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Written by Saeid Bagheri Moghaddam

 

  As a person who lived in a religious environment, a question that kept re-emerging was: where do I get my soul or spirit, which shapes my character, creates a zest for life, and gives energy to my moral existence? I was told that these can’t be done merely with non-conscious molecules and neurons; there must be something “indivisible” and “nonmaterial” in me or with me. Religion offers a short answer to this mystery--soul. When I was very young, I was fascinated by one of the most influential Islamic theologians, Al-Ghazzali, and one of his books, “Incoherence of the Philosophers.” In it he denied any connection between soul and body for a good reason—to refute any causality between them. He believed that our soul is “incorporeal” and “is not the cause of our body.” Al-Ghazzali himself did not believe that his claim can be proved by rational arguments. He thought that the scope of philosophy is limited in the realm of causality, despite the fact that there is no cause in the natural course of events; “it is because God has created them in that fashion.” He believed that the position of philosophers in proving the existence of soul and Supreme Being is untenable because the quiddity of soul and Supreme Being can not be understood by mundane means—those are off the map of creation where no cause is at all. He writes, “[I]f [body] can be eternal, it will have no cause at all.” The problem that I have with this argument is that if the causality of an event were an absurd product of human imagination, then the punishments and rewards that, they believe, are dispensed in the hereafter would be meaningless; because its very premise is based on the notion of causality. Al-Ghazzali’s thoughts seemingly changed the direction of the course of history in the Islamic world because he rejected the notion of causality and reasoning. He promoted the idea of submission and Taqlid (Taqlid is a term used in Islamic theology for the acceptance of religious concepts and rules without evidence). His beliefs were disastrous for a most flourishing period of the Islamic era. Although Ibn Rushd in his book, “the Incoherence of the Incoherence”, tried to confine the damage done by Al-Ghazzali, Al-Ghazzali’s beliefs had prevailed over rational voices such as Ibn Sina and Farabi.

 

When I came to America in 1998, I had no answer to that legitimate question: where do I get my soul or spirit? To grasp the theological argument about soul in the Christian faith, I read one of Augustine’s books, De Animae Quantitate. In it he explicitly defined the soul as “a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body.” In a logical way of thinking about his definition, one may ponder that if we supposed that the proposition of nonmaterial and indivisible entity, as Augustine and even Descartes put it, were right, then we would encounter a logical difficulty of understanding how a wraithlike “substance”, as Augustine called it, has a material locus--the brain. For instance, anyone who has witnessed the significant changes in personality and character of a stroke survivor would admit that the damaged part of the brain has severely disturbed the soul and in some cases caused irreversible harm to it. Therefore, there must be a necessary connection between the cause, brain damage, and the effect, changed character and personality. As David Hume put it, the cause necessitates its effect. From this, one can easily understand that the soul can’t be indivisible or immortal in Augustine’s sense.  Ironically, the doctrine of the immortal soul has recently been ruled out by a Christian theologian, Frederick Buechner, in the light of considerable evidence about how the brain functions. Buechner referred to a part of the Apostles Creed, “resurrection of the body,” concluding “we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e., resurrected) just as we were given them by God in the first place." The idea is still maddeningly obscure because the notion of the “resurrection of the body” creates a huge desire in some of its followers to die young. William James in one of his essays, “Does Consciousness Exist?”, pointed out a very important historical development of how the meaning of the soul has gradually been changing from “transcendental entity” to  “transcendental ego.” He wrote, “"[the soul] attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the 'content' of experience IS KNOWN."(p. 2).

 

Drifting inexorably from one school of thought to another, I found out that there must be a mechanism for consciousness from which we can answer that legitimate question of our existence, understand what we are and what we can be, rethink our perceptions of humanity, and ultimately reformulate the whole structure of our civilization based on that new philosophy of human nature. I realized that consciousness is an important key available to us whereby we are able to make sense of “self” and “I.” Consciousness is a vital ingredient of our being--without it we would be in some form of vegetative state, delirium, or mutism. Oddly, this very salient phenomenon in us has remained a mystery, partly because of its subjective nature. So one may ask, “Why is there any problem at all”? I must admit that the mysteriousness of consciousness has to do with experiences that we have of the outside world. Many believe that every individual may have qualitatively different subjective experiences of a particular event or stimulus, which creates two severe puzzles. On the one hand, there are activities in the brain, which we are unconscious of, such as the activities of the spinal, cerebellar and vestibular reflexes; and there are some activities in the brain, which we are conscious of, such as joy and sadness, pleasure and pain. A scientific question arises from this: how does the brain distinguish between our conscious experiences and unconscious activities of the body? How can the brain marshal the body for action? For example, when we reach out for a cup of tea, the brain sends only discriminated data to appropriate organs. Or when the traffic light turns red, we immediately say, “that is a red light.” How can the brain contain those data and their correlates? How is the brain able to coordinate our conscious and unconscious activities?  The philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed this as the “Easy Problem,” because science will eventually unravel this mystery one way or another. On the other hand, we encounter an insurmountable difficulty when Chalmers challenges us to tackle the “Hard Problem.” The Hard Problem seems to me a similar question to that I had been asking myself for years: where do I get my own soul and spirit? What is it that causes me to have my own private sensations and experiences? How can conscious, subjective experiences arise from over a trillion non-conscious neurons? Chalmers himself asks, “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?”

 

In this documentary, I am trying to answer these questions, or to put it more conservatively, to explore some of the answers to those questions that been given to us by neuroscientists. It seems to me, neuroscience, at its very best, tries not to reject the idea of soul, but to refine the concept in mechanical terms, exorcising the ghostly substance in the genuine, subjective feelings that we have, which we don't really know whether it is real or illusion.  But Thomas Nagel and a few other philosophers believe that it is almost impossible for science to address the Hard Problem; he writes, “If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done.” I argue that this is not the case; there must be a way or ways, directly or indirectly, to study this very obvious phenomenon in the human brain; otherwise the ghost in the body remains the only viable answer to the question of consciousness. Eric Kandel, an American neuroscientist and a winner of the Nobel Prize, believes that neuroscientists have made “considerable progress in understanding the neurobiology of perception and memory without having to account for individual experience. For example, cognitive neural scientists have made advances in understanding the neural basis of the perception of the color blue without addressing the question of how each of us responds to the same blue (p., 382).” In this documentary, I am trying to convince my audience to pass beyond that ghostly image and to think of consciousness as a process rather than imagining a “headquarters” inside the brain and a little observer that sits down there and runs the “show.” I believe that because consciousness is a biological phenomenon, there must be a scientific explanation(s) for it.

 

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CONCLUDING REMARKS AND SUMMARY.

The three leading principles which have determined the chief movements of expression—Their inheritance—On the part which the will and intention have played in the acquirement of various expressions—The instinctive recognition of expression—The bearing of our subject on the specific unity of the races of man—On the successive acquirement of various expressions by the progenitors of man—The importance of expression—Conclusion.

I HAVE now described, to the best of my ability, the chief expressive actions in man, and in some few of the lower animals. I have also attempted to explain the origin or development of these actions through the three principles given in the first chapter. The first of these principles is, that movements which are serviceable in gratifying some desire, or in relieving some sensation, if often repeated, become so habitual that they are performed, whether or not of any service, whenever the same desire or sensation is felt, even in a very weak degree.

Our second principle is that of antithesis. The habit of voluntarily performing opposite movements under opposite impulses has become firmly established in us by the practice of our whole lives. Hence, if certain actions have been regularly performed, in accordance with our first principle, under a certain frame of mind, there will be a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of directly opposite actions, whether or not these are of any use, under the excitement of an opposite frame of mind.

Our third principle is the direct action of the excited nervous system on the body, independently of the will, and independently, in large part, of habit. Experience shows that nerve-force is generated and set free whenever the cerebro-spinal system is excited. The direction which this nerve-force follows is necessarily determined by the lines of connection between the nerve-cells, with each other and with various parts of the body. But the direction is likewise much influenced by habit; inasmuch as nerve-force passes readily along accustomed channels.

The frantic and senseless actions of an enraged man may be attributed in part to the undirected flow of nerve-force, and in part to the effects of habit, for these actions often vaguely represent the act of striking. They thus pass into gestures included under our first principle; as when an indignant man unconsciously throws himself into a fitting attitude for attacking his opponent, though without any intention of making an actual attack. We see also the influence of habit in all the emotions and sensations which are called exciting; for they have assumed this character from having habitually led to energetic action; and action affects, in an indirect manner, the respiratory and circulatory system; and the latter reacts on the brain. Whenever these emotions or sensations are even slightly felt by us, though they may not at the time lead to any exertion, our whole system is nevertheless disturbed through the force of habit and association. Other emotions and sensations are called depressing, because they have not habitually led to energetic action, excepting just at first, as in the case of extreme pain, fear, and grief, and they have ultimately caused complete exhaustion; they are consequently expressed chiefly by negative signs and by prostration. Again, there are other emotions, such as that of affection, which do not commonly lead to action of any kind, and consequently are not exhibited by any strongly marked outward signs. Affection indeed, in as far as it is a pleasurable sensation, excites the ordinary signs of pleasure.

On the other hand, many of the effects due to the excitement of the nervous system seem to be quite independent of the flow of nerve-force along the channels which have been rendered habitual by former exertions of the will. Such effects, which often reveal the state of mind of the person thus affected, cannot at present be explained; for instance, the change of colour in the hair from extreme terror or grief,-- the cold sweat and the trembling of the muscles from fear,-- the modified secretions of the intestinal canal,--and the failure of certain glands to act.

Notwithstanding that much remains unintelligible in our present subject, so many expressive movements and actions can be explained to a certain extent through the above three principles, that we may hope hereafter to see all explained by these or by closely analogous principles.

