{"id":12780,"date":"2016-05-12T08:58:57","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T15:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12780"},"modified":"2016-05-12T07:04:14","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T14:04:14","slug":"big-picture-part-five-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/12\/big-picture-part-five-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Picture Part Five: Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>One of a series of quick posts on the six sections of my book <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/bigpicture\/\">The Big Picture<\/a><em> &#8212; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/08\/big-picture-part-one-cosmos\/\">Cosmos<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/09\/big-picture-part-two-understanding\/\">Understanding<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/10\/big-picture-part-three-essence\/\">Essence<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/11\/big-picture-part-four-complexity\/\">Complexity<\/a>, Thinking, Caring.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Chapters in Part Five, <strong>Thinking<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"p3\">37. Crawling Into Consciousness<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">38. The Babbling Brain<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">39. What Thinks?<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">40. The Hard Problem<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">41. Zombies and Stories<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">42. Are Photons Conscious?<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">43. What Acts on What?<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">44. Freedom to Choose<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Even many people who willingly describe themselves as naturalists &#8212; who agree that there is only the natural world, obeying laws of physics &#8212; are brought up short by the nature of consciousness, or the mind-body problem. David Chalmers famously distinguished between the &#8220;Easy Problems&#8221; of consciousness, which include functional and operational questions like &#8220;How does seeing an object relate to our mental image of that object?&#8221;, and the &#8220;Hard Problem.&#8221; The Hard Problem is the nature of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Qualia\">qualia<\/a>, the subjective experiences associated with conscious events. &#8220;Seeing red&#8221; is part of the Easy Problem, &#8220;experiencing the redness of red&#8221; is part of the Hard Problem. No matter how well we might someday understand the connectivity of neurons or the laws of physics governing the particles and forces of which our brains are made, how can collections of such cells or particles ever be said to have an experience of &#8220;what it is like&#8221; to feel something?<\/p>\n<p>These questions have been debated to death, and I don&#8217;t have anything especially novel to contribute to discussions of how the brain works. What I can do is suggest that (1) the emergence of concepts like &#8220;thinking&#8221; and &#8220;experiencing&#8221; and &#8220;consciousness&#8221; as useful ways of talking about macroscopic collections of matter should be no more surprising than the emergence of concepts like &#8220;temperature&#8221; and &#8220;pressure&#8221;; and (2) our understanding of those underlying laws of physics is so incredibly solid and well-established that there should be an enormous presumption against modifying them in some important way just to account for a phenomenon (consciousness) which is admittedly one of the most subtle and complex things we&#8217;ve ever encountered in the world.<\/p>\n<p>My suspicion is that the Hard Problem won&#8217;t be &#8220;solved,&#8221; it will just gradually fade away as we understand more and more about how the brain actually does work. I love this image of the magnetic fields generated in my brain as neurons squirt out charged particles, evidence of thoughts careening around my gray matter. (Taken by an MEG machine in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.psych.nyu.edu\/poeppel\/\">David Poeppel&#8217;s lab at NYU<\/a>.) It&#8217;s not evidence of anything surprising &#8212; not even the most devoted mind-body dualist is reluctant to admit that things happen in the brain while you are thinking &#8212; but it&#8217;s a vivid illustration of how closely our mental processes are associated with the particles and forces of elementary physics.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/my-brain.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12837\" src=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/my-brain.jpg\" alt=\"my-brain\" width=\"600\" height=\"399\" srcset=\"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/my-brain.jpg 600w, https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/my-brain-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The divide between those who doubt that physical concepts can account for subjective experience and those who are think it can is difficult to bridge precisely because of the word &#8220;subjective&#8221; &#8212; there are no external, measurable quantities we can point to that might help resolve the issue. In the book I highlight this gap by imagining a dialogue between someone who believes in the existence of distinct mental properties (M) and a poetic naturalist (P) who thinks that such properties are a way of talking about physical reality:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>M:<\/em> I grant you that, when I am feeling some particular sensation, it is inevitably accompanied by some particular thing happening in my brain \u2014 a \u201cneural correlate of consciousness.\u201d What I deny is that one of my subjective experiences simply <em>is<\/em> such an occurrence in my brain. There\u2019s more to it than that. I also have a feeling of <em>what it is like<\/em> to have that experience.<\/p>\n<p><em>P:<\/em> What I\u2019m suggesting is that the statement \u201cI have a feeling\u2026\u201d is simply a way of talking about those signals appearing in your brain. There is one way of talking that speaks a vocabulary of neurons and synapses and so forth, and another way that speaks of people and their experiences. And there is a map between these ways: when the neurons do a certain thing, the person feels a certain way. And that\u2019s all there is.<\/p>\n<p><em>M:<\/em> Except that it\u2019s manifestly not all there is! Because if it were, I wouldn\u2019t have any conscious experiences at all. Atoms don\u2019t have experiences. You can give a <em>functional<\/em> explanation of what\u2019s going on, which will correctly account for how I actually behave, but such an explanation will always leave out the subjective aspect.<\/p>\n<p><em>P:<\/em> Why? I\u2019m not \u201cleaving out\u201d the subjective aspect, I\u2019m suggesting that all of this talk of our inner experiences is a very useful way of bundling up the collective behavior of a complex collection of atoms. Individual atoms don\u2019t have experiences, but macroscopic agglomerations of them might very well, without invoking any additional ingredients.<\/p>\n<p><em>M:<\/em> No they won\u2019t. No matter how many non-feeling atoms you pile together, they will never start having experiences.<\/p>\n<p><em>P:<\/em> Yes they will.<\/p>\n<p><em>M:<\/em> No they won\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p><em>P:<\/em> Yes they will.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I imagine that close analogues of this conversation have happened countless times, and are likely to continue for a while into the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of a series of quick posts on the six sections of my book The Big Picture &#8212; Cosmos, Understanding, Essence, Complexity, Thinking, Caring. Chapters in Part Five, Thinking: 37. Crawling Into Consciousness 38. The Babbling Brain 39. What Thinks? 40. The Hard Problem 41. Zombies and Stories 42. Are Photons Conscious? 43. What Acts [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-picture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12780"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12844,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12780\/revisions\/12844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}