Month: June 2023

Is Dennett an Illusionist?

No, he does not say that “Consciousness is an Illusion”. End of.

In a sentence: Dennett’s position is that: Consciousness and conscious will are as real and evolved as anything else in the world. The powerful (useful, but misleading) ILLUSION is the Cartesian theatre / video screen with the homunculus viewer / user as things distinct from each other. It is / we are one and the same evolved behaviour of our brains.

[Final Version – 3 July 2023]

Frequently find myself correcting even the best commentators on consciousness that “No, Dennett really isn’t saying that consciousness is an Illusion”. He does say, and has said over the years, many things about the illusory nature of some aspects of consciousness. Some aspects we intuit are illusions, but our consciousness (and its free-will) is real, so real he’s spent a long career evolving his explanations for it.

Happened again today with John Horgan, who made such a reference in reposting today his 2015 profile of David Chalmers, in response to the Chalmers-Koch bet news from the other day, that neuro-science would not find a “solution” to consciousness by this year. I already made an ironic reference in a note at the end of my last “Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness” post.

Horgan’s profile of Chalmers is pretty good. I’m guessing it must have involved personal dialogue, because in both 2015 and 2017 versions, he cites Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” as an influential read before he switched from Maths to Philosophy and Consciousness – a search finds very few citations anywhere except Horgan’s(?) eg:

Found also this Cliff Sosis 2016 interview with Chalmers with explicit reference (same story as he told Horgan – or the source of Horgan’s quote?):

Q – “What made you turn away from mathematics?”

A – “It’s a long story. Before starting at Oxford I hitchhiked around Europe for four months or so. I’d done a bit of hitchhiking in Australia and enjoyed it. It was a great way to meet people and see all sorts of small towns in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, England, and Scotland. Of course I spent plenty of the time by the side of the road, and I read various philosophical books along the way. Not analytic philosophy — I still didn’t really know about that then. I read things like the Tao Te Ching, The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, philosophical novels by Umberto Eco and Hermann Hesse, and Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse (a neglected classic in the philosophy of living, I think). Somehow all that got me into thinking more and more about philosophy and especially about consciousness.”

Plenty of Zen and the Art and Chalmers references in searches, but mainly overlaps within Blackmore, McWatt and others, not direct Chalmers refs.

But Chalmers also has mentioned Pirsig on Twitter earlier this year:

(No Zen, ZMM or Pirsig mentioned in the slides themselves or anything else published by him? He was a student of Hofstadter of course and I’ve mentioned Doug’s parallel’s to Pirsig before. But I digress.)

Obviously Chalmers is famous for inventing the name “hard problem” for the fact that objective science will never explain the subjectivity of consciousness. That’s simply a fact, a limitation of objective science, not a problem with explanations of consciousness, not a problem anyone invented. Just a fact. Despite Koch conceding the bet to Chalmers, consciousness already has been explained by more complete versions of science, ones that permit the subjective (eg Solms, in a single post.)

Anyway for now, as my title suggests, I wanted to follow-up the Dennett as Illusionist myth. It just so happens I’ve been re-visiting some old Dennett pieces, since last week’s post.

In the profile above, Horgan compares Chalmers to Dennett:

… unlike, say, Daniel Dennett
when he insists that consciousness is an “illusion”

That link is to Horgan’s own review of Dennett’s “Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB) which I’ve referenced many times and had my own review published here in The New Humanist. and (say) here in “Dennett’s Speculative Bet”.

In Horgan’s review he includes this (presumed) Dennett quote right at the start:

‘[Consciousness] doesn’t exist, at least not in the way we think it does. It is an illusion, like … “American democracy.”‘

That’s very clearly about the way it exists being illusory – democracy exists and is embodied in real world organisation of things, but doesn’t exist in the same way a physical object does (in an orthodox view of the physical world). However, consciousness – like democracy – clearly exists in some form?

