Philosophy of Mind

"Looking at" suggests something that takes some time.  Perhaps it can even get interrupted and then resume?  In any case, you are probably moving your eyes (saccading) and different objects are focused on.  There certainly seems to be a philosophical sense of "visual experience" that applies to the result of a succession of saccades, but I am honestly less clear about what it 'really' is and/or whether there's some fictionalizing about the whole idea.  It's also the case  that we don't have an uncontested neurophysiological theory about what is going on. 

Colleagues of mine in vision science are working on an aspect of the problem, anorthoscopic vision, and we've had a number of discussions, so my ignorance here isn't entirely a matter of being uninformed.  

In my upcoming paper, On the Theoretical generation of Antinomies and Paradoxes, I write:

Empirical research suggests that the lowest higher-order representation that humans normally seem to be aware of is the one in which the major sensory elements are bound up into a single conscious whole.  Within our visual field, for example, in her book Exploring Consciousness Rita Carter states that “[…] we see color… form, location, (movement)[1]...and so on,  all in one - not as separate elements” (2002, p. 34).  Additionally, cognitive researchers have known for quite some time that despite the billions upon billions of neurons and tens of trillions of synapses, the maximum number of abstract representations or categories that the mind is consciously aware of at any one time seems to only be four or five.  We know that the brain processes massive amounts of raw sensory data in bits and pieces before binding it together and brings only the timeliest and most important information into focus.  We also know that on the conscious level of awareness the brain assesses this information in only four or five separate concepts or components.  But why does the brain selectively deliver everything into consciousness already bound up in a single whole?  And why, despite the immense processing power available, do we only keep four or five things or categories in conscious awareness at any one time?  Why not ten, or a hundred, or even a thousand?  To date no one has provided a compelling explanation for these two puzzling facets of human cognition. 

My earlier investigation (Acosta, 2006, pp. 151-165) indicating that fundamental data may ultimately be transformed into conscious symbolic meaning and knowledge through a complex refining process, whereby basic information is filtered up through an iterated hierarchical contextual continuum, may provide an answer.  Referring back to the underlying structure of games, we recall that the contextual framework of games and number theory are simply abstract and more complex parallels to, and permutations of, the four macro properties of the universe (space, matter, motion, and time) plus the original causal objective of all life.  Each successive slightly more complex iteration of the primal frame of reference, form the basis for an interconnecting and interacting continuum of essential information within which a given chaotic knowledge system develops.  

This fact alone may explain why the brain always presents conscious information as a single whole.  The single whole in question refers to a particular abstract frame of reference viewed as complete representation, while the four or five distinct categories of basic information of which we are aware would individually equate to different expressions of the five criteria of the original frame of reference when viewed separately.  To recapitulate, the frame of reference of a game consists of: 

1. Field
2. Element(s)
3. Rule(s)
4. Objective(s)
5. Feedback Loop

· A field may be defined as a static, non-moving bounded area of space in or on which the elements move. (1) 

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· Elements are objects that move, or are caused to move, along or within a field. (2) 

· Rules, i.e., the action component, are descriptions of how the elements are positioned in space, and move or are caused to move in relation to the field and relative to each other. (3) 

· The objective is the underlying rationale that initiates an action, resulting in a gain or a loss, or which can be perceived in the more general positive and negative terms of a concept and its opposite. (4) 

· The feedback loop is any action or reaction to the prior movement of elements within the field over time. (5)  (Note: when an object changes position along or within the field we contextually perceive this movement in terms of a span or duration of time.  Accordingly, the “fourth dimension” of the physical universe is implicitly understood to be an operational element of the frame of reference of any game.) [2] 

You are having one perceptual experience corresponding to your visual field.  Within it you are identifying three objects, i.e., computer, desk, and cup.  There is no motion to speak of, so the rules component does not come in to play.  The objective category would be depend on whether you began typing on your computer, opened your desk drawer, or picked up your cup.  The resultant perceptual feedback would depend on your exact choice.

    [1] It is assumed that the phrase, “and so on” includes motion, which is why the term “movement” was inserted by this author. 

    [2] When physicists describe time as the fourth-dimension, they have in mind the three spatial dimensions of height, length, and width combined with time.  By contrast, the term “fourth dimension” as utilized in this paper is meant to convey the four macro properties of space, matter, motion, and time, also with time as the fourth but distinct element in the series.  My convention is intended to emphasize the temporal dimension in a manner that is more in keeping with the way it is subjectively perceived. 

From vision to sounds.

When I play the piano my two hands touch the keyboard, sometimes my two feet touch the pedals and I constantly move my body. When my two hands touch the keyboard I clearly live  two experiences, two hands one body, one subject. But I also live an integrated experience with all the components. I clearly feel an interaction between my body and the instrument. Then I live the experience of projecting my mind into the future when I improvise.

