The Landscape of Conscious Experience
Chris Petrunis
Submitted to
The Department of Computer Science
at
The College of New Jersey
In partial fulfillment of the requirements of CMSC497
4-22-2004
Mentor: Dr. Nobo Komagata
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Abstract
Understanding the mind requires understanding consciousness which in turn
requires understanding phenomenal consciousness. The study of the mind then needs to
include the subjective “what it’s like” aspect of experience. We invoke the concept of
qualia to talk about these raw feelings of experience. I attempt to outline the underlying
conceptual structures of phenomenal consciousness and qualia and, to some extent,
describe how these work. Consciousness and the mind, as well as phenomenal
consciousness and consciousness in its entirety, exhibit a part/whole relationship.
Phenomenal is distinguished from psychological consciousness, and its role in experience
is described as a kind of processing of incoming signals and translating them into qualia.
A useful analogy comes from the symbol interpretation process in semiotics. Once this
theory is established, I make use of some of the classical qualia arguments such as the
cases of inverted qualia and the zombie world. Finally this is applied to computation,
with an extra emphasis on the zombie world, which has obvious applications to artificial
intelligence and seems to undermine the Turing test.
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1. Introduction
While the sciences have made a great effort to study the mind as a whole, the area
of consciousness (or at least the aspect most relevant to this study) has received much
less attention than many other areas of the mind. Literature in this area is much less dense
than in others. Interestingly though, most people would consider consciousness to be a
fundamental aspect of the mind, or even the most fundamental aspect. Consciousness is
also the part of the mind with which we are most intimately acquainted. I am aware of
my mind because I am conscious. Furthermore, we may also consider how conscious
experience is essential to our existence. Every moment of experience comes through the
lenses of consciousness, and without these lenses we would have no experience at all. So
we might be interested in consciousness for its fundamental role in the mind, its
fundamental role to our acquisition of knowledge, or its fundamental role to existence as
we know it.
Studying consciousness is vital to more practical areas as well though. This type
of knowledge will be quite useful if we hope to one day produce artificial life. Strictly
speaking, life does not necessarily imply any kind of consciousness (though some
theories of mind might not agree to this). For example, we might consider bacteria. It
seems quite likely that bacteria are not consciousness beings, but they are still living
beings. If this is the case then we can create pseudo-bacteria, an artificial life form,
without running into the problem of consciousness. While these artificial bacteria may be
intriguing in their own right, other life forms may look more attractive. As we move up
the evolutionary ladder to more complex beings, consciousness looks more and more like
a prerequisite. We may quibble about where consciousness comes into play: Do we
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draw the line at dolphins? What about cats? Worms? But after some currently
undetermined rung on the ladder consciousness is required. Finally we ascend to
humans. Most of the time when we talk about artificial life we talk about artificial
humans, and there is no question about whether we are above that essential rung. So any
endeavor attempting to create artificial humans will need to incorporate some theory of
consciousness.
For the remainder of this paper I will be explaining the basic terrain of
consciousness and attempting to illuminate the role of experience. Throughout the
journey I try to point out the basic components of consciousness and their relations.
Eventually we will make our way to conscious experience and find that it is a kind of
information processing related to reading a sentence or executing a program. After that I
touch upon a few of the classic examples of the problem of conscious experience. The
paper concludes by applying these to artificial intelligence. I should also note that while
this problem clearly echoes the mind-body problem, the theory I offer remains agnostic
about that issue. In order to concentrate on the structure of consciousness and to create a
theory that is not committed to any theory of substance, this problem has been omitted.
2. The Essence of Consciousness
To understand the essential element of conscious experience, we first need to
remove consciousness from the mind as a whole. After this we can separate the areas of
consciousness we are most concerned with from those that we are not. To find conscious
experience, we will need to remove many of the aspects of consciousness commonly
studied in the sciences, until we get at the essence of consciousness as we know (or
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experience) it. Only then will we be able to find and understand what we are searching
for.
2.1. Consciousness Out of the Mind
Mind
Consciousness
Memory
We will use the mind as our starting point. The mind can be divided into parts,
one of which is consciousness. People have commented before that the two are really the
same thing. When we talk about the mind we are talking about consciousness. This
might often be true because when we are engaged in philosophical inquiry about the mind
we are mostly concerned with consciousness. In those cases the terms may be used
interchangeably, but there are also times when we want to talk about the mind but not
consciousness. Anytime we are talking about consciousness we are talking about the
mind though, because consciousness is a part of the mind.
