THE INTEGRITY PAPERS Genre Group - Buchanan ceptualinstitute.com VALUES, SYSTEMS AND CONSCIOUSNESS [Part 1]
February 14, 1997
by Bruce Buchanan, M.D.* (Bruce Buchanan)1. Introduction:
William James as well as Freud took consciousness for granted as the most familiar and fundamental of postulates, leaving nothing which needed to be said. Today, as Dennett says, this topic leaves "even the most sophisticated thinkers...confused".(Dennett,1991)
The suggestion put forward for consideration here is that consciousness entails integrative functions which evaluate ongoing experiences of the organism and contributes to purposeful strategies of response. As such, consciousness includes the field of current awareness within which we attend to perceptions, but also to varying degrees a fleeting penumbra of summary considerations in terms of which perceptions are evaluated in relation to needs, memories, feelings and lesser goals, with a view to priorizing a response. Consciousness does not always occupy the total field of purposive behavior, but it appears to become involved in situations of conflict and/or new challenges.
As C.S. Peirce once noted, what we mean by something, and what we mean to do with it, are synonymous (quoted by Pribram,1996).
This thesis requires considerable unpacking if it is to be clarified for adequate discussion. This paper outlines a few of the considerations which have led to these views, and some possible consequences of such views. This approach is offered as a conjecture (Popper,1976)), to point in a direction for further study and research, before rigorous theorems or experimental data can be expected. The purpose is to elicit the critical views and comments of others.
The challenge for a new descriptive framework is whether it takes note of relationships and/or distinctions previously neglected. What has been classified and studied separately by researchers in awareness, memory, feelings, knowing, meaning, intention, etc. and from various directions of inquiry - philosophical, neurological, cognitive, behavioral - have all been seen to have a bearing upon consciousness. And it is far from clear what the relationships among these entities and approaches might be, or that they refer to a common unitary entity. Yet a comprehensive framework should somehow take these aspects into account.
Moreover, insofar as consciousness reflects 'what we are about', it is important to grasp clearly its role in ordinary life, and in relation to questions of choice, freedom and responsibility. Consciousness is not primarily a question of conceptual, linguistic and/or academic interest and concern.
As Sloman has pointed out (Sloman,1990), there is a need for explanatory theories able to subsume mechanisms which account for empirical facts, and producing useful conceptual frameworks (e.g. taxonomies) based on those theories. In this process an effort is needed to identify questions amenable to empirical investigation.
But as Harman has noted (Harman,1994), the confusions and difficulties posed by our present situation should not be underestimated. Emerging views may imply significant change in the way we think about science - and challenge reductionist views which are sometimes thought to be part of science. Emerging ideas may also challenge the way we see our place in the world. We cannot afford the indulgence of philosophical abstractions remote from actual testing, nor can we wish to guide our lives according to such doctrines. Personal and social guidance systems based upon reliable knowledge are a primary concern. And challenges to the basic assumptions and raison d'etre of many modern institutions, including those of science and politics, may be logically implied by a thoroughgoing paradigm shift.
The history of the ways in which mind and consciousness have been understood is beyond the scope of this article. Many schools of philosophy, and in recent years many scientific disciplines, have suggested and/or revealed a variety of alternatives and approaches (Casti, 1989; Damasio,1994). While issues of human freedom and responsibility are involved, these questions will not be considered here from a philosophical perspective, although a framework of implicit metaphysical assumptions is of course unavoidable. Rather, principles of systems sciences (Beer, 1994), of logical entailments and of causal sequences and information feedback will be the focus of attention.
To the extent that methods of science rule out consciousness as a causal reality they are inadequate to deal with the mental springs of action Yet data of direct minute-by-minute experience affirms the importance of the ability to choose, and the decisive importance for adaptive success of inner criteria and guidance to choose the better alternatives. The dilemma is basic and not to be evaded (Harman,1994). If we deny the real data of immediate personal experience, and do not recognize the failure to date of science to provide an adequate cosmology for the guidance of life and society, we are engaged in an intellectual pretence that is belied by events of daily life.
Of course all human beings are necessarily guided by their current assumptions. But there are many scientists who, when they encounter the words philosophy or metaphysics, believing that there has been no progress in philo- sophy for the past two thousand years, immediately lose all interest. It is to such people that this paper is partic- ularly addressed, as an examination and possible reconsideration of such assumptions.
Philosophy has had a role in helping to formulate questions and methods, and on occasion in suggesting answers. We need not try to discuss the role of philosophy in general terms. The value of concepts and language, whether in philosophy or science, depend upon the purposes and methods by which they are given meaning and use, and is therefore best discussed in very specific terms.
