Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at mindmatters. AI.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Greetings and welcome to Mind Matters News. I'm your conscious co host, Robert J. Marks.
To me, consciousness is a weird thing to talk about. Consciousness is a hard thing to define. In fact, the authority in all things. ChatGPT, in the response of defining Consciousness, says, philosophically and scientifically, consciousness is one of the most challenging and debated topics with questions about its nature, how it arises from the brain and its relationship to the physical body still unresolved. Again, that's from ChatGPT. The authority. The authority of all things. But we do have an idea what consciousness is and that allows us to talk about it. And that's what we're going to talk about today with our with our guest, Maritu Gutta. Mind Matters News in this podcast is a product of the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute. So welcome and thanks for listening.
My co Host today is Dr. Angus Minouche. Angus is chair of the Philosophy department at Concordia University in Wisconsin. Angus has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He's a really prolific author and is past president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Hey, Angus.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Bob.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Okay.
At Mind Matters News, we've been interviewing authors featured in the book Minding the Brain. It's edited by Angus Minouj, Brian Kraus, and yours truly. The book delves into the age old question, is the mind more than the brain?
This debate spans centuries.
What was once solely a philosophical and metaphysical discussion has now attracted the attention of science.
For more information about the book, visit mindingthebrain.org that's mindingthebrain.org Our guest today is Dr. Meritu Gutta, who wrote the chapter in Minding the Brain entitled in what Sen is consciousness a property? Dr. Guta teaches analytical philosophy at Biola University and Azusa Pacific University.
He's an Associate Fellow of the center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity International University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from Durham University and he's the co editor of the book Selfhood, Autism and Thought Insertion. And as the editor of Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties, we're going to make links to these books available on the podcast notes. So Dr. Gutta, welcome.
[00:02:59] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Okay. I've been talking a long time so let me turn over the floor to my co host, Angus Minouche. Angus.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: All right, so welcome Aretu and your fascinating chapter.
In what Sense is Consciousness a property?
Really makes us rethink the nature of consciousness.
Maybe we should just begin by defining a few of the basic terms to help listeners understand the topic.
First of all, let's think about what we mean by consciousness. For example, suppose one's lying asleep next to a tree and wakes up and becomes aware of the tree's shape, its branches and leaves, and birds moving around and singing. Well, what just happened? What is it that consciousness adds that wasn't there before when one was asleep?
[00:03:52] Speaker D: I think this is a very good question. And it has got actually many aspects to it. When someone wakes up, you know, from a sleep and all of a sudden, you know, became aware of the things around him or her, what just happened is what philosophers call, that's intransitive consciousness. Like in one sense the person is awake. So it's just a rudimentary form of consciousness in the sense that, yeah, trees are around me, people are whizzing by, and there are cars and so on and so forth. But the person is also engaged in what philosophers call transitive consciousness.
That means that you are aware of objects around you. You're not simply kind of conscious of things without paying attention to what kinds of things those things are that you're conscious of, but you are conscious of, let's say, oh, this object is a tree and there is a car over there, or someone is coming toward me and something like that. But here there are two things that we can talk about. So a person is aware of birds singing and so on. And that is kind of a. There's a visual experience, so.
And a tactile experience as well. Maybe the person can go ahead and reach out and touch things around that environment and so on. But the person basically is engaged in what we call phenomenal consciousness. That is what it is like for that person to hear birds chirping and singing. It's a very unique phenomenological experience based personal and person relative experience.
So I think the question is like pregnant with all sorts of things like, well, there is a transitive consciousness to it, intransitive consciousness to it, phenomenal consciousness to it, and all of the above. So it is not simply kind of a rudimentary form of being conscious, if that makes sense.
[00:06:01] Speaker C: Yeah, that's very helpful that it is a multidimensional phenomenon consciousness.
And so your focus is interesting because what you want to know is what kind of property. Consciousness is. So for the non philosophers in the audience, how do philosophers understand the general idea of property and what would be examples that anyone could relate to?
[00:06:27] Speaker D: Yeah, in our non philosophical moments, we all are in general aware of the differences that we notice around us. So philosophers really understand the notion of property in multiple different ways. And we will have an opportunity to look at that at the latter point. But in a nutshell, properties are meant to be entities of some kind that represent different objects in a certain way.
So if I have a red apple, the apple is red. It's being presented to me as red object. But redness itself is a property of the object that we call an apple. So when I talk about the apple, I talk about the apple being red.
So the redness that property presents, the apple being red.
So one way to understand property would be properties simply help us to understand the way objects are, but objects in turn bear those properties. So there's a kind of a very close relationship, ontological relationship between properties and objects. So like, everyone knows about periodic table. So from high school on, so there are different elementary, you know, elements on the periodic table, start with helium, start with hydrogen, and go to the more complex elements.
So we talk about atomic number, atomic mass of, let's say, hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, and so on.
Why are they different from each other? Like, why don't they simply display similar kinds of properties to us? But that's not what we notice. And people who've organized these elements on periodic table, they've automatically assumed that helium is very distinct kind of element compared to hydrogen, hydrogen is distinct element compared to oxygen, carbon, and so on, because we can distinctly talk about the properties of carbon, which are completely, well, different, even though in some ways related to the properties of oxygen. And we can generalize from this saying, meaning that properties really determine, even at the more deeper ontological level, the essence of the objects in question. But in a nutshell, for everyone out there, we know these elements are different from each other. The secret is the property that each element has or set of properties that each element has. So that's what we mean by, by property, kind of in a general, kind of understandable sense of the term.
[00:09:25] Speaker C: All right, very good. And so the heart of your argument is that consciousness is a unique property. It's very odd. It's not like the redness of an apple or the roundness of an apple or something like that. Just in very basic terms, because we'll get into this later, what is it at its heart that is so odd about the Property of conscious.
[00:09:51] Speaker D: In my view, what is odd about this property is it is deeply familiar to all of us, right? We know what it's like to be a conscious being. We live in our own universe called this conscious universe. Constantly in our mind, things are happening. We're thinking, we're, you know, we're analyzing things, we're introspecting. And lots of things are happening. So, look, I have no way of knowing, for example, Angus, what's happening in your kind of mind. And you have no way of knowing what's happening in my mind unless I am willing to share that with you, and so on. So consciousness is very, very unique because it's inextricably, completely linked, attached to its bearer. So it's deeply subjective, person, relative. And that makes it extremely difficult for us to be able to, for example, scientifically study consciousness. I'm not saying that scientists do not study consciousness. They do study consciousness, but they do study consciousness in a way that wouldn't automatically reveal to us what nature is. And we can get into this at some point during the course of our discussion. So this relativized nature of consciousness is really one of the unique features of it, aspects of it. When I talk about relativized aspect of consciousness, I'm not implying this relativism as it is understood in moral philosophy. I'm not saying that, you know, what is true to you is true to you. What is not true for me is not true for me. Not in that sense. And relativized sense means that every single one of us has our own subjective experiences and that are imprints, well, that are not shareable with any other person. If someone is having in your family a headache, there's no such thing as, like, sharing that headache. A bit of that headache, like, to distribute it, like, to your family members.
