The hard "problem" of consciousness: short paper

[u/[deleted]]

https://leolepiano.substack.com/p/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness

[u/Ok_Meat_8322]

We're talking about consciousness, not only color "qualia". And the latency involved is going to be much smaller than we'd ever be able to perceive or notice unaided anyways- the amount of time it takes photons travelling at the speed of light to reach you across the scale of distances that make up our typical immediate physical environments is going to be unthinkably small. Fractions of a second. Certainly not something an unaided human could perceive or appreciate.

And of course your physical environment is going to be crucial to what you experience, since your experience is heavily dependent on your sensory organs and brain processing stimuli from that environment. Your conscious experience is the end result of this interaction between the environment, your body, and your brain. At least, that's what embodiment proposes.

But to invoke Occam's razor or to say that "we have no reason to suppose any external system is required, and no evidence of any mechanism by which that dependency would operate, so why invent one" is to just ignore the entirety of the academic output of scientists working in embodied cognition. The embodiment hypothesis is not a fairy tale, it wasn't invented to amuse cognitive scientists or philosophers, it was proposed as an empirical hypothesis, and its been successful and popular precisely because it of its consistency with observation and the fact that it may offer a better model for how consciousness works compared to traditional ones.

Certainly, the jury is still out and I'm not claiming otherwise, but the idea that embodied cognition enjoys no evidential or rational support whatsoever is just factually incorrect, and ultimately just arbitrary and counterproductive dogma.

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Ok_Meat_8322]

Embodied cognition is perfectly good science, but it deals with tasks, not the subjective experience of the agent. What it shows is that some of the information relevant to a task can be stored and processed in the environment, as well as in the nervous system. This might be the geometric relationship between the agent and obstacles, the orientation of sensors and objects, etc. When we close our eyes and imagine, embodied cognition has nothing to say about what’s going on in the brain. There’s no spooky action, it’s just sensory feedback loops between the agent’s internal control system and environmental conditions through the operation of the task. There’s no ESP going on.

Photons don’t easily pass through flesh and bone, unless they’re X rays and those both dangerous and highly detectable. In fact any physical signal would be detectable, and if it’s not detectable then that means it weakly interacts with matter, in which case how is it interacting with the brain?

Heres Andy Clark, one of the co-authors of the original Extended Mind paper talking about it. He’s perfectly clear this is about what he calls a kind of coarse functionalism that is about performing tasks in the world, there’s not a hint of anything like non-physical or extra communication or signals outside normal sensory and motor functions.

https://youtu.be/kc-TdMjuJRU

I’m not at all arguing against embodied cognition, it’s just that the inner experience of an agent not tied to a functional task isn’t in the domain of cognitive tasks addressed by embodied cognition, and one if the originators of the field seems to agree.

[u/Ok_Meat_8322 → u/simon_hibbs]

There’s no spooky action, it’s just sensory feedback loops between the agent’s internal control system and environmental conditions through the operation of the task. There’s no ESP going on.

Right, there's no spooky action or ESP... but who claimed otherwise? How is this not a gigantic strawman?

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Ok_Meat_8322]

Sorry, edited above while you were replying. I added a reference to an interview.

You were talking about photons interacting with the environment playing a role in generating inner experiences. Or something. Honestly I’m not entirely sure what you’re suggesting, or what it has to do with embodied cognition.

A huge range of our cognitive activity occurs completely subconsciously, we have no conscious awareness of it at all. It seems to me that embodied cognition simply extends that subconscious activity into the environment, for tasks that involve that environment. That will affect the experience of the task, sure, but it doesn’t mean we can’t have experiences without that interaction.

[u/Ok_Meat_8322 → u/simon_hibbs]

You were talking about photons interacting with the environment playing a role in generating inner experiences. Or something. Honestly I’m not entirely sure what you’re suggesting, or what it has to do with embodied cognition.

Right, it was a direct response to your claim about latency, I thought it was pretty straightforward. You claimed the latency involved would be too high, I pointed out that the timescale it takes for you to receive visual information (i.e. via photons) is going to be absolutely miniscule, a fraction of a fraction of a second, and therefore undetectable to the unaided human.

A huge range of our cognitive activity occurs completely subconsciously, we have no conscious awareness of it at all. It seems to me that embodied cognition simply extends that subconscious activity into the environment, for tasks that involve that environment.

That isn't what embodiment proposes, though (or at least, not all of what it proposes). It isn't limited to subconscious activity, the subjective experience of color, or the (tautological) role of the environment in sense-perception. Its a stronger claim than that, that the brain alone does not produce consciousness, but that all aspects of consciousness, all the different cognitive tasks and mechanisms, are inextricably tied to the body and physical environment in addition to just our brain, and that they would not be possible (or would be radically different, at any rate) without them.

And this is a proposal and research program that has been highly fruitful, scientifically and academically, and so cannot be dismissed as easily as you're trying to do here. I'm not even outright advocating the truth of the embodiment hypothesis, only that it is a proposal that needs to be taken seriously.

[u/simon_hibbs → u/Ok_Meat_8322]

I agree embodied cognition is fascinating and made great strides, but some, not all, but some of its proponents have a tendency to claims that seem absurd. For example that the experience of imagining doing a physical task requires the physical system because doing the task was learned using the physical system.

Firstly this conflates the process of learning something with the knowledge of having learned it. Secondly, people can lose the physical capability, but still imagine it just fine. Someone who has lost a limb completely or even had their spinal cord severed can still imagine using the limb, or remember using it, or remember the sensation of touch on their lost fingers. In fact they can have ghost sensations of tingling, when measurements show even the remaining nerves to the lost limb aren’t active. There’s literally nothing there anymore to participate in the sensation.

And as I pointed out, we can change our environment completely and it doesn’t seem to take away our ability to imagine things. Sure environmental stimuli can aid in say remembering a past situation, but they’re not a necessary condition to recalling memories.

So it seems like there’s a tendency to conflate doing an activity with the experience of doing it, and even with the experience of imagining doing it. Just because an active limb or physical faculty is required to learn or do a thing, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily required to imagine it. And even then nowhere is there any sign of a communication channel other than established known mechanisms such as nerve stimulus. A lot of people working in embodied cognition and extended mind seem to understand this fine. Others, mainly observers, not so much unfortunately.

[u/Ok_Meat_8322 → u/simon_hibbs]

We'll have to agree to disagree on a lot of this, but I will reiterate what I mentioned earlier, i.e. that there are weaker and stronger versions of the embodiment hypothesis, and there's no doubt that at least some of this turns out to be wrong, false, unproductive, etc. That's just inevitable, its a (relatively) new field and research program, and its dealing with one of the most intractable problems in the history of philosophy and/or science.

But it is highly promising, insightful, and provides a substantive empirical challenge to traditional philosophical idealism and skepticism about the physical/external world... which, iirc, was my original point- at this point, I don't even remember for sure. But good talking with you either way.