I see my hands on the keyboard,  I see them touching the black and the yellowish ivory keys. I can close my eyes and keep playing and touching the keys and inside my mind I will see the paths where the improvisation is taking me. Sometimes I can smell the  wood of the piano, I feel  my cat moving around, see the red bricks of the wall.

The only way to experience my auditory cortex seems to be when I hear the sounds of the music I am playing, and feel their impact in my body.

The process of making music combines my experiences. This is definitively a carnal integrated series of experiences with various elements.  (Integration of mind and body).

There is a togetherness in the musical act. Togetherness does not mean the simultaneity of cognitive events (or is it the illusion of simultaneity?) Is consciousness the integration of information as does suggest Giulio Tononi? Phenomenal unity or a series of micro-consciousness? But then how do you bind the micro-consciousness?

When I introspect my musical experiences, I live the experience of living the experience, no transparency for me here.

When I walk the streets of  Brooklyn I can hear the music in my mind but there is no volume, no sound. It’s there allright, no question. Is the pitch really silent? In some cases of verbal hallucination you can hear the words but there is no sound.

Luc Delannoy

May I disagree with Benj ?

Seeing something black (the piano) is an action, it involves brain processes and they are actions; such biological processes have psychological consequences. Brain processes are, or are the cause of, mental states. Looking at a black piano is also an action but it might imply desire, volition, attention and concentration, and more complex brain processes (actions).  I am not sure about the sharp distinction as Benj put it. Hearing and listening to music are both actions; perceptual actions with perceptual states, the latter being conscious or not. I guess I have a hard time with the use of the word static. My 2 cents.

A J Wrote: "Suppose you are looking at a screen with a slit in it, behind which a camel is passing.  What you see is camel stages, we might want to insist.  However, at the end you get what you really want to say is something like a whole-camel percept.  But of course, since the whole camel was never present, we might feel unhappy about saying you actually saw the whole camel at some one time; one thing that's interesting is that we can't put it all together if we are clueless about what we are seeing."

A T: In  fact we can put it all together even though we might be clueless before we put it together. Consider the following experiment that I conducted a few years ago (A. Trehub. The Cognitive Brain. MIT Press, 1991).

Seeing-More-Than-Is-There (SMTT)

If a narrow vertically oriented aperture in an otherwise occluding screen is fixated while a visual pattern is moved back and forth behind it, the entire pattern may be seen even though at any instant only a tiny fragment of the pattern is exposed within the aperture.

Procedure:

1. Subjects sit in front of an opaque screen having a long vertical slit with a very narrow width, as an aperture in the middle of the screen. Directly behind the slit is a computer screen, on which any kind of figure can be displayed and set in motion. A triangular-shaped figure in a contour with a width much longer than its height is displayed on the computer. Subjects fixate the center of the aperture and report that they see two tiny line segements, one above the other on the vertical meridian. This perception corresponds to the actual stimulus falling on the retinas (the veridical optical projection of the state of the world as it appears to the observer).

2. The subject is given a control device which can set the triangle on the computer screen behind the aperture in horizontal reciprocating motion (horizontal oscillation) so that the triangle passes beyond the slit in a sequence of alternating directions. A clockwise turn of the controller increases the frequency of the horizontal oscillation. A counter-clockwise turn of the controller decreases the frequency of the oscillation. The subject starts the hidden triangle in motion and gradually increases its frequency of horizontal oscillation.

Results:

As soon as the figure is in motion, subjects report that they see, near the bottom of the slit, a tiny line segment which remains stable, and another line segment in vertical oscillation above it.

As subjects continue to increase the frequency of horizontal oscillation of the almost completely occluded figure there is a profound change in their experience of the visual stimulus.

At an oscillation of ~ 2 cycles/sec (~ 250 ms/sweep), subjects report that they suddenly see a complete triangle moving horizontally back and forth instead of the vertically oscillating line segment they had previously seen. This perception of a complete triangle in horizontal motion is strikingly different from the line segment oscillating up and down above a fixed line segment which is the real visual stimulus on the retinas.

As subjects increase the frequency of oscillation of the hidden figure, they observe that the length of the base of the perceived triangle decreases while its height remains constant. Using the rate controller, the subject reports that he can enlarge or reduce the base of the triangle he sees, by turning the knob counter-clockwise (slower) or 
clockwise (faster).

3. The experimenter asks the subject to adjust the base of the perceived triangle so that the length of its base appears equal to its height.

Results:

As the experimenter varies the actual height of the hidden triangle, subjects successfully vary its oscillation rate to maintain approximate base-height equality, i.e. lowering its rate as its height increases, and increasing its rate as its height decreases.

