Small talk

Nature is fact, leading to descriptive and explanatory accounts, while morality concerns values and norms. So in an often heard fallacy evolution is somehow tied to ethical randomness.  How do we tie what is good to some objective standard? Is everything allowed, now that ‘there is no God in which to ground morality’?

Well of course not. That would imply there never was, nor ever will be a standard, however subjective it might be, for ethical behaviour, which is plainly wrong from my point of view. That statement won’t solve our problems of course, so we will try a little harder.

Keeping philosophical jargon out as much as I can, it is best to start at an easy place. Many will have heard of it before, yet I often encounter people being flabbergasted by it when the principle crosses their paths in discussion. It is the difference between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, or in pragmatic terms, a fact and norm. It is very easy to grasp this by examples from nature. When, for instance, elderly creatures die because they are less apt for survival, then that is a factual statement, prone to verification or falsification. If it turns out to be correct, what does this tell us? Well, it tells us that older creatures tend to die, duh. This then, is the ´is´ that is not an ´ought´. If you haven’t already recognized the difficulty, then you will be able to now by turning it into a normative statement. ´Elderly organisms tend to die more quickly in nature, this means that they ought to die, as it is only natural`.

Anyone that has an old grandma will protest, or at least I hope they would. But this is, exactly, what it is to turn a factual statement into a normative one. Absolutely not-done in philosophy, although more complicated counter examples have started to arise, but prone to pop up in normal conversation every now and then. If you are inclined, after the grandma example, to deny this, then consider another example.

Paedophiles. Not many people like to have them as a neighbour, especially not when children are around. When they abuse children people are often outraged, and with good reason. When discussing what to do with these people, who clearly have a functional disorder in their brain– that is to say, they are ill and need treatment, not simply punishment- things get a little messy. Most tend to make a swift u-bend and demand punishments, which neither cures victim nor perpetrator. As soon as I start arguing that these people can have a hard time themselves too -by living in a society where their needs are tabooed- I run into wall. “Nonsense, these people are crazy.”

Now if we regress, plunge into the depths and take a closer look at all the arguments, I always keep something in the back of my mind: You cannot punish someone for something he or she cannot help or for which they are not responsible. This does not mean paedophiles may run free, it means they have rights too. At these moments people often frustratingly turn their heads to a last resort “that it is just unnatural”. And there we have it, a natural thing that became a norm.

Is it informative, does it help us here? I don’t think it does. “Look”, you might say, “there are no grown up lions trying to make love with cubs.” That is probably correct, so in the case of lions it is unnatural to have sex with whelps. Does that mean they are not allowed to? You tell me. Paedophiles again: They either are what nature made of them, what society made of them or some mix in between. In the first case the unnatural argument already stopped working, in the second other people are as much to blame as the paedophiles themselves and the third is a bit more ambiguous, but the blame is not all credited to the person’s own fault. These things are very important. From a societal perspective it might be a good solution to simply lock them up,  but from a judicial perspective it is not correct to punish misbehaviour driven by uncontrollable forces.  It is telling, I think, that even in extreme cases like these there are examples in nature where children are involved in sex with adults. There are even monkeys who have sex with ‘children’ to arrange social relations and hierarchy, so unnatural, in the strict sense, will already have been deflated.

My attention was turned to paedophiles for a reason. As I said, and I hope you agree, it shows just how easy it is to condemn an act without thinking it through, sometimes just because it feels wrong. It has been done before on many occasions, as people desperately sought for objective moral grounds, so don’t worry. Here are some other examples, some of which are almost humorous.

Let’s start with the West’s beloved Socrates who demonstrated to his contemporaries the difficulties involved in attempting to assign the gods as the source of morality. He left us the question “is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Whether philosophically inclined or just quick witted, it’ll lead you to a difficulty. When it is pious because it is loved by the Gods, morality becomes arbitrary: It’ll mean that when they decide that killing kittens is pious, it’ll make it a good thing to do, which is clearly counter intuitive. If you choose the other option, it logically implies some other reason that the pious is good, because apparently the God’s also use that reason.

