4.8 The Mystery of ‘Experience.’

Many thinkers have maintained that even after we learn all about how our brain-functions work, one basic question may always remain: “Why do we experience” things?” Here is one philosopher who has argued explaining ‘subjective experience’ could be the hardest problem of psychology—and possibly one that no one will ever solve.

• David Chalmers: “Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? … Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? ... The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.”[24]

It appears to me that Chalmers assumes that experiencing is quite plain and direct—and therefore deserves some sort of simple, compact explanation. However, once we recognize that each of our everyday psychology words (like experience, feeling, and consciousness) refers to a suitcase of different phenomena, then we should no longer expect to find and single way to explain all the contents of that suitcase-word. Instead, we first will need to make theories about each of those different phenomena. Then we may be able to see that some subsets of them share some useful similarities. But until we have made the right kinds of dissections, it would be rash to conclude that what they describe cannot be ‘derived’ from other ideas. [See §§Emergence.]

Physicist: Perhaps brains exploit some unknown laws that cannot be built into machinery. For example, we don’t really know how gravity works—so consciousness might be an aspect of that.[25]

This too assumes what it’s trying to prove—that there must be a single source or cause for all the marvels of ‘consciousness’. But as we saw in §4-2, consciousness has more meanings than can be explained in any single or uniform way.

Essentialist: What about the basic fact that consciousness makes me aware of myself? It tells me what I am thinking about, and this is how I know I exist Computers compute without any such sense, but whenever a person feels or thinks, this come with that sense of ‘experience’—and nothing else is more basic than this.

Chapter §9 will argue that it is a mistake to suppose that you are ‘aware of yourself’—except in a very coarse everyday sense Instead, you are constantly switching among different ‘self-models’ that you have composed—and each of these is based on different, incomplete set of incomplete evidence. “Experience” may seem quite clear and direct—but frequently it’s just plain incorrect, because each of your various views of yourself may be partly based on oversights, or other varieties of mistakes.

Whenever you look at somebody else, you can see their appearance, but not what's inside it. It’s the same when you look at yourself in a mirror; you only see what lies outside of your skin. Now, in the popular view of consciousness, you also possess some magical trick with which you can look at yourself from inside, and thus see directly into your own mind. But when you reflect on this more carefully you’ll see that your ‘privileged access’ to your own thoughts may sometimes be less accurate than are the ‘insights’ of your intimate friends. (See §9-X.)

Citizen: That claim is so ridiculous that it makes me annoyed with what you said—and I know this in some special way that directly from inside myself, to tell me exactly what I think.

Your friends, too, can see that you are disturbed—and your consciousness fails to tell you details about why those words made you feel annoyed, or to shake your head that particular way, what caused you to use those particular words to say annoyed instead of disturbed? True, we can't see much of a person's thoughts by observing their actions from outside—but even when we 'watch from inside,’ it is hard to be sure that we really see more, in view of how often such ‘insights’ are wrong. So, if we take ‘consciousness’ to mean 'aware of our internal processes'—it doesn't live up to its reputation.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."—H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

§4-9. A-Brains and B-Brains

---Socrates: Imagine men living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light—but the men have been chained from their childhood so that they never can turn their heads around and can only look toward the back of the cave. Far behind them, outside the cave, a fire is blazing, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a low wall built along the way, like the screen, which puppeteers have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. ---Glaucon: I see. ---Socrates: And do you see men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood, stone, and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. ---Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image … ---Socrates: Like us, they see nothing but only the shadows of themselves and of those other objects, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave… Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than those shadows... —Plato, in The Republic

Can you think about what you are thinking right now? Well, in a literal sense, that’s impossible—that each such thought would change what you're thinking now. However, you can settle for something slightly less—if you imagine that your brain (or mind) is composed of two principal parts: Let’s call these your A-brain and B-Brain.

Now suppose that your A-Brain gets signals that stream from such organs as eyes, ears, nose, and skin; then it can use those signals to discern some events that occur in the external world—and then it can react to these, by sending signals that make your muscles move—which in turn can affect the state of the world. By itself, it’s a separate animal.

However, your B-Brain has no such external sensors, but only gets signals that come from A. So B cannot 'see' any actual things; it can only see A's descriptions of them. Like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, who sees only shadows on that wall, the B-brain mistakes A’s descriptions for real things, not knowing what they might actually mean. What the B-Brain sees as its 'outer world' are only events in the A-brain itself.

