John Stuart Mill's Mother

... you wouldn't know he had one, from his Autobiography (which I just finished reading), other than that he mentions the presence of younger siblings and, in passing, his father's marriage. Pages containing the word "father" in the Autobiography: 127. Pages containing the word "mother": 1 (in reference to someone else's mother).

Biographers seem to conclude that Mill's mother had little influence on him (e.g., Wilson in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Mill) -- but I don't think that follows at all. A Google search of Harriet Barrow Mill doesn't reveal much; she seems to be lost in the dust of time.

Worried about the University of California?

... this graph says it all. The blue line is below the yellow line because the blue line indicates the national average for all public higher education, including lower tier universities and two-year community colleges.


Source: http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?p=314

Professorial Product Placement

Viewing the latest Lady Gaga video, with its ten product placements, I'm inspired by the thought: Why don't professors do product placements, too?

Actually, this first occurred to me a couple years ago, when I noticed Andy Clark sipping a Monster energy drink while speaking before a large audience at a plenary session of the biennial Tucscon Toward a Science of Consciousness conference. Naturally -- I dare say inevitably -- I thought to myself: "Hey, Monster energy drinks must be cool if Andy Clark is drinking one. I should go out and buy one now! I wonder how much Monster would pay me to drink one at my plenary session?" (Admittedly, my experience at the moment was not sampled by a Hurlburt beeper, so my recollection may be slightly erroneous.)

There are many product placement opportunities for professors: We could display products like drinks or high fashion during classes and public lectures -- with all the respect we command from the high socio-economic status young adult demographic! We could mention products as examples in oral presentations and published articles. ("Suppose that a trolley is rolling out of control toward five people it will inevitably kill unless you push a heavy object over the tracks to stop it. The only available heavy object is a late-model Lexus RX10....") We could even link to them from our blogs.

However, the most dramatic impact would surely come from a tattoo on the face. Thus, I make the following standing offer: For $2,000,000 U.S., I will give over three inches square of real estate on my check, for an appropriately tasteful tattoo by a company that's not too evil. (Evil companies will have to pay a surcharge sufficient to bring the overall utilitarian considerations back into balance.) To preserve what's left of my dignity, I will immediately donate half the amount to Oxfam -- which should, conservatively, save at least ten people's lives. (That seems worth it, doesn't it? Would you want to face the ten people who died because you weren't willing to tattoo your face?)

Now admittedly, the U.C. Riverside / Schwitzgebel brand is probably not realistically worth enough to command that kind of money for an advertisement, but maybe an eminent professor at Harvard or Princeton could do so -- especially given the free press that would no doubt accompany the first professorial facial tattoo advertisement. Peter Singer seems like a natural choice given his high visibility, and with his attitudes toward famine and charity, how could he refuse the offer?

Map of the Analytic Philosopher's Brain

Back in the 1990s, Joe Cruz and I joked around about drawing up a "map of the analytic philosopher's brain" -- a kind of phrenological map, with the size of the labeled areas proportional to their importance to the discipline. Twin Earth would have a major lobe, while the meaning of life would have only a tiny nodule. (Twin Earth is a science fiction thought experiment about a planet just like Earth in all ways detectable to the inhabitants but with some chemical XYZ rather than H2O running in streams and clouds and faucets. The question is whether this would change the content or meaning of the inhabitants' thoughts and words.) Although Twin Earth discussion has died down a bit since the 1990s, I'd wager it still gets considerably more mentions in analytic philosophy articles than does the meaning of life.

(As a rough check of this, I just did a JStor search of occurrences, since 1990, of "twin earth" and "meaning of life" in the sixty JStor philosophy journals. Sure enough, "Twin Earth" wins 552 to 377. Looking just at the four most elite general analytic journals [J Phil, Mind, Nous, and Phil Review], the ratio is even more lopsided, 174 to 48.)

It occurs to me that the recent Chalmers/Bourget survey of the philosophical community is a kind of map of the analytic philosophers' brain, too. With feedback from a fair number of beta testers (including me), they developed a list of thirty questions to send around to a huge chunk of the Anglophone philosophical community (including almost all faculty at major departments) -- questions they felt would provide a kind of sociological snapshot of the profession's views on a wide range of key issues.

Below, then, are the thirty questions they selected. Notice that the meaning of life makes no appearance. But we do see questions about zombies, teletransporters, and runaway trolleys. That these were the questions chosen is as interesting a fact about the sociology of the profession, I think, as the particular distribution of the answers.

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

God: theism or atheism?