Another example is Aquinas, a rightly famous Christian. He, sadly, deduced norms from nature, which doesn’t work as we already saw. Innovative as he was, he also tried it from a teleological perspective. This takes a different route, but it ends up where we stopped earlier: Something is perceived in nature, and therefore it is right. Take the human eye and nose. They have a clearly perceived function for most of us. If you were to ask, “for what do you use your eye”,  the question would  almost appear to be inappropriate. Well, for seeing maybe? Likewise with the nose, only then for smelling, and perhaps, breathing. There are many more of these examples, many having apparently easy answers, such as what the heart, lungs and ears are for. The problem is that they are pretty clear cut cases on first sight, but what if you push a little further?

What would you do if you risked your eyes drying out, making them dysfunctional? You would see a doctor, I suppose. Even if you wouldn’t, I still imagine you will, just for the sake of argument. Now, the eyelash seems to hold a proper relation to the eye in making sure it keeps functioning. So my inclination is that it is a natural function of the eyelash to keep your eye healthy. That is a descriptive statement or an explanatory one at best. If we walk the path laid down to us by Aquinas, batting your eyelash to impress someone across the street will therefore be an immoral act.

Are there any other ways out? Going for another optional route in stating that ‘nature almost universally tends to function in that way’ -which you could see in this case as the equivalent of saying that certain things almost always work in a certain way, via a certain route and sometimes towards a certain goal-, won’t bring us anywhere. One simple example to illustrate this: Most people are right handed. That logically excludes the possibility that most people are left handed, provided we read ‘or’ as ‘implying only one option’. Does this mean that, because most are right, being left handed is an act of immorality? The judgment is yours to make.

The basis of the actuality of moral standards

The forgoing was almost entirely couched in negativity meaning my objective was to defuse some of the issues that invariably arise in any discussion of ethics thus denying them the opportunity to obscure our vision or to block any further fruitful discourse on these matters. We’ll turn now toward a more positive, more actual instantiation of morality that will presumably provide a framework wherein I will not argue for decisive rules that ought to be followed, but rather one that demonstrates why being an atheist does not deprive an individual of an ethical paradigm.

Surprisingly, it brings us back to an aspect of nature. After all the deflation, it is time to give nature some credit for the qualities with which we are bestowed. The most relevant one is, without a single doubt, language.  Having an ethical code, let alone adhering to one, is virtually impossible without an ability to use and turn to language, as reflection needs a vehicle.

As there are many different languages, subtracting things that are present in all of them is an unlikely and immensely complicated way of gaining results. Gladly, there are better ways. The foundation of a language is important here. Languages are not prone to individual changes, they are large systems guided by rules. Changes of meaning can therefore only be achieved via acceptance and recognition by more than one person.

You might say: Well I am able to rephrase this sentence or re-examine the meaning of this word. You still won’t have moved even an inch, as language’s syntax –grammar or structure- held you firm in place. This fact, the very simple observation that language is bound by rules and therefore non-random, together with semantics (meaning), creates a collective body enabling you to communicate and pass on intelligible information. In this the reason for the impossibility of a private language is hidden: A private language knows no rules but those of your will; content, structure and meaning can be changed to your liking. Ask why those things are necessary for a language and I will turn to Wittgenstein by replying: “That is what it means to be a language”. (And there is no denying that, unless you are able to go beyond your own cultural horizon, which will need reflection, and guess what you need in order to reflect?)

My indebtedness to Wittgenstein is great here, as he demonstrated not only the omnipresence of meaning in language, but also a refutation of scepticism. Scepticism requires language to express itself, but to refute itself as well, hence it presupposes what it tries to falsify or deny. This also means that language is, in a certain way, something objective, something you can use to build with or on. It might not prove reality beyond all doubt, but it is ‘as solid as a rock’ for human standards.

