David Chalmers: Developing a science of consciousness

Transcript from September 25, 2002 2:00-3:15 PM Eastern

Copyright © by International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design 2002.

ISCID Moderator
Our guest speaker today is David Chalmers. Dr. Chalmers is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Dr. Chalmers is also the author of "The Conscious Mind" and a leading philosopher of mind and consciousness. Chalmers regularly defends a non-reductive, yet fully naturalistic account of consciousness (defined as experience or "what's it like"). In doing so, Chalmers argues for both a philosophy and science of consciousness that takes experience, or the phenomenal, as fundamental.

ISCID Moderator
I am now going to hand the talk over to Dr. Chalmers. You can start sending in your questions.

David Chalmers
hi everyoe, thanks for coming along. i don't have any big statement to start with. i'm happy to answer any questions that people might have about the philosophy and the science of consciousness. people who are new to all this might take a look at my paper at http://consc.net/papers/facing.html. in a nuthshell, my view is that there's good reason to think that conscoiusness is irreducible to a physical process, but that we can nevertheless develop an empirical science of consciousness that integrated third-person data about brain and behavior with first-person data about conscious experience.

Philos
Don't we fail to distinguish between what consciousness "does" and what it "is?" Don't most of us fail to consistently separate reasoning based on two different phenomena, and two distinct definitions, (a) consciousness viewed hazily and from without ("objective" consciousness), when through our five external senses we view the behavioral and neural correlates of what our subjects claim is conscious experience, what our subjects observably say and do, and what our instruments say is also occurring, and (b) consciousness viewed inarguably and from within ("subjective" consciousness), when we are experiencing by means of our five external senses, or remembering or imagining doing so, at the same time sometimes being aware that we are doing so, logically by some internal neuronal path from one part of the brain to another?

David Chalmers
hi, when i talk about consciousness, i always mean what you're calling the "subjective": roughly, the way it feels from the inside. of course people use the term for both. that's hyi find it useful to distinguish the "easy" problems of consciousness, which concern behavioral matters and the like, from the "hard" problem, which concerns the subjective aspect.

twc
How would you characterize first-person data? Can you give some examples?

David Chalmers
first-person data concern the introspective knowledge that all of us have about our conscious experience. e.g., i know that i'm visually conscious now, that i am having experience of such-and-such colors and shapes, and so on. of course our knowledge here isn't perfect or infallible, but then neither is our knowledge of more ordinary third-person data. (end)

micah sparacio
Dave, I'm currently reading through C.D. Broad's *Mind and its Place in Nature* and was wondering if you could comment on how (and how not) Broad's work is relevant to the current debate in philosophy of mind and consciousness?

David Chalmers
hi, broad's 1925 book is one of my favorites -- my recent paper "consciousness and its place in nature" was partly inspired by it. i think of it as the first book that takes the modern approach to the mnd-body problem. he took consciousness very seriously, and a lot of his arguments have been further developed by recent philosophers -- e.g. hi gives a precursor of jackson's "mary" argument. and i think he gives what is still the most sophisticated exposition of the notion of emergence, and of a picture on which consciousness is emergent (in a strong sense) from physical processes in the brian. i feel quite sympathetic with him on many issues.

Jeremy
Hello Dr. Chalmers. It is a pleasure to talk with you. Could you give, in a nutshell, what your view is on the problem of mental causation. More specifically, what role does the mental or subjective aspect of our experience play in the causation of our behavior, if any? Does the mental do any real work?

David Chalmers
hi, i don't have fixed views on this. i see epiphenomenalism -- the view that consciousess plays no causal role as a live option, and i think it's not as bad as many people think it is. but i also think that interactionism -- the view on which non-physical consciousness plays a causal role in affecting physical processes -- is very much a live option, especially given the state of quantum mechanics. and there are some other interesting possibilities for integrating consciousness into the causal order, some of which i discuss in the paper i mentioned a moment ago.

Philos
Your introduction made the same distinction, between third- and first-person data. If you are "always" meaning the first-person data, when does the third-person data (the old behaviorism, plus neurological studies) come in?

David Chalmers
i said that by "consciousness" i always mean the first-person data. but a science of consciousness will be all about connections and correlations between consciousness and processes in the brain, aspects of behavior, and so on. the latter are the third-person data. e.g. the search for the neural correlates of consciousness is a currently very active project, and an extremely important one on my view. this is all about connecting physical processes (third-person) with consciousness (first-person).

alex
You say that consciousness is not reducible to a physical process. Process suggests simply transforming and translocating. Would you differentiate between a process and a phenomenon given that process?

