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The question is this: provided that to all or some types of psychological processes there correspond simultaneous processes in the central nervous system, what connects the processes in question with one another? Very little has been done toward a solution to the correlation problem of the psychophysical relation, but, even if this problem were solved (i.e., if we could infer the characteristics of a brain process from the characteristics of a psychological process, and vice versa), nothing would have been achieved to further the solution of the essence problem (i.e., the psychophysical problem). For this problem is not concerned with the correlation, but with the essential relation; that is, with that which "essentially" or "fundamentally" leads from one process to the other or which brings forth both from a common root.
...there still remain, in the main, three hypotheses: mutual influence, parallelism, and identity in the sense of the two aspect theory...
Three contradicting and unsatisfactory answers and no possibility of finding or even imagining an empirical fact that could here make the difference: a more hopeless situation can hardly be imagined...
Rudolf Carnap, P. 37-38. The Logical Structure of the World. 1928
We are interested in explanations of experience in nature and the issues related to formalizing them. The workshop aims to bring together leading theorists, logicians and computer scientists, with empirical research in biology and physics to ask some of the harder questions regarding the foundations of logic and apprehension.
Rudolf Carnap saw an individual's entire embodied experience as the basis of logical construction and used “the recollection of similarity” as his formal basic relation. Arguing the physicalist manifesto he later observed that sentences of psychology can be translated into sentences of physical language. Yet the physicalist manifesto, as presented, offers no explanation of experience, it simply observes its presence. Carnap fully anticipated that our physical models would be extended.
Alfred North Whitehead also observed the presence of experience and argued that it is a fundamental effect of all process. Charles Sanders Peirce saw it as the basis of all cognitive apprehension but was never able to resolve the apparent dualist conflict. Yet Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, in establishing the basis of contemporary computational and information sciences, essentially found no place for it.
None have provided a role for it in the assembly of physical structures.
The focus of Turing and Shannon delivered clear practical benefits, driving the explosion of technology in the twentieth century – but they have left fundamental questions unanswered.
Today dominant explanations of experience remain fundamentally unscientific and do not take experience seriously as a phenomenon of the world. Experience is simply not explained, or it is merely observed. In the most widely recognized models it has become a magical property of emergence or simply an illusion (the nature of which is unexplained) in an identity with some other phenomenon.
Perhaps the theories of quantum physics that have caused us to review the fundamental nature of scientific explanation allow us to accept such magic. We think they do not.
We believe, that it is time to again take experience seriously as a phenomenon. To address the question with penetrating inquiry and rigor. To develop models in which experience has a role. To develop theories that make predictions about physiological structures that can be falsified.
The time for such predictions is upon us. Our empirical knowledge of gene mechanics and biology in general has grown by extraordinary degrees. The genome projects provide a fundamental basis for empirical biophysics previously impossible to consider. New medical technologies enable us to inspect organism structure and behavior in entirely new ways. And despite the broad confusion in physics, we believe that an inquiry into the fundamental nature of experience has never been better equipped, the demand for an explanation that is integrated with other physical theories never more necessary.
In the journal Nature, January 2005, Roger Penrose said he continued to believe “... a physical 'theory of everything' should at least contain the seeds of an explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness ...” He has campaigned tirelessly since he first expressed his concerns in “The Emperor's New Mind,” that we have missed something fundamental. That some further explanation is required. That there is no greater mystery that deserves a return of our attention. In many ways, this workshop follows his lead.
This is a small closed workshop. It will take place over two days at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Precise and revealing empirical accounts will be sought. Clear constructive definitions will be required and new concepts encouraged.
The proceedings of the workshop will appear in a new academic journal to be launched in conjunction with the workshop entitled "Experience in Nature."
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Palo Alto, California. August 2006
The programme committee reflects our cross discipline interest.
IASE is a newly forming international research institute with a single scientific focus: the explanation of experience in nature.
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