The good thing is that language, by its semantics, is meaningful. Being meaningful, it carries value in the widest sense of the word. Don’t think metaphysics; remember Husserl who said (transl.) ‘Go back the things themselves’, in a similar fashion Wittgenstein said ‘Don’t think, look!’. This means something very simple. Concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ and ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ are part of the system. Can you strictly define them? I couldn’t, and I dare say you cannot either. Still, you do grasp their meaning. You grasp their meaning because you know how to use them, you know when either one of them can be applied to a situation in reality, precisely because they became what they are via a route that ties them to the horizons of our lives.

If this sounds vague, then let me explain. There is nothing that makes ‘good’ an objective thing, or better: there is not a Platonic essence of ‘goodness’. If you encounter something, judge it to be ‘good’ and ask yourself ‘why ‘:  What will you seek? Reasons or essence? They are not the same. You know something to be good, because you have been raised and taught, acquired and mastered a language in a culture that you made your own, came to be a creature capable of reflection and independent thought: This is what makes you yourself able to judge, because you have a standard that is both your own, and that of your culture.

This implies something: Sharing aspects is not the same as sharing everything. Being embedded in a culture, then, still leads to misunderstanding. There is room for discussing things, thanks to a common language, but there will remain things on which you cannot come to agree (republicans versus democrats, for instance). The jump towards ethical relevance is nearly there, because, on those things we agree to disagree, it is most often our norms, not our values that ensure pluralism.

By now you’ll understand, I hope –or I’ll have failed abysmally-, that ethics is not something beyond our lives. If nothing was new to your brains, then I regret wasting your time, but then you might as well read the rest. My conclusion of this paragraph draws precisely on the fact that, though meaning is not strictly definable, it is here. Remember that it is part of a (language and cultural) tradition, a process of learning, constantly being redefined, subtracted off and added to. Everything then, is not permitted, or at least not in our world. If anyone thinks this is not true, try to murder in our world and see what happens: You’ll be locked up. Why? Because you attacked our system, the system we live in and came to see as justified, true and worthy of consent.

An attack on cultural relativism; ‘why we can be good, after all’

So morality and language share as close a relation as anything. As there are so many languages, do they all lead to different codes and standards? If so, are we confined to live in a world of relativism?

To the first question, I am inclined to nod. Yes, there are many languages; yes these lead to different codes of behaviour. I left out the most crucial question, however: Do these lead to different values? To that, I vigorously shake my head. ‘Naturally’, it is possible that people might live differently from what we are used to, and therefore come up with a system so tellingly anti-us, that nothing seems to be able to explain it away, and it some cases people might even have very different values, but these, I think, are exceptions and no need whatsoever to think morals and ethics are a waste of our time, by never being able to live up to any objective standard.

To prove my point, I’ll use some rather extreme examples. Extreme example are well able to shed light on normal issues, as both I and another greatness of the 20^th century share as an outlook (Austin, a British philosopher of language. The use of ‘another greatness’ refers to Wittgenstein. Don’t confuse my imperfect reference for arrogance).  Two examples are hopefully enough: Ritual sacrifice and reincarnation.

A ritual sacrifice is not something that is generally considered to be inherently valuable, as it is tied to a set of ‘ought’ beliefs. It describes or prescribes what must happen. Think of several reasons why rape as a ritual sacrifice must happen, such as ‘it pleases the Gods’, ‘it makes the Gods less angry’ or ‘the Gods are bored with normal politics’. Whatever you come up with, you will see it is not a value that is being denounced.

Not being denounced? What could be more gruesome than rape? Not much springs to mind to give a satisfying answer. And it needn’t. It is the norm that is revolting, not the value. Gods that like rape scenes repel us, no doubt. What about the people who practice these rituals? At first thought, they too would suffer the fate of our displeasure. But what makes them do it? Pleasing the Gods: The very same thing Christians profess to do when attending church and Muslims when practicing Salaat. Westerns burned witches in ‘the middle or dark ages’, as they were ‘devilish’. We don’t agree with that, but we all understand what drove them: Their religious beliefs, their loyalty to God, and surely their ignorance. That is what you get when God is the ground for morality: Everything is allowed, as long as God likes it. It is not evolution that makes this world random, dangerous and immoral here.

