Confusion about EEGs and fMRIs in my JCS paper

So, I had a paper published last month in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS). I'm very happy about this, especially as it resulted in brief discussions on the journal's yahoo group's messageboard.

I'm particularly happy about this as this journal is what brought me back to philosophy. In 2002, I was working as a waitress in a hotel bar - hold on, no I wasn't. I was working as a technical support engineer/software consultant - the title kept changing - in a desolate industrial estate just a few miles from Schiphol airport in Holland. On my breaks, I found a series of articles and discussions about consciousnesss. The one that struck me was 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness' by David Chalmers in JCS (free-to-read here). I'd gotten quite cynical about philosophy after my undergraduate - definitely partly due to not having done any work for my BA. After reading Chalmers' article, I got interested again. Never thought I'd be published in the JCS myself, though. Alot of things have changed.

Like my professional situation. In February, I applied to IRCHSS - the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences - for my two-year project 'Time and Illusion' at University College, Cork. Two weeks ago, I found out that I got it. Again, I am very happy. In Dublin at the moment for a meeting of 'awardees' tomorrow in Dublin Castle.

Anyway, enough about me - more about my mistakes. In my JCS paper, I discussed a possible experiment for finding out if there is a privileged frame for the neural correlates of experience - or, at least, the subject of the experience. This experiment turns on measuring the velocity of the neural correlates. The evidence needed is a common velocity, i.e., not a velocity relative to each subject, for the neural correlates in all subjects. In setting up the experiment, I suggested you could do this with an fMRI or something like that.

However, as I discovered in discussion with my friend David Jenkins, this can't be done by fMRI. fMRI - or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging - is a method of mapping activity in the brain. To quote from the Columbia site, it does so by tracking increases in blood flow. It doesn't measure the movement of the correlates themselves. Positronic emission tomography, or PET also only measures the blood flow. EEG (electroencephalography) does seem to measure neural activity directly but it does not seem to do so finely enough to pick out the motion that's needed.

This, however, is not a problem for the argument of my paper. It is a problem for those who object to it. So it is not a serious issue for the position I promote. But it still shows that I should pay more attention to the actual detail of how things are made, and what they can do. I forget that most things I encounter have limits. They can break; they are finite. Even the  internet you're reading this on is not some spiritual non-physical dimension of thought. It's electric fields, dark dots in hard disks, copper wires and undersea cables. It is a multitude of such things, the locations of which are not easy to find. But the multitudes are finite, and they are somewhere. You can break the internet by pulling enough plugs.

Anyway, enough!

Caprica

Caprica is set in the Battlestar Galactica milieu but set several decades before that story. It is set in a world of a mixed aesthetic of the 1930s prohibition US and some time very near in our future. Men wear hats and conservative clothing, smoking, standing by apple carts. There is sexual liberation, casual interplanetary prejudice, and a multisensory, immersive online world where anything goes.

The story revolves around a group of families from different backgrounds connected by the tragedy of a single terrorist act. This act is in the service of a religious group called the Soldiers of the One True God. One family's daughter is a member of this group; she dies in the first episode. Her father is the original designer of the Cylons.

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Caprica breaks away from the typical science fiction model of these shows in the first few episodes by playing with a very common premise: The Super-Girl. There is one of those in it, certainly, but here she does not look like a girl; she has the mind of one. In most shows, the Super-Girl looks like an ordinary girl but she is actually a super-hero/robot/and so on. It is important that, no matter what she is, she looks normal. Here, she doesn't look normal. She looks like a great big clunking machine. She, Zoe, is downloaded into the body of a Cylon . Although, there is a bit of a cheat on this - the immersive virtual world (if I remember the world's name I'll set it in) allows her to appear as a girl.

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One of the ideas in this series is that Zoe, in being downloaded from the immersive virtual world into her Cylon body, leaves the immersive virtual world. She cannot simply be copied into the Cylon body. She is not like a file. You cannot simply copy her and make two of her.

In the last four years, I've been a tutor at the university where I did my doctorate. There, we ran courses in the philosophy of mind and the introduction to theoretical philosophy. Some of the thought experiments run were like the following two:

(i) In the future, you can teleport to very distant planets by doing the following: You step in a machine which scans information about all the atoms in your body, with all the relative locations, parts, etc. It then sends this information to a receiver in a far away planet, where the machine over there assemblies an exact physical duplicate of the original body as you stepped in. The person who steps out is physically identical to you, down to the arrangements of the most basic atoms.  Meanwhile, the body in the original machine is broken down into raw materials for assembling bodies from incoming signals.

