Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:00
foreign new developments in the sensory motor theory of phenomenal consciousness and I'm going to try and explain why people say that there's something it's
00:00:19
like to have a conscious experience now something it's like is considered to be perhaps the greatest mystery in Consciousness research researchers will come up with all sorts of theories about
00:00:34
how this could come about but in my opinion none of them have presented any intelligible link to to soft
00:00:45
there's no intelligible link to the real phenomenology of something it's like there seems to be an explanatory Gap so much so that many scientists appeal to dualist type theories
00:01:00
sensory motor theory proposes a metaphysical shift surely claiming that we all know what we mean by something it's like is not enough to do science to do science we
00:01:15
must ask what people mean when they say that there's something it's like we must divide and conquer we must decompose something it's like into a collection of describable properties
00:01:27
this project I call an analytical phenomenology when we do this something it's like is seen to be a collection of capacities instead of a single magical thing
00:01:44
the explanatory Gap and the heart problem evaporate similar thing happened at the beginning of the 20th century for the concept of life as an old Seth mentioned
00:01:57
the concept of life was de-refied I I was no longer considered to be a single coherent entity I think sensory motor theory should propose a similar
00:02:09
derailification of consciousness so to take a concrete example let's take the example of feeling the softness of a sponge when I say well we have to ask what people mean
00:02:26
when they say that there's something it's like to feel the softness and when I say what do people mean I'm talking about normal naive adults philosophers May mean
00:02:39
strange things when they talk about Consciousness and here also I'll be talking about what people mean as adults about Consciousness I'm not talking about children and I'm not talking oh well
00:02:51
let's say babies I'm not talking about animals and not talking about machines we can talk about that some other time so when we think about this the first thing that seems obvious is that when we
00:03:04
say that it feels like something then there must be a person with sufficient cognitive capacities to be able to know that currently they're interacting with a sponge in a soft way in other words
00:03:16
there must be a self now I'm not talking about a minimal kind of self a pre-reflective kind of self I'm talking about a socio-cognitive construct like philosophers like Dennard
00:03:30
and others have suggested a construct which is of a cognitive type it may also be of a social kind as suggested by social scientists like for example Wolfgang Prince Ian hacking and
00:03:42
even some neuroscientists like Michael Graziano have proposed scientific approaches to the notion of self so I think the self is not a mysterious thing now I'm going to leave that aside
00:03:54
another thing that we imply when we're saying we say we're conscious of the softness is that we are cognitively accessing the fact that it's soft okay now this cognitive access has also been
00:04:07
discussed in scientific ways there's a higher order thought theory for example that emphasizes the hierarchical aspect of this knowing that you know that you know and then Global workspace theories
00:04:19
have emphasized the fact that you need to have information which is somehow globally available to do this and then predictive processing theories have also mentioned the importance of of higher
00:04:31
higher order knowledge combining with lower order knowledge making predictions so all these three components are receiving currently scientific approaches and I think that this can be solved and it's not
00:04:45
mysterious but where there may be a little bit of a mystery is in the quality of the redness of red or in this case the quality of the felt softness and this is where
00:04:56
sensory motor theory has an original contribution okay sensory motor theory asks what are we actually doing when we're feeling the softness answer we're probing we're
00:05:10
mentally and physically testing whether the sponge is soft I press and it squishes that is what it means to feel softness to be in the State of Mind such that I know that currently if I press it
00:05:24
squishes it's a sensory motor law the quality of softness lies in that sensory motor law of course softness is never felt all by itself softness is always accompanied by
00:05:39
a number of other Fields like for example the springiness the roughness of the sponge Etc and even much more General aspects such as the fact that it's a
00:05:51
tactile sensation rather than let's say a visual ordinary sensation but the thing is that all those as aspects of my field are sensory motor laws that things the ways of doing things the laws are
00:06:04
described by current mode of interaction with the sponge so they're all types of ongoing Pro uh probing they're all sensory motor laws now would you say that the feel of
00:06:21
softness was generated by the brain now this question doesn't seem to make sense from a sensory murder point of view because softness is not the kind of thing that's generated in my brain okay
00:06:36
softness is a word that describes how I am currently interacting with a sponge it's a mistake to go looking in the brain to understand why I feel it is soft rather than hard because it lies in
00:06:48
what I'm doing and the same for these other accompanying fields thinking this way about softness is a way of escaping from the explanatory Gap
00:07:01
because it it's a way of escaping from the idea that we need to find a brain mechanism that's generating the softness softness is a non-mysterious fact about how you interact with soft things and
00:07:14
that can be talked about in everyday language there is no explanatory Gap so because of the advantage in Bridging the explanatory gap for softness sensory
00:07:29
motor theory takes the wager to try and account for all experiences in the same way a similar idea was actually suggested by Nick Humphrey a long time ago in his
00:07:41