Neurologist: And that also applies to you and me. For, whatever you think you touch or see, the higher levels of your brain never can actually contact these—but can only interpret the representations of them that your other resources construct for you.

When the fingertips of two ardent lovers come into intimate physical contact, no one would claim that this, by itself, has any special significance. For there is no sense in those signals themselves: their meanings to each lover lies in each one’s representations of the other one’s mind. .[26] Nevertheless, although the B-Brain cannot directly perform a physical act, it still could affect the external world, albeit indirectly—by sending signals that change how A will react. For example, if A gets stuck at repeating itself, it might suffice for B just to interrupt.

Student: Like when I've misplaced my spectacles, I tend to keep seeking it on the same shelf. Then a silent voice reproaches me, suggesting that I look somewhere else.

In the ideal case, B could tell (or teach) A exactly what it ought to do. But even if B does not have such specific advice, it might not need to tell A what to do; it may suffice only to criticize the strategy A is using now.

Student: But what if I were walking across a road, when suddenly my B-brain said “Sir, you’ve repeated the same actions with your leg for more than a dozen consecutive times. You should stop right now and do something else.”

Indeed, that could cause a serious accident. To prevent such mistakes a B-Brain must have appropriate ways to represent things. This accident would not occur if B represent ‘walking to a certain place’ as a single extended act—as in “Keep moving your legs till you’ve crossed that street”—or in terms of progress toward some goal—as in, ‘keep reducing the remaining distance.’ Thus, a B-brain could act like a manager who has no special expertise about how to do any particular job—but still can give ‘general’ guidance like these.

If A's descriptions seem too vague, B tells it to use more specific details. If A is buried in too much detail, B suggests more abstract descriptions. If what A is doing is taking too long, B tells it try some other technique.

How could a B-Brain acquire such skills? Some could be built into it from the start, but it should also be able to learn new techniques. To do this, a B-Brain itself may need help, which in turn could come from yet another level. Then while the B-Brain deals with its A-Brain world, that ‘C-Brain’ in turn will supervise B.

Student: How many levels does a person need? Do we have dozens or hundreds of them?

In Chapter §5 we’ll describe a model of mind whose resources are organized into of six different levels of processes. Here is an outline of what these might be: It begins with a set of instinctive reactions with which we are equipped with from birth. Then we become able to reason, imagine, and plan ahead, by developing ways to do what we call deliberative thinking. Yet later we develop ways to do “reflective thinking” about our own thoughts.—and still later we learn ways to self-reflect about why and how we could think about such things. Finally we start to think self-consciously about whether we ought to have done those things. Here is how that scheme might apply to Joan’s thoughts about that street-crossing scene:

What caused Joan to turn toward that sound? [Instinctive reactions.] How did she know that it might be a car? [Learned Reaction] What resources were used to make her decision? [Deliberation.] How did she choose how to make her decisions? [Reflection] Why did she think of herself as making that choice? [Self-reflection.] Did her actions live up to her principles? [Self-Conscious Reflection.]

Of course, this is oversimplified. Such levels can never be clearly defined—because, at least in later life, each of those types of processes may use resources at other levels of thought. However, this framework will help us to start to discuss the kinds of resources that adults use—and some ways that these might be organized.

Student: Why should there be any ‘levels’ at all—instead of just one large, cross-connected cloud or resources?

Our general argument for this is based on the idea that, to evolve complex systems that still are efficient, every process of evolution must find a compromise between these two alternatives:

If a system’s parts have too few interconnections, then its abilities will be limited.

But if there are too many connections, then each change will disrupt too many processes.

How to achieve a good balance of these? A system could start with clearly distinctive parts (for example, with more-or-less separate layers) and then proceed to make connections.

Embryologist: In its embryonic development, a typical structure in the brain starts out with more or less definite layers or levels like those in your A, B, C diagrams. But then, various groups of cells grow bundles of fibers that extend across those boundaries to many other quite distant places.

Or, the system could begin with too many connections and then proceed to remove some of them. Indeed, this also happened to us: during the eons through which our brains evolved, our ancestors had to adapt to thousands of different environments—and, every time this happened to us, some features that formerly had been ‘good’ now came to function as serious ‘bugs’—and we had to evolve corrections for them.