The sum of that headache will fizzle out. You will have like one third of the headache and someone will have one fourth of the headache. Such a thing, you have a complete headache that's unique to you. You suffer from it. Other people simply kind of express their sympathy with you, but that's it. How it feels like for you to have that headache experience is absolutely. It's a black hole. It's just only known by you. There's no. We can't plug in an electric cord and just see what happens or kind of read how it feels like on, you know, a bigger screen or something like that. So there's kind of an accessibility, kind of, in a necessary sense of the term. So you have that Subjective experience. And in my view, that is the most interesting aspect of consciousness. So because of that, it's just hard for us to be able to manage it in a way we always wish to manage it, but it's not that simple.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: All right, that really helps. And maybe we can use that example of a headache. Because you say that when we're looking at consciousness, or for example, a consciousness of a headache, you say there's a difference between a first order analysis and a second order analysis.
What are you trying to get at there? And why is it that you think just focusing on a first order analysis is not really adequate?
[00:13:24] Speaker D: Yeah, I think the first order analysis of anything is necessarily partial because it's not going to get to the heart of the matter of the issues in question. For example, in my chapter, I talk about like I've actually caught a philosopher of physics whose textbooks actually I used at Biola when I taught philosophy of physics. His name is Tim Maudlin and he is a fantastic philosopher of physics. And he says that these days education in physics is shut up and calculate. Okay? Don't ask the nature of heat. Don't ask the nature of, I don't know, mass or charge or spin or any major issues. Let's say in physics you can do a marvelous job. You can do a fantastic job. You can even win Nobel Prize on the basis of simply tackling first order issues without ever actually touching second order issues. For example, if you take a thermodynamic phenomenon, heat, yeah, you can, you can. Mathematically, there are equations. You can show how molecules behave and so on and bond and unbond and so on. But what exactly is the nature of hit.
Okay, what is it? That's not a straightforward scientific question.
Science has got a kind of an aspect that can claim to be in its own territory. Of course, thermodynamic phenomenon, okay? That's what scientists do, the empirical aspect of it. But no amount of exhaustive knowledge about the empirical aspect of that question is going to give you a complete picture of what the nature of heat is. In fact, let me even add like the nature of gravity, for example, if you take a simple gravitational equation, force equals g, which is constant m1, m2 over r squared, okay? It's is this equation literally tells us what gravity is, or is this equation is meant to tell us the phenomenon that we witness when we throw a big rock up into the air, it gets pulled down. When we do the same thing, we will get pulled down to the ground.
Look, the equation I just mentioned doesn't tell you about the nature of gravity. It tells you the phenomenon that you witness about what we say, gravity. So you can be excellent physicist and you know, manipulating this equation and relating it to the phenomenon that you witness in your environment without ever having a different knowledge of the nature of gravity. So as we speak, we still are scrambling what gravity is, is it a force? Well, modern physics actually doubts that. So how should we understand about that? So the second order approach to first order issues is always kind of focusing on a fundamental, bedrock, foundational, metaphysical, ontological assumptions that are being made by people who actually engage in first order investigation of those things.
So as a philosopher, that's what you do. So you appreciate physicists, you appreciate chemists, you appreciate biologists, but you don't really leave your research there. You go deeper and say, well, if the biologist tells you what life is, well, okay, a biologist might say life, metabolism, reproduction, blah, blah, these are features. It doesn't tell me anything substantial about what life is. So what life is is a different kind of question compared to what the features of life are. So in a nutshell, second order approach is always digging out this metaphysical buried assumptions, ontological baited assumptions, which cannot be eradicated, cannot be avoided. No matter what people say verbally, they can deny verbally, they are always there and they do their magic. And therefore I can argue that for any given discipline, P, there is the philosophy of that discipline called P, Economics, theology, physics, chemistry, history, you mentioned any first order discipline, there is a philosophy of that discipline. Therefore, we can never complete our investigation if we don't bring these two approaches to help us understand at a deeper level, whatever that we are investigating. That's exactly what I need in this show.
[00:17:57] Speaker C: That's very, very helpful. And could you apply that directly to a conscious experience like the consciousness of pain? What's the difference there between the first order and the second order approach when we're talking about pain?
[00:18:12] Speaker D: So neuroscientists often engage in the investigation of pain. And the way they do that is, let's say they might like peer into your brain, let's say using functional magnetic resonance imaging or other techniques, which are too many in neuroscience, they might not actually ask questions like what is painfulness? What makes pain pain?
What is the connection between pain and its painfulness? When I talk about the painfulness of pain, I am talking about the quality of pain. So I can talk about pain without ever engaging in its nature, such as its quality painfulness. So if you take most philosophers who are working on philosophy of mind, their entire attempt is to get rid of this quality aspect, the painfulness aspect, because the painfulness aspect is squarely grounded in first person perspective.
You are the only person who can tell us how painful it is to you when you experience a certain, let's say, a token pain.
So you can talk about pain without ever investigating painfulness. If you do not investigate painfulness, you're leaving out the quality of pain. So your understanding of the nature of pain is not only fragmented, it's truncated, it's half baked, and it will never be complete. The reason is this. If painfulness, if pain doesn't have painfulness, if pain doesn't have a quality that we call painfulness, literally, I will have no way of literally telling you how painful a certain pain experience that I'm having is, how terrible my headache experience is. I tell you, my headache is awful. I hate it, I do not want to have it ever again. It is stupid. And I always remember and I cringe. Why? Because it's already recorded in my mind. I know the quality of that, that kind of pain. Let's say people who suffer from migraine, for instance, they tell you that it's a excruciating in a different sense, at a different level, at a different depth.
But if, if you have never experienced migraine, you have no idea what they are talking about, but you can deduce from your own mini headaches that you, you have experienced in the past, oh, it must be awful, and so on. But people who really suffer from migraine, they tell us that it's not an ordinary pain. So what they are saying is that they know what the quality feels like. And, and the only way that we can make real, genuine progress in investigating the nature of pain is absolutely engaging in second order analysis of what this painfulness is all about.
Pain is first order, but painfulness is a second order approach that we take as philosophers or people who work on philosophy of mind to spell out and dig out and just explain and uncover, unravel the very heart of this quality.
I'm not implying that we have an exhaustive knowledge of this quality. Even in neuroscience there are so many gaps because neuroscientists literally do not spend much of their time in trying to ask these questions. They just focus on the surface level issue or pain. Okay, let's actually kind of come up with a number line between 0 and 1. What, where should we rate? Like what's the rate of your pain experience? And so on. Those things are, they don't really explain the quality of pain. But then you're Being asked to rate the pain, which means that they are implying against their own, like, fundamental position, they are conceding that it is you, not them, who can rate actually the extent to which you are actually kind of experiencing this pain. So it goes back to what I said. It is private, personal, grounded in first person perspective. The only way we can investigate the quality of pain is absolutely taking second order approach, not first order.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: So Meureto, I'm an engineer and we have a saying in engineering and it says in theory, theory and reality are the same, in reality they are not.
