Dennett on Mandik on Dennett and Rosenthal

Out now is Content and Consciousness Revisited: With Replies by Daniel Dennett edited by Carlos Munoz-Suarez and Felipe De Brigard. My chapter in the book is "Conscious-state Anti-realism." Dennett's reply to my chapter is on pp. 218-219, viewable below as well as at this link containing all of his replies.

Here's an excerpt from my chapter:

Dennett’s most famous argument for his first-person operationalism (hereafter, FPO) proceeds by pointing out the alleged empirical underdetermination of theory-choice between “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” explanations of certain temporal anomalies of conscious experience (Dennett, op. cit., pp. 115-126). The explanations conflict over whether the anomalies are due to misrepresentations in memories of experiences (Orwellian) or misrepresentations in the experiences themselves (Stalinesque).
David Rosenthal (1995, 2005a, 2005b) has offered that his Higher-order Thought theory of consciousness (hereafter, “HOT theory”) can serve as a basis for distinguishing between Orwellian and Stalinesque hypotheses and thus as a basis for resisting FPO. The gist of HOT theory is that one’s having a conscious mental state consists in one’s having a higher-order thought (a HOT) about that mental state.
I’ll argue that HOT theory can defend against FPO only on a “relational reading” of HOT theory whereby consciousness consists in a relation between a HOT and an actually existing mental state. I’ll argue further that this relational reading leaves HOT theory vulnerable to objections such as the Unicorn Argument (Mandik, 2009). To defend against such objections, HOT theory must instead admit of a “nonrelational reading” whereby a HOT alone suffices for a conscious state. Indeed, HOT theorists have been increasingly explicit in emphasizing this nonrelational reading of HOT theory (Rosenthal, 2011; Weisberg, 2010 and 2011). However, I’ll argue, on this reading HOT theory collapses into a version of FPO.

Here's Dennett's reply (click image for larger image or click here):

Here's a video synopsis from back when my project was a contribution in Consciousness Online 4 (2012):

And as a video bonus, here's my rundown of Dennett's theory of consciousness:

New Mandik Paper: What's It Like When Your Eyes Move?

Image source: Pete Mandik on flickr

Is there a distinctive visual phenomenology that accompanies saccadic eye movement? I suggest that there is none in my short piece "What's It Like When Your Eyes Move?" appearing starting today at the Brain's blog symposium on Wayne Wu's “Against Division: Consciousness, Information, and the Visual Streams.”

Here's an excerpt from my contribution:

On this alternative to Wu’s hypothesis, the best way to account for so-called spatial constancy is [...] instead of treating it as the appearance of an absence of motion, we treat it as an absence of an appearance of motion. So, back to my visual inspection of my yard, I see the chairs and the tree trunk, which involves, I presume, neural processes encoding relevant information concerning shape, location, and color, and during saccades I just don’t have any representations of those things as moving, which, I presume, is different from having representations of the things as not moving. 

I made a short video about Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness

I made a short video about Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness:

Video discussion of my papers "The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity" and "The Neurophilosophy of Consciousness"

The following video, from YouTube user YuryLarrea, discusses two of my papers on neurophilosophy, "The Neurophilosophy of Subjectivity" and "The Neurophilosophy of Consciousness.":

Conscious-State Anti-Realism

A presentation related to my chapter in a forthcoming book about Daniel Dennett. "Conscious-State Anti-Realism" is to appear in Munoz-Suarez, C. and De Brigard, F. Content and Consciousness Revisited. Berlin: Springer. Read the chapter here: http://www.petemandik.com/philosophy/papers/csar.pdf

Color-Consciousness Conceptualism

A presentation related to my paper, "Color-Consciousness Conceptualism" which appeared in 2012 in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. Read the paper here: http://www.petemandik.com/philosophy/papers/ccc.pdf

New Mandik papers

I've got some new(-ish) papers up on my website now:

1. Mandik, Pete. (in press). Conscious-state Anti-realism. In: Munoz-Suarez, C. and De Brigard, F (eds.). Content and Consciousness Revisited. Berlin: Springer.
2. Mandik, Pete. (2013). What is Visual and Phenomenal but Concerns neither Hue nor Shade?. In R. Brown (Ed.), Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Studies in Brain and Mind 6, (pp. 219-227). London, Springer. DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6001-1 1

Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience

Brown, R. (ed.) Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience

Brains: Study of Color Discrimination and Memory

Brains: Study of Color Discrimination and Memory: Study of Color Discrimination and Memory

We are conducting a study of color discrimination and short-term color memory. I would be grateful if you would participate in the study. You'll need to use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the color of a square to fit the color of a second image. It will only take about 5-10 minutes. Click on the link below to begin.
www.synesthesiaresearch.com/study

Mole reviews Prinz's book on consciousness

The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

Jacob Berger, Do We Conceptualize Every Color We Consciously Discriminate? | PhilPapers

Jacob Berger, Do We Conceptualize Every Color We Consciously Discriminate? | PhilPapers:

Mandik (2012) understands color-consciousness conceptualism to be the view that one deploys in a conscious qualitative state concepts for every color consciously discriminated by that state. Some argue that the experimental evidence that we can consciously discriminate barely distinct hues that are presented together but cannot do so when those hues are presented in short succession suggests that we can consciously discriminate colors that we do not conceptualize. Mandik maintains, however, that this evidence is consistent with our deploying a variety of nondemonstrative concepts for those colors and so does not pose a threat to conceptualism. But even if Mandik has shown that we deploy such concepts in these experimental conditions, there are cases of conscious states that discriminate colors but do not involve concepts of those colors. Mandik’s arguments sustain only a theory in the vicinity of conceptualism: The view that we possess concepts for every color we can discriminate consciously, but need not deploy those concepts in every conscious act of color discrimination.

What's Tye's beef with Dennett?

There's a lot that I like about both Michael Tye's and Daniel Dennett's views on consciousness, so it's a bit of a bummer to read Tye's statements against Dennett in Richard Marshall's recent interview of Tye for 3am magazine. Of Dennett's "Quining Qualia" (one of my all-time favorite papers), Tye says:

...the most charitable way to read him is as holding that experiences themselves are dispositions to believe various things. So, there are no experiences or qualia, conceived of as non-epistemic, non-belief-laden entities. This view seems obviously mistaken...

I don't know, but if it is mistaken it doesn't strike me as obviously so. It also strikes me as significantly similar to Tye's own view. A notion of "poise" plays a key role in Tye's theory of phenomenal character, and I have a hard time reading poise as being anything other than a dispositional property, specifically, a disposition related to belief. Here's Tye describing his own view in the interview:

A mental state has phenomenal character just in case it is appropriately poised (a functional role condition) and it nonconceptually represents a complex of properties.

And:

What representations have to do to get to be experiences, on my view, is that they have to arise at the right level in the information processing. They have to be available to cognitive processes in the right sort of way. They have to be appropriately ‘poised’. Your visual experience of the computer screen before you and its properties is the evidential basis for your belief that there is a computer screen ahead and a whole host of related beliefs.

I'm guessing that Dennett's reaction to that wouldn't be "that's obviously mistaken" but instead "sounds pretty good to me". So what's the rift, here? I'm not seeing it. First-order representationalists about phenomenal character, can't we all get along?

Conscious-State Anti-Realism at Consciousness Online

My paper, video presentation, etc for "Conscious-state Anti-realism"  is now online at the 4th annual Consciousness Online conference.  Alex Kiefer and Daniel Kostic are commenting. Check it out!

