If that doesn’t make sense, try imagining yourself whistling the tune un-self-consciously. Now try to imagine the experience the person you are imagining is having. Is that not like having the tune be you at that moment?

Now consider the contents of consciousness from other times, when you do identify with the contents. Say during the having of a propositional thought. Can that thought, or the having of that thought, be considered in this dual way too? Why not?

This question troubles the psychotic. When he hears strange voices, the voices are “in his head”, meaning they are epistemologically privileged, but perceived as “other”. There is the whole battery of depersonalization symptoms that seem to point to the same issue.

If we take the extended mind hypothesis far beyond where Clark goes, we arrive at the co-dependent arising of subject and object in immediate experience, as Varela saw.

If we adopt this stance, and redevelop our vocabulary of psychology, junking the received notions of memory, attention, etc, we might arrive at terms that can help us to better understand the psychotic’s situation. I’m just sayin’.

The Middle Way (Madhyamika) of Mahayana Buddhism seems to me to be a way of overcoming this conceptual problem, which is simultaneously a vision problem. We have no clue to what extent our derived concepts structure experience, and to what extent it arises from immediate sensori-motor activity. In fact, present experience turns out to be something of a myth. There is no P-world. But you have to look very hard at the P-world to see that. Autonomy is not tied to some personal construct.

There is no P-world. This might be a hard one to swallow.

But Wei Wu Wei saw all this very very clearly indeed. But it comes out in various ways: Here’s a good one:

There is no time….Phenomena are not extended in space-time objectively, as things in themselves: it is the perceiving which extends them.

The first set of concepts applied to understanding brain function emphasizes the predictive nature of the brain. Examples include predictive accounts of motor control, as in Wolpert’s work, the entire dopamine literature, and many functional accounts of frontal cortex – though the phrenology of prediction is complex, including primarily frontal and parietal lobes, but ultimately involving pretty much the whole brain. Common to these accounts is the notion that if we do something at t_0, it very much looks later as if the brain were expecting a specific effect of our act upon the environment. Usually, we say that the brain is running a little simulation, or calculating a forward model, so that at a later time, t_1, the actual state of the environment can be compared to the predicted state, thus allowing error correction and fine tuning of movement.

The second set of concepts are dynamical, and they are found in the ecological, enactive, and dynamical approaches to cognition. These approaches model system dynamics, and the system that is so modelled may, and typically does, extend across the organism-environment boundary. Indeed, a strength of these approaches is their concern with delineating the shifting boundaries of autonomy. Consider a person, standing upright in the experimental moving room of Lishman and Lee (1974). The entire room rests upon wheels or rollers. As the subject stands straight in the middle of the room, we can gently move the room back and forwards. This produces a changing pattern of optical stimulation upon the retina that would, under normal circumstances, only be generated by swaying of the torso to and fro. As a result, the subject will exhibit compensatory torso sway, locked in anti-phase with the oscillation of the room. Here, the fullest description of the lawfulness inhering in the situation is to be found in a dynamical description of two yoked sub-systems: the person and the room. They are not distinct, and their autonomy is somewhat lost in the coupling that results.

One of the principle differences between these accounts is in their treatment of causality. Causality is complex. Here, we are faced with two classical kinds of Aristotelian causality: efficient cause in the case of prediction, and formal cause in the dynamical description. The former, efficient cause is characterized by the notion of temporal sequence. An initial action, A occurs earlier in time, and is invariably followed by a distinct event, B at a later time. A caused B. Backward causation is not possible. If A occurs before B, it is not coherent to talk of B causing A.

The latter, formal cause of the dynamicist treats time differently. Here, we seek the fullest description of the behaviour of the state descriptors in time. Time acts as a canvas upon which events are drawn, and from which they are moulded or sculpted. If the system finds itself headed towards an attractor, it is by no means incoherent to consider the attractor as the proximal “reason” for the evolution of the system towards it, but as it is later in time, it can not play the triggering role of the initial event in the A-then-B sequence.

The predictive brain account typically rests implicitly or explicitly upon some notion of executive control. This feature of pretty much all information processing models of cognition is problematic in many ways. It may be a homuncular fallacy, or we might side with Dennett in hoping that each appeal to an executive process demands less and less fluid intelligence, so that at bottom, the regress is not infinite, but runs out in a hoard of mechanisms. Usually, modellers assume it is some else’s problem, as they get their teeth into a part of the problem that does not rely on so chimerical a construct.

