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Neurophilosophy: (Essay One: "Does intentionality/qualia undermine…

- - - - Easy vs Hard Problem
      - Consciousness is present if there is something that it is like to be a subject of experience.
    - - Mistake 1: P Chalmers thinks that we should just continue on our puruist to find a neurobiological definition of consciousness - missing the point that they're categorically distinct.
        
        the track we're currently on in science is the explanation of the performance of functions rather than the explanation of the subjective experience that accompanies these functions.
        
        She argues that given that the "easy problems" are not so "easy" its far too early to be drawing this kind of a division, however this just further demonstrates her misunderstanding of the categorical distinction between hard and easy - it's less a literal description and more a categorical distinction.
      - Churchland accuses Chalmers of succumbing to the argument from ignorance fallacy whereby one uses a lack of evidence for x as positive evidence for y.
        
        However this is self-refuting: If Chalmers easy hard distinction is an argument from ignorance so too is the argument that we should continue to pursue the solutions to the easy problems in the hope that we will find an explanation of the HPOC.
        
        There's no evidence that functions or brain processing give rise to conscious experience. Assuming the full-understanding of these will explain consciousness then is just as much of an argument from ignorance as proposing the easy/hard split.
        
        Churchland criticises Chalmers for saying that one can imagine that neurons are responsible for processes but not subjective experience.
        
        Chalmers is valid in "imagining" this though - no matter how much we understand about processes and functionality the basic explanatory point is unaffected.
        
        With the easy problem we at least have a conceptual grasp on what is needed in order to explain them eg. Sensorimotor integration - once we know what the mechanism that underlies this is and we understand it the phenomenon will be explained. Thus it appears that we could easily explain any given amount of neuroscientific processes or functions without ever touching the HPOC.
    - - In Paul Churchland’s paper “The Rediscovery of Light” he argues that one could make a case for an anti reductionist explanation of light in the same way that Chalmers’ is doing with consciousness
        
        Compares luminesence to all of the extrinsic or physical features of light such as EM waves which can be reductively explained
        
        Ironically the luminesence which he is saying is analagous in its irreducibility to consciousness is the conscious experience of light and so he is ironically validating Chalmers argument.
        
        Thus he is failing to separate the functio from the conscious experience of the function and then claiming that the conscious experience of the function is irreducible - which is exactly what Chalmers is saying it is.
    - - Dennett says that Qualia is the term for “the ways things seem to us” (Dennett, 1988). The way Dennett phrases this reveals his thinking on the matter as it suggests that there may be other ways that things could seem to us or that things could possibly seem differently to others. But Qualia is seeming, it is the way anything seems to anything, it is the “what it’s likeness” of seeming.
        
        He argues that in reality Qualia does not have these special properties and he attempts to prove this through a series of fifteen “intuition pumps” in the hope that he will “flush out” the notion of Qualia which he thinks is blocking a fully objective and materialist, third person view of the world (Dennett, 1988).
        
        However a third person view of the world doesn’t exist, inherent in any view of the world is Qualia. A conscious organism couldn’t have a view of the world without having some kind of Qualia and the idea that there can be a view of the world that isn’t accompanied by an experience of the world or of at least holding a view is absurd.
  - - - So, intentionality is the “aboutness” quality that mental states contain as they are directed toward something.
      - Reductive Approach - non-mental phenomena can have intentionality.
        
        Can be a natural phenomenon and exist separately from phenomenology.
        
        Dretske views it as part of a component within what a mind would contain if we were to create a mind.
        
        Uses examples of non-mental things such as a compass but holds that for it to be the same as a mind it must have the power to misrepresent.
        
        Developing a natural system for intentionality involves systems learning internal indicators that coordinate output to the conditions that they carry information about and have this function because they carry information.
        
        To illustrate we will take a system that has the need for information of condition F (eg. system is threatened.) then we can assume the system has an internal state A that indicates F and a natural process that gives A the function of indicating F. - “...the result will be a system with internal resources for representing (with the associated power of misrepresenting) its surroundings. Furthermore, that this system represents, as well as what it represents, will be independent of what we know or believe about it. The entire process can happen spontaneously and, when it does, the system will have its own cache of original intentionality.” (Dretske, 2002, p.497).
        
        Dretske see's this as very close to thought.
        
