https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JCdpwdoYvJ4
Welcome to Untangling the World Nod of Consciousness, wrestling with the hard problems of mind and meaning in the modern scientific age. My name is John Vervecky. I’m a cognitive psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Throughout the entire series, I will be joined in dialogue by my good friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez, from James Madison University in the United States. Throughout, we are going to wrestle with the hard problems of how we can give an account of a phenomenon like consciousness within the scientific worldview, how we can wrestle with that problem in conjunction with the problem that Greg calls the problem of psychology that is pervasive throughout psychology, which is that psychology has no unified descriptive metaphysics by which it talks about mind and or behavior. Throughout this, we will be talking about some of the most important philosophical, cognitive scientific, and neuroscientific accounts of consciousness. So I hope you’ll join us throughout. I want you to note that it’s not only what we’re saying, but the dialogical manner of the presentation that’s part of what we’re arguing for here in this discussion. That’s right. I’ll share that. Greg Enriquez here, and I had a moment of inspiration. I wrote John, I was like, John, you realize that we’re dialoguing about the ontology of mind in a Socratic fashion to usher in a new way of doing academic work. I think with that intersection, that made me really excited about this project. So thank you, John, for this set of insights and at so many different levels. It’s very, very valuable, I think. Well, thank you, Greg. I mean, your partnership is and your friendship are much appreciated, as well as your vast reading and relevant expertise. None of these things that I’m proposing, and that’s what they are, are proposed as well. Of course, this is the case. This is the hardest, the most difficult thing we’re trying to wrestle with. And so doing it in a Socratic situation, I think is the most intellectually ethical way we can be responsible to the material and to the people who might be listening. So last time we were taking a look, I’m presenting, so following on the idea of the importance of problem formulation and spending a lot of time before trying to solve the problem and just say what consciousness is. There’s a lot of that already. I’m proposing, and Greg is helping me, that we go through and really try to formulate the modern problem of consciousness as clearly as possible. And towards that end, what I’m doing, Greg, are you still there? Yeah, yeah, no, I’m just, I’m enraptured. Set it up. Yeah. Oh. Oh. So towards the end, what I propose we do is take a look at the arguments that are generally considered to be the classical presentation of the problem. What I’ve been arguing is that, and these arguments emerge within the context of the scientific revolution, and they emerge around the pivotal figure of Descartes. And what I’ve been trying to argue is we need to get that historical formulation of the problem very clearly in hand before we then proceed to try and unravel that. And then Greg has been making valuable, insightful connections. Not only has he given me feedback on the proposals, he’s in addition making valuable, insightful connections to the problem that he sees central. He sees it, of course, as related to this problem, the untie and the will knot, but the problem that is typified in his Tree of Knowledge. And next time, or possibly the time after that, Greg is going to take the burden of leading us through presentation as he wrestles with, and hopefully I can be as helpful to him as he has been to me, wrestles with how this problematic given to us by Descartes and the scientific revolution has translated into what he calls the problem of psychology. So that’s sort of where we’re going. So today I wanna try, with Greg’s help, I wanna try and finish out the arguments. So last time we took a look at an argument by Descartes, and now I’m not gonna try and make the argument. Please don’t accuse me of straw manning. I really last time tried to present Descartes’ argument in detail and carefully. So this is now just a summary. Descartes is basically saying, well, if you take a look at mind and matter, there are two kinds of stuff, and they don’t seem to share any properties. Oh, sorry, let’s do it the other way around. When we take a look at the properties of mind and matter, they don’t seem to share any kinds of properties with the properties that seem to be central to mind are not possessed in matter and vice versa. And so that leads into the conclusion that there are radically two kinds of stuff. And then I pointed out that that argument is technically not valid. And then I pointed out an attempt to try and keep it valid by moving from properties of mind and matter to essential properties of mind and matter, also doesn’t turn out to be technically valid. And then what that leaves us with is, right, the question of why is the argument so influential and it’s technically not valid. And what I argued was is that Descartes was actually using a form of argumentation that is central to all of science, which is inference to the best explanation. And then if you put Descartes’ proposal for dualism into competition with the other contenders at that time, his proposal does the best. So the most prominent contender is of course, the Aristotelian worldview, but the scientific revolution is leading that worldview into collapse. And whereas Descartes’ view seems to be directly in sync with the emerging scientific revolution, because what his view does is remove a lot of the problematic Aristotelian properties from the world and put them in the mind, therefore leaving the world free to a more mathematical and mechanical explanation. He then also, what he does is he then comes to see the mind almost exclusively in terms of its capacity for manipulating mathematical propositions. The mind becomes a purely mathematical epistemic engine. And that’s because the old job of the mind in the Aristotelian worldview of actualizing life into agency and coupling us to the world in the right way has been lost in the scientific revolution. And then Descartes’ view is also in competition with the late Renaissance, right? Neo-Platonic magicians. I’m not invoking anything supernatural here, but that’s perhaps the best way. And they were very interested in things that are now central to the emerging analysis of mind. They were interested in action at a distance, real relations, self-organization. And then Descartes and one wing of the Catholic Church sort of allied together because they want that approach to mind and life and reality completely discredited and marginalized because it presents a very significant threat to the Christian worldview. And so what remains therefore is a new notion of matter and a new notion of causation. Matter is no longer pure potentiality like it was for Aristotle. Matter is an actuality, but it’s only act, its single act is the act of raw resistance. It is inert, it is inertial, it has no inner structure, no inner dynamic quality. It