Noteworthy Articles on Philosophy of Mind

Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics are invoked in support of panpsychism, though there are no real grounds for it.

Rest of the experts mostly take a physicalist point of view, though few mention that there is no way to know whether a machine is conscious.

There is nothing to worry about because ultimately we won’t be there. As soon as we die, the consciousness goes away and only an object is left behind. Anil expresses this in more detail in his interview on Philosophy Bites.

Life was considered very mysterious when we had no idea about cells and DNA, concepts like a force of life were invoked to explain it. On learning more about actual workings of living organisms, the mystery faded away. The same should happen, author hopes, with Consciousness as Science is now advanced enough to explore the working of the brain in detail.

Think of consciousness in two different ways: experiences (inner movie) and self. Our common sense notions about both can fall apart.

The rich world, full of colors, shapes and smells, we see around us is a controlled hallucination created by our mind. Optical / Audio illusions tell us that our perception is the best guess of the world that mind conjures up for us. Basically, we are hallucinating all the time. We call it reality when we agree about our hallucinations.

The rubber hand illusion shakes our sense of self as an embodied organism.

So can our smartphones be conscious one day? Author’s research tells him that it might never happen because intelligence and consciousness are two separate things. You don’t have to be smart to suffer. Smartphones can be very intelligent, even more than humans but they are not living organisms.

“There were two main lines of criticism in Papineau’s review: one concerns Dennett’s doubts about explicit understanding or “comprehension”; the other concerns his views about consciousness.

On comprehension, Dennett maintains that much animal and indeed human behaviour displays “competence without comprehension”, achieving ends without the subject’s understanding why. In a similar vein, he holds that human cultures can develop blindly, due to the natural selection of the “informational viruses” that Richard Dawkins has labelled “memes”, including some of the greatest products of human culture (hence Bach and bacteria). Papineau argues that Dennett fails to justify his downgrading of animal intelligence or his exclusion of deliberate design from cultural innovation, and hence that Dennett does not take sufficiently seriously the widespread role of intelligent insight. On consciousness, Papineau takes issue with Dennett’s view that consciousness is a kind of illusion (“illusionism”) and argues that materialists should have no difficulty accepting the reality of consciousness – the difficulty is finding the material basis of this reality in the brain.”

This thought experiment raises doubt about our sense of self and makes the Author think that there is no inner, substantive me (or soul). Our bodies are going through change all the time and sense of self is an illusion created by our minds amidst this change. If a replica is created, both of them will have an illusion of self and there is no me anyway.

IIT Postulate called ‘exclusion’ proposes the components of a system may have non-zero phi but they are not consciousness because the phi of the entire system exceeds that of its components, resulting in suppression of components’ consciousness. So a group of people communicating obsessively with each other might result in them losing their consciousness as the group itself becomes conscious.

Scott Aaronson, a critic of IIT, says that Phi may be a necessary condition for consciousness but not sufficient.  IIT “unavoidably predicts vast amounts of consciousness in physical systems that no sane person would regard as particularly ‘conscious’ at all: indeed, systems that do nothing but apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transformations of their input data.  Moreover, IIT predicts not merely that these systems are ‘slightly’ conscious (which would be fine), but that they can be unboundedly more conscious than humans are.”

John Searle in his review of Koch’s book complained that IIT depends on a misappropriation of the concept of information. “you can’t explain consciousness by saying it consists of information, because information exists only relative to consciousness”.

One way to understand measurement puzzle is to consider it as effects of conscious observer, it is proposed by some physicists (many-worlds being another popular explanation). With this unsolved mystery about the possible role of consciousness in physical laws, the Causal Closure argument doesn’t look conclusive.

To explore the possible role of Consciousness in Quantum Physics, Author proposes to devise experiments based on Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness. If IIT is true, such experiments should tell us whether its Consciousness that causes the collapse of the wavefunction.

Consciousness can be divided into Personal Awareness and Contents of Consciousness (thoughts, beliefs, sensations etc.). Personal Awareness doesn’t create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated by fast, efficient non-conscious systems in our brains.

A subset of our experiences, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs form a personal narrative. Personal Awareness has no control over Personal Narrative.

Mood, thoughts and perception can be profoundly altered using Hypnosis which by-passes consciousness.

Experience of consciousness is a passive accompaniment to non-conscious processes, much the same way as rainbows are to meteorological phenomena.