One more example, before I’ll call it a day: Reincarnation. Some people are very, very reluctant to kill earthworms. This would strike many of us as odd. They make such good baits for fishing!

Does this mean -or do those people believe- that earthworms are valuable, precious creatures? No, it does not. There is another belief backing their supposed love for earthworms. Those people love their relatives, and they believe that those of them that died could, or even might have, come back as earthworms. So the value here is (for instance): You don’t kill or harm those you love. Taking it a step further, this will imply a norm: You don’t kill or harm any earthworms.

A meaningful world

The notion that gives morality actual input is tied to the world we live in, I feel like I have said it a dozen times (maybe I have). Values are much more universal than we they are, especially when we encounter strange, unfamiliar cultures. Surely you can come up with many counter examples that put heavy strain on my point of view, from cannibals to devil adherents. You would even have me on your side, but that is not the point. The point is that we now have a reasonably objective platform from which we can judge not just our own standards, without those of others as well.  And isn’t that a lovely fact?

Isn’t it a good thing to know we, not just religious people, can be moral? You might wonder why nothing was written on evolution in here. The most notable and well-known scientific theory on earth, perhaps, yet that would irritate as many readers as it would please. The paradigm of science tells us all about evolution, and we would do well to look beyond evolution, which is after all a realm of facts not of norms. All the stories about our endowments with a social nature are very plausible to my mind, even if they aren’t to yours. These would explain why we are social, why we reason and why we care about morals, but they would not justify them, as we now know.

To end this article neat and clean, I would have to present a nice summary and conclusion, but if you are a good reader you will have had enough; enough to know that all is well.

This article is mainly focused on Bayesianism, a popular interpretation of the concept of probability used to evaluate hypothesis and justify the extent to which we feel confident that they are true. It replaces in part the famous, or infamous, problem of induction. The problem of induction was first explicitly brought to light by David Hume, an interesting Scottish philosopher with a lovely writing-style. It has served as a wall to bang your philosophically-inclined head against for centuries. Bayesianism does not solve this problem, let this be clear, but it does in part propose a way of clarifying why induction is so persuasive. I don’t think it’ll pose any problem at all for someone to read this, whether you are normally interested in philosophy or not. In any case, it is an interesting topic that deserves your attention. The only question that remains is whether my manner of my writing about it does so too, something for you to judge.

Especially on philosophical things comments and criticism are much appreciated, so I would strongly invite you to do so. Also question about concepts or statements that are unclear to you are welcome, I will be more than happy to talk, discuss or explain related issues.

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… An essential feature of Neyman-Pearson statistics is the aim to deny a place to false hypotheses and to reserve a place for those that are true. As risk here, as with practically all demands in theories within the boundaries of the philosophy of science, is making a theory too cold, meaning you set standards too low and everything will become scientifically meaningful, or on the other hand making demands too hot, so as to exclude knowledge that definitely belongs to epistemological areas.

As we will see shortly, this is exactly what happens with Neyman-Pearson statistics. Still, it is interesting. It is especially interesting when we combine it with a view on just what sets Bayesianism apart from other statistical ways of justification. Both have their own shortcomings, since neither has a core that is solely objective. We’ll take a quick look at why the first doesn’t work, after which we’ll discuss the alternative offered to us by Bayesians.

The trick to keep in the good stuff, and jettison the bad stuff has been prominent since the positivists. Their war on metaphysics is a part of practically any curriculum in philosophy education and provides an easy way to start talking about verifying and falsifying hypotheses. Anyone busy in the area of epistemology knows to be true what was just said, that the difficult task is one of including and excluding; science and pseudoscience; empiricism and metaphysics. So many different accounts have been given, that identifying and solving problems is sure to give you work for a lifetime.