is in no way teleological. And all of the causation has now collapsed into mechanical causation where these inert things smash into each other and bump into each other. Given that scientific worldview, Cartesian dualism can out-compete both. The declining Aristotelian worldview, it can help to marginalize the neoplatonic magical view and therefore best align itself with the emerging scientific revolution. And what I was therefore trying to show was the scientific worldview and the problematization of consciousness go hand in hand, not because of an initially antagonistic relationship. People often know, oh, but consciousness, it’s being science, blah, blah, blah. It was actually, it was the scientific revolution that originally gave us this dualistic picture of mind. The dualistic picture of mind is not some new radical way to respond to the way science has emptied the world of all meaning and mind. It was actually generated by the scientific revolution by one of its premier representatives, which is Descartes. So that’s the first argument. Anything you wanna comment on that, Greg? So I think that the reason we wanna do problem formulation here, folks, from my vantage point, and I think from John’s also, is not only do we wanna get a frame, but we also wanna understand that we’re inheriting the grammar. I mean, at least our culture is inheriting the grammar of this history of, what I would call this history of justification, this history of narrative sense-making that we are a part of, and the way in which our grammar functions. So that’s why it’s so crucial, both for problem formation and to understand kind of where we are and how people tend to use language around these terms. So that’s one point as to why I wanna echo why this is so super crucial. The other thing I will say is that I wanna, I’m gonna be trailing this through the more, the matter in motion mentality, okay, which is Galileo, and certainly in conjunction with Descartes, but Galileo into Newton. And one thing I’ll simply say is Galileo, I think I might’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll simply reiterate, Galileo hates Aristotle’s metaphysics because it’s getting abused in a particular way. So he cuts off form, final causation and formal causation and leaves behind substance and efficient or kinetic causation. So when John’s doing this, okay, this is in part also what Galileo is doing when he’s watching matter in motion, all right? And then you have Descartes and Galileo, both really birthing in their own way, the modern scientific system. And then you’ll get to Newton, who will essentially formalize in a macro way, Galileo’s system in a particular way. And that’s gonna take off. It’s the intersection of a lot of these different things down the line. But so that’s what’s happening as the sense-making system. And the other thing I’ll simply will say is that we’re not going to be able to justify ourselves in any way. We’re going to be able to justify ourselves from a psychological cognitive dissonance, every way, how do we justify ourselves? It makes perfect sense to me historically that René Descartes and the Catholic Church will sort of come to a compromise here in this dualistic worldview, given the powers that be and where they are in the institutions and the sense-making systems that are operative at this time. Thank you, Greg. I do, I do agree with that. I think that’s excellent. And picking up on the connection between Galileo and Descartes, Galileo divides all of the properties, all of the qualities into two kinds. The mathematical ones, which are primary, are taken to be objectively real. And then all the non-mathematical ones are taken to exist only in the mind. Those are the secondary qualities. And they are now, philosophers now refer to that with the abbreviated term qualia. And they only exist in consciousness because they don’t exist in the world. And so, why is the Cartesian dualism problematic? And especially why, like what’s wrong with consciousness being an immaterial substance, et cetera, and all that sort of thing. The problem with that is while Descartes sort of wins all the argumentative battles, he, and I think this is something that Greg does excellent work on, he loses, we all know he’s losing the experiential existential battle because, I mean, it is readily apparent to me that there is a profound intimacy and interpenetration in my experience of mind and matter. If Descartes was right, mind can in no way move matter. It has no physical energy. It has no inertial properties. It has no material resistance. There is no way mind can bang into any material part of my brain. So how is it that my desire to pick up my watch actually ends up in the physical movement of my watch? And then the reverse. How is it the material events? How lead to a purely mental event within consciousness? Pain. This is the problem that Descartes has. And this is not something, oh, no. Everybody around Descartes, including Descartes, realizes that this is a profound problem. And it’s precisely a profound problem because people are convinced by Descartes’ arguments, and we’ve just reviewed the first one, and yet they can’t deny the overwhelming evidence for mind-body interaction, and again, mind-to-mind interaction, because the only way I can pick up on Greg is there’s photons coming out of my TV screen. It’s a material event, and somehow that has a causal chain. And if that causal chain is all physical and it never can reach the purely immaterial mind that he possesses, then I can’t actually ever know his mind. And this has, of course, horrible consequences, because if you think, and we’ll come back to this later, you think that animals don’t possess consciousness, then of course there’s nothing wrong with doing live dissections of them, because it’s no different than a bell ringing and things like that. So, and then there’s all kinds of untoward consequences. And as I said, Greg is going to show how those ramify through the history of psychology in ways that have become, as he’s already indicated, woven into the very grammar by which we talk about ourselves and by which we pursue therapeutic relief of our distress. This is how profound this problem is. This is how very, you can’t say, oh, well, who cares about the philosophy? I get it in one sense, but in another sense, and I think Greg is deeply right about this, this gets into the guts of your life and your attempts to understand yourself and alleviate any distress you might be undergoing, et cetera. Excellent. All right, so that’s the first argument. Descartes has three, and they’re all influential, and they’re all part of the problem formulation. And any attempt to address the world-knock of consciousness has to address all three of these arguments to be satisfactory. Okay, so what’s the second argument? The second argument is an argument around comparative realness. And Descartes follows a long-standing tradition, and it’s even sort of presupposed, and Nicholas Maxwell has talked about this within science, and it goes back to Parmenides, that realness is sort of measured by intelligibility, how much sense we can make of something. And that’s just why we think of things like equals