Revisionism about Qualia: Prospects for a Reconciliation Between Physicalism and Qualia

 

Workshop with Daniel Dennett @danieldennett in Antwerp on Jan 30, 2018.
Call for papers here: https://t.co/yvxqFEVrem
Deadline: Oct 15. pic.twitter.com/MO4UWRRwmZ

— Bence Nanay (@BenceNanay) September 1, 2017

On January 30th I’ll be presenting joint work with Aaron Sloman (“Revisionism about Qualia: Prospects for a Reconciliation Between Physicalism and Qualia”) at a conference in Antwerp on Dan Dennett’s work in philosophy of mind (sponsored by the Centre for Philosophical Psychology and European Network for Sensory Research).  Both Aaron and Dan will be in attendance.  I don’t have an abstract of our talk, but it will be based on a slimmed-down version of our 2016 paper (with some additions, hopefully taking into account some recent development’s in Dan’s position on qualia).

The official deadline for registration has passed, but if you are interested in attending perhaps Bence Nanay, the organiser, can still accommodate you?  Below please find the list of speakers and original calls for registration and papers.

Centre for Philosophical Psychology and European Network for Sensory Research

Call for registration 

Conference with Daniel Dennett on his work in philosophy of mind. January 30, 2018. 

Speakers:

• Daniel Dennett (Tufts)
• Elliot Carter (Toronto)
• Ron Chrisley and Aaron Sloman (Sussex)
• Krzysztof Dolega (Bochum)
• Markus Eronen (Leuven)
• Csaba Pleh (CEU)
• Anna Strasser (Berlin)

This conference accompanies Dennett’s deliverance of the 7th Annual Marc Jannerod Lecture (the attendance of this public lecture is free). 

Registration (for the conference, not the public lecture): 100 Euros (including conference dinner – negotiable if you don’t want conference dinner). Send an email to Nicolas Alzetta (nalzetta@yahoo.com) to register. Please register by December 21. 

Workshop with Daniel Dennett, January 30, 2018

Call for papers!

Daniel Dennett will give the Seventh Annual Marc Jeannerod Lecture (on empirically grounded philosophy of mind) in January 2018. To accompany this lecture, the University of Antwerp organizes a workshop on  Dennett’s philosophy of mind on January 30, 2018, where he will be present.

There are no parallel sections. Only blinded submissions are accepted.

Length: 3000 words. Single spaced!

Deadline: October 15, 2017. Papers should be sent to nanay@berkeley.edu

Roles for Morphology in Computation

 

From Pfeifer, Iida and Lungarella (2014)

Tomorrow I’m giving an invited talk in Gothenburg at the Symposium on Morphological Computing and Cognitive Agency, as part of the The International Society for Information Studies Summit 2017 (entitled — deep breath — “DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY: Embodied, Embedded, Networked, Empowered through Information, Computation & Cognition!”).  Here’s my title and abstract:

Roles for Morphology in Computation

The morphological aspects of a system are the shape, geometry, placement and compliance properties of that system. On the rather permissive construal of computation as transformations of information, a correspondingly permissive notion of morphological computation can be defined: cases of information transformation performed by the morphological aspects of a system. This raises the question of what morphological computation might look like under different, less inclusive accounts of computation, such as the view that computation is essentially semantic. I investigate the possibilities for morphological computation under a particular version of the semantic view. First, I make a distinction between two kinds of role a given aspect might play in computations that a system performs: foreground role and background role. The foreground role of a computational system includes such things as rules, state, algorithm, program, bits, data, etc. But these can only function as foreground by virtue of other, background aspects of the same system: the aspects that enable the foreground to be brought forth, made stable/reidentifiable, and to have semantically coherent causal effect. I propose that this foreground/background distinction cross-cuts the morphological/non-morphological distinction. Specifically, morphological aspects of a system may play either role.

The Symposium will be chaired by Rob Lowe, and Gordana Dodig Crnkovic, and the other speakers include Christian Balkenius, Lorenzo Magnani, Yulia Sandamirskaya, Jordi Vallverdú, and John Spencer (and maybe Tom Ziemke and Marcin Schroeder?).

I’m also giving an invited talk the next day (Tuesday) as part of a plenary panel entitled: “What Would It Take For A Machine To Have Non-Reductive Consciousness?”  My talk is entitled “Computation and the Fate of Qualia”.  The other speakers are Piotr Bołtuć (moderator), Jack Copeland, Igor Aleksander, and Keith W. Miller.

Should be a fantastic few days — a shame I can’t stay for the full meeting, but I have to be back at Sussex in time for the Robot Opera Mini-Symposium on Thursday!

