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Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness
This book proposes a novel view to explain how we as humans -- contrary to current robots -- can have the impression of consciously feeling for example the red of a sunset, the smell of a rose, the sound of a symphony, or a pain.
The book starts off by looking at visual perception. Our ability to see turns out to be much more mysterious than one might think. The eye contains many defects which should seriously interfere with vision. Yet we have the impression of seeing the world in glorious panavision and technicolor. Explaining how this can be the case leads to a new idea about what seeing really is. Seeing is not passively receiving information in the brain, but rather a way of interacting with the world. The role of the brain is not to create visual sensation, but to enable the necessary interactions with the world.
This new approach to seeing is extended in the second part of the book to encompass the other hearing, touch, taste and smell. Taking sensory experiences to be modes of interacting with the world explains why these experiences are different in the way they are. It also explains why thoughts or automatic functions in the body, and indeed the vast majority brain functions, are not accompanied by any real feeling.
The "sensorimotor" approach is not simply a philosophical It leads to scientifically verifiable predictions and new research directions. Among these are the phenomena of change blindness, sensory substitution, "looked but failed to see", as well as results on color naming and color perception and the localisation of touch on the body.
The approach is relevant to the question of what animals and babies can feel, and to understanding what will be necessary for robots to become conscious.
The book starts off by looking at visual perception. Our ability to see turns out to be much more mysterious than one might think. The eye contains many defects which should seriously interfere with vision. Yet we have the impression of seeing the world in glorious panavision and technicolor. Explaining how this can be the case leads to a new idea about what seeing really is. Seeing is not passively receiving information in the brain, but rather a way of interacting with the world. The role of the brain is not to create visual sensation, but to enable the necessary interactions with the world.
This new approach to seeing is extended in the second part of the book to encompass the other hearing, touch, taste and smell. Taking sensory experiences to be modes of interacting with the world explains why these experiences are different in the way they are. It also explains why thoughts or automatic functions in the body, and indeed the vast majority brain functions, are not accompanied by any real feeling.
The "sensorimotor" approach is not simply a philosophical It leads to scientifically verifiable predictions and new research directions. Among these are the phenomena of change blindness, sensory substitution, "looked but failed to see", as well as results on color naming and color perception and the localisation of touch on the body.
The approach is relevant to the question of what animals and babies can feel, and to understanding what will be necessary for robots to become conscious.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published June 24, 2011
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246 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 15, 2018
Research psychology presented, at it's best. O'Regan is one of a modern crop of psychologists and philosophers who favour the idea that consciousness (or 'cognition) is based not just in the brain, but 'out' in the world too. There are 4 variations of this - embodied, embedded, extended and enacted (see Mark Rowlands, The New Science of Mind).
Ragan however, is a research psychologist, not a philosopher, so he is presenting actual research and it's results - and this is very refreshing in the world of cognitive science. In a bright and breezy style, full of concrete examples and actual testing, he shows how cognition is built up from the outside first.
Currently (2018) the book is available for free download from the author's website, so a big thumbs up for that!
Ragan however, is a research psychologist, not a philosopher, so he is presenting actual research and it's results - and this is very refreshing in the world of cognitive science. In a bright and breezy style, full of concrete examples and actual testing, he shows how cognition is built up from the outside first.
Currently (2018) the book is available for free download from the author's website, so a big thumbs up for that!
August 28, 2020
I'd recommend (the first 25% of) this book to anyone doing computer vision research. It highlights the limitations of doing research in the context of narrow, single-task learning rather than an embodied system trying to learn about the world. In this way, ORegan makes a strong case for the necessity of embodiment for developing AGI, or any system that hopes of understanding the visual world.
ORegan begins by narrating an old age paradox in the mechanics of biological eyes: images are projected inverted on the neurons that carry signal to the brain, why do we perceive the world right-side-up?
He describes the "spectre of the homolocus" that has plagued scientific thinking in resolving this apparent paradox. Basically it boils down to whether the inversion is corrected in "pixel space" or "latent space". Scientists who believed in the Cartesian theatre - that is to say images from the eyes are physically projected right-side-up in a region of the brain and is interpreted by a "little man in the brain" were essentially arguing for "pixel-space correction". This is almost certainly wrong.
ORegan points out numerous other mechanical flaws with the human eyes:
- photo receptors are mostly concentrated in the middle of the eye
- color focus and resolution focus cannot be simultaneously achieved
- the eye is curved and straight lines are projected as curved
- there are blind spots
- there is object continuity when we perform "faccades" with our eyes
The all share the property that scientists tried to explain the apparent disconnect between noisy input image and noiseless perceived visual world by "pixel-space" adjustment.