        Issue - just because we can find examples of naturally occurring intentionality doesn't mean we can use these to create a mind - there's more to the intentionality of a mental state than there is to the intentionality of a compass.
        
        Dretske holds that it is just the ability to misrepresent that is needed in order to make naturally occuring intentionality comparable to the kind of intentionality in a mind, however there is more to it than that - intentionality is phenomenal.
        
        Dretske takes the common approach to naturalizing intentionality where he just tries to show that non-mental things can exhibit intentionality.
        
        Few philosophers (Dennett may be one of the only ones) would attempt such a thing with Qualia.
      - Non-reductive Approach: Only phenomenal/mental states can have intentionality.
        
        Searle
        
        Chinese Language Thought Experiment to demonstrate the lack of "aboutness" or intentionality that computers and artificial systems have.
        
        Our minds are more than syntactical processes they are semantic and they possess an “aboutness” that is inherent in the mental.
        
        Horgan and Tienson: More than just an "aboutness" though, there is actually a "what it's likeness" to the aboutness.
        
        When has a thought ever occured without some form of qualia alongside?
        
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        There is also an about-ness to all "what it's likeness"
        
        On John Searle’s (1983) conception, intentional states are states having “conditions of satisfaction”. For a belief, they are the conditions under which it is true; for sense-experience, they the conditions under which it is veridical; for an intention the conditions under which it is fulfilled or carried out.
        
        One peculiarity that may encompass the directedness/aboutness/of-ness/reference of both sense experience and thought (while covering desire and imagination as well): they all may seemingly relate (“purport to point”) to objects that do not exist. - There is the ability to misrepresent.
      - Is Intentionality reducible: If Brentano is correct and only the mental exhibits intentionality then one must choose accept intentionality and deny physicalism
    - - Mental states have intention as their aboutness while the thing the aboutness points to or refers to is the intension.
  - - - The contents of the world are wholly exhausted by matter.
        
        Why can't there be non-physical things such as minds?
        
        Causality: They couldn’t causally interact with and be affected by the non-physical things that there are.
        
        Causality requires a space like structure - the physical domain is the only domain that has this structure - this gives us a causal argument for a monistic physicalist ontology.
        
        Conclusion for substance dualists then is that immaterial minds (the mental) are causally cut off not only from physical objects and events but also from other minds as well.
        
        This is sufficient ground he believes for rejecting substance dualism of all kinds or any ontology that acquises in immaterial non-physical things.
        
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        Kills substance dualism
      - “Supervenience or exclusion argument holds that the causally efficacious mental phenomena must be reducible to physical ones and because the physical domain is closed any phenomenon causally linked with physical phenomena must itself be physical phenomena.”
        
        On this view the mental cannot causally interact directly with the physical. Rather the mental must somehow piggyback on the causal chain. eg. desire accompanies the causal chain from my motor cortex to my leg muscles but desire does not CAUSE my leg muscles to move.
        
        There are excellent reasons for assuming that the physical world is causally closed.
      - Epiphenomenalism: physical events are causal with respect to mental events. Mental events are viewed as completely dependent upon physical functions and as such have no independent existence or causal efficacy - it is a mere appearance.
        
        Causal exclusion problem: Pain occurs (and is grounded in neural processes) is has neural substrate x. If x occurs you will experience pain and you will not experience pain unless x occurs. If one says that pain causes your finger to twitch the physicalist would not agree that the mental event (pain) caused your finger to twitch but rather that x caused your finger to twitch.
        
        Given that the finger twitch has a full physical cause (x) how then can it also have a mental cause? This is the problem causal exclusion poses for dualism.
- - - - it is the view that certain common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist.
      - Distinct from Reduction: This claim is not a form of reductionism; it is a form of elimination. Reduction says that there are mental properties, but they are, in fact, physical, or behavioural, or functional properties. Eliminativism says that there are no mental properties – nothing exists that corresponds to mental terms like ‘belief’, ‘desire’ and so on.
    - - 1956 article, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Wilfred Sellars introduced the idea
        
        It is the notion that our conception of mentality may be derived not from direct access to the inner workings of our own minds, but instead from a primitive theoretical framework that we inherit from our culture.
        
        This claim that our conception of the mind is theory-based and falsifiable at least in principle would become influential later on.
        