But there is an essential need for an evaluative enterprise that is adequately comprehensive. And philosophical analysis may be useful in helping to shape potential theories and in considering criteria and methods for evaluating what we think we know (Chalmers,1995b). An element of speculation will always be involved in highly abstract considerations, and accepted science is not free of this. (For example, there are grounds for conjecture that even the concepts of time and space involved in modern physics are grounded in somewhat speculative hypotheses (e.g. relativity theory with a block universe, in which human freedom has no place), which have not yet been totally resolved to everyone's satisfaction (Elitzur,1996).
2. The Present Approach:
It has been widely suggested that some kind of paradigm shift is required in order to account adequately for phenomena of consciousness, particularly for the role of subjective awareness as such.
Some of the limitations of established scientific criteria and methods in relation to consciousness studies are well recognized: e.g.
(1) Scientific knowledge involves a very strict selection of data, which necessarily is a
reduced set of what is given in experience;
(2) Art and literature explore connotative and allusive implications of experience and
language in ways ruled out by science, but nevertheless are well recognized as highly
conscious products (Frye, 1991);
(3) Behaviors which do not involve the abstractions of science or art, such as child-rearing,
skilled trades, business acumen or political leadership, etc., also involve and manifest
consciousness, as does spiritual inquiry and the human search for meaning in life, what-
ever the status of these activities and inquiries may be from a conventional scientific
point of view.The concept of consciousness is clearly an abstraction, and it points to experience as fundamental, the source of data essential to any adequate theory of consciousness. So we must look to relationships with direct experience to carry the explanatory burden as to the nature of consciousness.
The experience of which we speak is that given in immediate awareness with apparent reference to sources in the external world and in perceptions of the body. This experience is prior to language and conceptualizations which may refer to it. Of course, the focus of attention involved in experience may be variable, and much refined and discriminated in terms of cultural and scientific constructs. Nevertheless, all such derived constructs are partial and selective in relation to the massive and ongoing data presented to immediate awareness moment-by-moment. Individuals tend to see what they already know, of course, and corticothalamic circuits of the brain help us to understand how this can occur, but healthy functions register perceptions of the external world as these are shaped by behavior (Powers, 1973).
Direct experience is indeed fundamental. By comparison, concepts of mass and space-time are highly elaborated abstractions, but are not perceivable as fundamental entities. They are, of course, conceptualized as fundamental entities within the logical structure through which we understand the world, but that is not the same thing.The map is not the territory (Korzybski,1958).
From the point of view of the philosophical position known as naive materialism, experience appears to depend upon the world as we see it. But there is a minefield of untenable assumptions in such a statement, beyond our scope here to deal with in any detail. Now, psychophysical laws and principles have been described in attempts to account for such dependency. But the theories of science provide a somewhat closed system in this regard, at least in terms of the internal coherence of logical structure that is a desired feature of any scientific theory. The challenge is to revisit the assumed boundaries, and open the systems of possible concepts, not to interfere or invalidate known laws, which would not be possible, but to perhaps situate them within an expanded frame of reference of enhanced explanatory power. (Although it may seem difficult to imagine how this may happen now, it is not difficult, given the history of science, to imagine something like this happening within the next hundred years, and more likely much sooner.)
The fact is that actual experience depends upon processes which cannot be derived from what we know as physical laws alone. In other words, experience depends upon and reflects external realities which are prior to human concepts and more actual than the constructions of physical science can be. Science does not provide for a deterministic system and does not completely describe the actual world (Popper,1976).
Chalmers (Chalmers,1995b) speaks of a need for new principles, perhaps with an extra ingredient, which are needed to build the explanatory bridge. In the concepts offered here, the extra ingredient is to be found in the relationships of the processes involved in evaluation and feedback. The feedback loop, as the fundamental model of models, represents causal factors which produce an effect, which is then evaluated in comparison some value, and the discrepancy, or measure of error, is then linked by feedback of that information to one or more causal factors at the next instant of time. These real processes integrate measures of value into outcomes and events into ongoing causal chains and complex relationships.
These processes are structured in time. Indeed, the processes link events before-and-after to impart the features of delay and binding which we perceive and come to know as time. Since these relationships also provide the basis for the if-then of logical relationships, and the construction of abstract models, they provide the basic structure for the control systems we have come to know as mind. Analysis may separate these aspects of the basic package (Kirk, 1995) for our more convenient understanding, but the processes as they exist are bound up with one another.
