The Qualia Commons

My Darwin's Nightmare Nightmare

2006-03-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to a screening of Darwin’s Nightmare, and there was a Q&A with the director afterwards. It’s a documentary about how the introduction of an invasive fish species (Nile perch) to Lake Victoria has destroyed the lake’s ecosystem, but provided one of the few economic opportunities available in Mwanza, Tanzania. 500 tons of fish per day are shipped to Europe and Japan, while the local people are left to fight over rice and fried, rotting fish heads. The planes that fly the fish out of Tanzania don’t bring anything of value back from Europe, besides smuggled weapons that are used in conflicts in Congo, Zaire, and Angola. The fish industry has brought more people to coastal villages than there are jobs. Consequently, their wives and children are unable to maintain their farms in distant villages, and the men get AIDS from prostitutes and eventually go back and infect their wives.

The film has footage of the people fishing on the boats, the Russian pilots, the prostitutes who sleep with the pilots, the fish factory owner, children brawling over handfuls of rice, orphans sniffing glue, a night watchman who guards a fish research facility after the previous guard was murdered, and a local priest explaining that he can’t advise people to use condoms because they are sinful.

It’s a well-made and important movie, but the director is an insufferable prick. The first question of the Q&A session was about how large the film crew was. He was immediately annoyed and “wanted to talk about the film, first.” We also learned that the director “does not do interviews,” he “talks to people.” He has such a defeatist attitude about globalization that you wonder why he made the film in the first place. It’s a “fact of life” that he sees no way of changing, and he seemed proud not to support efforts made by activists to boycott the Nile perch industry. He’s a “filmmaker,” so he doesn’t do that sort of thing. He was also uninterested in talking about anything specific about the fish industry, because “the film is not about fish, it’s about globalization.” I guess we shouldn’t start somewhere, we should just point cameras at poor people and congratulate ourselves for using their problems as a “metaphor.” Before the film started he said that he wasn’t going to answer “what should we do about this” sorts of questions.

Despite the fact that the filmmaker seems personally uninterested in helping his subjects, hopefully the film will inspire less self-absorbed people to address the problems in the film.

Today's Most Horrifying Serendipitous Discovery

2006-02-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

In the course of an unrelated PubMed search, I came across this case report:

We present a case of an accidental autoerotic death involving the inhalation of a propane-butane gas mixture, also known as LPG (liquefied petroleum gas). A 19-year-old male was found dead in supine position in his bed in a residential accommodation one day after he was last seen alive. On a personal computer at the end of the bed, a pornographic movie was still running. On his left shoulder, an empty rubber balloon and on the bedside 2 empty "Kisag-Gas" cartridges were found. Toxicologic investigations revealed an intoxication with propane and butane, together with a recent consumption of cannabis. This case report compares the toxicologic findings with other recently published cases, and the theories of the toxic effects are discussed.

This was all very amusing until I found out the hard way that the article includes a picture of this, er.... situation. If you kill yourself creatively enough, your image will be immortalized in the American Journal of Forensic and Medical Pathology, with arrows and a figure legend pointing out the really embarrassing parts.

Hidden Wonders of Pubmed, rave edition

2006-01-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

First we have this paper, titled "Methamphetamine toxicity in mice is potentiated by exposure to loud music." The findings will be very troubling to anyone who regularly injects 5 grams of meth and has seizures while listening to The Prodigy on repeat. The authors soberly note that:

the clinical relevance of our findings is likely to be much greater for popular music styles than for classical music. Classical music is rarely played very loudly in public places and there is no evidence of an association between listening to classical music and stimulant abuse. In contrast, there is a relationship between drug use and music style, with fans of rave music being more likely to have experimented with drugs than those who preferred other styles of music. There is also a relationship between the behavioral characteristics of people who listen excessively to loud music and those who abuse substances.

Indeed. I'll revise my weekend plans accordingly.

The next paper is titled "(+/-)-3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, 'Ecstasy') increases social interaction in rats." It certainly does. If you are a human being, taking ecstasy will make you braver at socializing and wimpier at walking on boards way up in the air. The authors could not rest until the same thing had been demonstrated in rats.

