when did we develop conciousness?

[Mercutio]

I don't know what "radical behaviourism" is. If they mean something different by the word "behaviour" as it is commonly employed, then you must provide the definition.

It is quite apparent that you do not know radical behaviorism. Too bad, as it is the current school of thought within behaviorism. If you are going to argue against it, you might wish to argue against it, and not against a strawman.

I did define behavior. It is what you do.

No.

Methodological Behaviorism is just the recognition that it is only behaviour which can be scientifically studied. It does not commit itself to any philosophical position on what consciousness actually is in itself. This is in contrast with analytical behaviourism which holds that consciousness just is behaviour.

Perhaps we differ in that you approach this from the philosophy angle, whereas I approach it from the experimental science angle. John B. Watson, the preeminent methodological behaviorist, thought that consciousness was "talking to yourself"; purely an objective behavior, initially (kids talk themselves through problems all the time), but more and more subtle as we learn to hide the behavior. He even tried putting electrodes on a person's larynx to measure their vestigal speech while thinking.

And I've told you before that private behaviour is an oxymoron. By definition behaviour is that which is potentially observable -- that which potentially can be determined from the 3rd person perspective.

You admit above that you do not know Radical Behaviorism, but you dismiss its definitions out of hand. Private behavior differs from public behavior only in the number of potential observers. Both are natural events; both are appropriate for scientific study; both are under the control of their antecedent and consequential stimuli.

You are giving your definition of behavior, not radical behaviorism's. It is only an oxymoron to you because you define behavior incompletely.

Absolutely not. Not only do I not agree, but it is transparently false. Appropriate physical processes in the brain might elicit or cause or generate pain, but pain itself is numerically distinct from the physical processes which give rise to it.

You do not feel pain? How do you know when you have a toothache, let alone when another person does?

 

[Interesting Ian]

It is quite apparent that you do not know radical behaviorism. Too bad, as it is the current school of thought within behaviorism. If you are going to argue against it, you might wish to argue against it, and not against a strawman.

Mercutio, I have read numerous books and papers on the mind-body problem. They are all united in their conclusion that analytical behaviourism, i.e metaphysical behaviourism, is dead and buried. I have never come across this "radical behaviourism"; not ever, apart from you.

So the question here is whether it is a scientific position on how best to study consciousness, or whether it is a metaphysical position on the mind-body problem. If the former then it is completely uninteresting. If the latter I want to know how it differs from analytical behaviourism.

You say that consciousness exists, but that it is a private behaviour. How is an experience of toothache a behaviour? It is simply flat out false. A pain is simply that, and never anything more. It might well be caused or generated by physical processes, but that of course does not make pain a behaviour. If you're saying pain is the very same as these physical processes, then that's identity theory, not any type of behaviourism (and identity theory, at least type identity theory, is also dead and buried).

I did define behavior. It is what you do.
Perhaps we differ in that you approach this from the philosophy angle, whereas I approach it from the experimental science angle.

I just don't have any interest whatsoever in approaching it from an experimental science angle. Science could only ever in principle study behaviour and not consciousness itself.

John B. Watson, the preeminent methodological behaviorist, thought that consciousness was "talking to yourself";

Well you can certainly talk to yourself in your head. But that's one thing that consciousness does, not what it is.

purely an objective behavior, initially (kids talk themselves through problems all the time),

Oh, you mean talking out loud to yourself . . . That certainly isn't consciousness no.

but more and more subtle as we learn to hide the behavior. He even tried putting electrodes on a person's larynx to measure their vestigal speech while thinking.
You admit above that you do not know Radical Behaviorism, but you dismiss its definitions out of hand.

Yes I do indeed dismiss it's definitions out of hand. This is because by definition consciousness is not constituted by behaviour. Otherwise a p-zombie by definition would be conscious. But by definition it is not conscious. Thus we get a logical inconsistency.

The only way you can get out of that is to assert p-zombies are logically impossible. But if you maintain this you need to say the entirety of a person's behaviour (and if you like we can include brain processes here) is actually wholly constitutive or equates to their consciousness. But this is flat out false since in addition to everything I ever do or say there are the actual conscious experiences themselves.