If the mind is not identical to consciousness but consciousness is part of it, then
there must be some elements that: A) exist inside the domain of the mind, and B) do not
exist inside the domain of consciousness. The chief example here would be memory.
Premise A holds because memory is obviously a feature of the mind. B might be a little
more difficult to understand as far as memory is concerned, but this premise holds as
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well. We can safely say that something is not part of consciousness if it cannot become
conscious. The contents of memory can of course become conscious, so they would not
conform to requirement B. If we think of memory in terms of structure rather than in
terms of content, it becomes easier to see that memory does not become conscious.
Memory would be something like the warehouse of information. While the information
may appear before consciousness, the warehouse itself would not. A number of other
items may be features of the mind but not of consciousness. Just knowing that one item,
memory, can fill these requirements assures us that the mind is more than just
consciousness, so illustrating others is somewhat unnecessary.
2.2. Separating Phenomenal From Psychological
Psychological
Consciousness
Phenomenal
Consciousness
In order to understand consciousness we need to start with a rather essential
component, phenomenal consciousness. This is the part of consciousness we speak about
when we talk about “what something is like;” the other half is psychological
consciousness (Chalmers 1996). Together these two components translate roughly into
the subjective and the objective aspects of consciousness, respectively. Phenomenal
consciousness comprises what it is like to be us; psychological consciousness provides
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what we are like to others. For now we will work with the assumption that these two are
separate and neither comprises all of consciousness. Later we will see the division laid
out in more detail.
Phenomenal consciousness provides an interesting and useful subject
matter for a couple of different reasons. First, almost every aspect of psychological
consciousness has been somewhat explored. Since the psychological is more accessible
to science, it has been favored for research and experiments. In Consciousness, Hobson
frames his study of consciousness in terms of psychological characteristics. His building
blocks of consciousness include attention, emotion, learning, language, and orientation,
amongst others. These aspects are more accessible to science, so neuroscientists like
Hobson often base their research on them. Attention, for example, lends itself well to
scientific experimentation. When we want to know about attention, we are not
particularly concerned with what it feels like to be attentive; we are more interested in
inputs and outputs. The situation with phenomenal consciousness is quite the opposite.
Nearly all of phenomenal consciousness is uncharted territory; studying the phenomenal
is pioneering work. Unlike attention, when we talk about pain we are more apt to want to
know how it feels. This is primarily the reason why phenomenal consciousness does not
yield to science as easily as psychological. As Chalmers has claimed, psychological is
the ‘easy’ and phenomenal the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness.
The difficulty of understanding “how it feels” (as opposed to “how it functions”)
is essentially the issue with phenomenal consciousness. When we study the
psychological, we are concerned with functionality which can be analyzed through
normal scientific methods that utilize our perception of data, objects, etc. in the world.
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However, the phenomenal does not yield to such an analysis. We come to know the
phenomenal only through introspection, and we only have this type of access to our own
minds. The only point of reference each of us has is ourselves. This becomes fairly clear
if we imagine some evil being, with illusory power comparable to the Cartesian demon or
the Matrix Architect, who has tried to deceive us by putting us in a world populated with
automata that look and act just like real people. Eerily enough, this world looks exactly
like ours. Traditionally this has been referred to as the problem of other minds, but we
might very well call it the problem of other consciousnesses. The best we can do is
assume others have phenomenal consciousness because we see that they have
psychological consciousness. We do not have the direct knowledge of phenomenal
consciousness in others that we have in ourselves. Understanding the phenomenal
presents greater difficulties than understanding the psychological, thus it is the ‘hard’
problem.
Finally, phenomenal consciousness is much more strongly connected to us. It is
the component of consciousness that is essential to existence as we know it. Experiences
are, by definition, phenomenal. The summation of experiences makes up existence as we
know it (experience as a subject). Then to exist without experience would be
subjectively incomprehensible, maybe something akin to death. Certainly it would be
nothing like the existence we now have. Suddenly I am a subject robbed of all that
makes me a subject; maybe I then cease being a subject altogether. Lacking an
understanding of phenomenal consciousness then means lacking an understanding of that
which is most essential to our existence.
