Explanatory Perspectivalism: Limiting the Scope of the Hard Problem of Consciousness Daniel Kostić
Topoi An International Review of Philosophy ISSN 0167-7411 Topoi DOI 10.1007/s11245-014-9262-7
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Author's personal copy Topoi DOI 10.1007/s11245-014-9262-7
Explanatory Perspectivalism: Limiting the Scope of the Hard Problem of Consciousness Daniel Kostic´
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract I argue that the hard problem of consciousness occurs only in very limited contexts. My argument is based on the idea of explanatory perspectivalism, according to which what we want to know about a phenomenon determines the type of explanation we use to understand it. To that effect the hard problem arises only in regard to questions such as how is it that concepts of subjective experience can refer to physical properties, but not concerning questions such as what gives rise to qualia or why certain brain states have certain qualities and not others. In this sense we could for example fully explain why certain brain processes have certain subjective qualities, while we still don’t have a viable theory of concepts that explains coreferentiality of phenomenal and physical concepts. Given this limitation, the hard problem doesn’t pose a problem for the empirical study of consciousness. Keywords Hard problem of consciousness Explanatory perspectivalism Topological explanations Transparency of explanations Conceptual analysis Conceivability arguments Semantic view of explanations Descriptions of the causal roles
1 The Hard Problem In two very influential papers, Chalmers (1995, 2003) divides problems of consciousness into the easy and the hard. The easy problems concern the structural and
D. Kostic´ (&) Institute for Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, 18-20 Cˇika Ljubina Street, Old Building, 1st Floor, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia e-mail:
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functional explanations of memory, cognition, information integration in the brain, reportability of mental states, attention, etc. The hard problem (hereafter HP) is that even after we provide a complete structural or functional story about the easy problems, we can always ask how is it that they produce consciousness, that is, why consciousness arises from these processes. In his second paper on the hard problem, Chalmers explains what is hard about the hard problem: What makes the hard problem hard? Here, the task is not to explain behavioural and cognitive functions: even once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of consciousness – discrimination, integration, access, report, control – there may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? Because of this, the hard problem seems to be a different sort of problem, requiring a different sort of solution. (Chalmers 2003: 104) It is very important to distinguish two very different sets of questions which are central to the formulation of the HP, and that they require different explananda. On the one hand, we can ask: what gives rise to qualia? Or why are performances of certain brain functions accompanied by experience? These seem to be straightforward empirical questions. On the other hand, we seem to be able to ask a further nontrivial question why physical processes in the brain give rise to consciousness? We can ask a further question because of the substantive and determinate cognitive content associated with the subjective experiences that can’t be cast in terms of descriptions of the causal or functional roles. Therefore it is not clear how a theoretical sentence containing terms which refer to physical properties and terms referring to properties of subjective
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experience can possibly be true. Understanding a phenomenon in terms of the a priori analysis of theoretical terms and theoretical sentences containing them is the matter of conceptual analysis, and this is why it plays such a prominent role in formulating the HP. Here I refer to the so-called ‘‘Canberra plan’’ account of conceptual analysis (which is mostly used in formulating the conceivability arguments and the HP), according to which we first a priori analyse certain folk concepts or macrophysical concepts, such as ‘‘water’’, ‘‘heat’’, ‘‘pain’’ or ‘‘consciousness’’, to determine what would be the best role fillers that satisfy the descriptions of the (a priori) assigned functional or causal roles. In the second step we find those role fillers.1 The fact that two sets of questions about the HP require different explananda is central to understanding the idea of explanatory perspectivalism. To