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| Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach |
To Hofstadter, that the human mind incorporates a sense of self is a thing that needs to be explained somehow. He explains it by recourse to a "self-symbol" or "self-subsystem."
In Hofstadter's view of the brain, its neurons' activities are organized in such a way as to produce, at a very high conceptual level, a plethora of "symbols." Along with the symbols themselves, there are also paths or patterns by which these symbols become active or are "triggered" in various combinations and sequences. Such a pattern, combination, or sequence of symbol activation constitutes a "thought."
A super-sized combination of symbols that tend to be activated together forms a "subsystem" (see p. 385). More precisely, a subsystem is "a constellation of symbols, each of which can be separately activated under the control of the subsystem itself." Another term Hofstadter uses for the same idea is "subbrain." A subsystem amounts to a "subbrain" of the entire brain.
Various subsystems or subbrains exist in each of our brains. Some of them, for example, "represent the people we know intimately," says Hofstadter. These subsystems associated with particular individuals constitute models by virtue of which we can understand and predict our friends' reactions to various contexts of experience, insofar as they may differ from what our own reactions would be.
Hofstadter gives the example of how we might know that a certain friend's concept of "mountain" is keyed to that friend's having had "a wonderful hiking experience in the Alps" years ago (p. 386). Accordingly, when we activate the "mountain" symbol in our own brain within the context of the subsystem that represents our Alp-hiking friend, that activation is somehow different from what it would be if it were activated in the context of just our own Alp-less personal experience.
Our own personal activation context for "mountain" — sans Alps, if we have never been there — and other symbols amounts to what Hofstadter calls our "self-symbol" or "self-subsystem." This unique symbol or subsystem of the human mind — though we each have a separate one of them, of course — is "the 'I' inside my brain," says he (p. 385).
I am right with Hofstadter on all the above, but our paths are nevertheless about to diverge. A bone of contention emerges, in fact, as of the "Where Is the Sense of Self" section of his intriguing chapter on "Minds and Thoughts" (see pp. 384-385).
Hofstadter's discussion of the self-symbol or self-subsystem follows closely on the heels of that particular section. In it and what follows he makes what I consider to be a bad mistake — a subtle one, to be sure, but nonetheless bad. He fails to distinguish between the self-symbol and consciousness.
I should have put that differently: he refuses to make a distinction between consciousness and the activity of the self-symbol. In fact, he makes it apparent that he would reject out of hand any proposed model of consciousness that would "elevate consciousness or awareness to [a] 'magical,' nonphysical level."
That resistance to the so-called "magical" seems to amount to nothing short of a bias on his part. True, it looks as if much of the remainder of his book (which I have not yet read) consists of a coherent argument against "magical" conceptions of the mind and consciousness. Yet as of this juncture in my reading, I feel disinclined to accept any such argument, on the grounds that I already have what I think is a well-justified view of consciousness that I imagine Hofstadter would call "magical."
In other words, my bias doesn't match Mr. Hofstadter's bias. Sorry about that.
My own bias when it comes to a philosophical understanding of consciousness is pretty well laid out in my earlier series of posts, which I collectively labeled "Quickening to Qualia":
- Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously
- One Hand Clapping (Q2Q II)
- The Qualities of Experience (Q2Q III)
- I and Thou (Q2Q IV)
- The Surprise of Selfhood (Q2Q V)
- What Is It Like To Be Self-Aware? (Q2Q VI)
- Water Into Wine (Q2Q VII)
- Thouness (Q2Q VIII)
- The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX)
- "Thouness" and Self (Q2Q X)
- The Mind's Enigmas (Q2Q XI)
- Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII)
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| Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny |
Consciousness is the experience we have of what it is like to use our brains, says Wright. If the use of the brain involves high-level symbols, as Hofstadter believes, then Wright would say that consciousness is the experience we have of symbols being activated in certain sequences and combinatorial patterns.
That subjective experience, however, is something that goes on in addition to the symbol-activation process. Even if there exists a super-symbol or subsystem or subbrain that, in our so-called self-awareness, represents the self, the experience of being self-aware comes on top of the self-awareness per se.
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| David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind |
Awareness, or knowledge, is of immense practical benefit to us. So is self-awareness or self-knowledge. And (as Hofstadter points out in Gödel, Escher, Bach) it is tough to imagine that creatures as smart as we are could ever make sense of the world to which we relate without a symbol in our brains for the entity doing the relating (see p. 388).
What we are aware of at a conscious level exceeds all that, Chalmers says. We experience the "qualia" of the things in the outside world represented in our brains by Hofstadter's symbols. We also experience the qualia of our own internal states. So what are qualia?
A "quale" (the singular of qualia) is what gives any particular conscious experience its subjective quality. It is that experience's "qualitative feel":
When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing [in the brain], but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one's tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience, from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one's experience of selfhood. (Chalmers p. 4)To Chalmers (and to myself) consciousness is a feeling or aura that surrounds an awareness of what our mind is doing. It goes along with the awareness, but it is different. Our response to the qualitative feel of something is itself incapable itself of "doing" anything in the world, in a practical sense.
If we are aware of a red tricycle, for example, the color red is experienced consciously by us in a certain phenomenal way, above and beyond any psychological reactions we may have to red objects. We simply possess an idea of "what it is like" for something to be red. It is entirely possible that in some imaginary world other than the one which we actually inhabit, that same "what it is like" feeling or aura in the presence of a certain color would pertain not to red but to green.
That "what it is like" feeling or aura, whether it be associated with red or green, is sort of like a sidecar to the motorcycle which is the awareness of the color and of the object which has that color. The sidecar steers nothing, drives nothing, powers nothing. The motorcycle (or its driver) does all that practical stuff. The fellow in the sidecar — consciousness, subjective awareness, whatever you want to call it — simply comes along for the ride.
It is also possible for us to imagine a world of "zombies" who have all the smarts we do but lack conscious experience entirely. Think Lt. Comdr. Data, the android on the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Data, a glorified robot who looked very nearly human, was forever stymied in trying to imagine the feel of the experiences that he knew his biology-based counterparts had. Try as he might, he couldn't experience anything — despite the fact that he was just as capable a starship officer as any of the flesh-and-blood officers were.
As Wright points out in Nonzero, in some imaginable alternative world there might have evolved flesh-and-blood creatures as smart as Data (and as us) who look just like us but are no more clued in to the subjective feelings of conscious experience than Data was.
Along these same lines, Chalmers asks (p. 4), "Why should there be conscious experience at all?" He finds consciousness "metaphysically baffling." His book represents an attempt (which I think is at least partially successful) to show that consciousness, so defined, must arise from laws of nature that are distinct from the ordinary laws of physics.
Speaking loosely, since he has no religious ax to grind, Chalmers says (p. 138) that "God still had more work to do" after he established the physical facts of our world. To wit, he had to add in the natural-but-not-physical laws by virtue of which consciousness would arise when the right type of physical organization — that of the human brain, for instance — emerged.
Such a view is religious only to the extent that you think natural laws, whether or not they happen to be physical laws, come from God. Chalmers happens to have no concern whatsoever about addressing this question. His talk of God as having "more work to do" is purely illustrative of his concept of natural laws as composing a larger category than merely physical laws. Even if there is no God behind the natural world and its scientific laws, his arguments would stand or fall by themselves.
Nonetheless, it occurs to me that Hofstadter might call Chalmers a dirty name: "soulist." In discussing the location in the brain of the sense of self, Hofstadter assumes the latter to be something of a "mechanism which does the perceiving of all the active symbols" in the brain (p. 385). He is about to identify that something as the "self-subsystem" I talked about earlier, but before he does that he takes a swipe at anyone who would "merely assert that the perceiver of all this neural action is the soul, which cannot be described in physical terms, and that is that."
Such a person who calls the brain's internal "perceiver" of its own neural action a non-physical phenomenon is thus lumped by Hofstadter into the category of "soulist," a word he has made up which apparently is the antonym of materialist. Hofstadter himself is such a materialist, or perhaps, better put, a mechanist. The brain to him is akin to a computer, a machine. Its awareness is "a direct effect of all the complex hardware and software" that it is made of (p. 388). End of story.
Just after saying that, he introduces the Oxford philosopher J.R. Lucas as something of a foil to his own mechanist views of consciousness. He starts down this path by excerpting (pp. 388-390) a long passage from Lucas' 1961 article "Minds, Machines, and Gödel," the full text of which may be read here. In the passage cited by Hofstadter, Lucas champions a reading of Gödel's incompleteness notions as demonstrating that the human mind cannot be equivalent to a machine, "within the meaning of the act."
That is, if a machine is defined as something that cannot stand outside itself as a formal, mechanical system and see the truth of those sorts of propositions which Gödel said all formal systems ineluctably lack proofs for, then the human mind is no machine. For the human mind can indeed see such truths. It is accordingly, Lucas says, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Why? Because it is of a degree of complexity that has gone, in the analogy Lucas draws to a nuclear reactor, "super-critical."
A machine might someday be built that has such super-critical complexity, Lucas wrote, but if it was built, "it would cease to be a machine, within the meaning of the act." It would be "no longer entirely predictable and entirely docile." It would "have a mind of its own" (can we say it would possess "free will"?) "Even when presented with a Gödel-type question" — i.e., a question that no formal, mechanical system could answer — "it [could get] the answer right."
To be quite frank, when I first began reading Hofstadter, I thought this sort of thing was exactly what he was leading up to. I thought he was going to use Gödelian incompleteness as a springboard to claiming that consciousness exceeds the merely physical workings of the brain, just as what we can know exceeds what we can demonstrate the truth of mechanically and formally.
Now I realize how wrong I was. Instead, Hofstadter is (as of the end of his chapter on "Minds and Thoughts") clearly about to embark on a demonstration of the opposite: that Gödelian incompleteness can be interpreted as supporting a strictly materialistic, mechanistic view of the mind, including the conscious and self-aware aspects thereof.
A clue to this comes from the way in which Hofstadter describes the Lucas paper in his bibliography (p. 751): "A highly controversial and provocative article, it claims to show that a human brain cannot, in principle, be modeled by a computer program. The argument is based entirely on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and is a fascinating one. The prose is (to my mind) incredibly infuriating — yet for that very reason, it makes humorous reading."
Talk about damning with faint praise! I found the prose excerpt from Lucas spoken of above to be anything but infuriating. In fact, I found it chimed with my own views, which means that I found Lucas to be in the same ballpark as Chalmers and Wright on the subject of consciousness.
To be more precise, Chalmers in his book seems to differ with Lucas, albeit in fairly nuanced ways that I frankly admit I am not mentally up to comprehending (see pp. 313-314), even though both writers take non-materialist approaches to the question of consciousness.
At the same time, Chalmers dismisses Hofstadter's views in Gödel, Escher, Bach much more broadly (pp. 30-31): "Hofstadter (1979) has some interesting things to say about consciousness, but he is more concerned with introspection, free will, and the sense of self than with expierience per se." In other words, Chalmers (generously, in my opinion) lets Hofstadter off the hook by reading him as saying nothing much at all about conscious experience as Chalmers describes the phenomenon.
I don't quite agree with Chalmers on this point. I think Hofstadter intentionally declines to address consciousness as a phenomenal, non-material thing, simply because he, Hofstadter, takes for granted that such a thing could never exist. If it did exist, it would be "magical," and it would demand a "soulist" explanation — which, to him, is no explanation at all.
In taking that approach, I think Hofstadter is guilty of artificially excluding a logical middle ground between his mechanistic, material view of consciousness and a true "soulist" view. I take the latter to amount to the standard religious notion of the "soul" as being somehow impressed upon the body by some higher power, call it God or whatever.
But, as Wright, Chalmers, and Lucas all demonstrate, there are various ways to occupy such a logical middle ground without adopting either a mechanical view of the mind or a traditional religious view of the soul.
Even if there really is such a possible middle ground, I have found in my readings of the subject of consciousness that there are a number of smart people like Hofstadter who shy away from it.
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| Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works |
Pinker is on record as being an atheist. As such, he is much kinder to the non-materialist view of consciousness than another well-known atheist who has written on the subject of the mind, Daniel Dennett. I haven't read Dennett, but from what I have read about his books and other writings, I feel confident in saying he does not subscribe to any such notion as a dualist division between the conscious mind and the physical brain.
And so it seems that the more opposed to religion one is, the less one is inclined to believe that the mind or soul is anything more than a direct result of the physical workings of the brain. I find that correlated opposition to two widely held ideas — God and the immaterial mind or soul — curious, to say the least. Perhaps their opponents resist both because both seem "magical" to them.
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