He also introduces the Fitness Beats Truth idea and the kinds of experiments that he says proves its validity. — Wayfarer

Does it though? For a perception to be fit, it must correlate to truth in some way. Pure hallucination cannot do an organism any good

Though the same cannot be said of ideas. Some ideas might be perfectly false, and yet have fitness value.

That and facts about composition is misunderstood as a reduction. To be sure, all cells are made from molecules. All molecules are made from atoms. This isn't a reduction. You can't predict how a molecule works from theory in physics, you need all sorts of ad hoc empirically derived inputs for it to work. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This conflates reduction and prediction. No one can or will predict the steady state behavior of Conway's Game of Life from it's initial state. Yet no one denys the reduction of that behavior to the very simple rules.

Have you read the book? I feel like it sort of gets misrepresented in reviews because the argument really doesn't come into focus until the last chapter. Hoffman's point is an argument about a certain, fairly dominant form of naturalism that imports Kantian dualism into "science." — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, I'd heard of Hoffman's "interface theory," but was discouraged by the largely dismissive reaction of the professional community and didn't invest more time in him. The point to which you are referring remains obscure to me.

I agree on the type of error involved. I disagree on the track record of reductionism. How many true reductions do we have? Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is the canonical example, but it is a rare example. 120 or so years on, the basics of molecular structure in chemistry has yet to be reduced to physics. Reductions are not common. Unifications, the explanation of diverse phenomena via an overarching general principle are far more common. For example, complexity studies explains disparate phenomena like earthquakes and heart beats via a similar underlying mathematics. But of course this does not say that heart beats or earthquakes are "nothing but," the math they share in common. Yet it seems to me that unifications are very often misunderstood as reductions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wasn't talking about some grand inter-theoretical Reductionist programme, but of the general form of reductive explanation, which is prevalent in science and elsewhere. The idea is to explain something in terms of something else - reduce it to something else. This could mean identifying the principal causes of a concrete event or a mechanism behind a class of observations.

When Newton proposed a theory that explained a large class of dynamical observations, he thereby gave them a reductive explanation. The motion of a cannonball as it accelerates towards the earth is nothing but the action of the gravitational force in Newton's dynamics. He also reduced Kepler's theory of planetary motion to his own theory - that is an example of unification via reduction. (The example that you give is not unification, as there is no common theory - just a structural similarity across unrelated domains. Such mathematical similarities are commonplace - after all, we don't usually have to invent new math for every new problem.)

But the above is a singular example. I was thinking more of reductive explanations that we make all the time: A happened because of B or A functions by way of B. Even if we are talking specifically about inter-theoretic reductions, on a smaller scale, they are commonplace in science. For example, mechanical properties of materials that are taken as data in dynamics and statics are being explained in (reduced to) materials science, chemistry and solid-state physics.

That and facts about composition is misunderstood as a reduction. To be sure, all cells are made from molecules. All molecules are made from atoms. This isn't a reduction. You can't predict how a molecule works from theory in physics, you need all sorts of ad hoc empirically derived inputs for it to work. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Identifying composition can be a crucial step towards a reductive explanation. Because we know generic properties of many materials, knowing what something is made from can tell us a lot about that thing, reducing some of its properties to those of the materials that compose it. We are not talking about a complete reduction though, except in trivial instances.

But I think the error you identify is directly related to smallism and reductionism. The justification for the causal closure principle is normally that minds are "nothing but" brains/bodies, and the brains and bodies are "nothing but" atoms and their constituent particles. Particles are the smallest structure and thus most fundemental. Everything is "nothing but" these, and so everything is describable in terms of their interactions. This makes all other causal explanations duplicative. At best they are a form of data compression. And so this makes motive irrelevant and conciousness epiphenomenal. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Causal closure does not imply epiphenomenalism, unless you interpret it too broadly (i.e., not the way it is usually understood). One could believe that the world is closed under fundamental physics, but that does not automatically imply that everything else, such as consciousness (or chemistry), is causally inert. It just doesn't have a place in the explanatory framework of fundamental physics, and if you put it there by hand, then you would have causal overdetermination. But alternative explanatory frameworks can coexist without conflict. Consciousness (and chemistry) could still take place in a world that is closed under fundamental physics, but you would need other means than physics to identify and describe mental (chemical) phenomena qua mental (chemical) phenomena.

