I remain perplexed at the idea in one sense, but not in another. I don’t see how different physical configurations could yield the same memory, yet if they don’t, I am at a loss to suggest how it is that different people could reliably report the same event (science, judicial system, etc). On one hand, we could take an approach that suggests, “Since two people do not share the exact same perspective, they do not share the exact same memory.” What is our standard of ‘exactness’ here, however? It is one thing to suggest such human limitations, it is another altogether to suggest there is at any rate a standard of exactness that makes sense here. A friend and I witness an event, and report it independently (say we are being questioned) and give the same accounts to the satisfaction of all involved (perhaps we even draw a sketch)… surely we have the same memory? If we don’t, what are we failing to do for ‘sameness’ that wouldn’t also throw all kinds of categorization out the window?
Independent scientists test a phenomena and it supports some theory or rules out some other; they share their experiences; is it the same event they remember? Does this mean their brains are in an identical state? If not, what is our criteria for sameness here that we may still suggest, “Their memories, which are sufficiently similar, are purely physical?”
I think we go wrong here. At this moment I am not sure I can suggest just how. Must think on it a bit. Will be mulling over phrases like: “A context is a physical thing;” “Seven is a physical thing;” “White is a physical thing;” “This ball is a physical thing.” Note to self: when would we say such a thing? Who are we explaining what to?
First thought, via my hero: “X is a physical thing” is an instruction we give when either one doesn’t know what X is, or what a physical thing is. i.e., X is given as a sample, or X is being characterized. At no point is it used when both X and ‘physical thing’ are undefined…
Eris, I think that a case could be made that because no two brains are wired the same, no two brains can have the same memory. It isn’t like a computer whose RAM is built to the identical specs of some other computer. The whole ganglia network in each brain is unique. Moreover, owing to the nature of electromagnetism, no two people can perceive the same event at the same time in the same place. Thus, if you and I are looking at a picture, even our fields of view are slightly different because our eyeballs can’t get any closer together than our heads will allow. Computers can share the same memory, but people can’t.
Hence my puzzlement. What about, “Similarity supervenes on the physical”? How am I to interpret that? Can I say that? I am in a muddle with this topic over and over.
Which I think amounts to a killer argument for nominalism. Our categories fail to obtain. Ugh.
Digital, it is difficult to define awareness without circularity, so I will describe it instead. From Merriam Webster: “AWARE implies vigilance in observing or alertness in drawing inferences from what one experiences <aware of changes in climate>.” I don’t think that a thermometer and a person are aware of changes in climate in the same way. In fact, it really isn’t even the thermometer reacting. It’s the mercury or whatever material that is doing what it does when temperatures change. It would expand or contract regardless of whether it were incorporated into a thermometer. The scale markings are just ornamentation tacked on in juxtaposition with the stem. The whole thing isn’t even a thing, except inasmuch as humans use it to interpret weather. A dog will walk up to it and lick it maybe, but he won’t be any the wiser about temperature from it.
I think that awareness requires memory because the brain does not process instantly. Quite much happens between photons striking the retina, and the brain becoming aware of a coherent event. Much processing occurs before any inference can be made. By the time the processing is complete, the event has past. Therefore, awareness relies on memory of the event.
I think that this is part of what confused me. I don’t think we’re talking about the same memories, nor even about memories of the same event (or object, or whathaveyou). If I understand the point of debate, it is the nature of memory – simply that memory has a physical basis, just like objects in the world. In other words, is there something that is not physical that is required for memory?
OK. Now, deconstructing that definition, it seems to me that we need to be concerned with the phrases “vigilance in observing”, “alertness in drawing inferences”, and “what one experiences”. The first two certainly imply memory of a sort; however, there is also more to them. I mean, take “drawing inferences”. It implies reasoning at some level. I’d think that this removes many, if not most, of the lower animals from being aware in any meaningful sense. Let’s dive straight to the bottom and consider an amoeba. To say an amoeba is not aware is wrong, IMO. To say an amoeba does not draw inferences is correct.
Now, take “vigilance in observing”. To say an amoeba has “vigilance in observing” may or may not be correct. I’d say it does, which is consequently why I think it is aware (albeit in a very, very restricted sense; more below). But, I don’t think this is much removed from a thermometer. At a slightly higher level, consider a cockroach. Based on how I’d describe it, a cockroach is “vigilant” – just watch one wave its nasty little antennae around. Is it observing? Is it aware? Since I answer yes for an amoeba, naturally, I’d answer yes for a cockroach also. Does it qualify for you?
Granted. But I’d like to stay clear on the scope we’re using for “awareness”. If you require human awareness, I can work with that. But it’ll be really easy to trip over meanings of the word later on. Not to mention that I think it is giving more “power” to the word than is necessary.