Neyman and Person tried it via a hypothesis test. A simplified way of expressing this talks of Rejection of H and A, where H is hypothesis one and A an alternative two that is incompatible with H. To derive, or not to derive, a rejection will depend on the height of the number to which the individual constant X refers, and on the ratio you will get after filling the number into the theory. The formulation itself is not important here, what is more important are its philosophical implications: In ideal circumstances, when A is true, H will come out false. They are aiming for this goal by going for small-size on the one hand, and for greater strength on the other. It is not sure that these two pillars can be combined: It is as much as saying that you want to minimize size, and maximize power within statistics.  This can also be found in what is known as ‘The Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson:

“In the case of simple dichotomy, there exists, for any possible size, a uniquely most powerful test of that size. It may be a mixed test, but it is unique.”[1]

And within statistics, much power is derived from large numbers, especially when your core is weak in qualitative measures. And that is something to which I cannot ascribe much strength (it has strong ties with so called ‘likelihood tests’). So too has the ‘optional stopping’, which brings along at least two problems. The first is the most essential: When is a proposition falsified or verified, in other words: When have we collected enough data in order for us to stop investigating? The answer is, with induction lurking around the corner, ‘never’. The other question strongly relates to this, only it is more specific by a focus on the formula’s goals (small, strength). When you for have the aforementioned two hypotheses that are mutually exclusive, you need to know both when one is granted more probability than the other, why, what is worthy of confirmation or disconfirmation and when does ‘the most likely outcome’ swap sides, i.e. when will enough con- or disconfirmation have taken place to speak of a different allegiance of belief?

Bayesianism deals with these issues in a very different manner. We can see this when we take a look at its most basic formula, according to A. Bird:

Bayesianism does not take off from grounds that are self evident. In fact Bayes theorem is accepted by almost all probabilistic minded-philosophers, what they do not accept are the conclusions Bayesians infer from them. How then do they themselves view the way in which hypotheses need confirming or disconfirming? Recall an alternative here, in order to make a clear contrast. Take Hempel, famous for the Raven-paradox. He struggled with a qualitative notion of confirmation by asking what it is for given evidence to confirm a hypothesis. How much confirmation is supported by evidence is the quantitative notion that should later be dealt with, after settling with the qualitative aspect. Bayesians think this is all wrong. For them, confirmation is something quantitative in nature right from the start. We can’t ask whether evidence confirms or disconfirms a hypothesis, unless we know how probable H was in the first place. This simply means that, for something to be able to be confirmed or disconfirmed, it needs a prior probability. The way in which results are obtained is quite straightforward really, at least in essence it is (things can get messy and complicated, though this author likes to keep things clear). After a hypothesis with a given probability is confronted with evidence, it is confirmed if the probability rises, and disconfirmed if the probably gets lower in light of the evidence.

Now this brings along some difficulties. How do you attach probability to something?  We can’t just rule out subjectivism, because what to is subjectivist to you might seem wholly reasonable to me. I’ll to illustrate this with a short and simplified historical example about the concept ‘gene’. After Darwin’s ‘On the origin of species’ biological knowledge was granted to enter a whole new paradigm, albeit reluctantly. Natural selection, especially after it was combined with G. Mendel’s heredity, got a boost that still reverberates today. Even so, genes were unknown entities at the beginning of the 20^th century. It took a long time after the term was invented before they were actually discovered. This did not prevent anyone from using the term within a referential framework, that is to say: it did not prevent biologists from assigning them certain characteristics and qualities, despite the fact no one had ever proven their existence. Does this fact make talking about or making predictions with ‘genes’ something unscientific at the beginning of the last century? I should think not. If anything, it was a clear and wonderful result of intellectual expectations, based on inferences from good, probable knowledge. Still if we would add up the probability numbers of such an entity existing, it is certainly not unimaginable that its result would be quite low given the fact that they are based on non-existing evidence, hence either their place in Bayes theorem is illegitimate, or the theorem casts aside genuine scientific innovation. Now don’t be disappointed, things are not that clear.

There are two ways to go here. The first is opting to build on prior knowledge, of which genes were no part. The second is including not just results of things we only grasp inductively, but also things we have not yet accounted for by evidence but which play a decent, functional role in our theories nevertheless. In many cases this would seem like cheating, but since we are talking about probability and (future) testing this is clearly not the case here. A difficulty that would certainly arise is of course how you would assign a certain probability number to genes, and this has strong ties with beliefs, however rational these in essence might be, for as we know, gene-adherents turned out to be right.