By definition, values are the criteria and measures which govern such patterns of purposeful behavior, although the values differ in relation to their context. In these ways the logic of cybernetics, which is already implicit in many if not most areas of psychological and neurophysiological inquiry (e.g. reentrant loops, etc.), may help to elucidate the significance of such processes.
These ideas will be expanded somewhat in the following section, which will be followed by further brief comments on principles of cybernetics, the nature of language, and precedents in the thought of Popper and others.
3. More General Considerations with Respect to Theory:
Concepts are tools that reflect usage, and concepts of consciousness vary according to purposes (indeed that is the point). A theory, as understood by most hard scientists, implies a generalized model of reality and carries implications of objectivity, and accommodates subjective data only as consensually validated. The question arises: What subjective data are appropriate and valid in relation to consciousness studying itself? A likely answer may be: That which can be made explicit, agreed upon by observers, and clearly and consistently related to other events and phenomena.
The hypothesis being advanced is that consciousness may be usefully considered in terms of integrative goals and evaluative processes. The issues involve acceptable defining characteristics. An adequate theory of consciousness ought to have explanatory power, both in making sense and giving meaning to one's own consciousness as a subject, as well as a causal role, involving responses to perceived meaning, for the outside observer.
It makes sense both intuitively and as a matter of objective study to take into account factors, as these can be made explicit, which influence purposive behavior. It has been part of the methodology of ethology to do just that. Birds and animals have been studied and behaviors have been found to be influenced by innate priming and release mechanisms which respond selectively to environmental trigger stimuli. (Such examples also indicate that, while conscious behaviors may be purposive, not all purposive behaviors are conscious.)
What count as observations, of course, either from an inner perspective or in terms of affect, language and behavior of others, depend upon reproducibility and falsifiability. Nor can these be provided in advance. It is part of the task of scientific discovery to identify such explanatory entities and examine their relationships. This general approach may be used to include reports of subjective experience which can be assessed and validated under comparable conditions. The methods involved in such studies of course pose difficult problems, but such methods can be defended in principle.
Metzinger sets out several criteria which a theory of consciousness might be expected to meet (Metzinger, 1995):
(1) conceptual coherence;
(2) empirical plausibility; and
(3) intuitive acceptability as a theory about our own inner experiences, i.e. account for the inner
perspective of the subject.As Güzeldere points out (Güzeldere, 1995), a key component of the puzzle of consciousness involves the element of perspectivity. Inner experiences are a varied as the individuals whose lives they reflect and motivate, but each one has a perspective based upon uniquely personal values by means of which he or she manages continuity and change.
The question of the hard problem of how personal consciousness can be the product of physiological processes may be seen as an artifact of assumptions about forms of acceptable theory. It is a type of category mistake to consider that experience depends upon conceptual constructs. In fact the dependency relationship is the reverse. Theories of the physical world, including our knowledge of the brain, derive from a consensus based upon experience.
Moreover, since a theory by definition is a formal representation or conceptual model of identifiable entities and their relationships, no model can represent novel and emergent or creative phenomena before their advent. This is an inherent limitation which affects any representation of human consciousness. An adequate model of consciousness cannot be a closed conceptual system, for it more resembles a control system (Sloman, 1992) open to information, and subject to unpredictable inputs and transformations. It is also a feature of consciousness that this openness and vulnerability to contingency are recognized as real conditions, not formal requirements of an abstract model. It is an advantage of cybernetic models that they deal with adaptation to contingency.
Personal experiences as well as the history of human civilization show very clearly that the possibilities inherent in human consciousness cannot be formalized or known fully in advance. Much can be understood, but there are no boundaries on the future, and the prospects are not limited to man's capacities for abstract thought.
And, of course, no theory of consciousness, or theory of values, can provide absolute answers to questions asking for specific information in particular cases. While a theory of consciousness may consider the role of goals and values, these are presented to the organism by the circumstances into which it is thrown in its life. Its values are those of meeting its needs, obtaining security and extending freedom of action on its own terms. There is no specific formulation of value which is absolute in its own right. In fact the highest values of freedom and creativity depend upon the possibilities of revaluing values (Mesthene, 1968). Thus a theory of consciousness, while it allows for values, entails no doctrine with respect to particular values, with the possible exception of the values of curiosity and freedom of inquiry which appears to be required for open systems.
There may be other ambitions which various individuals have for a theory of consciousness, and on the basis of which any proposal runs risk of being rejected on the grounds that it does not meet those criteria. It is probably not possible to identify all or many of the presuppositions which might be put forward in this regard. Such additional desiderata may be considered individually on a case by case basis.