This experiment demonstrates that the human brain has internal mechanisms that can construct accurate analog representations of the external world. Notice that when the hidden figure oscillated at less than 2 cycles/sec, the observer experienced an event (the vertically oscillating line segment) that corresponded to the visible event on the plane of the opaque screen. But when the hidden figure oscillated at a rate greater than 2 cycles/sec., the observer experienced an internally constructed event (the horizontally oscillating triangle) that corresponded to the almost totally occluded event behind the screen.

The experiment also demonstrates that the human brain has internal mechanisms that can accurately track relational properties of the external world in an analog fashion. Notice that the observer was able to maintain an approximately fixed one-to-one ratio of height to width of the perceived triangle as the height of the hidden triangle was independently varied by the experimenter.

These and other empirical findings obtained by this experimental paradigm were predicted by the neuronal structure and dynamics of the putative retinoid system, a system of brain mechanisms that was originally proposed to explain our basic phenomenal experience and adaptive behavior in 3D egocentric space (Trehub, 1991). It seems to me that these experimental findings provide conclusive evidence that the human brain does indeed construct analog representations of the external world.

The key message is this:

The retinoid system created a vivid conscious experience of an object undergoing a series of systematic spatial transformations when the object and the events that were consciously experienced were not a part of the exteroceptive visual world of the observer. This striking experimental outcome was predicted by the theoretical neuronal structure and dynamics of the retinoid model.

[Edmond Wright]  I am naturally with Luc Delannoy in reminding us that the selection of a portion of a sensory field (visual or other) is a matter of ‘desire, volition, concentration and attention’.  Those four would be better rendered generally under ‘motivation’.  At the animal level, the brain of the organism is geared to embed in memory portions of fields that accompany pain or pleasure experiences as gestalt-unities.  Pain embeds them marked with fear, pleasure with desire, which provides the motivational element that spurs the organism to future would-be appropriate action, be it at first no more than advance or retreat. 

It needs saying that the etymology of the word ‘motivation’ reminds us that motion in the service of bodily/species maintenance is what is at the core of the process.  This is the sense in which we can see one relevance of Noe’s drawing our attention to the sensorimotor aspect.  Initially these can only be ad hoc embeddings that may or may not succeed;  later encounters with that same portion of the field may or may not refine the response, but evolution does seem to have favoured the continual rejigging of the gestalt, in an endless open provisionality.  For the unity of the gestalt is no more than a tentative feature of the process, for the organism may be forced to rejig the memory with a radical transformation of the gestalt, for example, replacing what was taken for a ‘single’ entity in the real with two others, or two-and-a-bit others, or none at all (see my discussion of this at length in my contribution to The Case for Qualia (Cambridge MA : MIT Press, 2008, pp. 35-60) and my chapter on ontology in Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005, pp. 103-20).  Gestalt-unity is no guarantee of singular entityhood in the real as good conjurors know well.  For this reason it is unwise to hang a theory of perception on a belief in given. ‘transparent’, external ‘unities’, be they supposed ‘objects’, ‘persons’ or ‘selves’.

As distinct from the animal organism (as it may still half-survive in our reptilian brain), we human beings made ourselves human by learning how to update, hopefully, each other’s gestalts.  The refinement process became no longer just an outcome of a chance encounter by the solitary organism, bound to the conditioning regime.  Co-operating groups (from two members upwards) discovered how to take advantage of Michael Tomasello’s ‘joint attentional scenes’ (Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, MIT Press, 2008);  for how the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s notion of play clarifies the process, see URL http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1401/).  They are certainly 'scenes', acted out, performed, because the ideal focus of the game, required to enable the talkers to home in on roughly the same region of the real and improve their co-ordination in action, owes its singularity to their mutual imagining.  

It is interesting to see that Tomasello himself never questions the existence in the real of the ideal singular focus (Tomasello, pp.74-80).  The real exists all right as the field over which our differing perspectives range, but not the ideal, perfect superimposition of them all.  Even when we admit that our perspectives are 'vague', there is no guarantee that the criteria that we take for granted in our vague conceptualizing overlap completely with those of others.  One person's view of the 'vagueness' is not the same as that of others, as David Wiggins seems to think (Wiggins, ‘On Singling out an Object Determinately’, in Philip Pettit and John MacDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought  and Context. Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. 169-80).  Grice made the same error, for he never wondered whether the hearer's intention might not match that of the speaker.  Sir Alan Gardiner, who anticipated Grice cooperative notion by many years, saw the problem clearly (The Theory of Speech and Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 80).

Arnold Trehub’s ingenious experiment highlights the brain’s fondness for constructing a provisional gestalt out of surprising sensory qualia.  It also demonstrates how the ‘countability’ S. A. Crutchfield is in search of is merely an essential device, a kind of catalyst in the knowledge process, its deliverances always expendable, revisable.  Hence, singular entityhood constitutes no metaphysical ground.  God is no mathematician.

I believe the choice is up to the individual.it could be one  visual experience  or three, there's no reason for one to be wrong and one to be right,why create divisive opinions dismissing the possibility of unity.