Actions of all kinds, if regularly accompanying any state of the mind, are at once recognized as expressive. These may consist of movements of any part of the body, as the wagging of a dog’s tail, the shrugging of a man’s shoulders, the erection of the hair, the exudation of perspiration, the state of the capillary circulation, laboured breathing, and the use of the vocal or other sound-producing instruments. Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulation. With man the respiratory organs are of especial importance in expression, not only in a direct, but in a still higher degree in an indirect manner.

Few points are more interesting in our present subject than the extraordinarily complex chain of events which lead to certain expressive movements. Take, for instance, the oblique eyebrows of a man suffering from grief or anxiety. When infants scream loudly from hunger or pain, the circulation is affected, and the eyes tend to become gorged with blood: consequently the muscles surrounding the eyes are strongly contracted as a protection: this action, in the course of many generations, has become firmly fixed and inherited: but when, with advancing years and culture, the habit of screaming is partially repressed, the muscles round the eyes still tend to contract, whenever even slight distress is felt: of these muscles, the pyramidals of the nose are less under the control of the will than are the others and their contraction can be checked only by that of the central fasciae of the frontal muscle: these latter fasciae draw up the inner ends of the eyebrows, and wrinkle the forehead in a peculiar manner, which we instantly recognize as the expression of grief or anxiety. Slight movements, such as these just described, or the scarcely perceptible drawing down of the corners of the mouth, are the last remnants or rudiments of strongly marked and intelligible movements. They are as full of significance to us in regard to expression, as are ordinary rudiments to the naturalist in the classification and genealogy of organic beings.

That the chief expressive actions, exhibited by man and by the lower animals, are now innate or inherited,--that is, have not been learnt by the individual,--is admitted by every one. So little has learning or imitation to do with several of them that they are from the earliest days and throughout life quite beyond our control; for instance, the relaxation of the arteries of the skin in blushing, and the increased action of the heart in anger. We may see children, only two or three years old, and even those born blind, blushing from shame; and the naked scalp of a very young infant reddens from passion. Infants scream from pain directly after birth, and all their features then assume the same form as during subsequent years. These facts alone suffice to show that many of our most important expressions have not been learnt; but it is remarkable that some, which are certainly innate, require practice in the individual, before they are performed in a full and perfect manner; for instance, weeping and laughing. The inheritance of most of our expressive actions explains the fact that those born blind display them, as I hear from the Rev. R. H. Blair, equally well with those gifted with eyesight. We can thus also understand the fact that the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

We are so familiar with the fact of young and old animals displaying their feelings in the same manner, that we hardly perceive how remarkable it is that a young puppy should wag its tail when pleased, depress its ears and uncover its canine teeth when pretending to be savage, just like an old dog; or that a kitten should arch its little back and erect its hair when frightened and angry, like an old cat. When, however, we turn to less common gestures in ourselves, which we are accustomed to look at as artificial or conventional,-- such as shrugging the shoulders, as a sign of impotence, or the raising the arms with open hands and extended fingers, as a sign of wonder,-- we feel perhaps too much surprise at finding that they are innate. That these and some other gestures are inherited, we may infer from their being performed by very young children, by those born blind, and by the most widely distinct races of man. We should also bear in mind that new and highly peculiar tricks, in association with certain states of the mind, are known to have arisen in certain individuals, and to have been afterwards transmitted to their offspring, in some cases, for more than one generation.

Certain other gestures, which seem to us so natural that we might easily imagine that they were innate, apparently have been learnt like the words of a language. This seems to be the case with the joining of the uplifted hands, and the turning up of the eyes, in prayer. So it is with kissing as a mark of affection; but this is innate, in so far as it depends on the pleasure derived from contact with a beloved person. The evidence with respect to the inheritance of nodding and shaking the head, as signs of affirmation and negation, is doubtful; for they are not universal, yet seem too general to have been independently acquired by all the individuals of so many races.

We will now consider how far the will and consciousness have come into play in the development of the various movements of expression. As far as we can judge, only a few expressive movements, such as those just referred to, are learnt by each individual; that is, were consciously and voluntarily performed during the early years of life for some definite object, or in imitation of others, and then became habitual. The far greater number of the movements of expression, and all the more important ones, are, as we have seen, innate or inherited; and such cannot be said to depend on the will of the individual. Nevertheless, all those included under our first principle were at first voluntarily performed for a definite object,--namely, to escape some danger, to relieve some distress, or to gratify some desire. For instance, there can hardly be a doubt that the animals which fight with their teeth, have acquired the habit of drawing back their ears closely to their heads, when feeling savage, from their progenitors having voluntarily acted in this manner in order to protect their ears from being torn by their antagonists; for those animals which do not fight with their teeth do not thus express a savage state of mind. We may infer as highly probable that we ourselves have acquired the habit of contracting the muscles round the eyes, whilst crying gently, that is, without the utterance of any loud sound, from our progenitors, especially during infancy, having experienced, during the act of screaming, an uncomfortable sensation in their eyeballs. Again, some highly expressive movements result from the endeavour to cheek or prevent other expressive movements; thus the obliquity of the eyebrows and the drawing down of the corners of the mouth follow from the endeavour to prevent a screaming-fit from coming on, or to cheek it after it has come on. Here it is obvious that the consciousness and will must at first have come into play; not that we are conscious in these or in other such cases what muscles are brought into action, any more than when we perform the most ordinary voluntary movements.

With respect to the expressive movements due to the principle of antithesis, it is clear that the will has intervened, though in a remote and indirect manner. So again with the movements coming under our third principle; these, in as far as they are influenced by nerve-force readily passing along habitual channels, have been determined by former and repeated exertions of the will. The effects indirectly due to this latter agency are often combined in a complex manner, through the force of habit and association, with those directly resulting from the excitement of the cerebro-spinal system. This seems to be the case with the increased action of the heart under the influence of any strong emotion. When an animal erects its hair, assumes a threatening attitude, and utters fierce sounds, in order to terrify an enemy, we see a curious combination of movements which were originally voluntary with those that are involuntary. It is, however, possible that even strictly involuntary actions, such as the erection of the hair, may have been affected by the mysterious power of the will.

Some expressive movements may have arisen spontaneously, in association with certain states of the mind, like the tricks lately referred to, and afterwards been inherited. But I know of no evidence rendering this view probable.

The power of communication between the members of the same tribe by means of language has been of paramount importance in the development of man; and the force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the face and body. We perceive this at once when we converse on an important subject with any person whose face is concealed. Nevertheless there are no grounds, as far as I can discover, for believing that any muscle has been developed or even modified exclusively for the sake of expression. The vocal and other sound-producing organs, by which various expressive noises are produced, seem to form a partial exception; but I have elsewhere attempted to show that these organs were first developed for sexual purposes, in order that one sex might call or charm the other. Nor can I discover grounds for believing that any inherited movement, which now serves as a means of expression, was at first voluntarily and consciously performed for this special purpose,--like some of the gestures and the finger-language used by the deaf and dumb. On the contrary, every true or inherited movement of expression seems to have had some natural and independent origin. But when once acquired, such movements may be voluntarily and consciously employed as a means of communication. Even infants, if carefully attended to, find out at a very early age that their screaming brings relief, and they soon voluntarily practise it. We may frequently see a person voluntarily raising his eyebrows to express surprise, or smiling to express pretended satisfaction and acquiescence. A man often wishes to make certain gestures conspicuous or demonstrative, and will raise his extended arms with widely opened fingers above his head, to show astonishment, or lift his shoulders to his ears, to show that he cannot or will not do something. The tendency to such movements will be strengthened or increased by their being thus voluntarily and repeatedly performed; and the effects may be inherited.

It is perhaps worth consideration whether movements at first used only by one or a few individuals to express a certain state of mind may not sometimes have spread to others, and ultimately have become universal, through the power of conscious and unconscious imitation. That there exists in man a strong tendency to imitation, independently of the conscious will, is certain. This is exhibited in the most extraordinary manner in certain brain diseases, especially at the commencement of inflammatory softening of the brain, and has been called the "echo sign." Patients thus affected imitate, without understanding every absurd gesture which is made, and every word which is uttered near them, even in a foreign language.[1] In the case of animals, the jackal and wolf have learnt under confinement to imitate the barking of the dog. How the barking of the dog, which serves to express various emotions and desires, and which is so remarkable from having been acquired since the animal was domesticated, and from being inherited in different degrees by different breeds, was first learnt we do not know; but may we not suspect that imitation has had something to do with its acquisition, owing to dogs having long lived in strict association with so loquacious an animal as man?

[1] See the interesting facts given by Dr. Bateman on ‘Aphasia,’ 1870, p. 110.

In the course of the foregoing remarks and throughout this volume, I have often felt much difficulty about the proper application of the terms, will, consciousness, and intention. Actions, which were at first voluntary, soon became habitual, and at last hereditary, and may then be performed even in opposition to the will. Although they often reveal the state of the mind, this result was not at first either intended or expected. Even such words as that "certain movements serve as a means of expression" are apt to mislead, as they imply that this was their primary purpose or object. This, however, seems rarely or never to have been the case; the movements having been at first either of some direct use, or the indirect effect of the excited state of the sensorium. An infant may scream either intentionally or instinctively to show that it wants food; but it has no wish or intention to draw its features into the peculiar form which so plainly indicates misery; yet some of the most characteristic expressions exhibited by man are derived from the act of screaming, as has been explained.

Although most of our expressive actions are innate or instinctive, as is admitted by everyone, it is a different question whether we have any instinctive power of recognizing them. This has generally been assumed to be the case; but the assumption has been strongly controverted by M. Lemoine.[2] Monkeys soon learn to distinguish, not only the tones of voice of their masters, but the expression of their faces, as is asserted by a careful observer.[3] Dogs well know the difference between caressing and threatening gestures or tones; and they seem to recognize a compassionate tone. But as far as I can make out, after repeated trials, they do not understand any movement confined to the features, excepting a smile or laugh; and this they appear, at least in some cases, to recognize. This limited amount of knowledge has probably been gained, both by monkeys and dogs, through their associating harsh or kind treatment with our actions; and the knowledge certainly is not instinctive. Children, no doubt, would soon learn the movements of expression in their elders in the same manner as animals learn those of man. Moreover, when a child cries or laughs, he knows in a general manner what he is doing and what he feels; so that a very small exertion of reason would tell him what crying or laughing meant in others. But the question is, do our children acquire their knowledge of expression solely by experience through the power of association and reason?