get this point across it is very important to understand the relation between the HP and the conceivability arguments. There is a common temptation to associate the HP with the conceivability arguments, knowledge argument (Jackson 1982, 1986), zombie argument (Chalmers 1996), and two-dimensional argument (Chalmers 2010), (hereafter all referred to as CA). For example, one can think that these arguments use the HP as a premise, but as we shall shortly see, that would be wrong. The idea of conceivability arguments is the following: if physicalism were true, then certain counterfactual scenarios, such as the possibility of zombies,2 would not be possible. The CA are purported to show that such counterfactual scenarios are possible (not merely conceivable) thus it is concluded that the physicalism is false. However, as Chalmers made it explicitly clear at the recent online conference (Chalmers 2012), the HP does not figure in these arguments in any direct sense. The link between the HP and all these arguments is the shared tacit assumption that conceptual analysis is the basis of explanations. In this sense the HP, as Chalmers himself puts it (Chalmers 2012), is based on a mere intuition. He says that for him it is enough that he can see it, along with many other philosophers and even neuroscientists. He puts it in the following way: … Glenn and Liz take me as arguing that there is a hard problem of consciousness by using zombie arguments, the knowledge argument, and so on. But I never argue in this way. In my 1995 paper on the hard
problem of consciousness I introduce the problem without ever mentioning zombies or the knowledge argument. In my 1996 book I use zombies and the knowledge argument to argue against materialism in chapters 3 and 4, at a point where I’m already taking for granted that there is a hard problem. (Chalmers, 2012) Although the CA play no role in formulating the HP, the CA are based on conceptual analysis, and conceptual analysis seems to be central to formulating the HP. As we shall shortly see in more detail, the reason why we seem to be able to ask a further question after all the easy problems are solved, is that we don’t understand how can qualia be integrated into the scheme of descriptions of the causal or functional roles (Dowell 2008: 101). My strategy will be to argue against conceptual analysis as the main epistemological assumption in the structure of explanation in the formulation of the HP. To this effect I argue that conceptual analysis can’t really answer any of the most interesting questions about the HP, e.g. what gives rise to qualia, why are certain brain processes always accompanied by certain quale and not by the other, etc. Conceptual analysis can only tell us how certain concepts fit the explanatory scheme based on the descriptions of the causal or functional roles, and why the explanation is necessary true, given such a scheme. But conceptual analysis can’t help us discover what gives rise to qualia or answer any similar questions. This is what I will call the explanatory perspectivalism.3 According to this view the HP then seems to be limited in scope only to a theory of concepts. We can think of explanations in terms of conceptual analysis, realization, supervenience,4 function, mechanism. But is there any method of deciding whether some of these approaches are better suited for certain domains of phenomena? It seems that it depends on what we want to know. For example, Chalmers thinks that structural or functional explanations can’t explain consciousness—that they are not very well suited for explaining the phenomenon because of the special substantive and determinate cognitive content associated with the concept of conscious experience from the first person perspective. My argument is based on the idea of explanatory perspectivalism, i.e. a view according to which what we want to know about a phenomenon determines the type of
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For more details on the Canberra plan style of conceptual analysis, see (Jackson 1998) and (Chalmers and Jackson 2001). 2 The creatures who are functionally, structurally, behaviorally indistinguishable from us humans, but who unlike us do not have subjective conscious experiences.
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I’d like to thank Peter Machamer for introducing a very similar notion of investigator perspectivalism to me in the context of philosophy of experimentation. 4 Realization and supervenience are relations that hold between properties in the world, they are not explanations themselves, but explanations based on these relations normally explain by showing how the realization and supervenience bases are individuated.