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2.3. What It’s Like
We already talked about conscious experience, but we have yet to see the key
term that frames our study of consciousness. Our experience is composed of unique
moments, events, and entities of perception. Whenever a person tastes coffee, sees red,
hears chirping, feels a pain, or smells a rose he or she is experiencing a quale. They are
the “raw feels” or the “what it’s like” of experiences. At this point it is probably fairly
obvious that qualia (the plural of quale) are significant to consciousness.
The discussion of qualia is often accompanied by Frank Jackson’s hypothetical
story of Mary, a brilliant neurosurgeon who has never seen any colors before. Mary has
spent her days in a black and white room and her only visual contact with the outside
world is a black and white monitor. She has still managed to learn every physical fact
about color vision, while never experiencing the phenomenon herself. One day Mary is
released, and she sees the color red; it seems that Mary has learned something or gained
some sort of knowledge. The fact she has learned is what the experience of red is like –
she has learned what a red quale is like. As the story has been retold and retooled, the
details have been changed but Mary’s exact situation is inconsequential. Mary has shown
us what qualia are.
Talking about qualia can get very confusing very quickly, so it is important to
understand exactly what they are and not to confuse them with other things. It can be
very difficult to divorce this concept from many other related ideas. For example, red is
commonly used as an instance of qualia, but this is not to say that colors are qualia.
Color can be defined in many ways that have nothing to do with experience. The
hexadecimal code for red in a computer is one such instance; here red is simply a range
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of numbers (or, alternatively, it is one of three different variables, red/green/blue, used to
create all the colors that appear on the display). I am talking about qualia when I talk
about how red looks to me or the redness of a certain item. In a sense it is a rather
personal idea.
2.4. Phenomenal Out of Consciousness
Mind
Psychological
Consciousness
Prop.
Attitude
Phenomenal
Consciousness
Quale
Consciousness
Memory
In order to show that phenomenal consciousness is only part of consciousness we
will produce the division in the same way we separated consciousness from other aspects
of the mind. To do this we must introduce another mental phenomenon. We have
already become familiar with qualia. I might see red things due to qualia, but this does
not explain how I believe that there is a red book on the desk. My beliefs, hopes, wants,
and other attitudes toward propositions like “there is a red book on the desk”, “today is
Thursday”, and “I need lunch” are called propositional attitudes. While qualia are
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characterized by their feel, propositional attitudes are relations between subjects and
propositions.
Once we sufficiently understand these two concepts, we can put them to use and
establish the difference between phenomenal consciousness and consciousness in general.
Both of these must exist inside consciousness because we can be ‘conscious of’ both
propositional attitudes and qualia. Again we will need to find those mental phenomena
that exist within consciousness but not phenomenal consciousness. Propositional
attitudes serve this purpose. We have established that they exist in consciousness, and
while they might be about qualitative feelings, it is not the case that they are qualitative
feelings. Since they are not phenomenal qualities (qualia), they do not exist in
phenomenal consciousness. The phenomenal deals with ‘raw’ data; propositional
attitudes take this data a step further by exhibiting it in a structured form (propositions)
and displaying relations to the subject (attitudes). Objects in phenomenal consciousness
are simply about appearances and feels; they do not require the conceptual basis that
propositional attitudes necessitate. Unlike qualia, propositional attitudes, or propositions
at least, can be evaluated true or false. Phenomenal raw feels are much more basic. We
can easily imagine lower animals having these, while it is more difficult to picture them
having propositional attitudes (though undoubtedly some of the higher animals do have
these). It is conceivable that an earthworm might experience simple qualia – maybe they
know what darkness or dirt feels like – but it is much more of a stretch to allow them
propositional attitudes – they probably do not even have simple concepts representing
‘dirt’ and ‘darkness’, so it seems fair to assume that they do not have access to
propositions and thus propositional attitudes. These different phenomena probably come
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about at different levels in conscious beings, but we only need to know that propositional
attitudes do not exist in phenomenal consciousness, and we have already seen that this is
the case. From our very concept of phenomenal consciousness we can know this.
