Untitled Document

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

Churchland: The Hornswoggle Problem

[All quotes did link to the original document as it was posted on the Internet but the link stopped working.]

Beginning with Thomas Nagel, various philosophers have proposed setting conscious experience apart from all other problems of the mind as "the most difficult problem." When critically examined, the basis for this proposal reveals itself to be unconvincing and counter-productive. Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw. Use of "I-cannot-imagine" arguments is a related flaw. When not much is known about a domain of phenomena, our inability to imagine a mechanism is a rather uninteresting psychological fact about us, not an interesting metaphysical fact about the world.

There is little for me to disagree with in this essay. I’d like to add some though.

It is foolish to decide which currently unsolved problems are difficult or hard in advance. The truth is that the problems are equal and solving any of the "easy" problems will require solving the "hard" problems at the same time, and visa versa.

Remember that we are dealing with the nervous system which is a system of billions of connections of very similar nerve cells. To understand how computations are performed, functions are controlled and experiences are registered is all part of the same task. It requires an understanding of the nature of such cells and the nature of change that occurs during the firings of such cells in various ways. At the single-cell level, there are not that many differences but we have no way to directly experience the sensation or experience of a single cell but through observation and logic.

We need to understand the nature of one of these cells that makes it possible that a network of them can have the power to make decisions and create understanding. This is no easy task when we can only observe the activities of billions of them in concert when trying to understand the purpose of one cell. The problem is compounded because we need to understand cellular experience that occurs in a period of time so small that it is beyond our ability to perceive and analyze but with instruments that measure only increments of time and frequencies of firing. That a nerve cell might have a variety of sensory "experiences" within several milliseconds is difficult to consider.

Put billions of these cells together with trillions of connections dealing with information coming from many different types of sensory receptors and the various different functions and powers of processing are multitudinous and appear to be quite different. Much of these differences are an illusion.

Before we can solve the problems ("easy" and "hard") we need to really understand the nature of the questions we are asking and make sure we are not asking impossible questions. (Remember that there are religions that have been started by asking one or two faulty questions that are impossible to answer and then offering an answer. One impossible question can lead to thousands of books written by theologists who suffer no recourse for being wrong.)

Just look at the cells! Look at them in action and say they are not doing the same thing. Yes, of course, when you have a lesion in a different part of the brain a different function is affected, but it does not directly follow that these cells are doing something different in the different parts of the brain.

To understand what the cells are doing when they fire in different ways is a tremendous mystery. In order to solve these problems we must be very careful in coming to any conclusions about any observations. The language used to describe various activity needs to be scrutinized as some of it implies, as fact, activity and structure that is only current theory. Any conclusions taken for granted have the power to forever keep the answers at bay while in use.

If you unplug the toaster from the outlet and then decide that the outlet regulates the ability to heat bread and then cut the power from another outlet and when the refrigerator stops working you then conclude that the other outlet regulates the ability to cool your milk, you are missing something in your analysis. Both outlets do the same thing and any changes in your household are an issue of how items are wired into the network and where the interruptions of power occur. In a way this sums up our current knowledge of what is happening in the brain related to function and the geography of the brain. We really don’t know what is happening in the system to make things work. We have an idea of ways we can change the functioning and affect various abilities or symptoms, but we have no idea of why any of these approaches work. (Some professionals present current knowledge to us as if we have a lot of knowledge about what is happening, but such is an illusion until we know we are right. I could create a religion today that I know is a fiction and someday down the road a thinker or writer in my religion will write a thousand page book of theory "proving" why he is right about his interpretation of the world through his understanding of my religion. The amount of knowledge can appear to be greater when we are wrong about things... for instance, to try to understand and collect data about different forms of gravity for every different object - dust gravity, horse gravity, lawyer gravity - will create a very great and complicated field of inquiry that would require an "expert" in different gravities until the knowledge of a simplified universal law of gravity was discovered and understood.)

Conceptualizing a problem so we can ask the right questions and design revealing experiments is crucial to discovering a satisfactory solution to the problem.

Very right. I do believe that I have such a conceptualization that will be very useful and makes much more sense of a variety of data. I can also suggest many new studies that will be able to further support (or not) this new approach. I have already taken the liberty to try a new medication technique based on theoretical predictions that has been very successful. (The best way to prove a unified theory as correct is to show how to cure a variety of problems that have not been cured with current approaches.)

Although I agree that consciousness is, certainly, a difficult problem, difficulty per se does not distinguish it from oodles of other neuroscientific problems. Such as how the brains of homeotherms keep a constant internal temperature despite varying external conditions. Such as the brain basis for schizophrenia and autism. Such as why we dream and sleep. Supposedly, something sets consciousness apart from all other macro-function brain riddles such that it stands alone as The Hard Problem.

Understanding consciousness is required before any of the other functions of the brain can be understood. (Those of you who don’t want to give up the mystery of the mind in order to retain the special status of being God’s chosen species on earth, I promise that there will be plenty of mystery about the nature of life left over when the functioning of the brain and the mind have been explained. To explain the mind requires massive mathematical logic that can show that a range of emotional experience is available to a single-cell organism. Some want to believe that only humans have emotional life. Sorry.)

Perhaps it is just a problem with what you expect when you try to understand consciousness. Many define consciousness as inner language and a very basic cellular language needs to be involving billions of cells in order to control such language-based processing. How could we ever use a language that follows a one-bit-at-a-time structure to describe a processing that involves millions of nerve cell actions simultaneously? We can’t see it all at once but we can break down the logic in a way that can show how such a system can work.

What drives the left-out hypothesis? Essentially, a thought-experiment, which roughly goes as follows: we can conceive of a person, like us in all the aforementioned Easy-to-explain capacities (attention, short term memory etc.), but lacking qualia. This person would be exactly like us, save that he would be a Zombie -- an anaqualiac, one might say. Since the scenario is conceivable, it is possible, and since it is possible, then whatever consciousness is, it is explanatorily independent of those activities. (Something akin to this was argued by Saul Kripke in the 1970's.)

I take this argument to be a demonstration of the feebleness of thought-experiments. Saying something is possible does not thereby guarantee it is a possibility, so how do we know the anaqualiac idea is really possible?

Churchland is right. It is important to remember that things go wrong with these brains in certain ways for a reason. A great variety of disorders have been identified. I don’t agree with the way disorders are described and categorized, but a lot of important information about the workings of the brain comes from looking at how symptoms group together and the nature of how things go wrong. There are particular ways that things go wrong and there are ways that things could conceivably go wrong that are never observed. The structure of the system is reflected in all of this.

One important clue to consider is that the system is very perfect. Even in those with terrible forms of mental illness the illness is a reflection of something that can happen with a perfect system. There are mechanisms that provide for the success of life that must also cause certain problems. These successful protective mechanisms are the reason we all endure certain kinds of decline with old age.

Another important way of looking at these things is to try to understand why every action is the organism’s attempt to seek pleasure or health and avoid pain or decline of health. Even the most outrageous damaging symptoms such as head-banging must serve some beneficial purpose for that person who is under the stress of an autistic or psychotic disorder. Understanding such a purpose is one of the clues to understanding how the nervous system communicates and experiences the world. No matter how we attempt to stop the symptoms in these people, we are only providing a maintenance treatment without solving the real problem when we don’t understand why the patient receives some kind of neurological benefit from such activity.

The word "qualia" is one of those words that come from misunderstanding the system and how it works and a need to define understanding in such terms will get in the way of seeing how the system works.

The philosophical lesson I learned from my biology teacher is this: when not much is known about a topic, don't take terribly seriously someone else's heartfelt conviction about what problems are scientifically tractable. Learn the science, do the science, and see what happens.

But it is also important to question the science itself. You must ask the questions but you must also question the questions and question your scientific method. (Is the scientific method making assumptions or is it using incomplete logic or is it missing any options when considering ways to interpret the data?)

I was once involved with performing magic. One of the tricks of the magician is to ask a question that can never be answered. With a clever presentation the audience will never know they are dealing with a faulty question. It could be something as simple as asking how did the coin move from my hand to your hat? (when no such thing ever happened) or something much more complicated and tricky.

It is in the nature of the people trying to solve the problem to seek an answer and when the answer to the mystery is difficult to achieve, it is human nature to seek increasingly complex ways of explaining the trick. I think the mind naturally adds to the complexity of the possible solutions because it does not discard approaches that have not been proven absolutely wrong and keeps them in memory and because we want to believe that complexity is required when an answer is not readily available. The longer the audience goes without figuring out the trick, the further they get from finding the answer because they are mired in thinking of complex ways of performing the illusion and the truth is always something very simple. This is why the audience gets so angry when they are told how the trick is performed. (When told they often insult the magician. "That is so simple," they often exclaim with real anger and then they might discount it as a stupid trick when so disillusioned. To learn the answer does not make them happy because they want to believe that something special has occurred and that they were dealing with a substantial mystery.) This is pretty much the same reaction that occurs when a scientific discovery comes along that removes a big mystery. There are angry reactions. The scientist is called a nut or worse.

Sometimes the audience is told how a magic trick is worked and they still don’t believe it and continue to try to explain how it was done in other (impossible) ways that they prefer to believe.

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