Cogito Ergo Sum

PsyMSc3A KOG
Sabine Windmann

Prüfungsrelevante Literatur zur heutigen Vorlesung:

Windmann, S. & Durstewitz, D. (2000). Phänomenales Erleben: Ein fundamentales

Problem für die Psychologie und die Neurowissenschaften. Psychologische
Rundschau, 51, 75-82. Plus Kommentare und Repliken!

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 Structure and Learning Goals

• The ambiguity of the term „consciousness“

• Famous thought experiments illustrating the
core problem
• „Easy“ Problems: „access consciousness“
• The „Hard“ Problem: „Qualia“
• Three criteria differentiating Hard and Easy
• Why hitherto proposed solutions are none

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 What is consciousness?
(Natsoulas 1978)

1. Awakeness versus deep sleep/coma

2. General alertness (versus generally
inattentive)
3. Focal attention (versus incidental processing)
4. Reflective, reportable state (metacognition)
5. Self-awareness (self-consciousness)
1-5 can be examined by
6. Qualia (subjective experience) Neurosciences

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 Ned Block (1995) in BBS: Two
principle forms of consciousness

• - access consciousness
• - phenomenal consciousness, qualia or
„sentience“

See also Gazzaniga et al. 2002, page 656-660

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 Mary in the white room
Frank Jackson (1982)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument 5
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason,
forced to investigate the world from a black and white room
via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in
the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose,
all the physical information there is to obtain about what
goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use
terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for
example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky
stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the
central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords
and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the
uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue". [...] What will
happen when Mary is released from her black and white
room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn
anything or not? (Jackson 1982, p. 130) 6
What is it like to be a bat?

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 Quotes Thomas Nagel

• What is it like to perform aerial acrobatics, live most of

your life in complete darkness, and acquire nearly all of
your information about the world from echoes bouncing
off objects and back to your ears?
• “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”
• „Without consciousness the mind-body problem would
be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems
hopeless.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F 8
 Qualia: The Hard Problem of
Consciousness

Nagel (1974) Chalmers (1996)

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-
a-bat/
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 David Chalmers (1996)

The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is

often exploited by both philosophers and
scientists writing on the subject. It is common to
see a paper on consciousness begin with an
invocation of the mystery of consciousness,
noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of
subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no
theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is
clearly the hard problem - the problem of
experience…

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

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 David Chalmers (1996)

... In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes

more optimistic, and the author's own theory of
consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, however,
this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more
straightforward phenomena - of reportability, of
introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the
author declares that consciousness has turned out to
be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like
the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem
remains untouched.

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

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 Chalmers: The hard problem

Contemporary Theories of Consciousness

• - deny the phenomenon (Churchland & Churchland)
• - explain something else (Crick & Koch, 1990)
• - claim to be explaining it (Flohr, 1992; Singer, 1998)
• - analyse the structure of experience
•- identify the substrate of experience by attributing
• the mystery to another mystery (Hameroff, Penrose)
• - claim the problem cannot ever be resolved (McGinn, 1993)

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13
 Three characteristics of access
consciousness (= easy problems)

1. Operationalized: Can it be defined and

observed in objective terms?
2. Implementation: Can we find ways to
implement it in an artificial neural network?
3. Adaptivity: Is there an evolutionary function?

Windmann & Durstewitz, 2000, Psychologische Rundschau

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 For access: The answer is YES

...for all cognitive and emotional functions we are

experimentally examining.

Example: „Pain“ (identification of bodily damage)

– the three criteria are met
1. Self-reports (ratings) on affective, motivational, sensory
level, behavioral reactions, physiological reactions,
endocrine reactions
2. Build a robot with an artificial body and a neural
network including „damage detection“ that elicits central
and peripheral defense reactions when the robot
encounters system-damaging stimuli
3. Protect yourself from damage so you don‘t die (= so
you can reproduce better)
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 Functions of Access Consciousness
• Control/select/enable flexible, adaptive
responding.
• For that:
• all you need is a neural network that associates
the stimulus input (context) with the adaptive
behavioral response
• the process (action potentials, synaptic
connections, behavioral output) is bound to
physical matter (energetic), objectively
defineable, observable from 3rd pp in space and
time, to interact with environment.
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Phenomenal Consciousness ? HARD!
Example: Seeing colours

530 nm
530 nm

650 nm
650 nm

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 Why is this a hard problem?
3 criteria are NOT met:
1. Qualities can not be operationalised, i.e., they
cannot be defined/measured in objective terms.
2. We have no idea about neural implementation
and whether an artificial neural network can
experience colours (as opposed to discriminating
wavelengths)
3. Evolutionary Function is more than unclear as
natural selection operates only on behavior/
entities that interact with the outside world, not
on purely subjective entities
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 Typical Counter-Arguments

Siehe Windmann & Durstewitz (2000):

QE (Qualitatives Erleben) = Qualia = Phänomenales Bewusstsein
- QE ist ein Epiphänomen
- QE ist ein kulturell-gesellschaftliches Phänomen
- QE ist von materiellen Prozessen frei
- QE existiert nicht, es existiert nur Materie
- QE ist dasselbe wie ein bestimmter materieller Zustand
- QE ist dasselbe wie ein bestimmter materieller Zustand
aus der 1. Personperspektive

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 Why is this a fundamental Problem?

„Qualities“ do not exist in physics (or from a third-

person-perspective). They exist only
subjectively.
Physics knows only energy, mass, charge,
gravitation… = material properties.
Yet colours do exist in our minds!, as does pain
and so many other subjective qualities.

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 A matter of paraphysics?
No. Natural science is the most stringent, sparse,
and most successful paradigm. Giving it up
would be a big step backwards to pre-modern
times.
On the other hand, it seems that something in the
physical description (of brain functions) is
missing.
 Perhaps physical descriptions of (brain) matter
are incomplete and need to be revised/extended
or even revolutionised.
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 Klausurfragen/Verständnisfragen

• Warum sind die folgenden zwei Positionen keine

befriedigende Lösung für das Leib-Seele-Problem:
1. Qualia sind ein Epiphänomen
2. Qualia hängen von sozial-kulturellen Einflüssen ab?

• Beschreiben Sie ein Gedankenexperiment, das den

„explanatory gap“ illustriert, den das Leib-Seele-Problem
kennzeichnet
• Erläutern Sie: Was macht aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht
phänomenales gegenüber Zugangs-Bewusstsein zum
Problem? ( 3 Kriterien)
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