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!

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?

Hallucinations and Perceiving

These last posts show that I am preoccupied about what we experience when we imagine something.

This is because I feel compelled to believe that we do experience something; - further, that what we experience is something complex; - further again, that the complexity of what we experience when we imagine something is in some sort of way like the complexity we experience when we perceive it: when we see/hear/taste/smell/touch, and so on. And this 'in some way like' seems to me best understood as what we experience resembles what we experience when we see, etc.

So, being less abstract, I feel compelled to believe that what we experience on imagining a ghost resembles what we would experience when we see a ghost.

This gives a reason why what we might call 'powerful' imaginings -   hallucinations, particular fantasies, affecting dreams - seem to us to be actual perceptions.

But doing this raises all sorts of challenges, the sorts of challenges I've been looking at:

• If we believe that there are only physical things, i.e., only what occupies some physical space exists, then whatever we experience when we hallucinate has to occupy physical space. 
• However, if it is true that we experience something blue when we see a little blue skittle 'meep' man (if I can call it that; see the first season of '30 Rock') and 
• If it is true that what we experience on hallucinating a blue man is the same as what we experience on seeing a blue man, 

                        then

• We must experience something blue on hallucinating a blue man.

But, then, what is this blue thing we are experiencing? And where is it?

That's been the problem so far.

Disjunctivism
But maybe there is another way of approaching hallucinations.

The philosophical position of disjunctivism is that hallucinations are not anything like perceptions. A visual hallucination of a  blue man is not at all like seeing a blue man. We experience something when we see the man but we don't necessarily experience something, or experience at least anything like a man, when we hallucinate one. So, forget about it. 

This answer is like the answer to what happens when we imagine (last post).

But, like there, we have this problem:  whoever hallucinates a little blue man will say that it's like seeing a little blue man. So why do they do it.

• One answer is this: the issue is with their beliefs about what's going on - that's where it goes wrong. 

• Or, maybe, we're not sure if it was like actually seeing it - but it's the only way we can describe it. We are, to use a phrase Wittgenstein is famous for, 'tempted to say' that visual hallucinations are like seeing,etc...

Projectivism
In 2005, the Sydney-based philosopher Philip Chaurd argued that this is just what happens when we believe we see, hear, etc., i.e., we perceive, the temporal order of things, e.g., hearing one note after another, a C followed by a G. That we seem to hear this change in notes gives rise to the doctrine of the specious present, the most contemporary understanding of which is that we see, hear, etc. a duration because we see, hear, etc., a temporally ordered change  (I discuss this in depth in in my doctoral thesis). But this idea of the 'specious present' has raised all sorts of issues over the ages, issue that seem to require metaphysical thought.  And some philosophers deny that we do perceive a duration or an ordered change. But then why do we think perceive this sort of thing?

Chuard's answer, if I understand it right, is that, from our belief that (i) what we perceive, which is not change ,and (ii) beliefs that our perceptions have changed,

We 'project' to the belief that (iii) we have perceived a change.

I think. I'm not sure. I don't know what 'projections' from beliefs are exactly, or what they are supposed to do in theories of perceptions, or what they save us from in the discussion (this Wikipedia entry is the most collated entry on projectivism I can find). If they are projections as Hume describes them...they suggest a 'beaming out',  like a film projector, of something from the mind onto things in the physical world - which, taken

• - Literally, is weird. However, weirdness should be no barrier to philosophy; the world seems to be weird if you think enough about it.  The problem here is that it is not helpful to think of it as a literal projection: the 'something' and its properties still exist, e.g., if I project a little blue man-like thing into the world from my beliefs - there is a...well...a little blue man-like thing in the world.                                          This is like projecting an image onto a cinema screen. What is projected onto the screen is, in an important way, actually on the screen. Sure, a thirty-foot Liv Tyler's face isn't there in the cinema, on the screen, but blue, pink and brown colours, and two-dimensional shapes are up there.  And these - the properties of the image of Tyler's face - are what is projected.
• - Metaphorically, is no help either. What is the metaphrand (a term from Julian Jaynes) of the projection metaphor. That is, what is it that we are describing metaphorically as a projection? It's a 'belief' doesn't, I think, answer this question at all.