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Logic: classical or non-classical?

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Proper names: Fregean or Millian?

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Time: A-theory or B-theory?

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch?

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

Do Ethicists Steal More Books?

... is now in print at Philosophical Psychology.

Abstract:

If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists’ behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing.

My favorite table (click to enlarge):

Does the Majority of Philosophers Think that the External World Exists?

... and other poll results here. (These are, of course, the results from David Chalmers' and David Bourget's PhilPapers survey of thousands of philosophers.)

It turns out that 81.6% of philosophers are non-skeptical realists about the external world, thus confirming my hypothesis that there is greater philosophical consensus in favor of the Democratic party than about the existence of a mind-independent external world.

Lebensraum / Elbow Room

The Schoolhouse Rock video "Elbow Room", celebrating the westward expansion of the U.S., got considerable TV airplay back in the 1970s when I was a kid. It looks very different to me now. What I find most chilling is the gleeful -- I'm sure unintentional -- parallel to the Nazi idea of "Lebensraum" (living room), used to justify German expansion.

Here's the video:



We were so fortunate to have an empty continent all to ourselves, don't you think?

The Experience of Reading

What kinds of imagistic or sensory experiences do you normally have when reading prose? Here are three possibilities, not exclusive:

(a.) Inner speech. You "hear" (or more accurately auditorially imagine) a voice -- maybe your own voice, or the voice of the author, or the voice of a character, or some other voice, saying the words you are reading.

(b.) Visual imagery. You experience visual images of the events described or hinted at in the text, or maybe images in other modalities (auditory images besides those of the words you are reading, maybe tactile images, olfactory images, motoric images).

(c.) Sensory experience of the text. You visually experience the text on the page, that is, the black and white of ink on paper or pixels on the computer screen.

I'm inclined to say, in my own case, that (a) and (c) are pretty much constant and (b) comes and goes. I also would have been inclined to think that (a) and (c) would be pretty universal for everybody and (b) highly variable between people. But it turns out that reports of (a) and (c) are also highly variable.

For example, the research participant "Melanie", interviewed in my 2007 book with Russ Hurlburt, says that normally when she reads she starts out in inner speech and then "takes off" into images, leaving the inner speech behind (comparable to the difference between an airplane taxiing and flying; p. 101). When she is asked to report on two particular moments of experience while reading (having been interrupted by a beeper), she comes pretty close to explicitly denying that she has any sensory experience of the text on the page (e.g., p. 100).

Julian Jaynes says to his readers "And as you read you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning" (1976, p. 26-27) -- thus seeming to deny at least visual experience the text on the page, and probably auditory imagery or inner speech of the words as well.

In contrast, Bernard Baars seems to assume the near-universality of inner speech, writing: "Human beings talk to themselves every moment of the waking day. Most readers of this sentence are doing it now" (2003, p. 106).

Wittgenstein writes: "Certainly I read a story and don't give a hang about any system of language. I simply read, have impressions, see pictures in my mind's eye, etc. I make the story pass before me like pictures, like a cartoon story" (1967, p. 44e).

Charles Siewert writes, after quoting the Jaynes passage above: "[If] Jaynes is denying that we consciously see the book, the page, or anything printed on it, then it seems what we are asked to believe is this: typically when we read, we function with a kind of premium-grade blindsight.... I find this extreme denial of visual consciousness, once made plain, very strange, and just about as obviously false a remark as one could make about visual experience" (1998, p. 248-249).

Max Velmans, like Siewert, seems to find the visual experience of the text mandatory, inner speech more optional: "When consciously reading this sentence, for example, you become aware of the printed text on the page, accompanied, perhaps, by inner speech (phonemic imagery), and a feeling of understanding (or not)" (2002, p. 16).

Gavin and Susan Fairbairn, in a text intended to instruct college students in better reading, write: "In contrast to the experience of those who find that they are conscious of every word when they read fiction, many people find, especially but not exclusively when they are reading fiction, that when they 'get into' the text they seem to be aware of meanings, sounds and pictures, even smells and feelings, without any conscious awareness of the words used to convey them.... Hearing the sounds of words when you read can be a handicap" (2001, p. 25). This view seems rather close to Melanie's analogy to taxiing and flying.

Almost all these authors -- Melanie is of course an exception, and Wittgenstein may or may not be -- take these statements to describe the experience of reading in general, not just for themselves individually. Obviously, though, they reach very different conclusions. (Such is consciousness studies!) As far as I'm aware, however, no one has ever published a systematic study of the matter.

