Abstract
Self-affirmation. Self-evidencing. Self-creation. Self-location and perspective. Body ownership and agency. Free will. The self as a good regulator. The self’s blankie. Subjectivity of self-models. Phenomenal content and phenomenal affect. Virtual reality, real suffering. The third revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
St. Anselm’s argument dates back to the 11th century CE. For an overview of ontological arguments for the existence of God, see (Oppy, 2020). Williams (1962) offers a fascinating discussion of the concept of existence. In this connection, see also the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness — that is, the emptiness of absolute (as opposed to dependent) existence (Priest, 2009) — which comes up later in this chapter.
- 2.
Margolis (1964) offers an analysis of the cogito argument, as does Unger (1979), who opens with a quote from A. J. Ayer:
The sentence ‘I exist’, in this usage, may be allowed to express a statement which like other statements is capable of being either true or false. It differs, however, from most other statements in that if it is false it can not actually be made. Consequently, no one who uses these words intelligently and correctly can use them to make a statement which he knows to be false. If he succeeds in making the statement, it must be true.
- 3.
The phrase sentio, ergo sum is due to Johann Gottfried Herder (Sugiyama, 2019). For a psychological angle on this notion (in the context of motivation), see (Cantril, 1967). Modern computational treatments of the sense of existence are based on the concept of embodiment (Craig, 2002; Hohwy and Michael, 2017; Seth and Tsakiris, 2018).
- 4.
Here is how Locke puts it: “This Source of Ideas, every Man has wholly in himself … And though it be not Sense, as having nothing to do with external Objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be call’d internal Sense.” (Locke, 1690, II.1.iv). For a brief review of the medical history of the concept of self-feeling, see (Rzesnitzek, 2014). The health angle is discussed by Koban et al. (2021). Northoff and Panksepp (2008) expand the discussion to a “trans-species concept of self.” The identification by Solms (2019, p.7) of consciousness with “felt uncertainty” connects the concept of self-feeling with the predictive processing framework, which I discuss at length later in this chapter.
- 5.
Regarding the delusion of self-nonexistence (Cotard’s syndrome), see (Radovic, 2017).
- 6.
An even better analogy would be to the “dead man’s switch” that is sometimes installed on buses and trains and is designed to switch the engine off, unless the driver keeps pressing a special pedal.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
This, of course, is the evolutionary take on existence; subjective views, which weigh the agreeable aspects of existence (such as they are) against the suffering that invariably accompanies it, may differ. See (Edelman, 2020), ch. 12 (Existence) and ch. 32 (Suffering).
- 10.
There is no end to the philosophical debate about whether or not a thermostat can be conscious. I will not indulge in it here.
- 11.
Regarding the computational commonalities between “life-like” and “mind-like” systems, see (Seth and Tsakiris, 2018, p.979): “The deep physiological roots of instrumental inference gesture towards a […] connection between ‘life and ‘mind’ […] Our view suggests […] that there are intimate connections between the functional imperatives imposed by our physiological reality, by the drive to stay alive that animates all living creatures, and the predictive machinery that implements instrumental interoceptive inference.” Kauffman and Clayton (2006, pp.506-507) discuss the thermodynamics of minimally life-like “molecular autocatalytic systems.” Solms and Friston (2018) argue that the minimal thermodynamic requirements for being alive, when considered together with the endogenous nature of consciousness, constitute “sufficient conditions for attributing feeling to being.”
- 12.
Kauffman and Clayton (2006, p.519) define autopoiesis in terms of “the concept of the cycle of work: the constrained release of energy, and the use of work to construct those very constraints.” See also (Rudrauf et al., 2003; Kirchhoff, 2018; Allen and Friston, 2018; Miguel Signorelli and Meling, 2021).
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
A sleeping brain too can create a virtual world, a different one, when it dreams. A classic philosophical parable here is Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream (Cheng, 2014). See Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1971) novel The Lathe of Heaven for a fascinating fictional treatment and (Edelman, 2011) for the computational considerations that apply to any attempt to distinguish between dreaming (or simulation) and reality.
- 16.
- 17.
For a clinical presentation of the room tilt illusion, see (Sierra-Hidalgo et al., 2012); a detailed case study can be found in (Arntzen and Alstadhaug, 2020). The vestibular origins of this family of illusions are discussed in (Malis and Guyot, 2003). Tekgün and Erdeniz (2021) report the relative weighting of vestibular and visual cues.
- 18.
The source of the quote is La dioptrique by Descartes (1637). Note that the lens of the eye produces an image that is inverted both upside down and left to right.
- 19.
Dennett (1988) gets it just right: “Only a very naive view of visual perception could sustain the idea that one’s visual field has a property of right-side-upness or upside-downness independent of one’s dispositions to react to it — “intrinsic right-sideupness” we could call it.” Dolezal (1982) is a book-length report of experience with adaptation to inverting goggles.
- 20.
The rubber hand illusion was first reported by Botvinick and Cohen (1998).
- 21.