But the executive self, appearing in a tableau based on the notion of efficient cause, is crucial to our notion of agency, responsibility, and free will. In the intentional realm, we like to think of our actions having consequences. It has proved useful in our history to think like this, and the normative constraints that ensure that we wear pants to work and do not kill our own kind, are crucially reliant upon an efficient cause notion of action.

The notion of agency and the executive self both serve to further suggest that there is a split between organism and environment. A split that is part of the edifice upon which we have built societies. And which can crumble at any moment. There are lawful biological processes going on between us, that are emergent at the collective level and only available by inference to us down here. They can look a lot like fate, as properties of the constituent layer (that’s us) bring about phenomena whose very existence is not predictable at the constituent layer, but which is manifestly influenced by arbitrary subsets of their properties – those responsible for the emergent properties.

…. or (Nov 2010) ….

Agency + prediction = entrainment. Without the spooky stuff.

The supposed qualia are experiential, not observable. As used in standard discussion within the field of cognitive science and its philosophy, they are an attempt to take the domain of experience and treat it as a thing – as something to be found in the world. Worse, they partition experience, until all that is left is the poverty of the notion of “redness” or “sweetness”. Experience does not reduce in this fashion. This is the persistent problem: treating of mind, or consciousness, or qualia, as something to be found in the world.

My preferred term, because it helps to get things straight, is experience. Mind, consciousness and qualia are all just confused ways of acknowledging the reality of experience in the first person. And experience is not to be found in the world. Experience is what gives us a world in the first place.

Let us digress, before this becomes bitter, and go back to a fictional Isaac Newton, sitting under an apple tree in rural England, looking at apples, perhaps picking one or two up, feeling them, hefting them, throwing one up in the air and catching it, then biting into one.

“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.

How might we demur? My suggestion is to question the simplistic use of the personal pronoun, “you”, to refer to the antics of a bag of meat. If you (Jake) believe that this word (you) refers to the carry on of your body, then Crick is probably right. However, if, as seems clear to me, the use of the personal pronoun is anything but simple, and refers to stuff that is both individual and collective, then it unravels.

The first constraint pertains, of course, to the familiar notion of physical law, in a Newtonian framework. The latter two speak of human interpretation and even experience. It is worth considering just what the limits of that which may be expressed within the Newtonian framework are, and how my present approach may help to shed more light than hitherto on the relation between that and the latter two observations.

A Newtonian account ought firstly to be separated from modern physical accounts. The former speaks of physics as we observe it at the human scale. Its regularities and concepts work well at everday spatial and temporal scales: they describe the movements of things as big as oranges and as fast as dogs. Happily, they continue to bear predictive fruit at some remove from the human reference point¹. That we now have a physics that supplants the entire Newtonian framework need be of no concern, for those observations one can make that speak of an understanding at variance with the classical approach are all, without exception, to be made at removes impossibly distant from the familiar time and spatial scales of phenomenal experience. For our purposes here, Newtonian physics is, in fact, a human centered physics. The supposedly objective framework is none such, for it has a human center.

On my account, we are beginning to have a story to tell about what it is to come at the world from a specific point of view, with an understanding that is anchored in a specific spatial and temporal scale. We get this from the observation of the relation between perception and action as they generate the encountered world of an active organism. The essence of this relation can be seen already in observing the relation between a single cell and its environment, and the fundamental link between perception and action in generating immediate experience of a world does not change from the bacterium to the human. In observing the lawfulness of the relation between perception and action, we also see why the encountered world has the specific scales it has, and thus why all organisms meet the world from a specific perspective. No organism encounters a pre-made world.

What we see in this framework is the regularity in the relation between specific forms of energetic gradients that impinge on the sensory surfaces of an organism, and the attendant (not consequent!) motion, or action, of the same. In this picture, the very best physical account we may come up with of nervous system activity is limited to the observation that brains move muscles. There is not, and never will be, a Newtonian account of goals, plans, the rules of golf, or the elegance of the golfer. The Newtonian account is, of course, deterministic, but it is not, nor should it aspire to be, exhaustive.