MC squared as profoundly real, because we can explain so much. It renders so much of the rest of the world intelligible, it must be deeply real. So there’s a deep connection between realness and intelligibility. So then Descartes basically makes an argument, which goes along the following lines. The intelligibility of the body is asymmetrically dependent on the intelligibility of the mind, which means the mind is, by this argument, inherently more real than the body, and differences in realness are differences in kind. So the difference between, right, are differences in kind. So let’s give a concrete example, one borrowed from Descartes, you can think of the movie The Matrix about this sort of thing. Descartes says, well, I can be dreaming that I have a body, and in that dream, that body is not, and here’s the right word, it’s not real. I can only actually make sense of that body by having a more direct intelligibility, a direct awareness of my own mind. So this is where the cogito ergo sum of Descartes comes in. So essentially, this is the very famous, I think, therefore I am, which every freshman will tell you is not an argument. That’s not an argument, that’s not an argument. The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise, like what the hell, right? What Descartes means is, and we’ve talked about this, remember what we had with Aristotle was a contact epistemology, a conformity epistemology, and what Descartes says is the only thing the mind is now in conformity with, the only thing it participates in is itself, and that is a feature of consciousness. You know your consciousness by being conscious, and so the mind has a direct awareness of itself, it is directly intelligible to itself. It cannot doubt its own realness. For you to say, I think my consciousness is an illusion, is like what? Like what does that, that makes no sense. So for Descartes, well, it is reasonable to entertain the possibility that your body is an illusion, it is not equally reasonable to entertain the idea that your mind is an illusion. So it’s very possible that your body is only an illusion, and therefore it is less real than your mind, and secondly, how do I know about my body? And this is something I wanna call into question later, but this is Descartes’ argument. Well, I start from the mind’s direct awareness of itself, and then the events in my mind, and then I infer that I have a body. I infer that I have a body, and that inference, of course, is a kind of abductive, inductive inference, and that means it’s potentially fallible. The dream example shows you that, and so Descartes says, the realness of the mind is inferior to and completely dependent on the realness of the body, and therefore the mind and the body must be two different kinds of things in order to give a good explanation for why we have this huge difference in realness. So first of all, how does that argument, how does that argument first come to be? Yeah, I think that very important when you make the freshman comment, so let’s make a distinction here, and I think you do this actually in your course, which I found to be very, very dead on, and I hadn’t actually formulated it this way. So in terms of logic, Aristotelian logic deductive argument, I think therefore I am is not great, okay? But at the psychological, phenomenological level of being, it’s a very, very powerful argument. It really is, and it is the case, and the dream, the evil demon dream argument, or even that gets materialized in modern things in the matrix, does allow us to basically be like, it is nonsensical psychologically to say, oh, I wonder if I’m awake, or if I’m really experiencing this that quickly. So it’s a very psychologically or phenomenologically psychologically compelling experience to have that frame. So I just wanted to echo that and emphasize that. Well, that’s actually, that’s perfect. That fills in a missing premise in the argument I wanna make. So notice what’s happening with what Greg just said. We regard it as a rational conviction, but it’s not following from deductive or logical argumentation. And this is Descartes’ point. It’s following from a direct conformity of the mind with itself, a direct phenomenological experience. Now that is very interesting because now Descartes has actually slipped something in that is gonna be very problematic because he’s given us two different ways by which we establish intelligible realness. And therefore two different standards by which we evaluate if things are real. One is the standard that follows from logical mathematical argumentation, and therefore says the mathematically realized properties are the most real, the primary quality. So the objective mathematical properties, that’s what’s most real. But then he’s given us another argument that moves from a completely different base. It’s not a logical argument, at least initially. It’s a direct phenomenological experience which says, no, no, no. This direct awareness I have of the realness of my own mind, that’s what’s most real. And everything else has a derived reality from that. And now you have a problem. What Descartes has done in his argument for dualism, again, these very convincing arguments for dualism, and this is an important component of the mind consciousness problem, is that he has rendered our normative judgments about realness perpetually unstable. Because we can always set these off against each other, and you can then see psychology and philosophy, and in fact, I would argue, the whole intellectual history of the West since Descartes is constantly vacillating between these two different normative strategies and types of claims for what’s real. You can either say, no, no, oh, sorry, Greg. I was just gonna, really quick, so when we started off, we’re gonna get a much differentiated picture of mental processes. That’s part of where we’re headed. So remember, phenomenologically, this is mind two, okay? And then mind three is getting into justificatory rationality, all right? So I just wanna highlight that this blend actually is going to be differentiated when we get to the end of our puzzle making. Thank you, Greg, thank you for doing that. That’s excellent. Okay, so what’s the vacillation I was talking about? Well, what we can do is we can go basic, we can be sort of a realist of some kind, and we can say, what’s ultimately real, and people hammer on things, material things, that’s what’s real, objective, mathematically, and everything else is merely subjective, merely an illusion. And then other people say, what are you talking about? My subjective awareness of my own consciousness is the most real thing there is to me. Everything else could just be an illusion or a dream, and then you move towards idealism, and then of course, and like many other people, I don’t think that kind of idealism is a plausible alternative, because you get into problems around solipsism and deep history, and I think Berkeley basically shows that that kind of idealism requires something like a god to explain why things are persisting outside of our awareness, and then you’re in the situation of that, your model of mind depends on establishing, independently establishing the existence of