It seems to me that your first order thing is that in theory, theory and reality are the same. That's where we go into equations and simulations and such. But they never explain reality in the totality of reality. And therefore we need to get into that either through more depth or a philosophical interpretation.
[00:22:52] Speaker D: Absolutely. I think you nailed the nail on its head. Because, look, I personally don't understand why people get worked up like, look, we haven't created this universe and we're lucky actually to be here. So we've been given consciousness, a conscious like mind. That's why we investigate things. That's why we invented drones. And as an engineer, you guys do marvelous things and so on. It took what we call consciousness. Consciousness is extremely unique phenomenon in relation to us. We are the only species who are able to be creative in the way that we are. And I think there is not a single evidence of other species ever created, like, I don't know, cars or even the simplest things that are extremely complicated, you know. So first order approach taken by itself is a territory where you can confuse reality with theory, not only reality with theory, theory models with theory. Models are not true or false, they are just toys. Like they are like fork, you know, insofar as they work in helping you explain or manage a certain natural phenomena, you keep them with you. When they fail, toss them out the window. But the problem is, once you get confused, people die over models. Like, as if models are like a matter of life and death.
I think many scientists have a very, very convoluted understanding of the relationship between theory models and reality. Models are toys. They are just tools.
They do not actually describe anything. It is your human attempt to use it as a tool to explain something independently existing out there.
So the tool itself is not part of reality, the tool itself, at times it might succeed in bringing you nearer, relatively speaking, and understanding how things are out there. Some tools are better than others, some are awful tools. So we discarded them even in science. So I Think that's the profoundest claim that I've ever heard. Because first order approach taken in and of itself is literally, it's a recipe for disaster. Because you would never, never make any progress because you've already convinced yourself that theory and reality are just converged in that approach. No, reality converges between first and second order approach.
But our knowledge of anything is always going to be partial, no matter even if we combine the two. It doesn't mean that, you know, it's a piece of cake where we can be in a position to unravel the mystery of the reality, but we can make a tremendous progress. So the animosity and antagonism that we're witnessing, okay, and a scientist would say philosophy contributes nothing. You know, it's just a waste of time and blah, blah. When they make even that argument. They are helping themselves doing philosophy. And the only thing that we should, we should do on our part is help them understand that they are practicing philosophy. So by practicing philosophy, if you are against it, then you are defeating what you're saying.
So it's sort of like me saying I'm not giving this interview in English and I'm so sorry guys and, and then keep on, you know, giving this interview in English and you'd definitely be confused. You might even like suspect this guy is like, is he having a mental breakdown? Or someone at Biola who can help him. And you know, you know, you see that self defeating nature, I think that's kind of obvious for so many people.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: You know, you touched on this, but this is something Yagos and I was talking about. We're a little bit off topic here, but the idea that people fall so in love with their models that they won't abandon them even when they're proven wrong. Angus and I were talking about this beforehand and indeed that's true. And I think that that's the definition of thinking outside of the box. And that's where the creativity comes in. You have to think outside of the outside of your rut and the older you get, and Angus and I agree, the older you get, the, the deeper the rut you dig and the harder it is to see outside of the box. And it's all the young people that don't know what's impossible that come out and do great things.
Anyway, let's get back on topic. Angus.
[00:27:18] Speaker C: Yeah, so this shows, I think already that there's something quite remarkable about mental properties when you give that second order analysis. The painfulness that you have this intrinsically subjective, intentional quite when we look at the responses of philosophers. You distinguish four and end up rejecting three of them. The first one is called the ontological thesis about properties. What's that saying?
[00:27:49] Speaker D: Yeah, ontological thesis about properties treats individual distinct properties to be independent of each other.
For example, mental properties are mental properties by their nature. They are not physical properties.
Physical properties are not mental properties, they are just physical properties. For example, physical objects can be described in terms of the space that they occupy and the extension that they display. For example, the table in my office right here at Biola is extended in a space. It occupied a space.
So that's a kind of Descartes definition of, you know, the property of physical objects. So we're not going to be able to lump that with, let's say, a propositional attitude, which means a property that we call beliefs or desires or intentions or regrets and so on.
These are mental properties. They do not extend in space, nor do they occupy a space.
And they are not even visible. We can't really see them. So there is a complete, sharp difference here. But they work in tandem. You know, my beliefs are sustained by the healthy functioning of my brain. And my brain is kind of complicated organ with at least hundred billion neurons, each neuron making 10 different, 10,000 different connections at the least. That would really give us like a minimum of 100 trillion synapses. All of those work in amazingly complicated, mind bogglingly like breathtaking manner. You have neurotransmitters and their properties, electricity and, you know, blood and water and proteins. And then the list goes on and on and on. Okay, that's a physical property. All of that is physical property. But then we have this mental properties. So ontological thesis says, let us not lump those two species of properties. Let us keep them distinct from each other without denying that they collaborate and they work together and they are in sync most of the times.
So that is literally what the ontological thesis is saying without reducing one to the other.
[00:30:15] Speaker C: So now of course physicalists in general don't want to grant there's anything special about the mantle. So they adopt what you call either the conceptual thesis or the identity thesis, or the eliminativist thesis. Can you kind of briefly explain what they say and why ultimately you think that they're not adequate?
[00:30:39] Speaker D: So the conceptual thesis says, well look, let us go ahead and use the terms, okay, yeah, mental properties and physical properties. Let us not sacrifice these terms and kind of reduce them to one single term. Rather than doing that, I can say, when I say mental properties, I do not mean these are Properties like unique kind of species compared to physical properties or the neuronal firings in my brain. But what we're witnessing here is like a conceptual difference, not the referent difference. I want to make this point clear when I say referent object, that the descriptors that we use are meant to refer to.
So the conceptual thesis says there is only one species of property that is physical property.
We can talk about this one as species. That's physical property using two distinct concepts.
When I say mental and physical, I mean one kind of property, ultimately speaking, that's kind of physical property.
That's one aspect of the conceptual thesis. But things are not that straightforward. And I just want to add one more kind of twist to it. There are philosophers who reject being identified as physicalists. For example, let's say if you take John Hile, very prominent philosopher, he's a neutral monist.
Neutral monism is a view. According to Hirsch, properties are neither physical nor mental. Okay, how should we go about understanding this claim? We don't have time to get into that. But just simply, what else is left?
Yeah, I want your listeners to think about it, suffer over it and sweat over it and so on. So I think that would be fun stuff. But the definition is okay, they are neither physical nor mental. But then when we talk about properties, we are just not talking about ontologically distinct properties, but we're talking about a property that's neither physical nor mental. Hence the name says that neutral monism. There's one thing, there's one property, neutral. Neutral between what? Neutral between, like pronouncing that these properties are ontologically distant from each other. So John Hile himself, as far as is concerned, the best way to understand about properties is what he call powerful qualities. As powerful qualities, properties are both powerful and they are also qualitative.