Embryologist: Indeed, it turns out that more than half of those cells proceed to die as soon as they’ve reached their targets. These massacres appear to be a series of post-editing’ stages in which various kinds of ‘bugs’ get corrected.

This reflects a basic constraint on evolution: it is dangerous to make changes to the older parts of an animal, because many parts that later evolved depend on how the older ones work. Consequently, at every new stage, we tend to evolve by adding ‘patches’ to structures that are already established. This led to our massively intricate brains, in which each part works in accord with some principles, each of which has many exceptions to it. This complexity is reflected in human Psychology: where each aspect of thinking can be partly explained in terms of neat laws and principles—but each such ‘law’ has exceptions to it.

The same constraints appear to apply whenever we try to improve the performance of any large system—such as an existing computer program—by adding more fixes and patches on top, instead of revising the older parts. Each particular ‘ bug’ that we remedy may eventually lead to more such bugs, and the system keeps growing more ponderous—and this seems to apply to our present-day minds.

This chapter began by presenting a few widely held views of what “consciousness” is. We concluded that people use that word for a great suitcase of mental processes that no one yet thoroughly understands. The term ‘conscious’ is useful enough in everyday life—and seems almost indispensable for talking on social or ethical levels—because it keeps us from being distracted by wanting to know what’s inside our minds. It is the same for most other psychology-words, such as understanding, emotion, and feeling.

However, when we don’t recognize that we are using suitcase-words, then we may fall into the trap of trying to clearly define what those kinds of words ‘mean.’ Then we get into trouble because we do not have clear enough ideas about what our minds are and how their parts work. So, if we want to understand the things that human minds actually do, we will have to dissect our mental processes into parts that we can analyze. The following chapter will try to explain how Joan’s mind could do some of the sorts of the things that people can do.

[1] www.srichinmoy.org/html/library/questions_answers/consciousness_qa.htm

[2] Fodor, J. A., Can there be a science of mind? Times Literary Supplement. July 3, 1992, pp5-7.

[3] Chapter 2 of Conversations with Neil’s Brain, REF

[4] In comp.ai.philosophy, 14 Dec. 1994

[5] An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748

[6] In sci.psychology.consciousness, 15 Jun 96.

[7] There are important exceptions to this. It would seem that experts like J.S. Bach developed ways to accomplish more multiple, yet still similar goals in parallel. However, as their skills improve, most such experts become less and less able to tell the rest of us how they do them.

[8] William James discussed this extensively. See: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/jimmy11.htm. Several other more modern ideas about this are developed in Daniel Dennett’s 1991 book, Consciousness Explained.

[9] So, despite a popular intuition, research on parallel processing has shown that such systems are frequently prone to end up accomplishing less for the same amount of computational power Nevertheless, if that cost can be borne, then the final result may come sooner!

[10] See Parallel Distributed Processing, Rumelhart, D., J. McClelland et al., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 1986. See also my discussion of ‘opacity’ in http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/SymbolicVs.Connectionist.html. For some limitations of the most popular forms of neural networks, see [Perceptrons.][ref.]

[11] See Jeffrey Siskind, publication about…

[12] Chapter §8 will propose more details about how our memory structures are organized to so swiftly deliver such information. Basically, when a problem arises, some processes may start to solve it before other processes formulate questions about it.

[13] See §25.4 of The Society of Mind, p257.

[14] ” —[email protected], 29 Sep 1997.

[15] In Outlines of Psychology, 1897.

[16] This idea is explained in more detail at http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/MatterMindModels.html.

[17] In a discussion on the newsgroup comp.ai.philosophy, 7 Feb 1992.

[18] Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained. [ref.]

[19][ref to metaphor, lakoff, etc.]

[20] I don’t think modern programming, on the whole, has reached this stage. Indeed, I did once suggest, very long ago, that a Cartesian Theater concept be a good model of programming. Old design paper]

[21] http://www.imprint.co.uk/online/new1.html

[22] Dennett, Daniel C and Kinsbourne, Marcel, (1992) Time and the Observer. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2): pp183-247. http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000264/

[23] SoM 25.04 Continuity.

[24] http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html.

[25] Ref. to Penrose’s book.

[26] This example is from Frederik Pohl’s prescient short story Day Million in his anthology, Day Million, Ballantine Books 1970 ISBN: 0330236067