This brings us to the aforementioned subjectivism. There is no standard to set probability, at least not at the beginning of the process. This does not mean we should immediately bow our heads in despair. As I see it we have several good things that can lead to many good things, such as a demand for consistency with other beliefs in your web of knowledge and their mutual dependence of those beliefs (we don’t want ‘red wine is sacred liquid’ something probable, because it is atomic in its meaning and therefore quite useless indeed). Demands when it comes to falsifying, verifying, corroboration and repeatability of tests also spark the imagination. All of these have shortcoming however, which means Bayesianism will take at least a part of the blow by leaning on them.

For consistency makes it easy to stay dogmatic; think of the religious paradigm. Darwin’s evidence was inconsistent with it. Should we have laid evolution to rest as a theory, especially because many thought it, at first sight, so unlikely? Of course not. Assigning a higher probability to well known hypotheses rather than to the unknown ones is something intuitive. People ascribe beliefs to others and themselves every day, social interaction would not be able to function if this didn’t happen. In normal conversations this does not lead to problems, since we’re not typically occupied with justifying all of our beliefs. Some, like political or ethical points of view, might need elaboration but they seldom get into the depths where Bayesianism finds itself. So where do we start? An initial position will be necessary for any theory. And they can come up with nothing better than subjectivism.

That sounds like a negative judgment, although it isn’t. Bayesianism is our best alternative; the only thing it is not able to solve is the problem of induction. True, it gives us much explanatory power on why induction works and why it seems a good thing to put your faith in. In this article I have largely left aside the issue of objective versus subjective probability. And I had good reasons to do so, or at I least I thought I had. I don’t think objective probability is likely, not at all. Its ideal poses obstacles too readily in our path, even without impossible, infinite regression. In the end hardly anyone of us beliefs in rigid and objective standards, why would probability be any different? As far as subjectivism goes, we won’t be able to get it more objectivistic than this.

As I posted several days before, Richard Dawkins’ made ‘The out campaign’ see the light of day. This nice little example of creationist activity in an actual sense bears many relations with events happening in real life. Time to point towards another worthwhile initiative, called the Brights.

It focuses on more or less the same people as does ‘the out campaign’, though with a slightly less desperate tone. For one thing, it is less specifically aimed at people who are socially under pressure in defining their public beliefs, though to be fair to the Brights they do all but forget this part of their potential members. I do get the impression though, that they are more positively (that is to say: in affirmative terms) describing their members, rather than just boldly stating they are atheists.

To give an example we can bring forward their definition of ‘a bright’. Three points are listed:

1. A Bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
2. A Bright’s worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
3. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

Being an atheist is near logical entailment if you apply these three principles to a personality, though I doubt whether it works the other way around (being an atheist doesn’t necessarily mean ethics, actions and worldviews have to be reduced to nature. Though I am sure that, in general, those things will accompany each other).

Now I’m not writing this for mere fun. I’m writing this because I think it is a (dare I say useful?) introduction to a new folder that has been created by the Brights. It is something that almost coincides with a plan of the so called creationists, which is re-releasing Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, only then by leaving out all the fragments with which they cannot cope. Creationist by the way, can be seen as a collection of idiots who think their theories are on equal footing with science, but I will divert my attention to them later this month (by ripping their arguments apart).  The initiative by the Brights focuses itself on the more secure parts of our human knowledge however. Most importantly, for a naturalistic minded Bright, the theory of evolution.

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is something that can be heard and read all over the place. And it is a fact, a true fact even. Because of the enormous rich body of knowledge this theory can account for, it will be way too interesting to leave it aside. Quite unlike the creationists, who are merely interesting because of their enormous stupidity, the theory of evolution is something I will refer to many, many times. Therefore I consider it to be a subject that is worthwhile to write about, which is another promise I am now indebted to fulfill in the coming months.