And he uses the example called sphericality.
If you take tomato, tomato is a spherical in its shape. Okay, so sphericality is the quality of the tomato, but then the shape of the tomato. Sphericality also allows tomato to roll over, let's say over a flat surface, let's say across a flat surface, because it's a sphericality will enable it to roll.
So Heyl says that, well, properties are powerful qualities, means that they are both instantiating the feature of powerfulness and the qualitative feature at the same time. So we shouldn't really kind of, with surgical precision, identify powerfulness with another quality and qualitativeness with another quality. He already defined his definition neutral monism. Well, he is not going to concede that properties are ontologically mental and physical? No, neither. But he's neutral on that. But he wants to say that they are powerful qualities. When you see properties of objects, certain aspects of those objects are being powered, enabled to do something because of the quality that those objects actually have. So the conceptual thesis comes in many different forms. But David Papanu, the British philosopher, actually calls people who defend a conceptual thesis conceptual dualists. Conceptual dualists are not substance dualists. They are simply literally defending the duality of concepts. Which means mental and physical are concepts that are meant to have one single referent, if that makes sense.
[00:35:35] Speaker C: Yeah, it does.
What about the more extreme austere views, the identity thesis and the eliminativist approach?
[00:35:46] Speaker D: Yeah, in my chapter, actually I criticize a little bit Heil's approach and Papanius characterization as well. A person who is committed to the conceptualist thesis is automatically, you know, is forced to embrace the identity thesis. I know these two philosophers wouldn't reject, but Heil actually rejects my comment here. But yeah, the identity thesis says literally the identity that is at play here is not qualitative identity, but it's numerical, a strict identity. So this is kind of a concept that is fleshed out by invoking what we call philosophers. Leibniz, indiscernibility of identicals.
Leibniz is a 17th century philosopher. I think many people know him, you know, reading the history of philosophy. So this law called indiscernibility of identicals simply says that for all X and for all Y there is a property P such that if one thing is true of X, the same property must be true of Y. In that case, X and Y are strictly identical, not qualitatively strictly identical. So the identity thesis is literally saying that mental properties are 100% with zero qualification and reservations are the same thing as physical properties. Which means that to be absolutely precise, neuronal firings in our brain or action potential in our brain or whatever, you know, this different neurotransmitters actually do chemical properties in our brain, for example. So the identity is not missing any word. And there are many people who are committed to this view, including Jao Gun Keane, for example, very influential philosopher. So the identity thesis here should be understood in this, in a strictest form, not in this qualitative form. So I hope I don't know. Angus, do you want me to explain qualitative sameness and strict sameness, or is that okay?
[00:37:58] Speaker C: That should be okay. I really just want you to focus more on what is it about the subjectivity feature which you focus on in the chapter that in the end makes you argue that the identity view, or even the eliminative view view that wants to get rid of mental properties altogether. Why do you think that they're ultimately, you know, unsatisfactory? And we do have to maintain the reality of mental properties and especially consciousness, right?
[00:38:31] Speaker D: So consciousness is sort of like an umbrella term for various kinds of mental properties such as sensations or human agency or perception and the rest. So if you adopt identity thesis, basically, literally what you're saying is that consciousness that we call the subjective experience that we all have, the inner awareness that we each has, the fact that we can be in a position to tell how it feels like for me to have a taste of coffee or to look at a beautiful day, a sunny day or a roaring ocean, you know, sound and so on, all of that is nothing but literally like neurons bumping into each other, you know, like a, you know, a traffic jam, you know, you know, kind of hitting each other. There's nothing special about that. So they say that's what it is. And okay, if that's what it is, why is it that I end up actually having my own story to tell about how things feel like for me? So where am I getting that information? Why is that information available to me? You see, if you ask me right now which part of my brain is lighting up, I have no idea. I can't. I can't give you any information whatsoever. I am pretty sure that this is true of each one of you as well. We can't introspect our physical, you know, properties, you know, we, we. We don't know. We can't introspect our voice, blood circulation. We can't introspect our protein.
How proteins actually get organized and synthesized, we have no idea. We don't introspect, our digestion takes place and so on. All of these are physical things. But imagine you can introspect so many things.
Where is that? Okay, here is, here's this analogy. So here's a. Here's an impediment. So why I'm able to do certain things, such as introspection, but why am I not able to, let's say, be in a position to do the same thing with respect to my other physical properties, let's say neuron and firing and so on. So identity thesis seems to be very, very unconvincing now, because if it were identical, then I would be in a position to have some insight into it. So since I don't, hence by Leibniz and Discernibility of identical.
We can actually kill the identity thesis here because I'm telling you a property that is true of my mental life, that is not true of my physical aspect of my life. Because I am able to do X, but I'm not able to do Y. Therefore what is true of Y is not true of X. Therefore the difference is established. Hence it should follow from that the identity thesis is not going to be true.
And the same thing with eliminativist thesis. Churchlands would say that both husband and wife Church Lentz they say, well, okay, physicalism might have some deficiencies and so on. Their proposal is you have to deny folk psychology altogether. Common sense is garbage. It doesn't really illuminate anything.
Common sense doesn't unravel any mystery. We have to hope that neuroscience will give us information and help us understand the true nature of our own experiences. So their proposal is, beliefs are not true, they are not real. Desires are not real. Intentions are not real. Painfulness is not real. And the list goes on and on and on and on. That is even the worst proposal than the identity proposal. So let me deny. Okay, let's deny together. Now we are having headache, but let's deny, pretend that oh, headache is not true. Like it's just I'm dreaming or something like that. Good luck.
So the whole experiment that we undertake to eliminate beliefs, desires and intentions and the rest automatically fails. So common sense is not mistaken here.
So I'm not saying common sense is perfect.
Well, where it goes wrong, we should prune it, we should correct it, we shouldn't jetsen it.
Science is entirely grounded in common sense. And I've, I've written elsewhere why that's the case. And I'm ready to debate anyone who tells me that science is completely divorced from common sense. What are we talking about?
Our initial gateway to any investigation is absolutely common sense. So you see the problem now in the eliminative case, consciousness is not real. How about that? Okay, we've eliminated consciousness. Really? What does it even mean?
So what is happening here, to be honest with you guys, is that verbal debate. A verbal debate is just simply making statements and then say, oh, okay, consciousness is not real. Okay, but you go home with your full experience.
Nothing has changed when it comes to your experience. Headache is still real. You feel hungry, you look at the beautiful day, you go like, wow. And you still introspect. Nothing has changed. Nothing. What has changed is a verbal sound we make in saying, oh, okay. Scholars or philosophers have now the majority of them agree that consciousness is not real.
Why does that matter?
We can't bring consciousness into reality by vote. It's not a majority thing.
