© 2000 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Consciousness and Theoretical Behaviorism1
1 Department of Psychology: Experimental, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708
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There are three domains of experience that concern students of behavior: Domain 1. The domain of felt experience, the phenomenological domain. Domain 2. The domain of physiology, the real-time functioning of the brain. Domain 3. The domain of behavioral data, "intersubjectively verifiable" reports and judgments by experimental subjects. Consciousness has meanings in each of these domains. Domain 1 consciousness is beyond the reach of science as public knowledge. Empathy and plausible inference may tell us that our spouse, or our dog, is as conscious as we are. Science cannot. Research in Domains 2 and 3 permits us to infer similarities and differences between human and non-human psychology. Unfortunately, these will never permit us to know ‘what it is like’ to be another creature. An example from the study of motion perception illustrates the point that the fruitless attempt to answer this question can actually impede the objective study of behavioral processes we share with non-human animals.
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The stakes are high, nothing less than the scientific understanding of what it is like to be animals...and what is truly unique about the human mind. (D. R. Griffin, 1982
, p. 2) Everyone agrees that animals and humans are related, but they differ on what this means for mental life. Consciousness, once dismissed as a topic for human, much less animal, psychology has returned in force. Do—or which, depending on one's commitment to the idea—animals have consciousness? What do we mean by "consciousness"? (Notice that the existential question usually precedes the definitional one.) And finally, what should we do about it—how should we treat animals? About the last question, I have nothing to say here; about the first two, I will argue:
- That there are three domains that concern psychologists:
- Domain 1. The domain of felt experience, the phenomenological domain—qualia.
- Domain 2. The domain of physiology, the real-time functioning of the brain.
- Domain 3. The domain of behavioral data, "intersubjectively verifiable" reports and judgments by experimental subjects.
- Domain 2. The domain of physiology, the real-time functioning of the brain.
- Domain 1. The domain of felt experience, the phenomenological domain—qualia.
- That Domain 1—the question animal-consciousness fans really care about—is out of the reach of science.
- That behaviorism allows for an objective assessment of consciousness in Domain 3, but that
- consciousness is probably not useful as a scientific explanation and, being ill-defined as well as private, is not easily explained itself.
Let me take up each of these assertions in turn.
In tres partes divisa est...
First, why these three divisions? Because they exhaust the field of inquiry open to psychologists, and because they separate Domains 2 and 3, which are third-party-accessible, from Domain 1, that alone contains private events. "Consciousness has a first-person ontology and so cannot be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, phenomena with a third-person ontology." (Searle, 1999) Contra B. F. Skinner and several contributors to this symposium (strange bedfellows!), I contend that Domain 1 events can never be a part of scientific inquiry.3
A phrase that has become fashionable in the philosophy of mind is ‘what is it like (to be a bat, a whale, a parrot, etc.)?’ If I understand it correctly, this is a way of speaking about qualia, subjective sensations: consciousness, in Domain 1. For example, discussing John Searle's famous Chinese Room example (Box 1), Owen Flanagan writes "Even if the room is Turing-identical to a Chinese speaker and even if it represents Chinese speech production somewhere along the way, there is nothing it is like to be the Chinese-speaking room." (1992, p. 68) This is essentially Searle's argument also. The room does not understand Chinese, he contends, "Because the program is purely formal or syntactical and because minds have mental or semantic contents, any attempt to produce a mind purely with computer programs leaves out [its] essential features." (1992, p. 45)
But what are the "essential features" of understanding Chinese, or any other kind of understanding? In third-person-accessible science they can only be discovered through interrogation—in which case the ‘what-is-it-like-to-be-a-...?’ question was settled years ago. For example, Friedrich Hayek, a perceptive philosopher-psychologist as well as economist and political theorist, wrote in 1952: "That different people classify external stimuli in the ‘same’ way does not mean that individual sense qualities are the same for different people (which would be a meaningless statement), but that the systems of sense qualities of different people have a common structure (are homeomorphic systems of relations)" (p. 37). In short, while I can establish that red, green and blue lights make white for you and me both, your green may well look like my red—I cannot know. A fortiori I cannot know what it is like to "understand" Chinese, so cannot say whether the Chinese room understands it or not—except by third-person-accessible interrogation. If the room passes that test—and, per hypothesis, it does—we have no basis for denying it "understanding."
To Searle's objection that "minds have mental or semantic contents" we can respond: How do you know? And we're back again either to a behavioristic test—or to assertions that must be taken on faith.