In fact in Dennett’s B2BnB he never says anywhere “Consciousness is an illusion” nor even uses the word illusion except in the important later chapter entitled “Consciousness as an Evolved User-illusion”

I spent some time on that in my own review. Using the language of “user interfaces” fashionable among many in the 21st C as an update to his earlier Cartesian Theatre metaphor. Although our metaphorical “minds eye” calls up “a view” in our subjective experience, there is no separation between the subjective (mental) view and the physical performance on the (biological brain) stage. The view experienced is the experience viewed, they’re one and the same, there’s no user distinct from the hardware and software behaviour. That’s the illusion that has evolved, for good reason. #Distancing

One place Dennett suggests the idea of consciousness being an illusion is his infamous TED Talk entitled “The Illusion of Consciousness” from over 20 years ago, where the first line of intro says “Dan Dennett thinks that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.” That’s NOT denying the reality of consciousness in my book, it’s simply the title of his talk.

And importantly – as per his title – the subject of his talk is an illusion (or a set / class of illusions) OF consciousness, not any suggestion that consciousness IS the illusion. Primarily visual illusions about detail we see (or fail to see) in the world vs what is physically (statically and dynamically) presented by the world. Things worth understanding as we build and refine our model or explanatory description of our consciousness and the many aspects of its workings, but in no way suggesting that consciousness is not real – that it’s merely an illusion.

Provocative click-bait is not unusual in media titles and set-piece debates 🙂 Hat-tip to Anvesi on Twitter and to John’s response to the tweet above for pointing out Dennett’s use of the same content in the talk he gave at the same Chalmers-Koch event. These are from 20 & 25 years ago!

More worrying for me are more recent references by Dennett to Illusions in a Consciousness context.

A favourite of mine, Kevin Mitchell – evolutionary neuroscientist and systems thinker at Trinity College Dublin – author of “Innate” and “Free Agents” picked me up on a more recent quote in the last year. (Kevin’s own post referring to the “Just Deserts” debates with Greg Caruso which also starts with a popular media piece by Oliver Burkeman in the Grauniad.)

Refreshing interview here just last month with Kevin – quite matter-of-fact description from a working neuro-scientist – on how our agency (free-will) and more work and evolved to work. Even starts by shunning the value of “a definition” – see also this LinkedIn piece – Matthew West & Anatoly Levenchuk. Anyway nothing contentious, and nothing Dennett would disagree with. It just all makes sense – including the levels of agency, the degrees of freedom – not every decision needs conscious thought – it’s just efficient – the free-energy principle – to have many semi-automated / habitual actions and to focus on the value-add of consciousness. Free-will as free-won’t – a supervisory control system – as many have said before.

Important to notice that in these cases the focus is that aspect of our consciousness we call free will or conscious will – that part of consciousness that makes decisions to act based on what our consciousness experiences. Not the whole of what we might mean by consciousness. Again with Dennett it’s the user illusion. The will, the agency exists. The illusion is that there is some separate entity deciding and acting, a “user” separate from the experiencing occurring in the brain machinery. Frankly, this all goes back to earlier Dennett and Hofstadter “who am I” thought experiments. We are our experience and sense of will. They’re not separate things.

And just last week, I was watching this Karol Jalochowski conversation with Dan at his home in Maine, November last year. Prompted by the post note on my last post. It’s very good. In fact it gets round to the “who am I” to have free will and responsibility for my actions. Large enough to be the whole person, not a detached, point homunculus within the Cartesian theatre, externalising everything else.

Freedom and responsibility are not absolute, they’re constrained by physics and biological & development evolution & history. The “oppression” of having masses of 20th C technology “can do” capabilities, and the prioritisation of the many “ought” possibilities that now exist. World hunger, health, climate, ecology – you name it – are we all responsible for all of it? Kinda, but let’s get real.

A wonderful relaxed, informal “interview”. Recommended.

In a sentence: Dennett’s position is that: Consciousness and conscious will are as real and evolved as anything else in the world. The powerful (useful, but misleading) ILLUSION is the Cartesian theatre / video screen with the homunculus viewer / user as things distinct from each other. It is / we are one and the same evolved behaviour of our brains.