Would you get in the machine?

(ii) From surgical evidence, it seems as if a person can lose a hemisphere of their brain (have a hemispherectomy) and still retain their personality, memories etc.(for, e.g., epilepsy). Let's accept that we can survive as ourselves with just one hemisphere, and it doesn't matter which one.

Now say also the following, slightly more science-fiction scenario occurs. An evil scientist knocks you ought, then clones your body.  They then swap one hemisphere of your brain in your original body with one hemisphere of your cloned body. The scientist then wakes both of you up. 

Who is the real you? Is the other a real person?

If they have the same personality, memory, etc. as you, and look the same, and actually have one of the original hemispheres from your body, are they just as right to think of themselves as you?

Let us say this happens: the scientist clones your original body, replaces one hemisphere of that clone's brain with one of your hemispheres, then destroys the rest of your body. The scientist then wakes....you up in your new body (because it is your hemisphere in there, and this has all of your personality in there)? ...Wakes your clone up (and has murdered you)? Which?

Change the thought experiment to this happening: the scientist is not evil at all but good. You barely survive a plane crash, which  happens at the base of her secret mountain fortress. She finds your smashed, ruined body in the debris, and that you have barely any brain activity; only one hemisphere is intact, but it is very intact. So what she does is clone your body in her laboratory, and then put the surviving hemisphere into the clone. A few days pass, the brain-body connections seems fine, so she wakes....is it, you? up.

If you get different answers for whether or not the hemisphere-in-clone is you, why do you think that is? Am I subtly leading you to those conclusions, perhaps? If so, is there are a more neutral way of describing these?

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These thought experiments are not identical to all the original courses' details. I pick out the details that suggest the following: You can physically copy  a person so that they are indistinguishable from the original copy - including: moles, cuts, broken noses, stomach ulcers, haircuts, environmentally worn neural pathways, etc. If you do this you get a psychologically, consciously, personally identical being to the original. This is true even if you keep the original.

Is this right? 

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So, is an exact copying of someone possible? Is it incoherent to say that it happens? Is it incoherent to say that it cannot happen? How could we know?

No person has never been exactly copied;  we don't have any evidence if it is right or not. 

What we have is whatever our assumptions about the world give us.

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Caprica suggests* a different response: whether they are merely  physical or not, persons are unique; they can only be maintained in one physical place;. This may mean one of two things, one of which I consider better than the other:

(i) A physical copy can be made, but a conscious or mental copy cannot. 

 Making a copy results in something that acts, looks and reacts just like a conscious, mental person, but this thing is not a person. 

This doesn't necessarily mean that the original keeps the consciousness or the mind. The physical duplicate or the clone-with-its-original-hemisphere might have the consciousness or the mind, and the original lose it. The point is that the behaviour of the non-conscious or non-mental thing is just like it has consciousness or a mind, but it doesn't, because only one of them has a  mind.

This option exploits one or both of two philosophical issues, the problem of other minds and the possibility of philosophical zombies. I'll put these aside for now (but will return to it later).

(ii) A physical copy can't be made and the original survive.

No matter what we do, no matter how exactly our technologies  should, in  principle, physically duplicate the original, either:
a. The original remains intact, acting like it is the same conscious/thinking, etc. person but a copy can never be constructed of the original person.
b. The duplicate is a proper person but the original fails in some crucial respect, so that it fails to behave like a conscious, thinking, person.

In comparison to (i), (ii) is rarely considered.  Yet, so far as it stands, in terms of contemporary evidence, (ii) is as possible as (i). And what someone claiming (ii)  is also doing is making a falsifiable statement about the world. It's just it comes from how we think about minds, not how we think of the physical world.

Both alternatives are possible at the moment. Until we actually succeed in making a copy of someone while keeping the 'someone' as well, we cannot discount either. If we do succeed, then we throw aside (ii), leaving just (i), and then face the puzzle of who is the real you.

But at the moment, it is all just a problem for the characters in Star Trek, just like evil is a problem for the characters in Christianity.

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*Although it only suggests it. Arguably, Cylon-Zoe is a software copy of original Zoe. Although, they also seem to be different - and they are not as clearly distinguished as how I put it here (which is interesting too).

Technical Metaphysical Interlude: does what we experience exist?