David Chalmers
i'm not quite sure i grasp the distinction. but i think that consciousness isn't reducible to a physical process or to a physical phenomenon. i think of it as a nonphysical phenomenon (not sure if it's a nonphysical process).

DesG
David. Could you clarify your current position wrt the causal nature of conciousness? Do you think it plays a role and do you think we could emulate human functional behaviour without it?

David Chalmers
hi, see my answer two or three questions up. i suspect that we can almost certainly emulate human behavior computationally. however, my own view is that if we do that, the computational process may well itself be accompanied by consciousness.

Koevoet
There has been some talk of a "lag" between physical commitment to action by the somatic processes and the consciousness, thus sketching a scenario in which the conscious mind lags in time behind what the body is already doing or committed to doing. This would seem to relegate “mind” or at least consciousness to making sense of or just reporting on what was going on rather than being an integral part of decision-making.Do you support this argument, and what thoughts do you have on it?

David Chalmers
ih, i think you're referring to some results of libet's from a couple of decades ago. these results are quite controversial, especially regarding their interpretation. i do think that it's like that the neural correlates of consciousness have precursor neural events that are not themselves associated with consciousness, though. that fits with libet's view that there are neural indicators of conscious decisions even before people are aware of those decisions. i don't think that necessarily makes consciousness completely irrelevant, though. libet's own view is that this still leaves consciousness with a kind of veto power -- a sort of "free won't". my own views about the role of consciousness in action are up in the air -- it's a very difficult topic.

Jeremy
Do you have any thoughts on the teleological representationalism of Fred Dretske as laid out in *Naturalizing the Mind*? Are all mental facts representational facts and all representational facts information-theoretic facts, as he argues? Where would you differ from him most significantly?

David Chalmers
hi, i am sympathetic with the idea that consciousness is representational through-and-through. i don't think one can wholly explain consciousness in terms of a prior notion of representation, though, as dretske does. in that sense i'm a nonreductive representationalist rather than a reductive representationalism -- it's rather that consciousness and representation are vey deeply intertwined. if anything if prior, i'd say consiousness is prior to representation, but i'm not sure whether either is prior. i'd also reject the teleological view of representation for other reasons. incidentaly i just directed a six-week NEH institute on consciousness and intentionality that was all about these things -- there's a bunch of material from it on my website.

twc
Given your notion of organizational invariance - that the same functional organization determines the same phenomenal experience - why couldn't first person feels simply *be* the functional organization at some level, say, of a sufficiently articulated representational system?

David Chalmers
i think there is a systematic correlation between functional organization and experience. but i think this is just correlation, in the sense that it would at least be logically possible to have the functional organization without consciousness; and furthermore, that explaining the functional organization doesn't explain why the system is conscious.

DesG
Have you had a chance to review Bierman's (et al) experiments concerning "pre-sentiment"? Do you think their findings are genuine and what implications do you think the ability to anticipate fixed events in the future would have for consciousness - it would presumably not be something a conventional computer could do.

David Chalmers
bierman presented his work at the tucson conference i organized earlier this year. for people who don't know it, he examined others' results in experiments on emotional responses to cards and the like, and detected what he claims are emotional responses prior to the card being viewed. obviously this is highly controversial -- a number of people raised questions about whether there are statistical explanations. i am somewhat skeptical about parapsychological phenomena in general, but i certainly can't claim to rule them out entirely. even if they exist, the connection to consciousness wouldn't be quite clear -- the anecdotal evidence suggests just as strong a connection to the unconscious!

Koevoet
Do you entertain the notion that there are “unconscious” levels of consciousness in the same way as Freud proposed, and how do you explain the results of V.Ramachandran’s experiments showing that “phantom limb” pain can be relieved by showing visual effects that the limb exists where the conscious person is quite aware of the trickery, but seemingly some underlying process is taking the illusion at face value and updating some kind of body image?

David Chalmers
i think there are certain unconscious processes in the brain, and unconscious representations that drive many aspects of our behavior. i wouldn't call that an unconscious level of consciousness (oxymoron?), but maybe that's just terminology. ramachandran's result is an example of a more widespread phenomenon, the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience, i.e. that way that our perceptual experience is sometimes affected by what we know and believe. i imagine the explanation here involves some sort of feedback from cognitive systems in the brain to perceptual systems, but i don't think anyone knows how it works in detail yet.

harlandh
Why does there have to be anything more to consciousness than the functional organization? Couldn't the "first person feels" be only illusions?

David Chalmers
i don't really know what it means to say that the first-person feels are illusions. i'm more confident that these exist than that the external world exists! it seems to be a manifest fact that there's something it's like to be me, to see, and so on, and this fact is something that a complete science needs to explain.

