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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 ...
In reading this article I realized where I had gotten confused in the last! I got wrapped up in the something like the “zombie challenge” when I mentioned that Denett doing his heterophenomenology on a zombie wouldn’t matter because it couldn’t possibly be touching on actual feeling by virtues of it being a zombie, and that this was equivalent to an admittal that heterophenomenology could not answer the hard problem. The whole zombie situation does not really matter in what I was trying to convey – well, what I should have been trying to convey. Heterophenomenology is looking at the “cognitive neuroscience of the functional correlates of consciousness (i.e. of feelings)”. All the things being measured by it are once again just "internal goings-on that generate certain outputs in response to certain inputs,". That being said, it is not trying to say that what Denett is defending measuring is not at all related to real feeling – these measurements are, they are clearly functional correlates BUT that tells us nothing about the hard question: how and why we feel.
ReplyDelete"This is empty sci-fi. Either such a Zombie is possible, or, much more likely, it is not. Either way, I have no idea how/why."
ReplyDeleteThe proposition of zombie cognizers sounds quite familiar. I see this concept as a variant of Descartes' other minds problem. I agree with Dennett's rejection of this concept, that is it very improbable and "empty sci-fi", but in the end it is impossible to rule out for certain. We lack the ability to address the other minds problem further than to test the functional capabilities of cognizers around us - hence the Turing Test. I believe that these methods are the closest we can get to heterophenomenology. Therefore, it is possible zombie cognizers exist, but as Dennett says, there is no explanation as to how or why they would exist. It it altogether more logical to assume that the phenomenon of feeling which we can confirm in first person phenomenology extends to those around us - that I am not alone.
The article is very enjoyable to read and I can see the intense debate going on between the A team and B team. As shown in the Dennett and Harnad’s articles, the A team argues that third-person empirical evidence (heterphenomenology) is able to explain the first-person experience, but the B team asserts that the A team leaves out the hard problem – how and why we feel, which is not solvable in their perspective.
ReplyDelete“(B) Aaaargh! Don't fall for it! Youre leaving out . . . experience!”
“You are leaving out feeling. (Experience, like thought, is 100% equivocal. The relevant bit is felt experience -- not just "had" experience, or "real-time-past" experience, or "functioned through" experience, or "processed" experience, or data.)”
Throughout Harnad’s paper, it has been mentioned repetitively that many words that Dennett used are equivocal: thoughts, beliefs, consciousness, experiences, etc. And as Harnad puts it, the only thing matters for the hard problem is feeling. I think it’s interesting that how different vocabularies are used to describe the first-person data, and that might be a leading reason for which causes so many confusions in cognitive science.
This paper simply explains how heterophenomenology will not explain the how and why we feel. A Robot can say that it feels pain when being pinched but cannot explain why and how it’s feeling pain is the main argument. By using a heterophenonmenologic way of seeing if someone or a robot has consciousness or the ability to think it doesn’t explain the way and how they are feeling. It would explain the easy problem but not the hard problem of how and why therefore this is why this way of analyzing consciousness would be robust. The paper also tackles how we can differentiate ourselves from zombies by asking harder questions and not simply looking at the surface of things. If there is consciousness in cognition, heterophenomenology couldn’t explain cognition in its entirety.
ReplyDelete1. I feel like this paper just jumps right into the debate, and never fully addresses the background information, or why it’s important to have this debate over feeling. Having said that, I did find that the points made in the paper were interesting and insightful. I particularly liked the following excerpt on zombies:
ReplyDelete“The (hypothetical) Zombie does not "fervently" anything, because he does not feel! He only behaves in a way that is interpretable (by us) as if he felt. If there can indeed be such a Zombie, the how/why difference under discussion would be that difference between actually feeling and merely functioning-as-if-feeling.”
When I read the Dennett paper (10A), his comments during this section on zombies are what sold me on his point of view. However, I have to say that the new comments that were made in this paper were very convincing. The comment Professor Harnad made (shown above) helped me link the idea of the zombie to the Turing Test, and to a T3 machine Isaure that we have been talking about in class. I had previously been thinking of the zombie almost akin to human lacking awareness and higher order thinking. But this comment makes me think of a zombie within the context of the machine, essentially as Isaure. This shift in perspective changes the entire way that I think about the problem, as well as its implications.
“Just pick any feeling at all: pinch/ouch. That's all you need. The full-blown problem is there, even with an organism that has that feeling and that feeling only in its repertoire. Explain the how/why of that. The rest is just a ritual dance skirting around the question.”
ReplyDeleteThis comment alludes to pain as a type of feeling. However, from what I remember from a class that I took on pain, pain is thought of as a sensation. Therefore I can’t help but think that the term ‘feeling’ as it is described here is meant as a general term, that not only includes feelings, but any other sensation that is restricted to first person report (i.e. anything that cannot be described using third person report). In this sense, I am still unconvinced by this argument, as I don’t see why our sensation of feeling could serve as proof that we are any different from a zombie. I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but after reading this article I still find myself drawn to the arguments made by Dennett in the original paper (reading 10A).