Is there an essential distinction between experienced and observed consciousness?

Question

The belief that there is somehow a fundamental, essential, or irreducible distinction between the so-called first-person and the third-person perspectives on consciousness seems to me a metaphysical dogma that prevents those who adhere to it from developing (or coming to an agreement about) a scientific theory of consciousness (self-awareness, experiential consciousness). It seems to me that as long as we hold to that dogma, no scientific, comprehensive, physicalist or computational theory is ever possible, since the dogma seems to entail an in principle unsolvable, metaphysical problem of Other Minds.

But I wonder

What if our experience of our own consciousness is not essentially different from our observation (or our attribution, our so-called inference) of consciousness in other creatures who are suffiently similar to us, like other humans? What if there is no essential difference between self-observation and other-observation, but just differences in (for example) amount of available data?

The question could also be asked, instead, about sentience.

It seems to me we could take the implied position (there is no essential difference) as a starting point, and then see what we can do with it; see, if it's more fruitful than the opposite starting point. Alternatively, we could also try to argue directly for the implied position. One challenge in both cases may be explaining the (what I think is mostly an illusionary) experience of immediacy and/or showing what is illusionary in that presumably immediate, presumably "transparent" experience.

Who are the most important current philosophers or scientists who have advocated that this dogma is indeed an unwarranted or unfruitful dogma (similar to what I'm suggesting here)? Is it possible to concisely summarize their main approaches and arguments?

Answer 1

The first and third-person characterizations of experience are synonyms for the mind-body duality. The mind and introspection are private and inaccessible to others, while the body is public and accessible. The body is the source of our empirical data (if you choose to continue with that old-fashioned conception of senses), and the mind is the source of our rational life.

Given the duality of the first-person and third-person, just like mind and body, one has to either accept or reject it, and if reject it, decide if a monist metaphysics is the answer or perhaps accept a third category of experience. Descartes is, of course, famous for his dualism. Dennett sees only the third-person approach as relevant and declares first-person experience an illusion. Kant famously declared the transcendence of a third category in his transcendent idealism. Berkeley famously eliminated the physical with what is now called subject idealism. Chalmers is a property-dualist and is therefore a monist.

You ask:

(Is) [p]hilosophical dogma hindering scientific progress?

I suspect of greater hindrance to scientific progress is scientific dogma. The history of science and a social science perspective of the philosophy of science show us that scientific progress is often stymied not by dogmatic philosophers, but dogmatic scientists, the latter often having little training and no interest in philosophy at all. In fact, it might be a current scientific dogma that metaphysical speculation is a foolish endeavor and a waste of time, since many scientists don't quite understand that all knowledge is infused and affected by philosophical reasoning.

And it might be inaccurate to characterize the advancements in consciousness studies as being slow to make progress. Right now, two prominent theories are the Integrated Information Theory and the Global Workspace Theory and are being debated. Techniques like fMRIs continue to drive cognitive neuroscience forward in accumulating a range and understanding of neural correlates of consciousness. And new techniques will doubtless be applied, such as the increasing power of CRISPR to conduct ethological studies of consciousness.

So, yes, scientists on the whole struggle with, not so much with philosophical dogma, but philosophical ignorance. Science Guy Bill Nye once declared war on philosophy, for instance, only to retreat. But, it would be better to characterize scientists as suffering from a lack of progress not from philosophical dogma, but a dogma about the power of philosophy. And one might be left to wonder, if a scientist dogmatically thinks philosophy is waste of time, how accurate can there accounting of consciousness really be when so much of our conscious energies when thinking are engaged in philosophical thinking.

Answer 2

You present your post in a setting with a strong bias.

But the distinction between the two ways of accessing internal experiences – first-person stance and third person stance – is not a dogma from metaphysics. It is a fact, that these two methods provide distinct data: Data about subjective experience on one hand, and on the other hand data from neuroscience, which are measured in an objective way.

1. A first step tries to fit these data and to interpret them as originating from the same source. That’s the positive message: We have two different methods of access to explain a given mental phenomenon.

   But it creates the severe problem to integrate the experience of free will with the principle of causality.

2. This problem is unsolved, but I do not consider the problem to be unsolvable. Also on this blog there are several post which document some progress to solve the problem. I favour the approach of Peter Bieri from the philosophical side and Kevin Mitchell from the viewpoint of biology.

