Download Enactivism as an Approach to the Brain

Body-Mind/Fact-Value:
How Do the Two Problems
Interrelate?
E-INTENTIONALITY
THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2007
Steve Torrance and Erik Myin
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Experience and value
• In some people’s minds, the two domains
are closely associated, in some deep
way…
• See Sue Blackmore, Conversations on
Consciousness OUP, 2005
5 examples…
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1. I don’t squish bugs anymore
Conversation with Christof Koch (p 134)
• SB: How has studying all this changed you as a
person?
• CK: Well, I can tell you in a very practical way, I
don’t squish bugs anymore….unless they
attack me. Why? Because I’m a biologist. Most
pet owners would agree that cats and dogs are
conscious, and the monkey is conscious…. Now,
you can ask, how low does it go in the
evolutionary ladder?
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2. self-transformation;…becoming fully
what we might be
Conversation with Stephen LaBerge (p 146)
• SB: Do you think that a science of consciousness must
necessarily entail …questions of self-transformation?
• SL: Yes. ….Eastern traditions have been working at this
inner knowledge for thousands of years. And I think that
we in the West have the unique opportunity of benefiting
from an interaction with that Eastern tradition, bringing in
the Western scientific perspective. I think the
collaboration of these two perspectives is what will give
us the potential to understand consciousness in a
new way and then make use of the value that it has, in
becoming fully what we might be.
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3. without consciousness morals
evaporate
Conversation with Roger Penrose (p 184)
• SB: Does [a] moral element come in for you when
you’re thinking about the nature of consciousness?
• RP: I think it has everything to do with it, because
without consciousness somehow morals evaporate.
I remember having an argument with a computationalist
– I’ve forgotten who it was now – where the question of
morality came up, and this person just didn’t understand
what consciousness had to do with morality, and I
thought, ‘What?!’ I mean, if you bought a computer
which is conscious you’d have a responsibility; it’s a
moral issue.
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4. … the basis of our joys, pleasures,
pains, tragedies
Conversation with Petra Stoerig (p 213)
• SB: I want you to tell me …why consciousness is so
interesting and difficult.
• PS: Why is it interesting? That is an easy question: of
course it’s interesting because it’s the basis of all our
joys and pleasures and pains and tragedies and so
on.…From my point of view, consciousness is the
prerequisite of experience, and experience is what
makes us happy or sad or enjoy the sunset or a glass
of wine, or a wonderful Belgian meal…
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5. The most cherished quality of what it
is to be alive
Conversation with Francisco Varela (pp 225-6)
• FV: …So the question is, why is it that consciousness
feels so personal, so intimate, so central to who we are,
and of course, that’s why it’s so interesting. The study of
consciousness is a kind of singularity in science,
because you’re studying precisely the most cherished
quality of what it is to be alive.
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What’s the connection?
– it’s seen in rather vague terms;
– different people see the connection differently;
• Possible themes:
(a) C as basis of quality of life
(b) To see a being as C is to assume a
responsibility
(c) Understanding C fully leads to the possibility
of self-transformation
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A Tale of Two Gaps
• (a) A gap between properties of
brains/bodies and consciousness
– (Mind-Body gap)
(primarily consciousness)
• (b) A gap between facts-in-the-world and
ethical commitments
– (Fact-Value gap)
(primarily ethical value)
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Questions
(a) examine the common structures of these two
debates
– how far would participants in each debate benefit
from comparing their ‘moves’ with corresponding
‘moves’ in the other debate?
(b) can an ‘enactively’ inspired approach provide a
standpoint from which progress can be made on
both issues
– in parallel?
– in collaboration?
• How useful is it to see an interaction or
‘entanglement’ between the two domains?
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Objective/subjective
• Both issues can be put in terms of a question
about the relation between objectivity and
subjectivity:
MIND-BODY:
• Can ‘subjective’ (1st-person) properties of
mind be explained in terms of ‘objective’
(3rd-person) features (e.g. of our physical
make-up)?
FACT-VALUE:
• Can the ‘subjective’ features of ethical
judgments be grounded in ‘objective’
features of the world?
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Special features of each domain
• Traditionally, theorists have identified a key property for
each domain that makes it special and problematic…
• CONSCIOUSNESS
– the qualitative, felt nature of conscious awareness
(subjectivity, phenomenality)
• ETHICS
– the conceptual connection between ethical beliefs
and preferences, commitments, springs to action
(prescriptivity, practicality)
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Key dilemmas
• CONSCIOUSNESS:
– how to get a theory of consciousness which
grounds it in ‘objective’ features of the world
without obscuring the special feature(s) of
consciousness (subjectivity, phenomenality)
• ETHICS:
– how to get a theory of ethics which grounds it
in ‘objective’ features of the world without
obscuring the special features of ethics
(prescriptivity, practicality)
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Commonalities between the
domains
• Different kinds of responses to each
problem match up with each other
• Examples….