I, as an individual person, I'm an authority over my subjective experiences. Not even my doctor, not even anyone else. I am the world class authority. You cannot prove me wrong. If I'm having headache, I'm having headache full stop. If I'm not literally being psychotic or some egregious form of medical complications is messing up with me, where I'm hallucinating, auditory hallucination or verbal hallucination, if I am literally a normally functioning human being, a distant human being with, with a very distant life, if I tell you honestly that I'm having a bad headache, no amount of denying that is going to change an Eorta. So what are we doing then? We're wasting our time, that's what we're doing. So forgive me for being absolutely explicit and then just no apologies being asked. Clear? So that's how I do things when it's really obvious there's no point in denying things. So common sense is okay.
[00:45:03] Speaker C: So we looked already at the amazing nature of consciousness and how it really doesn't reduce to anything physical. And some would view this in terms of David Chalmers famous hard problem of consciousness, namely that none of our physical sciences explain or predict that there's something it's like to be us. And yet there is. But in a way your chapter I think raises what might be called an even harder problem of consciousness.
And that is that we have to ask what kind of being, what kind of entity must exist in order for consciousness to exist.
And you argue that consciousness seems to be unique in requiring a bearer. Exactly what is it that you are claiming there? And why does that show that consciousness is a very unique property?
[00:46:00] Speaker D: Yeah, this is a very good question. And I think what I mean by consciousness kind of requiring a bearer as something that's kind of based on my fundamental metaphysical assumption with respect to the nature of consciousness. Because consciousness is necessarily a phenomenon that cannot. What? The phenomenon that cannot exist unless it is borne by a certain kind of entity.
Here's a very straightforward example for people to see my point.
Take for example perception.
I can talk about perception without a perceiver, or let's talk about thinking without a thinker.
How does that work?
Let's do this kind of experiment together.
So David Hume and the Treatises of Human Nature, in one of the books in that volume, he postulates that individual existence, like perceptions, can't exist without having a bearer.
That's a very extraordinary claim.
And While I was doing my PhD, I just couldn't make sense of that. In one sense, I couldn't make sense of that. Well, the English is clear, the statement is clear, the metaphysics is not clear, the ontology is not clear. So I just couldn't bring myself into saying, oh, I nod my head, I can understand. Oh, perception is out there. Wow, wow. Perception one is bigger than perception two. But we're saying that literally without a perceiver, what does that actually mean?
So that doesn't really make sense because we can't make sense of perception and abstraction from a perceiver.
So if perception necessitates perceiver, there's no sense in which we can actually divorce perception from perception.
Because perception as a phenomenon can exist because there is a perceiver.
Thinking as a phenomenon, mental phenomenon can exist because of a thinker.
So once you dissociate the two, you've lost the game because there's no thinking. There cannot be perception in my view. Hence, in the same fashion, if consciousness is perception, thoroughly subjective experience is person dependent in an ontological sense of the term. If we cannot separate perception from perceiver, thinking from a thinker, we cannot, in the same fashion, using the same logic, we cannot divorce consciousness, that subjective experience from a person who is, or from an entity who is metaphysically necessary for that experience to happen or to take place. So the bearer model is now bringing into the picture what many philosophers have actually have ignored for years.
This doesn't include JP Moreland. JP Moreland have argued more or less to the same again to the same conclusion, but I'm bringing this to the forefront of our awareness. Look, when we debate and discuss about consciousness, let us not try consciousness as if consciousness can exist in its own independent island where we can actually look and look at it and treat it as if it's just an entity in its own right. No, look, to crack the mystery of consciousness, the nature of consciousness, we should be able to also crack the mystery of is better.
That is what makes it to be harder.
David Chalmers only talks about the hard problem of consciousness.
Well, he is not concerned about bearer. He doesn't postulate about the bearer of consciousness, by the way, he doesn't even write about that. He never wrote anything explicitly. I had actually a face to face conversation with Chalmers at the University of Arizona. Not once, two, three times. And he said, yeah, he doesn't really kind of include, he never included those kinds of things in his, in his writings. So we can take Chalmers hard problem of consciousness, we can strengthen, in fact increase the pressure on that problem, that's what I'm doing. By bringing into the picture we not only have to talk about the problem of consciousness, we also have to talk about the bearer, the bearer of consciousness. Because consciousness literally cannot exist without sparer. Just like perception cannot exist without a perceiver, thinking cannot exist without a thinker. The same logic works here. If anyone really thinks otherwise, I would like to see anyone to convince me that thinking can exist without a thinker and perception can exist without a perceiver. If I don't get satisfactory answer, then I am going to stick to my guns here. So sorry, that's what I mean.
[00:51:05] Speaker C: That's very helpful. And this bearer dependent nature of consciousness race is a kind of a crisis for how you can locate the property of consciousness in any of the standard views of properties.
For example, if someone is a Platonist, what's the problem if you give a Platonist account of consciousness.
[00:51:32] Speaker D: Excellent. So to see this problem, first let's talk about like very briefly how Platonists view properties. So properties for Platonists, they are universals. Universals are properties that are said to exist in multiple locations, but as numerically one property. Let me explain this. Take for example 20 red cars in 20 different states. Here in United States, each car is red, occupying different locations. In United States in 20 different states.
The ancients asked, ancient philosophers asked, how many rednesses do we have here?
One redness numerically one redness shared by like 10 different or 20 different cars in 20 different states or each car in all of these estates has its own redness token. Redness or redness that's not shareable with another redness of the car that's in another state? So here are two questions. Okay, is redness numerically one shared by multiple objects or multiple objects are instantiating their own mini rednesses?
So if you take Platinus answer, nope, there is one numerically one redness shared by multiple objects. But the redness can exist even if objects didn't instantiate it, didn't exemplify it. So if you apply this logic directly to consciousness, it means literally consciousness is out out there, some in Platonic universe. And your consciousness, my consciousness, Bob's consciousness, Austin's consciousness is a kind of a, a token instantiation of that universal type. We philosophers talk about type versus token. Type is a universal. Token is a kind of a single, a specific instantiation of that single universal or type. So that doesn't make sense to me because I don't think there is consciousness out there in a Platonic universe. Where I'm exemplifying that consciousness and someone is also doing likewise. But there is some complexity here. Well, we can say that the property of being conscious is a property that's shared by all of us universally. Okay?
Like four of us here in this interview session, we each, each one of us shares the property of being conscious. That's fine, that's fine. But we're not. We're not taking that the property of being conscious as a universal here. Like each one of us is literally numerically sharing one universal called being conscious. That's not what we mean. I think this needs a little bit of fleshing out.
[00:54:28] Speaker C: But.
[00:54:29] Speaker D: But the point is it opens the door. Platonist model opens a door for the existence of consciousness, whether or not it is instantiated by us. So it's independently existing thing. Well, the problem is my definition of consciousness is subjective. Experience is how things look to me.
It's specific, it's dependent on me. It's not something existing in abstraction from what I'm experiencing.
That's not the kind of consciousness that we're talking about here. So it's thoroughly attached to me and it defines my nature. So I don't know if this makes sense, but it's a bit complicated as that. But I hope that makes sense.
[00:55:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, because they can't be consciousness. That's generic. That's no one's consciousness. And each person's consciousness is unique. So we don't have this identity that you would have any example of the redness where each of those could be identical.
So that really is a problem. And you say as well that even the Aristotelian account, which perhaps is better in some ways, still faces a problem. You say that it doesn't tell us how subjectivity is connected to the property of being conscious. What's the problem? Even with the Aristotelian account, okay, with
[00:55:52] Speaker D: the Aristotelian approach, actually, the problem is literally shifting the platform of the problem.
I haven't used this term in my chapter, but I think that's exactly what's happening. The reason is Aristotelians and Platonists, they do not disagree over whether or not properties are universals. They do agree, like they have a common, like, convergence point there. You know, Aristotelians say, yeah, universals exist, properties are universals, they can be shared by multiple objects and so on. So a redness, a single numerical redness, can be shared by any number of things. For Aristotelians, the same thing is true. For Platonist. The problem that Aristotelians see in the Platonist model is that in Platonist model, uninstantiated properties also can exist. You see, properties don't have to be exemplified to exist.
Aristotelians reject that. Aristotelians would say objects wherever they are insofar as they are red. They are simply instantiating one numerically, one rare redness. So Aristotelians domesticated the platform where properties get instantiated. The problem that we face is exactly the same kind of problem that we face when I talked about the Platonist model. Like if we adopt Aristotelian model, all of us are instantiating literally numerically the same property called being conscious. Well, this is going to conflict with our own individual experiences. Individual, subjective, unsharable person, relative person, dependent host of experiences. You know, again we go back to the headache stuff. Well, Angus, your headache, Bob's headache, Austin's headache, my headache given, for example, Dian model is exactly numerically the same.
Numerically the same. But the only difference is you are over there, I am over here, someone is over there, someone is over there. But we all are having one kind of a type kind of headache. But we are demonstrating our own token headache. Like I have a token headache of that one headache.
Every one of like Bob has his token headache of that one headache, a bigger headache and the same thing is true.
That's not what consciousness is all about. Conscious experience doesn't work that way. I'm sorry. So the experience goes against that kind of analysis. Therefore it is highly problematic. And there are other things. But this is the main conundrum that we run into even when we take up like the Aristotelian model.
[00:58:34] Speaker C: Now of course there are philosophers who deny universals altogether nominalists. And though we can't talk about all of them properly, probably the most popular approach in nominalism today is trope theory. Could you just explain trope theory briefly? And also then even that really doesn't solve this problem. It doesn't do justice to the nature of consciousness.
[00:59:00] Speaker D: Excellent point. So tropontology, or modern nominalism as some philosophers call it, Tropontology is kind of highly advanced the discussion in this area. But here is right to the point, without getting into kind of a jungle. Tropontology is called a one category ontology.
It does not recognize that there's a distinction between a property and a certain kind of object that instantiates that particular property. For example, take an apple. An apple is an object.
If an apple is red, then we are witnessing, let's say two properties here, even three Properties.
An apple has a size, let's say it could be big or small. And an apple is red, that is the color property. And apple is a spherical, that's a shape property. So a shape property, a size property, and a color property, all of those make up for drop ontology, what we call an object apple.
So there are no two different categories. An apple being an object doesn't belong to the category of, let's say, particulars. You know, philosophers say objects or particulars, and its color property doesn't belong to the property of universals.
For tropontology, these properties literally congregate. They come together and make up an object.
So the common togetherness of the size property, the shape property, the color property, give rise to object that we call an apple. So what just happened here? So we don't have two categories or three categories, for example, we have only one category. So within that one category, the magic happens. So if that's the case, fundamentally it goes against my model. Why the bearer dependent model doesn't really work here because the bearer defendant model actually distinguishes the distinction between the bearer ontologically having its own category and the property it bears. The property has its own ontological category. Aristotle actually has a fine model, but we can't really discuss about him. So top ontology, one of the problems with significant problems is inability, inability to distinguish consciousness and despair at the ontological level.
Yeah, I think defenders of this will say, no, we're not doing that. But they are doing that because it's a one category ontology. But I don't believe in one category ontology because it's a category mistake. I have no idea how an object is kind of a accumulative effect of different kinds of properties coming together, congregating. What is congregating them? What is the glue that glues them all as one object? How's that happening? Nobody has a clue. But defenders of this position say it's a simpler version, it's a simpler theory. I have a big problem when it comes to simplicity. We cannot establish, you know, a simplicity principle and then judge the quality of theories. What should really dictate our judgment of any theory is whether or not it is in sync with the way things are or not. So it's reality that should really determine what, what kind of principle we should be using in order to judge that. So the problem is the denial of the distinct bearer of consciousness, among many other problems, if that makes sense.
[01:02:33] Speaker C: Yeah, that's very helpful. Now, of course, you mentioned this in the chapter you've Got some versions of Buddhism which deny the self. And of course, you've also got Hume's view where he claims that you can understand consciousness without a bearer. And you spoke of that earlier.
And perhaps I could read just an excerpt from what Hume says about that, and I'd like you to kind of comment on this. He famously says, for my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other.
I never catch myself at any time without a perception and can never observe anything but the perception. And so concludes that we are just bundles of perceptions, that there can be consciousness without a bearer. What exactly is it that you think is incoherent about Hume's position?
[01:03:30] Speaker D: Okay, this passage has been honestly exhausted by many countless philosophers over the years.
You know, right there on that passage, Hume is automatically presupposing, but then at the same time giving us an impression that he was not aware of what he is doing. He is saying, like, I have been looking. I have been looking into my core being, and then I did not run into, let's say, the self and so on. Well, what has he been doing? Who. Who has been looking into his. His own core being, who has been searching for, let's say, the self or something like that? This is the entity he has already distinguished. He has already admitted, without being aware of what he was doing, that there is a fundamental distinction between a person who has been searching for something and, you know, perceptions that are totally mental and so on. So he has given us a wonderful account of, yeah, perception is real. This is real, that is real. And then he was distinct. You know, he was aware of those things. So that's an entity. So he admitted that he was an entity, but he was not aware of the implication of his own statements. It is problematic because if I were to say to you guys, as I said earlier, well, I cannot speak a word of English. Or let's take for example, the logical positivist claim that any statement, unless it is empirically verifiable or verified, it cannot count as genuine knowledge. Well, okay, we know how things went really, really bad and wrong for that view because philosophers came along and said to logical positivism of the 1930s and 40s, well, okay, what exactly justifies the very statement that says that unless X is empirically verifiable, then X doesn't count as a reliable body of knowledge. You can't shove in that statement in any laboratory and test it and then, wait, what kind of output you'll get at the end of doing that. So it's self defeating, self contradictory, and it undermines its own claim. I do believe personally, David Hume's claims literally undermine themselves because he has been searching for a cell. Then there is an entity right there.
