I guess it's getting off topic, but to bring it back in, I would say that drawing a line between "motivating philosophy" and "hamster-wheel philosophy" is as invalid and misleading as drawing a line between "useful ways of looking at conciousness (behavioral, situational, etc.)" and "imaginary ways of looking at consciousness (introspective, self-actualized, etc.)". In all cases, these are just different slices of philosophy, and different slices of consciousness studies. The only thing that can be demonstrated to matter when taking these slices is their value and results. Those can be subjective to the individual using the mode of inquiry, or they can be objectively demonstrable using science. But even if we are to restrict to the scientific usefulness, one need only look for objective ways that scientists are using the concept. Above all, what determines if it is science is whether or not it applies scientific methodology, not whether or not it is "correct" in some rhetorical sense.

Scientific aspects of the history of philosophy, therefore, might look at how the work of various philosophers "trickles down" into changes in how various groups think. Indeed I have little doubt that philosophical elements exhibited by every contributor in this thread can be traced fairly directly to the thoughts of well-known philosophers of the hamster-wheel variety, which ultimately percolate through the educational system that we've all been exposed to (those so-called "viruses"-- scientific education is one of those too, though many like Dawkins would likely not care to admit it).

But in terms of the critical stream of the thread, instead of debating which modes of inquiry into consciousness, which selected image space to project the concept on, are the valid ones to follow on rhetorical grounds, one should look instead to which ones have yielded results and informed our thinking about what consciousness is. It seems pretty clear to me that the introspective elements of consciousness are the entire reason that it is a topic of such interest in the first place. In other words, if a behavioralist claims that the introspective route to understanding consciousness is scientifically invalid, they had best be willing to motivate the entire study on behavioral grounds in a way that does not invoke introspection.

In my view, virtually all of the vocabulary we have used to even describe the existence of consciousness was initially established introspectively, and only later modified to fit other image spaces, and I cite for evidence the interest in the topic exhibited by those with no behavioral science training at all. Indeed, it seems entirely plausible, given the evidence on the table, that consciousness might never be understood by someone who could not perceive it introspectively, because it would never occur to them to even form a definition of it. They might define a concept of "ways that people behave that distinguish outcomes that affect themselves from those that affect others", but I wager you will not find that as the definition of "consciousness" any time soon. I submit that a more useful way to think of that description is as the projection of the concept of consciousness, as established and defined introspectively, onto the behavioral image space. One may then cite the scientific advantages of isolating that image space, but one should not make the mistake of then arguing that this is what "consciousness really is"-- it would be an example of losing track of the process, something I see happening all too frequently in many avenues of science (as many of you tire of hearing me say, I'm sure, yet here it is again!).

And it might be that introspection is the only way we'll ever understand it. Dennett offers the scenario in which we trace ever single nerve route of arriving sensations, follow the ramifications through the association cortices, the amygdala and hippocampus, understand all the flitting neural allegiances and their drivers, and then find ourselves working outwards again through the ellicited motor responses. We stop and ask "But where was consciousness?" We've seen it, but it just isn't consciousness when examined from the outside.
It's a view that provides a certain amount of subversive glee, as well as a modicum of despair.

Grant Hutchison

I argue that the despair comes from unreasonable expectations for scientific understanding. It seems to me that in a nutshell, understanding is nought but the unification of familiarities, and scientific understanding is the unification of scientifically established familiarities. Once we have unified those familiarities into a cogent and minimalist whole, in the manner you quote Dennett, then science is finished with the question-- there is no point in "waiting for the light bulb to go on", it already has at that point. It's a little like the reaction people have when they find the North star-- "but it isn't very bright, is it?"-- it's not that it is bright that matters, it is that it is north.

If a process is complex, complete unification into something simple may not be possible. Along the say, certain simplifying principles may be enountered (like what happens when parts of the process you describe are fed back into themself), so those "mini-unifications" are important steps, but does not science always leave us feeling at some level like the question was begged (why is there gravity, for example)? This is the very nature of science-- it is great for what it can do, but it will never really be enough to satisfy our curiosity completely-- sometimes simple introspection may lead us to answers that science does not, or we can even apply scientific methodology to take a "slice" from the pie of introspection. I can't think of any topic for which that approach is more relevant than pain-- or consciousness.

Would it be fair to say then that you, Grant, Dennett, and myself all agree that consciousness is not to be found by studying the brain?

It seems to me that the only reason any of us wonders about consciousness is because we are conscious. Consciousness is subjective, for now, and like anything else it requires consciousness to contemplate and understand. So there is the question of whether or not consciousness has the capacity to understand itself.