In any case, for change at least, it's not my view. My own work undermines the central assumption that we don't perceive change. My own work isn't out yet, though - it's to be published soon in the Journal of Consciousness Studies - so I wouldn't expect anyone to be considering it.

Anyhow, we might be able to say this sort of thing with hallucinations, dreams, etc.   But we might say of all these trauma-induced memory hallucinations, and those caused  by drugs, and maybe those suffering from conditions such as a schizophrenia, or dreams, etc., that they don't see, hear, etc. anything. People are just delusional here - they think they saw something under the influence of drugs but they saw nothing; they did not see. All is good.

And, anyway, how imagining seems is very different to hallucinating, dreaming, etc.

With hallucinating, dreams, etc., what we experience seems to be real.  But with imagining, is this true? Couldn't we say that what we experience doesn't seem real?

This is something Julia Jansen has raised with me.

Images, imagining and remembering

Whether I like it or not, I often think of myself as somewhere other than here. I don't live only in the present. I'm not a tree either: I'm not rooted to this spot; I have been in at least one other place, even if it is only where I was born. So when I think about myself, who and what I am, I do not think only of myself at this moment in this place. Instead, I think of myself as I am at different times and places.

I am not all here in another important way: many things that occupy my thoughts and a lot of situations in which I see myself are not real – or, at least, are not obviously real. I think about the future, I imagine it, I worry about it, but I never, in doing so, am actually there in it; I don't even know if I will be in it. I might think of tomorrow as another dull guilt-ridden day in my home-town but it might not be. It might be nothing for me because I might die tonight. Tomorrow might never come.

I also remember scenes, books and films which are entirely fictional. And I day-dream. I imagine conversations I should have had, killer lines I should have said, relationships I ought to have avoided, and situations I would like to be in; yet, although I think of myself as in them, I know that these can never occur. Still, I fill some of my time with them, often for the pleasure of doing it, but I sometimes even when doing so can only cause me pain. The imagination is not always under one's control (or....else....I'm a masochist).

When I do imagine some of these scenarios, or worry about the future, or relive the past, I can get lost. I can forget where I am now. I'm walking down a street thinking about the last time I was in Cork - who I talked to, what we said - and I'm imagining what I could have said otherwise, then I realize I've already walked by my destination at the bank. I was so obsorbed in my reminiscence that I hadn't noticed.

This is something that commonly happens to all of us, but I still find certain features of it curious. I don't find my failure to notice the bank curious; one could easily think of that as a failure - the failure to notice something - a failure to experience something. What I find more curious is what, we might say, I was experiencing when I was so distracted. What do I experience when I am so deeply remembering or imagining? Do I experience anything at all?

Pictures in the Head

According to the psychologist Kosslyn, when people imagine things there really is something they are aware of. And what they are aware of is something like their perception of the external world. There are features to what we imagine that are not just hearing our own voices describing them (internally or externally), i.e., imagining is more like looking at pictures than thinking with words. There is something it is like to imagine something which is not just saying what you imagine. (e.g., Kosslyn, S. Thompson, W.L. 2006. 'The case for mental imagery.' Oxford, Oxford University Press)

The idea is that people have a mental image or mental picture in their mind when they imagine something, and we seem able to do things with that image which we can do with objects in the world: we seem able to stand back from it,change our perspective on it, add features to it, and even discover features of it which are not obvious when we first think it. Try it for yourself to see if you agree, e.g., imagine a blue square. Cover it in red polka dots. Next, put a rabbit on it. Now, what colour is the rabbit? How big is it in comparison to the blue square? Now put a leprachaun beside the rabbit - which is bigger? What's the leprachaun's expression? Imagine the leprachaun laughs - what does it sound like? How does the rabbit react?