God, and my response to that is, well, good luck with that. Right, and what I will also say, in a nod to your future, is that we’re gonna want a system that shows how these domains participate in relationship to each other in some sort of transactional kind of pattern. Exactly, exactly, that’s very well said. The problem with both a kind of trenchant materialism and a trenchant subjectivism idealism is they ultimately don’t explain the problem that Descartes has left us with, which is the deep interpenetrating participatory relationship between mind and body, while they do adopt reductive strategies of arguing that one of the two poles is somehow an illusion, which is, as Greg is nodding, is just a fall prey to the very Cartesian grammar that needs to be challenged, that needs to be challenged, because that grammar, if you follow it consistently, is not going to give you a stable account of realness, and the history that’s come out of this, I think, is good evidence for the claim I’m making, and Greg is nodding too. So what that does is, I think it tells us that any account of mind that has the consequence of rendering our ability to judge realness unstable and non-viable is ultimately a self-defeating account of mind. Amen. Especially if it can get an inductive to a best explanation that doesn’t do that. Yes. Doesn’t have that problem. That would be very good. Okay, so I take it that we want to, and so when we talk about this cultural cognitive grammar, I mean that all of these disputes that keep going back and forth between our culture, they all are in dispute with each other precisely because they share this common cultural cognitive grammar around mind and body and realness, et cetera. Yep. Okay, so that’s the second argument, which means any attempt to unravel the world knot has to not only, you’re now gonna see why this is getting to be a hard problem. It’s not only gonna have to deal with, well, how do we do that while maintaining all of what we got from the scientific revolution? Because the two, this model of mind and the scientific revolution are interwoven. That’s hard enough, but now we add in the second thing. Well, while you’re at it, in order to address the mind-body problem, you need to break out of this grammar and stabilize what realness is. Well, that’s a pretty hard problem too. That’s a pretty hard problem too. Okay, so now the third argument from Descartes. Oh, great, do you wanna say anything before I move to the third argument? No, is this where we get into Hobbes and the? Yep, yep, exactly. Perfect, yep, nope, that’s where I was thinking. And then that’s gonna bring us into a more specifically, properly psychological theory, I would say, a theory of mind, a theory of cognition that is more specifically mathematically, experimentally open to examination. Yep. That’s what Hobbes does. So Hobbes takes a look at what Descartes done. And he’s deeply like everybody. They’re contemporaries. Yeah, yeah, and Hobbes even writes to Descartes. Descartes is not very nice to Hobbes because Hobbes is brilliant, but Hobbes is not a good mathematician, and Descartes knows that. And so he has contempt for Hobbes in that way. But Descartes is also a bit of a political courtier, the way he responds to Princess Elizabeth, who sometimes says some not brilliant things. She sometimes says really good things too, but sometimes she says things, but he’s always, oh, you’re so brilliant, blah, blah, blah. So they are contemporaries. But Hobbes notices what Descartes is doing, and he says, well, look, you’ve taken away all the causation, all the other jobs that the mind used to have, and it has one job and one job alone now. It’s a purely epistemic engine, and it’s an epistemic engine that operates in a purely mathematical manner. What it does, it’s an epistemic engine, a machine for coming up with knowledge, and that’s all it does. It doesn’t do any of that actualizing, any of that embedding, any of that contact with the world. It’s not doing any of that. It’s just manipulating mathematical representations in order to come up with the most certain account of the world, and that’s all it’s doing. And then Hobbes looks at that and he says, well, the purely mechanical, mathematical, sorry, the purely mechanical manipulation, logical manipulation of mathematical propositions, well, that’s just computation. That’s just computation. And so he actually says, this is a direct quote, by ratiocination, which is an old term for cognition, I mean computation. He specifically advocates the idea that cognition is computation. People think this is a radical new idea that came out of the computer revolution. No, it was revised, but Hobbes proposes it. You see how the computational model of mind is actually one of the first children of the scientific revolution. And so Hobbes proposes this, and then Hobbes does something really radical with it. He says, you know what? We can get rid of all of this Cartesian problem. Because if cognition is computation, well, look around, because what’s happening? They already have machines, very primitive by IR standards, that are capable of doing addition, calculation, and some of the first automatons were being made. Right, like a mechanical duck. I don’t remember where that comes from, but that’s a classic. These are the talk of European civilization. And so Hobbes says, well, can I make something like an automated abacus that can do a purely mechanical form of computation? And if it’s doing computation, then it’s cognitive, and then I’ve made a mind, and then I don’t have to worry about all this immaterial substance and all of that stuff. And what I have is a purely computational account of mind, which of course is a very current proposal. Strong AI. Strong AI, strong AI, exactly, exactly. Now, what’s Descartes’ argument? So Descartes’ third argument is basically a series of responses to Hobbes, and we have to note this. Now, it’s tempting to think that what Descartes’ gonna do is he’s sort of gonna invoke religious ideas about the soul and immortality in order to try and refute Hobbes, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t do that at all. What he does is he says, Hobbes, you’re an idiot, because your model of mind is not consistent with the scientific revolution. Descartes actually, within his historical context, makes scientific arguments against Hobbes’ proposal. What are the nature of those arguments? Well, he says, well, and this is brilliant. Descartes says, well, what do we need to presuppose is going on in people who are actually doing science? What do we need to say about their cognition? Well, their reasoning. Okay, well, what is it to reason? Well, he says, well, reasoning depends on the meanings of things, and the scientific revolution, with the destruction of the Aristotelian worldview, says there is no meaning in things. Meaning isn’t a mathematical, extended material, inertial thing. Meaning is completely in the mind. It’s not a property of matter. So, Hobbes, how could you possibly manipulate matter and get meaning out of it? You’re not paying attention to the scientific revolution. Matter is inert. It has no teleology to it. It has no internal dynamics. All it does is