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explanation we use to understand that phenomenon. On this view, certain explanations explain a very limited aspect of a phenomenon, but the dialectic of certain positions is such that they are presented as if they are explaining much more. For example, conceptual analysis is used in arguments which allegedly show that there is a dis-analogy between explanations based on the analysis of natural kind concepts (water is H2O) and concepts of qualia (pain is some neural process). Such an analysis enables us to understand why water is H2O, but not why pain is some neural process. To that effect, it would be reasonable to expect such a disanalogy between explanation of easy and hard problems of consciousness. However, just as conceptual analysis helps us understand why information integration is some brain process, it does not actually explain how the information is integrated. By the same token, conceptual analysis can’t tell us what gives rise to qualia or why certain brain processes have particular qualities and not others. In this sense, the limits of conceptual analysis are determined according to what we want to know; we can use it if we want to know why sentences containing macro and micro concepts in a theory are true, but not to explain how things actually work. This is what I call explanatory perspectivalism. Based on that, I argue that the HP rests on a misguided view of semantic explanations. I propose that the topological approach is much better suited for explaining consciousness and more likely to be the right approach given that network analysis, which is the basis of topological explanations, is used very successfully in explaining various aspects of brain functioning that are thought to be central for understanding consciousness. Such relevant aspects of brain functioning are, for example: multisensory perceptions (Anderson et al. 2010; Grossberg 2007; Rubinov and Sporns 2010), attention (Bu¨chel and Friston 1997; Corbetta et al. 1998; Grossberg 1999; Raj and Chen 2011), and memory (Basar et al. 2000; LaBar et al. 1999; Rubinov and Sporns 2010). In cognitive neuroscience, the network analysis is heralded as a distinctly new tool that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and consciousness (Seung 2009; Sporns 2012). 2 Structure of Explanations and the Epistemic Transparency To understand the role of conceptual analysis in formulating the HP, it is important to discuss the issue of transparency of explanations. On this background, the HP seems to appear because an explanation of qualia in terms of conceptual analysis is not epistemically transparent. That is, on Chalmers’ view, we can’t a priori understand how the concepts of qualia could be co-referential with some
physical concepts, in contrast to cases with natural kind concepts where we can do that. Epistemically transparent explanations consist of a scheme that makes it obvious or self-evident why and how the explanans explains the explanandum, i.e. how the explanandum fits the explanatory scheme. The debates in the philosophy of mind normally use only descriptions of the causal roles as such a scheme (Chalmers and Jackson 2001; Chalmers 2010). Once we have the scheme of the causal roles and we find the role fillers, we have semantically transparent explanation. On Chalmers’ and Jackson’s view (Chalmers and Jackson 2001; Chalmers 1996, 2010), epistemic transparency of explanations is understood in a priori terms. According to these philosophers, epistemically transparent explanations have a form of an argument and require three crucial premises: the first premise is the semantic one and it is a priori; the second premise is an a posteriori claim or empirical discovery; and the third premise, which is usually tacit, tells us why the conclusion is true, given the first two premises. For example: (a) (b) (c)
Water is actual watery stuff (semantic premise based on the conceptual analysis of the word ‘‘water’’) H2O is actual watery stuff (a posteriori premise or an empirical discovery) Water is H2O (by transitivity of identity). (Dowell 2008: 101)
The conclusion in (c) follows a priori from (a) and (b) because of the logical principle of transitivity of identity. That is why this explanation is epistemically transparent, or in Chalmers’ terms, why it is a priori true. What is epistemically transparent about this argument scheme is that it is gapless, i.e. the scheme leaves no room for a rational doubt as to how steps of the inference follow from one another and also makes it obvious how, given the premises, the conclusion must be true (Dowell 2008: 101). This argument scheme is epistemically transparent because its gaplessness is based on an a priori conceptual analysis of the term ‘‘water’’. That is to say, it would not be gapless if the truths about macro-physical properties of water were not a priori derivable from micro-physical descriptions. Dowell summarizes it nicely: The water example illustrates these ideas. It’s because the first, semantic premise tells us what something has to be like in order to be in ‘water’s’ extension that we’re able to see that water just is H2O. (That premise tells us that water just is whatever the actual watery stuff is and that stuff turns out to be H2O.) Because water just is H2O, the watertruths are made true by what makes the H2O -truths true. (Dowell 2008: 102)
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In the case of qualia, this pattern of explanation wouldn’t work because the concept ‘‘pain’’ is not conceptually analysable in terms of causal roles of C-fibre firing5, and this is what generates the HP of consciousness. That is why physicalist explanation of qualia is not epistemically transparent, or for Chalmers, this is what opens the ontological gap. The reason why this sort of analysis is not available for qualia is because there is a determinate and substantive cognitive content associated with qualia, which can’t be explained in terms of descriptions of the causal roles. The substantive and determinate cognitive content associated with qualia is the reason why Chalmers and others who accept the HP can ask a further question after all the functional, structural and causal story has been told. The problem with this view is that it generates explanatory gaps and hard problems not only with qualia but everywhere, even in familiar cases of natural kinds. Very convincing argument is provided by Block and Stalnaker (1999), in which they argue that the explanation of the term ‘‘water’’ in terms of conceptual analysis is neither a priori nor derived from microphysical descriptions, and thus generates the hard problem for natural kinds just the same as with qualia. Other philosophers argue that the HP is just an appearance, which generates an intuition that physicalist explanations of qualia require some further explanation (Papineau 2002, 2007).