To summarize: we may say that concepts, to be useful, must be compatible with the data that we have, not reject data on the basis of theoretical preconceptions, and should be amenable to evaluation also in relation to one another e.g. internal coherence, coherence in relation to theories in other domains, reproducibility of experience, and consistency with common sense. In addition to semantic and syntactic meaning, concepts also have a pragmatic dimension which extends potentially to all aspects of human social and cultural life.
4. Methods and Models:
Harman (Harman, 1994) has described a basic epistemological dilemma: Our understanding is determined partly by reality and partly by our mental processes. But knowledge of those processes of understanding must be built upon a scientific epistemology, which involves a circular dependency. So very considerable circumspection is required. There are a number of problems which may be identified. One is that of how to break out of a closed and self-validating system of ideas. For science this requires appeal to experience and data from the external world. If the external or actual world is confused with the world as constructed by the concepts of physical science we have an unresolvable circle of self-reference. In principle, however, this can be opened up to new evidence.
Yet there are powerful forces of psychological resistance at work. These may be identified with individual habits of thought and avoidance of unpleasant change and uncertainty, and also the interests of social institutions. Research on perception suggests that the influence of the unconscious is greater than is usually recognized. Science itself has not been fully or even adequately assessed in this regard.
As Galin has emphasized (Galin, 1996), while attention may have a central focus, there are inevitably also impor- tant features of fringe awareness. If one's purposes are in conflict it is unlikely that one will easily acknowledge their existence and character, perhaps not even in general terms. They may be considered as things that just happen, not part of one's own interest, intent or doing. Aspects that one does not like or accept are very often, by well-known psychological mechanisms, "projected upon" or ascribed to others, or disowned in favour of inevitable circumstances, etc.
It is most useful role of abstraction to add reasoning processes to the impressions of phenomena, not to falsify or be fixated emotionally upon them. Yet it is evident, (and their are clearly defined neural correlates of thought and consciousness, in rich corticothalamic connections, that help to describe the physiological basis for this) that it may be difficult to perceive inputs from the external world when these are easily blocked by expectations which derive from habitual mental sets.
Over time, through transformations involved in perception and memory, subjective impressions acquire a specificity and boundaries. While we are constantly correctly errors in this regard, improving our mental models, deeper analysis reveals ultimate limits to this endeavour, such that we can never accurately reflect external reality as it exists. The current literature on consciousness studies describes numerous models, none definitive or final, as none can be, but from which we can learn (Chalmers, 1995b).
In their "neurobiological theory of consciousness", Crick and Koch describe neural oscillations (apparently correlated with awareness) as the basis of consciousness, and of binding or the integration of separate pieces of information about perception (Crick, 1994).
Baars's "global workspace theory of consciousness" described the neural basis for a global workspace which mediates communication among specialized nonconscious processors. While these conjectures may account for cognitive accessibility, and the distribution, integration and reportability of information, their relation to the role of conscious experience is uncertain (Baars, 1988).
Edelman's "neural Darwinism" model provides an account of the possible development of perceptual awareness and the self-concept (Edelman,1989). Dennett's "multiple drafts" model deals with the reportability of certain mental contents (Dennett, 1991). Jackendoff's "intermediate level" theory deal with some computational processes (Jackendoff, 1987). These and other accounts available to date fall short of an overall perspective within which the contribution of conscious subjective experience is clear. And indeed, by not admitting the data afforded by such experience as material for enquiry, such limitation on results is scarcely surprising.
An analogy to some interpretations of brain research might be to an astronomy that accepted as its point of departure the physics and chemistry of photographic emulsions, plates and telescopic equipment found in observatories, rather than the heavens to which they point. Another analogy might be to a radar installation studied for its microwave technology and equipment without noticing the decisive part played in determining its structure and maintenance by arrangements which ensure the correspondence of images to the surroundings.
The perspective afforded by Popper's 3 Worlds concept (Magee, 1975) provides a framework within which it is possible to give a better account of relationships between man and the world. From the uncertain tangle of circumstance and events that is the external world (World 1), we derive some of the data we are given in experience (World 2), from which we select and abstract images and ideas. Some of these we embody in language and culture, which includes all our formal knowledge as well as all our theories of science and the physical world (World 3).
Abstract - Noetic Journal Title page
Part 1 - Approach ; Consideration ; Methods ; Models
Part 2 (next) - Medicine ; Epistemology ; Cybernetics ; Language ; Popper ; Consciousness ; Hypothesis
Part 3 - the Hypothesis (con't) ; Implications ; Evidence ; Conclusion ; ReferencesIntegrity Links Buchanan Index Genre