accidentally hit other chunks of matter. There is no way you can get meaning out of matter. And then, aligned with that, he says, notice when I’m reasoning, I’m reasoning in terms of what’s true. But truth is a function of meaning. I can only tell when something is true if I know what it means, and therefore, truth, like meaning, is also non-material. So, how are you gonna give that capacity to seek the truth with a purely material machine? And then, look at what we’re talking about. We’re talking about seeking the truth. That’s to act on purpose. But you know what the scientific revolution has shown us? It’s shown us that matter does not act on purpose. The only thing that’s teleological is in your mind. And then, although Descartes doesn’t make this third argument as directly, we can make it on his behalf in terms of implication. Hobbes, the scientific revolution has specifically worked by saying all of the secondary qualities, all of the qualia are not in the world. They’re only in the mind. They’re only in the mind. Therefore, you can’t get them to inhere in a purely mechanical thing. So, the scientific revolution is telling me that mind and truth and purpose and qualia are not in matter, and there is no way by manipulating matter that you will get them to appear. So, you’re an idiot, Hobbes. You’re an idiot. Now, Hobbes tries to reply by saying, well, you know, with the meaning, what we could do is we could attach little pieces of paper to the various beads of the abacus, like cat and mat and da and is, and then we could get it to say the cat is on the mat, and then it would have meaning. And then Descartes’ point, and then, you know, John Searle just redos this with the Chinese room argument. He just says that manipulation of those physical tokens has no meaning in and of itself. It only has meaning that you attribute to it. If you put the abacus on the beach and it moved, the waves moved the abacus, so the beads come to say the cat is on the mat, would you think that the waves were communicating meaningfully to you? Of course not, right? So, it’s only when the symbols, and we’ll come back to this, it’s only when the symbols are used intentionally in terms of an attributed meaning in the pursuit of truth that you actually get the meaning that we’re talking about when we talk about what do we need to presuppose is going on in the minds of people who practice science. So Descartes’ arguments all run off the existence of science. They all say, given that we’re doing science and we think that science is getting us at reality and it’s the model of knowledge, notice what that presupposes, and none of those presuppositions line up with what the scientific revolution is saying about matter. And so this is an argument, of course, that Houghlin made very famous, in fact in a book called Artificial Intelligence, the Very Idea. Because here’s what Houghlin is trying to show that what Greg said earlier, strong AI, weak AI is just, let’s make machines that do things that people used to have to do. Like in the 1930s, computers was the name of a group of people that were in your business and you set anything down that needed to be computed. And now the job that used to be done by people is now done by a machine. Or you used to have to go to a teller, but now that you can go to an automatic, an ATM, right? And so, I don’t like these because it sounds pejorative, but weak AI is just, let’s make machines that can do what people used to do. And that’s a valuable and important project. Absolutely. Strong AI is this. Strong AI is the project of trying to do the following. It’s trying to satisfy and provide evidence, and I’ll use Greg’s term, justification for Hobbes’ claim that cognition is purely mechanical material computation. So what it’s trying to do is to create an instance of cognition by creating an instance of computation that can reply and give satisfactory answer to all of Descartes’ problem. Strong AI would be, here is an instance of computation and it counts as a bona fide instance of cognition, perhaps consciousness as well, because here’s how this model of strong AI gives me a plausible response to the problem of meaning, the problem of purpose, the problem of qualia, et cetera. So notice how the problem of strong AI is actually bound up with the world, not that Greg and I are attempting to untangle. And it’s so cool to me. I didn’t know about this history, but as soon as I was hearing about it, oh my God, this is the Chinese room problem, which I hope folks who are watching this know, this is John Searle’s argument against strong AI. So it’s so cool that Descartes and Hobbes are stumbling across this, you know, basic. I would not have guessed that. So to me, that’s just really interesting. Here’s another thing that I’ll say is that we talked briefly about this, and I think we’ll keep coming back. This concept of information, like matter and energy, this is a very, very interesting and complicated concept. And one of the things that we’re gonna wanna differentiate is information theoretic models, which actually connect deeply to mathematics. Somebody, Claude Shannon, sort of the Newton of information is concerned with information and really the reduction of uncertainty connects into thermodynamics, et cetera. Okay. And then there’s the information semantic element. Okay, so I am hearing one way to potentially hear this narrative through this particular lens is saying Hobbes is basically, hey, can we just do this via information theoretic, you know, computation? Right. And Descartes is like, no, cause you have semantic meaning making, you know, that makes us as embodied entities that are actually deciphering truth and meaning and reality, et cetera. Well said, very well said, Greg. And so yeah, that technical sense of meaning and that semantic sense, sorry, that technical sense of information and that semantic meaning oriented sense of information, trying to bridge between them theoretically is a difficult task. And I think I mentioned, I might’ve mentioned the last time, you know, there’s work by people very recently were trying to wrestle with that. And the thing we have to avoid, and this is what I think Greg is pointing to, and this is why the problem formulation again is so central. If you don’t keep these clearly distinct, you will equivocate between them and you will say, well, what’s the problem? You know, there’s information in the technical sense in my nervous system, and that’s just becomes information in my mind. And why is there a mind body problem? That’s because you’ve equivocated between these two totally different senses of information. And therefore you haven’t solved the problem, you’ve just fudged over it. And so this is another version of this problem. And it’s one of the central problems in strong AI and Searle points us to it. But as Greg said, I think Searle’s argument is just a modern, one of Searle’s arguments is just a modern version of what was going on between Descartes and Hobbes is that, you know, within a strong AI, we see a version of the mind body problem as the technical information, semantic information problem. How do we bridge between them in a completely non equivocal and consistent