This point is a good projective test for individual differences. To some people, Searle's assertion will seem obvious. British psychologist Jeffrey Gray, for example, in his commentary on a Ciba Foundation Symposium on consciousness, wrote "I once asked a radical behaviourist what, in his view, is the difference between two awake individuals, one of them stone deaf, who are both sitting immobile in a room in which a record-player is playing a Mozart string quartet? His answer: their subsequent verbal behavior. Mercifully, there were no radical behaviourists at the symposium" (1992, p. 277). My response would be "Do you mean ‘What do I know about the difference?’ or ‘What can I infer about it?’" "What I know" is only the different verbal reports, before and after the experience. "What I can infer" is something about hearing. So, in a sense, both are right. The problem seems to be that what is obvious, i.e., needs no inference, to one person (Gray), is not to another (radical behaviorist Howard Rachlin).
On the side of the behaviorist is physicist Brian Pippard, who wrote "All too rarely do I find colleagues who will assent to the proposition (which I find irresistible) that the very ground-rules of science, its concern only for public knowledge, preclude its finding an explanation for my consciousness, the one phenomenon of which I am absolutely certain" (1992, p. 29).
There is no logical or empirical way to resolve these differences. So unless we wish to abandon the assumption that science is about third-person-accessible information—public knowledge, in John Ziman's (1968) phrase—that is, information about which agreement is possible, at least in principle—we must abandon qualia as a topic for scientific study. I may know "what it is like" to be me (although some may doubt even that, since I have no experience of being someone else) and I may think I know what it is like to be my dog—but I'll never be able to convince you.
This, of course, is the position of classical behaviorism:
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute (Watson, 1913While I do quarrel with two of Watson's other prohibitions—of theory and of internal states, for example (Staddon, 2001a
)—his stand on consciousness seems to me unavoidable if we wish to retain the idea that science is a social creation, based on third-person-accessible data about which consensus is possible.
Objections have been raised, of course. Indeed, to many contemporary commentators the "wasteful detour into behaviorism" (Calvin and Bickerton, 2000, p. 197) is behind us—and good riddance! "Why does anybody today need to write a book proving that animals are conscious? Does anybody doubt it? The answer is yes; people doubt it if they have been put through the kind of behaviourist-inspired training [false consciousness?] that students of biology and psychology received during much of the 20th century...Though psychologists officially abandoned behaviourist doctrines some 20 years back, the attitudes that went with those doctrines do not automatically change" (Midgley, 1999).
Midgley and others have problems with behaviorism because it is opposed at many points to commonsense "folk" psychology, and thus to cognitive psychology, the dominant "doctrine" these days. "Of course, Rover is conscious!" says Aunt Edna (and Ms. Midgley) "[T]he standard contemporary model of cognitive science is arguably continuous with the apparatus of folk psychology" (1999, p. 11) writes consciousness guru Colin McGinn—sympathetically. Pet-lovers and cognitivists agree: We are all conscious now!
But not every psychologist has "abandoned behaviourist doctrines," officially or unofficially. Well aware that it threatens their position, cognitivists are the strongest critics of behaviorism. For example, Philip Johnson-Laird has commented:
The behaviorist argument is based on two false assumptions. The first is that the sole purpose of science is to frame parsimonious laws. Notwithstanding Watson's and Skinner's emphasis on prediction and control of behavior, science aims to explain phenomena not merely to describe them in laws. And explanation...takes the form of theories. Hence, if mental states exist, a complete psychological explanation should give an account of them even if they could be dropped from laws of behavior. The second false assumption is that psychology should concern itself solely with the sequence of a stimulus in the external world giving rise to a response (1988, pp. 17–18).
But are these assumptions really false? Is parsimony different in any essential way from (scientific) explanation (Johnson-Laird's first point)? Is behaviorism really restricted to stimulus and response? The answer is "no!" to both questions (Staddon, 2001a, b). I am not sure exactly how Johnson-Laird means to distinguish between laws and theories, but he seems to imply that theories should be judged by criteria other than parsimony, and here I must disagree. Parsimony is not just a desirable feature, like leather upholstery or electric windows, it is the measure of explanatory power. Given two theories that explain the same data, the more parsimonious is invariably preferred.
Parsimony is a ratio, composed of facts explained divided by assumptions made. Defining both numerator and denominator can be difficult. But parsimony is nevertheless a key attribute of all scientific explanation. I defy anyone to point to an accepted theory in science that is less parsimonious than a defeated competitor. As for "mental states" if they are accessible to science, they, or rather their properties, must emerge from theories based on behavioral (or possibly physiological) data, that is data from Domains 2 and 3. More on this in a moment.
