on illusionishm

friends & readers of this blog will understand that i'm terrible at catching my own typos. but the title here isn't one of those. this post really is about illusionism (without the 'h'). someone asked me in person recently to clarify whether i have become one of those folks. so i feel i should write this...

illusionism - without the 'h' - is the idea that consciousness is an illusion - our conscious experiences aren't what they seem like to us.

of course, philosophers argue over different versions of illusionism.

on some extremely strong version that i don't think anyone endorses, consciousness doesn't really ever happen. it's an illusion in the sense that it is non-existent in reality. we only mistakenly think we are conscious. but we are never really conscious at all.

on what is more standardly called strong illusionism, phenomenal consciousness is not real. but consciousness happens. it just doesn't involve phenomenal conscious experiences as such.

on weak illusionism, consciousness just isn't *exactly* what we think it is. it may not involve things like 'qualia', but phenomenal, conscious experiences are real.

now, many of my non-philosopher friends may be surprised: isn't 'qualia' the same thing as conscious experience? no they aren't quite the same. this may be a good 20 minutes video intro to this. well worth your time.

from there, you see the problem gets hairy. what exactly is phenomenal consciousness? can you deny the existence of that, and yet hold that there is something it is like for you to have conscious experiences? yada yada......

that's where the issues seem a bit too much verbal for me to get really interested. i'm not a real philosopher after all. but i can say, i think qualia, defined in the traditional, technical sense, don't exist. but it makes sense to ask people what it is like to have certain experiences. they can compare it with other experiences they've had. so tasting wasabi is a little bit like tasting hot pepper, at least more so than like tasting wine. tasting horseradish is a bit more like tasting wasabi (they aren't the same!) than tasting hot pepper. hearing a cat meow is a totally different experience altogether, etc.

and then for some brain processes, there is nothing it is like to have them going on in our brains. asking people what it is like to have them would draw a blank. most often we don't even know they take place.

but does it mean that this 'what-it's-likeness' implies phenomenal consciousness? well, that depends on how you define phenomenal consciousness i guess. and i feel i'm out of breath already....

***

so without knowing which notion of phenomenal consciousness one adopts, i don't know if one should consider me a strong illusionist. one may point to a citation for a definition, but just because there's a reference doesn't mean the notion is entirely coherent and stable. so i'm not sure.

but like others have pointed out, weak illusionism sounds too weak. and it's more than just a matter of how it sounds, i worry that it misleads.

to my very own mind, the real 'strength' of illusionism, like any view or doctrine, has something more to do with what it can *do*, rather than just what it denies as real. as soon as we said that qualia isn't real, it may make sense for us to develop a positive, detailed, and plausible story of why so many great thinkers have thought that qualia existed. what in our cognitive machinery has lead to such systematic bias? *that*, to me is why illusionism is interesting and powerful.

contrast this with the other popular way of dealing with the apparently weird properties of consciousness within a physicalist framework, phenomenal concept strategy. there, things get rather geeky pretty quick. and i still ain't so sure what scientific good can come out of it.

and by scientific good, i mean, we need to be able to do some work within the vocabulary of cognitive neuroscience, to make things seem less weird, more understandable. it's no good saying that consciousness just *is* so and so physical stuff. if we can't give a functionalist / cognitive explanation of consciousness, that is to admit that cognitive neuroscience would fail as a complete science of the mind. and let's face it, you aren't gonna declare its failure with something as nebulous as your introspective intuitions. this is like calling for a revolution with a fan club of one, and no weapons. the philosophy gods can decide whether you should be made a saint in an afterlife, but what's certain is that you'll never make it in this world. science will go on the way it does with or without you.

so functionalism *has* to be the working hypothesis, to those of us who like 'working' at least.

but just because we can give a functionalist account of something doesn't mean we accept the thing as entirely real as it seems to be either. first there is a sense in which that a heart is real and an algorithm isn't quite as real, even though both can be functionally defined. second, even if an algorithm is real it may not be exactly as it seems. it may have properties that are mistakenly construed by the agent running the algorithm itself.

so, it's complicated. which is why i advocate not getting so hung up about what exactly do we deny in illusionism for now. it may suffice to say: if consciousness is exactly as it seems to some people, then there may be metaphysically challenging stuff like qualia. but consciousness may not turn out to be *exactly* as it seems. it may be *somewhat* an illusion, at least in part. it's illusion-ish. so things may not turn out to be so challenging after all.

but what exactly do we mean it is illusion-ish? do we mean phenomenal consciousness isn't real?

my point is, i don't know. let's find out. i'm tempted to say i don't care but let me just say i don't know for now, coz i do care in the long run. but let's work out the positive story first, re: how we may explain in cognitive terms, why we may be mistaken about the exact nature of our own conscious experiences. let's focus first on things that we can all agree may be unreal, like qualia as defined in the traditional, technical sense. from there, it may be easier to work out what we are entitled to deny, to explain away as illusory. without that positive cognitive story in concrete terms, we can't assess the *strength* of that story, and as such i just don't see much point digging our heels deeper on any position.

so that's the crux as i see it. but as to what that positive cognitive story may be, i fear it has to wait till the next time i blog again.....