Mental Colors Published

My paper,"Mental Colors, Conceptual Overlap, and Discriminating Knowledge of Particulars" has been published online at Consciousness and Cognition here:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810011001607

See also: http://petemandik.blogspot.com/2011/06/mental-colors-conceptual-overlap-and.html

Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness

ScienceDirect - Trends in Cognitive Sciences : Empirical support for higher-order theories of conscious awareness:

by Hakwan Lau and David Rosenthal

Abstract:

Higher-order theories of consciousness argue that conscious awareness crucially depends on higher-order mental representations that represent oneself as being in particular mental states. These theories have featured prominently in recent debates on conscious awareness. We provide new leverage on these debates by reviewing the empirical evidence in support of the higher-order view. We focus on evidence that distinguishes the higher-order view from its alternatives, such as the first-order, global workspace and recurrent visual processing theories. We defend the higher-order view against several major criticisms, such as prefrontal activity reflects attention but not awareness, and prefrontal lesion does not abolish awareness. Although the higher-order approach originated in philosophical discussions, we show that it is testable and has received substantial empirical support.

Dennett's 1969 account of introspective infallibility

In chapter 5 of Dennett’s 1969 book, Content and Consciousness, he sketches an account of how, without recourse to dualism, our introspective reports can be infallible and we can have “certainty about the contents of our own thoughts” (p. 100). At the heart of Dennett’s sketch is a functional sketch of the brain as an intentional system, especially as it enables persons to make verbal reports on occasions of sensory stimulation. At the heart of this functional/Intentional view is a distinction Dennett borrows from Putnam (1960), a distinction between functional or logical states of a system and physical states of a system. As Dennett states the key idea:

“A particular machine T is in logical state A if, and only if, it performs what the machine table specifies for logical state A, regardless of the physical state it is in” (p. 102).

For both Dennett and Putnam, a significant upshot of such a notion of states is that T can be in A without itself ascertaining that it is in state A. Putnam argues, in a passage Dennett quotes (pp. 102-103): “Indeed,…suppose T could not be in state A without first ascertaining that it was in state A (by first passing through a sequence of other states). Clearly a vicious regress would be involved. And one ‘breaks’ the regress simply by noting that the machine, in ascertaining [anything] passes through its states—but it need not in any significant sense ‘ascertain’ that it is passing through them.”

Dennett elaborates:

“Suppose T ‘ascertained’ it was in state B; this could only mean that it behaved or operated as ifit were in state B, and if T does this it is in state B. Possibly there has been a breakdown so that it should be in state A, but if it ‘ascertains’ that it is in state B (behaves as if it were in state B) it is in state B.

Now suppose the machine table contained the instruction: ‘Print: “I am in state A” when in state A.’ When the machine prints ‘I am in state A’ are we to say the machine ascertained it was in state A? The machine’s ‘verbal report’, as Putnam says, ‘issues directly from the state it “reports”; no “computation” or additional “evidence” is needed to arrive at the “answer”.’ The report issues directly from the state it reports in that the machine is in state A only if it reports it is in state A. If any sense is to be made of the question, ‘How does T know it is in state A?’, the only answer is degenerate: ‘by being in state A’.

[…]

‘Even if some accident causes the printing mechanism to print: “I am in state A” when the machine is not in state A, there was not a “miscomputation” (only, so to speak, a “verbal slip”).’ Putnam compares this situation to the human report ‘I am in pain’, and contrasts these to the reports ‘Vacuum tube 312 has failed’ and ‘I have a fever’. Human beings have some capacity for the monitoring of internal physical states such as fevers, and computers can have similar monitoring devices for their own physical states, but when either makes a report of such internal physical conditions, the question of how these are ascertained makes perfect sense, and can be answered by giving a succession of states through which the system passes in order to ascertain its physical condition. But when the state reported is a logical or functionally individuated state, the task of ascertaining, monitoring or examining drops out of the reporting process.

A Turing machine designed so that its output could be interpreted as reports of its logical states would be, like human introspectors, invulnerable to all but ‘verbal’ errors. It could not misidentify its logical states in its reports just because it does not have to identify its states at all. “(p. 103-104)

Doing More with Mary

Jackson's Mary thought experiment is primarily discussed in connection with qualia. However, a couple of recent papers extend the thought experiment to raise problems concerning intentionality.