For a perception to be fit, it must correlate to truth in some way. Pure hallucination cannot do an organism any good — hypericin

He doesn’t say that perceptions are hallucinations per se. See this interview. As I’ve said above, Hoffman’s is really an argument against cognitive realism, but calling the book The Case Against Reality is more dramatic.

Hoffman's seems to be saying that the structure of space-time and objects can be different to what we perceive. — Apustimelogist

Chapter 6 of the book is called ‘Spacetime is Doomed’. There are many interviews with Hoffman arguing this. Of course many think he’s entirely mistaken.

My interpretation is that space and time are real, but they rely on an irreducibly subjective element. Why? Because, what can space be without scale? and time without duration? Both of these entail perspective, and perspective is what the observer brings. (I think this is also consistent with Kant’s analysis.)

I’ve mentioned a controversial paper by another scientist, Andre Linde, who’s a heavy hitter in the physics community, as the principle author of inflationary theory. He annoys a lot of his colleagues by saying things like:

The universe and the observer exist as a pair. You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.

Again, I think ‘dead’ is overly dramatic. I think ‘formless and meaningless’ would be closer to the mark.

I don't think these positions even necessarily go hand in hand with a "disenchanted naturalism," and certainly they don't go hand in hand with science. Rather, the first is just a bad inference from the assignment of values to "objects themselves" in early modern mathematical physics, with people mistaking the shape of their mathematical model for the structure reality, and the second is due to early modern philosophers being rather poor students of the scholastics and missing their careful distinctions vis-á-vis the role ideas play in sign relations — Count Timothy von Icarus

Excellent analysis as always. This passage from an essay on Whitehead makes the same point:

According to Whitehead, it is not so much the explicit as the implicit presuppositions that most fundamentally determine the conceptual framework of an epoch. For him, one of, not to say the most fundamental and momentous, though in some areas nonetheless very useful of all the implicit presuppositions of modern philosophy and science, characterized by the bifurcation (of nature), lies in the endeavour to describe reality on the basis of substance and quality, subject and predicate, particular and universal:

All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. [...] We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances [...]

Whitehead locates the systematic roots of thinking in the mode of substance and attribute in the hypostatization and illegitimate universalization of the particular and contingent subject–predicate form of the propositional sentence of Western languages. The resulting equation of grammatical–logical and ontological structure leads to conceiving the logical difference between subject and predicate as a fundamental ontological difference between subject and object, thing and property, particular and universal.

In general, Whitehead’s critique of substance metaphysics is directed less against Aristotle himself, “the apostle of ‘substance and attribute’” than against the reception and careless adoption of the idea of substances in modern philosophy and science, precisely the notion of substances as self-identical material. Historically, Whitehead sees the bifurcation sealed with the triumph of Newtonian physics, within which the mechanistic-materialist understanding of matter was universalized and seen as an adequate description of nature in its entirety. In this way, scientific materialism became the guiding principle and implicit assumption of the modern conception of nature at large:

One such assumption underlies the whole philosophy of nature during the modern period. It is embodied in the conception which is supposed to express the most concrete aspect of nature. [...] The answer is couched in terms of stuff, or matter, or material [...] which has the property of simple location in space and time [...]. [M]aterial can be said to be here in space and here in time [...] in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time.

My view is that Descartes’ rendering of substance as ‘thinking thing’ was a fundamental mistake in modern philosophy, as it objectifies the subject, as a kind of ethereal essence. That is the mistake that phenomenology sought to rectify

I also wonder whether there might be a resemblance between Hoffman’s ‘conscious agents all the way down’ and Whitehead’s ‘actual occasions of experience’, but I’ve never really understood that aspect of Whitehead’s philosophy.

Why do some forms of information processing result in first person perspective and other's don't? Why do these result in a phenomenological horizon centered on a specific body? — Count Timothy von Icarus

How about the following?

Because some forms of information processing occur in embodied systems with sensorimotor interaction with the environment. This results in the development of intuitions (deep learning) 'centered' on that specific body.

This seems backwards.

Of course you can predict Life, or anything similar. You could do it with a pencil and paper, just apply the rules and go step by step. You can predict any instance of Life by inputting the starting conditions and running it forward, computation works as well here as for calculating orbits of billiard balls bouncing off one another.