        Folk psychology is assumed to consist of both generalizations (or laws) and specific theoretical posits, denoted by our everyday psychological terms like ‘belief’ or ‘pain’.
        
        eg. If someone has the desire for X and the belief that the best way to get X is by doing Y, then (barring certain conditions) that person will tend to do Y.
        
        The idea is that we learn these laws and generalisations informally through our normal development.
        
        Proponents of this view of folk psychology (theory-theorists) hold that the mental states that make up the folk psychological explanations are not directly observed but are thought to account for observable effects like overt behaviour.
        
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        Often called the "theory-theory" because of the fact that it it claims that we use a a theory of mental idiom
    - - 1. General Theoretical Problems with Folk Psychology:
        
        (A) Stagnant/Incomplete: They claim any promising/accurate theory should offer a fertile research program with considerable explanatory power.
        
        Common-sense psychology appears to be stagnant, and there is a broad range of mental phenomena that folk psychology does not allow us to explain.
        
        eg. Questions about why we dream, various aspects of mental illness, consciousness, memory and learning are completely ignored by folk psychology.
        
        Rebuttal: These considerations have not undermined intuitive support.
        
        In response to the idea that its stagnant/incomplete people say that this is no reason that it may be radically false.
        
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        (B) Other Folk theories have failed (Folk physics, folk biology, folk epidemiology etc). Since these have turned out to be mistaken it seems likely folk psychology will too especially given that it addresses a far more complex and difficult subject.
        
        2. Specific Problems with Folk Psychology:
        
        (A) Challenging The Syntactic Structure Of Beliefs
        
        Challenged and emphasized the apparent mismatch between the sentential structure of propositional attitudes on the one hand, and the actual neurological structures of the brain on the other hand. Whereas the former involves discrete symbols and a combinatorial syntax, the latter involves action potentials, spiking frequencies and spreading activation.
        
        Patricia Churchland (1986) has argued, it is hard to see where in the brain we are going to find anything that even remotely resembles the sentence-like structure that appears to be essential to beliefs and other propositional attitudes.
        
        Rebuttal (Wrong level of Analysis): Seems to me like a totally backwards approach, arguing that beliefs don't exist because they don't map well onto the brain is crazy. It's an assumed physicalist position from the off which just does not make sense.
        
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        (B) Challenging the Semantic Properties of Beliefs
        
        Argues against the semantic properties of beliefs and argues that these propositional attitudes are part of what makes them ill-suited for even a computational theory of mind.
        
        The point here is that folk psychology individuates beliefs by virtue of their semantic properties - what they are about (which is problematic because they're vague, causally inaccurate and breakdown in the case of the mentally ill).
        
        He holds we should individuate beliefs based on the syntactic or physical properties of a given cognitive state.
        
        Rebuttal: We can't deny the existence of things just because they're ill suited for science.
        
        (C) Eliminativism and Cognitive Science
        
        Deny that there's any similarity between the central properties and that which is in folk psychological states and a scientific account of cognition at any level of analysis.
    - - Denett on Pain;
        
        Regards the notion of pain as fundamentally flawed because it includes essential properties like infallibility and intrinsic awfulness that cannot co-exist with reactive dissacoiation (where people report excruciating pain that is not unpleasant)
        
        Dennett suggests that this suggests pain may not be real and that part of the reason there have been difficulites replicating pain in computational systems is because it is not real.
      - Qualia:
        
        Dennett: His argument focuses on the apparently essential features of qualia, including their inherent subjectivity and their private nature. Dennett discusses several cases—both actual and imaginary—to expose ways in which these ordinary intuitions about qualia pull apart. In so doing, Dennett suggests our qualia concepts are fundamentally confused and fail to correspond with the actual inner workings of our cognitive system.
        
        Georges Rey eliminativist outlook with regard to phenomenal consciousness itself.
        
        Argues that it seems easy to believe that we can replicate consciousness on a computational device if we consider what our current theories say consciousness involves such as internal monitoring or the possession of second order representational states.
        
