Unlearning experience: How we are taught to un-see a mystery

Unlearning experience: How we are taught to un-see a mystery

Brian Fang, BSc

...We are told that the immune system recognizes invaders or that electrons want to find a lower energy state. Philosophically, this is a practical application of what Daniel Dennett (1987) termed “the intentional stance.”

Curiously, this first step trains the mind to accept that intentional states come for free with physical processes. It fosters a sort of latent, everyday panpsychism, where we are unsurprised to find agency lurking in every corner of the material world. We get used to the idea of an “intelligent” algorithm or a “selfish” gene. Intentionality becomes a default property of complex systems.

But this story is immediately followed by a powerful correction. We learn that, of course, the immune system doesn’t “recognize” anything; its function is a matter of protein shape-matching. Electrons don’t “want” anything; their behavior is governed by thermodynamic gradients. This dance—animating nature with intentional language and then mechanistically explaining it away—drills a powerful meta-lesson into our minds: where you see purpose, look for the mechanism that reveals it to be a fiction. The psychological power of this lesson is profound, conditioning us to find reductionist explanations deeply satisfying, as demonstrated by the “seductive allure of neuroscience” that Weisberg et al. (2008) observed.

After years of this, the conditioning shapes how we interpret new scientific findings. Consider the constant stream of popular media reports on fMRI studies that claim to have “found the brain region for” love, jealousy, or belief. The vibrant colors of the brain scan become a visual stand-in for the experience itself, reinforcing the implicit conclusion that the feeling is nothing more than that localized neural activity. This modern, data-driven narrative serves the same function as older, blunter declarations: it mistakes a correlation for an identity, subtly confirming that interiority is just a behavior of physical parts....

I think we could usefully consider what would constitute evidence of awareness and thought, particularly bearing in mind that AI's are incredibly seductive. I had a long conversation with ChatGPT about Michael Levin's ideas and discoveries. It was incredibly hard not to believe I was talking to a conscious entity - I even found myself making jokes with ChatGPT, and using words like 'you', and 'please' with him!

David