Falsification of Scientific Theories of Consciousness

[Jim Cross]

I'm sure we have gone over this several times before, but it's worth repeating - the problem has little to do with how many theories are out there, but rather with what is being asked of the theories. They are being asked to take quantitative abstractions of conscious experiences and use those abstractions to explain that which they are abstracted from. It is really no different from a fundamentalist religious person attempting to explain all natural phenomenon with the entity "God". If we are not willing to grant the "God" theory scientific status, then the same should go for material theories of consciousness.

I was responding to the statement that there are no theories. So you agree there are theories.

However, equating scientific theories to fundamentalism seems rather bizarre, especially if the contrary argument is Mind at Large, which sure as heck seems a lot like God.

I was pointing out why they should not be considered scientific theories. I am not relating all scientific theories to fundamentalism, only those which purport to explain consciousness. BK's idealist MAL philosophy never pretends to be a scientific theory.

Of course, BK's theory isn't scientific. It doesn't explain consciousness or anything else.

[AshvinP]

I was responding to the statement that there are no theories. So you agree there are theories.

However, equating scientific theories to fundamentalism seems rather bizarre, especially if the contrary argument is Mind at Large, which sure as heck seems a lot like God.

I was pointing out why they should not be considered scientific theories. I am not relating all scientific theories to fundamentalism, only those which purport to explain consciousness. BK's idealist MAL philosophy never pretends to be a scientific theory.

Of course, BK's theory isn't scientific. It doesn't explain consciousness or anything else.

And neither do those theories you mentioned earlier - that's the point... they are not scientific. And they don't even have any philosophical value, unlike BK's idealism. So they are an epic waste of time, resources and intellect, unless they happen to stumble upon something of scientific value in the process, which is possible but not likely.

[Jim Cross]

I was pointing out why they should not be considered scientific theories. I am not relating all scientific theories to fundamentalism, only those which purport to explain consciousness. BK's idealist MAL philosophy never pretends to be a scientific theory.

Of course, BK's theory isn't scientific. It doesn't explain consciousness or anything else.

And neither do those theories you mentioned earlier - that's the point... they are not scientific. And they don't even have any philosophical value, unlike BK's idealism. So they are an epic waste of time, resources and intellect, unless they happen to stumble upon something of scientific value in the process, which is possible but not likely.

So every scientific paper that has ever been written on consciousness is not science. And every researcher doing any research in the area of consciousness is deluded.

What's more likely every scientist doing research on consciousness is deluded or you are?

[AshvinP]

Of course, BK's theory isn't scientific. It doesn't explain consciousness or anything else.

And neither do those theories you mentioned earlier - that's the point... they are not scientific. And they don't even have any philosophical value, unlike BK's idealism. So they are an epic waste of time, resources and intellect, unless they happen to stumble upon something of scientific value in the process, which is possible but not likely.

So every scientific paper that has ever been written on consciousness is not science. And every researcher doing any research in the area of consciousness is deluded.

What's more likely every scientist doing research on consciousness is deluded or you are?

Every paper and researcher trying to explain the existence of consciousness from a 'material' substrate is not scientific. Rather it is a statement of religious cult-like dogma. I hope my emphasis above was adequate to prevent continued misrepresentations of what I am claiming.

[Jim Cross]

And neither do those theories you mentioned earlier - that's the point... they are not scientific. And they don't even have any philosophical value, unlike BK's idealism. So they are an epic waste of time, resources and intellect, unless they happen to stumble upon something of scientific value in the process, which is possible but not likely.

So every scientific paper that has ever been written on consciousness is not science. And every researcher doing any research in the area of consciousness is deluded.

What's more likely every scientist doing research on consciousness is deluded or you are?

Every paper and researcher trying to explain the existence of consciousness from a 'material' substrate is not scientific. Rather it is a statement of religious cult-like dogma. I hope my emphasis above was adequate to prevent continued misrepresentations of what I am claiming.

You are not understanding any of these theories. Where do any of them make any sort of metaphysical claim? Perhaps one does but I'm not aware of it. You seem to be making a straw man argument. Nobody that I know of is claiming a 'material' substrate as the ultimate reality in any of these theories.

[Eugene I]

At the moment there are no scientific theories of consciousness, how matter becomes conscious; not any half-assed hunches or wild untested crazy ideas . . . so considering whether falsification of any theories is a bit premature.

You may think them inadequate but there are many theories of consciousness. A few.

1- Integrated Information theory
2- EM field theories
3- Varieties of global workspace
4-Orchestrated objective reduction (ORCH)

This book with Dean Radin writing the foreword has a chapter on twelve electromagnetic field theories alone.



It includes chapters on Sheldrake and Lazlo in addition to Pockett and McFadden, and others.

The confusion of what makes a theory scientific does not only apply to the theories of consciousness, we can see it in most branches of science, in physics in particular. I don't think it's is possible to draw a definite line between scientific and nonscientific theories and mark them with black-or/white labels of "scientific" or "non-scientific". Even the criteria of verifiability and falsifiability turned out to be not such well working and well defined. For example, most variants of the modern string theory are non-falsifiable. Typically, the more assumptions of a "metaphysical" kind any theory assumes, the less scientific it becomes. For example, any scientific theory that includes any non-verifiable and non-falsifiable ontological or metaphysical assumptions (such as the materialistic hypothesis of the existence of non-conscious matter, or the opposite idealistic refutation of the existence of non-conscious matter) will become non-scientific to the extent of adopting such assumptions. In physics for example, there are interpretations of QM that are more agnostic to any metaphysical assumptions (such as QBit or relational interpretations) which makes them more scientific, and other interpretations (many-world or Copenhagen) that are based on materialistic realism ontological assumptions, which in turn makes them less scientific.