Philos
You suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. Then, (a) would that require a return to pre-literate thought habits - - so that we would be, for the moment, Navajo (Ref: Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous.); (b) is that not explicitly an excursion out of the traditional scientific method, such that the traditional scientific tools (notably, consensus between different observers) may be difficult or impossible to apply; and (c) would there be, to a hard-core scientist, no "hard questions" because "what it is like to be" anything is a scientifically meaningless question?

David Chalmers
hi, i don't see the connection to the navajo. i don't see why taking experience as fundamental prevents us from treating it rigorously. either way, we have to gather the data rigorously, and systematize it, ultimately inferring the underling laws. if there's a problem here, it's not the fundamentality per se, but the difficulty in measuring the phenomenon. but here, we all at least have first-person access, and we have access to the data in others if we rely on the measuring instrument of verbal report -- which needs to be handled with care, but which still plays a vital role. there's are some differences with traditional scientific areas, but nothing that precludes science altogether.

Jeremy
Do you find all forms of substance dualism to be too mysterious to be useful or obviously false? What is the most compelling reason you find for rejecting substance dualism and adopting property dualism (if your view can in fact can be considered a form of property dualism)?

David Chalmers
i don't really reject substance dualism, so much as being unsure what the distinction amounts to, since i don't know what it means to say that consciousness is a substance. one way of nuderstanding the distinction is to say that property dualism allows one class of fundamental entities with two sorts of properties, whereas substance dualism has two classes of fundamental entities (particles and persons, say). if that's what is meant, i don't know that substance dualism is false. my attitude is just that it goes beyond what is forced on us by the arguments -- the extra fundamental properties are all that the conclusion buys there.

DesG
Do you have a view on whether conciousness can be reduced to an algorithmic process within a closed system - could a PC with no sensory links to the "outside world" experience an inner mental world for example>

David Chalmers
my own view is that the environment makes a big difference to our conscious experience, but isn't required in principle. a brain in a vat could be conscious like me with just simulated inputs. and i think i'd be conscious in a sensory deprviation tank, even without perceptual experience. i don't see why an appropriate system, maybe even a PC, couldn't have that sort of "internal" experience alone.

Jon runyan1
Do you think there was an evolutionary stage when the human brain received its consciousness?

David Chalmers
i don't know the answer to that question. i have some sympathy with panpsychism, the view that consciousness has been around all along. it's also possible that as brains evolved to become appropriate information-processes, certain basic laws of nature (e.g. connecting information and consciousness) brought consciousness along as a sort of byproduct. the evolution of consciousness is a wide-open question that no-one has a good answer to.

harlandh
What role do you give to speech and symbolic thinking in creating, or shaping consciousness?

David Chalmers
i think consciousness is more primitive than language, so that non-human animals can be conscious (e.g. in perceptal experience) without symbolic representation. but when language is present, it makes a big difference. not least because it gives us a huge repertoire of concepts, and concepts play a major role in articulating and structuring the contents of consciousness. it also greatly facilitates our social consciousness, of course.

Philos
I mentioned the Navajo view as opposed to the scientific, where Galilio convinced people to forget Aristotle and take a look through his telescope, disbelieving at first and then gradually setting aside their differences of perception; hence, third-person consensus. But, the very virtue of third-person consensus is that it excludes first-person experience; feelings don't count, only objective use of the external senses. This is why teh scientist is "coldly objective." In contrast, from Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World: "For the Navajo, one's individual psyche could never be comprehended as being ontologically separate from the surrounding world of nature and the manifest earth, because the Navajo know themselves to be intimately linked to nature through the sacred air they both breathe. In short, the Navajo version of the human psyche is one that is thoroughly co-extensive with the animate, breathing air and earth. [Which] is curiously similar to some of

David Chalmers
hi, interesting. i'm certainly sympathetic with the navajo idea that we need to go beyond the "objective". but maybe unlike them, i think one can still deal with the subjective in a scientifically rigorous way.

DesG
Do you see a link between time's arrow and consciousness - could time even exist without a mind to experience it? If an executing algorithm could be conscious why not a static one?

David Chalmers
i think time would exist without consciousness. but it may be that the (apparent) *passage* of time is tied to our conscious experience of time passing. without consciousness, we could make sense of spacetime as a sort of "block universe" without passage. with consciousness, it becomes trickier. i'm inclined to think that some sor of activity and causal process is part of the crucial basis of consciousness, though, so it's not clear that a static system could be conscious. certainly it couldn't process information, which i think is deeply tied to consciousness.

Jeremy
In "Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness" you argue that the principles of simplicity, elegance, and beauty which fuel the physicis't search for a fundamental theory will also apply to a true theory of consciousness. Any thoughts on why, given the truth of naturalism, we should expect the fundamental furniture of the world, including consciousness, to be simple, elegant, and beautiful?