In my thesis, I defined a principle I called PEPE,The Principle of the Experienced Particular Existent. This principle is that what we experience exists (and is something in particular - but that's not important right now). If this is right, then if we experience something when we are imagining, then this 'something' exists.*

But is this right? Is there anything wrong with saying that what we experience doesn't exist? (and isn't something in particular - but that isn't important right now).

I called my principle a principle because I don't think there is anything obviously contradictory in denying it. It doesn't seem to me to be incoherent to say that what we experience doesn't exist. But at the same time I think that, when pressed, this is not what we tend to say.

How would we be pressed on this? Consider the following: someone turns up, shaken, late at night, soaking wet from walking through fields of heavy rain, and says:

'I'm sorry. It's so late. I had this experience. It - I seemed to experience - it was - was - like - it wasn't like I saw something, or heard or - it wasn't like anything physically touched me, or any sort of sense-perception..But, tonight, you must believe me' - and he twists his sleeves in his fingers, looks up at you, scared, hopeful - 'I experienced the presence of God.'

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you do. Do you believe that you can have some awareness of God? Perhaps you do. Say this, however, take this viewpoint: you do not believe in God.

If you are an atheist - you must be an atheist to run this - an agnostic might concede the possibility - my hunch is that you will say to him: 'look - calm down - here, have this vodka and lime.** I know you're overwhelmed for now, but, although it seems that way, you did not experience the presence of God.'

Does that seem right to you? And do you think that your intent is clear to the listener? Or could you say, without causing any extra confusion, or for the listener to not have to actively interpret what you're saying: ''you experienced the presence of God alright but God does not exist'.

Because we tend to speak the first way, I think that, when we talk about 'experience', we mean that we are consciously aware of something, there is something apparent to us; there is something phenomenological going on. But we do not often refer to 'experiencing' as experiencing, typically. We refer to it as seeing, hearing, or doing something of which we are conscious, e.g., experiencing running a marathon, jumping from a plane, scratching off the charcoal from burnt toast.

My example above suggests another point about experience: we refer to an experience as only an 'experience' when we mean the most general form; we aren't referring to a particular kind of experience, e.g., to seeing a bright light, hearing a low rumbling, remembering the taste of honey, or reciting the ten times tables 'in our heads'. I think we only refer, in ordinary conversation, to experiences in cases of being unable or unwilling, or of being unsure how, to specify the kind of experience further. For whatever reason, we can't say we are seeing, feeling, imagining, or only thinking. It's just we are experiencing. That's all we can say.  

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But there might be another way of using 'experience', especially if we are talking about being conscious in experiencing. Perhaps when we talk about experiencing something, 'something' needn't exist. Or, even more, what we experience needn't even seem to exist.

For example, if I imagine a unicorn, I experience the unicorn - but I also definitely experience it even if it doesn't exist and I know it doesn't. That's just what it is to imagine unicorns.

Once I say that, I no longer say anything more: I imagine a griffin and so I experience furriness, eagle-head-shape-ness - but no problem: whether I experience it or not, the furriness needn't exist or even seem to.

I got this idea from a conversation with Julia Jansen: she didn't see why I would think in the following way: we experience a mental image when we imagine something. What we imagine isn't necessarily what we experience - actually, anyone is more likely to say that it isn't. What we imagine is, e.g., a griffin, and whatever we say here, it doesn't seem right at all to say that we experience a griffin. But why, Julia wondered, would anyone bring images into this story? When I imagine a griffin, I just imagine something that doesn't exist - and, so we could say here that I am experiencing something that doesn't exist as not existing. But this doesn't mean we have to say, really, we experience something that doesn't exist or we experience something else that does exist. The former is like saying you really experience a God, though there is a non-existent God; the latter is saying you experience an image.

Julia is an expert in phenomenology, which we might very roughly call the philosophical examination of appearances, or how things appear to us, or an examination of consciousness from the first person perspective. This isn't exactly accurate, there is a  lot more too it, and different versions of it from different founders, each version different to the others, e.g., Husserl's phenomenology is more ideal than Heidegger's phenomenology,  who is fascinated with the sense of our being always conscious in time , while Merleau-Ponty constantly reiterates the compelling idea that we are always experiencing the world from a body.