***

so have i become an illusionist? on twitter, yes. in reality, i like illusionishm better. which is perhaps to say, philosophy is often above my pay grade.

the stroboscobe & my banishment from science

i can't quite remember what really got me on the wrong foot with Mr. Bruce Lee, the physics teacher i mentioned in the last post. i guess i just wasn't a very good student then. and he believed in hard discipline, like the good old Chinese teacher. not that he could get away with physical punishment, even back then, but he did look quite formbidable and scary. and as i was playing my class clown thing there was no way he could let me get away with it. and because i wasn't really that bad of a student, in terms of intellectual curiosity and stuff, i felt i was picked on for silly reasons. so i couldn't really get along with the guy.

there was one incident though, that i remember quite clearly. i was doing my usual thing, joking around with friends instead of doing class assignments (always hated those). and then Mr. Bruce Lee barked my name and asked: so, how do you measure the distance between the peaks of the wavefront!

in a rare moment of sharpness i looked up the blackboard & felt i more or less understood the problem to which i should have been paying attention but hadn't. so if you throw a pebble into a pond you create a ripple. the ripple have a certain spatial frequency. but because it is moving, how do we measure the thing? if you put a ruler next to it to measure it, you need to move along with the wave which is pretty hard.

so i said: er... yes, sir. you can put a ruler next to it, and then take a picture with a camera. then in the picture you can see the static wavefont at a given moment, together with the ruler which gives you the spatial scale, we can....

Mr Bruce Lee said: no! that would take too long for the photograph to be developed. we need a solution to give us an answer now!

well, you can take a Polariod, sir. i must say i felt rather pleased with myself, for not being too slow on that day.

but he said: no! that's *incorrect*! the *correct* answer is that you use a *stroboscobe*. now, who can tell me how to spell the word stroboscobe.....

to those who want to find out WTF is a stroboscobe, you can look it up yourself. it's an ancient, clumsy device that could also do the job. it may do other cool things too, i don't know. but for this specific problem, today i'll just use the camera on the phone.

thinking about it now, i see that my teacher was no real Bruce Lee. this poor guy didn't deserve the right to call people "useless" coz he didn't really understand what it means to be useful and practical ....

***

physics was actually my favorite subject back then. but i lost interests after having been taught by Mr Bruce Lee for 2 years. in hindsight, really, it wasn't his fault. he's a good guy. just an ordinary teacher  - not any more mediocre than i myself am - trying to do what he could. the system itself was kind of dull & rigid. spelling stroboscobe correctly was the correct way to do well in the exam.

but as you see from the HK protests, the kids still turn out alright. they are anything but dull. somehow, people learn to be 'useful' after all, in this city, under essentially the same system. it would be a pity for us to not to try to understand why.

i got a B in physics in the open exam in the end. that was my best grade. i got C in average. D in chemistry - which was why i was so pleased to have gotten a paper published in the journal *Molecular* Psychiatry recently (which wasn't really about anyting molecular, but still).

because i did so badly in the sciences i wasn't allowed to continue to study these subjects in the same school. from there i studied economics and other stuff in a different school for a couple of years, and made it to university. but then because i lacked the science background, i wasn't allowed to study the hard sciences anymore. which was how i got into psychology & philosophy.

ah well. maybe i should thank Mr Bruce Lee after all.

Tucson article / Bourdain / Weiskrantz memorial

it's been a rather emotional couple of days. it was Larry Weiskrantz's memorial. and then my favorite living author Anthony Bourdain died. strangely these have been helpful in putting things into perspective, for something i've struggled with for a while.

people often think of Bourdain as a TV celebrity. i enjoyed watching those shows too. but Kitchen Confidential was something else. in a better world that would have been how i like my book on consciousness to read like. but too bad i'm not as good a writer, nor do i think the world is quite ready to accept a scientist to write in that kind of tone exactly.

but i have to say that sense of mourning paled in comparison when i watched Larry's memorial online (https://livestream.com/oxuni/weiskrantz). unlike my relationship with Bourdain, i knew Larry in person. in the last post i also hinted at some interesting kind of academic lineage. but above all, Larry's work defined my adult life. one could sum up all my work on consciousness to date as nothing more than some footnotes to help people understand what blindsight really means. i only got to have work to do at all thanks to people who continue to miss the point entirely (e.g. this; search for the word "judiciously").

it is in this sentimental context that i respond to this piece on the Tucson conference, which just came out. on a different day maybe i would have been more bothered by how lunatic some of my soundbites appeared, when they are somewhat taken out of context. but i guess these are just the nature of soundbites.

i did write to Dave Chalmers to clarify and had a nice exchange of a few emails. thanks Dave for ever having a heart so big to not take offense.

i may write more to clarify later. but for now... whatever is really all i can come up with. i'm sorry. just as Bourdain was important but not nearly as important as Weiskrantz, whatever happens to the Tucson conference is just not that important to me anymore. if you are bothered or intrigued by the article and wanted to talk more, i can only recommend two things.

first is to go to the other conference which is actually run by a professional society. without doing that one really should not be judging the field, making funding decisions for or about it etc.

second is to watch the stream from Larry's memorial (https://livestream.com/oxuni/weiskrantz), and ponder in that context what they mean when people say the modern study of consciousness was revived / reorganized in the 1990s.

to those who know the history - as a field we have made a Faustian pact of sort, and borrowed something we don't deserve via sheer black magic. we should be aware that we will probably have to repay that debt one day. sometimes debts are better settled sooner rather than later, for the interests may well rake up.