 

Functionalism, Revisionism, and Qualia

A paper by myself and Aaron Sloman, “Functionalism, Revisionism, and Qualia” has just been published in the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computing. (The whole issue looks fantastic – I’m looking forward to reading all of it, especially the other papers in the “Mind Robotics” section, and most especially the papers by Jun Tani and Riccardo Manzotti). Our contribution is a kind of follow-up to our 2003 paper “Virtual Machines and Consciousness”. There’s no abstract, so let me just list here a few of the more controversial things we claim (and in some cases, even argue for!):

• Even if our concept of qualia is true of nothing, qualia might still exist (we’re looking at you, Dan Dennett!)
• If qualia exist, they are physical – or at least their existence alone would not imply the falsity of physicalism (lots of people we’re looking at here )
• We might not have qualia: The existence of qualia is an empirical matter.
• Even if we don’t have qualia, it might be possible to build a robot that does!
• The question of whether inverted qualia spectra are possible is, in a sense, incoherent.

If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to hear what you think.

Ron

The existence of qualia does not entail dualism

Our next E-Intentionality seminar is this Thursday, December 1st, at 13:00 in Freeman
G22.  This will be a dry run of a talk I’ll be giving
as part of EUCognition2016, entitled “Architectural Requirements for Consciousness”.  You can read the abstract here, along with an extended clarificatory discussion prompted by David Booth’s comments.

Architectural Requirements for Consciousness

I’ll be giving a talk at the EUCog2016 conference in Vienna this December, presenting joint work with Aaron Sloman.  Here is the extended abstract:

Architectural requirements for consciousness
Ron Chrisley and Aaron Sloman

This paper develops the virtual machine architecture approach to explaining certain features of consciousness first proposed in (Sloman and Chrisley 2003) and elaborated in (Chrisley and Sloman 2016), in which the particular qualitative aspects of experiences (qualia) are identified as being particular kinds of properties of components of virtual machine states of a cognitive architecture. Specifically, they are those properties of components of virtual machine states of agent A that make A prone to believe:

1. That A is in a state S, the aspects of which are knowable by A directly, without further evidence (immediacy);
2. That A’s knowledge of these aspects is of a kind such that only A could have such knowledge of those aspects (privacy);
3. That these states have these aspects intrinsically, not by virtue of, e.g., their functional role (intrinsicness);
4. That these aspects of S cannot be completely communicated to an agent that is not A (ineffability).

A crucial component of the explanation, which we call the Virtual Machine Functionalism (VMF) account of qualia, is that the propositions 1-4 need not be true in order for qualia to make A prone to believe those propositions. In fact, it is arguble that nothing could possibly render all of 1-4 true simultaneously. But this would not imply that there are no qualia, since qualia only require that agents that have them be prone to believe 1-4.

It is an open empirical question whether, in some or all humans, the properties underlying the dispositions to believe 1-4 have a unified structure that would render reference to them a useful move in providing a causal explanation of such beliefs. Thus, according to the VMF account of qualia, it is an open empirical question whether qualia exist in any given human. By the same token, however, it is an open engineering question whether, independently of the human case, it is possible or feasible to design an artificial system that a) is also prone to believe 1-4 and b) is so disposed because of a unified structure. This talk will: a) look at the requirements that must be in place for a system to believe 1-4, and b) sketch a design in which the propensities to believe 1-4 can be traced to a unified virtual machine structure, underwriting talk of such a system having qualia.

a) General requirements for believing 1-4:

These include those for being a system that can be said to have beliefs and propensities to believe. Further, having the propensities to believe 1-4 requires the possibility of having beliefs about oneself, one’s knowledge, possibility/impossibility, and other minds. At a minimum, such constraints require a cognitive architecture with reactive, deliberative and meta-management components (Anonymous1 and Anonymous2 2003), with at least two layers of meta-cognition: (i) detection and use of various states of internal VM components; and (ii) holding beliefs/theories about those components.

 

b) A qualia-supporting design:

• A propensity to believe in immediacy (1) can be explained in part as the result of the meta-management layer of a deliberating/justifying but resource- bounded architecture needing a basis for terminating deliberation/justification in a way that doesn’t itself prompt further deliberation or justification.
• A propensity to believe in privacy (2) can be explained in part as the result of a propensity to believe in immediacy (1), along with a policy of *normally* conceiving of the beliefs of others as making evidential and justificatory impact on one’s own beliefs. To permit the termination of deliberation and justification, some means must be found to discount, at some point, the relevance of others’ beliefs, and privacy provides prima facie rational grounds for doing this.
• A propensity to believe in intrinsicness (3) can also be explained in part as the result of a propensity to believe in immediacy, since states having the relevant aspects non-intrinsically (i.e., by virtue of relational or systemic facts) would be difficult to rectify with the belief that one’s knowledge of these aspects does not require any (further) evidence.
• An account of a propensity to believe in ineffability (4) requires some nuance, since unlike 1-3, 4 is in a sense true, given the causally indexical nature of some virtual machine states and their properties, as explained in (Anonymous2 and Anonymous1 2016). However, properly appreciating the truth of 4 requires philosophical sophistication, and so its truth alone cannot explain the conceptually primitive propensity to believe it; some alternative explanations will be offered.

 

References:

Sloman, A. and Chrisley, R. (2003) “Virtual Machines and Consciousness”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (4-5), 133-172.

Chrisley, R. and Sloman, A. (2016, in press) “Functionalism, Revisionism and Qualia”. APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 16 (1).