Is behaviorism restricted to stimulus and response? No, the idea of internal state is integral to theoretical behaviorism. Figure 1 shows a cartoon version of this view, which is no more than the generalized state machine (see Staddon, 2001a, b for fuller accounts).
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So what is left of consciousness, scientifically speaking? I will let a cognitive psychologist have the last word:
If Watson had not been so inept as a philosopher, he might have offered behaviorism as a pragmatic theory of mind, comparable to Peirce's pragmatic theory of meaning, James's pragmatic theory of truth, and Dewey's pragmatic theory of value. The mind—the other chap's mind, at any rate—is something whose existence is inferred entirely from the behavior we observe. "John is conscious" must be translated into the hypothesis, "If I call to John, he will answer," or, "If I stand in John's way, he will detour round me," and so on. In short, if I present him with such-and-such stimuli he will make such-and-such responses. To paraphrase Peirce, "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the mind to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the mind" (George A. Miller, 1962In other words, science can talk about consciousness as Hayek's "homeomorphic system of relations." We can study the pigeon's color vision by doing color-matching experiments, which can tell whether it has a three- or four-color system; we can do generalization experiments and see if things that look similar to us look similar to it;4 and we can try to understand other aspects of its psychology by doing the kinds of behavioral experiments that have been so eloquently described by Delius, Pepperberg, Terrace, Wasserman and many others. But qualia form no part of that work. These studies will not tell us what it is like to be a parrot or a chimp, although they may show us that we are in some respects similar and in others different from these creatures at the level of behavior and whatever underlying processes can be inferred from behavior. We may find that animals and human beings are similar kinds of machines, and we may infer from this that "what it is like" to be a bonobo is probably much like "what it is like" to be a congressman. But we cannot scientifically go beyond and test the idea. The private worlds of other beings are forever closed to us.
But do not despair! Little is lost when consciousness is omitted. I conclude by describing a perceptual example where, I contend, the injection of consciousness into the discussion has produced little but confusion, whereas omitting consciousness leads at once to a simple scientific account.
How consciousness-speak has muddled a simple perceptual phenomenon
When you watch a movie, your retina is stimulated 24 times each second with 24 static images. An object that takes up adjacent positions in each successive image is perceived as moving smoothly. The effect can be demonstrated experimentally with a single bright spot that is successively presented at one place and then at an adjacent place. This is termed the phi phenomenon (see Fig. 2).
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There is a related effect in which the two spots are different colors. What is then seen is a single moving spot which changes color at about the midpoint of its travel. This color-phi effect was particularly puzzling to philosopher Nelson Goodman. Daniel Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne (1992) discuss the problem this way:
Goodman wondered: "How are we able ...to fill in the spot at the intervening place-times along a path running from the first to the second flash before that flash occurs?".... Unless there is precognition, the illusory content cannot be created until after some identification of the second spot occurs in the brain. But if this identification of the second spot is already "in conscious experience" would it not be too late to interpose the illusory color-switching-while-moving scene between the conscious experience of spot 1 and the conscious experience of spot 2? ...[other experimenters] proposed that the intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs, and "projected backwards in time"....But what does it mean that this experienced motion is "projected backwards in time?" (p. 186).So presented, the color-phi effect might well puzzle anyone, but as we'll see, this description is highly misleading. Dennett and Kinsbourne maintain the suspense by inventing two supposedly standard cognitive ways of dealing with this effect. One, which they term "Orwellian," is that we experience things in one way, but then revise our memories, much as Minitruth in Orwell's 1984 revised history. The color-phi effect thus becomes a post-hoc reinterpretation: two spots are experienced, but a smoothly moving, color-changing spot is reported. Dennett and Kinsbourne term the other standard approach "Stalinesque," by analogy with Stalin's show trials, in which false evidence was reported accurately. In this view, what is reported is what was actually experienced, though what was experienced was not what (objectively) happened.
These are vivid analogies, but not altogether satisfying as explanations. The reader is now ready for Dennett and Kinsbourne's alternative. They dismiss the Stalinesque and Orwellian accounts in favor of what they term a "multiple-drafts" model: "Our Multiple Drafts model agrees with Goodman that retrospectively the brain creates the content (the judgment) that there was intervening motion, and that this content is then available to govern activity and leave its mark on memory. But our model claims that the brain does not bother "constructing" any representations that go to the trouble of "filling in" the blanks" (p. 194). In the multiple-drafts model consciousness becomes a distributed construct, like "The British Empire" (their analogy), which is not uniquely located in time or space.