And I think this is a close tie-in to the memory question. I think an amoeba does pretty much the same thing. That is, it is simply reactive. If it’s reactions are purely physical, and we consider it “aware”, then we’ve jumped the first hurdle. Do you agree that an amoeba is “aware”?
I’ll leave the rest until after we come to a better agreement on what the extent of “aware” is.
Lib, you and Sentient seem to be saying the same thing, but I still can’t see it. I don’t know how to make sense of a sentence like: “Therefore, awareness relies on memory of the event” because it seems to make awareness reliant on memory instead of vice versa.
It seems to me the chain unravels like so: event–> sensory/pre-cognitive processing of event stimulus–>awareness–>storage of the experience of awareness in memory.
You seem to be placing memory earlier in the chain, but I can’t see how or where.
There is an example I read somewhere, probably from Stanford’s excellent site but maybe not, about “pumping” as an epiphenomenon, whether it was one. I think it will help to focus my puzzlement. It was in looking at a pump and suggesting that “pumping” is a real property. We can explain the entire mechanism; this explanation replaces pumping. Pumping is not a real property (water isn’t moving because of the mechanism**+**its pumping) but supervenes on the mechanism, which has just been reductively explained. In this way a physical explanation of a phenomena replaces or is identical to that phenomena, conceptually speaking. I gather from previous discussions that this is the way our OP approaches the matter (to wit, I asked whether “does love exist” mean the same thing as “is there some physical event that happens in the body we call ‘love’”, or some terribly similar question which escapes me). I’ve been in this conversation before, however. It is surely common knowledge what the construction of a broom is; but I should hardly ask anyone to hand me “[list components of a broom].” So I suppose the question here is whether an explanation replaces or can stand in for all concepts. If so, I think one should accept physicalism in some fashion (certainly the reductive fashion; I don’t even want to try and consider non-reductive physicalism which sounds like another name for dualism if you ask me).
The Stanford site, I think, is misleading in its case. It is strongly levelled at a modal framework of possibility and actuality, and seeks to define physicalism in just that aspect. But it is just that aspect which is perplexing in the first place. In the pump example above, it is simple enough to picture a pump, especially if you are familiar with them, being taken apart–perhaps I am instructing you, or you are remembering an instruction on pumps–, and each piece explained as to how it contributes to the whole. But this is a magic trick. We are wondering about pumping, not this pump. How, after all, do I decide that a category is not instead a proper name (for what if I’ve never seen such a thing before)? --by its use, “This, and similar things, are pumps.” But what this means is that the reductive account is misleading in its simplicity. Just what we are looking for is an account of a category in the first place. Memory is a physical thing, not, “When I think of this memory, I see a physical reaction in my brain in this portion as revealed by…” We seek to understand that temperature is a physical thing, not “this thermometer.” It’s very reference as ‘this’ is an indication of “being a physical thing.” It is instantiable, one might say. But what is being instantiated?
Argh. Why, why, why do I always end up at this point?
“Memory is a physical thing. You know what memories are, yes? And what physical things are? Then there you have it.” --Misleading. Highly. If this were the case, knowing what memory was would already suggest it is a physical thing–‘Memory is a physical thing’ is not a piece of information if I already know the meaning of the terms. But it might be a confirmation. “If you were wondering whether memory is a physical thing, it is.” Which supposes an evidentiary claim. We might find such evidence in the sciences. But this is just a result of naturalism snatched from a context (say a lab) and placed in philosophy.
The (non)Mind of the Gaps! One wonders what should happen if these gaps are closed. I can give a description of the parts that constitute a broom–is it merely a matter of convenience that I call it a ‘broom’? But then, presumably, one would say, “It is not just the parts, but they way they are arranged that makes it a broom. And that arrangement is of course governed by physical laws.” Only the ignorant say ‘broom’? Only the people with a grasp of physics really mean ‘broom’? What applies here?
Memory is a physical thing. “We can correlate memories to activity in the brain.” And later, “…to these specific kinds of activities.” And then the activities become synonymous with “memory”? “But one needn’t understand the physical process to remember.” Then why would it make sense to say memory is, after all, a physical process? Isn’t memory more of an accident in such a case? “I am lucky physical laws govern my memory some how, else I wouldn’t know what I remember”?
“I remember the scene quite clearly.” (A picturesque view of a lake.) And again, “There is a specific configuration of neurons and their firing in my brain.” We might well explain memory this way, much as we might explain to a person how to make a broom by describing its parts… so long as we didn’t actually wish to give an account of its contents, or so long as we are not about indicating the use of a broom.
A troublesome example: there is a drawing of a scene in the woods. We examine its detail and find it suggestive of a scene we once saw. Later we describe it to someone. In the drawing is almost hidden an American Indian, but we failed to “see” this–does a physical account of light hitting my eye, creating signals, and so on, indicate this specifically? Yet should I not be able to select the image among similar ones? “This is the image which I remember.” It is hard to know what to do with this when I later find the Indian in the picture. I remember it different now… but all the same, the properties of the picture hadn’t changed, nor had my eyes. I don’t know what to do with this example and keep the reductive account in view. Is it a memory interference? But what triggered the perspective of seeing the Indian?
“I’ve seen that optical illusion before.” I remember that it plays tricks on my eyes… because I once got a clear picture of it when it wasn’t playing such tricks? Or I remember the tricks? But to draw the tricks, I draw the image and show it to someone. Can I replace that with a pure account of what is happening in my brain? --This question seems very wrong to me. I should like to say: an account of a physical thing is used in certain circumstances, but those circumstances do not account for the physical thing out of those circumstances; a potentially misleading parallel: a physical account of a chessboard is not a physical account of chess.
I don’t like this conversation anymore. It makes me feel stupid and that I need more gin. But then, most things make me feel like I need more gin. I’d be more witty about the former aspect, but then, I suck at self-deprication.
erislover – it seems what you’re grappling with has to do with static vs. dynamic. The pump is static; we can describe its parts independent of time. Pumping, on the other hand, necessarily indicates change over time.
I believe similar ideas could be applied to your other examples. Would it be acceptable to say that we need both parts and process? Is that sufficient (if not necessary)?
The quality of being a pump, physically, means maybe having these parts (or parts like them) assembled in such a way, assuming the behavior of liquids, and so on. Or maybe it means the dynamic behavior. Presumably our OP wishes to suggest: in either case, of course, we are after the physical explanation behind it. There is an explanation that lies under it, which we are to uncover or discover. It is the account of pumping, as a quality or behavior, which is in any case physical anyway. So, I feel, we are to approach the question of memory, as our OP wishes, describing a host of dynamic processes. Pre-processing, duration for short-term memory storage, etc. While at the same time the opening is about static images, this picture, this object frozen for a moment…
Thanks for appearing, erl - I hope you’ll find this useful.
If I might suggest, it’s extremely difficult to grasp the philosophical consequences of neuropsychology from a “top down” approach - perhaps it would be better to come with me on a “bottom up” walk from cells to bees to birds to humans from a computational viewpoint and ask at each stage what each agreed result means philosophically. Put aside the philosophy books for the moment, and read the psychology.
We must first divest ourselves of the “I remember a 10 megapixel photograph” notion - clearly we don’t. Have a look again at that article on pigeons’ visual perception of a watering can again. Pigeons recognised 3-D objects based on 2-D drawings: the use of “geons” was every bit as apparent for them as for us. This is the mechanism whereby viewers from two different angles still agree on “There’s a watering can of such-and-such a size in such-and-such a location relative to another identifiable object”: That’s how you and your friend give consistent testimony in court.
You have different memories from which our visual cognition extracts similar information: your friend’s memory has the watering can spout pointing in a different direction, but the geon recognition process allows you both to say “there’s a watering can on the floor”.
Yes. An event can be remembered by more than one memorising device: an object can be photographed by two different cameras.
Stick with “white” and “a ball” for now, I’d suggest. Once we’ve got them sorted, we can try to describe “concepts” and “seven” in terms of a kind of average of memories.
Glad you got the sly innuendo - I think it’s a useful analogy.
In order to explain it: to tell the story of how it came about from a situation in which it did not exist. Of course we use these handy linguistic shortcuts in our daily lives - that’s how language and human cognition evolved in the first place.
I’m not getting why you think it’s so circular an explanation.
Careful. One wouldn’t quite say that your screensaver is “a configuration of current pulses” - each pixel is saved as a configuration of logic gates or magnetic domains which might be nowhere near each other, and a program assembles them according to a protocol. In human visual memory, whatever activity the scene caused in the first place reactivates more “faintly”. Your sentence “There is a specific configuration of neurons and their firing in my brain” is true, I suppose, but you’re missing out the precise neuropsychological mechanisms which will help you understand how memory works.
Optical illusions are an extremely useful tool to examine visual cognition with (what the hell is a Magic Eye picture, anyway? Pinker givers an excellent explanation). The modules which process edges, shapes, shading, texture, distance and the like act on those signals. We cannot examine “you hunting the Indian in the picture” by simply stopping at your cornea.
My friend, if you’re stupid then I barely have the cognition of a nematode worm. Pour one for me.
Understand that I’m wary of coming up with definitions which may later allow a “Ha! How circular is that?!” but I’ll try “spatio-temporal location of, and energy of, and forces between, particles” (assuming that we won’t be talking about anything sub-quark, say). In both carbon and graphite, the quarks form protons, which are themselves clustered into nuclei containing 6 protons, and electrons, 6 of which orbit each nucleus. In diamind there is a different spatial relationship between those nuclei compared to that for graphite: it is a different form of carbon.
Is there any reason why “event-> sensory processing of event stimulus -> storage in medium term memory -> storage in long term memory” can’t be awareness and/or experience, that they are our shorthand words for that process?
I think that calling an amoeba aware is akin to stretching the fabric of an umbrella to cover a thousand heads when it was built to cover one. Just because something reacts to something does not mean it is aware. When I kick a ball, I am aware of the event, but the ball is not, despite that the ball takes flight. A ball is as aware as a cadaver. We might as well say that it is the laws of physics and chemistry that are aware. After all, they are responsible in the same way for the amoeba reacting to a toxic substance and for a ball flying across a field. An amoeba does what a cell must do, just as a rock expands and contracts.
Spot on, well said. What I seek to explore here is the difference between an awake human and a dead one, rather than what one can say about the consciousness, sentience, awareness, experience of what is lying on the mortuary table. Working memory is the discriminatory basis I find most promising.
Well, what is an event? An event is the scattering of energy. Photons and other electromagnetic waves propogate as a result of electromagnetic collisions. Consider that, were all energy at rest, there would be no events. (Consider also that energy cannot be at rest, because then we would know both the position AND the momentum of a particle, and that is not possible.)
As in the case of rocks and thermometers, I do not consider the involuntary and hapless reactions of colliding fields to constitute awareness. When the energy that is scattered from an event reaches your brain, it does certain involuntary things. It fires synaptic impulses that excite certain chemicals in such a way that it could do nothing else. But once this is accomplished, there is suddenly the emergence of a tactical dilemma. Awareness occurs, and now the reaction is not involuntary, but deliberate.
Even some things humans do with their brains are done unaware. You breathe all the time without being aware of it, until breathing becomes an event that you have processed intellectually. Once this happens, now you are in a state of awareness with respect to your breathing.
Just so we’re clear, I want to emphasize that I’m not debating at this point. Instead, I’m trying to come to a point of agreed upon definitions, which I think is necessary to not get fouled up later.
I agree that calling an amoeba “aware” is not what most people mean when they use the word. Which is why I bring it up – surely, a chimpanzee is aware. Surely, a dog or cat is aware. Is a cockroach? A barnacle? Where is the line drawn?
My thinking is that most people implicitly recognize a continuum of awareness. The problem is that that continuum is not explicit and is ill-defined, which leads to sloppy discussion and debate. I’m often accused of being pedantic and/or quibbling at times like this. I also realize that it’s just not as much fun to discuss the awareness of amoebae when we could talk about humans. However, I find that it is often the border cases that provide the greatest insight.
Yes, a ball is as aware as a cadaver. But I think there’s a qualitative difference between an amoeba reacting to a toxic substance and a ball flying across the room. That difference is awareness. It’s a rather nice rhetorical trick to shift from amoebae and other animals to inanimate objects such as balls and cadavers (not in the sense that you’re attempting to pull a fast one, but in the sense that it avoids the difficulties that crop up). I’m not convinced that saying “an amoeba does what a cell must do” is adequate; one might say the same about a slug and salt or a person and a hot stove.
Can I explain and/or quantify that difference? Not really. I think it is worth making an attempt. Perhaps it might be the overcoming of physics? (A bad phrase that, but I plead for leniency.) That is, the fact that an amoeba can react without coming into contact with a toxic substance (if that’s indeed the case)? Or maybe the difference lies in the fact that an amoeba does not follow a deterministic ballistic trajectory like a ball does? Perhaps, in terms of this discussion, it might be that an amoeba really does have a rudimentary form of memory – just enough to recognize toxic substances and then move in the opposite direction.
Ah – so, a reflex (e.g., a doctor hitting you on the knee with a little rubber hammer) is no indication of awareness. Awareness requires some sort of reflection? That is, the ability to identify something (an internal state, an object in the world, etc.) and compare that sensory perception with the contents of memory? Would that be an adequate description? Or, is there something more required (since you mention deliberate reactions)?
One wonders what should happen if these gaps are closed. I can give a description of the parts that constitute a broom–is it merely a matter of convenience that I call it a ‘broom’? But then, presumably, one would say, “It is not just the parts, but they way they are arranged that makes it a broom. And that arrangement is of course governed by physical laws.” Only the ignorant say ‘broom’? Only the people with a grasp of physics really mean ‘broom’? What applies here?