So you see all behaviourist positions are flat out absurd. Indeed all reductive materialist positions are flat out absurd. There are no 2 ways about it I'm afraid.

Private behavior differs from public behavior only in the number of potential observers.

Hang on a sec. We don't observe our own conscious states. They are just immediately given or experienced.

Both are natural events; both are appropriate for scientific study; both are under the control of their antecedent and consequential stimuli.

Consciousness certainly isn't appropriate for any scientific study. Not unless you rely upon subjective reports. According to science we should all be p-zombies. But we're not. So much for the scientific study of consciousness!

You are giving your definition of behavior, not radical behaviorism's.

It doesn't matter about my definition of behaviour. What you are not allowed to do is to redefine the word behaviour to refer to conscious experiences. By doing this you're abusing the English Language. And it's going to make communication with me rather difficult since I resolutely refuse to embrace any of the materialists redefining of words.

It is only an oxymoron to you because you define behavior incompletely.
You do not feel pain? How do you know when you have a toothache, let alone when another person does?

I know I have toothache because it is immediately given. I do not observe the pain. It is not a process, least of all a behaviour. It is simply that, a pain. Moreover it is never anything more than a pain. Playing around with words can never alter this fundamental truth.

 

[Piggy]

I just don't have any interest whatsoever in approaching it from an experimental science angle. Science could only ever in principle study behaviour and not consciousness itself.

<snip>

Consciousness certainly isn't appropriate for any scientific study. Not unless you rely upon subjective reports. According to science we should all be p-zombies. But we're not. So much for the scientific study of consciousness!

Good God, man, you don't even understand science.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Good God, man, you don't even understand science.

Eh . .I rather think I do. At least the philosophical underpinnings of science. I got a first in the history and philosophy of science module at University, and a first in the empiricist module, and a first in the origins of modern science module (although only a 2.1 in the mind-body problem module). Moreover my understanding was minuscule then as compared to now.

So my suggestion is that, in common with almost everyone else on here, it is you who do not know what you are talking about.

 

[Roboramma]

Ian, why do you think science should conclude that we are all p-zombies?

 

[Piggy]

Eh . .I rather think I do. At least the philosophical underpinnings of science. I got a first in the history and philosophy of science module at University, and a first in the empiricist module, and a first in the origins of modern science module (although only a 2.1 in the mind-body problem module).

Any actual science mixed in there, brother?

 

[Darat]

Ian, why do you think science should conclude that we are all p-zombies?

Because p-zombies are defined to be without something that science can't describe.

It's actually nothing more then a circular argument; p-zombies are only logically coherent if you start with the premise that reality is dualistic.

Despite what some people claim p-zombies can't be used to refute or show that non-dualist concepts of what consciousness "is" are logically incoherent.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Ian, why do you think science should conclude that we are all p-zombies?

The world is supposed to be physically closed. This means that all change can be explained by reference to physical chains of causes and effects. This means that the totality of our behaviour is due to such physical chains of causes and effects. In particular, everything that occurs in the brain is solely due to prior states of the brain plus input from the environment evolving deterministically according to physical laws (the randomness due to QM is unimportant). Thus the ultimate origin of our behaviour is no different in kind from the Earth as it orbits the Sun, or a boulder as it rolls down a hill.

But this then means that consciousness is completely causally inefficacious since it is the firing of neurons etc which wholly causes our behaviour. But if consciousness has absolutely no affect upon the world whatsoever then science cannot conclude it exists. Science by definition can only deal with that which is causally efficacious. It has no need to appeal to the existence of consciousness since everything we ever do, can be, in principle, completely explained by measurable events in our brains and our environment.

Science is not in the business of postulating entitites or processes which do not affect the world one iota. Therefore from a scientific perspective we are all p-zombies.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Any actual science mixed in there, brother?

Science is not relevant to the question of whather consciousness can be scientifically explained. It is the philosophy of science which is relevant.