While qualia and propositional attitudes are clearly different, we often find both
being instantiated together. We can look again at the sentence, “I believe there is a red
book on the desk.” This is clearly a propositional attitude, but qualia seem to be
incorporated in the proposition. We can break the proposition into a logic statement:
∃x (red(x) ^ onDesk(x)). Each of the predicates can be thought of as a quale (though
onDesk should probably be broken into smaller components before we think of it as a
quale; for this reason we will simply talk about red). The subjective ‘feel’ of red plays an
important role in the truth value of the proposition (does x fit the bill?). If I believe such
a proposition, it is probably safe to say that it is due to my experience of a red quale when
looking at the book. It might be the case that I believe this proposition because someone
or something reported it to me, but then it would be fair to assume that the reporter had
such an experience before relaying the message to me. When we use the adjective ‘red’
in this sentence, we are talking about that particular quale. It is very difficult to avoid
qualia in such a sentence (though we might look back to some of the earlier examples of
objective uses of ‘red’; the hexadecimal code for red would work). In many cases, these
ideas are tied together. We might have propositional attitudes about qualia, like in the
example above, or we might have some quale associated with some propositional
attitude, such as the qualitative feel of hate in the propositional attitude “I hate packing.”
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2.5. Perception and Sensation
Body
Mind
Psychological
Consciousness
Phenomenal
Consciousness
Prop.
Attitude
Quale
Consciousness
Sensation
Memory
Perception
When people talk about qualia we often see examples of after-images,
hallucinations, and other similar situations. These examples are used to try and separate
the concept of qualia from its external source. Imagine the image that persists after one
stares at a bright light for some time then turns away. Phantom pains can also provide us
with a useful situation where external stimulation stops playing a role in the process of
creating experience. The point of these classical examples is to try and separate the
internal feel from the external object that creates it.
Quite a number of people use these terms for various purposes, but I will refer to
internal bodily sources of qualia, like phantom pains, as sensations and external nonbodily sources of qualia, like seeing a dog, as perceptions. This is not an arbitrary
assignment; in everyday language when we talk about sensations we speak of pains,
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chills, and other phenomena that are largely focused on internal states and only applied to
external sources in a secondary way. When I talk about a tingling sensation I am
stressing the internal state. Perceptions on the other hand are focused outward and
applied to external objects. When I talk about perceiving something red I am stressing
the external red object. If someone were to speak of perceiving pains and sensing bright
objects we would understand him or her but still think that these utterances were quite
awkward. We have an implicit notion that these terms should be used in the way I have
defined them rather than in the way that the person above conceives of them.
Another important distinction needs to be made as well. When I use the term
‘sensation’ I do not mean qualia, but rather an internal source of qualia. Other authors
have used the term to name the qualia associated with a perception. While their proposed
definition may have its advantages, it seems that such a term is rather unnecessary. In
this case ‘sensation’ and ‘qualia’ are basically synonymous. It seems fair to define the
term either way – people use both in general speech – but the definition I advocate is less
redundant.
So we have two different terms for two different sources of qualia. The
distinction made above becomes important when we deal with phantom pains, for
example, because we do not want to say that phantom pains are qualia; they are only a
source. This account of qualia is not dependent on external objects because internal
objects may also create qualia. We can employ the term ‘sensation’ to talk about these
strange situations where experience happens without external stimuli. Sensations like
these do not exactly bring us to an understanding of phenomenal consciousness, but they
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clear the path to qualia by removing some of the details of perception that may stand in
the way.
3. The Mechanics of the Phenomenal
Signal
(from red balloon)
Red
Quale
Ant
3.1. Generating Meaning
How does phenomenal consciousness work though? A useful metaphor comes
from the field of semiotics. Signals caused by perception or sensation (e.g. impulses in
the brain created by a visual stimulus) relate to qualia in much the same way that words
relate to their meanings. Phenomenal consciousness then is a kind of interpreter or
extractor of ‘meaning.’ It processes the information received by turning the incoming
signals into qualia. As meanings are extracted from words, qualia are extracted from
sensations and perceptions.
Sometime after I had adopted this view of qualia, I found that I was not alone.