If you still do not get it, do not worry: the essence of the correct view is Dennett and Kinsbourne's phrase "creates the content." "Multiple drafts" and so forth is irrelevant. What is important is that a given history causes a certain state of the organism ("content," if you prefer). That's all. This is close to the view of theoretical behaviorism, but it can be more directly expressed.
Much of the muddle arises first of all from confusion among the three domains I described earlier. For example, Dennett and Kinsbourne write "Conscious experiences are real events occurring in the real time and space of the brain, and hence they are clockable and locatable within the appropriate limits of precision for real phenomena of their type" (p. 235). Well, no, not really. What can be clocked and located are reports of conscious experiences and measurements of physiological events. Conscious experiences are Domain 1, which has neither time nor space, but only ineffable qualia. The only evidence we have for these qualia (at least, for someone else's) is Domain 3. And we can try and correlate Domain 3 data with Domain 2 data and infer something about the brain correlates of reported experiences. But that's all.
The picture becomes much clearer once we take look more closely at Domain 3: What did the subjects report and when did they report it? The real-time events in the color-phi experiment are illustrated in Figure 3, which is a version of the general framework of Figure 1 tailored to this experiment. Time goes from top to bottom in discrete steps.5 At time 0 the red spot is lit and goes out; there is a delay; then the green spot is lit; there is another delay and then the subject reports what he has seen, namely a continuously moving red spot that changes to green half way through its travel, which I will denote by "RRRRGGGG."
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The stimuli and responses in the diagram are Domain 3. The states are not in any of the three domains, of course: they are neither qualia, nor brain measurements nor behavior. They are theoretical constructs. Their properties are defined by whatever theory we devise for the phenomenon (I describe a possible theory in a moment).
The problems with this example seem to arise over how the subject's response is to be interpreted. What does "RRRRGGGG" mean? Is this what the subject really sees? Interpreting the response seems to be the heart of the puzzle, but the unknowable quale here is scientifically irrelevant. From a third-person (i.e., scientific) point of view, the response just tells us something about what other, "control" experiments might give the same response. Figure 4 shows one such control experiment. In this experiment, a single spot really is moving and changing color at the midpoint: RRRRGGGG, and the subject's report is appropriately "RRRRGGGG." The similarity between the responses to the objectively moving stimulus and to the color-phi stimulus is what the statement "the color-phi stimulus looks like a continuously moving spot that changes color" means. The point is that we (i.e., an external observer) cannot judge the subject's quale, but we can judge if his response is the same or different on two occasions. And as for the subject, he can also judge whether one thing looks like another or not. These same-different judgments are all that is required for a scientific account.6
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The comparison between these two experiments casts the color-phi experiment in a form that poses an answerable scientific question, namely: "What kinds of process give the same output to the two different histories illustrated in the two figures?" More generally, what characterizes the class of histories that give the response "RRRRGGGG"? The answer will be some kind of well-defined process, which can be simulated on a computer or built in to a microchip.
One can even get a glimpse of the appropriate process. It will be one in which the representations of temporally adjacent events tend to inhibit one another, so that "end" events are more salient than events in the middle of a series. Thus, the sequence RRRRGGGG (small letters indicating weak stimuli) might well have much the same effect on an observer as the sequence RRRRGGGG. Perhaps the effect of the middle stimuli, RRRGGG, is in fact negligible, in which case the color-phi sequence R......G (... indicating no middle stimuli stimulus at all) would also produce the response "RRRRGGGG." I have described such a process to illustrate a potential mechanism for the serial-position effect in verbal learning, in which end stimuli also have a stronger effect than stimuli in the middle of a sequence (primacy and recency; Staddon, 1998). No doubt something similar could be devised to account for color-phi.7
There is one remaining problem with this account. We can readily concede the existence of a process that will give the same output to three different input sequences: RRRRGGGG, R......G, and RRRRGGGG. The question is, why is the subject's response "RRRRGGGG," rather than "RRRRGGGG" or "R......G"? Why do people report the truncated or modified sequences as appearing like the unmodified sequence? Why privilege one of the three possible interpretations over the others? It is here that one must appeal to innate mechanisms. Roger Shepard (e.g., 1987) has argued persuasively that our perceptual mechanisms have evolved to interpret a given stimulus sequence in the way that has been most probable during our evolutionary history. Thus, by responding "RRRRGGGG," rather than one of the other ways, we may be simply be playing the evolutionary odds. Given that these three sequences all produce the same internal state, the most likely state of the world is RRRRGGGG (rather than one of the others)—so RRRRGGGG is what we perceive—and report.
It is worth noting that the problem posed by color phi, as I have framed it, parallels the history of research on another perceptual phenomenon: color vision. An early discovery was that people sometimes see (report) "red" (for example) when no spectrally red light is present—just as people sometimes see movement when nothing is actually moving. Later research expanded on this theme through the study of after-effects, color-contrast and "Land" effects eventually showing a wide range of disparities between the color seen and the wavelengths present. The solution to the problem was the discovery of processing mechanisms that define the necessary and sufficient physical-stimulus conditions for a person to report "green," "red" or any other color.
Notice that this way of studying the color-phi effect is as suitable for non-human as human animals. No verbal report is necessary, merely a response signaling that sequences are perceived as similar or different. If we agree with Watson that we should "recognize no dividing line between man and brute"—and biologists will surely agree—then the attempt to interpret phenomena in terms of "consciousness" turns out to be more usually a scientific hindrance than a help.
The point is that science advances when we discover theories that explain our observations. The observations that make up the color-phi effect are pretty straightforward. Couching the problem in terms of conscious perception is not only unhelpful, it may have actually retarded scientific understanding of what turns out to be a relatively simple problem. There are many other examples, not only from purely behavioral experiments, but also from psychophysiology (Staddon, 2001a). A recent reviewer commented "many scientists are providing strong evidence that animals feel and think in ways akin to humans" (Best, 2000). Well, maybe they are and maybe they do, but such experiments do little to answer the scientific question, which is not "Do animals think and feel as we do?" but "How do they (and we) work?"
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- Argument from epistemology: Only my consciousness is certain. Neither your consciousness nor Fido's is public knowledge. Science is about public knowledge. Hence, scientific knowledge about consciousness is not possible.
- Argument from utility: The attempt to treat the "what is it like to be...?" question as a scientific one has impeded understanding of public data.
- Proposal: Statements about mental life should usually be rephrased as statements about equivalent histories—with a great gain in clarity and in continuity with animal research, and...
- The Principle of Historical Equivalence: A psychological phenomenon is adequately explained if we can devise a process that produces the same output from a defined set of histories.
- So what about consciousness? Miller's rewriting of Peirce will do very well: "Consider what [third-person] effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive consciousness to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our [scientific] conception of consciousness."
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BOX 1: THE CHINESE ROOM
Never has so much discussion been elicited from so many by so modest a proposal:
Simply imagine that someone who understands no Chinese is locked in a room with a lot of Chinese symbols and a computer program for answering questions in Chinese [my italics] The input to the system consists in Chinese symbols in the form of questions; the output of the system consists in Chinese symbols in answer to the questions. We might suppose that the program is so good that the answers to the questions are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. But all the same, neither the person inside nor any other part of the system literally understand Chinese (Searle, 1992
There are several objections to Searle's argument. Most important, I think is the System Response: Of course, the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese; no part of the system "understands" Chinese, any more than any neuron in your brain understands English. You, the system as a whole, understand English; the room-plus-program understands Chinese. And as for that computer program: where is it written that such a program could be constructed? Yet without proof that it is possible, the argument is inconclusive.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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I thank Clive Wynne, Hank Davis and an anonymous reviewer for comments on the manuscript as well as numerous colleagues and students for discussions that have helped clarify my thoughts on these issues. This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health to Duke University.
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1 From the Symposium Animal Consciousness: Historical, Theoretical, and Empirical Perspectives presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 6–10 January 1999, at Denver, Colorado.
2 E-mail: Staddon{at}psych.duke.edu
3 Note that this is a weaker position than that favored by some behaviorists, who argue that the ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ question (Nagel, 1974) is not just unanswerable but meaningless—if only because "like" implies comparison and, mythology apart, no one has experienced both "batness" and "humanness." (The introspections of Count Dracula probably cannot be trusted.) But since one can imagine unanswerable questions that nevertheless have meaning, I am reluctant to take the stronger view when the weaker serves the same purpose, namely to exclude "what is it like to be...?" questions from science.
4 Jerry Lettvin years ago, in the lively talks that were his trademark, used to point out that the fact that cryptic moths (designed by evolution to evade bird predators) also look cryptic to us, implies that the visual world must look similar to birds and people.
5 The discreteness is not theoretically necessary, but makes the temporal sequence easier to illustrate.
6 This account of subjective experience is essentially the same as economists' account of subjective value. Economists generally agree that we cannot put a number on how much you value your pet bunny or your Picasso lithograph. But the science can proceed just knowing whether you are indifferent between the bunny and your ocelot or whatever, i.e., just based on judgments of "same" or "different."
7 My account both of the color-phi phenomenon and its explanation is greatly simplified, so as to clarify the methodological point. For example, both number of alternations and speed of alternation are important, but these variables do not affect the argument.
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