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Examples of analogies between
the two problem areas
1. SPECIAL ENTITIES OR PROPERTIES: Consciousness
as a special property: non-physical but scientifically wellfounded (Chalmers). Goodness, rightness, etc. as
special properties - non-natural, but objectively knowable
(Moore)
2. REDUCTIONISM / NATURALISM. Consciousness-facts
equated with (e.g.) brain-facts or computational facts.
Ethical facts equated with (e.g.) facts about maximizing
satisfaction or facts about social choices.
3. ELIMINATIVE VIEWS – concepts of consciousness or of
ethics seen as based on confusions about mythical
facts/properties (as in postulated by theories of type 1.)
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The legacy of Logical Positivism:
ethics
• Hilary Putnam, in a recent lecture (The Fact-Value
Dichotomy and its Critics, Dublin, March 2007):
• Putnam:
– Logical Positivism claimed that ethical statements
(and value statements generally) were cognitively
meaningless, and not amenable to rational discussion
– Yet “ethical questions are the ones that most of us
think of as the most important in life, and as being the
most important to discuss rationally.”
– But for much of the 20th century ethical issues were
marginalized in philosophy and in science because of
the legacy of Logical Positivism
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The legacy of Logical Positivism:
consciousness
• Reference to consciousness (and other ‘mental’
entities) was banished from scientific discourse
by Logical Positivism
– once again because such terms were seen as
cognitively meaningless.
• Behaviourism (although it predated the Vienna Circle),
was perhaps given greater pre-eminence because of the
philosophical influence of logical positivism.
– Even with the rise of ‘cognitivism’ in the 50s and 60s,
consciousness continued to be marginalized
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Enactivism
Certain strands within Enactivism (and
Phenomenology) suggest a distinctive
approach to
BOTH
the brain-consciousness gap
AND
– the fact-value gap.
(Cf Varela, Thompson, Noe, O’Regan, Myin – plus key ideas from
Merleau-Ponty, etc.)
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• Some relevant ideas of enactivism
– Mind as ‘lived embodiment’
– Importance of sensorimotor interaction with
environment in characterizing cognition,
experience
– Intersubjectivity as pivotal
– Problematization of traditional ideas of
objectivity and subjectivity
– ‘Laying down a path in walking’; mind as
‘bringing forth’ a world
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• What follows will also provide an approach
to was called (in the Life and Mind talk
yesterday) a ‘thick’ conception of
phenomenality….
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Conscious experiences as special
kinds of entities in the world
The ‘consciousness-brain’ gap:
We propose to target an ontological
assumption behind the gap –
– that conscious states are special kinds of
entities (facts, properties, etc.) in the world
• and that these entities / facts / properties need to
be tied in with the other kinds of entities / facts
/ properties through logical links of explanation.
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Difference of Perspectives
The Enactive approach suggests a way of
rethinking the relation between the
phenomenal or subjective and the physical or
objective aspects of our nature.
– The difference between the phenomenal and
the objective should be understood in terms of
a difference in perspectives
• rather than a difference between kinds of
entities, facts, properties, etc.
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Mind-body gap as incompatibility of
perspectives
WE PROPOSE:
• The ‘gap’ between consciousness and
physicality arises from an incompatibility
between two perspectives,
• rather than as a result of an ontological
incompatibility of different kinds of fact
– (i.e.) of two subcategories of one generic
ontological category of ‘fact’.
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• A similar view can be held about the factvalue gap (to be discussed later)
– People often think of ethical judgments as
referring to special kinds of facts (or, by
contrast, as expressing ‘imperatives’, or
‘prescriptions’)
– But we claim: it would be far more fruitful to
think of ethics in terms of two perspectives
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Dreaming of Objectivity
• Both gaps arise from a common
framework concerning objectivity
– This familiar, but misguided, framework is
based on equating the universe with a totality
of facts (Wittgenstein, Tractatus)
• Where these facts are thought as being ideally
knowable by an ideally placed observer
• And where the goal of science is to try to describe
and explain more and more comprehensively .