adverbial approach to sensation now this seems to make sense for softness I can convince many people that what I've said makes sense about softness but what about the redness of red
00:07:57
and what about the hurt of pain it seems much harder to account for these things as things that you do but given the advantage in Bridging the
00:08:08
explanatory Gap let's try and over the last decades with my colleagues I've been trying to apply this approach to all experiences and I've had some success and that and
00:08:22
the success that I'm most excited about is color the redness of red okay so what did we do to cast the redness of red in sensory motor terms
00:08:35
what we did is we considered that the feel of red is not something that you passively receive the feel of red lies in how different colored surfaces modify
00:08:47
the light coming into your eye when you move the surfaces around under different illuminations and it turns out that you can mathematically describe that law
00:08:58
as a three by three Matrix that you can calculate objectively by combining the spectral absorption of the three human photoreceptor types and the surface reflectances of different colored
00:09:12
surfaces when you do that and you look at the resultant three by three matrices for all colors you find that there are four colors red yellow green and blue
00:09:23
that have very special properties the matrices that correspond to those colors are what mathematicians call singular singular matrices have the property that the law that they describe is much
00:09:37
simpler than all other other laws and using this idea we were able to precisely Define those particular Hues of red yellow green and blue that were
00:09:50
those Hughes that were universally named in all cultures throughout the world precisely determine those years and we
00:10:02
were also able to precisely predict psychophysical measurements done on people asking them to determine which Hues they thought were pure and unique
00:10:14
so we were very proud of that because it was what I call the victory of philosophy over science a simple idea predicted so precisely something that psychophysicists and anthropologists
00:10:28
were not able to predict so accurately another other applications of sensory motor theory in addition to color naming we've done work on change blindness it showed the feasibility of sensory
00:10:40
substitution I've been doing work on the rubber hand illusion and also work on the development of Notions of space all to say that sensory butter approach is not just philosophy it makes predictions
00:10:53
and stimulates new research but let me come back to what people mean when they say that there's something it's like to consciously feel the softness of the sponge have I dealt with everything is there perhaps something
00:11:06
missing is there an Ultimate something it's likeness some kind of hard to define something it's like that makes experienced experienced rather than feeling like
00:11:19
nothing at all now as scientists to advance we need to grow deeper we can't just shrug our shoulders and say well we all know what that means we have to know what we mean
00:11:32
when we say it's experienced so let's try brainstorming some other words to describe better of what we might mean so for example you could perhaps say that things that are
00:11:45
experienced feel like they're ongoing or accurate or real or lived or they affect us at a Locus for example in the world or on our body or in our
00:11:58
body or in our minds or as people they impose themselves on us they are felt they occupy us they are present to us they're displayed to us all of these are
00:12:10
terms that could be used to perhaps make more precise what we mean when we say there's something it's like what I'm going to do now is try and show you how we can find some objective
00:12:22
sensory motor laws that perhaps explain this first feeling of ongoingness occurrence and realness and lividness so to proceed let's think about what the
00:12:37
man in the street means when he says it was a real experience that bicycle ride I took down the mountain path what does he mean I think it's a question of control
00:12:49
it means that you're actively engaged in interacting with a bicycle in the world but you're only partially in control there's lots of fast ongoing give and take between you and the bicycle in the
00:13:03
world but unpredictable things must also be happening so let's try and be more precise let's see how this could be scientifically treated let's make a graph okay the
00:13:17
y-axis here will be the objective degree to which I through my voluntary actions can control the flow of information coming into my brain and on the x-axis I'll plug the slowness
00:13:31
or vastness of this interaction now note ideally I want these axes to correspond to objective information theoretic measurements made on neural channels that a physicist would be able to come
00:13:45
and measure objectively okay now let's look at what I meant by saying it was a real exciting experience with my bicycle I plotted in this red
00:13:56
oval here because the control I have was partial only okay um and it was fairly fast okay um
00:14:09
it was only partial because unpredictable things could happen notice that if I had complete control over what was going on I would not call
00:14:24
it an ongoing occurrent experience in fact it would be as though I I knew already what I was doing I knew any new scenery with that would come into mind
00:14:37
come into my eyes it would just be like a form of knowledge in a way okay if I had total control and notice that if I had no control if it was a completely automatic
00:14:51
bicycle ride like an Uber I would just be there admiring the landscape I would not be interacting with a bicycle it would not be perhaps I would not be experiencing the bicycle riding experience I'd be perhaps experiencing
00:15:04
the admiring the landscape experience but it would not be a real bicycle riding experience and of course if the control I had was too slow then I would not call it a
00:15:19
current ongoing experience it'd be more like answering the waiting for a phone call for example it'd be more like a state okay now this is the intuitive idea one gets from inspiration from bicycle
00:15:32