But an instance of Life isn't just the rules of the game. It isn't even the rules plus the initial conditions. It's the entire process of the instance run forward—computation is inheritly processual.

Something like this seems plausible, but it doesn't seem to me to do much as an actual explanation. Why are some systems conscious? Well, it isn't just that they are adaptive or respond to the environment. A thermostat ticks those boxes. So we say it is because they have "sensorimotor" interactions. Well, here the term we are using for an explanation contains "sensory." We've explained which systems experience in terms of those systems having a sensory (i.e., experiential) component. "It experiences because it has experiential interactions."

Wouldn't this be a bit like the old "opium causes sleep because it has a hypnotic (sleep causing) property?"

Because, what can space be without scale? and time without duration? Both of these entail perspective, and perspective is what the observer brings. (I think this is also consistent with Kant’s analysis.) — Wayfarer

“…. if we take away the subject or even the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear.…” (A42/B59)

Of course you can predict Life, or anything similar. You could do it with a pencil and paper, just apply the rules and go step by step. You can predict any instance of Life by inputting the starting conditions and running it forward, computation works as well here as for calculating orbits of billiard balls bouncing off one another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But only in theory, on the subset of starting conditions that can actually be solved. Some may only reach a steady state after trillions of iterations. Some may never. But the only way to know is to actually do the simulation. No law can predict it in the absence of simulation.

Maybe a cleaner example is the halting problem. There is no way to predict wherever a program will eventually halt. But this in no way implies that the behavior of a program is not reducable to it's instructions.

Yeah right. Say that, and everyone freaks out.

Causal closure does not imply epiphenomenalism, unless you interpret it too broadly (i.e., not the way it is usually understood). One could believe that the world is closed under fundamental physics, but that does not automatically imply that everything else, such as consciousness (or chemistry), is causally inert. It just doesn't have a place in the explanatory framework of fundamental physics, and if you put it there by hand, then you would have causal overdetermination. But alternative explanatory frameworks can coexist without conflict. Consciousness (and chemistry) could still take place in a world that is closed under fundamental physics, but you would need other means than physics to identify and describe mental (chemical) phenomena qua mental (chemical) phenomena. — SophistiCat

I think (weak) emergence is the concept here.

Something like this seems plausible, but it doesn't seem to me to do much as an actual explanation. Why are some systems conscious? Well, it isn't just that they are adaptive or respond to the environment. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd suggest that some systems are conscious because they are in an ongoing process of melding incoming sensory information with what arises from deep learning, into a model of whatever aspect of the world the system is conscious of as a result of such modeling and model monitoring. Yes, we are talking about something vastly more complex than a thermostat.

:up:

Yes, although this would also hold true for all sorts of deterministic physical systems or chaotic functions, so long as they don't enter any sort of cycle or steady state. Likewise , if you get enough billiard balls bouncing around and you need a lot of computational power to predict how they will interact. You can't predict Life without doing the computations, but that's also true for all sorts of things.

But I think the more interesting question is if Life, or computation more generally, is reducible to anything else. I don't think it is. Certainly programs can be decomposable, but that doesn't seem like the same thing.

It's sort of like Zeno's paradoxes. There seem to be issues with reducing motion to a series of frozen instants, and the issues Zeno highlights seem applicable to how we think of process more generally.

What makes some information "sensory information?" Doesn't "sensory information" imply conciousness anyhow? Likewise there is the issue of what makes a physical process an "information processing" process and what makes a physical relationship a "modeling relationship?"

One of the challenges for CTM is that all physical processes can be described as computations or information processing.

What makes some information "sensory information?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

The fact that it is information arising from the processing in a neural network which has inputs which are largely the outputs of sensory nerves. (E.g. the optic nerves for vision, the olfactory bulb for smell, whatever nerves carry signals away from the cochleas for hearing.)

…..everyone freaks out. — Wayfarer

Ehhhhh…..not my problem. No one will ever find space by the bucketful, and if you ask a guy for a minute of his time, that is exactly what you won’t get.