But I am going astray, as so often happens. The initiative is an “Evolution Education Flyer”. It’s simple and elegant, much like the theory itself you might say (though admittedly there are sides of evolutionary biology that are anything but simple). You can view their new pamphlet here.

A stone step to the phenomenal self model & what it is like to see

Religion taught us to be satisfied with what we know, yet we no longer regard our bodies to be driven by souls or a spark of life. We have been pushed around, from the corner of behaviorism to quasi-scientific Cartesian theatres.  And it seems that, despite of all old and new scientific progress, there remains little to silence the call for a noncircular, consensus creating explanation of consciousness.

There have been many attempts however, and I will focus on three of these. They all regard the relation of consciousness to action as one that is very intimate. Most important of these three will be the text by Metzinger, in which he introduces us to the Phenomenal Self Model. I will argue that his work and that by O’Regan and Noë mutually support each other, and that a strong case can be made out of them. Though the practical and extent of knowledge displayed in these author’s texts surpasses Chalmers’ in “Facing up the problem of consciousness”, I will nevertheless try to put them in perspective in relation to this text. It is unlikely that this will increase our knowledge on this topic, but it is quite useful to illustrate the usefulness a guide to further investigation can provide. There is more to philosophy than merely summarizing or walking paths other scientists have laid down, and Chalmers’ account can serve as a reminder that opportunities and possibilities are not always taken, they can be handed out.

As a start, we might first consider in what direction Chalmers thought we should head. We will in part take over his vocabulary when it comes to so called ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ consciousness-related problems, though it should be noted what Chalmers himself noted: Problems related to awareness (easy problem) and those related to consciousness (hard problem) are likely to coincide were we to find an answer to the questions we pose. In order to follow his method, we need three principles:

1-     Principle of structural coherence:  This is an isomorphism between lower levels of awareness and that what we tend to call experience. It says that cognitive processes do not entail consciousness, but that they do (mutually) depend on each other.

2-     Principle of organizational invariance: The only physical properties relevant to the emergence of experience are organizational properties.

3-     Double aspect theory of information: This third principle depends on the former two, by stating that informational processes will eventually account for consciousness by means of both a physical and phenomenal aspect (1), while informational content can be seen as organizational processes par excellence (2).

Now in itself these principles are regarded as mere possibilities. Quite good ones though, for if we were to compare this to what is, in my opinion, the most satisfying explanation of consciousness we can see how both the outlines and gaps are filled in.

Therefore we will now turn to Metzinger. His account draws on what he calls the Phenomenal Self Model (PSM) and the Phenomenal Model of the Intentionality Relation (PMIR). The PSM will seem counter intuitive at first, because it will, to say the least, change our old conviction that there is a personality, a stable existing ‘self’ which we are. I shall espouse on these two, for I think they are both empirically and theoretically plausible. The first is a multimodal representational structure, the contents of which are what we regard to be conscious experience. The base of this needs to be sought in the brain of course, and we can see that this representational link differs from mere awareness by its continuity of internally created input. It is easy to compare the PSM with principle three, for Metzinger tells us large parts of the PSM are phenomenally transparent (the so called transparency constraint), meaning that, by virtue of their complexity,  they can no longer see or recognize themselves to be representations within a system.

So here we have both a physical and phenomenal aspect of information, which can help us in explaining the PMIR. We cannot ‘inwardly’ experience ourselves the way we are. That is to say that, by introspection, we will not be able to experience or perceive any neurons firing.  Because we cannot do so Metzinger thinks we are embedded in this world, ‘our’ world, by a so called “naïve-realistic self-misunderstanding”. The only thing that remains to be done in order to arrive at the PMIR is to apply the transparency constraint to a subject-object or subject-goal relation, which will result in such complex representational states in our brain that we have sufficient reason to at least ascribe a certain plausibility of this as an explanation of phenomenal experience as a subjective phenomenon.