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[Long Story Short – When Dennett says “consciousness is an illusion” he is saying our subjective experience of consciousness is real experience, but it’s an illusion to think of it (or its qualia) as a physical thing – an objectively distinct and observable thing, within the terms of orthodox science – even though it is entirely explained as the result of physical processes. Every systems thinker – anyone who’s crossed Solms’ Rubicon – knows he’s right. There really is no mystery – thinkers like Mitchell, Solms & Friston, McGilchrist and, of course, Dennett already have consciousness and conscious will cracked. The questions are all about how much devilishly detailed explanation of which aspects do you want? The necessary angels are already in the abstractions.]

Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness

I’ve already documented my take that there really is no longer any mystery behind consciousness and our conscious (free) will – my simplest single reference being Mark Solms “Hidden Spring”. Surely, massively valuable in its own right to have solved that long-standing human riddle? And, more importantly, it takes away a massive source of confusion and wasted argument from would-be scientific approaches to the future of humanity and our planet more widely. Also not insignificant, surely? An enhancement to our knowledge of the world that science and humanity benefit from.

As an old man in a hurry, I’m already focussed on the “so what next?” to achieve such global aims given that understanding, rather than the detail of cementing the underlying agreement in all stakeholders -that’s all of us – and a whole Kuhnian paradigm or Kondratieff cycle, typically three human generations. I’ve already documented every which way my “systems thinking” position says that the appropriateness of detail is a very real consideration driven by understanding the system(s) you’re currently dealing with. Yes, the devil says all details matter eventually, but the angels really are in the abstractions, here and now.

The intersection of the philosophy of consciousness and the science of brains with systems thinking is precisely what my reference to Mark Solms is about. The particular version of systems thinking being “Active Inference”, based on the Free Energy Principle and the statistical-thermodynamics information-processing idea of Bayesian inference across the Markov Blanket boundaries of the systems we’re dealing with. Fortunately amongst the Active Inference Institute’s 750 members and more guests there are people concerned with firming-up understanding and agreement of those explanatory principles and models, as well as exploiting their future value.

Two such people, in particular Maxwell Ramstead and Mahault Albarracin, gave a presentation to the AII yesterday:

It was very good.

Firstly it was admittedly a summary of – a crash course in – the underlying principles that are maybe taken as given by AII members. But, useful in itself.

Secondly it developed the FEP idea all the way to the many-layered experience – affect –  we call consciousness. Particularly striking for me was the meta-layering on multiple dimensions at every level of granularity and scale.

In general / dynamic systems thinking we may find ourselves talking about processes, procedures, methods and methodologies seemingly interchangeably or redundantly, yet needing to make distinctions when appropriate. Well, even starting back at the level of fundamental physics we have principles, mechanics and dynamics with layered explanatory dependencies. And remember we’re starting with “a principle”, the FEP.

The aim – theirs and mine – is not a new theory n+1 of consciousness, but an integrative unification of n partially agreed theories – exploiting their iso-morphism across many layers and aspects to provide an explanatory view of the whole. A “minimum unifying model” (MUM).

One attractive feature of the FEP-based explanation is its sparseness, a sparseness that is iso-morphic with both the problem domain (life, the universe and everything) and with the ontology of our brains, wrestling with with that problem of daily life. A 100 billion neurons, each with only (max) 10’s of thousands of connections. Yes, everything is connected eventually, even those molecules in the proverbial box of gas, but only a tiny proportion interact directly with each other. There are degrees of separation – a small number relative to the population itself. Sparse.

One corollary of this is that hierarchy – the dirty word in power politics –  is the entirely natural view of the organisation. The natural nesting of overlapping systems. And with any ontology, there is a concentration of information – a compression – at every interface, each level in the hierarchy. It’s simply efficient, minimising free energy, at all scales from quanta to black holes. Whilst our system may be arbitrarily networked – a neural net, the apparent opposite of a pure hierarchy – remember it is sparsely networked. Nevertheless hierarchical but heterarchical with many overlapping hierarchies – but tractably few population-wise. #GoodFences

Another iso-morphism, and the primary point of this particular pre-print presentation, is an “inner screen model of consciousness”. Bearing in mind we’re treating all interfaces as Markov Blankets and that their functional / logical definitions need not coincide or map one-to-one with physical sub-system boundaries. One such interface we can think of as the view from consciousness – an inner screen – which conjures up a neo-cartesian homunculus, but I think Dennett would love this whole explanation of reality, a view seen as an illusion yet nevertheless real and explicable.