3 What is Wrong with the Semantic View According to Explanatory Perspectivalism Explanatory perspectivalism can be applied at different levels. For example, if one accepts the view that to truly understand a phenomenon we must be able to see how the content of macro-physical concepts satisfies the microphysical descriptions of the causal or functional roles of brain processes, then it would only amount to understanding of how the indexical or demonstrative concepts from the first person perspective work. In that case, maybe the proponents of the phenomenal concept strategy (Stoljar 2005) are right, i.e. all we need to do to solve the HP is to show in what ways phenomenal and physical concepts can be co-referential. But it would not really help us to understand what actually gives rise to qualia or why I have this particular quale when certain brain process takes place and not some other quale. In this sense the phenomenal 5
This is a historical toy example. ‘‘C-fibre firing’’ stands for whatever actual neural mechanism of pain is. It is used as an analogy of the identity of macro concept of ‘‘water’’ and microphysical description ‘‘H2O’’. In this toy example with qualia, the concept ‘‘pain’’ is a macro concept and ‘‘C-fibre firing’’ represents a microphysical description.
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concepts strategy may save materialism but at the price of accepting that phenomenal qualities are inexplicable, and this brings us back where we started. More precisely, conceptual analysis would be useful only in explaining how is it that the content of a phenomenal concept, e.g. the reddish quale when I have sensory experience of red, has as a referent a description of a brain process. It is in this sense that the hard problem concerns only the semantics of our concepts. To be clear that I am not conflating easy and hard problems here, I should note that the HP in its various formulations claims not only that we don’t understand the semantics of our concepts of consciousness, but furthermore that we don’t understand how certain brain processes give rise to qualia, or why a brain process X is accompanied by a quale Y (Chalmers 2003: 103–104). These are strictly speaking very different questions, i.e. they have different explananda. Conceptual analysis is independent from the structure of theories that we use to answer the latter two questions. Such an approach to explanation clearly does not reflect the actual scientific explanatory practice in areas that are relevant to the philosophy of mind (such as biology and neuroscience). In terms of explanatory perspectivalism it only tells us how certain concepts work in very constrained contexts. In order to understand better the notion of perspectivalism, take for example the brain or physical processes that give rise to qualia6. Those physical processes are not more cognitively accessible to me than the motion of molecules when explaining the heat, or light refraction when explaining the rainbows. The fact that there is something it is like for me to have conscious experience does not make the neural underpinnings of conscious experience any more transparent to me, i.e. when I have a certain conscious experience, what it is like subjectively for me to have it is not represented as some brain process in my consciousness but rather as a subjective quality or a feel. In this sense indeed, what it is like for me qua subject of experience to have certain experience might be explained better in terms of conceptual semantics, i.e., in terms of armchair analysis of how we are able to posses and apply the concepts from the first person perspective and refer to some physical processes. However, if we wanted to know what gives rise to qualia, in terms of physical processes, an explanation in terms of the substantive and determinate cognitive content that I have as a subject of experience should be epistemically irrelevant as it is when we are explaining the heat, for example. Here we see that we have two different perspectives on the explanation of qualia. One is about 6
Assuming for the sake of discussion that it is true that physical processes indeed give rise to qualia.
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interdependencies of various aspects of conscious experience and the other is about concepts of subjective experiences. To make my point even more explicit, the conceptual analysis can only tell us how it is that phenomenal and physical concepts are co-referential (how it is possible that they both refer to the same thing), but the conceptual analysis can’t explain the phenomenon. From the perspective of what we want to know, the scope of conceptual analysis is then limited only to a theory of concepts and should not be relevant to an empirical theory of a phenomenon. In this sense there is the HP, but it is limited to a philosophical theory of concepts.