If I want to study my own consciousness I use introspection and when I want to study the result of another's consciousness I examine behavior. At the level of behavior I match my behavior with that of that other and wonder if the same conscious processes were required to arrive at those similar behaviors. How can I understand another's consciousness without replacing my own that that other's? And when I have done this, what do I use to examine that consciousness?

It seems to me that the only way to come to an understanding of consciousness is through clarifying as many parts of the whole as possible, and even then it will probably be necessary to use statistical methods with the entire population of humans to determine what is normal and what is not.

Since the brain is not infinite I feel it's operation can be described and simulated. But, it seems, the primary mode of operation of consciousness is to be focused. Focusing pushes aside all that can be understood to understand or work with a part of a whole. For instance, as I type this I am focusing on what I want to express and most of the world around me is not within my conscious focus, although it became so as soon as I started thinking about it to write about it. So it might be impossible to understand consciousness at all because we can not examine it in its' entirety, we can only focus on a set number of properties at a given time.

But with that said I think that it might be possible, now that we have written language and computers, to independently understand each of those parts and have the equivalent of a full understanding recorded in one place. We may even be able to use those separate understandings to create a simulation of consciousness by creating the parts and putting them all together, but it seems we may never be able to understand exactly what it is we created because by doing what consciousness does, focus, we can only see parts of it and may be incapable of seeing the whole.

An analogy using astronomy could help put the problem into perspective. We see within a limited bandwidth of the full range of electromagnetic energy. We are blind to light outside that bandwidth. But we now have devices to "see" in those ranges and when we want to view other ranges with our eyes we shift the spectrum we can't see to one we can. We can't comprehend the entire electromagnetic spectrum with our eyes, we can only understand a portion at a time. We can "see" almost any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum but since we have to view it through conversion to the limited bandwidth our eyes allow we simply do not have the capacity to understand it all at once at the same time. On the other hand, despite the fact that we can't understand it all at once, we can reproduce it (crudely).

But then, we can not fully comprehend what we reproduced because we can only observe the reproduction through our limited bandwidth.

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I don't see how you could understand consciousness without studying the brain. If you'd care to summarize why, I'd love to hear it. I believe we are closer to understanding consciousness through direct examination of the brain being conscious and as our imaging modalities improve we'll be able to correlate brain function with conscious function. I believe that consciousness is a product of the brain so I can't even comprehend why you would believe it isn't. You don't have to go into a long explanation, I'd be happy with a summary, but feel free to go on about any point you feel is relevant. I know all these points of view have been hashed out through the numerous postings in this thread but it might be a good idea to now assemble those disparate thoughts into a coherent whole.

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The Brain Science Podcast

No, for myself I would say that we do not "find" consciousness anywhere other than in a dictionary. But what we can do is try to understand what imprints whatever process inspired that definition leaves on various philosophical, artistic, religious, and scientific image spaces. Restricting to the scientific subset, we can see how the scientific methodology can be applied to various other "slices" of that concept. One of those slices could be behavioral-- another could be looking at the brain. But the grand-daddy of them all is simple instrospection, as that process which was used to define the term in the first place.

Yes, this perspective certainly makes sense to me.
[quote]
This is the problem whenever the "whole is more than the sum of its parts", which may very well be a key problem with consciousness. But the most important thing is not to intentionally exclude what one can learn from one image space simply because it won't fit into another one.

That wouldn't be fair to say, no.
Studying the brain, guided by the introspection of the person being studied, is the only chance we have of "finding consciousness". (I'm guessing that you're using this phrase to mean comprehending consciousness, or something similar, since I'm sure you don't anticipate us finding an object we can take out and put in a jar, marked "consciousness".)

But it may be that we're not clever enough, even having mapped out all the structures and activities, to see how consciousness emerges; that's certainly a view I entertain on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It may even be that we are actually incapable, by virtue of physical restriction, of containing the blueprint for our consciousness within our consciousness.
But by studying brains, I think we'll learn a lot about brains; and by studying behaviour, I think we'll learn a lot about behaviour.

Grant Hutchison

I think what Dennett's scenario shows is that, even if we could map the neurological processes behind consciousness in their entirety, that still wouldn't be the same as experiencing consciousness. Consciousness is first and foremost something that one feels, and sensations are irreducibly subjective (to borrow a term from ID).

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I'd say that depends on your definition of consciousness. Are you suggesting a magical component to the mind?

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Perhaps, but using imagination and dreams as a basis, I'm not sure we could work on explanations for why red and green are opponent colors for us. The task seems less hopeless once you factor in forests and fruit.

Those authors sometimes classify themselves not as subjectivists or as objectivists, but as relationalists, meaning that perception depends on both the perceiver and the perceived. Again, the idea is let's not leave Halle Berry totally out of perceiving Halle Berry.

That is the intuition that is hard to overcome. I don't have a killer argument that can convince anyone in one shot, but let's see if something dirt simple like this loosens your grip a teeny bit: An image is a thing like a photo or a painting right? The kinds of images we are most familiar with reflect light in various patterns. I suggest that if you think that when you look at a tree, you see some sort of image, it is because it reflects light as well.

If you still want to suggest that what you see is an image generated in the head, you need to demonstrate that somehow, preferably with a direct argument for the image you think exists (that is, not an indirect argument of the form: it's not out there, so by process of elimination, it must be in me).

The purpose of vision does not have be to deliver an image to something deeper in the brain. As we have seen above, the world can serve as its own image that we scan as needed if there needs to be an image somewhere. Think of the energy savings!

I consider perception as an ability to tell things apart. I would say that the eye is extra sensitive to contrast information in the environment in preference to lower frequency information. Change, whether spatial or temporal, in other words, is more valuable to organisms that have to act quickly to survive. The retinas pretty much just feed change information up the optic nerve, and the eyeballs jump around in saccades. It's not clear that there is a distinct, coherent image anywhere in most cases of vision.

How might the "the brain alters the image" hypothesis explain the Muller-Lyer illusion (the two arrows illusion)? This version here has a ruler below the arrows. The left arrow looks longer than the right arrow, yet both are the same length. Would you say that the brain has "Photoshopped" one arrow to be longer than the other? If so, notice that the spacing of the tick marks on ruler doesn't get smaller as you move your gaze from the longer-looking to the shorter-looking arrow.

Muller-Lyer Illusion

This suggests, to me anyway, that image-manipulation hypotheses probably aren't going to be effective in explaining perception.

No, I meant finding consciousness in the sense of "this right here is consciousness and it is going to be the subject of my study." Ken and Grant seemed to be recommending an introspective study for the most direct access to the subject because Dennett's detailed brain study scenario wouldn't provide answers to the key questions.

In my case, we all talk about consciousness and seem to know generally what each other is talking about when we use the term, yet most all of us know next to nothing about the brain. It suggests to me that when we talk about consciousness, we talk about something besides the brain (but that doesn't necessarily exclude the brain's role).

Hmm, seems like you are still arguing the case that an image does not exist. I don't disagree with that, what I said is "what is perceived by the conscious mind appears as images". I could clarify this a little by saying that when we see, we "think" we are seeing images similar to those displayed by a television, and when we imagine, we "think" we are seeing the same sort of images. I do not disagree about the fact that we do not see images of that sort, but I do disagree with the idea that we do not consciously perceive what we see as images. As anyone to describe how vision works and they will describe it in a context of imagery. This may not have been the case prior to the invention of the camera or art, but it is now. Although, it is unlikely things were different prior to these inventions since the inventions were created to emulate what occurs with vision.


Since I wasn't arguing that the brain stores images, this point you made is in reply to what you believe I said, so it does not sway my view at all. However, I do think that you are not seeing something correctly if you do not understand that the visual system is sending the message that the lines are of different lengths. Yes, the perception is flawed, but only because the brain does not see in images. The brain alters the image as it is assimilated, if it didn't, the lines would "appear" to be the same length because they are the same length. In this case, if what is perceived differs from reality, then obviously the brain has altered the stimulus during the process of perception.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

That's getting closer, but I would not suggest (and Grant doesn't seem to either) that introspection is the "most direct access", nor that it addresses "the key questions", expressly because both the access and the questions are all part of the research choices (what I'm calling the image spaces). All I'm claiming is that introspection is what laid out the problem in the first place, and now the scientist is free to take whatever slices he/she suspects might prove fruitful. The choices will ultimately be judged by the fruit-- but without introspection and the ability to perceive our own consciousness, I don't see how any questions, or even the term itself, would have emerged, "key" or otherwise. Still, what is the "most direct" access may have more to do with what we get out of, rather than what we put into, these definitions, and what are the "key" questions must await the scientific process to decide. Indeed, finding the "key questions" may be the most important part of all, and I'm not sure we're even at that point yet.
That is the introspective component. Most of what anyone knows about consciousness is from introspection, and most of the vocabulary in the definition comes from that source. Much as I hate to cite popular definitions in a scientific discussion, it is relevant that they invariably cite "awareness" and "mental states", both of which suggest an introspective mode of connection to the concept.

Dennett's scenario is just a story about how it might go.

We seem to be almost back where we came in, now.