Goldstein and Pinker
Salon.com has a great article on Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who are partnered and influence one another’s academic work (philosophy and cognitive psychology, respectively). Below is a short excerpt where they discuss David Chalmers and Sam Harris on science and the brain–a topic which they think is central to the question of “science versus religion”:
GOLDSTEIN: It’s interesting. Actually, my doctoral dissertation was on the irreducibility of the mind to the physical. We have not been able to derive what it’s like to be a mind from the physical description of the brain. So if you were to look at my brain right now, I would have to tell you what it is that I’m experiencing. You can’t simply get it out of the physical description. So where does that leave us? It might mean that we’re not our brain. It might mean that we have an incomplete description of the brain. Our science is not sufficient to explain how this extraordinary thing happens — that a lump of matter becomes an entire world. But the irreducibility doesn’t in itself show immaterialism. And you can turn it around and say, look, all the neurophysiology that we have so far shows there is a correlation between certain physical states and mental states. And even a dualist like Descartes said there’s a one-to-one correlation between the physical and the mental. So I’m not sure that we’ve settled this question once and for all.
PINKER: I’m also sympathetic to Chalmers’ view. It might not be the actual stuff of the brain that makes us conscious so much as it is the information processing. I don’t think Chalmers’ view would give much support to a traditional religious view about the existence of a soul. He says that consciousness resides in information. So a computer could be conscious and a thermostat could have a teensy bit of consciousness as well. Still, the information content requires some kind of physical medium to support the distinctions that make up the information. And the Cartesian idea that there are two kinds of stuff in the universe — mind and matter — doesn’t find a comfortable home in current views of consciousness, even those of Chalmers.
November 22nd, 2007 at 6:07 am
I wanted to say something about Pinker’s remarks that computers and thermostats encounter information as information.
I think we have to be clear that computers, no matter how intricate they get, are never anything more “information-like” than two hammers banging against each other. Computers encounter electric charge and magnetism, it is only ever the human user that deals with information. (recall John Searle’s chinese room argument)
November 22nd, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Well, I think that’s the big question–since the reductionist would say our information is neurons exchanging neurotransmitters, a different medium than computers, but the same effect.
But yes, the Chinese Room argument is interesting, although it’s been interpreted in so many ways.
Have you read Chalmers on consciousness and information? It’s interesting stuff, though I haven’t gotten a hold of all of it yet.
November 22nd, 2007 at 11:59 pm
No I havent, but I feel like I know what he’s going to say. I read a couple of chapters on what he wrote about quantum mechanics and he’s been very influential on me.
But more interestingly, I came across an idea in Dennett’s book - “Freedom Evolves”. The way I understand it, he is a reductionist but an example he uses early in the book I think gives a really good reason not to be.
He uses a mathematical game called “Conway’s Life” to talk about free will, but I think its the best model of Emergence there is. With emergent entities, you’ve got a new level of description, a new ontology, and it’s curious because it at first seems like the emergent layer is nothing but the components it is made from. But in the Conway model you can see that there is something else… and this is where I’m very influenced by Heidegger… its the temporal dimension.
Take a quick look at the rules and animations of Conway’s Life on Wikipedia. My argument is that in Conway’s model, with only the spatial dimensions, you have only the individual cells. Across the temporal dimension, you have objects like “gliders” and it is only with the addition of the temporal dimension that the emergent ontology actually emerges.
Back in the real world now, I think this added dimensionality is necessary for it to be possible to encounter something as information. As humans, we exist slightly ahead of ourselves if you know what I mean… we’re just a little bit in the future when we are in the everyday mode of perceiving. We see cars that are about to hit us, baseballs that are going to fall short of clearing the stadium, people with their intent - it is because we can do this that we can encounter information.
Information is information because it is relevant or significant for something. It is intimately tied up with life and consciousness. I dont agree with Pinker’s remarks that you can have a little bit of information or a little bit of consciousness. I think information is the experience of consciousness and both come on like wave patterns on a rope that is spun. You have nothing nothing nothing…. then wham, you have a half-wavelength standing wave pattern.
I think consciousness is emergent on the physical layer, but its onset is discrete not continuous, although its character can vary in degrees. Pinker is I think looking at it the wrong way ’round (typical psychologist!) he’s anthropomorphising - the information he sees in the computer and the thermostat is grounded in him. Once something has consciousness, the entire universe is informational.
I might be projecting, but I figured Chalmers might see it this way - that information and consciousness are inseparably woven together like this, and not separable in the way Pinker sees it.
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:47 pm
I’m still working through “The Conscious Mind”, and have just gotten to the chapter where he talks about information. From what I’ve read, though, he considers himself a “non-reductive functionalist”, meaning that whether silicone chips or the population of China are the material, the proper system will generate consciousness.
In terms of “information”, it seems like he distinguishes between a semantic account (information being about something) and a formal, or functional account, in which information is a “state selected from an ensemble of possibilities.”
These states can be realized physically and/or phenomenally. The thermostat example comes on p 293, where he moves from humans to dogs, etc. on down towards simple creatures and machines, arguing that phenomenal distinctions in vision correspond to physical distinctions, so in one sense, you could think of a thermostat’s states as having a minimal phenomenology. (Not self-consciousness, mind you.)
On a functional account, then, it seems hard to deny that, since there is nothing physical in humans that accounts for consciousness qua phenomenal experience–it is just (on Chalmer’s account) a psychophysical law that correlates physical and phenomenal together.
Anyway, it’s interesting, especially because he’s very careful about how he defines consciousness (doesn’t necessarily have to do with self-awareness, rational thought, etc) and because he takes a functionalist approach without being reductionist.
But yes, he says his view the universe is informational/conscious, and he has to clarify where he diverges from panpsychism.
I don’t know much about Pinker, though, aside from a little bit I read on his idea of “mentalese” which I found implausible.