As most of the movements of expression must have been gradually acquired, afterwards becoming instinctive, there seems to be some degree of a priori probability that their recognition would likewise have become instinctive. There is, at least, no greater difficulty in believing this than in admitting that, when a female quadruped first bears young, she knows the cry of distress of her offspring, or than in admitting that many animals instinctively recognize and fear their enemies; and of both these statements there can be no reasonable doubt. It is however extremely difficult to prove that our children instinctively recognize any expression. I attended to this point in my first-born infant, who could not have learnt anything by associating with other children, and I was convinced that he understood a smile and received pleasure from seeing one, answering it by another, at much too early an age to have learnt anything by experience. When this child was about four months old, I made in his presence many odd noises and strange grimaces, and tried to look savage; but the noises, if not too loud, as well as the grimaces, were all taken as good jokes; and I attributed this at the time to their being preceded or accompanied by smiles. When five months old, he seemed to understand a compassionate, expression and tone of voice. When a few days over six months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed; now this child could rarely have seen any other child crying, and never a grown-up person crying, and I should doubt whether at so early an age he could have reasoned on the subject. Therefore it seems to me that an innate feeling must have told him that the pretended crying of his nurse expressed grief; and this through the instinct of sympathy excited grief in him.

[2] ‘La Physionomie et la Parole,’ 1865, pp. 103, 118.

[3] Rengger, ‘Naturgeschichte der Saugethiere von Paraguay,’ 1830, s. 55.

M. Lemoine argues that, if man possessed an innate knowledge of expression, authors and artists would not have found it so difficult, as is notoriously the case, to describe and depict the characteristic signs of each particular state of mind. But this does not seem to me a valid argument.

We may actually behold the expression changing in an unmistakable manner in a man or animal, and yet be quite unable, as I know from experience, to analyse the nature of the change. In the two photographs given by Duchenne of the same old man (Plate III. figs. 5 and 6), almost every one recognized that the one represented a true, and the other a false smile; but I have found it very difficult to decide in what the whole amount of difference consists. It has often struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are instantly recognized without any conscious process of analysis on our part. No one, I believe, can clearly describe a sullen or sly expression; yet many observers are unanimous that these expressions can be recognized in the various races of man. Almost everyone to whom I showed Duchenne’s photograph of the young man with oblique eyebrows (Plate II. fig. 2) at once declared that it expressed grief or some such feeling; yet probably not one of these persons, or one out of a thousand persons, could beforehand have told anything precise about the obliquity of the eyebrows with their inner ends puckered, or about the rectangular furrows on the forehead. So it is with many other expressions, of which I have had practical experience in the trouble requisite in instructing others what points to observe. If, then, great ignorance of details does not prevent our recognizing with certainty and promptitude various expressions, I do not see how this ignorance can be advanced as an argument that our knowledge, though vague and general, is not innate.

I have endeavoured to show in considerable detail that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-stock, which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large extent in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other. No doubt similar structures, adapted for the same purpose, have often been independently acquired through variation and natural selection by distinct species; but this view will not explain close similarity between distinct species in a multitude of unimportant details. Now if we bear in mind the numerous points of structure having no relation to expression, in which all the races of man closely agree, and then add to them the numerous points, some of the highest importance and many of the most trifling value, on which the movements of expression directly or indirectly depend, it seems to me improbable in the highest degree that so much similarity, or rather identity of structure, could have been acquired by independent means. Yet this must have been the case if the races of man are descended from several aboriginally distinct species. It is far more probable that the many points of close similarity in the various races are due to inheritance from a single parent-form, which had already assumed a human character.

It is a curious, though perhaps an idle speculation, how early in the long line of our progenitors the various expressive movements, now exhibited by man, were successively acquired. The following remarks will at least serve to recall some of the chief points discussed in this volume. We may confidently believe that laughter, as a sign of pleasure or enjoyment, was practised by our progenitors long before they deserved to be called human; for very many kinds of monkeys, when pleased, utter a reiterated sound, clearly analogous to our laughter, often accompanied by vibratory movements of their jaws or lips, with the corners of the mouth drawn backwards and upwards, by the wrinkling of the cheeks, and even by the brightening of the eyes.

We may likewise infer that fear was expressed from an extremely remote period, in almost the same manner as it now is by man; namely, by trembling, the erection of the hair, cold perspiration, pallor, widely opened eyes, the relaxation of most of the muscles, and by the whole body cowering downwards or held motionless.

Suffering, if great, will from the first have caused screams or groans to be uttered, the body to be contorted, and the teeth to be ground together. But our progenitors will not have exhibited those highly expressive movements of the features which accompany screaming and crying until their circulatory and respiratory organs, and the muscles surrounding the eyes, had acquired their present structure. The shedding of tears appears to have originated through reflex action from the spasmodic contraction of the eyelids, together perhaps with the eyeballs becoming gorged with blood during the act of screaming. Therefore weeping probably came on rather late in the line of our descent; and this conclusion agrees with the fact that our nearest allies, the anthropomorphous apes, do not weep. But we must here exercise some caution, for as certain monkeys, which are not closely related to man, weep, this habit might have been developed long ago in a sub-branch of the group from which man is derived. Our early progenitors, when suffering from grief or anxiety, would not have made their eyebrows oblique, or have drawn down the corners of their mouth, until they had acquired the habit of endeavouring to restrain their screams. The expression, therefore, of grief and anxiety is eminently human.

Rage will have been expressed at a very early period by threatening or frantic gestures, by the reddening of the skin, and by glaring eyes, but not by frowning. For the habit of frowning seems to have been acquired chiefly from the corrugators being the first muscles to contract round the eyes, whenever during infancy pain, anger, or distress is felt, and there consequently is a near approach to screaming; and partly from a frown serving as a shade in difficult and intent vision. It seems probable that this shading action would not have become habitual until man had assumed a completely upright position, for monkeys do not frown when exposed to a glaring light. Our early progenitors, when enraged, would probably have exposed their teeth more freely than does man, even when giving full vent to his rage, as with the insane. We may, also, feel almost certain that they would have protruded their lips, when sulky or disappointed, in a greater degree than is the case with our own children, or even with the children of existing savage races.

Our early progenitors, when indignant or moderately angry, would not have held their heads erect, opened their chests, squared their shoulders, and clenched their fists, until they had acquired the ordinary carriage and upright attitude of man, and had learnt to fight with their fists or clubs. Until this period had arrived the antithetical gesture of shrugging the shoulders, as a sign of impotence or of patience, would not have been developed. From the same reason astonishment would not then have been expressed by raising the arms with open hands and extended fingers. Nor, judging from the actions of monkeys, would astonishment have been exhibited by a widely opened mouth; but the eyes would have been opened and the eyebrows arched. Disgust would have been shown at a very early period by movements round the mouth, like those of vomiting,--that is, if the view which I have suggested respecting the source of the expression is correct, namely, that our progenitors had the power, and used it, of voluntarily and quickly rejecting any food from their stomachs which they disliked. But the more refined manner of showing contempt or disdain, by lowering the eyelids, or turning away the eyes and face, as if the despised person were not worth looking at, would not probably have been acquired until a much later period.

Of all expressions, blushing seems to be the most strictly human; yet it is common to all or nearly all the races of man, whether or not any change of colour is visible in their skin. The relaxation of the small arteries of the surface, on which blushing depends, seems to have primarily resulted from earnest attention directed to the appearance of our own persons, especially of our faces, aided by habit, inheritance, and the ready flow of nerve-force along accustomed channels; and afterwards to have been extended by the power of association to self-attention directed to moral conduct. It can hardly be doubted that many animals are capable of appreciating beautiful colours and even forms, as is shown by the pains which the individuals of one sex take in displaying their beauty before those of the opposite sex. But it does not seem possible that any animal, until its mental powers had been developed to an equal or nearly equal degree with those of man, would have closely considered and been sensitive about its own personal appearance. Therefore we may conclude that blushing originated at a very late period in the long line of our descent.

From the various facts just alluded to, and given in the course of this volume, it follows that, if the structure of our organs of respiration and circulation had differed in only a slight degree from the state in which they now exist, most of our expressions would have been wonderfully different. A very slight change in the course of the arteries and veins which run to the head, would probably have prevented the blood from accumulating in our eyeballs during violent expiration; for this occurs in extremely few quadrupeds. In this case we should not have displayed some of our most characteristic expressions. If man had breathed water by the aid of external branchiae (though the idea is hardly conceivable), instead of air through his mouth and nostrils, his features would not have expressed his feelings much more efficiently than now do his hands or limbs. Rage and disgust, however, would still have been shown by movements about the lips and mouth, and the eyes would have become brighter or duller according to the state of the circulation. If our ears had remained movable, their movements would have been highly expressive, as is the case with all the animals which fight with their teeth; and we may infer that our early progenitors thus fought, as we still uncover the canine tooth on one side when we sneer at or defy any one, and we uncover all our teeth when furiously enraged.

The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever their origin may have been, are in themselves of much importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of communication between the mother and her infant; she smiles approval, and thus encourages her child on the right path, or frowns disapproval. We readily perceive sympathy in others by their expression; our sufferings are thus mitigated and our pleasures increased; and mutual good feeling is thus strengthened. The movements of expression give vividness and energy to our spoken words. They reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified. Whatever amount of truth the so-called science of physiognomy may contain, appears to depend, as Haller long ago remarked,[4] on different persons bringing into frequent use different facial muscles, according to their dispositions; the development of these muscles being perhaps thus increased, and the lines or furrows on the face, due to their habitual contraction, being thus rendered deeper and more conspicuous. The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand, the repression, as far as this is possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions.[5] He who gives way to violent gestures will increase his rage; he who does not control the signs of fear will experience fear in a greater degree; and he who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticity of mind. These results follow partly from the intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and their outward manifestations; and partly from the direct influence of exertion on the heart, and consequently on the brain. Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds. Shakespeare, who from his wonderful knowledge of the human mind ought to be an excellent judge, says:--

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his own conceit,

That, from her working, all his visage wann’d;

Tears in his eyes, distraction in ‘s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! Hamlet, act ii. sc. 2.