riding okay let's see whether these simple naive ideas can be applied to all experiences to emotions perception Etc so let's start with perceptual
00:15:44
experiences let's start with a vision what kind of control do we have over the visual influx well I claim we have partial control objectively our control is partial we have a good degree of
00:15:59
control because the slightest voluntary movements of my eyes immediately cause an effect on the retinal image and there thereby the retinal inflow but if
00:16:12
something happens in the visual field it's out of my control so I have this mixed kind of control so it's a typical case of what I would judge to be an occurrent experience
00:16:24
and the same kind of thing can be said about audition touch taste and smell I put taste and smell a little bit more to the left because it's slower the interaction we have with sniffing and
00:16:36
moving our tongues then the immediate interaction we have by moving our eyes or our head and then pain itches and tickles these are even slower
00:16:47
because they tend to be of more longer duration the interaction is of a slower kind so I put it more to the left and also I put it a little bit lower down because I think we have less control over the the
00:17:01
sensory manifestations of pains perhaps not so much for itches and tickles by the way everything I'm saying here is very qualitative you may not agree with exactly where I'm putting these
00:17:13
different experiences on my plot the point is that one should theoretically be able to make such a plot and I'm hoping that in the future physicists and information scientists will be able to
00:17:27
actually make this more objective this is just a qualitative scheme for the moment now let's go and look at emotions like anger fear disgust feeling sad and happy
00:17:39
here also these are much slower than pain Etc like the current experiences of perceptual experiences hunger and thirst also and also they are much less under
00:17:53
your voluntary control and because of that I've put them in this blue circle and lo and behold my prediction is that these should be perceived they should be experienced as more state-like and less a current and
00:18:06
ongoing and real and lived maybe we'll come back to whether they're real and a little bit later and now what's really interesting is the prediction we make about proprioception proprioception is a sensory system just
00:18:23
as complicated as vision and audition why do we not why did Aristotle not consider proprioception to be one of the five classic sense modalities why don't we feel proprioception the way
00:18:36
we feel vision this chart gives the the answer proprioception is almost totally under your voluntary control proprioception measures the position of your limbs you
00:18:49
have the uh you have the the muscle spindles and the joint receptors that give immediate changes when you move your muscles when you move your limbs voluntarily however it very rarely will
00:19:02
if not if ever happens that you get proprioceptive input that is that is not been caused by your voluntary control so you have complete almost complete control so proprioception as I predict
00:19:13
from the chart is received as a form of knowledge you know where your arm is you know what your posture is but you don't feel it in an ongoing and current fashion perhaps if you're a dancer
00:19:26
you've been doing this a lot then you begin to control it much more and you have more control uh and you begin to become more aware of the instabilities and the changes that
00:19:39
you can affect another case is mental States like here on the left confident feeling resolved feeling confused feeling lonely for example all these mental states are completely under your
00:19:53
mental control it's they only change very slowly as a as a a for for uncontrollable reasons so I've put them and it's rather a slow form of control so as I would predict these kind of
00:20:06
state these kind of these kind of experiences will be more knowledge like and not occurring and ongoing and there'll be there'll be more State like and now consider also a very interesting
00:20:19
visceral processes like my blood pressure my heartbeat oxygen in my blood Etc well we are not aware of these like we are aware of perceptual experiences why not well because this time we have
00:20:33
absolutely no voluntary control of them obviously it's true that you can control your heartbeat and your oxygen by running very fast but this control is nothing like the give and take that you have when you're seeing or you're
00:20:46
hearing so it makes sense that one should simply not experience these as experiences metaphysical reminder this is an attempt to account for
00:20:59
subjective judgments in terms of objectively measured information flow this is not just a subjective quality space about judgments about types of
00:21:12
experiences okay I'm making predictions here and the link between the subjective and objective is a constitutive link not a causal link
00:21:26
okay I'm suggesting that what people mean by an experience having an occurrent quality is that we can exercise partial control fairly quickly
00:21:39
Etc so I've been talking about how the feeling of ongoingness occurringness realness liveness could perhaps be accounted for
00:21:51
in terms of the controllability of the information the objective information flow into my into my mind into my brain via my voluntary actions I would have
00:22:05
liked it at that time to explain to you how the locus of the experience can also be explained in that way but I don't have time instead I'm going to talk about the notion of imposing this the
00:22:16
fact that experiences seem felt to us they occupy us and they are present to us and I'm going to explain that in terms of the controllability now not of information flow but of the actions
00:22:30
themselves an objective fact about many brain systems is that they involve hardwired innate mechanisms that can take over
00:22:42
control of our voluntary bodily functions our attention and our motivation they are exogenous independent of our will automatic difficult to resist voluntarily I I
00:22:56
suggest that these facts contribute to the subjective impression of imposing this pain is the obvious example so pain when you stick your finger in the fire
00:23:08