        Due to this he thinks the failure of these accounts to capture our ordinary notion of consciousness may be because the "inner light" we associate with consciousness is nothing more than misguided Cartesian intuitions.
  - - - A common way this charge is made is to insist that a capacity or activity that is somehow invoked by the eliminativist is itself something that requires the existence of beliefs. One popular candidate for this activity is the making of an assertion. The critic insists that to assert something one must believe it. Hence, for eliminative materialism to be asserted as a thesis, the eliminativist herself must believe that it is true. But if the eliminativist has such a belief, then there are beliefs and eliminativism is thereby proven false.
    - - common sense psychology is not a quasi-scientific theory used to explain or predict behavior, nor does it treat mental states like beliefs as discrete inner causes of behavior
        
        Moreover, since beliefs and other mental states are used for so many things besides the explanation of human behavior, it is far from clear that our explanatory theories about inner workings of the mind/brain have much relevance for their actual status.
    - - A third criticism of eliminative materialism is that it ignores the remarkable success of folk psychology, success that suggests it offers a more accurate account of mental processes than eliminativists appreciate
      - we also enjoy a great deal of success when we use common sense psychology to predict the actions of other people.
        
        an inference-to-the-best-explanation argument in favor of common sense psychology and against eliminativism. The best explanation for the success we enjoy in explaining and predicting human and animal behavior is that folk psychology is roughly true, and that there really are beliefs
        
        EM response to this which I actually appreciate: lesson from the philosophy of science; namely, that any theory—especially one that is as near and dear to us as folk psychology—can often appear successful even when it completely misrepresents reality.
    - - pivotal component of the eliminativist perspective is the idea that the correct theory of the mind, once discovered by psychologists, will not reveal a system or structure that includes anything like common-sense mental states.
        
        Thus, for eliminative materialism to get off the ground, we need to assume that scientific psychology is going to turn out a certain way. But why suppose that before scientific psychology gets there? What is the point of drawing such a drastic conclusion about the nature of mentality, when a central premise needed for that conclusion is a long ways from being known?
- - - - He is saying that on a computer the symbols have no semantic content, they are not about anything. His refutation of the Strong AI view is not solvable by some other technological wonder - it's independent to the state of technology.
        
        There is more to having a mind than having formal or syntactical processes.
        
        The mind has more than a syntax, it has semantics.
        
        Minds have more than a formal structure, they have content.
        
        Chinese room experiment
        
        If I go into a room with a manual for how to manipulate symbols within Chinese and then translate Chinese words based on this manual and pass them out the other end I do not understand Chinese. A computer is the same in terms of its functioning.
        
        However from an outside observer it will look like you understand Chinese.
        
        Must be a meaning or semantic content attached to symbol for it to resemble a mind.
        
        Crux of his argument: syntax alone is not sufficient for semantics, and dig- ital computers insofar as they are computers have, by definition, a syntax alone.
    - - 1. System Objection: The whole system understands Chinese, just because I as the central processing unit do not does not mean the system doesn't. Me the paper, the room etc all add up to understanding Chinese.
        
        However the issue is that this still does not get us from syntax to semantics.
      - 2. Causal Objection: Case of a causally interacting, chinese understanding robot. If the robot moved around and interacted causally with the world wouldn't that be enough to guarantee it understood Chinese?
        
        The causal interactions between the robot and the rest of the world are irrelevant unless those causal interactions are represented in some mind or other. But there is no way they can be if all that the so-called mind consists of is a set of purely formal, syntactical operations.
      - 3. Chinese Room Not Analogous: He thinks there may be some critical amount of complication in an algorithm that is necessary in order for the algorithm to start to exhibit mental qualities.
        
        Perhaps it's so large that it couldn't be carried out by a human being by hand as in Searle's example and must require a computer. This would challenge the practical accuracy of his objeection.
        
        Searle's response is that even if we replace the single symbol manipulator with a whole team, even one the size of india, the principle (that the computer - like the symbol manipulator team doesn't actually understand) is still in place.
        
        Counter: Isn't each individual Indian like an individual neuron and we wouldn't think that indvidual neurons would be conscious so maybe even though the individual Indians aren't the whole system is.
        
        Searle Response: It would be absurd that India, as a country, understood what each of its individual inhabitants cannot. A country is not in the "business of understanding" whereas a person is.
        
        Weaker than the original argument and he does not wholeheartedly agree that Searle proves that there is not some kind of disembodied understanding associated with the person's carrying out the algorithm.
    - - What about could a man-made artefact think? In principle -- if you designed a machine that was identical to a human being in every possible way then it would seem that it could think.
        
