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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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(10a. Comment Overflow) (50+)
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
"First of all, remember that heterophenomenology gives you much more data than just a subject’s verbal judgments; every blush, hesitation, and frown, as well as all the covert, internal reactions and activities that can be detected, are included in our primary data. "
ReplyDeleteThe premise of heterophenomenology -- to take peoples subjective accounts of experiences and expand on them in more concrete terms, or as Dennett suggests, 'apply the scientific method to the phenomena of human consciousness' -- while an interesting way to approach human feelings, doesn't get us any closer to answering the hard problem (how and why we feel). However, before even addressing the hard problem, I question the validity of the statement above. How much can we really detect of another's "internal reactions", and how do we even know that they are accurate? Self-reporting can only take us so far into the mind, and unfortunately it doesn't enable us to cross the boundary from correlation to causation, knowing how person A feels doesn't get us to understand why or how person A feels. That being said, if we accept heterophenomenology's goal of pairing objective measures of behavior and the so-called internal reactions that coincide, we still come no closer to answering the hard problem. A simple correlation between behavior and subjective accounts does not target the core question, nor take us any closer to reverse engineering a mind. Therefore, while it may provide a different way of looking at human consciousness (feeling), it merely grazes the surface -- much like neuroimaging does -- of answering how and why.
Dennet says that "we are robots made of robots…mindless as the molecules they're composed of. Turing's great contribution was to show us that Kant's Question could be recast as an engineering question."
ReplyDeleteI wonder how Dennet would rebut the criticisms of computationalism as an explanation for cognition. Computationalism fails because reverse engineering/solving the engineering of the brain is not equivalent to understanding cognition and the brain. Going back to Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, recreating a process that yields an identical output as a brain cognizing does not mean the process is cognition. Thusly, there must me something more to our brains than just being "some few trillion robotic cells" that when triggered gives us feeling, understanding and cognition.
I additionally ponder about the differential definitions that Dennet would give to many of the buzz words he used to create his argument, specifically in the example of Chalmers' zombie. Namely, while tempting and clearly drawn out, a large portion of his argument rests on slightly different humanly held connotations of words such as "conscious content" and "internal states" while completely missing the underlying equivalence between the two; a subjective experience of feeling.
The argument, while fairly entertaining to read (I like the back and forth, as well as academic call-outs that seems to happen often in writing on cognition – reads a little like banter), is still somewhat unclear to me. I see that it by and large is a defence of heterophenomenology but I was I’m still looking for some clarification on where it stood with regards to the hard problem’s role in the study of cognition. In response to heterophenomenology’s methodologies leaving out experience **read: feeling** Dennett assert that it is in fact included because, along with the subjects verbalized beliefs about what they are experiencing, the methods include recording data on “every blush, hesitation, and frown, as well as all the covert, internal reactions and activities that can be detected”. That being said, Dennett also admits later when that “Chalmers and his zombie twin are heterophenomenological twins: when we interpret all the data we have, we end up attributing to them exactly the same heterophenomenological worlds”. Just by admitting that, I understand Dennett to be admitting that heterophenomenology could not answer the hard problem – the zombie does not feel, yet we are recording all the same things as we would in a person and getting the same results. So, you can’t possibly be measuring, addressing, or even remotely getting at the “how and why we feel”. Dennett also says: “First-person science of consciousness is a discipline with no methods, no data, no results, no future, no promise. It will remain a fantasy.”
ReplyDeleteSo it would seem as though Denett is actually arguing that there is no reason to focus on the hard problem, while at the same time defending his use of heterophenomenology. Perhaps he is also proposing a different understanding of “experience” and “feeling” then we have used in this course, or Chalmers means when he talks about the hard problem – however, I would argue that if that were true Denett would be committing the mistake of confusing DOING for FEELING.
Heterophenomenology seems to be a very interesting concept but I am not sure how real it ca. be. In fact, I am confused about the fact the it is defined as being a third-person point of view of what someone is experiencing but that it also encompasses one’s belief and internal reactions that can be detected. How can that belief and reactions be assessed without some interpretation of them? Also, the person being “evaluated” will react to what he experiences or believes that he experiences. So this reaction is subjective to his belief. Thus, the Heterophenomenology cannot be totally neutral since it is based on a subjective element. This is where I think that qualia enters in this subject.
