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The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
Questions
Main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it. In other, more metaphorical, words, the central claim of this book is that as you read these lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain. rel:Disorientated
In complex domains, as historical experience shows, scientific breakthroughs are frequently achieved simply by stumbling onto highly relevant data, rather than by carrying out rigorously systematized research programs. Insight often comes as a surprise.
Analytical scholasticism - Arrogant armchair theorizing, at the same time ignoring first person phenomenological and third person empirical constraints in the formation of one’s basic conceptual tools.
Many philosophers are superb at analyzing deeper structures of language, and fall in the trap of analyzing the conscious mind as if it were itself a linguistic entity, based not on dynamical self-organization in the human being, but a disembodied system of rule-based information processing.
Tools
Mental representation is a process by which some biosystems generate an internal depic- tion of parts of reality.
Phenomenal self-consciousness generates “inwardness.”
In artificial intelligence research, in cognitive science, and in many neuroscientific subdisciplines, the concept of representation today plays a central role in theory formation. One must not, however, over- look the fact that this development has led to a semantic inflation of the term, which is more than problematic.
If we presuppose an externalist theory of meaning and the first insights of dynamicist cognitive science then the physical representa- tum, the actual “vehicle” of representation, does not necessarily have its boundaries at our skin. For instance, perceptual representational processes can then be conceived of as highly complex dynamical interactions within a sensorimotor loop activated by the system and sustained for a certain time. In other words, we are systems which generate the intentional content of their overall representational state by pulsating into their causal interaction space by, as it were, transgressing their physical boundaries and, in doing so, extracting information from the environment.
NOTE
phenomenological fallacy from Place
the mistaken assumption that one’s introspective observations report ‘literal properties of objects and events on a peculiar sort of internal cinema or television screen.’
Two levels of representation - one constituted of the linguistic reference to phenomenal states. The second level of representation is constituted by the phenomenal experience itself. My thesis is that there is an intimate connection between those two levels of representation and that philosophy of mind should not confine itself to an investigation of the first level of representation alone.
rel: Bug on Sensor?
If I look into a red flash, close my eyes, and then experience a green afterimage, this does not mean that a nonphysical object possessing the property of “greenness” has emerged.
The “nowness” of the book in your hands is itself an internally constructed kind of representational content; it is not actuality simpliciter, but actuality as represented. The phenomenal now is itself a representational con- struct, a virtual presence.
one can for the first time start to grasp the fact of what it means to say that phenomenal space is a virtual space; its content is a possible reality.
Introspectability as Attentional Availability
Karl Jaspers called Vollzugsbewusstsein, “executive” consciousness, the untranscendable experience of the fact that the initiation, the directedness, and the constant sustaining of attention is an inner kind of action, an activity that is steered by the phenomenal subject itself. However, internal attention must not be interpreted as the activity of a homunculus directing the beam of a flashlight consisting of his already existing consciousness toward different internal objects and thereby transforming them into phenomenal individuals
Rather, introspection is a subpersonal process of representational resource allocation taking place in some information-processing systems. Introspection is metarepresentation.
Introspection types
- Introspection 1 - (external attention). Introspection1 is subsymbolic metarepresentation operating on a preexisting, coherent world-model. This type of introspection is a phe- nomenal process of attentionally representing certain aspects of an internal system state, the intentional content of which is constituted by a part of the world depicted as external.
- Introspection 2 - (consciously experienced cognitive reference) - refers to conceptual form of metarepresentation operating on a pre-existing coherent model of the world. Epistemic Seeing is an example.
- Introspections 3 - (inward attention, and inner perception) - inward directed attention.
- Introspection 4 - (consciously, experienced cognitive self reference) - all situation which we think about ourselves as ourselves (what philosophers called I*-thoughts)
Epistemic Seeing
Consider an infant’s visual experience of a piano: it sees the piano, but it doesn’t see it as a piano. To put it another way, the infant doesn’t see that it is a piano. The distinction between these two ways of seeing an object expresses the purported difference between epistemic and non-epistemic perception. Most philosophers accept the idea that some perceptual experiences (or aspects of them) are non-epistemic, to the extent that we perceive objects without noticing or recognizing certain of their properties. Defenders of the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic perception emphasize the idea that epistemic perception involves perceiving an object as having certain properties, such that one’s experience can provide the basis for beliefs and knowledge of the object. For those who hold that perception is only epistemically relevant to the extent that in involves entertaining propositions, a commitment to epistemic perception entails that perceptual experience is a propositional attitude. Others who believe that perceptual experience of an object does not require entertaining any propositions (either because experience is non-conceptual, or perhaps entirely non-representational), need not reject the idea of epistemic perception, however. What is needed on such views is an account of which properties of a perceived object are presented in a perceiver’s experience, which might be articulated in terms of which properties are attended to or available for reasoning and short-term memory.
Availability For Cognitive Processing
I can only deliberately think about those things I also consciously experience. Only phenomenally represented information can become the object of cognitive reference, thereby entering into thought processes which have been voluntarily initiated. Let us call this the “principle of phenomenal reference” from now on.
We can only form conscious thoughts about something that has been an element of our phenomenal model of reality before (introspection).
A blindsight patient, suffering from life-threatening thirst while unconsciously perceiving a glass of water within his scotoma, that is, within his experiential “blind spot,” is not able to initiate a grasping or reaching movement directed toward the glass.