it jerks out of the fire automatically it so pain takes over control of your your voluntary actions it obviously also attracts your attention to the locus of
00:23:23
the of the injury and it changes your motivation you don't want to do it again tomorrow so pain and also itches and tickles have the property that they are bodily and
00:23:35
mentally imposing we have here an objective fact about how the brain is wired up that explains why we would say that pain and itches and tickles are
00:23:46
bodily and mentally imposing metaphysical reminder note the direction of the red arrow in the diagram between the pain and the actions the arrow goes both ways okay
00:23:59
pain does not cause automatic actions attention grabbing and motivation changes pain is constituted by these things when a nosive stimulation triggers innate alerting and avoidance
00:24:12
mechanisms we call the mode of interaction pain very important metaphysical point hunger thirst urges to urinate defecate are similar in involving
00:24:28
incontrovertible actions attentional grabbiness and specific innate changes they also have this bodily and in mentally imposing quality
00:24:40
emotions like anger fear Etc also produce automatic attention grabbing effects and they affect your bodily
00:24:52
voluntary bodily Behavior similarly but there's something interesting in addition these emotions cause changes in your facial and bodily gestures which other people interpret as
00:25:06
signaling emotional states and this in turns has an effect on you and so you perceive these emotions as having a an effect on you as a social person so
00:25:20
not only do these emotions have a bodily and mentally imposing quality but they also impose themselves on you as a person let's look at the perceptual senses and in particular Vision this is something
00:25:37
very interesting in addition to having these alerting innate alerting responses there are what I would call orienting reactions in particular the case of
00:25:48
vision if there's a complex visual scene over to the right in your visual visual field or high contrast stimulus your eyes are innately wired up to circade
00:26:00
towards the complex scene in fact your eyes cicade around involuntarily all the time and this innate automatic incontrovertible guiding
00:26:13
process takes over in fact the intake of information and so this gives you the impression that you are looking at a world that is
00:26:25
continually present in front of you it gives you this Grand Illusion of richness and impression of displayedness of the visual field in front of you and it's perhaps true also for audition
00:26:38
much less true for the others and now note something else very interesting about proprioception mental States and visceral states do these have these innate
00:26:52
um exogenous attention grabbing hardwired mechanisms I claim they don't now this is a prediction I would like to go in to the brain and actually see whether there are fibers going into the
00:27:05
frontal areas perhaps coming from proprioceptive receptors Etc I would predict there would be no such automatic interrupts uh from these types of experience
00:27:18
meaning that they do not have the imposingness of the perceptual Sensations and the same for visceral visceral phenomena there I would claim are not hardwired up objectively to
00:27:32
interrupt our thought processes and this explains also why they don't have this imposingness of course visceral states can indirectly affect your your your your state of mind but it's only
00:27:46
indirect I think what characterizes the perceptual Sensations is that they are hardwired to interrupt your attention and cognitive processing so taken together
00:27:59
um you see the the whole story is a bit messy here but globally the idea is that the objective facts about information flow and about how
00:28:12
hardwired mechanisms in the brain can interfere with our cognitive processing those objective facts can account pretty well for a lot of things that people say when they say that there's something
00:28:24
it's like the the areas of the diagram here in the middle are our experience types which have this partial control and they have a certain
00:28:37
degree of imposingness and it is these that we all agree really feel like something and some of them are more accurate and ongoing like the ones on the right the perceptual States whereas the more
00:28:49
mental States the more emotional and bodily States and more bodily States they are have a more state-like a character and then of course I can explain in this
00:29:10
objective reasons why I think like proprioception which is a proper sensory uh modality or a properly sensory system complex sensory system whether why we do
00:29:22
not have the same kind of ongoing occurrent feeling about it so in summary I hope I've convinced you that some of the subjective Impressions we have contribute to something it's
00:29:35
like can be accounted for in terms of objective facts about the controllability on the one hand of information processing through my voluntary actions and on the other hand
00:29:46
through control of my actions themselves conclusion number one this attempt to understand something it's like is just a start and it needs much more work I need
00:29:58
help from young people to look in more detail in particular about how to objectively measure this these degrees of controllability and we also need the way to psychophysically perhaps better
00:30:12
accumulate judgments about the different degrees to which people will apply these epithets like ongoing or current real displayed present
00:30:24
I have made some development along these lines in a recent paper in front of in Psychology but I'm not really very satisfied with it nevertheless added to the earlier work
00:30:37
that I did with the sensory motor approach on the what it's like of color and on work we've done on touch modality pain smell and audition these recent advances or this recent work shows the
00:30:50
feasibility of what I would call an analytic phenomenology even as concerns something so strange and mysterious as something it's like foreign
00:31:02
so if you want further information you can find it on my website and also download my pay my book thank you [Applause] [Music]
00:31:16
[Applause]
End of transcript