It's ironic that each of these apparent flaws with the human eyes have a "pixel-space" correction in computer vision research. In the same order they are,
- super resolution
- colorization
- mapping (of lanes in self driving for example)
- in-filling
- composing sequences of images in video
The thesis ORegan presents is that none of these adjustments are made in the human visual system. In other words, if we are hoping to build self driving systems for example, by composing a series of single-task, pixel-level corrections to what the camera captures then we are almost certainly doing it wrong - or at least different from how human perception works.
ORegan goes on to present a unifying framework to describe vision, touch, memory and imagination. He views each of these as an iterative attention process whereby the mind observes both an immediately relevant (high-res) detail and caches some peripheral (low-res) information for further exploration. This iterative process is grounded in the goals of the human, and in this sense "the reward is backpropagated all the way back from goals rather than a single image/vision tasks".
I personally like the elegance of such a unifying theory but would caution in making oversimplifications in understanding the brain.
He describes how this iterative attention mechanism explains the perceived stability of human vision. Spatial stability or the sense of "knowing everything in the room" is achieved by the very ability to see everything in the room (by caching low-resolution information to prompt future attention). Temporal stability or the sense of always "keeping an eye on something" (even when you're blinking or distracted) is achieved by a confirmation bias. "Do I still see the cat?" *Attend on cat "Yes".
I'd also go on to say there is a "sanity bias" - human's subjective experience is consonant with an expectation of being say.
"Of course I am continually looking at the cat."
"Of course making new memories don't delete old ones".
I think the main conclusion in this book is subtle but very startling. The subjective experience of seeing something is "nothing but" the decoding of neural signal by other neurons in the brain. This seems directly at odds with the "high-resolution" or subjective visual experience. Why do we not see the branches and leaves of the tree as a green and brown blob? Or why does a tree not "appear" as an elephant? Why does neurons firing conjure a subjective experience of seeing the outside world that is accurate with respect to the objects/things in the outside world?
One hypothesis is survival. A lot of neurons are dedicated to visual processing, perhaps because having high accuracy and resolution is necessary to survive (eat mushroom A but not mushroom B, don't mistake a lion for a gazelle).
Another hypothesis is sanity bias. We like to think we are seeing objects for exactly how they are when in reality, a "higher resolution experience" is possible. At the end of the day, we have no reference to judge what subjective experience "should be like".
One way to test the hypothesis that seeing is only the firing of neurons is to apply a well design electrical signal to a person's brain. The hypothesis implies we can modify subjective experience by modifying how neurons fire.
The latter parts of the book are as disappointing as the firsts were refreshing. It reads like a watered-down version of GEB.
The dialogue is unfocused. There is a noticeable shift of narrative style to using hyperbolic adjectives and verbs as the substance in the book decreases. ORegan's ideas on consciousness are outdated and cliche. "A chess playing robot is not conscious because it can't talk about the weather."
ORegan begins by narrating an old age paradox in the mechanics of biological eyes: images are projected inverted on the neurons that carry signal to the brain, why do we perceive the world right-side-up?
He describes the "spectre of the homolocus" that has plagued scientific thinking in resolving this apparent paradox. Basically it boils down to whether the inversion is corrected in "pixel space" or "latent space". Scientists who believed in the Cartesian theatre - that is to say images from the eyes are physically projected right-side-up in a region of the brain and is interpreted by a "little man in the brain" were essentially arguing for "pixel-space correction". This is almost certainly wrong.
ORegan points out numerous other mechanical flaws with the human eyes:
- photo receptors are mostly concentrated in the middle of the eye
- color focus and resolution focus cannot be simultaneously achieved
- the eye is curved and straight lines are projected as curved
- there are blind spots
- there is object continuity when we perform "faccades" with our eyes
The all share the property that scientists tried to explain the apparent disconnect between noisy input image and noiseless perceived visual world by "pixel-space" adjustment.
It's ironic that each of these apparent flaws with the human eyes have a "pixel-space" correction in computer vision research. In the same order they are,
- super resolution
- colorization
- mapping (of lanes in self driving for example)
- in-filling
- composing sequences of images in video
The thesis ORegan presents is that none of these adjustments are made in the human visual system. In other words, if we are hoping to build self driving systems for example, by composing a series of single-task, pixel-level corrections to what the camera captures then we are almost certainly doing it wrong - or at least different from how human perception works.
ORegan goes on to present a unifying framework to describe vision, touch, memory and imagination. He views each of these as an iterative attention process whereby the mind observes both an immediately relevant (high-res) detail and caches some peripheral (low-res) information for further exploration. This iterative process is grounded in the goals of the human, and in this sense "the reward is backpropagated all the way back from goals rather than a single image/vision tasks".
I personally like the elegance of such a unifying theory but would caution in making oversimplifications in understanding the brain.