The development of the phenomenological method comes in stages(I am not sure it is right to say it is done). But a significant beginner of it, a 'father' some might say, is Edmund Husserl. Husserl's description of the phenomenological method is, to my mind, the best example of what phenomenology is. In particular, there is epoche, the 'suspension of belief 'by someone about the reality, idealism or unreality of what is presented to them 'in consciousness' (as is often added - though I'd assume it anyway, if it weren't mentioned). To suspend belief is not to doubt the reality of what you experience; following thinking of Descartes, Husserl considers doubt to be disbelieving in something. Suspending belief is not believing or disbelieving it. Husserl thought you were free to do this, no matter what you were presented with it.

Give it a go. 

Get back to me when you do.

The point about this method is that you examine what is presented to you without necessarily believing it is real or not, and you do so in order to get at invariant features of consciousness, 'rigid data', and thus ultimately to develop a science of first-person consciousness of the world.

I think that's it, anyway, although I am often frustrated in my understanding.  (It reminds me of the pyrrhonian sceptic view, that one does not believe anything except appearances, does not assent to anything except to which she is a forced to consent to. I don't think this is a coincidence). The point I take, anyhow, is this: When you describe what we experience, you don't just presume what you experience is as you have assumed it to be. To do so is to remain in what Husserl has called 'the natural attitude', an attitude you are supposed to bracket off. Away from that attitude, and instead in the phenomenological attitude, you don't assume that what you are presented with is either illusory or real. You simply describe it as it appears to you.Back to the ancient sceptics again: I do not know if honey is sweet or not when I am not around, but it tastes sweet. It seems sweet.

Once you do that, though, this question arises: does anything seem real or unreal to you anyway, even if you suspend belief in everything you are conscious of? That is, can you suspend belief in everything you are presented with? Are you compelled to believe in the reality or unreality of anything you are presented with? What is left? What is lost? Are you forced to believe?

This question is important because it gets us to what phenomenology can contribute to a discussion about what exists. This is a metaphysical question, not in the domain of phenomenology as it is traditionally understood. But it is in the domain of which physics or physicalism is involved:  the entities posited by physics to explain what is apparent to us should address at least what we is apparent to us after doing phenomenology; physicalism says  only what is physical exists so it should show how what is apparent after doing phenomenology is physical (these two tasks might be different; they might  be the same; I'm not sure).   

When we walk in with what we hold to exist or be real, we can look at this phenomenological description as a test of our theory.

Take, for example, someone claiming to see the Virgin Mary hovering in the sky over a cave. What exactly is apparent to them? They believe that it is the Virgin Mary but what is apparent to them if they suspend belief in that? What can they suspend belief in, and what must just seem to be real and presented to them? 

This is the sort of thing that is supposed to be done in doing phenomenology.

Anyway, that is the end of this metaphysical discussion.

[Right now, I have a massively high temperature, dried out mouth, and exhaustion, sitting by a gas fire and listening to a documentary on BBC4 about the science of sleepwalking and law. So, the phenomenology bit might be a bit unclear. I feel very frustrated about my understanding of the phenomenological tradition. But I need to get it clear, bit by bit].

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*If I continue to run with this, I'll probably change the principle's specific terms. Since reading a paper by Peter Simons, and seeing a lecture by him, I think it's better too refer to 'real particulars' rather than 'existing particulars'. According to Simons, 'existence' refers to a much broader scope of things, including things that are not real; in addition, in his paper, he argues, or perhaps simply shows, that 'existence' is more...I don't have the paper in front of me, so I can't use his term - but, it might be said to be more esoteric, or metaphysically technical or idiomatic than 'real'. So, then, it would be the principle of the experienced real particular, or PERP. These things matter to analytical philosophers. But, here, existence is fine.

**Atheists always drink this. It's an empirical fact.

Are you an atheist?

See?

Humanistic science fiction: the uncanny valley and cartoon time

My brother Dermot is a ....well, was a... -is currently some new fangled title in the conceptual design film world. But I would have called him a conceptual designer other than that.

Anyway  - last time I met Dermot we talked about CGI. It's relevant to his industry, especially his latest films. And he told me about this interesting psychological trait of people: the uncanny vallley (eponymous website).

The uncanny valley seems to be the term for when something lifelike stops seeming cartoon-ish or comfortably fake and appears to hang between that and what is real. It's an uncomfortable feeling - a feeling of uncanniness. This applies especially to simulating human features - and in my view, most CGI animated human beings, especially Polar Express (imdb entry).

My version of it is all the cheap, nasty techno tracks I ended up seeing on MTV's 'The Mix' when I couldn't sleep. The characters moved too smoothly, the ground looked too blank; they moved smilingly through eerie and empty  no-places, their surroundings a furniture of no-things.

