Abstract
Carruthers offers a new description of the problem of consciousness. Whilst the Real Problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining consciousness, it also includes worries about measuring consciousness. How do we know when we have measured consciousness? This problem is distinguished from traditional worries about the nature of consciousness stemming from Descartes.
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- 1.
On reading this claim that the mind is a representational/computational device some readers may expect extensive discussion of a currently fashionable position known as “Bayesianism.” Bayesianism offers one possible formalism to Helmholtz’s early description of perception as being the output of unconscious inference. Roughly the formalism states that the posterior probability of a percept is proportional to the prior probability of the percept (the probability that the world is in the perceived state before being perceived) times the likelihood of the percept (the probability that the state of the world would cause the current sensory input). Advocates of this position hold that what we perceive is the state with the highest posterior probability. However, this approach fails to offer a testable alternative to the account considered here.
If Bayesianism is taken as more than a mere description of input/output relations, i.e., as a claim about what computations are actually performed by the mind, we see it immediately runs afoul of the frame problem—i.e. the problem of determining what needs to be represented to perform a particular cognitive task and keeping those representations to a manageable load for a finite computational device (e.g. Dennett, 1987). Taken literally, any possible state of the world with a non-zero probability of causing a particular sensory input would have to be computed and almost all rejected before anything could be perceived.
Worse, however, is the reliance on the “priors”, i.e. the probability that the world is in a particular state prior to being perceived. Such priors are purportedly “learned” through experiencing the world. Again, the frame problem is a problem here, there is an infinite number of states the world could be in with non-zero probabilities. Still, even if advocates could arbitrarily modify the formalism such that only states with a probability above some cut of score are actually represented, the value of the priors is too under-constrained to do any explanatory work. Whatever a subject perceives we can adjust the value of the prior in the formalism such that what they actually perceive turns out to be the state with the highest posterior probability. Without the ability to determine what priors are independently of the percept we are trying to explain, Bayesianism remains untestable.
- 2.
Many thanks go to Gerard O’Brien for this very helpful phrasing.
- 3.
I am using here the 1996 version of Cottingham’s translation from Latin, which also includes Cottingham’s own scholarship. I will occasionally add in parentheses some of Cottingham’s translation from the French version as this will aid our understanding.
- 4.
As a rough guide 1 degree is approximately the angle subtended by a point either side of your thumb nail held at arm’s length.
- 5.
Now of course in the normal case our eyes saccade constantly allowing us to build a much more detailed visual representation than is possible from staring at a fixation point. This makes the area of clear vision significantly larger than the 2–3 degrees observable in a fixation task. This doesn’t affect the central Dennettian claim that periphery is not clear and coloured in the way that we would typically assume. Nor do we typically reflect on how much moving our eyes is necessary for seeing the way we do.
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Carruthers, G. (2019). The Real Problem of Consciousness. In: The Feeling of Embodiment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14167-7_1
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