Quotes, descriptions of your own experience, etc., warmly welcomed in the comments section.

(Thanks to my student Alan Moore for some of the quotes above. His own interesting work on the experience of reading will hopefully be the topic of a future post.)

On Measuring People Twice

Lots of psychological studies involve measuring people twice. For example, in the imagery literature, there's a minor industry that seeks to relate self-reports about imagery to performance on cognitive tasks that seem to involve visual imagery, such visual memory tests or mental rotation tasks.

(A typical mental rotation task presents two line drawings of 3-D figures and asks if one is a simple rotation of the other, for example:Image from http://www.skeptic.com here.)

Participants in such studies thus receive two tests, the cognitive test in question and also a self-report imagery test of some sort, such as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), which asks people to form various visual images and then rate their vividness. Correlations will often -- though by no means always -- be found. This will be taken to show that people with better (e.g. more vivid) imagery do in fact have more skill at the cognitive task in question.

This drives me nuts.

Reactivity between measures is, I think, a huge deal in such cases. Let me clarify by developing the imagery example a little farther.

Suppose you’re a participant in an experiment on mental imagery – an undergraduate, say, volunteering to participate in some studies to fulfill psychology course requirements. First, you’re given the VVIQ, that is, you’re asked how vivid your visual imagery is. Then, immediately afterward, you’re given a test of your visual memory – for example, a test of how many objects you can correctly recall after staring for a couple of minutes at a complex visual display. Now if I were in such an experiment and I had rated myself as an especially good visualizer when given the VVIQ, I might, when presented with the memory test, think something like this: “Damn! This experimenter is trying to see whether my imaging ability is really as good as I said it was! It’ll be embarrassing if I bomb. I’d better try especially hard.” Conversely, if I say I’m a poor visualizer, I might not put too much energy into the memory task, so as to confirm my self-report or what I take to be the experimenter’s hypothesis. Reactivity can work the other way, too, if the subjective report task is given second. Say I bomb the memory (or some other) task, then I’m given the VVIQ. I might be inclined to think of myself as a poor visualizer in part because I know I bombed the first task.

In general, participants are not passive innocents. Any time you give them two different tests, you should expect their knowledge of the first test to affect their performance on the second. Exactly how subjects will react to the second test in light of the first may be difficult to predict, but the probability of such reactivity should lead us to anticipate that, even if measures like the VVIQ utterly fail as measures of real, experienced imagery vividness, some researchers should find correlations between the VVIQ and performance on cognitive tasks. Therefore the fact that some researchers do find such correlations is no evidence at all of the reality of the posited relationship, unless there's a pattern in the correlations that could not just as easily be explained by reactivity.

In the particular case at hand, actually, I think the overall pattern of data positively suggests that reactivity is the main driving force behind the correlations. For example, to the extent there is a pattern in the relationship between the VVIQ and memory performance, the tendency is for the correlations to be higher in free recall tasks than in recognition tasks. Free recall tasks (like trying to list items in a remembered display) generally require more effort and energy from the subject than recognition tests (like “did you see this, yes or no?”) and so might be expected to show more reactivity between the measures.

The problem of reactivity between measures will plague any psychological subliterature in which participants are generally aware of being measured twice -- including much happiness research, almost any area of consciousness studies that seeks to relate self-reported experience and cognitive skills, the vast majority of longitudinal psychological studies, almost all studies on the effectiveness of psychotherapy or training programs, etc. Rarely, however, is it even given passing mention as a source of concern by people publishing in those areas.

Perplexities of Consciousness, submitted draft

I have just submitted my new book manuscript, Perplexities of Consciousness, to MIT Press. The whole thing is now viewable from my homepage.

Comments still welcome -- more than welcome! -- either on this post or by email.

Now that this manuscript is in, I can focus on catching up with all those other things I should have been doing and didn't!

Winner's Way

... a novel written by my father, Kirk Gable (born Ralph Schwitzgebel), is now available at Amazon. I hear his voice on every page, glimpse some piece of his worldview, which so affected my own.

Here's the blurb:

In this inspiring coming-of-age novel, Mark, a young man who thinks his life is full of walls, obligations and dead-ends, comes to realize that there is something more. Mark is a freshman in college, studying business—a field that doesn’t interest him at all. Family obligations have turned him from his real interests. Boring classes and medical problems make him feel vulnerable and unable to make long-term decisions.

With the words, “You are not who you think you are,” a chance meeting with a mysterious man named Sensei shakes up Mark’s world-view and changes his life-course in ways he never imagined.