The same computational principles that make the rubber hand illusion possible apply also to tickling; Finlay (2019, p.4) describes “psychophysical demonstrations of how much and on what dimensions a pattern of stimulation can be distorted from one’s own movement to be adequately unpredictable to no longer count as ‘self’ and become tickle-inducing.”
- 22.
Here is a partial list of the recent reports on how our bodily self-perception can be subverted by combined visual and tactile stimulation: (Blanke et al., 2002; Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager et al., 2007; Blanke and Metzinger, 2009; Blanke, 2012; Guterstam et al., 2020). For an auditory counterpart, see (Lesur et al., 2021). Disorders of own body perception, such as somatoparaphrenia, are discussed in (Vallar and Ronchi, 2009).
- 23.
- 24.
Here is minimal agency in the words of Kauffman and Clayton (2006, p.505): “We shall call a system able to act on its own behalf an autonomous agent.” Similarly, Biehl et al. (2016) write: “First, define the spatiotemporal patterns which are suitable to represent both living (bacteria, animals, plants) and non-living (rocks, crystals) persistent objects. Then further classify those patterns into classes exhibiting features of agents such as perception, action and goal-directedness. Spatiotemporal patterns that satisfy all criteria will represent agents.”
- 25.
Buhrmann and Di Paolo (2017, p.218) argue in favor of the presence of agency and value judgment in single-cell animals:
These cells are agents in the sense that they can regulate interactions with their environment in a way that support their continued existence (e.g. by regulating osmotic pressure). Otherwise neutral external affairs thus gain a valenced status with respect to the cell. What is good or bad for it is not arbitrarily defined by an external observer, but is intrinsically determined by its processes of self-constitution.
- 26.
The comparator model of agency and body ownership is from (Gallagher, 2000, Fig.1). Buhrmann and Di Paolo (2017) offer a broader definition, according to which the sense of agency is “a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes.” For a robotics perspective, see (Hafner et al., 2020). The phenomenology of agency can be modulated by high-level cognitive processes: for instance, van der Weiden et al. (2011) found that causal knowledge affects self-agency experience.
- 27.
I am using “random” here to stand in for anything that is unpredictable. The prime example here is the randomness found in quantum physics and stochastic thermodynamics, but at the scale of biotic self-organisation too there is unpredictability, which is due to chaos (e.g., the exponential divergence of trajectories) in dynamical systems. Interestingly, this source of randomness arises from the particular nonlinearities that define biological systems, namely, solenoidal or conservative dynamics of oscillations, biorhythms, and life-cycles. Technically, these break detailed balance and thereby underwrite non-equilibria of the sort found in life.
- 28.
- 29.
The quote is from (Lem, 1984, p.88).
- 30.
See the story about Hodja Nasreddin’s cemetery encounter in (Edelman, 2020, ch.14).
- 31.
And perhaps not even that: a fully deterministic physics, which has no place for any randomness, has been outlined by Gerard ’t Hooft (2019).
- 32.
Here is Crutchfield (1994, p.26) on agency: “The goal for the agent is to detect the “hidden” states \(\mathbf {S} = \left \{S_0, S_1, \ldots , S_{V-1}\right \}\) in its sensory data stream that can help it predict the environment. The states so detected will be called “causal” states. For discrete time series a causal state is defined to be the set of subsequences that renders the future conditionally independent of the past.” Compare this to Rovelli’s (2020) remarks on the thermodynamics of agency: “The agent is here simply the place where we arbitrarily decide to start the sequence of correlations described by the laws we are interested in: it is, in other words, where we ignore previous physical links.” Note that the use of a personal pronoun (“we”) in this formulation is not essential: it can be rephrased in entirely impersonal terms.
- 33.
As Wittgenstein (1958, 621) noted, “…[V]oluntary movement is marked by the absence of surprise.”
- 34.
- 35.
In contrast, Block (2011) claims that “perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access.”
- 36.
Importantly, unlike in the Cartesian Theater scenario lampooned by Dennett (1991), where a homunculus is watching a presentation staged by the sensory processes, here all the components of what I call the “spectacle in the head” — including the audience — are virtual.
- 37.
- 38.
This quote is from Still et al. (2012, p.120604).
- 39.
- 40.
- 41.
I first came across a reference to the original Good Regulator paper (Conant and Ashby, 1970) while reading (Metzinger, 2003). Scholten (2010) has a detailed analysis of Conant and Ashby’s original proof, as well as a discussion of the relationship of their concept of optimal regulation to homeostasis and to the reduction of uncertainty. Eykhoff (1994) examines various control schemes in light of the Good Regulator theorem. Raut et al. (2020) have recently invoked it in the context of brain dynamics.
- 42.
A definition of the concept of entropy can be found in any textbook on thermodynamics or information theory. Sinai (1959) applies it to dynamical systems.
- 43.
In the by now familiar terminology of conditional probability, we can say that the agent’s states, which are internal to the blanket, are conditionally independent of the (rest of the) world’s states, as long as the blanket states are known. A recent must-read on Markov blankets is (Bruineberg et al., 2021), where an important distinction is made between inference with a model and inference in a model (“The agent does not have a model of its environment that it uses to perform inference, but rather the agent is a model of its environment (Friston 2013; Bruineberg, Kiverstein, and Rietveld 2018; Friston 2019; Baltieri and Buckley 2019).”) Note that the concept of Markov blanket is symmetrical with respect to the inside and the outside of the set of blanket variables. Insofar as it does not bestow a privileged status to “subject” over “object” variables, it is thus somewhat reminiscent of the non-duality thesis in Yogācāra and related schools of Buddhism (e.g., Mackenzie, 2018).