Heidegger rolling in his grave

2006-01-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

I found Heidegger's "Discourse on Thinking" on my bookshelf, where it's sat completely forgotten for over a year. I'm retyping some cool sections of it here, just because:

Let us not fool ourselves. All of us, including those who think professionally, as it were, are often enough thought-poor; we all are far too easily thought-less. Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today's world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly, instantly... Hourly and daily they are chained to the radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world... all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world...

Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste to our nature.

That said, I will die if I don't watch TV tonight.

it's fun to be contrarian

2006-01-16T23:24:00.000-08:00

I don’t like the implication that “life and wonder” are somehow being killed by our culture. The recognition that daily life can be a drag and we should cultivate a sense of wonder is at least as old as Hinduism. The Jetson’s direction society has taken is really convenient and really alienating, but I don’t think it’s to blame for problems as fundamental as boredom.

Speaking of songs and such, the lyrics to the Bad Religion song “Anxiety” are probably the most profound thing I’ll read all day. However, I would never have heard the song without marketing and mass production. Gentrification and sprawl only happen because many people genuinely prefer those sorts of environments. I dare say that many people find life and wonder in a dog, an SUV, a family, and a McMansion. We don’t, but we’re the alienated ones. It’s interesting to think about which comes first: the intellectual argument against society or the revulsion at some aspect of it?

I have no idea what the Derrida quote is supposed to mean.

toward a recultivation of "life and wonder in the sterilized objects and experiences of our mass-produced, hyper-marketed, super-alienated culture."

2006-01-15T11:11:00.000-08:00

"If they can be reduced, it seems like 'qualia' is a really jargon-y way of saying 'experiences.'"

so what do you want to name the blog, then? "The Experiences Commons"? there's not even alliteration there. it's wonky.

in any case, we had a time rescuing qualia like that from the clutches of epiphenomenalism.

no?

and that's actually an important thing to do because "experiences" (and yes, even when defined as "reduced qualia"), are vastly important and profound and should influence our daily decisions about how we conduct our lives.

this is what i mean:

first, try this media snack from the San Francisco Mime Troupe:

http://sfmt.org/media/index.shtml

it's a movie about gentrification in San Francisco.

here's a cool quote from "William":

"I'm a scultor-mechanic-gardener, and I seek to recultivate life and wonder in the sterilized objects and experiences of our mass-produced, hyper-marketed, super-alienated culture."

then check out this interview of Jacques Derrida by Paul Brennan:

P.B.: You end your book with a quotation from Rousseau, who has written about writing as a kind of dreaming. He says:

The dreams of bad nights are given to us as philosophy. Younwill say that I too am a dreamer. I admit this. But I do what others fail to do. I give my dreams as dreams and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.

My question to you is: are you allowing me to interview in much the same spirit - as a dream to be taken as the listener or reader wishes?

J.D.: Yes, but if I were to indulge in saying so, I would imply that I am totally awakened while dreaming, and I have no illusion about that.

http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/so.html

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"reduced qualia" is an oxymoron

2006-01-14T14:54:00.000-08:00

You wrote:

you said that "[qualia] exist in the same way that 'heat' is the rate at which molecules are moving or 'clouds' are collections of water molecules."

i agree with you 100% here, so there is no contradiction between qualia thusly defined and reductionism.

There is a contradiction here. Arguments for qualia don't exist except as arguments against reductionism. They are the properties of sensory experience that supposedly wouldn't be captured by a complete account of the brain. If they can be reduced, it seems like "qualia" is a really jargon-y way of saying "experiences."

If we're talking about the "heat" of a cup of tea, we're talking about the average rate at which water and solute molecules are moving around. In a cup of tea, there are only water molecules and things from tea leaves dissolved in the water, and all those things are moving. "Heat" is an interpretation of the cup of tea. It's the result of some other object contacting the tea and its own rate of molecular motion being altered. It's not that there is really some entity called "heat" inside the cup of tea, that is anything other than molecules moving around. In the same way, I don't think there are qualia in the brain or caused by the brain. The brain, like the cup of tea, is just doing things, some of which can be conveniently called "experiences."