This is only theory of course, rather than field-research. But were we to ask for empirical evidence, we could draw on evolution. We cannot describe the whole process due to a lack of time-travel opportunities, but it is at least imaginable that a naïve-realistic self-misunderstanding would help a species in survival for it is a naturalistic, efficient and elegant theory which does not embrace any Cartesian theatres, spotlights in our brain or immaterial essences. There are only dynamical brain processes, making sure future discoveries can add and strengthen rather than weaken and diminish our theory.

We might want to take a look at O’Regan and Noë here, for in “What it is like to see” could serve as an excellent back-up theory.  The way it is like to see is a result of the way we actually see, which is a process and the result of an act of doing rather than passively undergoing. When we see, hear or taste, something happens and a dynamic process goes all the way from our sense organs to the PSM.  It is not just this process however, which makes a perception what it is. The only reason we take something to be what it is, is exactly because we know we master our sensorimotor contingencies.  This is obvious when we think of anything too large to perceive all at once. Despite the fact that a house for instance might be too large to perceive at once, it doesn’t prohibit us from moving some aspects or things to the periphery of our field of vision without any major surprises occurring.

In other words: We know what to expect, because we know what it is. Exercising our mastery of sensorimotor contingencies constitutes the sensation we currently ‘have’, and when the object to which we have turned our attention is something we master, then we simply know how it behaves under particular conditions. The mastery of perceiving red for instance, exists solely in the fact that if we were to move our eyes or body, the resulting changes would be quite typical of that color.

There is however, in my opinion, no better example than the one used by the authors themselves. They compare the sense of vision with that of touch by illustrating a children’s game in which you put your hand in a closed bag, with unknown objects in it:

“The striking aspect of this game is that at first, when you have not yet identified the object, you are aware of local bits of texture, protuberances, edges, etc., but not of holding a particular object. Suddenly however, the “veil falls”, and the previously unrelated parts come together into a whole.”[1]

They argue that seeing is no different. The point at which you feel a certain illumination or the falling of a ‘veil’ is only less defined, less common and probably also less easy to imagine. But it is exactly this knowledge you create or have created that constitutes your perception of the object.

I think this connection is something we can be pleased about. For the PSM is something dynamic, a result of a functional double aspect of organizational information processes. But the PSM is rather empty without a turn to sensation and perception, for they are not separate and we can hardly say the overlap is slight: When the PSM receives content, we act.

What might be considered as a good ‘side note’ here is that the explanatory gap the older theories always put us up with is no longer present. The old views considered the input of our senses as a raw-product, yet to be interpreted as a base for our output, and where and when consciousness was to arise has always been a problem. What has here been said draws on internal processes no less than on what we consider to be the output (action), but more importantly: This works in a circular movement. Input does not just define output, output also defines future input.  The PSM and the way our senses work to account for our ‘self’ (which then needs to be seen as mere illusion, though a rather practical one) replace the magic flick of chaos needed in order for consciousness to arise.

The insights by Chalmers’ show striking similarities to what Metzinger and O’Regan and Noë try to prove. The three principals have all been fulfilled: If we accept the phenomenal self model in relation to perceiving as an act of doing aimed at objects, we actually end up with something that could be seen as a double aspect theory of information. That which account for awareness accounts for consciousness also, though admittedly the boundaries are fuzzy and we should beware of another ghost in our machine. The PSM is something which we cannot locate, because it is not there to recognize itself as such.

I think it is interesting to see how these theories intertwine and support each other, but I do not think we can expect widespread consensus on the scene any time soon. These three authors gave their best shot and, especially when they are put to use so as to mutually support each other, gave us an account that explains and satisfies to a certain extent.

List of literature:

O’Regan, K. and Noë, A. (2001). What it is like to see: A sensorimotor theory of perceptual

experience. Synthese, 129: 79-103.

Metzinger, T. (2004), “The subjectivity of subjective experience: A representationalist

analysis of the first-person perspective,” in Networks, 3-4: 33-64.

Chalmers, D. (1995), “Facing up the the Problem of Consciousness,” in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3), Thoverton, Imprint Academic, 200-219

experience. Synthese, 129: p88