:lol:

I've skimmed more of the book, and am reading the concluding chapter. But at this point, I must say I don't really understand it, nor do I like it much. What he's saying seems to be compatible with the idealist type of philosophy that I favour. But I'm really not clear on a lot of it, like what conscious agents are (I no more understand that than Whitehead's 'actual occasions of experience'. )

I think the salient point is that there can be multiple reductive explanations from different perspectives. So, to say that I went to the shop because I was thirsty is a reductive explanation, as much as saying I went to the shop because of certain neural activity is. Such different explanations do not contradict, and should not exclude, one another. — Janus

:up:

So for example, the epiphenomenalist might say consciousness does no work, just "goes along for the ride", so to speak, but that would be an illegitimate elimination of one reasonable way of explaining human behavior. I think what puzzles people is that we cannot combine the two explanations or achieve any absolute perspective which would eliminate one and retain the other. 'Either/ or' thinking seems to generally dominate the human mind.

I am not sure that epiphenomenalism is all that common in our thinking. Historically, the term itself was coined in the context of mental vs physical, and that is where you will generally encounter it. It was always puzzling to me that those who bring up epiphenomenalism tend to be narrowly focused on the mental/physical divide and don't seem to realize that the same reasoning applies (or fails) across a wide range of theories and explanations.

As I noted, this is not a theory, it's a standard you apply to an existing phenomenon to decide if it is living. — T Clark

I don't think @apokrisis meant it as a definition or criterion of demarcation, but of he did then it's of little relevance as an explanation of consciousness.

I don't think apokrisis meant it as a definition or criterion of demarcation, but of he did then it's of little relevance as an explanation of consciousness. — bert1

Perhaps he'll come and set me straight.

And yet in practice, there are procedures developed by neurologists to determine brain death in hospital situations. — apokrisis

While of considerable practical utility, this does not help us with developing a theory of consciousness.

Brain scans can tell if you are thinking about tools or animals. Whether you are day dreaming or focused. Happy or in pain. Not yet an exact science and may never be, but further along than you seem to suggest. — apokrisis

I have actually heard of that. But these are observations of correlations. There's no theory that explains the relationship in a principled way as far as I am aware.

So you are coming at what science can be expected to do in a simple-minded fashion. — apokrisis

I'm not expecting anything of a disembodied 'science'. I'm expecting an explanation of consciousness from people who claim to have one, like you for instance!

There is no one answer to the question you have - give me a theory that tells me both what consciousness is and also why I am experiencing exactly what I am experiencing right now. A theory that collapses the general and the particular, and which is somehow then useful to anyone. — apokrisis

I don't especially require a single theory for both these questions.

One of the challenges for CTM is that all physical processes can be described as computations or information processing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What distinguishes brains and computers from the rest of the universe is their universality. Unlike anything else we know, brains and computers can enact the informational processing part of other physical processes, without the physical part. Computers can even enact the information processing of different computers. Or, they can enact purely imaginary informational processes, which have no physical correspondence. They are of course limited by time and energy (computational power), space(memory), and reliability especially in the case of brains, but given those limitations, they are universal. (That said, they are wildly different, specialized for totally different kinds of problems.)

I'd suggest that some systems are conscious because they are in an ongoing process of melding incoming sensory information with what arises from deep learning, into a model of whatever aspect of the world the system is conscious of as a result of such modeling and model monitoring. — wonderer1

And yet modern AI does such modelling, presumably without consciousness. I think what makes brains conscious is that they are general informational processors whose interface to the world is the result of the modelling of sensory information you are talking. To brains, as far as they/we are concerned, such models are the subjective plentitudes we experience, they/we are wired to interface with the world in this way. Just as computers run on symbolic logic, our wet "computers" "run" on sensory experiences: we perceive, feel, imagine, and think to ourselves, all of which are fundamentally sensorial. It is these and only these sensations, externally and internally derived, that we are aware of, every other brain process is unconscious to us.

There's no theory that explains the relationship in a principled way as far as I am aware. — bert1

As if you have the expertise to judge.

And yet modern AI does such modelling, presumably without consciousness. I think what makes brains conscious is that they are general informational processors whose interface to the world is the result of the modelling of sensory information you are talking. To brains, as far as they/we are concerned, such models are the subjective plentitudes we experience, they/we are wired to interface with the world in this way. Just as computers run on symbolic logic, our wet "computers" "run" on sensory experiences: we perceive, feel, imagine, and think to ourselves, all of which are fundamentally sensorial. It is these and only these sensations, externally and internally derived, that we are aware of, every other brain process is unconscious to us. — hypericin

:up:

I think my criticism of your criticism is that you assume that consciousness is like a discrete thing that just pops up and then disappears under certain circumstances. I don't think there's any evidence for this. What differs non-conscious from conscious things is how they behave as dynamical systems and it doesn't seem to make sense to say that consciousness is some additional thing that pops up on top of that, under pains of a kind of epiphenomenal redundancy (see sections 4.4, 5.3, 7 of Chalmer's Conscious mind for details, full pdf available on internet).

