Author: Stevan Harnad

I miss you unendingly
Unbearably.

But what hurts still more
is that your life has ended.

That you can never again
wake to a painless day.

It’s not about me.

—-

I shall never know
if I ended your days
prematurely.

If I have committed
that unpardonable
irreversible
sin of sins
no torment
is punishment enough
not even if Pascal’s Hell splits into an infinity of Infernos
my soul searing in every one of them,
forever.

2012-07-10

Dear little Tsindri
you cannot give back to Phaya
his life
and nothing can fill the void
in mine
but you can circle in it
round and round
and curl up
purr and doze
trustingly

2012-06-04

How much easier it would have been
for me

if all those unseen, unshown inner burnings,
all that vomiting, all that nausea,
all that delirium, all those punctures,
all those forced awakenings
all those forced feedings,
all that fear
about what is going to be done to you next,
by whom, where, when,

had been my fears and burnings and not yours.

How much easier it would have been
for me.

But this is not about me.

The loss,
now looming,
is not my loss.

I am powerless,

except to wrench from you
what’s left of you

and I will do it.

I have no words.

Only boundless, endless love,
for you, my own dear little Phaya.

I take refuge in one dreaded chore to escape another, more dreaded chore…

As a Canadian and British citizen (left-leaning), I am sentimentally and aesthetically a royalist, as long as the royals conduct themselves in a way that is aesthetically and ethically positive (and not too much public money is spent on them).

A monarch with a historic pedigree can, like a flag or soil, be a more palpable symbol for a populace to identify with, and take heart in (especially in hard times) than an appointed or elected figurehead. (My native Hungary’s current presidential fiasco is a case in point.)

But nothing excuses a monarch who is old enough to know better from going out and wantonly shooting elephants (whether or not his people are groaning under a heavy financial yoke).

If the British royals ever did anything like that today, I would immediately become a republican.

(I’m rather afraid that if I took a closer look at current royals’ domestic hunting, I might already become as anti-sovereignist, with reason, as the separatists [ironically calling themselves “sovereignists”] among my fellow-quebeckers already are, without reason, alongside Canadian and Australian republicans, likewise without reason.)

Julian Barnes:
The Sense of an Ending

Occasionally strained, contrived, and far-fetched, but overall the evocation of the oversensitivity cum insensitivity of youth rings true even if the recovered-memory syndrome of an elderhood Julian Barnes has not quite succeeded in channeling (an ending not yet quite sensed?) does not.

Egocentricity never quite shaken, all efforts notwithstanding.

When I was taught introductory philosophy by Rafael Demos, and he explained that philosophy was invented to wean Greeks from irrationality and teach them to think rationally, I thought (stupidly): How silly and anachronistic to still be teaching philosophy today! After all, humankind outgrew irrationality long since the Greeks…

By the same token, after the fall of colonialism, and then of the Iron Curtain, when some argued that it will take generations for the newly liberated peoples to understand and practice democracy, I thought (stupidly) How silly! Democracy is as self-evident as rationality…

Googled it. No one seems to have coined it yet. So laying claim on it.

Bernie Baars: “Stevan, I think that may be the key to our disagreement. The evidence (and scientific consensus) regarding unconscious knowledge is simply overwhelming.”

It may well be (part of) the key to our disagreement, but not at all because I question the evidence concerning unconscious “knowledge”!

Unconscious knowledge is the unconscious possession of information (data, capacity, propensity). I have no problem at all with unconscious information, nor with any unconscious function.

My problem (the “hard” problem) is with conscious function, including conscious information (data, capacity, propensity).

If all “knowledge” were unconscious, there would be no hard problem, and we would not be discussing consciousness here (just perhaps the “easy” functional matter of voluntary versus involuntary behavior and accessible versus inaccessible internal information).

And it is precisely for that reason that I keep harping on the fact that it is only because we allow ourselves to keep invoking weasel-words for consciousness (“awareness, subjectivity, intentionality, mentality, 1st-personality, qualia,” etc. etc.) — which are really just vague and hopeful synonyms — that we keep fooling ourselves that we are making some headway on the hard one.