 

[4] Quoted by Moreau, in his edition of Lavater, 1820, tom. iv. p. 211.

We have seen that the study of the theory of expression confirms to a certain limited extent the conclusion that man is derived from some lower animal form, and supports the belief of the specific or sub-specific unity of the several races; but as far as my judgment serves, such confirmation was hardly needed. We have also seen that expression in itself, or the language of the emotions, as it has sometimes been called, is certainly of importance for the welfare of mankind. To understand, as far as possible, the source or origin of the various expressions which may be hourly seen on the faces of the men around us, not to mention our domesticated animals, ought to possess much interest for us. From these several causes, we may conclude that the philosophy of our subject has well deserved the attention which it has already received from several excellent observers, and that it deserves still further attention, especially from any able physiologist.

Posted by saeid at 11:22 PM | Permalink

Introduction:

·      Why does consciousness matter?

·      The trick of wily exploiters such as credit card companies?

·      Replicating modes and fashion?

·      Manipulated human beings by culture, memes, and themselves?

·      Happenings vs. doings ?

 

Abstract

·      Does consciousness is material or immaterial?

·      If it is material, where is it?

·      How does conscious form and evolve?

·      Who is a conscious mind?

·      What would it be the benefits of a conscious mind and side effects of it

Etymology & History

·      Conscientia=moral conscience

·      Rene Descartes coined the word, consciousness

·      John Locke in one of his essays, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, used the term, too.

·      Psychologists such as Jung, Fraud, and many others used the term as personal identity.

1. The question of whether consciousness is material or not begins with whether qualia exist or not.

·      What is quale?

·      Why is it important for the theorists of mind to deal with qualia?

o    by accepting the idea of quale, a theorist of mind doesn’t see any physical basis in the brain for consciousness. In other words, the quality of consciousness is defined by rejecting or accepting qualia.

o      Introducing the idea of “quale”

§        

ú       Do colors exist in the world? Some believe, “color as such does not exist in the world; it exit only in the eye and brain of beholder. Objects reflect many different wavelengths of light, but these light waves themselves have no color.” (Ornstein and Thompson, 1984, p. 55)

ú       What is red?

ú       This ancient philosophical conundrum was discussed by John Locke. He suggests that properties such as colors, aromas, taste, and sounds are secondary qualities. The primary qualities are size, shape, motion, number, and solidity, which provoke certain things in the minds of normal observers.

ú       Wilfrid Sellars distinguishes the dispositional properties (Locke’s secondary qualities) from what he called “occurrent properties.”

ú       Is occurrent pink a property of something in the brain or something “in the external world”?

ú       Thomas Hegel suggests, “The subjective features of conscious mental processes—as opposed to their physical causes and effects--cannot captured by the purified form of thought suitable for dealing with the physical world that underlies the appearances.” (1986, p. 15)

ú       When some one says, “I know the ring isn’t really pink, but it sure seems pink.” The first clause expresses a judgment about something in the world, and second clause expresses a second-order judgment about a discriminative state about something in the world. Denial Dennett believes, “We compare the colors of things in the world by putting them side by side and looking at them, to see what judgment we reach, but we can also compare the colors of things by just recalling or imagining them in our minds.” To prove his assertion, he suggests an experiment called CADBLIND Mark I Vorsetzer

ú       Jonathan Bennett draws our attention to a case that makes the same point, more persuasively, in another sensory modality. The substance phenol-thio-urea, he tells us, tastes bitter to one-quarter of the human population and is utterly tasteless to the rest.

ú       Denial Dennett believes, “Evolution softens the blow of the subjectivism or relativism implied by the fact that secondary qualities are lovely qualities. It shows that the absence of “simple” or fundamental commonalities in things that are all the same color is not an earmark of total illusion, but rather, a sign of a widespread tolerance for “false positive” detections of the ecological properties that really matter.” (p. 381) he believes that evolution explains “why secondary qualities turn out to be so “effable,” so resistant to definition.

·      Proponents’ Arguments

o    What is it like to be bat? Hegel’s argument, saying that consciousness has essentially subjective characters

o    Inverted spectrum: John Locke’s argument, imagining a morning when we wake up and see that all colors are inverted. He suggests that by doing this we actually have changed the properties of things without physical basis. What john Locke, in essence, wants to tell us is that the quality of conceivability proves possibility; if something is conceivable, then it is possible, which is very absurd. The zombie argument is the like.

o    Explanatory Gap (epiphenomenal): the standard of philosophical meaning of epiphenomenal: “x is epiphenomenal” means “x is an effect but itself has no effects in the physical world whatever.” introduced by Frank Jackson. He give a good thought experiment with Mary who is a brilliant scientist and has never seen colors. Mary’s way to learn about colors is not usual because she reconstructs the information in different way.

o      Chinese room was a thought experiment by John Searle. His analogy tries to prove that mind is not and can not be like computer. Here are his conclusions: 1- syntax is not sufficient for semantic; 2- brains cause minds 3- minds have semantic contents.

·      Opponents’ Arguments

o    Intuition pump: Daniel Dennett is one of many opponents of quale. he brings qualia into the world of neurosurgery, clinical psychology, and psychological experimentation. His argument attempts to show that, once the concept of qualia is so imported, it turns out that we can either make no use of it in the situation in question, or that the questions posed by the introduction of qualia are unanswerable precisely because of the special properties defined for qualia. About the Mary case, he argues that she already knew everything about colors before entering in the color room. Therefore the color room has nothing to teach her. He also identifies four properties for qualia, effable, intrinsic, private, and it also must immediately appear or comprehend in consciousness. Dennett also brings up some flaws in the Chinese Room experiment. Daniel Dennett writes, “the most influential thought experiments in recent philosophy of mind have all involved inviting the audience to imagine some specially contrived or stipulated state of affairs, and then—without properly checking to see if this feat of imagination has actually been accomplished—inviting the audience to notice various consequences in the fantasy. These “intuition pumps,” as I call them, are often fiendishly clever devices. They deserves their fame if only for their seductiveness.

 

2. If it is, in fact, material, Where is it?

·      Descartes proposed a role for it; in order for a person to be conscious of something, traffic from senses had to arrive at this station, where it thereupon caused a special—indeed, magical—transaction to occur between the person’s material brain and immaterial mind.

o      If so, what about reflexes? Dualists, including Descartes, postulated that they were accomplished by entirely mechanical short circuits of sorts that bypassed the pineal station altogether, and hence were accomplished unconsciously

o       

o      If the Descartes’ idea is not the convincing one, what do Dennett and other materialists think about consciousness?

o      Dennett calls his idea Cartesian materialism, which many candidate for such a Cartesian Theater, such as the pineal gland, the anterior cingulated, the reticular formation, and various places in the frontal lobes. The Cartesian Theater is a metaphorical picture of how conscious experience must sit in the brain.

3. If consciousness is considered to be material, what are its ingredients?

·      Gene

·      Evolution

·      Language

·      Culture

·      Memes

·      Time and space

4. How can these ingredients shape our consciousness?

To answer this question, we need a method of conducting some tests

·      First Person Plural: introspectionism

·      The Third-Person Perspective: extospectionism

·      The method of Heterophenomenology: scientific method with anthropological bent combined with subjective personal report. Dennett coined the term and explains, “"The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set for a theory of human consciousness. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness."

 

·      Introspectism vs Behaviorism

o    Dennett’s objection to introspectionism: the cozy complicity of the resulting first-person-plural perspective is a treacherous incubator of errors.

§      Phil Roberts, Jr. has argued that difficulties encountered with the use of introspection have less to do with the study of human minds than with the study of human beings:

§      Invalidity of the introspective method of investigation

o    Exploring some ideas of Behaviorism: only facts garnered “from the outside” count as data

§      Mental events don’t exist, period. (barefoot behaviorism)

§      Mental events exist, but they have no effects whatever, so science can’t study them.

§      Mental events exist, and have effects, but those effects can’t be studied by science, which will have to content itself with theories of the “peripheral” or lower effects and processes in the brain. (this idea is common among neuroscientists)

·      Evolution

o    The birth of Boundaries and Reasons

§       Very beginning

ú       No reason

ú       No purpose

ú       No function

ú       No interest

ú       Only cause

§       After millennia

ú       No interest but self-replication

§       Replicators arrive on the scene capable of behavior that stave off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings with it into the world its “good.” It creates a point of view from which the world events can be roughly partitioned into

ú       The Favorable

ú       The Unfavorable

ú       The Neutral

§       The most important factor of creation of reason is interest.

§       The first problem-facers was to learn how to recognize and act on the reasons that their very existence brought into existence.

§       As soon as something gets into the business of self-preservation, boundaries become important

ú       Primordial form of selfishness

ú       “me against the world”

·      there are reasons to recognize

·      where there are reasons, there are points of view from which to recognize or evaluate them.

·      Any agent must distinguish ‘here inside’ from ‘the external world.’

·      All recognition must ultimately be accomplished by myriad ‘blind, mechanical’ routines.

·      Inside the defended boundary, there need not always be a Higher executive or General Headquarters

·      In nature, handsome is as handsome does; origins don’t matter

·      In nature, elements often play multiple functions within the economy of a single organism

o      New and better ways of producing future

§       The fundamental purpose of brains is to produce future

§       Hope for the best

§       The problem of “now what do I do?