Martina Fürst, What Mary's Aboutness Is About | PhilPapers

The aim of this paper is to reinforce anti-physicalism by extending the hard problem to a specific kind of intentional states. For reaching this target, I investigate the mental content of the new intentional states of Jackson’s Mary. I proceed in the following way: I start analyzing the knowledge argument, which highlights the hard problem tied to phenomenal consciousness. In a second step, I investigate a powerful physicalist reply to this argument: the phenomenal concept strategy. In a third step, I propose a constitutional account of phenomenal concepts that captures the Mary scenario adequately, but implies anti-physicalist referents. In a last step, I point at the ramifications constitutional phenomenal concepts have on the constitution of Mary’s new intentional states. Therefore, by focusing the attention on phenomenal concepts, the so-called hard problem of consciousness will be carried over to the alleged easy problem of intentional states as well.

Philip Goff, Does Mary know I experience plus rather than quus? A new hard problem | PhilPapers

Realism about cognitive or semantic phenomenology, the view that certain conscious states are intrinsically such as to ground thought or understanding, is increasingly being taken seriously in analytic philosophy. The principle aim of this paper is to argue that it is extremely difficult to be a physicalist about cognitive phenomenology. The general trend in later 20th century/early 21st century philosophy of mind has been to account for the content of thought in terms of facts outside the head of the thinker at the time of thought, e.g. in terms of causal relations between thinker and world, or in terms of the natural purposes for which mental representations have developed. However, on the assumption that consciousness is constitutively realised by what is going on inside the head of a thinker at the time of experience, the content of cognitive phenomenology cannot be accounted for in this way. Furthermore, any internalist account of content is particularly susceptible to Kripkensteinian rule following worries. It seems that if someone knew all the physical facts about what is going on in my head at the time I was having a given experience with cognitive phenomenology, they would not thereby know whether that state had ‘straight’ rather than ‘quus-like’ content, e.g. whether the experience was intrinsically such as the ground the thought that two plus two equals four or intrinsically such as to ground the thought that two quus two equals four. The project of naturalising consciousness is much harder for realists about cognitive phenomenology.

Mental Colors, Conceptual Overlap, and Discriminating Knowledge of Particulars

I just received word of acceptance of my paper, "Mental Colors, Conceptual Overlap, and Discriminating Knowledge of Particulars" (PDF) forthcoming in Consciousness and Cognition (this is for Richard Brown's special issue associated with the 2nd annual Consciousness Online conference).

Abstract: I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, "Color-Consciousness Conceptualism." I resist Berger's suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling's proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some concepts. I question the relevance to perceptual consciousness of the arguments for demonstrative concepts that Pereplyotchik attacks.

Re Portugal

I'm back in NYC from a week of sun, beer, neuroscience, qualia, and zen in lovely Lisboa at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.

Zach Mainen, director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, ran a week-long course on consciousness and first-person methodology for the 2010 class of students in the International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme (with assistance from 2008 student Scott Rennie). Brian Keeley (who knows Zach from like a million years ago when they were together at University of California, San Diego) and I were brought on board to hang out in general as well as provide neurophilosophical overviews of consciousness, free will, and personal identity.



Each morning, the class kicked off with a half-hour of meditation led by monks from a local zen dojo. Then we set off to do things like coach opposing teams of students in constructing arguments about whether the self was something that could survive teleportation.

Thursday afternoon I presented "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" in the Neuroscience Seminar Series (abstract and answer here). It was fun to see so many neuroscientists get passionate about qualia!



Saturday afternoon, Brian and I took a teleporter to Cascais, where someone accidentally hit the "receive" button too many times.





(Photos from my flickr set, Lisbon 2011: Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown)

Pete to Portugal

This looks pretty cool.

Next week, my good buddy Brian Keeley and I are heading to Lisbon to help run a week-long course on consciousness for the Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. While there, I'll also be giving a talk, "Does the neuroscience of consciousness need to care about qualia?" More news, plus the answer to that titular question, when I get back to NYC later in May.