Winner’s Way received a Hewlett Foundation Grant for incorporating life enrichment skills in a novel. Although this engaging novel can be read for pleasure, the extensive author’s notes at the end contain information, humor and self-help resources. A Discussion Guide can be found at www.WinnersWay.net.

“Winner’s Way creates a new category of fiction where magical realism meets do-it-yourself. The ideas in this story and the author’s notes are wildly creative and yet as practical and useful as you are likely to find in any non-fiction book.”—Sandra Ryan, Literary Critic

“The hero, Mark, is everyman for all of us. His struggles typify what is true for so many of us—the groping for something exciting, inspiring, and meaningful. Mark’s eacher, Sensei, is the kind of teacher we all wish we had. Winner’s Way is a rare and wonderful treat for anyone in search of richer self-understanding, compassion, and substance.”—Timothy Zeddies, Ph.D. psychologist

“Winner’s Way is an inspiring tale of life situations that readers can easily relate to. Although the story happens to be fictional, readers can take away many lessons and apply them to their own lives.”—Etienne Emanuel, Peace Corps Volunteer

Kirkland R. Gable has had three careers: As a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and later California Lutheran University, he worked with serious criminal offenders; As a lawyer, his writings have been widely cited, including by the Supreme Court; With his twin brother, he developed the electronic monitoring bracelet for criminal offenders. A student challenged him to write about psychology in a more accessible fashion. Winner’s Way is the result.

Winner’s Way ISBN: 978-1-932842-32-6; LCCN: 2009921117; $17.95; 8.5 x 5.5; release date: May 18, 2009; available via Amazon, Star Cloud Press and www.WinnersWay.net. Winner’s Way is published by Star Cloud Press of Scottsdale, Arizona. Contact WinnersWayBook@gmail.com for more information.

A Very Simple Argument Against Any General Theory of Consciousness

Suspiciously simple, you might think. Here it goes:

(1.) No general theory of consciousness can be justified except on the grounds that it gets it right about certain facts known independently of that theory. Those facts include facts about the presence or absence of conscious experience in a wide variety of actual and possible beings that are unlike us in potentialy relevant respects -- beings like frogs, insects, weird sea life, computers and robots of various types, alien beings of various types, and collective superorganisms of various types.

(2.) Independently of a well-justified theory of consciousness, we cannot know, with regard to most such beings, whether consciousness is present or absent.

(3.) Therefore, no general theory of consciousness can be justified.

Are ants conscious? Block's Chinese Nation? Star Trek's shipboard computer? People will reach different intuitive judgments (as philosophical discussion amply shows) -- and there's no particular reason to think, anyway, that our intuitive judgments should track the truth about such matters. It seems that a well justified answer to these questions must lean on a well justified general theory of consciousness. But there are a lot of (actual and potential) general theories of consciousness, some of which imply that consciousness is very widespread, others of which imply that consciousness is relatively rare. We cannot choose among those theories without prior knowledge of how widespread consciousness in fact is -- the very knowledge that we cannot have without such a theory in hand.

It's a tight little vicious circle.

Curveball Illusion

I hadn't seen this curveball illusion before. Very striking and surprising. I haven't had a chance to look into the theory behind it yet, but it seems to me to suggest something strange about the mapping of visual input into peripheral space.

(Thanks to Paul Hoffman for the pointer.)

Epistemic and Phenomenal Consciousness

The term "conscious" is ambiguous between an epistemic and a phenomenal sense (as I'll explain shortly). So is the term "awareness". And "appears". And (in certain strained uses at least) "seems". There's a pattern here, a suspicious pattern. What's behind it?

First, the phenomenon. "Appears" is the clearest case, so let's start there. Sometimes we use the phrase "it appears to me that _____" simply to express a judgment -- a hedged judgment of a sort -- with no phenomenological implications whatsoever, that is, no implications about what's going on in one's stream of experience. If I say, "It appears to me that the Democrats are headed for defeat", ordinarily I'm merely expressing my opinion about the Democrats' prospects. I'm not attributing to myself any particular kind of conscious experience. I'm not claiming to have an image, say, of defeated Democrats, or to hear the word "defeat" ringing in my head. In contrast, if I'm looking at an illusion in a vision science textbook and I say that the top line "appears" longer, I'm not expressing any sort of judgment about the line. I know perfectly well it's not longer. I'm making, instead, it seems, a claim about my phenomenology, my visual experience.