ú       To solve this problem

·      You need a nervous system, to control your activities in time and space

o      The juvenile sea squirt

§       She needs first a rudimentary nervous system

§       After she found the spot and took root, she doesn’t need brain anymore, it eats it (Rodolfo Llinas)

·      This fact is the basis, as we shall see, for some of the most terrible and delicious (literally) features of consciousness. In the beginning, all “signals” caused by things in the environment meant either “scram!” or “go for!” (Humphery, forthcoming). The detective system of nervous system was far rudimentary, for no nervous system at that early time, had anyway to use a more dispassionate or objective message that merely informed it, neutrally, of some condition. They were capable of only what we may call proximal anticipation. (sow bug)

·      We oraganism try:

o      To get something for free

o      To find the law of nature

o      Wired in: we can notice between things looming and things hitting us. The duck response to looming is hard-wired in human beings. Alaram should be “friend, foe, or food.”

o      Regular vigilance gradually turned into regular exploration

o      The evolutionary development was fostered by a division of labor, two specialized areas:

§       Dorsal: online piloting responsibilities for keeping the vessel out of harm

§       Ventral : this left the ventral brain with a little free time to concentrate on the identification of the various objects in the world; it could afford to zoom in manner. An this also evolved into two hemispheres of right and left.

§       Plasticity of nervous system. Some of the complexities of human consciousness are the result of this development.

o      Evolution in Brains, and the Baldwin effect

§       The process of changing is chaotic

§       The role of pleasurable and painful stimuli—the carrot and the stick—in shaping behavior is undeniable

§       The plastic brain is capable of reorganizing itself adaptively in response to particular novelties encountered in the organism’s environment, and the process strongly analogous to natural selection. This is the first new medium of evolution: postnatal design-fixing in individual brains.

§       Those animals whose brains start out closer to the target will have a survival advantage over those who start far away

§       The Baldwin effect, also known as Baldwinian evolution or ontogenic evolution, is an early evolutionary theory proposed by American psychologist James Mark Baldwin which proposes a mechanism for specific selection for general learning ability. Selected offspring would tend to have an increased capacity for learning new skills rather than being confined to genetically coded, relatively fixed abilities. In effect, it places emphasis on the fact that the sustained behavior of a species or group can shape the evolution of that species.

ú       As an example, suppose a species is threatened by a new predator and there is a behavior that makes it more difficult for the predator to kill individuals of the species. Individuals who learn the behavior more quickly will obviously be at an advantage. As time goes on the ability to learn the behavior will improve (by genetic selection), and at some point it will seem to be an instinct.

o      Plasticity in Human Brain: Setting the Stage

§       Capable of stereotype anticipation

§       Adjusting to trends

§       Changing the question from “what do I do now?” to “what do I think about next?”

§       All hands on deck!

§       How can a particular state or event in the brain represent one feature of the world rather than another?

o      The Invention of Good and Bad Habits of Autostimulation

§       Invention of language

§       Language has survival value

§       Talking aloud, drawing pictures to yourself are act of self-manipulation

o      The Third Evolution Process: Memes and Cultural Evolution

§       the techniques of mutual and self-stimulation are deeply embedded in our culture and training.

§       The culture has become a repository and transmission medium

§       To get itself adjusted to the local conditions that matter the most

§       Evolution occurs whenever the following conditions exist:

ú       Variation

ú       Heredity and replication

ú       Differential fitness

§       Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, and so on

§       Who is in charge? Me or my memes?

§       A suicidal meme can spread, as when a dramatic and well-publicized martyrdom inspires others to die for a deeply loved cause, and this in turn inspires others to die, and so on. (dawkin)

§       Pernicious memes

§       We would not survive unless we had a better-than-chance habit of choosing the memes that help us.

§       The memes for normative concepts—for ought and good and truth and beauty—are among the most entrenched denizens of our minds, and that among the memes that constitute us, they play a central role.

§       We as thinkers are not independent of these memes

o      The memes of consciousness: the virtual machine to be installed

§       Infestation: 2. live as parasite on: to live as a parasite on or in something

§       Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes(or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a “von Neumannesque” virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities

§       We know we have conscious minds “by introspection and the minds we thereby discover are at least this much like von Neumann machines

 

 

·      How Words Do Things With Us

o      Bureaucracy vs. Pandemonium

§       no one has had anything very substantial to say about system of language production

§       human speech is purposive activity; there are means and ends

o      Conceptualizer: is a reification in need of further explanation

o      A discovery of self-interpretation

o      In content and consciousness, there had to be a functionally salient line (which I called the awareness line) separating the preconscious fixation of communicative intentions from their subsequent execution

o      How does a thing become preconscious? Through becoming connected with the word-presentations corresponding to it.” Freud (the ego and the id, English, edition, 1962, p. 10)

o      Whether a patient with aphasia feels anxiety about his or her situation.

o      Confabulation: to give fictitious accounts of past events, believing they are true, in order to cover a gap in the memory caused by a medical condition such as dementia or Korsakoff's syndrome.

o      Even normal people may often confabulate about details of their experience, since they are prone to guess without realizing it, and mistake theorizing for observing.

o      Another anomalous linguistic phenomenon is the familiar sympyom of schizophrenia: “hearing voices.” It is now quite firmly established that the voice the schizophrenic “hears” is his own; he is talking to himself silently without realizing it

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§       Why we can seemingly, sometimes , remember, even vividly, experiences that never occurred?

§       Difference between appearance and reality

§       The risk of interfering from “this is what I remember” to “this is what really happened,” hence we resist –with good reason—any diabolical “operationalism” that tries to convince us that what we remember (or what history records in the archives) just is what really happened.

§       Operationalism: if you can’t find a difference, there is not a difference.

§       Orwellian experiments

§       Perceptual revision vs. memory revision

§       What is the stream of consciousness

§       What does Dennett want to accomplish by offering the multiple draft model and Cartesian Theater

§       When a person is conscious of something?

 

If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our body and imitated our actions as far as it was morally possible to do so, we should always have two very certain tests by which to recognise that, for all that, they were not real man. The first is, that they could never use speech or other signs as we do when placing our thoughts on record for the benefit of others. For we can easily understand a machine’s being constituted so that it can utter words, and even emit some responses to action on it of a corporeal kind, which brings about a change in its organs. …the second difference is, that although machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps better than any of us can do, they infallibility fall short in others, by the which means we discover that they did not act from knowledge, but only from the disposition of their organs. 116

 

The fact that [machines] do better than we do, does not prove that they are endowed with mind. 117

 

A clock which is only composed of wheels and weights is able to tell the hours and measure the time more correctly than we can do with all our wisdom. 117

 

Our soul is in its nature entirely independent of body, and in consequence that it is not liable to die with it. 118

 

Meditation

I found here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone cannot be separated from me.

 

 

To speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks. 152

 

So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown … that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim op to the top.

 

