you, until you do realize it, until you become conscious of it and freeze in your tracks, or take a step back or get hit. The other that I use is the bear in the woods. Again you are not conscious of it, and then you are conscious of it. And then you run like hell or are mauled. In both of these, there are solutions available assuming you have a moment and ultimately choose wisely.

Daniel Dennett in his book latches on to I believe the same theme. He is, however, after much more. He wants to provide a materialist story eliminating the need for any homunculi watching or monitoring the scripts and programs I suggest. All is automated for him. There is in his story no system operator insuring that the proper script is embraced or applied. He was in 1991 providing a solution or a direction for neuroscience and AI to perhaps embrace. I offer you his hypothesis, which his book defends:

Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can be best understood as the operation of a "von Neumannesque" virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs. but at the same time many of its most curious features., and especially its limitations, can be explained as the byproducts of the kludges that make possible this curious but effective reuse of an existing organ for novel purposes. (p. 210, Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett, 1991)

In short, my offering is but just a part of the picture Dennett paints of consciousness in a brain using the AI / computer science to support and facilitate the story. My one sense or use of "being conscious" requires much of his mechanics. What intrigues me with his account is not only that he provides a story of consciousness eliminating the homunculi in the control room, but, and for me this is the more interesting part, he explains the higher level processes - those moments when we deviate from the usual scripts and processes, those moments when we are in my sense conscious. Even in his brief hypothesis he ends talking of how such a system results in novel thought and behavior, how it reinvents and reuses existing processing techniques and tools. We dodge the crazy cabby or we in fact hail it. 

From One Story to the Next. . .

So now a month later with life intruding and the accidental deletion of one version of this. . .(Blogger is not a kind app!), I continue from my earlier post, The Ramblings of a Rutgers Philosophy Student.

As I wrote in my prior post, the paper being read, David Chalmers', “Consciousness and its Place in Nature” is an overview of the various positions relating to that topic – Consciousness and its proper explanation. It is basically a review of the literature examining whether a materialist solution is feasible or is it the case that a dualist solution is required. Chalmers is sympathetic to a dualist position. That said most solutions to the question are guided by the proposition that mind and consciousness are of this world – they are materialist.

Returning to my narrative, I decided to write some response to the paper, as my writings from school had been shot down as too dated. And I did write a rambling response to it, which got me no where regarding the group. In the process of writing that response I did discover two topics that have continued to hold my attention. The first was or is what Chalmers described as “The Knowledge Argument”, involving Mary the neuroscientist. The second is the core of the debate over consciousness – qualia.

So Mary the neuroscientist, despite her complete knowledge of neuroscience and visual perception does not and / or has not perceived the color red. With that, Mary in fact has an incomplete knowledge of these topics. Despite her knowledge of the facts, her knowledge is incomplete.

The second topic is what drives the whole consciousness debate – qualia. In the end, I would have to say that Mary and her inability to experience red boils down to the discussion of qualia. Mary, despite all her knowledge is unable to experience red, just as we are unable to experience what it is to be a bat. Chalmers points out from the outset that there is an epistemic and metaphysical gap between the physical and the phenomenal truths. Regardless of how much we come to understand of the brain and neural processes, there will always be a gap between that information and our experiences.

Chalmers proceeds to explore the two most common responses by materialists regarding this gap, calling them Type A and Type B Materialism. The Type A entails a denial of the gap. Type B is a little more involved but roughly acknowledges the gap but limits it to an epistemic issue. At the end of the day the Type B materialist arrives at the same place as the Type A. There is just a little more work regarding the epistemic component, but again at the end of the day it is a materialist solution.

From there Chalmers proceeds to eliminativism, which falls under the Type A category. It basically argues that consciousness can be explained by an examination of neurological processes. In short, we have a study of the underlying neurological processes performing the various functional tasks explaining the various behaviors, responses, and self-reports. What was once defined as consciousness is eliminated and replaced with a discussion of the neurology and its functionality.

Now in the next section I will be looking to Daniel Dennett. Specifically parts and pieces of his book, Consciousness Explained – an appropriate work to appeal to. Before we turn to that, I want to poke at something here. So far we have Chalmers pointing out that the physical facts seem to leave something on the table. To the eliminativist, Chalmers is saying that their neurology and perhaps some set of functions is not sufficient.

It seems to all go back to common example to which I referred to earlier - the bat. We just cannot comprehend what it is like to be a bat. I have no idea what it is like to be hanging upside down in a cave with several hundred or perhaps thousands of one's fellow bats. Nor do I have any idea of what is like to be fluttering around in the dusk and dark relying upon some type of sonar to guide one's self, as opposed to the vision we rely on.

That said in the above paragraph we have already started making inroads into getting some understanding of their existence. It may not be perfect but it is not incomprehensible. Perhaps the biology including the neural processes, the associated functions and behavior these lead to are sufficient. Perhaps we can have some understanding of what it is like to be a bat.

Yet Chalmers' initial claim does resonate. At first blush it is hard to grasp what it is like to be a bat. Even a second or third is perhaps a challenge. . . A bat's phenomenal existence and experience is different from our own. That said, after our initial pause and shaking our heads, we do start to put together a story of their existence. We can examine the workings of their wings, theirs ears, their claws, and arrive at some understanding of them and with that eliminate some small distance between us and them.

Is it possible, considering that we can start to grasp something about a bat, that what Chalmers is pointing to is that which is novel? Is it possible that the phenomenal experience that he is pointing to is simply that which cannot be processed by our normal neurological and functional processes and components? In short, pondering what it is like to be a bat is not part of our day-to-day activities, and likewise not part of our cognitive nor neural processes. Granted if you are a zoologist or even a chiropterologist that might not be the case but for most of us, it is.

Consciousness is often gained at such moments. It is that moment when we stumble or trip over something novel. It is that moment when we do not know how to proceed. Our brain and the associated tools and processes both in our heads and the tools in our hands do not work. They are for that moment insufficient, That said, it is often the case that we do after that initial moment, that initial pause, do proceed. We stop in our tracks, realizing that we were about to walk out into traffic, or we run like hell away from the bear, or take in the scenic beauty of the valley and mountains that we have come upon. We might reflect on the question of what it is like to be a bat, and arrive at some type of answer, or we simply end up dead on that occasion, such as a bear or the oncoming taxi moving too fast, where no solution is forthcoming.