It may be less destructive to our innate sense of agency, if we look at a cell instead, for there we can already see the strengths and limitations of a Newtonian account. We can imagine, I believe, a more-or-less fully “mechanistic” description of the processes of metabolism. We can describe in exhaustive detail the dynamics that capture the lawful processes of change, distinguishing those that are proper to the cell itself (endogenous dynamics) and those that arise from interaction between the cell and its environment. But the fullest account we may obtain in this fashion is incomplete. Therein lies one limit of empirical science as it pertains to human experience. We cannot observe the agency of the cell. Philosophers have guessed wildly here. What I refer to as agency has been called Will, Vital force, Soul, Spirit, and numerous other things. No observation will reveal this. There is a mystery here, in the emergence of a temporally extended form of organization that is self-sustaining. We need new mathematics to describe it. But it does not appear insurmountable, once we locate the mystery in the right place!

For many people, a Newtonian approach to understanding observables is co-extensive with a scientific approach. Science is larger that that, and the Newtonian account is by no means an objective account that trumps all others, for it does not make reference to experience.

[1] It is worth considering how the concepts and methods of Newtonian physics work beyond the domain they arose in: that of everyday experience. We can generate a magnification of the head of a mite. Enlarged a thousand-fold, we see a monster, but an interpretable monster, with parts that are solid, built of ratchets, hooks, armour plates, hairs. We then have a paradoxical reaction. The thing is ugly and if it were to be encountered at a human scale it would terrify us, yet we find it only curious. It is no more troubling than an artistic representation of an anaethema, as in a horror film. Some may lose sleep over it, but we can all see that our emotional reaction needs to be tempered, for we recognize that we have gone beyond the bounds of possible experience.

When John Nash declared himself to be Emperor of Antarctica, by what license do we call him sick?  Mental illness is often attributed to illness of the brain, but this is problematic.  When the liver or the heart is diseased, we have a strong account of its function and the importance of that role in preserving the integrity of the organism.  Either organ may be considered sick if its ability to contribute to the health of the whole is impaired.  Our description of the role of the organ within the economy of the body is unashamedly teleological: the heart is there “to” pump blood and maintain circulation.  Now, I ask again, by what license do we interpret a bizarre belief as evidence of sickness?  To do so, we would need a teleological account of the role of the brain within the economy of the organism.  We have none such.
One goal of the development of the P-world notion is to arrive at something of this nature: a task description for the brain, if you will.  This is essentially a biological account, but biological in the sense of Ingold or Maturana, where the integrity of the organism  as a unity is emphasized.  The brain, here, is no kind of controller.  It mediates between receptors and actuators, and in doing so, it brings the phenomenal world into being.  But that latter trick is crucially dependent on other persons.  The P-world is largely socially constructed: our worlds of experience are by no means attributable only to the biology of the individual organism.  Language plays a huge role here, in helping us to interpret, categorize, and interact in a culturally determined manner with the world we encounter.
It is here that the teleological role of the brain is to be delineated, and Nash’s declaration might then, perhaps, be seen as pathological.  In doing so, we acknowledge fully the social nature of madness, and recognize the glaring truth that we have called it mad because we  disagree with the proposition and are unwilling to tolerate behavior informed by it.

We live in experience. We are subjectivity. I need to find words here.

When we look at a person, and interact with them, are we not seeing through the vehicle of their body, to the content of their experience? Are we not engaging with, tuning into, their flow of experience, rather than their physical form?

But their experience lies forever out of reach.

All we can talk about are vehicles. All we can report on are vehicles. There is no meaningful distinction between content and vehicle, because all we can point to are vehicles, and all that is is content.

This can be directly linked to Ruth Milliken’s notion of the direct perception of language (though her choice of terms is unfortunate).

Here’s the abstract:

The epistemological situation of a single cell is considered.
In chemotaxis, the relation between perception and action is
found to be lawful and bidirectional. Consideration of the
perception/action relation allows a characterization of the phe-
nomenal world of the cell that is grounded in perceptual dis-
tinctions that are relevant to its sustained viability. Moving
up the phylogenetic chain, this lawfulness, and its relation to
the phenomenal world of experience, is found to be essentially
unchanged in multicellular organisms. Nervous systems add
some innovation, in allowing distal responses and the non-
linear combination of information, but from cell to human,
the differentiation of the phenomenal world is found to arise
from the lawfulness of the perception/action relation, which in
turn reflects the biological constitution of the organism, and
not a pre-given objective world. This recognition suggests
that rather than looking within the nervous system for repre-
sentations of pre-given, external, entities, one might do bet-
ter to explore the fit between the function of the nervous sys-
tem and the phenomenal, meaningful, world encountered by
the organism in experience.

Here’s the article, in two scans: [part 1] [part 2]