manner? How do we scientifically integrate them or unify them? And that is actually a very hard problem. And we’re gonna see that the proposals that try to bridge that are going to invoke notions of agency, autonomy, self-organization, things like that. So what they’re gonna do is actually sneak Aristotle in order to try and deal with the problem that has been given to us by data. Yes. So let’s recap what we’ve got. We’ve got three arguments. We’ve got the argument we’ve just done, which is the argument that our cognition can’t be a mechanical material computation because the scientific revolution has removed all the properties central to scientific reasoning from matter, right? And then you would just be in a huge performative contradiction according to Descartes if you try to derive scientific reasoning from matter. We just did earlier the comparative realness argument, the consequence that the mind is comparatively more real to us, but what Descartes does is slip in a new way of determining what’s real that’s in contrast to the mathematical, logical way of determining what’s real. He now puts in this direct phenomenological, experiential participatory sense of realness, and then those two senses of realness are now gonna, because he just gives us both, and then they’re gonna smash into each other for centuries. And then the original argument was different kinds of properties, different kinds of stuff, and we saw that that also saddles us with the mind-body problem. So there’s where we’re at so far in formulating the problem. How’s that? I think that’s a really nice summary of what is emerging right here in terms of the modernist, Western modernist sense-making system that’s coming off of, that has its history very strongly, of course, in the Catholic Christian ideology and now is making these transitions. And this is then, okay, you have this thing, mind, that is representing the world out here, and there’s a primary world, and then you have a secondary mapping of that, and it is your position in relationship to that, that allows you to determine what is true. And then we hand that, and then of course, then that’s mind-body problem is actually, well, wait a minute, where basically there’s a dual world ontology here that’s very, very difficult to recognize. Right, so let’s, so when we, Greg and I will say mind-body and mind-brain problem, but let’s remember that it’s actually always a mind-brain problem or a mind-body problem, a mind-mind problem, because remember I can’t pick up on Greg’s mind, and it’s also a mind-world problem, right? If the only thing my mind actually directly knows is itself, then shouldn’t I be completely skeptical of any knowledge about the world out there? That’s what’s called mathematical world. That’s right. I generally refer to it when I’m spucking specifically off the tree of knowledge. I talk about the mind-matter problem, because then I’m gonna come back and bring the concept of matter in relationship to mind and add life and culture and show a nested hierarchy, and then that will change. But yes, that’s another, is it mind-brain, is it mind-body, is it mind-matter, is it mind-world, is it mind, these are all just good examples of wow, the complexity of this grammar dynamic is really profound. Yeah, that was very well said, Greg. So I wanna now talk about a little bit more of, because we have some time, and then I wanna, that way I can give sort of maximal opportunity for Greg next time to take the lead, because some of you are probably tired of me talking so much, and I wanna hear what Greg has to say, and he has expertise in areas I do not. So I wanna talk a little bit about going back again to Descartes and getting clear about a couple other parts of the problem formulation that we need to clarify. I believe we mentioned these earlier at the beginning, sort of the nature problem and the generation or function problem. So first of all, we can now clarify what the nature or the generation problem is. The nature of the generation problem is basically the problem of solving these problems that Descartes has given us. It’s the problem of how do we get back together, mind and matter? I’ll use Greg’s terms right now. Now, because most people, because they regard the dualism as implausible, because of all of these problems we’re opening up around it, they want to account for how does mind emerge out of matter? So we could get into a long attempt to defend that against idealisms and other things, but since this is what most people are doing, that’s how I’m gonna pose the problem. But if you want to, you can always think about it is, how do I come up with a worldview that reconciles the interpenetration and the interparticipation of mind and body? So how is it that we have something like consciousness in a physical body? That’s the nature problem. That’s the generation problem. Explaining to me the nature of consciousness that gives a way of answering of all of these problems that Descartes has given us, resolving them, so that it’s no longer problematic to say that I have consciousness and a body, and that they are intimately interpenetrating and causally connected in some fashion. That’s the nature problem. What’s the function problem? Well, the function problem is also coming out of this. What’s consciousness for? Remember we talked about how Descartes didn’t know all the important properties of mind? So one of them has been post-Freud, the discovery of the unconscious, and then Chomsky adds a tremendous amount to that. And here’s the idea. A lot of that computation that Descartes says is what mind is, is running unconsciously. I’m forming, my visual system is forming, right? It’s doing some kind of computation, so I’m forming a perception of Greg right now, and something in my hearing is parsing the noises that come out of his mouth, and somehow that’s making, I don’t know how any, I’m not aware of how any of that’s happening. The only place where awareness is, is at the end result. Yep, at the end. So if all of the heavy lifting and all of the computational work, I’m using Descartes language here and Hobbes’ language here, is going on unconsciously, what’s consciousness for? What’s consciousness for, and why, and is its sense that it’s somehow central or important to your agency, is that just an illusion? Is that just an illusion? That’s the function problem. What does consciousness do? You know how to do a lot of shit that you don’t know how to do. And I’m equivocating on the word no here, of course. No procedurally and no existence-wise, but not no analytically or explicitly, right? Ride a bike, right? I mean, it’s amazing how much, and yet we’re just aware of what we’re aware of in a particular way. There’s an enormous amount of embodied knowing that takes place without consciousness, so why do we have it? So that’s the function problem. Now, what I wanna briefly talk about is I wanna talk about how Descartes actually wrestled with these problems. I don’t think he resolves them, but his wrestling is instructive, because I take Descartes to have this insight that these two problems need to be solved in an interconnected manner, that if you try and solve the nature problem without