 

[Beerina]

just checked the "mirror test" passers.....

Humans (older than 18 months), great apes (except for gorillas), and bottlenose dolphins have all been observed to pass the test of recognising themselves in a mirror.

as an add on bonus question....how about computers? Could they "evolve" consciousness (with our help )

I don't know, some dogs bark at themselves in a mirror, others, like my Pekingese, completely ignore themselves. And my dog barks at anything that moves, including other dogs, so I know she must be recognizing it as herself. That she doesn't recognize it as a dog is not possible, unless they require scent and/or sound to make it real. Scent I can't see being needed as an animal could be upwind of the animal its looking at. Sound may be another issue though. But they have similar issues with things on TV, it's like they don't exist. TV, though, doesn't provide a 3D world; a mirror does.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Because p-zombies are defined to be without something that science can't describe.

It's actually nothing more then a circular argument; p-zombies are only logically coherent if you start with the premise that reality is dualistic.

Can I just clarify here. Dualism holds that consciousness exists and the physical world. By the physical world we mean a reality whose existence does not depend upon the mind.

But I'm actually only starting from the premise that consciousness exists. The physical world can be exhaustively defined in terms of various perceptual qualia by subjects. Thus a table is nothing more than a family of tactile and visual qualia in addition to the causal impact it has upon the environment.

Despite what some people claim p-zombies can't be used to refute or show that non-dualist concepts of what consciousness "is" are logically incoherent.

My axiom I start with is that consciousness exists ie qualia of various types such as emotions, pains, visual experiences, tastes and so on. If you do not accept this axiom and suppose that consciousness does not exist, then obviously materialism in all its guises works.

Indeed analytical behaviours and eliminative materialists do deny that anyone has ever been conscious.

I assert I know with complete certainty that I myself am conscious. I cannot prove this however, I take it an an axiom. But once you accept this axiom (or at least the axiom that you are conscious) then reductive materialism fails.

 

[Mercutio]

I was probably unclear above.

As far as I can tell, the phenomenon of conscious experience appears to be entirely an emergent phenomenon arising from the physical activity of the brain.

But this emergent phenomenon is not entirely equivalent to this physical activity.

I would argue that it is an emergent property of the physical activity of the entire body (including the brain). Our nervous system evolved as part of our bodies, and are entirely dependent on processing that happens in the body. Of course, this is a minor point. The emergent property, though, is not purely formed of brain activity, but of bodily activity as well, and of the language we use in describing and referring to this activity. Unlike Ian, I do not think that there is a thing we can call consciousness that is separate from our own behavior and experience. Rather, there are things we do which have been dumped into the category "bodily actions", others in the category "mental events", and others (the categories do overlap) into "consciousness". And yes, I continue to use the proper Radical Behaviorist definition of behavior, which includes private behavior. "Seeing a tree" is something you do; it is behavior, and it is as well understood as the behavior of walking--that is, neither is understood down to the individual nerve pathways in the brain, but each is understood pretty damned well considering the complexity of the system.)

There exists in the universe the phenomenon of "felt experience". And while it arises from, is dependent on, and is never separate from brain activity (as far as we know), and therefore can be presumed to be explainable entirely in terms of brain activity, it is not necessarily always associated with the activity of any sort of brain.

Agreed entirely. Two points: First, this "awareness of seeing a tree" (one example of a felt experience) may well be the result of a secondary neural pathway, the stimulus for which is the firing of the first neural pathway. So, in addition to "seeing a tree" we have "seeing the seeing of a tree". I think you, Piggy, have talked about Dennett's analysis of this earlier in the thread. But secondly...there is perfectly good reason it is not necessarily always associated withthe activity of any given portion of the brain (although new research shows spindle cells firing when we experience "awareness" of something): we do not learn the term based on the firing of brain areas, but based on behavior. Our referents for consciousness are not the brain firings, but actions which are imperfectly correlated with them. (this is why the analysis of how we learn the word is important--if one critique of the brain activity explanation is that the correlation between brain activity and felt experience is imperfect, this analysis renders that critique irrelevant.) Although the felt experience is (in part) an emergent property of a wide range of brain activities, our understanding of it is an emergent property of an even wider range of publicly observable behaviors which are imperfectly correlated with those brain activities.