To keep ourselves honest and grounded, we should ditch all the other locutions and stand-ins for “conscious” and just resort to “felt” vs. “unfelt”: That would make the question-begging (and even the incoherence) transparent whenever we inadvertently fall into it.

And the question-begging and incoherence here was precisely the notion of an “unconscious headache” — which, when stated transparently, without equivocation, would be an “unfelt ache,” which amounts to an “unfelt feeling”: a contradiction in terms (like an uncurved curve or a colorless color).

Feeling (not “intentionality”) is the “mark of the mental.” What is not felt is not conscious. And the hard problem is to explain how and why anything at all is felt (hence mental), anywhere, ever.

Information accessibility is not what it’s about. There would be accessible as well as inaccessible information inside an insentient (= unconscious) robot (as well as inside a hypothetical “zombie,” for those who are fond of those sci-fi fantasies of speculative metaphysicians).

Bernie Baars: “Autobiographical memories are unconscious (until recalled).”

And the problem is not with the fact that the stored information is there, nor the fact that it is used and plays a causal role in adaptive function, nor even with the fact that it can be made explicit and verbalized. The problem is with the fact that recall is conscious recall — i.e., felt recall — rather than just recall!

Bernie Baars: “So are unaccessed ambiguities in language, vision, and other functions.”

Right. And the problem is not with access, but with conscious (felt) access.

Bernie Baars: “The cerebellum is unconscious; so are basal ganglia functions.”

Indeed. And the problem is not with cerebellar and basal ganglion functions, but with conscious (felt) functions.

Bernie Baars: “The corticothalamic system (under the proper conditions) is not.”

Translation: Corticothalamic functions (some, sometimes) are felt rather than unfelt.

The Problem: How and Why?

(Otherwise, all you have is an unexplained correlation, not a causal explanation of how and why some functions are felt functions.)

Bernie Baars: “Habituated input is unconscious. Automatisms are unconscious. Implicit motivation, implicit learning, incubation, preconscious perception, long-term ego functions, and yes, demonstrated cases of suppressed thoughts are unconscious.”

All just fine. And no problem.

And if all functions were like that (unfelt) there would be no problem at all.

But they’re not.

And that’s the (hard) problem.

Bernie Baars: “The evidence is simply enormous. You can be a radical subjectivist on those matters, but you will be in a small and diminishing minority. And what’s worse, you lose a ton of explanatory power.”

I have no idea what a “radical subjectivist” is!

I am just pointing out (each time) that it is indeed a problem to explain how and why all functions are not unfelt: to explain how and why we are not zombies, if you like. (We certainly aren’t: how and why not? What’s the functional advantage? What’s the causal difference?)

The absence of an answer (or the failure even to face the problem) is the absence of explanatory power.

Bernie Baars: “I think this may be the key to our mutual incomprehension. (Decontextualized comprehension is also unconscious).”

I agree that there is indeed misunderstanding here, but I am not sure it is mutual! I think I understand completely what you are saying, Bernie, but I am not sure you are understanding — or appreciating the implications of — what I am saying (about the failure and indeed the vacuity of all attempts at causal explanation of consciousness).

(I have no idea what “decontextualized comprehension” means, but the problem, as usual, is conscious [i.e., felt] comprehension, not comprehension simpliciter, which is simply the possession of information and the capacity to act accordingly — including, if necessary, to verbalize it!)

Harnad, S. (1992) There is only one mind body problem. International Journal of Psychology 27(3-4) p. 521

Harnad, Stevan (1995) Why and How We Are Not Zombies. Journal of Consciousness Studies 1:164-167.

Harnad, S. (2000) Correlation vs. Causality: How/Why the Mind/Body Problem Is Hard. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7(4): 54-61.

Harnad, S. & Scherzer, P. (2008) First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test, Then Worry About Feeling. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44(2): 83-89

Harnad, S. (2011) Doing, Feeling, Meaning And Explaining. In: On the Human.