Reading Thomas Metzinger -- transparency

Transparency.

Reading "Being No One", the biggest problem I've found so far is the

"Transparency" constraint (3.2.7, of 3.2 "Multilevel Constraints: What

Makes a Neural Representation a Phenomenal Representation?", of 3 "The

Representational Deep Structure of Phenomenal Experience"), and the

related "Homogeneity" constraint (3.2.10 "“Ultrasmoothness”: The

Homogeneity of Simple Content"). Perhaps I'll grasp it making this

note.

Warning: the notion of attention I use below is the technical one

defined in the book.

Although the author appears to define "transparency" precisely, I'm

not sure the bundle of accompanying examples fits into a single

concept. It is spanned between two aspects.

The first is phenomenal simplicity: experience is transparent, when we

cannot direct attention to any more of the details of the process over

which the experience supervenes.  I.e. there is a strict unpenetrable

border of attention, the aspects of the preception process which (at

least potentially) are part of the experience, are the "portions" of

this process to which we can direct attention. And there are large

portions of the perception process to which we just cannot direct

attention at all, at least in normal conditions (e.g. not under

psychedelic drugs, some drug-induced artifacts might be transgressions

of this attentional border). This view of transparency makes the

experience "substantial": things (and I'll add thoughts as well)

appear to us as they appear to us to fundamentally be, we have no

experiential clue that the appearance could be, for example, an

abstraction or a statistical inference.

The second aspect is phenomenal givenness (veridicity?). In normal

wakeful awareness (and in some nocturnal dreams, those that are

"realistic" i.e. vivid and non-lucid), we are predisposed to be naive

realists. We experience being immersed in a world as it independently

of our act of perception is. Experience is transparent when it is

experienced as exclusively about the actual world (or the actual

us). Experience is transparent when its content is experienced as its

only cause. Under this aspect, thoughts, imaginations and lucid dreams

are phenomenally opaque (and therefore also plans, mental rehearsal,

etc.) They (usually) are perceived as "representing", as standing

for something (since only actual stuff can be present).

Of course these two aspects are related, for example we can talk about

ineffability and immediacy in both cases. But there might be

experiences that are one but not the other. It's likely that in vivid

dreams (and lucid dreams are vivid since a lot of the brain is waken

up) we experience qualia. Is Thomas Metzinger taking the two aspects

as two sides of a single coin, or just defining "transparency" as

conjunction of "givenness" and "simplicity"?

The author's definition of phenomenal transparency:

"For any phenomenal state, the degree of phenomenal transparency is

inversely proportional to the introspective degree of attentional

availability of earlier processing stages."

Earlier processing stages are "temporally earlier" in the aspect of

phenomenal givenness, and are "constitutionally earlier" in the aspect

of phenomenal simplicity. In both cases the "earlier processing

stages" are the "internal causes" of the experience.

I think from what Thomas Metzinger writes that he might think, if we

could direct attention to, for example, edge detectors in visual

processing, as long as we rest our attention at the edge detectors, we

would have to "will the perception into existence" of objects that

constitute the normal visual experience, for them to appear to us. By

analogy to how we experience imagination, where we have to "will"

imagined objects "into existence". The objects wouldn't just

effortlessly appear besides the edges. In 3.2.10 paragraph

"Homogeneity as an Informational-Computational Strategy" (he writes

such paragraphs for each constraint) he states: "Without homogeneity

we could introspectively penetrate into the processing stages

underlying the activation of sensory content. One obvious consequence

of this would be that the multimodal, high-dimensional surface of our

phenomenal world would start to dissolve. We would then phenomenally

experience the model as an ongoing global simulation permanently

generated from scratch, as it were, and thereby it would inevitably

lose the phenomenal character of being an untranscendable reality."

What is normally perceived is always a persistent, "maximum a

posteriori" object. Fixing too early processing stages, like edge

detectors, might be disruptive to this inferential process.

What are your thoughts? Do you think that phenomenal givenness implies

phenomenal simplicity? What about vice-versa? Do you think that the

objects of imagination are always given to us relationally, we always

grasp the processuality of their coming about? Are there imaginary

qualia? Do you think that attentional access to (constitutionally)

earlier processing stages dissolves the experiential immediacy of

later stages?

Lucid dreams are interesting because we can affect the scene

construction by directing our attention to toplevel fragments of the

top-down information propagation in scene construction, while the

bottom-up information propagation proceeds unaffected. I'd say that we

have "givenness" when we do not clamp any fragment of the toplevel

layers for the top-down information propagation of a given scene

(either because we cannot since the bottom-level layers are clamped by

sensory input, or because we don't realize that we can). (I'm sorry

for the homunkulus-like way of speaking.) I'd say we have "simplicity"

when the bottom-up information propagation starts below the lowest

attentionally available layer, rather than in the middle, for the

scene. I'm finishing 3.2.10, lucid dreams are covered somewhere in the

next chapter.