It is worthwhile, therefore, to consider how this phenomenon may arise, what sorts of brains may produce it, and which animals may engage in it, and to what degrees.

And it is not only worthwhile for mere scientific curiosity, but also for ethical reasons. It matters whether a fetus has a felt experience of pain. It matters if a cat or dog does, and if a cricket doesn't.

Have you read Dennett's Kinds of Minds? Chapter 4's discussion of pain in both rhesus monkeys and cephalopods is worth examining here.

That being the case, it is worthwhile to attempt to develop ways of determining whether other critters are subject to this phenomenon. If we can come to understand how this sense of experience is produced by the brain, then we may be able to answer some ethical questions regarding appropriate treatment of animals, for example.

If a cricket has no more experience of the world than a computer, then using it for bait cannot be said to be cruel. If there is no "felt experience" occurring at that point in the universe defined by the body of the cricket, then there is no suffering there either.

If a puppy "feels" pain (and doesn't just physically react to it) in much the same way that you and I do, then certainly it is cruel to burn its ears off. If whales feel emotional pain, then there are ethical implications to capturing them and penning them up to perform in theme parks.

I would argue that these questions are independent of ethics. Although I would not wish to cause pain and suffering, where I draw the line is independent of knowledge of "felt pain". (and, of course, comparing to Dennett's ch. 4 I mention above, it is behavioral similarity to our behavior that is the deciding factor, rather than phylogenetic similarity; cephalopods behave sentiently, despite being more closely related to clams than to vertebrates.)

If we do not make reference to this most salient feature of our own consciousness, then we do dodge the issue.

Of course we make reference to it. But we do so based on what we can actually observe and infer, not on what we assume.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but at the moment I can't see how a purely behavioral approach can effectively address this issue. If it can, then this will be a good thing b/c it will make research much easier.

I think you are, like, Ian, still treating "behavior" as "publicly observable behavior only". Including private behavior expands the range of things we can explore scientifically, but does not necessarily make the research easier! We still have the problem of its being private; although we can demonstrate that it is amenable to the manipulation of antecedents and consequences, we cannot demonstrate it to a third party. But at least we have no reason to believe that it is different in kind from other natural processes. No reason to turn to dualism...

 

[Roboramma]

The world is supposed to be physically closed. This means that all change can be explained by reference to physical chains of causes and effects. This means that the totality of our behaviour is due to such physical chains of causes and effects.

I don't see how science makes this assumption. If there was some evidence that showed that this is not true, science as a body of knowledge would be able to grow and expand based on that evidence.

In particular, everything that occurs in the brain is solely due to prior states of the brain plus input from the environment evolving deterministically according to physical laws (the randomness due to QM is unimportant). Thus the ultimate origin of our behaviour is no different in kind from the Earth as it orbits the Sun, or a boulder as it rolls down a hill.

Well, that's certainly my stance, but I don't think that science would grind to a halt if it were shown to be wrong. I get the impression that you're suggesting (above) that it would, but maybe I'm misreading you?

But this then means that consciousness is completely causally inefficacious since it is the firing of neurons etc which wholly causes our behaviour.

Unless we assume that conciousness is just our way of modelling the firing of those neurons. That is, conciousness is a property of the brain, rather than existing outside of it. I don't think we know enough right now to say what conciousness is, but I also don't think we can say yet that it isn't that.

But if consciousness has absolutely no affect upon the world whatsoever then science cannot conclude it exists. Science by definition can only deal with that which is causally efficacious. It has no need to appeal to the existence of consciousness since everything we ever do, can be, in principle, completely explained by measurable events in our brains and our environment.

Maybe. Except you're forgetting that one of the things we do is be concious, something for which every one of those scientists has evidence. And ignoring that evidence would go against science. In other words it would be unscientific to conclude that conciousness does not exist in the face of evidence (your own conciousness) that it does. What might be done is shown that our understanding of what conciousness is is very different from what it actually is, however.