Posted by saeid at 10:48 PM | Permalink

Saltational view of the mind The matters of human puzzlement can be sorted into “problem”, which can be solved, and “mysteries,” which cannot. The problem of free will, Chomsky opines, is such mystery. The problem of consciousness , according to Fodor, is and McGinn concurs. 381 dennett dangerous idea They have both (correctly) hailed the capacity of the human brain to “parse” and hence presumably understand, the offical infinity of grammatical sentences (in principle), couldn’t we understand the ordered sets of sentences that best express the solutions to the problems of free will and consciousness? 382 Dennett DDI In the case of such systems as language or wings it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them. Chomsky (Dennett Quote from book (Chomsky, 1988, p.167) I can vividly remember the shock wave that rolled through philosophy when Chomsky’s work first came to our attention a few years later. …of Noam Chomsky If Darwin-dreaders want a champion who is himself deply and influentially enmeshed within science itself, they could not do better than Chomsky. Dennett DDI 386 Years later, I finally realized that the reason he didn’t see what I was driving at was that although he insisted that “language organ” was innate, this did not mean to him that it was a product of natural selection. …Chomsky thought, was not an adaptation, but … a mystery, or a hopeful monster. Dennett DDI 386 It is perfectly safe to attribute this development [of innate language structures] to “natural selection”, so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena (Chomsky 1972, p.97). What are Chomsky’s actual views? If he doesn’t think the language organ is shaped by natural selection, what account does he give of its complexities?394 Dennett DDI Chomsky, on language and mind Question: if the mind has an innate structure, different people (or different classes, sexes, and races) could have different innate structures. That would justify discrimination and oppression. How do you respond to that? Question: You have suggested that our ignorance can be divided into the problems and mysteries. In terms of consciousness, our ignorance is a problem or a mystery? Question: as far as I was able to understand from your books, articles, and lecture, you are suggesting that the mind-body problem cannot be unraveled because some aspects of it apparently are out of realm of human understanding, in your own words, “[the problem lies outside our cognitive capacities.” Your analogy may be that a rat will never know the prime number. Do I understand you correctly? If yes, why? Question: one of your criticisms of naturalization of philosophy, which Dennett suggests, is that what is understood in today’s science “may not be ‘continuous and harmonious” with tomorrow’s physic, for example. You suggest that this form of reductionism “leaves us in even worse shape in the present context.” How does it so? Question: you’ve said, “the problem of reducing electricity and magnetism to mechanics, unsolvable and overcome by the even stranger assumption that fields are real physical things; the problem of reducing chemistery to the world of hard particles in motion, energy, and electromagnetic waves, only overcome with the introduction of even weirder hypotheses about the nature of the physical world. In each of these cases, unification was achieved and the problem resolved not by reduction of biology to biochemistery is a bit of an illusion, since it came only a few years the unification of chemistry and a radically new physics.” “these examples do differ from the consciousness-brain problem in one important way: it was possible to construct intelligible theories of the irreducible phenomena that were far from superficial, while in the case of consciousness, we do not seem to progress much beyond description and illustration of phenomena.” You are suggesting that the creative aspect of language, for example, shows a non-mechanical aspect of the brain function.” It seems to me you agree with Colin McGinn that the phenomenon of consciousness is irreducible and unsolvable. Do I understand you right? Question: what is “mental organ”? Question: the thesis is that natural selection is the only physical explanation of design that fulfills a function. Taken literally, that cannot be true. Why not? Question: the logic of induction mandates that children make some assumptions about how language works in order for them to succeed at learning a language at all. What these assumptions consist of? Language itself is not a single system but a contraption with many components. The matter can be further clarified by returning to Cartesian dualism, the specific hypothesis that sought to capture, in particular, the apparent fact that normal language use lies beyond the bounds of any possible machine. The approach to cognitive development called “domain specificity.” “characterize the organization of experience, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible. “kantian” Question: your old student, George Lakoff in his book, Metaphors We Live by, has come to some remarkable conclusions, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” Steven Pinker calls this hypothesis as lollapalooza with a big “if”, arguing that “If he is right, conceptual metaphor can do everything from overturning twenty-five hundred years of misguided reliance on truth and objectivity in Western thought… . I think Lakoff takes the idea a wee bit too far.” What do you think about this bold conclusion? Galileo, Dialogo “most secret thoughts to any other person …with no greater difficulty than the various collocations of twenty-four little characters upon a paper.” There is not a single effect in nature…such that the most ingenious theorist can arrive at a complete understanding of it.” Port Royal “marvelous invention” Darwin: “man differs solely in his almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.” “association of sounds and ideas” “natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification” wondrous achievement how a finite mechanism can construct an infinity of objects of this kind Chomsky critical of Darwin It is now understood that the lingustic achievements of infants go far beyond what Darwin attributed to them, and that non-human organisms have nothing like the linguistic capacities he assumed. Furthermore, association is not the appropriate concept. …nonetheless, Darwin’s point is basically correct. Essential characteristic of human language, such as the discrete-infinite use of finite means that intrigued him and his distinguished predecessors, appear to be biologically isolated. The concept of mind was framed in terms of what was called “the mechanical philosophy”, the idea that the natural world is a complex machine that could in principle be constructed by a skilled artisan Descartes himself pursued a reasonable course. He sought to demonstrate that the inorganic and organic world could be explained in terms of the mechanical philosophy. Newton: so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.’ Newton: to derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and Actions of all corporal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy,” Newton wrote, “ though the Causes of those Principle be not yet discovered.” Creative use of language “Occult qualities” Mind-body dualism is no longer tenable, because there is no notion of body. It is true that Descates was proven wrong, but not for those reasons. Newton exorcised the machine; he left the ghost intact. It was the first substance, extended matter, that dissolved into mysteries Unification vs. reduction Departing even more from common-sense intuitions Newton’s demolition of the mechanical philosophy. And they were drawn at once, pursuing John Locke’s suggestion that God might have chosen to “superadd to matter a faculty of thinking” just as he “annexed effects to motion which we can in no way conceive motion able to produce.” “Things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains.” “ these emergence are not regarded as irreducible but are produced by principles that control the interactions between lower-level events—principle we do not yet understand.” (Vernon Mountcastle) this thesis is often presented as an “astonishing hypothesis.” Chomsky’s view on this: There are not, however, the proper ways to look at the matter. The thesis is old; it closely paraphrases Priestley and others, two centuries ago. Thus, it now seems possible to take seriously an idea that a few years ago would have seemed outlandish: that the language organ of the brain approaches a kind of optimal design. Employed the least elaborate, the simplest and easiest of means Many of the questions that inspired the modern scientific revolution are not even on the agenda. These include issues of will and choice, which were taken to be at the heart of the mind-body problem before it was undermined by Mewton. No one even raises the question of why this plan is executed rather than some other one, except for very simplest organisms. Problem raised by Helmholtz in 1850: “even without moving our eyes, we can focus our attention on different objects at will, resulting in very different perceptual experiences of the same visual field.” History also suggests caution. In the Galilean era, the nature of motion was the “hard problem.” “springing or elastic motions” are the hard rock in Philosophy,” Sir William Petty observed We can, then, identify several points of view with regard to the general problem of unification: 1- there is no issue: language and higher mental faculties generally are not part of biology 2- they belong to biology in priniciple, and any constructive approach to the study of human thought and its expression, or of human action and interaction, relies on this assumption, at least tacitly. This category has two variants: a. unification is close at hand b. we do not currently see how these parts of biology relate to one another, and suspect that fundamental insights may be missing altogether. Three theses 1- Mountcastle: things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains,” though “these emergences are not regarded as irreduciable but are produced by principles that control the intractions between lower level events—principles that control the interactions between lower level events—principles we do not yet know” 2- Mark Hauser: we should adopt four perspectives in studying “communication in the animal kingdom, including human language.” To understand some trait, we should: a. seek the mechanisms that implement it, psychological and physiological; the mechanistic perspective b. sort out genetic and environmental factors, which can also be approached at psychological or physiological levels; the ontogentic perspective c. find the “fitness consequences” of the trait, its effects on survival and reproduction; the functional perspective d. unravel “the evolutionary history of the species so that the structure of the trait can be evaluated in light of ancestral features”; the phylogenetic perspective 3- C. R. Gallistel: the “modular view of learning,” which he takes to be “the norm these days in neuroscience.” According to this view, the brain incorporates “specialized organs,” computationally specialized to solve particular kinds of problems, as they do with great facility, apart from “extremely hostile environments.” The growth and development of these specialized organs, sometimes called “learning,” is the result of internally directed processes and environmental effects that trigger and shape development. The language organ is one such component of the human brain. Chomsky’s view on the first thesis: David Hume causally described thought as a “little agitation of the brain.” this idea was elaborated by the eminent chemist Joseph Priestley: “the powers of sensation or perception and thought” are properties of “a certain organized system of matter”; properties “termed mental” are “the result [of the] organical structure” of the brain and “the human nervous system” generally. The thesis has two aspects: 1- Empirical: it is a machine constructed of interacting parts 2- Methodological: has to do with intelligibility Human can express their thoughts in novel and limitless ways that are constrained by bodily state but not determined by it, appropriate to situations but not caused by them, and that evoke in others thoughts that they could have expressed in similar ways—what we may call “the creative aspect of language use.” Descates establishe two principles: 1- mechanical 2- mental Newton regarded his refutation of mechanism as an “absurdity,” but could find no way around it despite much effort. Hume’s judgment that by refuting the self-evident mechanical philosophy, Newton “restored Nature’s ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain.” In general, conformity to common-sense understanding is not a criterion for rational inquiry. Chemistry proceeded to establish a rich body of doctrine; “its trumphs [were] built on no reductionist foundation but rather achieved in isolation from the newly emerging science of physics,” a leading historian observed Physics had to undergo fundamental changes in order to be unified with basic chemistry, departing even more radically from common-sense notions of “the physical”: physics had to “free itself” from “intuitive pictures” and give up the hope of “visualizing the world,” as Heisenberg put it, yet another long leap away from intelligibility in the sense of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century The first thesis seems correct, but close to truism It seems to me that on a close look, his actual conclusions do not differ much from the extreme skepticism of his Harvard colleague, evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, who concludes—forcefully—that the evolution of cognition is simply beyond the reach of contemporary science. For example, the proclamation of some evolutionists: the human brain, vocal tract, and language appear to have co-evolved. We may ask whether Cartesian doctrine is correct in contending that this faculty is specific to human species, the unique thinking creature. How does the language faculty fit into the system of cognitive capacity? It is a coherent and perhaps correct proposal that the language faculty constructs a grammar only in conjunction with other faculties of mind. That extra support for language learning, beyond the data experience and maturation. They have overlooked a more promising alternative: “is vested neither in the brain of the child nor in the brains of parents or teachers, but outside brains, in language itself We are the host of language Instinct to learn Theory vs. framework There had already been efforts, of course, to reduce the complexity, eliminate redundancies What was striking about Galileo, and was considered very offensive at that time, was that he dismissed a lot of data; he was willing to say “look, if the data refute the theory, the data probably wrong.” And the data that he threw out were not minor. For