- 44.
- 45.
Limanowski and Blankenburg (2013) highlight “the potential power of the FEP [Free Energy Principle] in explaining the mechanisms underlying minimal selfhood and its key constituents, multisensory integration, interoception, agency, perspective, and the experience of mineness.”
- 46.
Kirchhoff and van Es (2021) mount a “universal ethology challenge to the free energy principle”; they also discuss the concept of good regulator as it applies in this context.
- 47.
As pointed out by Karl Friston (personal communication), what minimizing surprise through action looks like from the point of view of a behavioral psychologist is exactly reinforcement learning — a key concept, which appears in this book throughout chapters 1–3. In other words, if we associate surprising outcomes with those outcomes that a creature like me tends to avoid, by minimizing surprise it will look as if I am seeking reward or averting surprising (bad), aversive outcomes. On this view, reinforcement learning is an emergent property of self-evidencing when one replaces rewarding outcomes with the kind of outcomes that I find unsurprising and expect myself to encounter.
- 48.
This evolutionary argument is presented in (Edelman, 2015).
- 49.
- 50.
Metzinger (2003, p.553) writes: “I claim that phenomenal first-person experience works like a total flight simulator.”
- 51.
I offer this conclusion tentatively, as it is based on an informal appeal to the Good Regulator theorem. A formal proof would have to be based on an expanded version of the theorem, which would explicitly allow for the regulator’s inclusion in the regulated system.
- 52.
For a definition of the product of dynamical systems, see for instance (Nghiem, 1973).
- 53.
The dizzying prospect of infinite regress that is inherent in any attempt to include a model of the self in one’s model of the world may be an answer to what Chalmers (2018) called the “meta-problem of consciousness.” This consists in accounting for the widespread intuition (which I do not share) that reducing consciousness to properties of matter presents a uniquely “hard problem” (Chalmers, 1995). Clark et al. (2019) offer an alternative answer to the meta-problem, based on the view of the brain as a hierarchical inference and prediction engine.
- 54.
- 55.
See (Scholten, 2010, pp.15-17).
- 56.
- 57.
- 58.
Hence the inscription gnothi seauton (“know thyself”) above the entrance to the Delphic oracle’s cave. Similar sentiments are found in classical Chinese philosophy, e.g., (Lao Tze (Laozi), 1904, 33): “knowing others is wisdom; knowing the self is enlightenment”; and Buddhism, where mindfulness is defined as “complete self-mastery by means of self-knowledge” (Eliot, 1921, X).
- 59.
- 60.
- 61.
The William James quote is from (James, 1904).
- 62.
- 63.
- 64.
Smolin (2020) continues: “We posit that space is not present at the fundamental level of description, but is emergent, together with the relative positions of the various subsystems.” Note that here I am not concerned with ontology, merely with epistemology, which corresponds roughly to the Yogācāra stance on these matters (e.g., Mackenzie, 2018).
- 65.
For an brief overview of relational quantum mechanics, see (Rovelli, 2018).
- 66.
Fernandez Velasco and Loev (2020, p.23) write:
AIT’s [Affective Inference Theory] central tenet is that the valence of affective experiences corresponds to Expected Rate, so that positive (negative) feelings correspond to Expected Rate being positive (negative). According to AIT, Expected Rate is the mark of the affective.
In addition, the precision (inverse variance) of the error estimate is important: according to Fernandez Velasco and Loev (2020, p.6), it “serves then as a form of weighting when the system is deciding the degree to which the current hypothesis should be updated in light of incoming Error — highly precise Error will play a larger role in driving hypothesis updating. Accordingly, the brain is always trying to optimise precision, which is conducive to Error minimisation over time. In the PP literature, this process of precision-optimisation is what defines attention (Hohwy, 2012).”
- 67.
- 68.
The deep conceptual connections among uncertainty, surprise, and the exploration-exploitation dilemma are discussed in (Barto et al., 2013; Schwartenbeck et al., 2013). In a recent study that combined imaging with computational modeling, Cockburn et al. (2022) had participants choose between options that varied in terms of novelty, uncertainty, and expected reward, while the task horizon was being manipulated between trials. The results suggested three independent computational processes at work: reward seeking, novelty seeking, and uncertainty aversion. These were subject to timing constraints: on the one hand, the subjects adaptively evaluated the benefit of reducing uncertainty and were less likely to choose uncertain options as the prospective advantage of additional information declines; on the other hand, despite the inherent uncertainty of novel options, these were pursued regardless of the task horizon (Cockburn et al., 2022, p.2701).
- 69.
This is the central thesis of The Happiness of Pursuit (Edelman, 2012).
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Edelman, S. (2023). Self-Consciousness. In: The Consciousness Revolutions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24012-6_3
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