Nice quote from
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5:

On this basis, we can ask whether the FEP really loses some explanatory power as a result of being vacuously true for all sorts of particles.

Having originated in the study of the brain, it might seem dissatisfying that the FEP should also extend to inert things like stones, and that its foundations have nothing unique to say about the brain (or the mind, or living systems, for that matter).

In our view, the fact that the FEP does not necessarily have anything special to say about cognition is something of a boon - it should be the case that cognition is like a more ‘advanced’ or complicated version of other systems, and possesses no special un-physical content.

Indeed, the commitment to a principled distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, or living and non-living ones, commits to a sort of élan vital, wherein the substance and laws of learning, perception, and action should not be grounded in the same laws of physics as a stone, as though they provide a different, more implacable sort of organization or coherence of states [108]. In fact, the opposite has been argued in this paper: that such a theory should be reinterpreted in thermodynamical terms, just as much of the rest of soft matter and biological physics [17,106,109,110]. As such, we reject these implicitly dualistic views.

I don't think we can have a theory of consciousness in the way you want, not only because there is no fine line between conscious and non-conscious, but we are simply limited to describing what living things do (or what things we deem as being alive do) and nothing more.

I think what makes brains conscious is that they are general informational processors whose interface to the world is the result of the modelling of sensory information you are talking. To brains, as far as they/we are concerned, such models are the subjective plentitudes we experience, they/we are wired to interface with the world in this way. — hypericin

It's a mistake to say that brains do anything - that is what is described in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience as the 'mereological fallacy', attributing to the part what only a whole is capable of.

we are simply limited to describing what living things do (or what things we deem as being alive do) and nothing more. — Apustimelogist

That is true, if the scope of knowledge is defined in purely objective terms. But then, you tend to naturally look at philosophical questions through a scientific perspective, don't you? Isn't that why you find Aristotle 'diametrically opposed' to your way of thinking when I've mentioned him? (That link above returns a 404 by the way, due to the inclusion of the ending colon in the URL.)

And yet in practice, there are procedures developed by neurologists to determine brain death in hospital situations. — apokrisis

While this is true, it is not really the point. Recall Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and there are many pages devoted to the question of the neural correlates of consciousness and what is involved in mapping sensory experiences against neural activity. He discusses the split-brain procedures and various neurological anomalies and the nature of optical illusions. But the nub of the issue is this:

We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activity—or computer activity, or any other kind of physical activity—could cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience. We don’t have even one idea that’s remotely plausible. If we consider not just brain activity, but also the complex interactions among brains, bodies, and the environment, we still strike out. We’re stuck. Our utter failure leads some to call this the “hard problem” of consciousness, or simply a “mystery.” We know far more neuroscience than Huxley did in 1869*. Yet each scientific theory that tries to conjure consciousness from the complexity of interactions among brain, body, and environment always invokes a miracle—at precisely that critical point where experience blossoms from complexity. The theories are Rube Goldberg devices that lack a critical domino and need a sneak push to complete the trick.

What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity[…]

If we propose that brain activity is identical to, or gives rise to, conscious experiences, then we want the same kind of precise laws or principles—that link each specific conscious experience, such as the taste of basil, with the specific brain activities that it is identical to, or with the specific brain activi“ies that give rise to it. No such laws or principles have been offered [footnote reference to Integrated Information Theory].

If we propose that conscious experience is identical, say, to certain processes of the brain that monitor other processes, then we need to write down laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the conscious experiences with which they are identical. If we propose that conscious experience is an illusion arising from some brain processes attending to, monitoring, and describing other brain processes, then we must state laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the illusions they generate. And if we propose that conscious experiences emerge from brain processes, then we must give the laws or principles that describe precisely when, and how, each specific experience emerges. Until then, these ideas aren’t even wrong. Hand waves about identity, emergence, or attentional processes that describe other brain processes are no substitute for precise laws or principles that make quantitative predictions.