example, he was defending the Copernican thesis, but he was unable to explain why bodies didn’t fly off the earth; if the earth is rotating why is not everything flaying off into space? Also, if you look through a Galilean telescope, you don’t really see the four moons of Jupitor, you see some horrible mess and you have to be willing to be rather charitable to agree that you are seeing the four moons. Physicists, for example, even today can’t explain in detail how water flows out of the faucet, or the structure of helium, or other things that seem to be complicated. Physic is in in a situation in which something like 90% of matter in the universe is what is called dark matter—it’s called dark because they don’t know what it is Newton essentially showed that the world itself is not intelligible, at least in the sense that early modern science had hoped, and that the best you can do is to construct theories that are intelligible What do we mean by optimality? Few rules is better than more rules; less memory used in computation is better than more memory used etc. 1, 2, 3 and infinity; the others are too complicated Searle argues that “it is quite reasonable to suppose that the needs of communication influenced the structure” of language, as it evolved in human prehistory. I agree. The question is: what can we conclude from this fact? The answer is: Very little. The needs of locomotion influenced the fact that humans developed legs and birds wings. This observation is not very helpful to the physiologist concerned with the nature of the human body. It would be a serious error to suppose that all properties, or the interesting properties of the structures that have evolved, can be “explained” in terms of natural selection. Surely there is no warrant for such an assumption in the case of physical structures. When Searle says that “in general an understanding of syntactical facts requires an understanding of their function in communication since communication is what language is all about,” I agree only in part. If we take communication to include expression of thought, as he does, then the statement becomes at least a haft-truth; thus we will have only a partial understanding of syntax if we do not consider its role in the expression of thought, and other uses of language. Let us turn now to the sole serious point of disagreement, the “essential connection” that Searle claims to exist between language and communication, between meaning and speech acts. …Searle argues against the theory that “sentence are abstract objects that are produced and understood independently of their role in communication,” on the grounds that “any attempt to account for the meaning of sentences within such assumptions is either circular or inadequate.” Searle claims that the explanations of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Austin, Grice, himself, and Strawson, has “provided us with a way out of this dilemma,” by explaining “meaning” in terms of what the speakers intends the audience to believe or to do. … in that this approach permits us to escape “the orbit of conceptual space” that includes the concepts “idea,” “semantic marker,” “Fregean sense, and so on. This approach avoids the “circularity” to which Searle objects in his critique of classical semantics, and in particular, my version of it. Newton’s mysterious force was a return to the dark ages from which scientists had “emancipated themselves,” “the scholastic physics of qualities and powers,” “ animistic explanatory principles,” and the like, which admitted interaction without “direct contact.” Leibniz and Hugens condemn Newton for abandoning sound “mechanical principles” and reverting to mystical “sympathies and antipathies,” “immaterial and inexplicable qualities.” Newton’s phrase: “I frame no hypotheses” was an expression of concern over his inability to “assign the cause of this power” of gravity, which so departs from “mechanical cause.” He regarded the principle he postulated as an “absurdity.” The way “members of animal bodies move at the command of the will.” Thomas Nagel observes that “the various attempts to carry out this apparently impossible task [of reducing mind to matter] and the arguments to show that they have failed, make up the history of the philosophy of mind during the past fifty years.” Tyler Burge discusses the emergence of “naturalism” (“materialism,” “physicalism”) in the 1960s as “one of the few orthodoxies in American philosophy.”(1992: 31) Newton remained within “the materialist world picture”; that would be whatever science constructs, however it departs from “mechanical causes.” Still more mysterious notions of fields of force, curved space, infinite one-dimensional strings in ten dimensional space or whatever science concocts tomorrow? We have no coherent way to formulate issues related to the “mind-body” problem. Only on unjustified dualistic assumptions can such qualms be raised specifically about the domain of the mental, not other aspects of the world. Y the mid-eighteenth century, Diderot’s materialist commitments were apparently a factor in his overwhelming rejection for membership in the Royal Society. Hume wrote that “Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature,” but “he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain” Replacing “God” by “natural selection” Twaddle Scoff at the weird Joseph Priestley: whose conclusion was “not that all reduces to matter, but rather that the kind of matter on which the two-substance view is based does not exist,” and “with the altered concept of matter, the more traditional ways of posing the question of the nature of thought and of its relations to the brain do not fit. We have to think of a complex organized biological system with properties the traditional doctrine would have called mental and physical(John Yolton’s paraphrase; Yolton 1983: 114) We thus overcome the naïve belief that bodies (atoms aside) have inherent solidity and impenetrability, dismissing arguments based on “vulgar phraseology” and “vulgar apprehensions,” as in the quest for the me referred to in the phrase “my body.” with the Newtonian discoveries, matter “ought to rise in our esteem, as making a nearer approach to the nature of spiritual and immaterial beings,” the “odium [of] solidity, inertness, or sluggishness” having been removed (p. 113) Matter is no more “incompatible with sensation and thought’ than with attraction and repulsion. It is as reasonable to believe “that the powers of sensation and thought are the necessary result of a particular organization, as that sound is the necessary result of a particular concussion of the air.” Thought in humans “is a property of the nervous system, or rather of the brain.” I may do long division by a procedure I learned in school, but my brain doesn’t do long division even if it carries out Alan Turing Can Machines think? I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion(turing 1950: 442) Page 116 Gerald Edelman writes (Edelman 1992: 28), concluding that computational or connectionist theories of the mind must be wrong because of their discrete character. That is no more reasonable than the conclusion, a century ago, that chemistry must be wrong because it could not be unified with what we now know to be far-too-impoverished physic; in particular, because “the chemist’s matter was discrete and discontinuous, the physicist’s energy continuous” Computational theory: Chomsky believe that there is something deeply problematic in the theory that is more solidly established on naturalistic grounds, the “mental one”; and to worry about problems of “eliminationism” or “physicalism” that have yet only to be formulated coherently. How would a naturalistic inquiry proceed? Language faculty of the brain has two components 1- cognitive system 2- performance systems • Input receptive system • Output production system Human language is a “biological object.” Although this methodology is most fully developed in and characteristic of physics, it does not follow that lingustics is reducible to physics or to any other of the “hard” sciences. It has its own laws and generalizations that cannot be described in the language of “quarks and the like.” “naturalism” in this sense is central to all of Chomsky’s work, and explicitly excludes dualist demands that the analysis of language must meet criteria different from or in addition to those of chemistry or bacteriology. The mind-body problem cannot be formulated In the absence of a coherent notion of “body”, the traditional mind-body problem has no conceptual status, so no special problems of causality arise. More generally, there is no special metaphysical problem associated with attempts to deal naturalistically with “mental” phenomena (such as knowledge of language), any more than there are metaphysical problems for chemists in defining the “chemical.” However, despite the example of the reduction of biology to chemistry brought about by the revolution in molecular biology, unification does not have to take the form of reduction. Trying to reduce lingustics to neurology in the current state of our understanding is then unlikely to be productive. Consider the specific example of understanding the implications of electrical activity in the brain, as measured by “event-related brain potentials” (ERP). Linguists have a reasonable understanding of different kinds of “deviant” linguistic structure, where deviance is defined in terms of departure from principles of grammar, and it now appears that such differences correlate with particular patterns of electrical activity in the brain. such correlations have been taken to suggest that linguistic facts can be explained in terms of neurology. But here, and in a range of other cases, it is linguistics that enables us to make any sense at all of the results, as there is no relevant electrophysiological theory in existence. It is as impossible to express interesting generalizations about language in terms of the constructs of cells or neurons, as it is to express generalizations about geology or embryology in terms of the constructs of particle physic. In both cases demands for reduction go too far. There are aspects of our make-up that are inherently inaccessible to our intelligence. The intellectual world is divided into “problems” and “mysteries.” Skinner seems to have realized that a psychology that simply refused to admit the reality of any subjective, cognitive and effective, phenomena was just too incredible to satisfy the minimal plausibility constraints on an adequate psychology. For example, in order to search for the brain state identical to the psychological state of “being in love”, a psychologist will need to be sure even before he starts to search for the neural correlate that he has a bona fide case of “being in love” on his hands. Skinner believed that we will be better off describing and analyzing human experience and behavior in its own molar terms rather than in the molecular terms of physics or neuroscience. Skinner’s metaphysical commitment to the view that overt and covert behavioral phenomena are made of the same (material) stuff, and obey the same sorts of laws Behaviorists 1- Denying that private events exist 2- Admitting that private events exist but demanding operational definitions of them Nonintentional behavior Critics of Chinese room People not only behave as if they have intentionality, consciousness, a point of view, and free will, but they have the right sort of private experiences and the right sorts of bodies as well 1- Our belief that other humans possess intentionality, consciousness, a point of view, and free will rests exclusively on behavioral evidence. 2- Robot reply Cognitive science is committed to the reasonable view that the mind is a representational system, that is, an intentional system that transforms, processes, stores, and retrieves information about the world The cognitive scientist follows Kant in viewing this representational system as consisting of a rich system of a priori structures, processors, and categories which we use to create an orderly “picture” of the world. As the “picture” is enriched and revised throughout our lives we become continually better at anticipating reality Representation theory of mind (fodor) Although Brentano himself was no materialists, his thesis that intentionality is the ineliminable mark of the mental suggests the possibility of a criterion of demarcation between the mental and the nonmental which has no essential connection to Descates’ metaphysical dualism. More familiar to us than anything else Dennett puts it, the “quicksilver” of the philosophy of mind. Purposefulness, intentionality, and consciousness are really essential features of conscious mental of life Certain emotions, for example, seem to lack the property of purposefulness—they seem just to happen. It is impossible for a human to have the same thought or feeling, the same intentional state, more than once because no event can ever recur identically. … but every thought or feeling takes place either before or after every other thought or feeling, and every thought or feeling takes place in a mind, an intentional system, modified by previous experience. Because every other mental event takes place in a different space and time from every other mental event and in an experientially reconstituted system, every mental event is different from every other mental event. Because mental life is in flux, human personality, as well as the experiential quality of mental life is never fixed, permanent, or stationary. On the other hand, many empiricists, following Hume, are unable to find any empirical warrant for the belief in a self which has a unified consciousness and integrity and sameness over time. After all, all the empirical evidence points to the persistent changeability of everything. What we call the self or the person on this view is at best a “mere bundle of perceptions and ideas”—at worst, a vaporous wish. A multifarious force of low-level specialists—what Dennett calls an “army of idiots”—who run around at high speed, passing around the information that, the commander-in-chief, need. The mind is a representational system. Belief and ideas are mental attitudes which invariably lie in “aboutness” relations to specific meaningful contents Kant laid both the substantive and methodological foundations for modern cognitive science. On the substantive side, Kant was responsible for what he himself called the “Copernican revolution” in epistemology, the revolution of constructing the mind as active in the construction of knowledge. On the methodological side, Kant spelled out the logical structure of the still-canonical method for inferring hidden mental processes. Kant called his method of inference from words, words, behavior, and pieces of knowledge to hidden mental processes, transcendental deduction. Kant saw his philosophy of mind as an alternative to Hume’s empiricist model of mind Kant criticized Hume’s philosophy based on two main theses 1- Psychological: “all knowledge originates with sense impressions 2- Epistemological: complex ideas correctly represent the world to the extent that they can be traced back to sense impressions in the right sort of way. The idea of unicorn, for example, involves the association of the impression of a horse with an impression of a horn. Unicorn fails to refer, however, because at the level of our sense impressions, horses and horns fail to occur together. This is why we say that unicorns don’t exist. The concept of logic, causality, substance, space and time are subjective. Speaking of Hume and his fellow empiricists in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says, Hitherto it has been assumed [by the empiricists] that all our knowledge must conform to objects. …We must…make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. …We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primarily hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved around the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to involve and the stars to remain at rest. Those cognitive scientists looking for nativistic philosophical inspiration invariably choose Descartes over Kant. Transcendental Deduction 1- Start with a fact or set of facts 2- Ask how the fact or set of facts could be as they are. That is, ask how the state of affairs in question is possible, how it could have come to be the way it is. 3- Calculate the contribution observable events and processes make to the solution of the “how is this state of affairs possible” question. If the observable events and processes provide a satisfactory solution, Stop. Otherwise, proceed to (4), the transcendental deduction proper 4- Cautiously infer the necessary unobserved or unobservable events and processes to fill out the answer to the “how is this state of affairs possible” question. Reasoning transcendentally is a general feature of reasoning in situations where there are no eyewitness. 