Whatever it is that might happen when we imagine something, it does seem as if we have mental images or sensations when we remember. But how are such images and sensations related to what we perceive, i.e., to what we see, hear, and so on? The seventeenth-century philosopher David Hume thought that the sensations or experiences which we have when we imagine or remember something are distinguishable from those of perceptions by being less vivid than what we perceive. Other thinkers actually deny Kosslyn-type positions, i.e., that we have some kind of experience when we imagine or remember; I'll discuss that below. But if we do experience something when we imagine or remember, it may seem as if there is at least a difference in vividness. But I do not think so, for the following reason.

Many people who suffer particularly traumatic events often report remembering the events so vividly that it as if they are seeing what happened, hearing what happened, feeling what happened all over again. One example is discussed on 2007's BBC radio 4's 'The Memory Experience': a fire officer suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after a particular fire suddenly found himself reliving it - hearing the sirens, seeing the lights - when he saw a flashing blue light in his back garden (I think it was a faulty burglar alarm 'The Making of Memory: Is it Better to Forget Trauma?'). Chicago Public Radio's 'This American Life' (October 23rd, 2009) tells the story of a man who escaped arrest by the law for murder – but didn't escape his own conscience; in the years following, he could not forget his crime, and sometimes 'replayed' the events so vividly that it seemed to him as if the images of it were playing on the blank wall of his room, even though he was awake (I lump dreaming under imagining in this discussion).

Under vivid memories, I would also add in another very unusual and famous class of sensation and experience, one which is famous in contemporary literature on consciousness - phantom limbs. This is where an amputee still feels the amputated limb as if it is still there, even though it is gone. Again, what could only be something remembered seems to be perceived.

So what we remember seems to be something that could be as vivid as what we perceive - but there is also what we experience when we are only imagining, when what we may sense of experience is not happening and never was happening. People also report powerfully vivid experiences of what seems to them to be real but which is not, i.e., hallucinations (e.g., see the opening chapters in Julian Jaynes' 'The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'). A most common kind of hallucination is auditory hallucination, in particular hearing voices (information and support on this, see the 'Hearing Voices' website; also, recent research suggests this is more common than one might think (BBC, 18th September, 2006)).

Another example might seem obvious: what we experience when we dream. Unless we believe that we literally travel to some other place when we dream, we are experiencing things which are not actually in the world around us now, and in many cases never were - but still, we often believe they are happening.

Lastly, there are numerous illusions which show phantom motion, colour, that seem to be of seeing things out there - on the computer screen, etc - which are just not there (see Michael Bach's webpage).

All of these situations seem to be demonstrating that, first, when we remember or imagine something, it can be just the same as actually perceiving it; this suggests that we experience something like what we see, hear, taste, etc., when we imagine things. In addition, as with the guilt-ridden man or people who know what they're seeing is an illusion, we can know what we are imagining or remembering is not really perceiving it, yet still it can be as vivid as it.

What about where you voluntarily imagine or remember? Can you remember the blue of this summer's sky? Have you ever had that experience where you can suddenly remember exactly the touch of someone you once loved? Can you recall the taste of refresher bars or your own blood? (I take it you're not tasting either of these right now). Or let's be more mundane: do you remember the circle you had to draw with a compass in maths class? I can see myself now: sticking its tip into the paper and turning it unevenly in my hand. The spike is barely stuck into the paper; the gold-coloured metal is cool and the pencil scrapes and wobbles along the page.

This resemblance is not so clear when you voluntarily remember or imagine; in this case you might think that there is a difference in the vividness of remembering/imagining and perceiving. But don't you still experience something in these cases - in some way taste, hear, see, when you remember or imagine? When you imagine seeing a square box, you may not be seeing an actual square box - that is, something that is sitting somewhere in the world - what you see may not be very clear, but isn't there in some way an actual square? Aren't I in some way experiencing a square?

There are problems with that.