Science is not in the business of postulating entitites or processes which do not affect the world one iota. Therefore from a scientific perspective we are all p-zombies.

You're forgetting that I (and all those scientists) am a part of the world. My conciousness affects me, whatever "me" is, in that I can experience it. To ignore that phenomenon would be the unscientific route. What we can do is study it - hopefully as objectively as possible, find out what our misconceptions about it may be, where it comes from, what parts of the brain affect it or affect what aspects of it, etc. That's scientific. Pretending that it doesn't exist at all, is not.
Of course, if one were to conclude that conciousness is an illusion, that would be very different - after all, illusions exist, just not as what they appear to be.

 

[Roboramma]

Merc, the idea of private behavior seems interesting. Could you expand on what it is exactly? (I'm sure this is a much bigger question than I realise, so feel free to ignore if I've just asked you to write a textbook ).

Oh, I just realised you may have already, but if so I can't find it, so could someone point me to the post number?

I ask because everything I know about behaviorism I learned from Steven Pinker talking about how much he doesn't like it and from your posts. Needless to say you've given me a new perspective on it and I've become quite interested in what you guys have to say. Hoping to learn more. (Pretty please?)

 

[Mercutio]

Merc, the idea of private behavior seems interesting. Could you expand on what it is exactly? (I'm sure this is a much bigger question than I realise, so feel free to ignore if I've just asked you to write a textbook ).

Oh, I just realised you may have already, but if so I can't find it, so could someone point me to the post number?

I ask because everything I know about behaviorism I learned from Steven Pinker talking about how much he doesn't like it and from your posts. Needless to say you've given me a new perspective on it and I've become quite interested in what you guys have to say. Hoping to learn more. (Pretty please?)

Heh....you asked for it.

Actually, I will first point you to this behaviorism tutorial. It does an excellent job of presenting behaviorism as it was and is--how it developed, philosophical underpinnings, conflicts with other areas...the whole 9 yards.

From the tutorial, a brief answer to your "private behavior" question. It will make more sense in context, and after you complete the tutorial you will be more equipped to understand the finer points. Then, ask me anything!

Some part of the environment is private, in the sense that it is accessible only to one individual. Events in this part are important, but they are important as events in the behavioral dimension, not in the mental dimension. The term subjective, as contrasted with objective, is concerned with these same sorts of events. These private or subjective behavioral events are the sorts of phenomena identified in everyday language by such terms as "thinking," "problem solving," "recalling," and "imagining." Thus, radical behaviorism will accept that some behavioral phenomena are private, but not that their ontology is that of a mental or subjective dimension that differs from the physical or objective dimension. In particular, they do not need to be analyzed according to a different conceptual scheme, simply because they are not accessible to more than one individual. Any particular usage of a "mental" or "subjective" term in everyday language is to be analyzed to determine in what respects it is occasioned by behavioral, but not necessarily publicly observable, relations. The important questions are (a) what contingencies are responsible for the development of private events, and (b) what contingencies are responsible for any influence that private events exert on subsequent behavior. For example, as verbal behavior under the control of a private stimulus, introspection is an instance of behavior that needs to be explained. Introspection does not explain other behavioral phenomena. What contingencies make it possible to give introspective reports?

 

[Piggy]

Science is not relevant to the question of whather consciousness can be scientifically explained. It is the philosophy of science which is relevant.

That is the silliest thing I've heard in weeks. One of the silliest things I've heard ever.

 

[Piggy]

But this then means that consciousness is completely causally inefficacious since it is the firing of neurons etc which wholly causes our behaviour. But if consciousness has absolutely no affect upon the world whatsoever then science cannot conclude it exists.

There's your problem right there. That's like saying that because waves are the aggregate motions of molecules in the ocean, therefore waves can't affect physical matter. As a former resident of the Florida panhandle, I can assure you this isn't the case.

I think you need to emerge from your philosophies and join the real world.