3. Your post states that the “dogma” of distinctness

   “seems to entail an in principle unsolvable, metaphysical problem of Other Minds."

   But you do not provide any argument for this claim of unsolvability.

   Unfortunately you also do not provide any argument for your proposed solution: To just declare both perspectives to be identical.

   Why should it be more fruitful to negate the difference between the two perspectives?

I am curious to learn about about your ideas. And I would welcome a presentation which is more elaborate and introduces new ideas by supporting arguments.

Answer 3

The distinction between first person and third person accounts is evidently flawed because every account has an author, an "accountant". There is no such thing as a view from nowhere. All "third person accounts" are in fact first person accounts trying to hide their origin. However, I don't see this distinction as a "dogma". It's not enforced on anyone, as a dogma would be. It's just a blind spot (see below).

Is it slowing down progress on understanding the mind scientifically? Possibly, inasmuch as a clear conceptualization of a problem is necessary for its resolution. I suppose it would help if the most confused neuroscientists out there had a clearer idea of what they are trying to do.

The only philosopher I know of, who wrote about this, is Michel Bitbol. See his paper: Consciousness and the Blind Spot of Science. Bitbol states the glaringly obvious: that science is an activity of the human mind, a first-person job. But he also explains why we came to forget this obvious truth, i.e. what created the blind spot. The seer is never seen, and the goal of science is precisely to forget the seer, to abstract from individual perception into general truths.

In this framework, third-person accounts are an ideal of sorts, something which we will never reach, although our progress in this direction might be useful. What actually exists are first-person accounts agreed to by many people. In other words, objectivity is an impossible ideal but we can approach it through intersubjectivity.

Answer 4

David Chalmers (9 pages):

https://consc.net/papers/oxford1.pdf

[W]e must reconcile the third-person and first-person views of mentality.

We have three things between which we must find the relationship:

1. the brain
2. the mind which we experience (first-person)
3. the mind which the brain perceives (third-person)

One would hope at least for an identity between (2) and (3). This way it would be seen that the first-person and third-person views are truly inseparable.

The way I see it: We believe from investigations of brains, dead bodies, and living bodies that the brain somehow generates the mind via a physiological process. I don't know why this is called Third-Person. All such investigation, concepts, and beliefs exist only as a subset of my first-person experience.

The Inner Light Theory of Consciousness:

https://www.dspguide.com/InnerLightTheory/paper.htm

Now we make the critical assertion regarding consciousness: the first-person and third-person perspectives view the mind differently because there is an Information-Limited Subreality separating them. The first-person view is inherently from the inside of this Information-Limited Subreality, while the third-person view is from the outside. Introspection is the inner observer, while the world of science is the outer observer.

As I recall (perhaps in error) author Steven W. Smith does not explicitly describe the concept of an information limited subreality derived from thought experiments of Galileo and Einstein. Both performed thought experiments in which the human observer, or the acceleration detection device, exists inside a closed cabin with no information about external reality, that is, inside an information-limited subreality.

Galileo had his Observer inside a closed cabin on a ship sailing in a straight line at constant speed on a perfectly smooth sea. He argued that such Observer could perform no experiment to prove or demonstrate whether the ship was at rest or in uniform motion. Einstein put the Observer inside a closed box similar to an elevator. He argued that the Observer could not determine the whether the external cause of measured acceleration was due to a uniform external gravity field or due to the constant force of a rocket increasing the speed of the elevator box in isolated outer space.

So-called Third Person models of physics, thought experiments, information-limited subrealities, brains, dead bodies, other minds, and such concepts, are all contemplated in the context of my first-person experience. I find it more compelling to recognize first-person experience as an information-limited subreality; so-called third-person concept as a subset of first-person; and what ultimately exists apart from my first-person experience is a great mystery.

Answer 5

My view is that there is no problem of other minds. Other minds can reasonably be inferred. The alternative is senseless. There is no hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness is universal. Therefore, it is impossible for an event to be unobserved. The dogma of physicalism is indeed hindering scientific progress. It seems to me that neutral monist panpsychism challenges this dogma. One caveat is that the term consciousness is in fact a spectrum from awareness to sentience to self-consciousness. See Bertrand Russell, Galen Strawson, David Chalmers, Philip Goff.