So he's a bundle theorist. He says that only bundles exist. You know, bundles are universals, but they have to come together somehow in making up objects in our world.
There are certain examples in physics, but we don't have time to talk about that. But you see, I think, Angus, I think this is clear. Like, look, I just. There's a caveat here. Many philosophers want to rescue Hume here. Like they want to put things in his mouth and they want to rescue the implications of this passage. I think, to be absolutely honest, it is incoherent because he is undermining his own assumptions because he already presupposed him being distinct from what he has been searching for.
I don't know if that makes sense.
[01:06:49] Speaker C: Yeah, no, that does. And I, I've noticed too that he has multiple bouts of introspection. What is it that is able to compare these? If he really were a bundle, right, then there would be nothing which would be able to compare one bout of introspection with another. And of course, the thing that's doing it is the I that he keeps himself referring to. So I think you're right. It is an incoherent position. Now, what about others? When we're thinking about the.
What explains the emergence of the bearer? And you describe your view as a form of strong emergence. There are some. Nancy Murphy, and probably, it's probably a majority view, is that somehow it's just the complexity of the, of the brain. Somehow because of the hundred billion neurons and all of the amazing synaptic connections. If you have a system that complicated, well, consciousness is the kind of thing that's just going to emerge. And you disagree. You don't think that complexity is the right place to look for an explanation. Can you explain?
[01:07:56] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. So Colin McGinn, a British philosopher, has got an excellent book where he, in my view, successfully dismantles this kind of assumption and hope on complexity and causing a phenomenon, such a complex phenomenon as consciousness. So if you take complexity, if complexity literally plays a causal role in bringing about the existence of consciousness, then we need to first do the metaphysical hard work. What exactly is the property of complexity, such that in light of or in virtue of that property, the complexity in question ends up causing the phenomenon that we call consciousness?
So as far as, like up to now, up to now, people who Appeal to complexity.
They are literally talking about complexity, not because they have any evidence whatsoever.
So let's suppose, let's relate this to Bob's kind of field, computer science.
So make a computer as complex as you want.
So ChatGPT, for example, the 40 or the 4, 0 model, or 4O for a Macron or omnipotent, something like model that came out recently.
So make it as complex as you want.
It's just not obvious that complexity would do the magic here, because nervous system is extremely complicated. But the complexity is often talked about from the physical standpoint. Philosophers always, like, are ignorant of the functional complexity. So there's a functional complexity, the physical complexity, the networks, the circuits that you see, the neurons, how they are connected, blah, blah, blah. Take the functional complexity. The functional complexity is a cognitive phenomenon that would really require a high level of analysis here. So if complexity is causing consciousness, how is it causing consciousness? Like, where is this consciousness coming from?
So if you take embryology, human embryology, you have a woman gamete, a male gamete, and when they are united through procreative means, you have cells that coagulate, they come together and then they just start, like differentiating themselves. Structures emerge completely, Complexity emerge. You know, organ specialization emerges, liver cells specialized as liver cells, heart cells specialized as heart cells, and so on and so forth. Look, nowhere in its initial or in subsequent stages. We have no idea whatsoever where this phenomenon actually comes from.
Nothing. We simply witness when it manifests itself.
So if complexity were something that actually did this kind of magic to happen, then we would be in a position at this point, given our current neuroscientific knowledge, at least to get some insights into how this phenomenon actually emerges from brain complexity. Here is my conclusion. It is literally nothing more than pronouncing. It's a hook. It's a hypothesis unconfirmed, even to a lesser degree.
So there's absolutely no good reason for us to take it seriously because it's just saying it, oh, complexity did it. We don't know how it did it. Let's keep on doing this research and at some point we will get there. Even to get there, we haven't been given, you know, clear explanations about the nature of this hypothesis and how the hypothesis is supposed to work.
So I am not sold into it. And I think there are so many philosophers who are skeptical of the complexity because we haven't been taught about the nature of this complexity, the property of this complexity. Because when we appeal to complexity, we are appealing to causal process.
So what is the property that really endowed this complexity to be able to do that. I would like to hear if anyone has an answer for that question.
[01:12:09] Speaker C: That's very helpful. I mean, and certainly it's clear that we can have very complex systems, the entire universe, for example, or the Internet. And there's no reason, unless you're a panpsychist, to think that either of them is conscious.
And though the gap seems to be, as you suggest, it's a qualitative gap. Nothing about mere complexity of external relations has anything to do with, with what you say in the last part of your chapter, that what's really extraordinary about consciousness is it cannot be shared by more than one individual or exist uninstantiated. Whereas, of course, you know, anything physical, it could be a computer chip or a neuron in someone's brain.
Well, that can certainly.
You could take that chip or neuron and put it in another system, right? And it'd be just the same thing.
So exactly what's so important about this unshareability of consciousness and the fact that it cannot exist uninstantiated?
[01:13:14] Speaker D: So it cannot exist uninstantiated because when we talk about the phenomenal consciousness, we are literally talking about thoroughly about subjective experience or experiences.
So to say that these experiences can exist without me, for example, is sort of like saying my headache can't exist without me, my pain can exist without me. My test experience, let's say testing coffee, testing ice cream or testing smoothie or something like that. That test can exist without me.
It's really, really a meaningless statement. Let me bring in John Locke here. John Locke has this, what he calls primary qualities and secondary qualities. So for John Locke, primary qualities are out there. Like, you know, trees are out there, objects are out there, anyone can access them. Scientists can't really kind of investigate their investigation and so on, so forth. But he is entirely, not only unsure, he doesn't think that secondary qualities actually can be detected in primary qualities.
What this means is that in a nutshell, take my taste buds, okay, Look, I enjoy coffee, so I'm a very big coffee drinker.
I don't know whether this is because coffee was discovered in Ethiopia for the first time. I don't know.
But I started drinking coffee like when I was at college and so on and so forth, but ever since, I just became a coffee drinker. So look, if you bring any medical expert, let's say a doctor, to assess and examine my taste buds to its, like, micro level, like, to the level of like, even dissecting quarks or even Even go down even beyond quarks if you like. Do you think that doctor or scientist can come up with any understanding of how coffee tastes like for me?
No. How smoothie tastes like for me? No. So my sales do not have any experience of tasting a smoothie or coffee or something like that.
But I know what it feels like for me to have a taste of a smoothie or coffee or juice or something like that. So there's a deep mystery right here. So we have a physical infrastructure in place. My test. But experts can analyze the nature of these sales, how they are configurated and how they behave, what their properties are and so on. But having that exhaustive knowledge is literally, is not going to produce no, no, no information about my subjective aspect of experience, let's say my test experience, my and my head experience and so on. So this is the conundrum that we are literally kind of in.
This is the confusing part of this experience. My test bits are there to be studied. They can be studied by anyone. They can be understood by anyone. But you are lacking the secondary qualities.
So I have to test that. But let me shock you guys, but I'm not against people who test like expert testers of coffee or other, other beverages or something like that. Technically speaking, they are not experts. Okay?