solving the function problem, you’re ultimately gonna have an unsatisfactory account, because what would it be to say how something exists without explaining how it functions, how it causally interacts with the world? And the reverse is the case. How could I possibly explain how something functions if I didn’t have some sense of what its ontological nature was, what its nature is? And so I think we should follow Descartes in trying to answer these two problems in an integrated fashion. Now, that is not typically what’s done. There’s been a couple of recent papers that are trying to do this, but typically some of the biggest theories, global workspace theory, is largely a theory of the function of consciousness. The integrated information theory of Tononi is largely a theory of the nature of consciousness. And there’s been a recent paper that’s tried to put the two together, because people are realizing, hey, we really should be answering these two problems in an integrated fashion. So we’ve had a long, and this is where Greg could perhaps speak more to it than I could, we have a long history within science and neuroscience of not tackling, until very recently, not tackling these two problems in an integrated fashion together. And that has, I think, further, and sorry, I keep saying this, that has made this problem even more difficult. And it’s kind of a deceptive kind of difficulty, because it looks like we’re attempting to solve, untangle the world knot, but to the degree to which we’re pursuing a functional theory or a nature theory independent of the other, I think is the degree to which we’re actually still making the whole thing more deeply problematic, more deeply problematic. Now, what’s interesting about Descartes is he has a sense of where they come together. And this is a little bit tricky, because it requires me, going back to the example of the dog, remember we talked about how Descartes was willing to sort of, maybe this is apocryphal, maybe not do a live dissection of the dog, because dogs have no consciousness, so therefore they’re not feeling any pain, et cetera, which I find just a massively improbable claim. Right, and morally. Morally repugnant. But what many people don’t realize, and here’s where I’m very dependent on the excellent work done by Bill Seeger on this, is that Descartes didn’t think that animals were not intelligent. Right, and this is another thing that I’m gonna wanna challenge, which is the specotomy between intelligence and consciousness. And notice how much the function question can lead you to, well, I can, most of my intelligence is happening unconsciously, so therefore there’s no deep connection between consciousness and intelligence. But that actually flouts against the way we practice. The way we practice is we generally attribute consciousness where we find clear behavioral evidence for intelligence. So, now what was going on in Descartes? Let’s go back. Descartes said, well, he realized there was a problem. It seemed like animals learn, and it seemed like animals solved problems. He could see dogs doing this. You could teach a dog something. I mean, human beings have been teaching dogs for a long time, and dogs can, you know, a dog can come up, and you can even see a dog doing it. You know, when the dogs do this with their head, and then they seem to, they solve a problem. It’s like, so there’s intelligence there. So, they don’t have minds for what Descartes would call soul. So what’s going on? Well, Descartes had the idea that the brain had states. There are brain states that reliably covary with the world. So, what do I mean by reliable covariance? Think of the way your thermostat reliably covaries with the temperature in your room. So, in that sense, and we’re gonna come, this is gonna be contentious, but in that sense, the thermostat represents the temperature in the room, because it reliably covaries with it. It allows the thermostat to reliably discriminate between different states in the world, and then act accordingly. It will turn your furnace on or off. So, in a more complicated and sophisticated fashion, Descartes understands this, the dog has brain states that covary with the world that allow it to reliably discriminate between different states of affairs in the world, so that it can reliably differentiate its behavior so that it can achieve its goals. We’ll sort of not pay too much attention to that right now, because that sounds like teleology, and Descartes. But the idea is that you have something like brain states, sorry, we have brain states that are something like representations. And here’s where a few people that are watching us might say, oh, but isn’t he giving in to Hobbes here? Because isn’t that what Hobbes said, right? And then here’s where Descartes makes the difference. Descartes said, ah, but those aren’t actually representations. And Descartes actually borne out by sort of current philosophy of mind, because current philosophy of mind, there’s one of the most central accounts of mental representation, is the idea that representations are things in the head, the brain, whatever, that reliably covary with the world. But most people say that’s an inadequate account of representation, because co-variation does not pick up the specificity that representation does. So here’s this, and there’s something in my head that’s reliably covarying with it. Is it covarying with phone, material object, gift given to John, the thing I bought in 2016? Those are all different representations, and this is important what I’m now gonna say, of different aspects of the same thing. The co-variation is co-varying with all of them, but my representation specifies a particular aspect of it. Turn it around. Every representation is inherently aspectual. I’ll make this argument in more detail later, and people can see more comprehensive arguments about this, but the number of properties that are causally available, and this is technical information to me, all of the properties that are actually instantiated in this, it’s combinatorially explosive, it’s vast. So any way in which I represent it, as a phone or as a potential weapon, I’m selecting out of all of that information, a subset that I find relevant, and it’s not just sort of higgledy-piggledy, like when I think of this as a phone, it forms an integrated whole. So out of all that subset, sort of out of all that information, the subset of information in the technical sense that is relevant to me, and the piece of information are relevant to each other, and they are relevant to the actions I’m going to direct at the object. So I’m doing all this relevance realization. Every representation is inherently aspectual. And for Descartes, what he sees happening is that what consciousness does is it aspectualizes the covariation so that it becomes a particular specific representation. And John Searle makes a remarkably similar argument in the rediscovery of the mind in the 90s. Again, I don’t think that’s a coincidence because of how Cartesian his view really is. So here’s the idea. I got this covariation, and it may allow intelligent behavior, but it’s not representation. It doesn’t have meaning. It can’t be evaluated for truth because it needs to be aspectualized first, and all representations are aspectual, and that’s what consciousness does. Consciousness is a process of aspectualization. This is why for Descartes, you had to always be able to, when you were doing an argument, you had to be able to get the whole argument in mind at one time. You had to have a flash of insight. It had to go through an aspect shift because only then is it something that you could reason on. Only then were you capable of determining meaning and therefore truth. So notice what Descartes is doing here. It’s really interesting. I’m not claiming, and I know Greg is not claiming, this is not any kind of solution. This is not an untangling, but notice what he’s doing. He’s talking about a process that is central to the epistemic function of the mind. And what this does is it gives a function to consciousness. Consciousness basically aspectualizes co-variation into representations and readies that information for reason, which is very much like in many ways the global workspace and other models about access consciousness as poising information for reasoning. So Descartes got that there, but it’s also looks like he’s giving an account and I don’t know how much he was quite explicitly aware of this, of how mind emerges from matter. If we could figure out how we do aspectualization within a physical process, then we could also perhaps explain the emergence of consciousness via that aspectualization. I don’t think this is complete. I don’t think it’s adequate. I’m not saying that, but what I’m saying is, notice how brilliant this is because he’s offering an integrated response to both the function problem and the nature problem. Here’s one of the things I do wanna argue. I do think that we can give, and Greg and I are gonna argue about physicalism and I know that, but I do think we can give, because that’s what I attempt to do, I think we can give a scientific account of aspectualization in terms of a process for relevance realization. And I’ve already invoked it here, but we could explain it ultimately in terms of brain, well, embodied brain coupling to the world functionality. Then we would have an account of how aspectualization, at least, emerges within an otherwise scientific worldview. And then that would also link directly to the functionality of consciousness. Now, there’s a lot more, like look at my hands. There’s a lot more that has to be done. But what I’m trying to do is show you the promise of zeroing in on a point where the nature problem and the function problem seems to come together, which is in the process of aspectualization. Now, I think that’s an important lesson to take forward from Descartes. And we’re gonna see, again, this connection between consciousness and aspectualization, representation and relevance realization, ramifying through a lot of the accounts of consciousness that we’re gonna take a look at. Brilliant, brilliant. So let me summarize some of this in terms of, so what I’m hearing, so this aspectualization is then harmonizing aspects of this co-variation. Somehow, right? And then we talk about the function, like global neural inner workspace, where we’re gonna globally make available some sort of harmonizing in a whole brain way to get the system on the same frequency. Yes, yep, exactly. Use that term, okay? And let’s also make a distinction here between sort of the ontogenetic and proximal definition of functional, like, okay, how do we manage this conversation? And what is my consciousness doing? Versus, we haven’t talked about Darwin, but of course, when we talk about Darwin coming on the scene, right, and we talk about the phylogenetic functionality, right, and then nature built this in phylogenetically for certain kinds of purposes, okay? And I’ll just put a little plug here for behavioral investment theory framework for understanding what the nervous system is trying to do. It’s very consistent with Carl Friston’s work and others. Basically, the nervous system is trying to direct your energy work effort, all right, toward the good and the bad, you know, whatever is correlated with survival and reproductive success, okay? And what it says is it sort of downlates a model of that work investment. You got a model of the animal in relationship to the environment, paths of different kinds of work effort, okay? And so what you’re trying to do then is create a model that allows you to make predictions so that your investments pay off, all right? When that’s going fine, great. When not, the system needs to reboot and check, okay, when it gets surprised in a particular type of way, all right? So one of the things then that we may start to do phylogenetically is maybe some of this aspectualization pertains to predictability, expectation, okay? And then when things are not expected, then the things light up in a particular way to try to get them to model into a more expected route. And if that’s the case, then this aspectualization, tying into prediction, tying into work investment of this phenomenology really starts to have a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic functionality in a way that, you know, starts to tie stuff together. Excellent, well said. So let’s, there are probably deep connections between the capacity for aspectualization and model formation, I think, and there’s deep connections between aspectualization and relevance realization. And I think there’s deep connections between predictive modeling, relevance realization and intelligence. And therefore, we will turn out, though I will argue, and I think Greg agrees with me, and this is part of, I think some of my work plugs into the history of knowledge continuum, is that there is a deep connection, even continuity between the processes that make you intelligent and the processes that make you conscious, which has really strong implications for strong AI, actually. So that’s where we’re heading, that’s where we’re heading. And so next time, Greg’s gonna take us through how this very complex and tortured grammar ramifies through the history of psychology. Right, the field then tries to say, okay, well, we’ll scientize this thing, right? And then ultimately what happens is you get a multi-preparadigmatic emergence, multi meaning many, pre meaning that they’re unable to develop a fully functioning paradigm, okay? So Newton paradigmatically organizes classical mechanics for 200 years and really remains as a classical mechanic paradigm, okay? So we’re gonna try, the system is gonna try to wake up and say, hey, can we scientifically paradigmatically organize the mind from this logic? And then what we’ll see is the answer is actually no. That’s the short answer, is no, isn’t that interesting? No, you’re not able to do it. I look forward to this. This is gonna be very, very exciting, very interesting. So thank you, my good friend. This was excellent. Thank you, that was a great articulation. It really nailed some really central points, I enjoyed it. Thank you very much. And thank you for all of you who have given us your time and attention and look forward to seeing you next time when we continue to try as best we can, at least to some degree, on tangling the world knot.