He describes how this iterative attention mechanism explains the perceived stability of human vision. Spatial stability or the sense of "knowing everything in the room" is achieved by the very ability to see everything in the room (by caching low-resolution information to prompt future attention). Temporal stability or the sense of always "keeping an eye on something" (even when you're blinking or distracted) is achieved by a confirmation bias. "Do I still see the cat?" *Attend on cat "Yes".
I'd also go on to say there is a "sanity bias" - human's subjective experience is consonant with an expectation of being say.
"Of course I am continually looking at the cat."
"Of course making new memories don't delete old ones".
I think the main conclusion in this book is subtle but very startling. The subjective experience of seeing something is "nothing but" the decoding of neural signal by other neurons in the brain. This seems directly at odds with the "high-resolution" or subjective visual experience. Why do we not see the branches and leaves of the tree as a green and brown blob? Or why does a tree not "appear" as an elephant? Why does neurons firing conjure a subjective experience of seeing the outside world that is accurate with respect to the objects/things in the outside world?
One hypothesis is survival. A lot of neurons are dedicated to visual processing, perhaps because having high accuracy and resolution is necessary to survive (eat mushroom A but not mushroom B, don't mistake a lion for a gazelle).
Another hypothesis is sanity bias. We like to think we are seeing objects for exactly how they are when in reality, a "higher resolution experience" is possible. At the end of the day, we have no reference to judge what subjective experience "should be like".
One way to test the hypothesis that seeing is only the firing of neurons is to apply a well design electrical signal to a person's brain. The hypothesis implies we can modify subjective experience by modifying how neurons fire.
The latter parts of the book are as disappointing as the firsts were refreshing. It reads like a watered-down version of GEB.
The dialogue is unfocused. There is a noticeable shift of narrative style to using hyperbolic adjectives and verbs as the substance in the book decreases. ORegan's ideas on consciousness are outdated and cliche. "A chess playing robot is not conscious because it can't talk about the weather."
September 29, 2015
A year ago, I had the privilege to attend a lecture by J. Kevin O’Regan, ex-director of the Laboratoire de Psychologie de la Perception at the Université René Descartes, Paris 5. In his book, Why Red doesn’t sound like a bell, J. Kevin O’Regan writes about consciousness and feel in a new way. The first part is about the feel of seeing.
Why do we think we see “everything” in front of us whereas our eyes are not that good? Is it because the brain provides us with a fully corrected representation? No, J. Kevin O’Regan says.
I wrote a lengthy article about the first part here: http://ouzepo.wordpress.com/2014/08/3...
Why do we think we see “everything” in front of us whereas our eyes are not that good? Is it because the brain provides us with a fully corrected representation? No, J. Kevin O’Regan says.
I wrote a lengthy article about the first part here: http://ouzepo.wordpress.com/2014/08/3...
July 23, 2019
Found the book hard to read and difficult to finish till the end but the new concept of feel as sensor-motor interaction with the world really interesting.
"The idea is similar to the idea of feeling at home. When I am sitting on my sofa, I feel at home because there are a variety of actions I can undertake (go into the kitchen and get a coffee; go to the bedroom and lie down; etc.). But I need not undertake them. It is because I'm poised to do these things that I have the feeling of being at home. Feeling at home does not require actual action. In the same way seeing does not require actual action. It requires having previously acted, and it requires having the future potential for action."
"The idea is similar to the idea of feeling at home. When I am sitting on my sofa, I feel at home because there are a variety of actions I can undertake (go into the kitchen and get a coffee; go to the bedroom and lie down; etc.). But I need not undertake them. It is because I'm poised to do these things that I have the feeling of being at home. Feeling at home does not require actual action. In the same way seeing does not require actual action. It requires having previously acted, and it requires having the future potential for action."
September 25, 2019
Consciousness isn't one thing. That's part of the problem with that term it means different things to different people, and there are different components of it. There is a concept of self-awareness, that's an easy one, to explain at least. The more challenging part of consciousness is what is referred to as "qualia" which deals with individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. Like for example how you perceive an object that seems red, or what is pain, or what does pain feel like. That to me seems like a far more interesting aspect of consciousness. And this is by far the best treatise I've read about that particular component of consciousness. it's a difficult read. But very insightful.
Want to read
January 3, 2016o'regan's one of my favorite cognitive scientists. the only reason i haven't read it yet is that i've read a bunch of his papers already and i had to stop and read about retinas.
i'm really looking forward to it though.
i'm really looking forward to it though.
February 1, 2016
This is an incredibly concise and concrete explanation of feeling and consciousness. I'm amazed at how much is covered in this book and how clearly it's explained. The Notes for each Chapter are also quite helpful. Really great job!
January 8, 2025
The best scientific book I've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews