The Blind Brain Hypothesis

[Absurdity]

Maybe you've heard of it before. I hadn't until the other day, when I stumbled upon it here, and found it fascinating in a very unsettling way. Below is an excerpt that covers the thrust of the idea in a relatively easy to understand way.

Spoiler

CONSCIOUSNESS AS COIN TRICK: THE BLIND BRAIN HYPOTHESIS

What if we’ve been duped, not simply here and there, but all the way down, when it comes to experience? What if consciousness were some bizarre kind of hoax?

The final secondary argument offered in the novel is based on something called the ‘Blind Brain Hypothesis.’ Consciousness is so strange, so little understood, that anything might result from the current research in neuroscience and cognitive science. We could literally discover that we are little more than epiphenomenal figments, dreams that our brains have cooked up in the absence of any viable alternatives. Science is ever the cruel stranger, the one who spares no feelings, concedes no conceits no matter how essential. In the near future world of Neuropath, this is precisely what has happened under the guise of the Blind Brain Hypothesis, the theoretical brainchild of the story’s hero, Thomas Bible.

Consider coin tricks. Why do coin tricks strike us as ‘magic’? When describing them, we say things like “poof, there it was.” The coin, we claim, “materialized from thin air” or “appeared from nowhere.” We tend, in other words, to focus on the lack of causal precursors, on the beforelessness of the coin’s appearance, as the amazing thing. But why should ‘beforelessness’ strike us as remarkable to the point of magic?

From an evolutionary standpoint, the uncanniness of things appearing from nowhere seems easy enough to understand. Our brains are adaptive artifacts of environments where natural objects such as coins generally didn’t ‘pop into existence.’ Our brains have evolved to process causal environments possessing natural objects with interrelated causal histories. When natural objects appear without any apparent causal history, as in a coin trick, our brains are confronted by something largely without evolutionary precedent. Instances of apparent beforelessness defeat our brains’ routine environmental processing.

The magic of coin tricks, one might say, is a function of our brains’ hardwired abhorrence of causal vacuums in local environments. The integration of natural objects into causal backgrounds is the default, which is why, we might suppose, the sense of magic immediately evaporates when we look over the magician’s shoulder and the causal history of the coin is revealed. The magic of coin tricks, in other words, depends on our brains’ relation to the coin’s causal history. Expose that causal history, and the appearing coin seems a natural object like any other. Suppress that causal history (through misdirection, sleight of hand, etc.), and the appearing coin exhibits beforelessness. It seems like magic.

I bring this up because so many intentional phenomena exhibit an eerily similar structure. Consider, for instance, your present experience of listening. The words you hear ‘are simply there.’ You experience me speaking; nowhere does the neurophysiology–the causal history–of your experience enter into that experience as something experienced. You have no inkling of sound waves striking your eardrum. You have no intuitive awareness of your cochlea or auditory cortex. Like the coin, this experience seems to arise ‘ready made.’

The Blind Brain Hypothesis proposes that this is no accident. Various experiential phenomena, it suggests, are best understood as a kind of magic trick–only one that we cannot see through or around because our brain itself is the magician.

Whether or not the so-called ‘thalamocortical system’ turns out to be the ‘seat of consciousness,’ one thing is clear: the information that finds its way to consciousness represents only a small fraction of the brain’s overall information load. This means that at any given moment, the brain’s consciousness systems possess a kind of (fixed or dynamic) information horizon. What falls outside this information horizon, we are inclined to either overlook completely or attribute to the so-called ‘unconscious’–a problematic intentional metaphor if there ever was one.

Just as the magic of coin tricks is a function of our brains’ blinkered relation to the coin’s causal history, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests that many central structural characteristics of consciousness are expressions of our brains’ blinkered relation to their own causal histories, an artifact of the thalamocortical information horizon.

Given that our brains are in fact largely blind to their own neurophysiological processing, it seems clear that an information horizon exists in some form. Structurally, the brain is simply too complicated to track itself. Developmentally, the brain lacked both the time and the evolutionary impetus to track itself.

When we access our brain ‘from the outside,’ we’re exploiting circuits developed over millions and millions of years of evolution. Our brains are primarily environmental processors, exquisitely adapted to how things are in their environments. As a result, when we access our brains as another object in our environment, we have tremendous success ‘seeing how things are’ with our brains. When we access our brain ‘from the inside,’ however, we’re forced to completely forgo all this powerful circuitry. Instead, we’re limited to what seem to be relatively recent evolutionary adaptions, the ‘wiring of conscious experience.’ Our brains are not primarily brain processors, and as a result, we have tremendous difficulty ‘seeing how things are’ with our brains–so much so that we cannot even see ourselves as anything remotely resembling the brains we encounter in our environment.

Given these structural and developmental handicaps, information horizons have to exist. The real question is one of how they impact consciousness.

That the absence of information does affect experience becomes immediately clear if you simply attend to your visual field. You can actually track the falling off of information from your fovea–a spot the size of your thumbnail held out arm’s length–across your periphery and into …

Oblivion?

In fact, the point at which your visual field trails away lies outside of the very possibility of seeing. Sight simply does not exist on the far side of your ‘visual information horizon.’ We rely on other, non-visual systems to stitch successive visual fields into a coherent spatial environment, and so tend to ‘overlook’ the limits of our looking.

As mundane as this might sound, this example actually underscores something truly remarkable. It seems clear that the ‘trailing away’ of our visual field is a basic structural feature of visual experience, a positive feature. So does this mean it possesses neural correlates? Does it make sense to infer the existence of ‘visual trailing’ circuits? If not, this suggests that a neurophysiological lack can manifest itself as a positive feature of experience, in this case, the closure of our visual field. In other words, not all experience possesses functional correlates––at least not in the straightforward way we think.

Consider the ex nihilo character of volition, or they way want and desire simply ‘come upon us.’ According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, decisions and affects simply arise at the point where they cross the information horizon and are taken up by the thalamocortical system.

Or consider the so-called ‘transparency’ of experience, the fact that we see trees, not trees causing us to see trees. Since the processing involved in modeling environments falls outside the information horizon, all we access is the model and none of its constitutive neurological antecedents.

Intentionality also seems to fit. Since the processing behind our recollection of trees, say, falls outside the information horizon, our brain substitutes an abbreviated synchronic relation, what we have conceptualized as ‘aboutness,’ for a diachronic one, the particular causal provenance of our recollection.

The structure of normativity provides another potential candidate: since the processing involved in the bottom-up generation of behavioural outputs largely falls outside the information horizon, the thalamocortical system can only use the ‘tail end’ of regularities, so to speak. The brain only gives consciousness ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and nothing of the actual processing involved in testing.

Something similar might be said of purposiveness and the way teleology turns causality on its head: the information horizon encloses the circuitry involved in hypothetical modeling, but not much else, so even though our brain generates behavioural outputs bottom up, we perform actions for this or that–under the guise of bottomlessness. ‘Goals,’ the suggestion is, are what’s left when the bulk of the brain’s behavioural processing falls outside thalamocortical information horizon, save those involved in anticipation.

On this account, consciousness is a perpetual and quite impoverished middle-man, accessing, thanks to the information horizon, only opportunistic fragments of more global processes. We’re like a lone audience member, chained in front of the magician of our brain. We can intellectually theorize the causal provenances that make the tricks possible, but we are ‘hardwired into’ our perspective, we are nevertheless forced to experience the ‘magic.’

Nothing, I think, illustrates this forced magic quite like the experiential present, the Now. Recall what we discussed earlier regarding the visual field. Although it’s true that you can never explicitly ‘see the limits of seeing’–no matter how fast you move your head–those limits are nonetheless a central structural feature of seeing. The way your visual field simply ‘runs out’ without edge or demarcation is implicit in all seeing–and, I suspect, without the benefit of any ‘visual run off’ circuits. Your field of vision simply hangs in a kind of blindness you cannot see.

This, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests, is what the now is: a temporal analogue to the edgelessness of vision, an implicit structural artifact of the way our ‘temporal field’–what James called the ‘specious present’–hangs in a kind temporal hyper-blindness. Time passes in experience, sure, but thanks to the information horizon of the thalamocortical system, experience itself stands still, and with nary a neural circuit to send a Christmas card to. There is time in experience, but no time of experience. The same way seeing relies on secondary systems to stitch our keyhole glimpses into a visual world, timing relies on things like narrative and long term memory to situate our present within a greater temporal context.

Given the Blind Brain Hypothesis, you would expect the thalamocortical system to track time against a background of temporal oblivion. You would expect something like the Now. Perhaps this is why, no matter where we find ourselves on the line of history, we always stand at the beginning. Thus the paradoxical structure of sayings like, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” We’re not simply running on hamster wheels, we are hamster wheels, traveling lifetimes without moving at all.

Which is to say that the Blind Brain Hypothesis offers possible theoretical purchase on the apparent absurdity of conscious existence, the way a life of differences can be crammed into a singular moment.

But I’m getting carried away.

If our brains were somehow, impossibly, wired to process themselves from the inside (as the subject of introspection) with the same fidelity with which they process themselves from the outside (as the object of neuroscience), then one might expect the generation of ‘action’ to be experienced as one more thing within the great causal circuit of the environment. Rather than experiencing desires ‘motivating’ those actions, our brains would simply experience the translation of environmental inputs into behavioural outputs in toto. There would be no desire, only behaviour arising as another natural event. Rather than experiencing norms constraining those actions, our brains would experience the processing of behavioural outputs against ongoing environmental input. There would be no ‘right or wrong,’ no ‘corrections,’ only attenuations of behaviour in response to real-time environmental feedback. Rather than experiencing purposes guiding those actions, our brains would experience the processing of behavioural outputs against past environmental feedback. There would be no ‘point’ to our actions, only behaviour reinforced by previous environmental interactions.

But the ‘wiring of consciousness’ is far from complete, perhaps necessarily so. And given evolutionary imperatives, it stands to reason that the thalamocortical system would exploit it’s own limitations, leverage its own information horizon. If the processing behind our environmental interventions is inaccessible, and if the ‘ownership of actions’ pays reproductive dividends, then the development of something like the ‘feeling of willing’ makes a strange kind of sense. Since the greater brain behind the information horizon simply does not exist for the thalamocortical system, it has to cobble things together and make evolutionary due.

This, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests, could be the case for the ‘feeling of aboutness,’ the ‘feeling of forness,’ the ‘feeling of rightness,’ and so on. None of these things feel like coin tricks, like magic, simply because they are the mandatory constant, not defections from an otherwise causal background. But they seem to vanish when we look of the brain’s shoulder–they share the same antipathy to causal cognition–because they are, in a strange way, artifacts of an analogous limitation of our perspective, more the result of what we lack than what we possess.

If the Blind Brain Hypothesis turns out to be true (and heaven help us if it does), then consciousness could be–basically, fundamentally–a kind of coin trick. The so-called ‘hard problem,’ the problem of explaining consciousness in naturalistic terms, could be insoluble simply because there’s no such natural phenomena as ‘consciousness.’ The magic can only vanish as soon as the coin trick is explained. In this case, we are the magic.

For me, this is where the plank of reason breaks.

Where things become apocalyptic.

 

[Cognisant]

Yep

My personal take on it is that we'e a regulatory feedback loop, I mean if you're angry and you speak while angry you're liable to say or do something that upon reflection you might regret, to prevent this the output is immediately returned as an input so you can react to what you're going to say before you actually say it. If for example what you were about to say or do was going to hurt your social standing in the tribe/community you'll know not to do it, you might be nice to someone you hate because it's advantageous or you may conceal your intent behind the guise of something less objectionable, this capability for duplicity is a huge advantage in a civilised society.

Everything else is just a side effect, as a species we're fundamentally insane, there is no inherent self we're not things apart from everything else in the universe, we're just so much more carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, but we believe ourselves to be more, we give each other names and are largely convinced that these identities are somehow apart from us yet intrinsic to us.

As a species we are fundamentally insane.
It's why we're so dangerous.

No other species on earth takes offence at being preyed upon, no other species seeks revenge on behalf of individuals they may not have even known, no other species will hunt a predator to extinction out of spite.

We're not the toughest, fastest or strongest creatures on Earth, we're the fucking meanest.

 

[Coolydudey]

Interesting, to say the very least. I was not aware about a few of the facts and ideas in there. The whole thing actually seemed very reasonable, quite believable if you ask me, but it seems unclear to me why the information horizon provides any evidence for the blind brain hypothesis; why all this couldn't simply be some feature of another theory of consciousness. In that sense, it seems like a playful, but interesting and well-put-together theory.

 

[Cognisant]

it seems unclear to me why the information horizon provides any evidence for the blind brain hypothesis

Anything but epiphenomenalism tends to create more questions than it answers.

 

[Anktark]

If that's true, it would mean that time and "I" are not.

I am gonna print all the text in the OP's spoiler, take it outside and write it out on the snow in piss, thus disproving it.

 

[Cognisant]

That's an unconventional approach to rhetoric.

Photos or it didn't happen

 

[Absurdity]

I saw your comment before you deleted it, TA (and I can see it now anyway). I thought you would be happy to know I put the "Maybe you've heard of it before" caveat in especially for you.

Anyway, here's another part from that same post linked to in the OP about the "Bottleneck Thesis," which is very relevant.

Spoiler

Consider what might be called the ‘Bottleneck Thesis,’ which might be expressed as: we are natural in such a way that it is impossible to fully conceive of ourselves as natural. In other words, we are our brains in such a way that we can only understand ourselves as something other than our brains. Expressed in this way, the thesis is not overtly contradictory. It possesses an ontological component, that we are fundamentally ‘physical’ (whatever this means), and an epistemological component, that we cannot know ourselves as such. The plank in reason breaks when we probe the significance of the claim–step inside it as it were. If we cannot understand ourselves as natural, then we must understand ourselves as something else. And indeed we do, as we must, understand ourselves as agents, knowers, sinners, and so on. We may define this ‘something else’ in any number of ways, but they all share one thing in common: a commitment to a spooky bottomless ontology, be it social, existential, or otherwise, that is fundamentally incompatible with naturalism. We can disenchant the world, but not ourselves.

Although not contradictory, the Bottleneck Thesis does place us in a powerful cognitive double-bind. Despite the sheen of philosophical respectability, when we speak of the irreducibility of consciousness and norms as a way to secure the priority of life-worlds and language-games as ‘unexplained explainers,’ we are claiming an exemption from the natural. How could this not be tendentious? The only thing that separates our supra-natural posits from supernatural things such as souls, angels, and psychic abilities is the rigour of our philosophical rationale. Not a comforting thought, given philosophy’s track record. Moreover, these supra-natural posits are in fact fundamentally natural. Their apparent irreducibility is merely a subreptive artifact of our natural inability to understand them as such in the first instance. But then, once again, the only way we can assert this is by presupposing the very irreducibility we are attempting to explain away. We simply cannot be fundamentally natural because of the way we are fundamentally natural.

Given the absurdity of this, should we not just dismiss the Bottleneck out of hand? Perhaps, but at least two considerations should give us pause.

First, there is a sense in which the Bottleneck Thesis is justified as an inference to the best explanation for the cognitive disarray that is our bread and butter.
Say sentients belonging to an advanced alien civilization found some dead human astronauts and studied their neurophysiology. Say these sentients were similar to us in every physiological respect save that evolution was far kinder to them, allowing them to neurophysiologically process their own neurophysiology the way they process environmental inputs, such that for them introspection was a viable mode of scientific investigation. Where we simply see trees in the first instance, they see trees as neurophysiological results in the first instance.

Studying the astronauts, these alien researchers discover a whole array of neuro-functional similarities, so that they can reliably conclude that this does that and that does this and so on. The primary difference they find, however, is that our thalamocortical systems have a relatively limited information horizon. After intensive debate they conclude that humans brains likely lack the ability to process themselves as something belonging to the causal order of their environment. Human brains, they realize, probably understand themselvesin noncausal terms. They then begin speculating about what it would be like to be human. What, they wonder, would noncausal phenomenal awareness look like? They cannot imagine this, so they shift to less taxing speculations.

On the issue of human self-understanding, the alien researchers suggest that with the early development of their scientific understanding, humans, remarkably, would begin to see themselves as an exception to the natural order of things, as something apart from their brains, and would be unable, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, to divest themselves of the intuition. ‘There would be much controversy’ they suggest, ‘regarding what they are.’

On the issue of social coordination, the alien researchers conclude that humans would be forced to specify their behaviours in noncausal terms, as behaviour somehow exempt from the etiology of behaviour, and as a result would be unable to reconcile this intuitive understanding with their scientific understanding of the world. Given that humans are capable of scientific understanding (the specimens were, after all, astronauts), the aliens assume humans would perhaps attempt to regiment their understanding of their behaviour in a scientific manner, perhaps elaborate a kind of ‘noncausal ethology’ (what we call ‘psychology’), but they would be perpetually perplexed by their inability to reconcile that understanding with their science proper.

Human understanding of their linguistic behavioural outputs, the alien researchers assume, would likewise be characterized by confusion. Once again the human’s intuitive understanding would be noncausal, and given the maturation of their science, they might begin to question the reality of their hardwired default assumptions–their ‘intuitive sense’ of what was happening as far as language was concerned. ‘There might be some noncausal X,’ the aliens conclude, ‘that for them constitutes the heart of their immediate linguistic understanding, but it would seem to vanish every time they searched for it.’ (The X here, of course, would be what we call ‘aboutness’). Some more daring researchers suggest humans might eventually abandon this X, attempt to understand language in thoroughly terms. But this would provide no escape from their dilemma, since such an understanding would seem to elide obvious phenomenal features that not only seem to belong to language, but to be constitutive of it. (And here, of course, I’m talking about normativity).

And so the aliens continue speculating, all the while marvelling at the poor blinkered creatures, and at the capricious whim of evolutionary fate that perpetually prevents them from effectively rationalizing their neurophysiological resources.

Is this story that farfetched? Could aliens, given intact specimens, predict things like the mind/body problem, the problem of moral cognitivism, the problem of meaning, and the like? With enough patience and ingenuity, I suspect they could. The Bottleneck Thesis, I think, provides the framework for a very plausible explanation of the intractable difficulties associated with these and other issues. The theoretical uroboros of the intentional and the physical, the human and the natural, has a long and hoary history, repeated time and again in drastically different forms through a variety of contexts. It is as though we continually find ourselves, in Foucault’s evocative words, at once “bound to the back of a tiger” and “in the place belonging to the king.” This apparent paradox is a fact of our intellectual history, one that requires explanation.

As an adjunct to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, the Bottleneck Thesis not only explains why we seem to have so much difficulty with intentional phenomena in general, it explains why those difficulties take the forms they do across an array of different manifestations.

The second thing that should give us pause before rejecting the Bottleneck Thesis is that it constitutes a bet made on a eminently plausible neuro-evolutionary hypothesis: that our neurophysiology did not evolve to process itself the way it processes environmental inputs–that our brains are blind to themselves as brains. Given evolution’s penchant for shortcuts and morphological malapropisms, the possibility of such a neurophysiologically entrenched blind-spot, although grounds for consternation, should not be grounds for surprise. So we have evolved, and so long as we continue to reproduce, our genes simply will not give a damn. It would be pie-eyed optimism to assume otherwise.

There are cogent empirical and conceptual grounds, then, to think the Bottleneck Thesis might be true. And short of actually discovering intentionality in nature, there is no way to rule it out as a possibility. Certainly the absurdity of its consequences cannot tell against it, because such absurdity is precisely what one would expect given the truth of the Bottleneck. If we have in fact evolved in such a way that we cannot understand ourselves as part of nature, then we should expect to be afflicted by cognitive difficulties at crucial junctures in our thought.

If that's true, it would mean that time and "I" are not.

I am gonna print all the text in the OP's spoiler, take it outside and write it out on the snow in piss, thus disproving it.

That's a lot of piss.

 

[OrLevitate]

way too long to read. vanity plz. just concise omg.

if its saying consciousness is no big deal then i agree.

bats have sonar we have consciousness.