David Chalmers
that's an excellent question. cetainly we seem to have inductive evidence that there are simple fundamental laws, from physics. and i think this functions as a sort of regulative hypothesis in science -- one at least starts with simple hypotheses, and moves to more complex hypotheses only when these are rejected. i guess science is all about the idea htat the universe is a surprisingly simple place -- without that, science wouldn't really get off the ground. as for elegance and beauty, those are even tricker -- maybe i'll take a pass for now!

alex
In your (excellent) "The Conscious Mind" you do not seem to mention Clay's "specious present". Do you think there is such a thing?

David Chalmers
i don't know clay, but i do think there is some sort of specious present -- my "current" experience of the world seems to be of matters that last for some period of time, so that preception gradually transitions into memory. the length of the specious present is very controversial, though -- i've heard eveyting from 300 miliseconds to 5 seconds...

hbone
re brain in a vat: Isn't a newborn similar? Until a newborn capable of perception, but "empty" of meaning until repetition of images and sounds induce meaning(s)?

David Chalmers
i suspect that a newborn has perceptual experiences, if pretty chaotic ones -- james's "blooming, buzzing confusion". i imagine they gradually become structured, and eventually conceptual structure becomes overlaid on this structure.

cml
Does truly passive consciousness exist...consciousness without volition?

David Chalmers
i think perception is passive to a large extent. of course in most of us it is accompanied by the experience of volition. but of course the latter comes in degrees, depending on circumstances. there are times when we have no control over our actions, though i guess there we mostly have control over thoughts. some interesting cases to think about in this regard are dreams, not to mention people under the right sort of drugs, or even the potion they supposedly give to haitian "zombis".

frodo
Hello, concerning the "specious present", would you support the contention that the purpose of consciousness (at least qualitative consc.) is to "flag the present moment" so we do not confuse objects (of danger) presently before us with those in our memory? In addition, do all conscious states carry with them qualia?

David Chalmers
i don't think that's "the" purpose of consciousness, but i do think that one aspect of the content of perceptual consciousness is that it indicates that things are *currently* such-and-such. obviously the consciousness involved in memory and belief is a bit different. for me, it's true by definition that any conscious state has qualia -- both are definitionally tied to the notion of there being something it's like to have a state.

petervonshelt
I was never quite sure if your view of the mind and body is a dualist one. Your principle of functional equivalence suggests something like an identity theory, but your insistence that there is always 'something left' over suggests dualism.Any clarification welcome.

David Chalmers
hi, i'm a property dualist -- i think consciousness is a property irreducible to physical properties. i think it correlates lawfully with certain physical properties, though -- e.g. get a brain in the right state, it will be conscious. more generally, get the right sort of
functional organization, it will be conscious. but these correlations are guaranteed by laws that connect two different sorts of properties, so this is sti;l a sort of dualism.

harlandh
What role does binding play in consciousness, if any? Does a perception become conscious by connecting with information in other parts of the brain?

David Chalmers
most of our perceptual consciousness seems to involve binding -- or at least the attentive aspects do. there are some questions about whether consciousness outside attention involves binding. also, some pathologies seem to involve a deficit in binding, but people still seem to be conscious. so i don't think binding is absolutely essential to consciousness.

Koevoet
Do you think that groups of minds produce a meta-consciousness, in a way that many people interacting brings into being a conscious entity, does a society thus have a mind?

David Chalmers
i don't know. i suspect that inter-mind information-processing is less rich than intra-mind information processing, so any consciousness thus produced will be much more primitive than an individual consciousness. i don't reject the idea in principle, though.

tmoody
Hello David. How does property dualism, with laws connecting properties, actually differ from substance dualism, with laws governing the interaction of substances of different sorts? Isn't property dualism in the end just a way of finessing what is meant by "physical thing"?

David Chalmers
hi, i think i mentioned one way of answering that a few questions ago -- one relevant distinction is whether there is one class of fundamental particulars or two. here i'm agnostic as to the answers.

twc
On your view, what constitutes the self that has privileged access to the first person, phenomenal facts of experience?

David Chalmers
tied to the last question -- i don't know the basic nature of the self. in general i think we have much less introspecive access to the self than to its properties. it could be that the self is a fundamental particular, or the self could be somehing complex and derivative on some underlying entities and processes -- i don't know.

ISCID Moderator
Well, its about time to wrap things up. ISCID would like to thank David Chalmers for the thought provoking and stimulating discussion. If you would like to continue chatting after the event, feel free to move over into the General Discussion room.

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