Similarly, although the primary use of "conscious" in contemporary Anglophone philosophy is phenomenological, pertaining to the stream of experience, there's a secondary use of "conscious" in ordinary language that is more epistemic in character, on which to be "conscious" of some fact is more or less just to know it. A child becomes "conscious" of her race, and hippies seek to "raise consciousness" primarily in this epistemic sense. I am epistemically conscious of the time when I'm in a rush, even if I'm not phenomenally conscious of the time during most of my rushing around -- that is, even if I don't often (or even at all) have phenomenally experienced conscious thoughts about the time.

"Awareness" trends the other direction, with the dominant sense being epistemic and the secondary sense phenomenal. If I am aware of something, in the dominant sense, I know it. However, people sometimes use the word "awareness" to refer to the stream of experience, as when Hurlburt asks "What was in your awareness?" as a way of asking about what was being experienced.

Finally, "seems" has an epistemic use very much like "appears", but philosophers sometimes speak of "seemings" with, evidently, the intention to pick out facts about phenomenology.

Not all terms referring to consciousness are ambiguous in this way, but enough are to justify a demand for explanation.

One possibility is that consciousness has an epistemic and phenomenal aspect and these two are intimately tied. Perhaps we are always (epistemically) conscious of our (phenomenal) consciousness (as suggested by Brentano, Rosenthal, Lycan, Kriegel, and others). This might account for the blurring of the two senses in ordinary and philosophical language. Yet it would do so, I think, not in quite the right way: The epistemic/phenomenal ambiguity is not an ambiguity between having experience and being aware of that experience, the two properties that Brentano and company think travel always together. Rather, it's an ambiguity between having experience and being aware of something else, something other than the experience itself, something in the outside world.

My preferred explanation takes "looks" as a clue. "Looks" is, in fact, another term arguably with both an epistemic and phenomenal sense. Blind people use "looks". I can say that it looks bad for the Democrats or that it looks like Helen will get tenure, with no visual implications whatsoever. But, perhaps unlike the other cases, a certain etymological story is very inviting. Here's the story: Because one of the main ways we know about the world is by looking at it, we extend the visual sense of "looks" to cover other cases in which we know about something -- though the explicit reference to how things "look" hints toward the fact that appearances are sometimes misleading. The metaphor then dries out and becomes literal or almost so.

The most salient and dominant form of consciousness is sensory consciousness -- visual experience, auditory experience, tactile experience, etc. -- and when we have sensory experience of something, we generally learn about that thing. I hypothesize that, as with "looks", we metaphorically extend terms referring to sensory consciousness to general epistemic uses, and then these metaphors dry out. We bridge back in the other direction too: Terms for knowledge can start to become terms for sensory consciousness, including in the etymology of "conscious" itself (from "con" together + "sci" knowing).

Philosophers and psychologists sometimes slide between the epistemic and phenomenal senses of these terms -- as, for example, when psychologists unselfconsciously leap from conclusions about awareness in the epistemic sense (can a subject report a stimulus) to conclusions about phenomenal consciousness (was a sensation of that stimulus part of the stream of experience). And those who accept Brentanian or higher-order theories of consciousness, theories that link epistemic awareness and phenomenal conscious tightly together, are cheating if they try to defend their theory by appeal to a dry (and in this case slightly misapplied) metaphor.

Review of Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the British Journal for Philosophy of Science

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy, tranformative in the disciplines of history and philosophy of science. It had a huge impact, in fact, throughout the humanities and social sciences, especially in its use of the idea of scientific "paradigms" -- and probably the current use of "paradigm" in popular culture is at least in part traceable back to Kuhn. The book is also a delightful read. What more could one want as a reader or aspire to as an author?

With that in mind, I enjoyed this nearsighted review of the book in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, pointed out to me yesterday by a student. Some quotes:

On reading this book, one's first impression is of enthusiasm and vitality. The author clearly feels himself to be opening up a new world of appreciation and understanding. In the face of such force and charm, it seems mean to question the lasting value of the work; but it must be said that many of its features are already well established (Stopes-Roe, 1964, p. 158).

I would suggest, in fact, that if a reader wishes to bring out the real content of what Kuhn is saying, he may find it advantageous to try substituting ' basic theory' for every occurrence of 'paradigm' in the book. He will come across very few places where the sense suffers (many statements are made about legitimacy and rules, where the content is carried explicitly by an appropriate word); and a careful study of these will be more illuminating than the ubiquitous use of the odd word 'paradigm' (p. 159).

If your wonderful book isn't met at first with universal enthusiasm, take heart!