Their expertise would represent my experience. Right.
So if you are, if you are a world class coffee taster, let's say I'm not going to come at your livelihood. Go ahead and make money that you make. I'm happy for you. But why should I trust your judgment of how that coffee tastes and then concur with you? That's exactly the way it's going to test for me. Can I do that? No.
Mine is unique. It's unique to me and yours is unique.
It's your, it's how you, how things really feel like when you test them kind of thing. So I think I would say that there's a really, really deep mystery here. I don't think we can narrow this gap, gulf and gap that easily. And so the primary and the secondary qualities, they work in tandem, but then they are kind of not like each other. No amount of our knowledge of primary quality is going to produce any significant knowledge of our experience of secondary qualities. That's exactly why consciousness is unsharable. You can't. We, any given two people cannot have the same kind of subjective experience. It's just not possible.
It's not possible in a sense that the reality is such that we don't see that happening. How about that?
[01:18:11] Speaker C: That's very good.
[01:18:11] Speaker B: Well, what's interesting about this too, is that in the United States Patent Office, you cannot patent a smell or a taste because it's not something that can be tested. And then going back to your idea of complexity in the area of artificial intelligence, the reason they believe that consciousness is going to emerge is that there is the underlying assumption that we are computers made out of meat. And therefore, if we're computers made out of meat, you count the neurons in the human brain, you count the neurons in a artificial neural network, and when they are roughly the same, you say, voila, we, we must have consciousness emerge. George Gilder, I love this statement. George Gilder, who is one of the founders of Discovery Institute, calls this idea of emergence of consciousness from complexity, rapture of the nerds.
This is what it is. It's a faith and it's kind of a religion.
So that's interesting even to add to
[01:19:13] Speaker D: that briefly, for example, Bob, you're a computer expert, and what exactly is like, where do you guys create blood, proteins and water? And what are we comparing? Like, okay, in our case, our biology is in all aspects is unlike the complexity of any computer ever invented.
[01:19:40] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
[01:19:41] Speaker D: So when we compare two objects, at least we need to have a common platform where we can say we share this and that and that. I think my own judgment. I'm teaching the philosophy of artificial intelligence systems there at Biola, a course I introduced, a graduate level course.
[01:20:00] Speaker B: I would be very interested in the material you're using. Let's talk offline and I'd like to see what you're doing talking about. Okay, go ahead.
[01:20:07] Speaker D: Right, right, exactly. So what are we comparing with what? Because look, the, the gadgets that we are inventing, it took us, it took our knowledge, our creativity, our ontological nature to be able to produce them, to invent them.
So for us to be able to appreciate our gadgets in the sense of them being superior to us, or a day will come when they will be superior to us, is literally ontologically, it doesn't really make sense to me because there is unbridgeable ontological gap between us and the artifacts that we create because we are their gods with a small G, it took us.
So no nonsense can be made of any complex artificial intelligence can be compared with our natural intelligence. Having said that, I think this issue should be taken very, very seriously, because I'm really struggling what the basis of the comparison is. If you have invented this object, you've already ontologically, your superiority to these devices is literally sealed up Ontologically, so there's nothing you can do about it.
So, and also, if consciousness can be created on a machine, what exactly is consciousness?
We haven't solved this question, we haven't tackled this question. So if we are claiming that we can create consciousness, conscious machines and so on, without even tackling a fundamental question of what consciousness is, what are we actually doing and what are we really talking about?
[01:21:52] Speaker C: About.
[01:21:52] Speaker D: First, you have to understand X in order to be able to reproduce X. Here is my judgment analog. I will stop with this. I like the Bob. You can correct me, you can correct me. Everything artificial intelligence has achieved up to this point doesn't go beyond simulation.
[01:22:10] Speaker B: Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, Noam Chomsky called this chatgpt digital plagiarism. And so, yeah, it's, it's just spitting out what it's been taught.
[01:22:20] Speaker C: So wrapping this up, I think that what's great about your approach, moretto, the great takeaway lesson, is this, that we need to resolutely investigate consciousness on its own terms. In other words, just try to understand it as it is given to us and not try to force it into any preconceived scheme, whether it be AI or any particular view of properties that works elsewhere. Because there really is something unique about it. It reminds me in a way of how the Church Fathers finally realized that Aristotelian metaphysics was not up to explaining the persons of the Trinity. You just have to investigate the Trinity on its own terms.
So if you're right about approaching consciousness in this way way, what would your advice be for subsequent research? What should people be focusing on? What's maybe not going to be helpful if we're going to make progress along the lines that you recommend.
[01:23:26] Speaker D: There are so many things that I can say here, but let me say briefly the following things. First of all, it takes us back to what we have been saying at the beginning of this talk. We need to open ourselves up to embrace first order approach and second order approach. So there's a sort of like tribalism going on between, sometimes between philosophers and scientists and so on. So scientists think that the empirical approach is always more qualified than the non empirical approach in understanding the nature of something, let's say consciousness in this case. I think we need to bridge that gap. That's not going to be helpful. I think we've already talked about how our knowledge of anything in this world almost is going to be partial even if we combine the two approaches. But combining the two approaches will always give us a very good shot at what we're doing in terms of helping us to succeed to some extent. I think I would like to say scientists and philosophers, really, they have to work together. They have to have conviction that philosophical infrastructure is really, really important for the, for the progress that we are always like, striving to see in the scientific domain. I think that's one thing that I would like to kind of highly recommend, because otherwise we are really talking in our own little cubicles. Philosophers produce models after models and scientists produce models after models. And it's just not clear, honestly what to make of like, all this diverse, mutually exclusive, sometimes highly like, contradictory, sometimes models. Let's open ourselves up. We are in this one universe. Here is the best opportunity. Let's do our best. That's my recommendation, kind of for pragmatic reasons.
Anything else, Angus?
[01:25:29] Speaker C: No. That's really a great way to kind of summarize the approach, and I think it's very inspiring. I think that if we focus on consciousness being one phenomenon and we recognize there are these different approaches, that the best way for progress to occur is if we respect the insights that come from a variety of disciplines. And that's really what the whole Minding the Brain project was all about. And I think that's really an excellent takeaway message.
[01:25:59] Speaker B: That's great.
Thank you. Maretu. This has been a great time and I've learned a lot and this has been very instructive. So thank you. Angus Manouj and I have been talking with Dr. Murray Tuguta, who teaches analytic philosophy at Biola University.
We've been talking about his chapter in what Sense Is Consciousness a Property?
This is a chapter in Minding the Brain. For more information about the book and to read Dr. Gutta's chapter, visit mindingthebrain.org that's mindingthebrain.org I am your co host, Robert J. Marks. Until next time, be of good cheer.
[01:26:45] Speaker E: This is this has been Mind Matters News with your host, Robert J. Marks. Explore more at MindMatters AI.
That's MindMatters AI.
Mind Matters News is directed and edited by Austin Egbert. The opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the speakers. Mind Matters News is produced, produced and copyrighted by the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute.
