An (Draft) Ecological Approach to Hallucinating

Sabrina and I are planning our next papers, and in typical style she's been thinking about how to tackle a hard problem - this time, hallucinations. These are one of those go-to topics for representational people, because hallucinations by definition are not based in the detection of perceptual information. They are a kind of perceptual experience, however, and so seem to be a good candidate for identifying how perceptual experience is constructed internally. 

We've never let a little thing like a topic being hard stop us before, so it looks like this is next on our list. The goal is to lay out an ecological analysis and see where we end up. We are going to build on the work we did in the Ecological Representations paper, in which we considered how to understand (at least some) neural activity as the selection of consequent neural actions (pg 243 and on). This is the first of a few papers we have in mind where we apply our ecological analyses as worked examples to interesting topics (verbal instruction in coaching is on my mind too, as are cells making blood vessels). 

In this post, I'm going to do my usual thinking-out-loud about my notes from our first chat; all conclusions are works in progress! At this point, I am just assembling the resources our ecological approach provides us, and lining them up in their proper places so we can use them rigorously.

Reply to Hamlyn: In detail

This is a detailed reply to the critique Jim Hamlyn wrote critiquing our Ecological Representation preprint (and related blog post). If you aren’t him, then you might want to visit his blog to read his full review before proceeding…

First, Jim, thank you very much for providing such a thorough review of our paper. I hope this lengthy reply can be a part of an ongoing dialogue about these ideas. 

I’ve written this the same way I did the one for Sergio Graziosi (here) – replying to each point you make without reading ahead. 

Quotations are text taken directly from Hamlyn’s critique and are presented in the order in which they appear in his blog post.

“Hopefully they can be persuaded that this is only true if the required representations are of the fully public and intentional sort and not the neural and non-intentional sort that they seem to have embraced.”

As this sentence comes at the very beginning of your critique, let me take a second to say that I think what we propose here is consistent with a conception of public and intentional representations. The notion of informational representations is both public (in that they are external physical structures) and inherently intentional (in that they specify biologically relevant and, frequently, dispositional properties and, as such, coordinating with respect to this information is fundamentally FOR or ABOUT something, which satisfies most people’s construal of intentionality). 

Reply to Graziosi: In detail

This post is a detailed reply to Sergio Graziosi's useful critique of our Ecological Representation pre-print. As such, it's specific to his particular concerns about our argument, but I'm putting it here so that others can join in the discussion. If you are reading this and are not Sergio, you might want to head over to his blog and read the critique first. 


First, thank you very much for your detailed critique of the paper. It is incredibly useful and we are sincerely grateful for the time you've taken to comment on our crazy ideas. 

A quick note to start with. I am largely writing this reply reading a little bit of what you’ve written at a time because I want to respond to each point you make and to keep myself honest in evaluating your later proposed solutions to some of the problems you’ve identified in the paper (so I can’t shift my positions on basic issues!). So, apologies if my responses to these points aren’t relevant because of something you say later in your reply. 

Ecological Representations

Funny story. One day, I got a text from Sabrina that said "Holy crap. I think ecological information is a representation." "Uh oh", I thought - "Twitter is gonna be maaaaad". Then we thought, "we should probably write this idea down, see if we can break it". So we wrote, and the funnier thing was....it all just got stronger. The result is a paper we call "Ecological Representations", which we have just uploaded as a preprint to BioRxiv.

In it, we

1. argue that Gibsonian, ecological information meets the criteria to be a representation, then
2. predict that this information leads to neural activity that preserves its structure and that also meets the criteria to be a representation, and
3. we argue that these two ecological representations (informational and neural representations) can address the three core reasons cognitive science wants representations (getting intentionality/aboutness from a physical system, solving poverty of stimulus and enabling higher order cognition) while 
4. avoiding the two big problems with mental representations trying to address those motivations (symbol grounding and system-detectable error). 
5. We then spend a bunch of time getting serious about higher order cognition grounded in information (see, I told you we were working on it!)

We submitted this to a good cognitive science journal and got the reviews back last week. We were rejected after hitting a wall of confusion from two reviewers who got distracted by side issues and one who just didn't quite get it. No-one gave us much in the way of specific actionable things that need fixing, nor did anyone actually say our analysis of information as a representation was wrong. We remain unimpressed with the quality of the reviews (although the editor has been very clear and generous with his time in replying to us querying the rejection). 

That said, we are taking one hint from the process before submitting elsewhere, and that is we are clearly having trouble articulating the argument, in part I think because comes out of left field and we're tripping a lot of different knee-jerk reactions. We think the story makes sense but then we're us, so what we need is some fresh eyes. This is where you lovely people come in.

I have made some minor structural revisions to the version that got reviewed to address some of the issues that came up and I have uploaded it as a pre-print to BioRxiv.org. Now, we want your help.