This eerieness, the sense of emptiness I get from these things, I suspect, is an indication of seeing exactly what these simulcra are. There is nothing there - a CGI of a woman crying does not feel anything, nor does a painting of a woman crying. Nor, incidentally, does a character in a story about a a woman crying.

What feels something is the author who drew, or programmed, or wrote. And if they fail miserably at their job the coldness of the medium pops up. So, some CGI is uncanny because we see the mechanics of what is representing. These mechanics appropriately dehumanise what is not human.

I think.

This would suggest things stop being eerie over time. They stop being discomfiting (discomforting?). By mere repetition of stimuli, and the absence of reasons to scream, run away, have sex, the familiar follows the strange.

This could be all wrong, however. There may be an absolute boundary.

Uncanny Claymation
I have always had a deep-rooted and sincere horror of all claymation other than Aardman. Creature Comforts (home page, imdb entry) is one of my favourite shows (and I can see there's an American version. Good for them!). But ALL OTHER CLAY BASED ANIMATION IS HORRIBLE.

For example,

"Ca bhfuil Ruairi Crainn?" arsa Gregory Grainnoig. "Ca Bhfuil-" [trans. (from Irish, from Gaeilge): "Where is Rory the Tree?", said Gregory the Hedgehog. "Where is-"]. Aghhh! Stay the hell away from me, you creepy monochrome mud-thing!

This was never in any Bosco script, but it should have been, because all I could think, on watching that claymation (made from 'marla' , as it is called in Ireland), was: "Why is there something moving over their skin?"

What I'm talking about is, I think, a direct result of how I claymation works. You have the clay/plasticine molded on to a wire frame. You film the thing* in one position, and then another. But in the process, on a low budget and strict time scales, you can't let the clay really cool in between shots, so the clay becomes a bit soft. Your handprints appear on it, and the surface becomes mushed here, bunched there, in different places from shot to shot. As a result, in a clay animal's motion, its limbs would slightly change shape, indentations would appear and disappear across its artificial skin. That unintended motion looked as real as the rest of the illusionary motion. For a kid watching it that's pretty real.

I think this is another example, then, of the 'uncanny valley' but this time with no reference to modern CGI. And, boy, did I hate it - much much much more than any modern animation distortions (probably only because I'm about 5 times the age).

I think there's this valley in our 'Theory of Mind' (as mind-theorisers call it: see Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on folk psychology  and eliminative materialism): how we understand the thinking of what someone (or something) does. There's a point where something that acts human but isn't is believable, but bring it closer and closer to humanity and it goes....strange. But enough of that for now, as I really do need to sleep.

Brief note on cartoons
I should also write about the baffling and strange 'world' cartoons, i.e. not American, not Disney - although, even if they were Disney, they usually seemed wrong: everything seemed to bob up and down a little, like they were elastic; not Hanna Barbera cartoons, the monochrome ones, which also disappointed me (might as well have shown stills) and not. Looney Tunes, which were just brilliant.

These other cartoons popped up on Sunday afternoon on Irish Television. The conclusions I reached from watching these, as a child,  creeped me out about reality beyond my small town. So, I remember thinking one day, sitting by  myself on a summer day in the dining room, surrounded by copy books and dead flying ants (that's another story). So...children from other places like to watch....Autobahn? This was on a few times on 'Cartoon Time' ; also, one about a girl who melted because she cried so much.

But I won't now, because I'm very tired. Only had four hours sleep last night, for no good reason. (I don't have a social life anymore).

Oh! I can play Tetris now I've internet at home!

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So, at some point in animation, things stop looking like cartoons and start looking like something real but.....wrong. It's a fascinating fact of how we perceive things, and is undoubtedly tied up with the fact that, given a convoluted but otherwise featureless blob, we see no pattern, but put in a a dot at any point in the blob, and - wallah - a face. This is the phenomenon of pareidolia (wikipedia entry)). Consider this:

So.....is there a face here? Is there?










Now, consider these two, all just that above with an extra dot put inside the shape:













Do you see a face straightaway, or do you have to look? And what are you doing in either case? What could have such a face (that only a mother blob could love)?

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*I can't call them 'figures'. I can't reify them, 'bring them into the same world' as my own like that. I. Don't. Want. Them. Here.

(My childish nightmares were filled with the breathless chatter of the Tongue Twister Twins. You want an image of them? Luckily, I can't find any.)