4 Topological Approach and Explanatory Perspectivalism I should make it clear at this point that I am not arguing that the topological approach can solve the HP. In my view the HP concerns only our theory of concepts, so any other approach which is not based on the conceptual analysis is a very good candidate for answering the most interesting questions about the HP, e.g. what gives rise to qualia or why performance of certain brain processes has a subjective quality or feel. What I would like to point out here is that topological explanations are most likely the right approach given the explanatory perspectivalism. After all, according to explanatory perspectivalism we might have a successful empirical explanation of various interesting aspects of the HP, and still not have a viable theory of concepts. Someone might object that what constitutes the HP is precisely that we don’t understand in what ways the neural or physical processes are, or give rise to, subjective experiences. But if pressed into being less vague about subjective experiences, we can only find that they are constituted by other various aspects of brain functioning, attention, memory, perception, emotion. And this is a very important point in my argument because in increasingly successful approach used in cognitive neuroscience, each one of these aspects are explained in terms of topological properties of the network of their interaction (Rubinov and Sporns 2010; Raj and Chen 2011; Kaiser 2011). Thus in terms of explanatory perspectivalism, it seems more likely that the topological, and not the semantic approach will be the right one for explaining consciousness. Conceptual analysis, which operates at a very general level, can’t tell us anything about intricate and interdependent relations among these various aspects of the brain or their role in producing consciousness. One such unifying example could be an explanation of synchronous neural firing which enables communication among different brain regions and further enables any brain function to take place (Kim 2004; Eytan and Marom 2006; Strogatz 2001).
The topological approach is based on network analysis. Network analysis is used to describe real-world systems, their elements and their interactions as graphs and then to analyse them using various topological metrics (clustering, betweeness algorithms) in order to discover new elements of the system, to analyse and explain its dynamics or to explain some of its emergent properties, e.g. stability, resilience, robustness, functional features. A graph is defined simply as a set of nodes (vertices) linked by connections (edges), cf. (Newman 2010; Fortunato 2010). The same approach may be used for qualia. The qualia could be a result of certain topological features of the brain and explanation of synchronization may play a significant role in this regard (Kostic 2014a, b). In cognitive neuroscience, there are already many studies of topological features of the brain, which use network analysis to explain different kinds of ‘‘emergent’’ properties in the brain (Bassett and Bullmore 2006; Bullmore and Sporns 2009; He et al. 2007). Unlike the semantic view of explanation (Chalmers 1996, 2010; Chalmers and Jackson 2001; Levine 2001), in topological explanation the higher-order properties are not explained by referring to some lower-level or microphysical descriptions, instead they are explained by making reference to some (macro) topological features of the system or set of properties. Following this point we can look into many studies of graph theoretical analysis of brain connectedness, which purport to show that brain has small-world topological features (Bullmore and Sporns 2009; Bassett and Bullmore 2006; He et al. 2007; Sporns et al. 2005). If it were possible to give a description of qualia in terms of topological or graph theoretical features of its set of relevant constituent elements, then the conceptual analysis wouldn’t matter to a physicalist explanation of qualia. In that case, the qualia are realized by macro-topological properties of the brain, and not by micro-physical descriptions as the conceptual analysis presupposes. In this sense, the topological approach might indeed be better suited for qualia. In the topological explanation, properties are explained by various metrics of connectivity, i.e. by features embedded in the network topology. For example, resilience, stability or robustness of ecological communities, metabolic economy of small-world topologies such as the brain, can all be explained in terms of graph-theoretical properties or topological features (He et al. 2007; Huneman 2010; Sporns et al. 2005; Sporns 2012). Some neuroscientists also call it the connectomics (Sporns 2012; Seung 2012). Sebastian Seung writes, with, in all fairness, exaggerated enthusiasm about network analysis: ‘‘If it’s true, then curing mental disorders is ultimately about repairing connectomes. In fact, any kind of personal change—educating yourself, drinking less,
