The Distributed Brain Thought Experiment

I wanted to give a quick take on a thought experiment that has been doing the rounds on Twitter lately.

I thought I had heard all the consciousness thought experiments but at #cshlNeuroAI @LibedinskyLab told me a new one that literally kept me up last night. This is Camilo’s idea but I’ve taken some liberties with the details. Answer the polls in the order that you read them. 1/

— Dr. Anna Schapiro (@AnnaSchapiro) April 9, 2022

It's also worth reading this excellent write up by my friend at selfawarepatterns.com. That post also links a paper, which I confess I have not read. I'm going on the Twitter thread only.

The setup is to imagine being able to record and replay exactly what all the neurons in a brain are doing while experiencing something. When we replay, is the experience reproduced? What if the neurons are separated in space and in time?

I agree with whoever originally framed this thought experiment (Camilo?) that it poses a serious problem for physicalist functionalism. But it poses no problem at all for my view.

Strong Emergence and Free Will

In this post I will discuss whether the idea of strong emergence can help us to make sense of free will and a few related issues. These ideas have been on my mind lately largely due to the above discussion, but I've been thinking about this for a while.

Applying Illusionism to Physical Reality

Many of you would be aware already of illusionism, if in fact there were many readers of this blog. But in case it's needed, illusionism, exemplified by Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett, is an approach to the philosophy of consciousness which claims that qualia (the ineffable irreducible feelings associated with conscious experience, e.g. the redness of red), are entirely illusory and do not actually exist. As such, on this view the Hard Problem of Consciousness as defined by David Chalmers simply dissolves -- we need only explain why we believe we experience qualia, we do not need to explain how it is that qualia can be produced by physical stuff. As a bonus, illusionism may claim that even the idea of qualia are incoherent.

Illusionism is, I would say, a species of functionalism, and so is compatible with and largely overlaps with other glosses on functionalism such as computationalism. There may be corner cases where some illusionists may disagree with some computationalists, especially on how best to describe things, but the stories they tell about human consciousness are mostly compatible. As such, I count myself as an illusionist, a functionalist and a computationalist.

What I wanted to write about today is a strong rhyming I've noticed between the illusionist view of consciousness and how I think of the stuff of physical reality.