        However the question of whether or not a digital computer can think is a different one and its important to get very clear about what exactly we mean by that.
        
        The Actual Question: The question we wanted to ask is this: 'Can a digital computer, as defined, think?' That is to say: 'Is instantiating or implementing the right comput- er program with the right inputs and outputs, suf- ficient for, or constitutive of, thinking?
        
        Answer to this is "no" - because the computer programme is clearly syntactical.
        
        Thinking involves meaningful semantic content.
        
        If it really is a computer, its operations have to be defined syntactically, whereas consciousness, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and all the rest of it involve more than a syntax. Those features, by definition, the computer is unable to duplicate however powerful may be its ability to simulate. The key distinction here is between duplication and simulation. And no simulation by itself ever constitutes duplication.
        
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    - - Behaviourist view of mind - if x looks like its doing x its doing x
      - Mind is not a part of the biological world, somehow or other the mind cannot be treated as a biological phenomenon
    - - 1. Brain's cause minds (or loosely mental processes that we consider a mind are entirely caused by things going on in the brain.
        
        2. Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.
        
        3. Computer programs are entirely defined by their formal, or syntactical, structure (True by definition of what we mean by a computer)
        
        4. Minds have mental contents; specifically, they have semantic contents ( My thoughts, and beliefs, and desires are about something, or they refer to something, or they concern states of affairs in the world; and they do that because their content directs them at these states of affairs in the world. )
        
        Conclusion 1: No computer program by itself is sufficient to give a system a mind. Programs, in short, are not minds, and they are not by themselves sufficientfor having mind
        
        Conclusion 2. The way that brain functions cause minds cannot be solely in virtue ofrun- ning a computer program.
        
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  - - - Strong AI:
        
        Strong AI View–Overview:
        
        Not only do machines have minds but mental qualities of a sort that can be attributed to the logical functioning of any computational device, even ones as simple as a thermostat.
        
        Brain is computer, mind computer programme. Mind is to the brain as software is to the computer.
        
        It's an anti-biological view as it views the mind not as a product of the brain but as just one an indefinite number of kinds of hardware that could make up human intelligence.
        
        Ironic given that the AI literature is supposedly against Dualism yet implicitly endorses it because of how it denies that the mind is just a biological phenomenon like other ones.
        
        The notion here is that mental activity is simply the carrying out of some well-defined sequence of operations, frequently referred to as an algorithim.
        
        Brain is just an algorithim which differs greatly in degree from the thermostat but does not differ in principle
        
        All mental properties are to be viewed merely as features of the algorithim being carried out in the brain.
        
        Thus any computer running a comparable algorithim has a consciousness, brain and mind.
        
        Difficulties with the Strong AI view:
        
        1. Dualism: It is just the algorithm that counts and it makes no difference what that algorithm is based upon or where its coming from - simply the logical structure of the algorithm is sufficient to for the mental state to be produced
        
        Results in Dualism
        
        Mind-stuff which exists separately from matter, it is the logical structure of strong AI
        
        The particular physical embodiment of an algorithim is totally irrelavant such that the algorithim has a kind of disembodied existence.
        
        Incredibly ironic given that this is the view they would least want to be associated with.
        
        2. Algorithm Activation: The example is of a book that has all of the information that Einstein had in his brain such that by leafing through this book anyone could come to find the equivalent kind of an answer that Einstein himself would give.
        
        Thus in an operational sense this would seem to pass the turing test (albeit at a slow rate)
        
        However at what point does the book begin to have mental states? Is it just when it's opened or is the book always self-aware, even when it is just resting there?
    - - Operational view is that the computer thinks provided it looks as if it thinks - behaviour.
      - A test to determine if a machine can think.
        
        Person and computer answer questions via text type with the human trying to persuade a third part investigator that they are the human and the computer programmed to lie and say that its a computer.
        
        What's tricky for the computer here is appearing stupider than it actually is - if the interrogator asks is a ridiculously tough calculation it must say it can't do it for example.
        
        Would a computer that can do this be able to think?
        
        He thinks its quite a strong case.
        
        Conversational situation gives us a good indication as to whether or not their is conscious presence beneath these replies.
        
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        He says there is a certain unfairness to the Turing test given that the computer must do all the human does while the human need not do all that the computer does.