We have scientific laws that predict black holes, the dynamics of quarks, and the evolution of the universe. Yet we have no clue how to formulate laws, principles, or mechanisms that predict our quotidian experiences of tasting herbs and hearing street noise. — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality

______

*The English biologist Thomas Huxley was flummoxed by this mystery in 1869: “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.

'mereological fallacy' — Wayfarer

I actually agree with much here albeit probably in a weaker sense than the authors. Sometimes these "fallacies" may be genuinely due to the way people think about these things, sometimes it may just be out of expediency. I guess also how someone views these analyses might depend on their philosophy of mind somewhat.

(That link above returns a 404 by the way.) — Wayfarer

Hopefully fixed now.

That is true, if the scope of knowledge is defined in purely objective terms. But then, you tend to naturally look at philosophical questions through a scientific perspective, don't you? — Wayfarer

What are the alternatives? I genuinely can't conceive of any off the top of my head.

Yet each scientific theory that tries to conjure consciousness from the complexity of interactions among brain, body, and environment always invokes a miracle—at precisely that critical point where experience blossoms from complexity. — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality

This is miracle exactly what my quote from above was arguing against.

If we propose that brain activity is identical to, or gives rise to, conscious experiences, then we want the same kind of precise laws or principles — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality

Such a thing is impossible imo. What is the limit on experience? I don't see how there is one. You could conceive of infinite kinds of beings that detect different things and are structured in different ways. Surely, you would expect that there is no limit on the kinds of alien experiences things could have if they were structured in the appropriate way to have them. I don't see how mathematical laws could explain this when experiences would scale with the complexity of brute perceptual abilities for some system. A question is whether an information processing system could in principle "explain" to itself its own perceptual abilities introspectively - I highly doubt this.

if the scope of knowledge is defined in purely objective terms. But then, you tend to naturally look at philosophical questions through a scientific perspective, don't you?
— Wayfarer

What are the alternatives? I genuinely can't conceive of any off the top of my head. — Apustimelogist

Right - my point exactly. I think the assumption that objectivity defines the scope of knowledge is what is at issue. I'm not taking a shot at you in particular, I think this is very much the assumed background of the culture we live in. But I also think it's philosophy's task to be critical of that.

Recall Hoffman is a cognitive scientist — Wayfarer

Sure. But he has a book to sell, a name to make. There is a social incentive for him to angle his story so as to attract the audience he does.

And it is certainly correct that the neural correlates approach flounders to the degree it represents Cartesian representationalism – the story that the brain is somehow generating a "display" of reality.

That way of thinking about the problem of consciousness just bakes in the Hard Problem. It begins with the unbridgeable divide as its premise. A display needs someone looking at it. Experiencing it. Homuncular regress is the only option once you trap yourself into a neuroscience of "mental display".

Which is why enactive and Bayesian approaches are rooted in the notion of semiotic interpretance or an embodied relation, not in Cartesian display.

Do you see the difference? Especially now from the biosemiotic view – the one that makes good on Pattee's epistemic cut as an actual level of biological machinery – we can see that it ain't all about the "information processing taking place in the firing neurons". Our theory of consciousness has to incorporate the action taking place across the epistemic cut – the action at the mechanical interface between "ourselves" and "the world".

At some point – the point where the Hard Problem dissolves as some kind of fundamental causal issue – you have sensory receptors and muscle effectors coming into the picture.

The neurons of the central nervous system terminate in mechanical switches that are regulating entropic or metabolic flows. The energies of the world are being transduced into information – news about the degree to which the world is proving predictable or surprising in terms of the general brain model. The intentions of the mind are likewise being given effect as mechanical actions. Muscles are twitching in coordinated fashion, driven by that same self~world model.

This is the way that cognition is actually embodied. This is how it penetrates the whole body and lives in intimate contact with the actual world. Sure there is all this neural information processing. But then just as real is that there is all this mechanical interfacing going on. And that is where the rubber meets the road.

And who has that theory?

I mean we all know there are motor neurons and sensory receptors. But start looking for the neuroscientists who are getting into the detail of that mechanical interface – that epistemic cut – in the same fashion that biologists are now getting into the (staggeringly complex and hierarchically organised) interface between the body's genetic information and its frontline molecular machines.