readings> zombies and organic logic
Review of Zombies and
Consciousness (Robert Kirk, 2005)
Having popularised philosophical zombies in the 1970s, Nottingham
University’s Robert Kirk now thinks it is past time to kill
them off. But despatching the undead was never going to be easy.
Zombies and Consciousness has two aims. First, Kirk hopes to show that the notion of a zombie – a person of flesh and blood but without the inner light of experience – lacks logical conceivability; it is incoherent and thus cannot be used as grounds for proposing a ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness.
Second, he wants to go the next step and show that ordinary
physicalism
can completely account for consciousness. He identifies a set of
psychological functions, each of which is plausibly physical in its
causation and, when bundled together, should result in a conscious
being with no further (mental or otherwise non-physical) aspects left
dangling. Consciousness would be just the sum of these material
activities and nothing more.
The zombie story is that it is possible to imagine a creature which is
exactly the same as you and me in every physical detail. It would have
a brain that processes information and act as if it can
“see”, “think”,
“imagine”, and “feel”. But the
final essential ingredient would be missing. It would not benefit from
a parade of subjective experiences – qualia. All would be
dark inside. Kirk tells how he originally became a zombie enthusiast
following a naive question from a first-year student at a tutorial. As
he thought about it, the materialist position just melted away and for
some years he was an ardent convert.
Zombies do not actually have to exist. Just the fact that we agree the
idea to be a logical possibility opens the door to Cartesian dualism.
If all the physical circuitry does not necessarily entail the mental
states, then physicalism is not up to the job of explaining
consciousness. The mind is still the ghost in the machine.
It’s old idea, as Kirk acknowledges. In the 1930s,
G.F. Stout
used zombie-type examples to argue against epiphenomenalism. Stout said
it was “incredible to Common Sense” that there
could be human bodies lacking mental experiences that would still go
through the motions of making and using telephones and telegraphs,
writing and reading books, speaking in Parliament, even arguing about
materialism.
For a long time, zombies played only a minor role within consciousness
studies. Searle’s Chinese Room – which appealed
better to the artificial intelligence community – hogged the
limelight. But Chalmers (1996) put zombies centre stage in the late
1990s when he used them to argue that a physicalist approach to mind
could never work. The logical conceivability of zombies proved there
was an explanatory gap between the objective realm of the brain and the
subjective one of mind.
In philosophical circles, however, dualism is a
monster that many would like to see buried once and for all. So there
would be plenty of people to cheer on Kirk if he has now put paid the
zombies that he used to love. Does he succeed?
As a warm up exercise, he starts with the jacket fallacy. Some
properties can be imagined as capable of being shrugged off - like a
person might remove a jacket. Nothing essential changes. The wearer is
merely now sans jacket. However other properties are central to the
definition of what it is to be that thing. The performance of a car
cannot be altered except by fiddling with some physical part of its
machinery. It makes no sense to think of two cars identical in every
mechanical detail, yet one has “performance”, and
the other lacks it.
Of course this Rylean category-error style
rejection of dualism may be considered facile. To zombie-mongers, the
performance of a car is merely an emergent property. The mind appears
actually different in kind. Stronger arguments are required.
Kirk then mounts his own e-qualia argument (“e” for
epiphenomenal the reader is left to presume). His angle is that
e-qualia are a necessary corollary of zombiedom. For zombies to exist,
e-qualia would also have to exist as the precise type of mental
experience that the zombies so sadly lack. And then comes the clever
bit. If we feel that his description of these e-qualia is incredible
and quite contrary to common sense, the original idea of a zombie must
be incredible too. The downfall of one is automatically the demise of
the other, for they would be two sides of the same coin.
So what would e-qualia have to be? In the spirit of zombiedom, we would
begin with the suggestion that the world has a part that is physical
and closed in its causation. That is, every physical event within it is
a result of other physical events. This physical part would then be
used to construct a body with a brain that does complex cognitive
processing. Just like a zombie.
Then along comes the extra bit that
makes this creature instead conscious. It would enjoy a parade of
non-physical e-qualia. For some reason the physical activity would
generate an epiphenomenal, causally inert, glow of experience. The
qualia are there but they have no effects and do no cognitive work.
This logically is what we must suppose if e-qualia are then to be the
kind of thing that can be stripped away without altering the physical
activities of a brain in any way.
So Kirk presents us with a conscious being that can be turned into a
zombie through the loss of its e-qualia. It all seems conceivable - so
far. At this point Kirk hopes to snatch the rug from under the
argument. Consciousness involves one further necessary aspect he says.
We apparently have epistemic access to our mental states. They are the
subject of much noticing, attending, remarking and comparing.
How, for example, could we ever choose between the taste of
two wines
unless we had access to qualia that are the subject of the mental
contrast? We have no good explanation of this kind of access, he says,
but even zombie enthusiasts feel that we possess it. Therefore
e-qualia, in the sense of qualia which are so completely epiphenomenal
they do not even do indirect work by way of being noticed and acted
upon, cannot exist. If this kind of pure epiphenomenalism is
inconceivable, as even zombie “ultras” must admit,
then zombies become inconceivable as well.
Kirk dismisses the obvious counter-argument. Zombie supporters would
reply that zombies are able physically to feign all our complex mental
responses. This would be so by definition. They would process a lot of
information and give every outward impression of admiring two fine
wines. They would fake a sense of attentional effort and deliberation
if necessary. So again there would be a dualistic position in which a
physical world of itself cannot entail the presence of mental states.
The existence of qualia remain extra to any materialistic story.
This
misses the point, says Kirk. We know we have access to our conscious
states, so the idea of zombies as just us minus e-qualia is the thing
that is inconceivable. It is not about what level of clever behavioural
simulation might be possible but about whether we really have something
inessential that can be stripped away.
Does his argument work? Well not really. Perhaps I am missing something
here myself, but it could be true that we really need our mental states
to operate and yet it is also conceivable that a zombie might not. This
is the essence of the argument. Of course we are actually conscious (we
think). But it is unclear how that consciousness is entailed by any
physical mechanism.
It is a case of in for a penny, in for a pound.
Once we grant that a zombie can feign the presence of everything else,
like perception, thought and imagery, then why not also epistemic
access? Thus it remains open to us to suppose that we have e-qualia and
are merely being fooled by our remarkable cognitive machinery into
believing our mental states are both necessary and causal to our
intellectual functioning.
Kirk’s case is not helped by his principal follow-up
argument, the sole-pictures story (a pun on soul-pictures). He asks us
to imagine a zombie whose physical processes produce the particular
epiphenomenal effect that it has qualia-type pictures, like little
television images, playing on the soles of its feet. Whatever the
zombie feigned seeing would in fact show up somewhere as an actual
activity. The point is that we would not expect the zombie to have an
epistemic relation to this activity merely because it happened to be
occurring.
But this is weak. Flickering images projected on
the soles of the feet would be a physical process as Kirk himself
agrees. And the dualistic position is that, being mental, the
epiphenomenal states under discussion are of a different kind. Res
cogitans not res extensa. Thus it is not where they show up that
matters -– either in the head, or on the feet – but
the fact they exist.
So Kirk has not killed off his zombies. Must we then believe in the
resulting explanatory gap? Not at all! I would argue that the hard
problem is created by a basic assumption of the brand of logic that
philosophers generally choose to deploy. Being axiomatic to the logic,
this same logic can hardly be used to defeat it.
The arguments of Kirk,
Chalmers and others depend on a “mechanical” logic
based on the law of the excluded middle. Everything is either a this or
a that, one kind of thing or another. Crisp binary divisions are taken
for granted. But there is an alternative or indeed complementary view,
which I call organic (Kahn, 1960; Peirce. 1980), where middles only
become excluded in the course of a process. On this view the question
becomes, not how the physical could ever produce the mental, but how
they ever became separated.
In the organic view, everything begins mixed together as a vagueness
– the unbounded apeiron, or naked Aristotelian potential.
Then this vagueness divides dichotomously. It tends towards opposed
limits. The Peircean firstness of monadic vagueness becomes the
secondness of a dyadic separation through interaction. Then, out of
this separating, arises the thirdness, the triadic richness, of
hierarchical complexity. A bootstrapping story of 1, 2, 3.
This is not the place to defend organicism as an alternative logic. But
we can sketch its key consequences for theories of mind. It implies
that every dichotomous outcome begins in the commonality of a
vagueness. And the division does not bring absolute separations, only
relative ones. Limits arise, but they are limits that can only be
approached, never actually reached. To fully attain them would be to
break the world apart and leave no middle ground of interaction.
If we
follow this logic, which could be said to exude limits rather than
exclude middles, we can see that the apparent opposition of mind and
matter is in fact an outcome of the dichotomous separation of a single
potential. Although the two may now seem far apart as kinds, they must
remain connected in terms of causality. They are the mutual product of
a process of dependent co-arising or paticca samuppada (Macy, 1991). As
a necessary fact of logic, therefore, the physical and the mental are
to be regarded as joint products of a process of development. There can
be no hard problem because, like figure and ground or yin and yang, one
could not exist without the other.
This easy victory does have its troublesome consequences. The same
logic requires that all of the physical world must be connected to the
mental world in some real manner. This does not necessarily entail
panpsychism; the idea that the material world – objects such
as stars, rocks and water molecules – has qualia. But it does
lead us to pansemiosis, a view of reality organised in a holistic or
hierarchical fashion by a top-down, mind-like in the broadest sense,
knowing. This is not so outlandish as it may sound. Physics already has
universal laws that look down to constrain every local event.
Relativity and quantum theory are both observer-dependent models of
reality.
For the moment it does not really matter how the concept of mind would
be deconstructed under a pansemiotic and organic approach to the
modelling of the wider world. It is enough to show that zombies and
their detached e-qualia are highly dependent on a system of logic that
assumes what it then proves. There is hidden tautology in the arguments
of this book as well as in those of zombie enthusiasts.