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saving your marriage—is about changing your connectome’’ (Seung 2012: 8). Huneman (2010, pp. 219–222) provides a nice illustration of topological explanation of stability in ecology. He claims that if we specify a network of relationships of species in a community, with each interaction being represented as a link, we can then infer some properties of this network such as resilience, robustness or stability (Huneman 2010, p. 219). To do this we can consider some causal relations in the ecological community. For example, A can prey on B, or be prey to B, or be parasitic on B, etc. The causal interactions between the species are relevant to topological explanation of the stability of ecological community inasmuch as we can define graphs upon them by representing each species as a node, that has a lesser or a higher degree of connectivity (nodes with very high degree are called ‘‘hubs’’), and then based on their distribution, we can construct a proper network that will have specific graph-theoretical or topological properties, such as high clustering coefficient and long path length. Now, in ecological communities, hubs are the omnivores, and isolated nodes are highly specialized species; it appears that ecological communities with fewer hubs and many more isolated nodes will be more stable than others. Moreover, in this sense any two networks belonging to the same equivalence class that have the same path length between the nodes and high clustering coefficient, will have their stability properties explained by the same topological features, regardless of the different species or causal interactions that are specific to any of these networks, e.g. one can be an ecological community and the other can be a computer network, brain or a monetary system. One might raise a familiar doubt about applicability of topological explanation of the following sort: when thinking about rainbows, air pressure or heat, how they look to me, or what it is like for me to experience them, doesn’t affect the concepts that we use to explain them or to think about them. But when I have a conscious experience, what it looks like to me or what it is like to undergo it is all that matters. As it is often put, there is a determinate and substantive cognitive content associated with our concepts of consciousness from the first person perspective that we don’t find when explaining rainbows, heat or boiling of water. This is why an explanation of consciousness must be based on conceptual analysis. In this sense topological or any other approach to explanation that doesn’t address the issue of conceptual semantics will never be able to explain consciousness. My reply to this objection is this: it is a matter of explanatory perspectivalism. It depends on what we want to know and why some sorts of modelling are better suited for certain phenomena. In this sense, the conceptual analysis can only tell us how it is that we can refer to physical
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processes when using phenomenal concepts, but in principle it can’t tell us why these processes give rise to qualia or why, given the particular brain process, I have one quale rather than the other. Explananda of conceptual analysis and topological explanations are different. Explanandum of conceptual analysis based explanation in this case is what makes a theoretical sentence involving phenomenal concepts true in a priori terms. The explanandum of the latter questions is a description of topological property found in the network metrics. In short: the explananda of questions, such as what it is like to have a conscious experience from the first person perspective and why certain brain states are always accompanied by certain mental states like qualia, should be strictly distinguished. In the case of the former, it is the issue of conceptual semantics or metaphysical speculation where phenomenal concept strategy might be the best option, whereas in the latter case it is the issue of modelling, in which topological explanations are the best answer. The issue, as I see it, is ultimately about explanatory perspectivalism—what we want to know about certain phenomena. Taking all this into account, it would be possible to give a fully satisfactory topological explanation of what gives rise to qualia or why certain brain processes are accompanied by certain qualia and not the other, and at the same time still have the HP, because the HP concerns only the question of how it is that the concepts of subjective experience from the first person perspective refer to some physical process, structures or mechanisms. In this sense, we might not be able to solve the HP, but at least we can constrain it. Acknowledgments I am very much indebted for their tremendously helpful discussions and comments on various versions of this paper to: Philippe Huneman, Carl F. Craver, Paula Droege, Stephen Laurence, Peter Machamer, Joseph Levine, Raphael van Riel, Liz Schier and Dusˇko Prelevic´. I would like to emphasize my enormous gratitude for their encouragement and support to: Paula Droege, Philippe Huneman and Carl F. Craver. My special thanks goes to Paual Giladi and Zorana Todorovic´ for their meticulous job at proofreading the manuscript. I would also like to thank to two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments that helped me greatly improve this paper. The research in this paper is done within the project Dynamical Systems in Nature and Society: Philosophical and Empirical Aspects (project number: 179051) which is supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.
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