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More on ‘objectivity’ as commonly
understood
• ‘Objective knowledge’ thus consists in trying to
get as close as possible to that ideal-observer
state
– This may be done via systematization of
observation and theory, as in science, by
‘pure thought’, etc.
• This leads naturally to puzzles like trying to fit
CONSCIOUSNESS or ETHICS into this
framework
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Inflationary or deflationary
approaches to objectivity
The puzzles prompt alternative philosophical
solutions – of either an inflationary or a
deflationary kind
– Inflationary solutions propose special kinds
of properties
• (e.g. special ‘Cartesian’ or Chalmers-style
phenomenal entities or properties; or special
Moore-style ethical properties)
– Deflationary solutions offer various styles of
rejection of such special entities or properties
• (reductionism; eliminativism)
(Cf. Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology. )
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• All such solutions (both inflationary AND
deflationary) are unsatisfactory for all the
reasons familiar to students of both debates
– E.g. the classical puzzles about colour-blind
superscientists; zombies, etc.
– Or puzzles about “open questions” in ethics
• The way out is to challenge the picture of
objectivity which generates the various familiar
kinds of solution in both domains…
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Two perspectives, not two kinds of
entities
• Instead of seeing the world as populated with
(possibly) two different kinds of entities
– ‘Objective’ ones (nice, well-behaved);
– ‘Subjective’ ones (dodgy)…
• …rather see the world, life, experience, as
capable of being conceptualized from two
perspectives –
– ‘subjective’ (or ‘lived’, ‘engaged’, ‘enacted’)
• ‘My’ world
– ‘objective’ (‘disengaged’, ‘in-itself’, ‘ontic’)
• ‘The’ world
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Two perspectives: experience
• This can be applied to the ‘consciousness/body’
gap by saying…
– ‘experiences’ are not special kinds of events which
have subjective, private, ‘ineffable’ properties
• (in this sense of ‘qualia’, eliminativists are right to say that
qualia don’t exist)
– rather, our experiential awareness provides the way
we live our body and the way we engage with the
world
• See, for example, Evan Thompson Phenomenology of the
Cognitive Sciences, 2004.
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Two perspectives: ethics
• In the case of ethics – instead of saying that
ethics deals with a domain of special moral facts
or features (e.g. goodness as a G.E.Moore-style
‘non-natural property’)
– We treat the ethical view of the world as part
of how we engage with others in the lived
world
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Two perspectives on the same world
• So the special ‘phenomenality’ of consciousness
arises from the ‘livedness’ of the ‘lived’
perspective
– The ‘objective’ world (conceived as in-itself, as
phenomenally inert) IS the world which we live, but
conceived outside that living….
• And so too, the special ‘practicality’ or
‘prescriptivity’ of our ethical thought also arises
from our ‘living’ our world
– Whereas the world conceived objectively is
evaluatively inert….
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The ‘lived’ world as idiosyncratic, open
• The ‘lived’ perspective (the perspective of ‘my world’) is essentially
idiosyncratic – there is an essential openness about how I relate myself to the world.
• Each of us has to choose their own foundational framework, their
own way of placing myself in ‘the’ world.
• So there is an essential openness both about how I relate my
experience to my embodiment and other physical features of the
world, and about my values in action in the world.
– [In fact, for many of us, there is a constant vacillation between various
different frameworks.]
• In order to resolve this choice we can do one of two things:
either
(1) converse with others to compare and share frameworks
(2) try to live with no framework
• (Buddhist ‘enlightenment’?)
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Twin headaches
• This obviously creates a big headache for both
the fields of consciousness and of ethics !!
– In fact these are the twin headaches of the mind-body
and fact-value gaps:
• If the ‘lived’ perspective is open in this way, then there
seems to be no watertight way of explaining
1. how our experiential properties emerge from certain kinds of
neural or bodily processes (rather than others)
2. how our fundamental ethical convictions (e.g. that slavery or
genocide are morally heinous) are more than just idiosyncratic
preferences
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The mind-body headache
• the unsettling idea that, without some kind of
lawlike explanatory framework, there is no way
of demarcating the ‘phenomenological
constituency’
– What creatures are conscious and what aren’t?
– Why should anyone or anything have a
phenomenology?
• you, others, slugs, bunches of keys, robots, etc.
– Why should you deem me to have a phenomenology?
Why I, you?
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The fact-value headache
• the equally unsettling idea that, without some
kind of lawlike link between factual statements
and moral norms, there is no way of
demarcating situations in the world that have a
positive or negative moral significance:
– there is no way of showing (for example) why it’s
morally bad to seek to increase someone’s pain or to
diminish their pleasure,
– or why it is morally admirable to strive to reduce
suffering, etc.
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No ultimate validations?
(a) If my consciousness is essentially linked with –
or expressed in – the orienting framework(s) that
I adopt, then
– there seems to be no way to describe the ‘true nature’
of my consciousness;
– and no way to give a ‘true’ story of the relationship
between my consciousness and what lies ‘outside’ my
consciousness [me and not-me]
(b) And similarly for ethics: if my living expresses
or embodies my ethical outlook, then
– but there seems to be no way to provide an ‘external’
validation for my moral values
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A possible solution: Sharedness
• BUT what each of us can do is reflect on
the the sharedness of our condition …
• From this reflection we can perhaps extract or
reconstruct
– A conception of science as universal explanatory laws
– A conception of universalistic ethics .
 but neither can be given a rationally
watertight justification;
– everyone is free to adopt any other framework – at
cost…
– (the cost is: increasing idiosyncracy)
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Relief from headaches
• The solution is to realize that the predicament of
idiosyncracy is not just MY predicament, but
EVERYONE’S:
– It’s a universal predicament
– Pessimists might see this as fostering a nightmarish
plurality or nihilism
– But equally it could engender a move towards
unification
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Convergence in ethics
• IN ETHICS:
– it can allow for the possibility of a normative
convergence between different points of view
in ethics.
• The ‘lived’ ethical perspective isn’t
something that is done by a single person,
solipsistically:
– In recognizing other beings, I recognize other
beings who are each themselves engaging in
their lived perspective.
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Recognizing the lived perspectives of
others
• So: With recognizing the existence of others’ lived
perspectives, come certain coherency constraints on
what moral orientations make sense for each of us.
• Each actor, on reflection, will come to recognize the lived
reality of every other actor,
– and by that token certain life-styles or life-definitions become
harder to embrace consistently or coherently:
• for example: crudely self-serving or tyrannical
ethical viewpoints will make little sense on
examination.
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• Any such self-serving viewpoint will presuppose
an acquiescence by others to one’s self-seeking
or power-broking
– Such acquiescence will, of course, in all probability
not be forthcoming,
– or if obtained, it’s likely to be obtained only as a result
of some kind of physical or psychological duress.
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Summarizing how sharedness achieves
ethical convergence
So
(1) the idea of a ‘lived’ or ‘engaged’ ethical perspective
does not contain any explicit restrictions on the content
of ethical orientations that may be chosen
(2) But the world we live in is one in which each person
potentially affected by any individual’s actions is also
enacting their own ethical orientation.
(3) This reduces the coherence of certain ethical
orientations (e.g. purely egoistic or self-serving ones)
(4) and tends to encourage a convergence on
universalistic moral positions.
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• Thus:
– everyone is in the same lived situation with regard to moral
choice
– so there must be a kind of intervalidity constraint on the moral
choices one enacts
• Our moral choices are not just arbitrary choices in a
social vacuum,
– rather they have the effect of proposals for commonly shared
ways of living together.
• Recognition of this makes it more likely that idiosyncratic
or self-serving moral choices make little sense
– because such choices have no appeal to those who are not the
selves served by such choices.
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Relief from the mind-body headache
• There is an analogy here with how our perceptual
consciousness relates to the ‘objective’ world.
• Within the lived perceptual perspective on the world we
encounter many objects in the world as independent
from the flow of our experience.
– Our sensorimotor encounter with these objects provides us with
a set of possible ways in which our own individual experience
can vary as what we do varies (sensorimotor contingencies).
– But at the same time we experience such objects in terms of
possible experiences for many other lived perspectives at the
same time.
• The world of public objects is thus a world which is not
just a source of experiential flow for our own individual
history, but a source of experience for an indefinite
number of other conscious agents.
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• From Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of
Perception
– Here M-P. is discussing how we construct ‘objectivity’
in our perceptions
– E.g. how we conceive of a house itself over and
above the individual experience of the house.
• ...la maison elle-même n’est pas la maison vue de
nulle part, mais la maison vue de toutes parts.
L’object achevé est translucide, il est pénétré de
tous côtés par une infinité actuelle de regards qui
se recoupent dans sa profondeur et n’y laissent
rien de caché
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• …the house itself isn’t a house viewed from
nowhere, but from everywhere. The object thus
achieved (enacted??) is ‘translucid’, penetrated
from all sides by an actual infinity of looks which
deeply intersect with one another, and leave
nothing hidden.