Now, back to the theories of consciousness, the key question is in which sense any theory of consciousness may claim to "explain consciousness"? As Chalmers noted, there are two problems of consciousness: the "easy" one, which is to explain how particular phenomena and states of consciousness interact and correlate with any measurable physical states of the brain, and the "hard" one, which is how exactly those physical states give rise to the very fact of the existence of qualitative conscious experiences. All the theories listed above might be good candidates for solving the "easy" problems, but none of them offers any clue whatsoever to how even to approach solving the "hard" one.

[Jim Cross]

Eugene,

I can agree with that view to some degree. I think the main distinction is whether there is evidence or could be evidence in some form that would overturn a theory or make another theory more likely. Or if there is evidence and multiple theories, which explains the evidence better? Some physicists themselves have criticized string theory on the basis that there is nothing that could disprove it and nothing that allows distinguishing competing versions.

I think Chalmer's hard problem is a metaphysical problem so, if science explains the easy problem, it's done.

[Eugene I]

I think Chalmer's hard problem is a metaphysical problem so, if science explains the easy problem, it's done.

We discussed that before, but I don't think it's only a metaphysical problem, but again that's a matter of defining the boundaries of science: what science should or should not attempt or commit to explain. So far physics tried to keep up with a commitment to be able to explain any experimentally observable phenomena and facts. Qualitative conscious experience is definitely an experimentally observable phenomenon, it's a fact of experience, but it is only a 1-st person observable fact, not a 3-rd person one. Does it disqualifies it from the list of the facts that physics should attempt to explain? I do not think so, but of course other people may argue that this is the case. But either way, it's all a matter of definition and what scientists as a community would agree upon. At the end, it's a practical question, and scientists may just say - we agree that conscious experience is an observable fact but we just make no commitment to explain it, just because we don't get paid for it, and we just pass it to the philosophy department, may be those guys can get their grants for it.

[Jim Cross]

In a post on my blog I call Chalmer's easy problem a serious problem because it isn't really easy at all. It actually is hard but potentially solvable by science. I call his hard problem an unserious problem because it isn't a scientific problem. You can't explain subjectivity from an objective viewpoint.

[Eugene I]

In a post on my blog I call Chalmer's easy problem a serious problem because it isn't really easy at all. It actually is hard but potentially solvable by science. I call his hard problem an unserious problem because it isn't a scientific problem. You can't explain subjectivity from an objective viewpoint.

Yeah, Chalmers said that the "easy" problems are not easy at all, they are difficult, but by far not as "hard" as the "hard problem".

IMO science is supposed to explain all observable phenomena. The "objectivity" criterium is only a specific method to abstract and "extract" the experimental data from irrelevant information, such as information pertained to subjective content. For example, when studying the behavior of physical particles, any subjective content would be irrelevant, and that is why it is removed from the description of the data: when all relevant particle state measurements conditions are listed, a mood of an observer is excluded as irrelevant. But in the science of consciousness such irrelevance is no longer the case. For example: how can we establish any correlations between brain neural states and conscious/mental states without referring to the subjective data? When we study for example the neural states in the visual area of the brain and their correlations with with visual perceptions, we have to include the subjective visual perceptions in the experimental data, but those are the 1-st person subjective data only. So, if we only include the objective and 3-rd person data, we can not even attempt to study any correlations between neural and mental states in the science of consciousness at all, which means we can not even address all those "easy problems".

So basically what you are saying is: let's accept the subjective 1-st person perspectival experiences of mental states as a valid data for studying the correlations and all phenomena relevant to the "easy" problems, but lets not accept the basic experimental fact of the very existence of the subjective experience as a datum for scientific investigation. The problem is: if you deny a scientific validity of the fact of the very existence of the subjective experience, then how can you use the data of any subjective experience in the correlations studies for the "easy" problems? By doing this science would simply shoot itself into the foot. So, if you are an "honest" scientist of consciousness, you have only two choices: accept the validity of the data of the subjective experiences for the correlation and "easy problem" studies, but that also means that now the very experimental fact of even the existence of such data becomes the data point due for the explanation by the science of consciousness (per the "hard problem"). Or do not accept the validity of any subjective data for scientific investigation, but then you can not do any correlation studies at all, and all science of consciousness would be limited only to objective measurements of the neural states.

Now, if you do accept the existence of subjective experience as a valid experimental fact for the science, then there are three ways for the scientific method to approach such fact:
1. Demonstrate, at least in principle, how this fact can be derived from or reduced to a set of axioms and fundamental elements (fields, particles, fundamental equations) that the existing scientific models are based on. Such derivation would demonstrate that such fact represents an "emergent" phenomenon.
2. Or, if such reduction is not possible, include it in the list of the fundamental elements and declare it to be a "non-emergent" phenomenon.
3. Or, take a "mysterianism" approach and declare that such fact is actually an emergent phenomenon, but science has no way to show and prove it. This is the same as to accept that there are experimentally observable phenomena in the world that science can never explain.

So far there have not been a single hypothesis proposed to explain how to derive the fact of the very existence of conscious experience from the axioms of physics, and there are strong reasons and arguments (see Chalmers works) to believe that it is impossible in principle, so we can cross out the option 1. We are left with options 2 and 3. The option 2 is essentially panpsychism, but this time panpsychism not as a metaphysics, but as an actual scientific theory, as a variant of physical theory that includes the ability to have conscious experience into the set of its fundamentals. Option 3 is something scientists would try to avoid, because it is at the root of the scientific method to attempt to explain every observable phenomenon, or include it into the list of fundamentals. Taking the option 3 would basically mean for scientists to accept the failure of the scientific method at least in certain cases. So far the option 3 has never been "officially" exercised in the history of science.