Two more corollaries – One, the iso-morphism of a Markov blanket and a holographic “screen” interface in physics. Two – the most natural 2D surface view of any complex reality from one point in space-time. Think ancient Egyptian spreadsheets or clay tablets as our tabula rasa.

Anyway, passing (neutral) reference to IIT and multiple references to the usual suspects – Friston, Glazebrook, Fields, Levin as well as Solms – and several specific papers with collaborators mentioned here already. (No Levenchuk?)

Recommended.

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Post Notes:

Ironic that at the same time I published this post, the infamous 25 year bet between Chalmers and Koch was called in favour of the former’s prediction that consciousness wouldn’t be “solved”:

Of course my post headline is exactly that – no one thing “explains” anything – least of all a “principle” but Active Inference use of the the FEP is undoubtedly the last piece of the jigsaw in explaining how consciousness arises and functions. Obviously there are details of exactly which aspects of consciousness we’re talking about in any number of contexts, but there are no mysteries, even if it takes those three human generations of scientists to socialise the knowledge. It really is time to move on.

“It makes too much sense not to be true.”

Hear, hear!

I’m a skeptic like anyone else – finding fault is easy, making progress is harder – but there needs to be a division of human labour. We can’t all be expected to learn and go through every detail as individuals. That’s teamwork. The bigger story elsewhere here, is that the (marketing) success of objective (reductive) science has destroyed the intuitive (subjective) value of the no-less-real abstractions.

That’s what needs fixing.
Crossing back over that Rubicon.

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Systems-101

Kevin Mitchell and his colleagues at Trinity Dublin recently created and ran an introduction to systems course for their students in multiple disciplines. Last week Kevin posted a comprehensive blog reflecting on the whole process and outcomes.

Reflections on Systems – the Science of Everything
By Kevin Mitchell – 

Did you ever get the feeling, when you’re working on some problem (scientific or otherwise), that there are some basic principles at play that elude you, but that must have been worked out already by somebody? That’s certainly been my experience in my career in biology, whether it was in developmental biology, human genetics, neuroscience or other areas. I’ve felt the joy of discovering new components of systems and working out some interactions and pathways, but also a nagging feeling that I was not seeing the whole picture – that I was elucidating details of what was happening, but not grasping what the system was doing. I often felt like I lacked the principled framework to even approach that question. This was not because such frameworks don’t exist but because I had never learned about them – systems principles had simply not been part of my education.

It really is very good. Whilst it’s clear that practitioners in any discipline obviously need to learn, experience and understand details of their own area of expertise, there are more abstract systems principles and concepts that are isomorphic about any system and how they work at any scale. Indeed, the “science of everything”. Or as I often say:

The devil may be in the details,
but the angels are in the abstractions.

Also reported are some issues with using specific software tools in the educational exercise. Reminded me of earlier attempts to give all students a basic grounding in computing – which invariably get focussed on learning the technicalities of a particular technology, currently in fashion and therefore useful in the fast evolving world of consumer and business applications. Training people for “jobs” as opposed to educating them. The real value and proper focus of education needs to be in the transferrable abstractions, independent of the implementation technology.

(Previous example:
Computation 101 – Registry Programming Exercise.
Technology requirement – a handful of beans.)

Kevin’s “Science of Everything” exercise is a “Systems – 101”. Recommended.

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Quality in Mastery – Draft

Had tip to David Matos over at ZMMQuality on Facebook, for spotting this review by Steven Mintz on Adam Gopnik’s “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery”

The reviewer spots the great parallel with Pirsig’s “Quality” work, which is not actually mentioned by Gopnik. Mintz also spots the parallel with Richard Sennett’s “The Craftsman” – and again Sennett doesn’t reference Pirsig either, despite  large sections on “Quality”.

No-one mentions Matt Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soul Craft” either. Crawford does at least reference and quote Pirsig a couple of times, though doesn’t given him any overall credit for the thrust of his work.

[To be elaborated and links added.]