Hidden Wonders of PubMed

2006-01-11T00:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I stumbled across a paper on PubMed whose title captured something essential about my life. The title was "Apathy and the Functional Anatomy of the Prefrontal Cortex-Basal Ganglia Circuits." Apathy is exactly what I feel about some histology I should've done a long time ago. I don't think the authors were even trying to be funny. I did a quick search to find the article for this post, and found something even better:

Prefrontal system dysfunction and credit card debt

Credit card use often involves a disadvantageous allocation of finances because they allow for spending beyond means and buying on impulse. Accordingly they are associated with increased bankruptcy, anxiety, stress, and health problems. Mounting evidence from functional neuroimaging and clinical studies implicates prefrontal-subcortical systems in processing financial information. This study examined the relationship of credit card debt and executive functions using the Frontal System Behavior Scale (FRSBE). After removing the influences of demographic variables (age, sex, education, and income), credit card debt was associated with the Executive Dysfunction scale, but not the Apathy or Disinhibition scales. This suggests that processes of conceptualizing and organizing finances are most relevant to credit card debt, and implicates dorsolateral prefrontal dysfunction.

That's hilarious on many levels that I'll let the reader appreciate, but there's even more. Clicking on Lester's name to see his other publications is amazing. Give this man an Ig Nobel immediately. He's made many important contributions to science, especially the study of suicide.

Lester found that major league baseball players that killed themselves did so within a month of their birthdays more than you would expect by chance. He made the intriguing suggestion that artists' suicides can be a public good. He found that introversion and neuroticism are correlated. In a followup study, he found that Mac users have more anxiety about computers than PC users, because doing that study once just wasn't good enough. He has great interest in buying textbooks online. What will he discover next?

Check back for more PubMed absurdities.

qualia quarrelling

2006-01-10T19:22:00.000-08:00

this discussion has entered a new level of intensity which can indicate only one thing:

QUALIA QUARREL.

now, without doing any line-by-line refutation, we need to step back and talk about our discussion on "qualia" to clear up a few things.

firstly, let's get one thing straight:

i am not an epiphenomenalist.

if i were, then indeed, our friendship might be in danger.

so because we are both fully aware that the debate around qualia is polarized (politicized?), let us vow to remain friends after this discussion no matter what happens, no matter what mutually shared conclusion we do or do not reach.

seriously. if you think that i'm trying to posit qualia through epiphenomenalist gymnastics, you would be mistaken. i believe in only the reductionist's qualia, or "reduced" qualia.

secondly, let's be very explicit about maintaining a climate of civil, respectful, and compassionate discourse. admittedly, i was a little cheeky in the last post, which is fine, but we can't let this devolve into PofM mudslinging.

thirdly, we don't disagree on what qualia are, and i don't rely on epiphenomena to conclude that qualia are profound. i'm talking about properly "reduced" qualia as being profound.

you said that "[qualia] exist in the same way that 'heat' is the rate at which molecules are moving or 'clouds' are collections of water molecules."

i agree with you 100% here, so there is no contradiction between qualia thusly defined and reductionism.

in fact, this type of qualia is what we are sharing on the blog - i basically shared with you some electrons which were turned into photons by your monitor; that quale was named "i'm in my dark place_2005.jpg".

i think it was profound; we can talk about whether that is the case, but it seems we agree that it is a quale, i.e. an example of "reduced" qualia.

no?

There are no qualia

2006-01-10T17:44:00.000-08:00

I think the issues are:

1. The importance of parsimony (and other terminology issues).

“Occam’s Razor” and parsimony refer to the same principle, the principle that, on balance, simpler explanations involving fewer entities are preferable to more elaborate explanations. Reductionism is basically the intuition that the brain is “all that’s really going on” with the mind, and that a complete account of the brain’s function would explain the mind without “leaving anything out.” The qualia argument is that a reductionist account of brain activity leaves out what consciousness “feels like.” In this context, epiphenomenalism is the idea that qualia are effects of the brain that do not have other effects. It’s not coherent to hold this position, because if your sensations caused you to say “reductionism can’t account for my sensations,” your sensations had an effect. Interactionism is the idea that there are qualia, which are non-reducible sensory properties, and that qualia and the brain can influence each other. If the brain is causing non-physical, irreducible qualia to emerge somehow, and these qualia are influencing the brain, why is the concept of “qualia” necessary? What does it add that isn’t captured by an explanation of brain activity? I think it adds very little, and it’s more parsimonious to say that “the redness of red” or “what it feels like to be sad” ARE just patterns of brain activity. It’s a better explanation for the same reason that “gravity exists” is a better explanation than “each object is attached to an invisible string that God pulls on when he wants it to fall.”

