Dec 17, 2019 07:11 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-...ory-belief
EXCERPT (Massimo Pigliucci): . . . llusionism was labelled ‘the silliest claim ever made’ by Galen Strawson in The New York Review of Books last year, but is defended by other prominent philosophers, particularly by Daniel Dennett. [...] While I am tempted to sympathise with Strawson here, I think that Dennett is closer to the mark. ... Dennett suggests that phenomenal consciousness is a ‘user illusion’ akin to the icons we’re used to seeing on our desktop and laptop computer screens (and on tablets and smart phones).
[...] This is actually a very powerful (metaphorical) description of the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and the underlying neural machinery that makes it possible. But why on earth would we call it an ‘illusion’? The term brings to mind trickery, smokes and mirrors. Which is most definitely not what is going on. Computer icons, cursors and so forth are not illusions, they are causally efficacious representations of underlying machine-language processes. It would be too tedious for most users to think in terms of machine-language, and too slow to interact with the computer by that means. That’s why programmers gave us icons and cursors. But these are causally connected with the underlying machine code, which is why we can actually make things happen in a computer. If they were illusions, nothing would happen – they would be causally inert epiphenomena.
Or take a more mundane example. Would you call the wheel of your car an illusion? And yet, when you turn it this way or that, you are definitely not aware of the (increasingly) complex servo- and electronic mechanisms that translate your simple movements into your car actually turning this way or that. When you turn the steering wheel in a circular fashion, your car’s wheels don’t turn the same way, they shift right or left on a horizontal plane (which is why you can have cars that have levers moving right or left, instead of rotating steering wheels). The steering wheel, then, is in a sense a representation of what the car will do if you act on it this way or that, and it works because it is causally connected to the underlying machinery in a way that makes it possible for you to efficiently operate such machinery without being aware of it.
Similarly with phenomenal consciousness. The ‘what is it like’ feelings and thoughts that we have are high-level representations of the (entirely different in nature) underlying neural mechanisms that make it possible for us to perceive, react to, and navigate the world. Instead of more or less clever programmers, we have to thank billions of years of evolution by entirely mindless natural selection for these causally efficacious representations. To call them illusions is to derail our thinking along unproductive tracks, leading us – if we are not careful – to metaphysical and scientific claims that are just as problematic as those of Chalmers & co, and that Strawson is not entirely off in calling ‘silly’.
It is certainly true, as the illusionists maintain, that we do not have access to our own neural mechanisms. But we don’t need to, just like a computer user doesn’t need to know machine-language – and, in fact, is far better off for that. This does not at all imply that we are somehow mistaken about our thoughts and feelings. No more than I as a computer user might be mistaken about which ‘folder’ contains the ‘file’ on which I have been ‘writing’ this essay.
This illusion talk can be triggered by what I think of as the reductionist temptation, the notion that lower levels of description – in this case, the neurobiological one – are somehow more true, or even the only true ones. The fallaciousness of this kind of thinking can be brought to light in a couple of ways. First of all, and most obviously, why stop at the neurobiological level? Why not say that neurons are themselves illusions, since they are actually made of molecules? But wait! Molecules too are illusions, as they are really made of quarks. Or strings. Or fields. Or whatever the latest from fundamental physics says.
That way of thinking is, in fact, appealing to some greedy reductionists, but it truly is silly for the simple reason that it is unworkable. And it is unworkable because, when it comes to human understanding, different levels of description are useful for different purposes. [...] When illusionists argue that what we experience as qualia are ‘nothing like’ our actual internal mental mechanisms, they are, in a sense, right. But they also seem to forget that everything we perceive about the outside world is a representation and not the thing-in-itself. [...examples presented, see article...]
[...] Following John Searle, I think that consciousness is an evolved biological mechanism with adaptive value, and that treating it as an illusion is, in a big sense, denying the data that need to be explained. In his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), Searle writes:
What I want to insist on, ceaselessly, is that one can accept the obvious facts of physics – for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force – without at the same time denying the obvious facts about our own experiences – for example, that we are all conscious and that our conscious states have quite specific irreducible phenomenological properties.