Mechanical logic is in its way dichotomistic. But because of its reliance on the law of the excluded middle, mechanical logic leaves no option but to say that reality is either dualistic or monadic. Either the world is made of fundamental twonesses – such as chance and necessity, stasis and change, atom and void, discrete and continuous, substance and form, simple and complex, particular and general, matter and mind – or one of these two is taken as the fundamental and the other the derived or constructed.
Every one of the above mentioned
dichotomies has been the subject of Hard Problem type wrangling. Is the
world fundamentally continuous or discrete, random or determined, a
flux or a frozen spacetime block, a formless chora or the shadow cast
by Platonic ideas? It is simply the nature of the beast. A discourse
founded on the law of the excluded middle has no choice but to
vacillate between monism and dualism, finding neither satisfactory when
it comes to the deep ontological questions.
So it would be astonishing if Kirk, armed with standard logic, could
fulfil his first aim and finally dispose of zombies with the dualism
they imply. To start with the physical and then to try to build up to
the mental is a doomed project because the connecting middle ground
that must bridge the gap has already been excluded in the formation of
the dichotomy. Zombies and e-qualia may be incredible to common sense,
but dualism remains the inevitable destination for this way of thinking.
The second half of the book is taken up by Kirk’s other aim;
an attempt to define consciousness in terms of a bundle of functions.
He reviews the rise of awareness in the animal kingdom and says the
essence of subjective awareness is being a decider. This ability to
decide involves a “basic package” which includes
processes such the initiation and control of behaviour, the
acquisition, interpretation and retention of information, the
assessment of situations, and the choice of alternatives guided by
goals.
Then, to ensure this basic package of cognitive skills is
conscious, there has to be one final thing – directly active
information. What comes into the mind must have immediate impact and
gain processing priority. What he is hoping to achieve here is to
outline a set of functions which, when combined together, would leave
out nothing that a mind is capable of doing. You could hand over this
wish list to a clever hardware engineer and get back a conscious
system. If his list sounds believably complete and implementable, we
should find it easier to accept that mind is material.
Why does this approach seem so inadequate? Again because it is
mechanical – based on the atomistic and reductionist approach
by which humans build machines. Kirk is saying the mind can be created
by putting together a system of particulars. Each of the functions is
some particular skill, a component or a module. By careful choice of
particulars, a mind can be constructed. An organic metaphysics suggests
quite a different approach, for it treats mind as a fundamental
category. Mind is an extreme to match that other extreme, brute
inanimate matter, and so is a general rather than a particular. It has
to be approached in terms of its universal laws rather than as a set of
locally contingent specifics.
This is the message we should be taking from the ‘Hard
Problem’. The material realm is indeed not enough. Mind is
something other. But this does not mean we have to accept dualism. What
we have are two limits approached from a shared middle ground. As
scientists we should aim to model each kind of limit in terms of
universal laws. A heap of particulars would always be the wrong
approach for dealing with something that is actually fundamental.
Can mind in fact be treated as a universal? Yes, of course. An organic metaphysics – such as Peircean semiotics, for example – treats mind as the upper boundary, the realm of downward acting constraints. The whole that shapes up the parts. Organicism works as philosophy and it also works as science. Once we know what we are looking for, we can appreciate the progress already made towards modelling the universal laws of mind with anticipatory systems (Grossberg, 1995; Rosen, 1985), autopoietic systems (Maturana and Varela, 1992), complex adaptive systems (Waldrop, 1992), and hierarchy theory (Salthe, 1993; Pattee, 2000). All these approaches share similar principles and lead towards generalised mathematical ideas. And while they have been prompted by the need to explain (mainly) biological complexity, there is no reason why they cannot be extended to cover physical simplicity – the “simple” world of particles, stars and universes.
This is the future of consciousness studies, in my opinion
anyway. We
are working towards a theory of how wholes can organise their parts,
regardless of whether these wholes are organisms or entire worlds.
Kirk’s zombies are lumps of physics that have lost their
minds and no amount of mechanical complexity is ever going to restore
them. But the organicist’s idea of mindfulness as the
organising, constraining, downwardly-acting, aspect of a dichotomised
reality could bring mind back to the entirety of existence. Now that
would be quite an achievement for consciousness studies,
wouldn’t it?
Robert
Kirk's Zombies and Consciousness (Clarendon2005) reviewed
by John McCrone for the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
References
- Chalmers, David (1996), The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).
Grossberg, Stephen (1995), ‘The attentive brain’,
American Scientist, 83(5), pp. 438-449.
- Kahn, Charles (1960), Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology
(New York: Columbia University Press).
- Macy, Joanna (1991), Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems
Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press).
- Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco (1992), The Tree of
Knowledge (Boston, MA: Shambhala).
- Pattee, Howard (2000), ‘Causation, control, and the
evolution of complexity’. In P.B. Anderson, C. Emmeche, N.O.
Finnemann and P.V Christiansen (eds.), Downward Causation (Aarhus
University Press).
- Peirce, Charles (1980), Selected Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover).
- Rosen, Robert (1985), Anticipatory Systems (New York: Pergamon).
- Salthe, Stanley (1993), Development and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press).
- Stout, G.F. (1931), Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
- Waldrop, Mitchell (1992), Complexity (New York: Simon and Schuster).