2. Are qualia compatible with reductionism?

For the reasons above, I say no. The larger point is: what does a reductionist account of sensation, emotion, etc. look like? Well, thousands of people are working on it. It probably looks totally bizarre, and it’s probably going to be expressed in a vocabulary totally foreign to most people. Sadness will turn out to be something like “altered metabolism in the amygdala and the subgenual cingulate” or something even stranger sounding.

3. What is meaning, if reductionism is true?

If one takes reductionism seriously, then “meaning” and “profundity” are themselves physical events within the brain. The idea is plausible to me. A common experience of drug users is that thoughts (even stupid ones) “feel” deep, and mood is altered by clearly physical things like diet and exercise. Everyone has experienced depression when it’s been too long since their last meal, or they’re simply physically exhausted. While moods and impressions of profundity seem to be “about” what we’re thinking of while we’re having them, they can be caused by things having nothing to do with what we’re thinking about. Obviously, depression is often about what it seems to be about, but it isn’t always.

4. What does it mean to communicate an experience, if reductionism is true?

Obviously, whether an experience is possible for someone is going to depend on whether their brain can produce that experience. If a type of experience is the same thing as a pattern of brain activity, different people’s brains might also require different inputs to produce that type of activity. As you’re reading this, lots of stuff is going on in your brain that lets you read it. Communication is the process of causing another person’s brain activity to behave in a certain way.

In sum, taking reductionism seriously requires a big change from the “common sense” way of thinking about the mind, and it’s also incompatible with the idea that qualia “exist” in the strong sense. They exist in the same way that “heat” is the rate at which molecules are moving or “clouds” are collections of water molecules.

Post 2: qualia revisited or, what are qualia anyway

2006-01-10T03:13:00.000-08:00

points well-put, and well-received.

specifically, i agree:

- that an explication of "qualia" is in order (we’ll expand on "the commons" later)
- on reductionism all the way

* note: i’m actually not a proponent of parsimony generally, though i feel very comfortable using Occam’s razor to prune methodology generally; that said...

one way of going about discussing qualia would be to sort of trash epiphenomenalism, as in Post 1:

qualia -> Nagel -> "epiphenomena = bullshit" because of reductionism

and that’s always fun, because it's fucking true:

"there's atoms and gravity - that's uncontroversial. so shut up about your epiphenomenal gremlins already."

to be sure, in the interview with Wright at Salon.com [here], Dennett describes epiphenomena as an "insane" notion, among other things.

specifically, in direct response to Nagel's "What It's Like...", Dennett said:

"i think that's an intuition which is honored by tradition, but has nothing much going for it."

but what intution is he talking about?

Dennett is isolating the conceptual quagmire wherein reductionism is misunderstood to contradict "qualia" as such. it certainly does as formally defined by Dennett at Wikipedia:

----------------

1. ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.
2. intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.
3. private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
4. directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

----------------

and it should be noted that in the interview, Dennett was mostly annoyed, but at times tickled, by the notion that he is arguing against "consciousness" per se, though he's simply arguing against "consciousness-as-an-epiphenomenon".

however, otherly defined, reductionism and qualia are actually mutually inclusive...

*note: my ideas of merging different strains of thought in Philosophy of Mind stuff began with a reading of Owen Flanagan's Prospects For A Unified Theory of Consciousness or, What Dreams Are Made Of.