 

[Piggy]

I assert I know with complete certainty that I myself am conscious. I cannot prove this however, I take it an an axiom. But once you accept this axiom (or at least the axiom that you are conscious) then reductive materialism fails.

No, it doesn't. Or at least, it doesn't if you are willing to peek beyond your limited philosophy and consider the overwhelming and incontrivertible evidence that an objective reality exists, and the overwhelming evidence that consciousness is indeed an emergent phenomenon arising from brain activity.

 

[Piggy]

My lunch hour's ending, so I don't have time to consider everything in your post, Merc. I'll say, tho, that I am totally with you and in agreement up to here....

But secondly...there is perfectly good reason it is not necessarily always associated with the activity of any given portion of the brain (although new research shows spindle cells firing when we experience "awareness" of something): we do not learn the term based on the firing of brain areas, but based on behavior.

After the :, you shake me. Somehow I'm just going to have to figure out why you continually shift discussion back to the acquisition of terms. To me, this seems like a tangent, a red herring.

I'll ponder on it.

 

[Mercutio]

After the :, you shake me. Somehow I'm just going to have to figure out why you continually shift discussion back to the acquisition of terms. To me, this seems like a tangent, a red herring.

I'll ponder on it.

Lemme throw an analogy at you; that might help.

There have been threads here trying to explore the physiological substrate of NDE's (near-death experiences), no? In my experience, these threads have gotten bogged down because there is no one physiological cause that suffices to explain the variety of NDE's that have been reported. Some will then argue that, since there is no cause that fits all the examples, there must be no physiological cause of the phenomenon.

Ah, but that is the rub; the use of "phenomenon", singular, presumes that NDE's are of a kind. They may vary from one another, but all are assumed (by this logical line, anyway) to be variations on the same theme. As such, it is legitimate to look for a single cause.

My approach, then, would be to examine the term NDE, to see what sorts of things we put into that fuzzy category. In various threads here and on believer sites, we get everything from automobile accidents in which someone was not even injured, but "had [his] life pass before [his] eyes", to cases of stopped hearts, to cases in which no measureable brain activity could be detected. (Not to mention, we get widely varying clinical situations, from casual observation to individuals hooked up to various monitors in hospitals.) It seems, sometimes, like the only thing they have in common is the label NDE. It seems foolish to me to expect this wide variety of situations to all somehow have the same cause. The lack of a single explanation for this wide range of experiences is perfectly understandable (especially when various subsets are perfectly well explained by known processes, although the same processes are irrelevant to other subsets), and does not beg the question at all.

It seems to me that it seems to you that I conflate language and behavior, but in cases like this it is necessary. "NDE's" are an emergent property of the various different experiences that we lump together as NDE's, but the term itself is also an emergent property of the various ways we speak of the experiences. If asked to "explain NDE's", both sorts of emergence are important. The first can only be examined after the second has been (we cannot explain a category of NDE's until we have delimited it; if the second sort of emergent property throws together two physiologically distinct processes, there can be no analysis that shows one process to explain them both.)

Back to consciousness for a bit. Suppose we limit ourselves to "awareness" as a subset of conscious experience, just to make things more manageable. We then look to find a physiological substrate underpinning "awareness" as a felt experience. So far, all well and good. But as you say, we may find no area of the brain firing consistently with awareness. Now would be the time to examine what we mean by awareness, and whether we are looking at several different processes which we have labeled, emergently, with one term. It could be (purely hypothetical here) that awareness of seeing something results in spindle-cell firing, but awareness of pain does not. If "awareness" is seen as monolithic, this is a problem. If, however, we realize that we have "awareness" as the label for a number of different referents, there is no reason that the physiological underpinnings of one should be the physiological underpinnings for all.

Any who look at "awareness" as a unitary thing (even if it is viewed as an emergent property of a set of neural firings) will see no clear substrate, and will be able to argue a dualism-of-the-gaps and say that any one explanation is insufficient. Which it is...but only because the assumption of a unitary awareness (or, by extension, consciousness) is a flawed assumption.