Chalmers actually advocates a similar view in his proposal for a fundamental theory of
consciousness in The Conscious Mind. However, he sees information processing as a
source of consciousness rather than just qualia. The main difference here would be the
fact that Chalmers’ theory leans toward a somewhat strange form of consciousness where
rocks and thermostats may have mental states, at least to some degree. Theories of
consciousness that grant inanimate objects (and possibly all matter) mental or conscious
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states are called panpsychism. For obvious reasons, many people are disinclined to
believe in panpsychism, though the position has some interesting benefits. For example,
one never has to decide when consciousness emerges from matter if consciousness is
always a property of matter. My theory, however, does not carry the baggage that
Chalmers’ version carries. One does not need to accept panpsychism in order to accept
my theory.
This analogy also provides a particularly helpful account of a slightly different
problem of other minds. For meanings of words to be properly understood both the
speaker and the listener need to have some common ground. At the same time, it is quite
likely that each person has some different imagery or idea accompanying the specific
word. For example, whenever I hear the word ‘complicated’ I think of a huge
supercomputer. I remember first hearing the word and thinking that it sounded like the
word computer, then I found that such a machine provided a good example of something
that is complicated. This image has persisted ever since I learned the word. Despite the
fact that most people do not have the same imagery that accompanies the term, they can
still communicate with me using the same word. It is plausible that some other person
might imagine a long mathematical formula written on a chalkboard when they hear the
word, but he and I can still talk about the ‘complicated’ plot of a movie and understand
one another. Qualia seem to act in a similar way. Perhaps this same person and I both
perceive a red balloon. I might see a certain quale of red, and he might see one that is
quite different, but we still have enough common ground to talk about our confusion
about how this red balloon floated into the middle of our discussion.
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3.2. Further Examples of Qualia
Signal
(from red balloon)
Green
Quale
We should also consider the possibility that we do not really have common
ground at all when we converse about qualia. It might be that my word for red and my
friend’s word for red are really more like homophones. While they sound exactly the
same, they may refer to very different things. Let us imagine that when he sees red
things, he sees them the way I see green things. It might be that all the colors really show
up as their complements for him. We both call the same things red that are objectively
red, but he sees these red things as green. Furthermore, he does not notice that his colors
are inverted because he always sees red as green and has always been told that these
objects he is seeing are called ‘red.’ When each of us says ‘red’ we mean very different
things, but our naming patterns always accidentally match.
This fact brings us back to the symbol-meaning metaphor. We can set up a
hypothetical situation where an American and a European are talking about football, but
neither of them is talking about the same sport; the American means ‘pigskin’ while the
European means ‘soccer’. Each uses the same term but means something different. They
might both talk about things that apply to many sports, such as referees, teams, or balls,
or they might even converse about more specific items, such as fullbacks and kicking, yet
still never know that the subject matter clashes. As long as neither of them mentions
anything that might not apply to the other person’s sport, the two will never know the
difference, just like my inverted friend and I. Inverted qualia cases such as these are
often used to show that conscious experience can be different even though all relevant
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external facts are the same. The different qualia my friend and I experience act like the
meaning each person has in mind when they talk about football; the external facts act like
the common word ‘football.’
Another classic thought experiment about consciousness takes the inverted qualia
situation to the extreme. It certainly seems to be the case that if one person could
experience drastically different qualia without any noticeable external difference, he or
she might also have no qualia and still display no noticeable difference. Such a person is
called a zombie. A zombie can buy groceries, drive a car, converse with neighbors, and
conduct research just like any conscious person might. He or she acts just like a normal
person, but all the processes that occur in his or her body are not accompanied by
conscious experience. Everything takes place “in the dark” i.e. without experience. The
phrase, “the lights are on, but nobody’s home,” sums up the zombie’s situation rather
concisely.
4. Qualia Applied
Zombies become particularly interesting in the discussion of artificial intelligence.
Any kind of artificial intelligence that has been created so far would have to fall into the
zombie category. Clearly no one has created anything approaching consciousness, and it
is not foreseeable that such a thing will happen soon (this is true by our best method of
analysis; it is unlikely, but possible, that we already have conscious beings on our hands,
but we just do not know it). We simply have too far to go with artificial intelligence. It
is probably even too much of a leap to say that anything passes an extensive Turing test.
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We should note that the zombies we talked about above would have been able to pass a
Turing test. Since most of us would be fooled into believing that the zombies in the last
section were conscious, we might classify these theoretical beings as convincing zombies.