ReplyDeleteSince qualia is so hardly defined and understood differently by everyone, how can we neutrally define one’s experience if the person itself can’t fully describe it or even be fully away or it? Once again, qualia is a subjective experience that depends on the understanding of it of the person and is another reason why I am not sure how heterophenomenology can be neutral.
For zombies, the problem of qualia doesn’t apply because they do not feel. So would heterophenomenology be theoretically possible only for zombies that experience events in an objective way?
“First of all, remember that heterophenomenology gives you much more data than just a subject’s verbal judgements; every blush, hesitation, and frown, as well as all the covert, internal reactions and activities that can be detected, are included in our primary data. “
ReplyDeleteI definitely disagree with Dennett here, as many have commented before, observing behaviours is essentially collecting the third-person data, since the subjective experience remain unknown to anyone else but the person himself/herself.
“if some of your conscious experiences occur unbeknownst to you (if they are experiences about which you have no beliefs, and hence can make no “verbal judgements”), then they are just as inaccessible to your first-person point of view as they are to heterophenomenology. So heterophenomenology’s list of primary data doesn’t leave out any conscious experiences you know of, or even have any first-person inklings about.”
Here, I think Dennett assumes that we have the capacity to express everything that’s going on in our minds, both verbally and behaviorally, however, I don’t think that’s the case. First, the other minds problem says that a person only knows for sure the existence of his/her own mind, but he/she will never know if others have minds. By observing the behaviours of other people, we can assume that it is very likely that we have the same state of mind, but it’s still not certain. Thus, if we are not even sure that others have minds or have similar minds as ourselves, how could the behavioral data accurately reflect other’s subjective conscious world? Second, I think it’s not true that humans can say or show anything that we are feeling and thinking. Excluding all the unconscious processes going on in the brain which is not the focus of heterophenomenology as Dennett stated, even just consider thinking and feeling that we are consciously aware of, it is hard to express them due to our limited memory and language capacities. In general, our verbal or behavioural capacities only produce the output that the brain generates, but how and why the brain does it, which is the hard problem, cannot be observed or solved by heterophenomenology.
I think the claim that by through heterophenomenology we can assess if someone has a conscious. It’s a surface way to think about how to see if someone has thought and can explain how and why for physiological phenomena’s. Since we are observing another persons bodily responses to questions and the environment, this is a subjective way of thinking about the other person and proves nothing about the person’s consciousness. This goes with the other minds problem where we don’t know about someone else’s internal states and mind. A perfect robot who can show perfect human physiological reactions to questions than by using heterophenomenology we conclude that they have consciousness and thus have been fooled into doing so. According zombie philosophy the robot would be a neurological and behavioural zombie where it would be undistinguishable to a human in terms of behavior and physiology but by using heterophenomenology we fail to see if there is a soul and consciousness.
ReplyDelete1. I was not fully sold on Dennett’s heterophenomenology argument until I read the section addressing David Chalmers and zombies. In this section, Chalmers argued that he was differentiated from a zombie in that “none of this functioning will be accompanied by any real conscious experience. There will be no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a Zombie” (page 6)
ReplyDeleteFollowing this, Dennett disproves Chalmers:
“Although he says the zombie lacks that evidence, nevertheless the zombie believes he has the evidence, just as Chalmers does. Chalmers and his zombie twin are heterophenomenological twins” (page 7)
I could not agree more with Dennett’s point of view. It seems to me that the zombie is no better equipped to know whether it is feeling, and whether it has consciousness than any human. As Dennett addressed earlier in the paper, it must be noted that the human intuition is faulty, and self-report is not always reliable. To simply say that it feels like something to have consciousness is not sufficient to prove that we are conscious. We may instead be influenced by our faulty perception. Just in the same way that the Earth appears flat when you’re living on it, this is not sufficient proof, and simply following intuition is not sufficient to support either argument.