Chapter 4 "Case Studies I".

Let me pick up more issues in "Being No One", perhaps the glitches are

my own stubbornness.

The first problem is when the author claims (4.2 "Deviant phenomental

models of reality", 4.2.1 "Agnosia" p. 220/221) that a patient who

uses chromatic information for shape formation and motion detection,

but has no experience of color (his visual experience is in shades of

gray), has color cognitively but not attentionally avialable. The fact

that chromatic distinctions feed into shape formation has obviously

nothing to do with recognizing color conceptually, no? Chromatic

vision feeds into formation of concepts here, but not of color

concepts.

4.2.2 "Neglect". Similarily, hemineglect no doubt is an attentional

deficit (and a deficit of the "model of intentionality relation"), but

likely the deficit is simply because of the lesion of processing

stages leaving nothing to attend to and model. There's less of a

problem because the author doesn't say otherwise. He sort-of analyzes

the minimal conditions that could generate hemineglect.

Anton's syndrome discussion focuses on the self-modeling deficit

without mentioning whether the offline phenomenal experience

(nocturnal dream like, but top-down modulated) is also absent. I guess

it is.

4.2.4 "Hallucinations", Charles-Bonnet syndrome; "percepts are missing

characteristic features and are simply superimposed on, but not

semantically embedded in, the phenomenal model of external reality" is

contradicted by the following example. The patient reports pragmatic

and (slight) phenomenal abnormalities as distinguishing hallucinated

content, semantically it seems to be OK.

Phenomenal transparency/opacity is again distincitly used in two

senses, one is transparency as "phenomenally normal experience", and

the other, inflated meaning is opacity as "believed to not correspond

to reality".

I don't think it's likely that "earlier processing stages" can become

directly available for attention, because of architectural

limitations. It's more likely that they become available indirectly by

"polluting" the bottom-up signal with "vehicle properties" (the

"maximum aposteriori distribution" puts too much weight on the

consistency of the lower layers, so they fixate before propagating

information upwards). It is still a form of attentional

availability... Perhaps this could be not indirect, but an important

(if not the primary) mechanism of attentional availability? For

Metzinger, attentional availability is "subsymbolic

re-representation", i.e. additional neurodynamical structure is formed

that correlates with the original phenomenon and propagates

information about it.

You might be asking how this differs from cognitive availability,

i.e. "symbolic re-representation". The attentional structure is

(neurodynamically) homomorphic with the original phenomenon and so

cannot be reassembled in arbitrary contexts, while the symbolic

structure is only activationally linked with the original phenomenon.

4.2.5 "Dreams", "phenomenal dream content is not attentionally

available" -- obviously, "All there is is salience-driven, low-level

attention." Again we have two concepts conflated, "attentional

salience" and "volitional attention". Phenomena have to be

attentionally available (in the attentional salience aspect) to be

even minimally conscious. As later noted, this is related to the

distinction from chapter 2 (p. 36) between four forms of

introspection:

1. external attention

2. consciously experienced cognitive reference

3. inward attention / inner perception

4. consciously experienced cognitive self-reference

Introspection 1 is attention (subsymbolic re-representation) toward a

"world" experience. Introspection 3 is attention toward the

self-model, it "is generated by processes of phenomenal

representation, which direct attention toward certain aspects of an

internal system state, the intentional content of which is being

constituted by a part of the world depicted as internal".

Introspection 2 and 4 are the symbolic variants. Metzinger says

"introspection 3 is almost impossible in a dream state, because

high-level attention is absent." Obviously, most dreams feature a

phenomenal self, only it is not a volitional self because of the lack

of deliberation. Metzinger seems to say that in dreams, attention

cannot rest on the self-model, it only integrates features of the

self-model selected by the generated world-model. But it's an

attentional deficit (lack of high-level attention). "You cannot

introspectively attend even to your most simple sensory perceptions in

the dream state, because you are not an attentional subject."

(Anecdotally, I think I've had dreams without a phenomenal self -- dreamt

from the third person perspective, or, remembered as movies; I've certainly had

dreams with a phenomenal self that was not my actual (waking)

self-model, remembered as movies with a distinguished

character. Normally I have dreams remembered in roughly the same

format as normal memories.)

P.S.

Later the author makes it even more evident that he thinks of the presentational content, i.e. the processes that are only attentively but not cognitively available, as transparent, and of representational content, i.e. cognitively available processes, as opaque. As a tendency perhaps.