Despite all the research we have invested in artificial intelligence, the actual zombies we
have in the real world cannot compare to them; ours are quite unconvincing zombies.
But even if we did have something that acted enough like a human being, we still
would not necessarily have consciousness. As the zombie example illustrated, actions
that seem to be governed by consciousness may not actually be caused by a conscious
being. It is quite possible that the voice on the other line is actually a simulation without
conscious experience. Humanlike action and intelligence could be generated by a being
lacking conscious experience, a zombie.
In section 2 we saw that a similar problem arises even when we talk to other
human beings. We have no way to really know if they are having conscious experiences
or not. The best we can do is hope that, since they have analogous behavior, they also
have experiences like ours. In the case of artificial intelligence we would have to do the
same as well, or we would soon be left questioning consciousness in other human beings.
It would be difficult not to consider the robot in Bicentennial Man conscious, for
example. He exhibited creativity, opinions, rational thought, desire, and various other
qualities that we reserve only for conscious beings. Many of these can be taken as
indirect evidence of conscious experience. If, for example, a being takes pleasure in
doing a task, then we should be inclined to think that some enjoyable experience is
occurring that causes this pleasure.
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As Bertrand Russell noted in his paper “Analogy,” our best bet then is to assume
consciousness by analogy. If the being is sufficiently humanlike then it should probably
be assumed that it is also conscious. Since we extend the courtesy of analogy to our
fellow man, we should do the same to our fellow intelligent beings. This answer is not a
simple one however. As we imagine the range of beings that we might try and apply this
analogy to, we must wonder where to draw the line for consciousness. How unlike us
might something be and yet still be conscious? Some cases are simple to decide: rocks
and most other inanimate objects certainly seem to miss the mark; humans, dolphins, and
primates seem to be quite far above it. Others are much harder though: perhaps the
object in question can converse about literature, describe its favorite food, talk about
what it detests most, and communicate the feel of a pain, yet it is inorganic and
inanimate; is this a conscious being?
5. Conclusion
Throughout the course of this paper we have come to understand the underlying
structure of the mind and a basic mechanism that can describe the workings of qualia.
The part of the mind we have been most concerned with is consciousness, and the aspect
of consciousness we targeted was phenomenal consciousness. Qualia are a kind of
interpretation of signals by phenomenal consciousness. These signals translate into
certain “raw feelings” that we associate with objective facts. Red looks a certain way, the
high C from a piano has a specific sound, and an itch has a particular feeling. Each of
these, along with other qualia, composes the experience we have as human beings (or
phenomenal experience.
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This understanding of the basics of qualia and the structure of the mind bring us
one step closer to a grasp of phenomenal consciousness, which in turn will help us to
understand the whole of consciousness. Knowledge like this is helpful to of us because
we are conscious, but it is particularly useful for anyone interested in artificial
intelligence. The presence of qualia provides a good criterion for judging whether or not
something is conscious in a meaningful way.
We now have some idea of how all this works, but this is only a very small
portion of what we would like to know about consciousness and the mind. As was
mentioned before, most of the information provided in this paper about the mind,
consciousness, and qualia was little more than a sketch. Another mental phenomenon,
propositional attitudes, would also need to be explained before we can understand the
components of consciousness. These will undoubtedly be even more difficult to explain
because of their more complex structure and because of the difficulty in disassociating
them from qualia. I imagine though that if we come to some firm understanding of
qualia, propositional attitudes might become quite simple to understand as well. While
this is just speculation, it seems plausible to think that propositional attitudes may be at
least partially composed of qualia or have developed from qualia. We also still need
some account of the origins of consciousness from the brain. If we can better understand
what parts or interactions are responsible for the creation of a mind, then we will have a
much better picture of consciousness. Many other details need to be fleshed out as well.
Knowing the origins of consciousness may solve some problems, such as knowing what
beings may be considered conscious, but that only answers the where/who of
consciousness. Knowledge of how the brain (or anything else) can create consciousness
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would be much appreciated too. This brings up the ever present problem of dualism and
monism. Issues such as these have existed for an exceedingly long time, but maybe
science and philosophy will finally be able to come up with a definitive answer. I am
sure we have a long time to go though, and in the meantime there is still much more
research to be done.
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Tye, M. 2002. “Visual Qualia and Visual Content Revisited” in David J. Chalmers ed.,
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