Answer 6

"Fundamental" "Essential" "Irreducible" are different words with different nuances.

When(if) you see a person who can read your mind as easily as you read a book,
in a very empiric and pragmatic way knows you better than you know or have ever known yourself,
you know in a completely inarguable way that there is a Oth person view prior to the 1st person view. We may not have access to it (from our seemingly irreducible 1st person perspective) but it's obviously there.

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Note: This is also the strongest refutation of the cartesian assumptions that lead to solipsism as an inexorable philosophical conclusion

Answer 7

My eyes always glaze over terms like "fundamental" and "essential". Philosophers do seem to like such terms, but what precisely those actually mean seems elusive.

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There are varying views about consciousness, even among scientists. If you're talking about an irreducible distinction between consciousness and what we observe, that's presumably dualism.

On that note, we have managed to reduce consciousness down to different physical components, we have shown how damage to the brain directly affects conscious experience, we've shown how various substances do the same, along with showing a well-evidenced path of the natural development from single-celled organisms to human with human brains.

Given all of the above, it's not surprising that the non-physical views of consciousness are losing popularity among scientists and among the general populace. Rates of theism, while distinct from dualism, is a pretty good indication of this... although both of these things are also strongly affected by whether religious claims can stand up to scrutiny.

If there were a dogma towards dualism that's precluding scientific advancement, we wouldn't expect as many of the advancements above.

Such a dogma may be more common in the general populace. A neuroscientist will have a hard time doing their job if they hold that consciousness is irreducible... given that their job is literally the reduction of consciousness.

If there were a dogma against dualism (or against theism or against the supernatural), we'd expect to see some evidence of this, which I haven't seen (although those who think there is such a dogma would presumably say I'm adhering to it too... which is an easy way to dismiss the arguments against claims you make). The typical arguments I've heard along these lines is that study of the supernatural is dismissed or looked down upon, but the response to that is that said study is based on unsupported presuppositions, it follows methodology that varies from questionable to atrocious, or it outright lies about things (scientists look down upon bad science). When good methodology is followed, the supernatural claims cannot be verified, or are falsified.

Non-metaphysical distinctions

It's probably fair to say there's an epistemic distinction between experienced and observed consciousness (solipsism) - the only thing you have direct experience of is your first-person experience. Everything else is inferred. But this doesn't necessarily mean there's a metaphysical distinction there.

Maybe there's also some categorical distinction between observer and what is observed, but this also doesn't translate to a metaphysical distinction.

The shifting window of supernatural claims

There's an interesting side note here about the shifting window of supernatural claims.

You'd probably have been burnt at the stake a thousand years ago, had you dared to utter things that are widely accepted facts (even among dualists) about consciousness and the origins of humans, life, Earth and the universe in the modern day (although some of those things are less widely accepted than others).

You may have received a similar response some time before that, had you dared to hypothesise that weather is caused by natural processes and not by gods, or that viruses and bacteria cause disease, instead of gods, or that we're just some speck in a vast universe. It wasn't that long ago that someone challenging the idea that Earth was the center of the universe wasn't received well.

The dogma has always been in favour of supernatural claims. We've shown that those claims don't hold water, and that's been met with accusations that the dogma has flipped to be against supernatural claims, but those accusations don't hold much water either. The evidence just isn't on their side.

Scientific ignorance of philosophy?

It's probably fair to say scientists would benefit from knowing some basics of philosophy.

Similar to how a builder might benefit from knowing the basics of chemistry and physics. A builder may know a whole lot about weight distribution and load and effects of wind and the weight capacity of various materials and how they are affected by various things. Such a person may be a great builder 99.9% of the time, but there may be some rare edge cases where a lack of knowledge of the underlying foundation of all of that (chemistry and physics) may lead them to the wrong conclusions about how buildings would behave in some unexpected circumstances.

Following the scientific method and Occam's razor is going to lead to good science almost all the time. But if you don't understand the underlying philosophical foundation, you might miss the mark in some rare cases.

But I'd say that probably carries a bigger risk of supernatural claims sneaking in, more than anything else. Although I've also seen some scientists criticise supernatural proponents for the wrong reasons, e.g. dishonesty instead of cognitive bias... but that may be more about psychology than philosophy.