... so let me show you an example of "qualia"; a "quale", if you will:

this is my friend Jason, the picture is titled "i'm in my dark place_2006.jpg".

i took it a couple hours ago in Jason's livingroom on my Treo 650.

i thought he was sad, so i put a lampshade on his head and took a picture. he was in his "dark place".

but what is going on when we look at photos? we all agree on sensory experiences, they are so immediate and tangible and "real":

"i see a guy with a lampshade on the head. he looks sad."

epistemological questions: what are we absolutely sure of here? what CAN we be sure of?

if we posit basic physics and biology (which, again, are highly uncontroversial positions), we are sure that photons are hitting our eyes as having been emitted from the computer monitor; this is a quale-as-sensation which is certain.

but what about Jason's experience of "sadness"? what about "what it's like to be Jason in his dark place?" no - seriously, is this quale certain? is it "real" as is the quale-as-sensation? and if so, then how? if not, then why?

this is an important question for a lot of people, many feel like reductionism somehow robs their qualia of profundity. especially things like "happiness", "sadness", etc.

i'm actually not going to denigrate all that stuff; i'm actually going to say that it is still profound at the same time that reductionism is the case.

i would argue that the quale is indeed "real", but only insofar as it is can be "reduced" to atoms which are spacio-temporally localized via gravity.

but why can't that be profound? that "sadness" is a quale, AND a real/entirely "material" thing? sadness-as-quale is not inconsistent with reductionism at this point, and that fact itself boasts of a profundity which borders on the indescribable...

at the same time, the Buddhist might say that there actually is no "subject" to be sad, but that is, perhaps, a digression.

now, Dennett says something during the interview which is key:

"i think that's an intuition which is honored by tradition, but has nothing much going for it."

he's talking about epiphenomena.

but the quote extends to the confusion around "reduced" qualia, or put differently, the supposed mutual exclusivity between reductionism and "qualia", read in this context as "lived experience reduced to atoms-having-been-spatio-temporally-localized-via-gravity".

"i'm in my dark place_2006.jpg".

basically, this blog is all about sharing qualia thusly reduced, no?

The First Post

2006-01-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

It's quite appropriate to start this blog with a post about qualia. Conveniently, Slate posted an interview with Daniel Dennett here. It's worth watching for the entertainment value of seeing Dennett get irritated, but there's also some interesting philosophy talk.

"What is it like to be a bat?" is a classic paper (pdf) by Thomas Nagel. It's a property dualist argument against reductionism. In English, Nagel's point is that it's really weird that bats use echolocation, and we have no idea what it feels like. Our brains aren't even wired such that we could know what echolocation feels like. If we knew everything about the neurobiology of echolocation, it still wouldn't tell us what it feels like, so neurobiology fails to capture something important about echolocation.

My problem with this argument is that it sets up a straw man about what materialism actually predicts. Let's say that future brain scanning devices will be able to give a complete picture of a person's neural activity. I could sit and think while I was being scanned, then come up with a function that relates my brain activity to my conscious experience. Enough people could do this that general principles relating neural activity to conscious experience could be determined. We could then study bat brains and make extrapolations about what bats experience. Materialism does NOT predict that our own brains could cause those experiences to happen to us. It predicts that could not happen, because our brains are different. That doesn't mean a complete understanding of bat brains wouldn't completely explain what a bat experiences. It just means that we couldn't experience it ourselves. The fact that we can't experience something doesn't make it mysterious and non-material. There is no way I can experience echolocation without altering my brain. However, I also don't know what what it's like to take methamphetamine. There is no way of knowing what it's like to take methamphetamine without altering my brain by taking it. That doesn't mean "what it is like to take methamphetamine" is inexplicable. Methamphetamine has specific, relatively well-described effects on the brain, that completely explain why it has the effects it has.

If property dualism is true and there ARE qualia, then one of two possibilities exist: epiphenomenalism or interactionism (thanks, Wikipedia!). The Dennett video does a great job of explaining why epiphenomenalism makes no sense at all, and interactionism seems to violate Occam's Razor. If brain activity is producing mental states that in turn influence brain activity, why is the "mental states" step necessary? It's more parsimonious to say that brain activity is influencing other brain activity, and consciousness is identical to that brain activity.

Dennett also claims that his wife knows things about what it's like to be him that are true but never occurred to him. That's pretty clever.