‘Irreducibility’ here is not a mystical concept, and it can be cashed out in a number of ways.... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Massimo Pigliucci): . . . llusionism was labelled ‘the silliest claim ever made’ by Galen Strawson in The New York Review of Books last year, but is defended by other prominent philosophers, particularly by Daniel Dennett. [...] While I am tempted to sympathise with Strawson here, I think that Dennett is closer to the mark. ... Dennett suggests that phenomenal consciousness is a ‘user illusion’ akin to the icons we’re used to seeing on our desktop and laptop computer screens (and on tablets and smart phones).
[...] This is actually a very powerful (metaphorical) description of the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and the underlying neural machinery that makes it possible. But why on earth would we call it an ‘illusion’? The term brings to mind trickery, smokes and mirrors. Which is most definitely not what is going on. Computer icons, cursors and so forth are not illusions, they are causally efficacious representations of underlying machine-language processes. It would be too tedious for most users to think in terms of machine-language, and too slow to interact with the computer by that means. That’s why programmers gave us icons and cursors. But these are causally connected with the underlying machine code, which is why we can actually make things happen in a computer. If they were illusions, nothing would happen – they would be causally inert epiphenomena.
Or take a more mundane example. Would you call the wheel of your car an illusion? And yet, when you turn it this way or that, you are definitely not aware of the (increasingly) complex servo- and electronic mechanisms that translate your simple movements into your car actually turning this way or that. When you turn the steering wheel in a circular fashion, your car’s wheels don’t turn the same way, they shift right or left on a horizontal plane (which is why you can have cars that have levers moving right or left, instead of rotating steering wheels). The steering wheel, then, is in a sense a representation of what the car will do if you act on it this way or that, and it works because it is causally connected to the underlying machinery in a way that makes it possible for you to efficiently operate such machinery without being aware of it.
Similarly with phenomenal consciousness. The ‘what is it like’ feelings and thoughts that we have are high-level representations of the (entirely different in nature) underlying neural mechanisms that make it possible for us to perceive, react to, and navigate the world. Instead of more or less clever programmers, we have to thank billions of years of evolution by entirely mindless natural selection for these causally efficacious representations. To call them illusions is to derail our thinking along unproductive tracks, leading us – if we are not careful – to metaphysical and scientific claims that are just as problematic as those of Chalmers & co, and that Strawson is not entirely off in calling ‘silly’.
It is certainly true, as the illusionists maintain, that we do not have access to our own neural mechanisms. But we don’t need to, just like a computer user doesn’t need to know machine-language – and, in fact, is far better off for that. This does not at all imply that we are somehow mistaken about our thoughts and feelings. No more than I as a computer user might be mistaken about which ‘folder’ contains the ‘file’ on which I have been ‘writing’ this essay.
This illusion talk can be triggered by what I think of as the reductionist temptation, the notion that lower levels of description – in this case, the neurobiological one – are somehow more true, or even the only true ones. The fallaciousness of this kind of thinking can be brought to light in a couple of ways. First of all, and most obviously, why stop at the neurobiological level? Why not say that neurons are themselves illusions, since they are actually made of molecules? But wait! Molecules too are illusions, as they are really made of quarks. Or strings. Or fields. Or whatever the latest from fundamental physics says.
That way of thinking is, in fact, appealing to some greedy reductionists, but it truly is silly for the simple reason that it is unworkable. And it is unworkable because, when it comes to human understanding, different levels of description are useful for different purposes. [...] When illusionists argue that what we experience as qualia are ‘nothing like’ our actual internal mental mechanisms, they are, in a sense, right. But they also seem to forget that everything we perceive about the outside world is a representation and not the thing-in-itself. [...examples presented, see article...]
[...] Following John Searle, I think that consciousness is an evolved biological mechanism with adaptive value, and that treating it as an illusion is, in a big sense, denying the data that need to be explained. In his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), Searle writes:
What I want to insist on, ceaselessly, is that one can accept the obvious facts of physics – for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force – without at the same time denying the obvious facts about our own experiences – for example, that we are all conscious and that our conscious states have quite specific irreducible phenomenological properties.
‘Irreducibility’ here is not a mystical concept, and it can be cashed out in a number of ways.... (MORE - details)