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• So – although our lived world is idiosyncratic
– (I could, in principle, think I see a weasel when you see a cloud)
• There are normative constraints upon our how we
interpret our experience,
– Based not just upon our sensorimotor interactions with the
environment
– But also upon our interaction with other experiencing agents
• This also helps us to resolve questions of what particular
features in the world seem to be most closely associated
with phenomenality - brains versus rocks…
– (the ‘phenomenological constituency’ question)
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Cross-fertilization: moral concepts as
intertwined with phenomenal concepts
(1) Moral concepts are deeply intertwined with
phenomenological concepts
• e.g. Welfare –
– a key component of the notion of welfare is to do with states of
conscious feeling that have positive or negative polarity
• Key terms in moral discourse such as benevolence,
sympathy, interests, care, happiness, suffering, etc – all
such concepts imply a focus on people’s states of
consciousness
• There’s an important role for asking ‘what it’s like’ in
ethics as well as in the study of consciousness – it plays
a key role in ethically evaluating and advocating
actions…
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Evaluative significance of phenomenal
attributions
(2) Phenomenological attributions and evaluative
significance.
• It’s an important feature of many phenomenological
states that they have either a positive or a negative tone
or polarity.
• Thus the feel of a piece of velvet isn’t just a phenomenal
quality that feels thus-and-so, in an evaluatively neutral
way.
– an essential part of its characterization is that it feels nice (to
most of us at least).
• Similarly the experience of a mild electric shock (or a
piercing shriek) isn’t just an experience that has a neutral
quality –
– it’s an experience that feels unpleasant, nasty, unbearable.
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Constituency
(3) Questions of constituency
• Discussions about the constituency of
phenomenality (conscious beings) are closely
linked with questions about the contours of the
moral constituency.
– There is a deep assumption that moral consumers or
potential beneficiaries of morality have to be capable
of phenomenal states.
– This is particularly relevant to philosophical
discussion concerning ETs, zombies, robots, virtual
agents, brain-to-silicon uploads, etc.
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Practice
(4) Centrality of practice.
• It’s long been a commonplace in moral
philosophy to see ethics as centrally bound up
with practice or action
– The enactive approach also stresses how
consciousness is essentially constituted by
potentialities for action and interaction (SMC theory,
etc.)
– So this is another way in which the enactive approach
provides a natural framework for unifying or crossfertilizing discussion concerning ethics and
consciousness.
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To summarize…
• I’ve suggested that we can distinguish an
engaged, ‘subjective’ perspective, from the
disengaged, ‘objective’ perspective
• This provides a more acceptable way to
view the subjective-objective relation
• The world, life, etc. can be viewed from
either perspective….
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Summary (2)
• The mind-body puzzle is resolved by showing
that experientiality is not a special kind of entity
or process, separate from a physical world
(conceived as experientially inert)
– But rather experience is the way we live our
embodied existence in the physical world
• The fact-value puzzle is resolved by showing
that ethics doesn’t relate to some special realm
outside the natural world (where the latter is
conceived as evaluatively inert)
– But rather arises from our engaged life within the
world.
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Summary (3)
• In both cases a problem arises, to do with the
fact that the ‘lived’ perspective seems to
threaten a kind of nightmare pluralism of
idiosyncracies – any explanatory or normative
framework seems to be as valid as any other
• But this is answered by reflection on the
‘sharedness’ of our lived predicament
– This reflection helps us at least to remove certain selfserving kinds of ethical viewpoints;
– It also helps us to construct a non-arbitrary
conception of a world apart from us, and a world
where the ‘phenomenological constituency’ isn’t
constructed in a haphazard way.
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Summary (4)
• In this way it can be seen
– That the ‘fact-value’ and ‘mind-body’
dichotomies
• have important parallels as problems;
• and there are parallels in a method for their
solution
• We’ve also sketched ways of showing also that
– There is a deep (and multifaceted) crossfertilization between the two domains.
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Another quote from Putnam
… I believe that the unfortunate division of contemporary
philosophy into separate “fields” (ethics, epistemology,
philosophy of mind…) often conceals the way in which
the very same arguments and issues arise in field after
field. For example, arguments for “antirealism” in ethics
are virtually identical with arguments for antirealism in
the philosophy of mathematics; yet philosophers who
resist those arguments in the latter often capitulate to
them in the former. We can only regain the integrated
vision which philosophy has always aspired to if at least
some of the time we allow ourselves to ignore the idea
that a philosophical position or argument must deal with
one and only one of these specific “fields”. [Emphasis
added.]
Ethics Without Ontology (2004, Harvard U.P.), Introduction.
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