1- Causal talk is pervasive in ordinary discourse as well as in physic (where principles like “every effect has a cause” are considered self-evident). 2- Kant acknowledges the force of Hume’s argument that we never see causality as such, we only see constant conjunctions between events; that no beliefs based wholly on sense data are self-evident 3- Kant asks how our concept of causality is possible if neither its substance nor it epistemic character originate in sense data 4- His answer is that it must be supplied a priori by us. It must have a priori components. Cartesian cast: each person is in a special epistemic position to observe the goings-on of his or her mind. 1- Simple Cartesian: one knows for sure that one has a mind, that one is a thinking thing. 2- State Cartesian: each person has infallible and privileged access to the intentional and phenomenal states she is in. 3- Content Cartesian: special access to the content of mind. For example, I know that I desire a cold drink. 4- Causal Cartesian: one has special access to the cause of the states and their contents. I know that I desire a cold drink because I have just exercised and exercising causes water loss, which causes thirst. 5- Process Cartesian: one has privileged access (at the functional level, not at the neural level) to the internal mental processes. Undermining the causal Cartesian: “telling more than we can know” written by Nisbett and Wilson Chomsky insists that evidence points in the direction of a genetically determined and unique mental faculty whose one and only function is language acquisition, processing, and production. A unique, domain-specific language processor is, Chomsky insists, the only plausible way to account for the (alleged) facts that all biologically normal children reach puberty; and that reaching this “steady state” has surprisingly little relation to “general intelligence” or the possession of other talents and skills. Chomsky writes, We may usefully think of the language faculty, the number faculty, and other “mental organs,” as analogous to the heart or the visual system or system of motor coordination and planning. They called it as the modularity thesis Split brain The operation, known as a commissurotomy 1- The left and right cerebral hemispheres are associated (to a significant degree) with opposite sides of the body 2- Disunified consciousness, and unaware of this disunity Results 1- There is a considerable amount of functional localization in the brain, different systems do different sorts of processing 2- Conscious introspection gives us virtually no access to these processes and processors 3- Consciousness does not so much course through, and thereby unify, all the different parts of the mind, as it occurs, when it occurs at all, as an end product of massive amounts of cognitive processing. …this is not to deny that consciousness often initiates mental activity; it is simply to deny that it does so as often or as omnipotently as we are consciously inclined to think. Serious challenges to the views: 1- That the mind is a unified general-purpose device that performes all tasks the same way and is equally competent across domains 2- That consciousness has access to all mental goings-on 3- That consciousness has power over the rest of the system, 4- That awareness is one unitary thing Churchland are the most able and articulate contemporary defenders of eliminativism Critical of reductionism (Putnam) 1- Wrong because psychology is strongly determined by sociology. Even if people are wired with some sort of innate “Universal Grammar,” as Chomsky hypothesizes, nothing at all follows about what natura language any particular individual speaks, or what he uses it to say, until we learn where he was born and lives, how he has been specialized, and so on. How the mind works Steven Pinker To say that the mind is an evolutionary adaptation is not to say that all behavior is adaptive in DARWINS’S SENSE.(How mind works) Fundamental division between biology and culture.(pinker Opposes this) To understand means to try to explain behavior as a complex interaction among: • The genes • The anatomy of the brain • Its biochemical state • The person’s family upbringing • Society • The stimuli that impinge upon the person As science advances and explanations of behavior become less fanciful, the Spector of Creeping Exculption, as Dennett calls it, will loom larger. The scientific mode of explanation cannot accommodate the mysterious notion of uncausal causation that underlies the will. Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning A chromosomal marker for homosexuality in some men, the so-called gay gene, was identified by the geneticist Dean Hamer. Hydraulic model of Freud Access and sentience Blindsight patents: they deny to see anthing in their blind spot, but they guess above chance Logical positivism: holds that if a statement cannot be verified it is literally meaningless. It is like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren’t wet. We can not banish sentience from our discourse or reduce it to information access, because moral reasoning depends on it. 148 God delusion: (Denise)What if the trolley can be stopped by dropping a large weight in its path from a bridge overhead? That is easy: obviously we must drop the weight. But what if the only large weight available is a very fat man sitting on the bridge, admiring the sunset? Almost everybody agrees that it is immoral to push the fat man off the bridge, even though, from one point of view, the dilemma might seem parallel to Denise’s, where throwing the switch kills one to save five. Most of us have a strong intuition that there is a crucial difference between the two cases, though we may not be able to articulate what it is. Pushing the fat man off the bridge is reminiscent of another dilemma considered by Hauser. Five patients in a hospital are dying, each with a different organ failing. Each would be saved if a donor could be found for their particular faulty organ, but none is available. Then the surgeon notices that there is a healthy man in the waiting –room, all five of whose organs are in good working order and suitable for transplanting. In this case, almost nobody can be found who is prepared to say that the moral act is to kill the one to save the five. As with the fat man on the bridge, the intuition that most of us share is that an innocent bystander should not suddenly be dragged into a bad situation and used for the sake of others without his consent. Immanual Kant famously articulated the principle that a rational being should never be used as merely an unconsenting means to an end, even the end of benefiting others You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help in sight. You can save the child, but your trousers will be ruined in the process. The human soul was supposed to be spiritual in nature, a fixed and permanent agent, unalterable and everlasting Cheryl’s problem is that her vestibular apparatus, the sensory organ for the balance system, isn’t working. She is very tired, and her sense that she is in free fall is driving her crazy because she can’t think about anything else. She fears the future. (“feeling settled” or unsettle, balanced or unbalanced, rooted or rootless, grounded or ungrounded) Chalmers: the process of natural selection cannot distinguish between me and my zombie twin Explanatory question: Can consciousness be explained by physical theories? Ontological question: is consciousness itself physical? • In our world, there are conscious experiences • There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold. • Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts • So materialism is false. If a physical identical zombie world is logically possible, it follows that the presence of consciousness is an extra fact about our world, not guaranteed by the physical facts alone. The best evidence of contemporary science tells us that the physical world is more or less causally closed The self is not any single being; it is a multiplicity of becomings (wp 492) Plato and Nietzsche propose a social model of mind Nietzsche argued, the very mind that denies the reality of the world denies its own reality. Proclaiming that there is some other world with opposite features Dionysian naturalism argues that there are only internal perspectives on the world, and that ascetic supernaturalism is in fact a self-nagating and viciously circular internal perspective. Apollonian: 2 of or relating to the rational, ordered, and self-disciplined aspects of human nature : the struggle between cold Apollonian categorization and Dionysiac lust and chaos. Compare with Dionysian : 2 of or relating to the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature : dark, grand Dionysian musi Our sybjective experience is also the grist for our reasoning, speech, and action The boy would stay in the shower for hours at a time, unable to decide when to get out, and could not leave the house because he kept looping back to his room to check whether he had turned off the lights Why would a society of mental agents need an executive at the top? Yiddish expression, “You can’t dance at two weddings with only one tuches Hubbub of competing agents If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious? May your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience, The qualia-debunkers do have a point. At least for now, we have no scientific purchase on the special extra ingredient that gives rise to sentience. As far as scientific explanation goes, it might as well not exist. I am as certain that I am sentient as I am certain of anything. We are chauvinistic about our brains, thinking them to be the goal of evolution. And that makes no sense, for reasons articulated over the years by Stephen Jay Gould. First, natural selection does nothing even close to striving for intelligence. The process is driven by differences in the survival and reproduction rates of replicating organisms in a particular environment. Over time the organisms acquire designs that adapt them for survival and reproduction in that environment, period; nothing pulls them in any direction other than success there and then. When an organism moves to a new environment, its lineage adapts accordingly, but the organisms who stayed behind in the original environment can prosper unchanged. Life is a densely branching bush, not a scale or a ladder, and living organisms are at the tips of the branches, not on lower rungs. Every organism alive tody has had the same amount of time to evolve since the origin of life—the amoeba, the platypus, the rhesus macaque, and yes, Larry on the answering machine asking for another date The complexity of an organism has to increase over the eons; they become bigger, faster, more poisonous, more fecund, more sensitive to smells and sounds, able to fly higher and farther, or better at building nests or dams—whatever works for them. Organisms don’t evolve toward every imaginable advantage. SETI (search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumberable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? Is it possible that an animal having, for instance, the structure and habits of a bat, could have been formed by the modification of some animal with wholly different habits? Can we believe that natural selection could produce, on the one hand, organs of trifling importance, such as the tail of a giraffe, which serves as a fly-flapper, and, on the other hand, organs of such wonderful structure, as the eye, of which we hardly as yet fully understand the inimitable perfection? Can instincts be acquired and modified through natural selection? 142 darwin to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light? In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? The foregoing remarks lead me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists, against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that very many structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety. This doctrine, if, true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory. Yet I fully admit that many structures are of no direct use to their possessors. It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two great laws—unity of type, and the conditions of existence. By unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure, which we see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite independent of their habits of life. On my theory, unity of type is explained by unity of descent. The expression of conditions of existence, so often insisted on by natural selection. For natural selection acts by either now adapting the varying parts of each being to its organic and inorganic conditions of life, or by having adapted them during long-past period of time: the adaptations being aided in some cases by use and disuse, being slightly affected by the direct action of the external conditions of life In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researchers. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. As the teeth, for example, grow by necessity, the front ones sharp, adapted for dividing, and the grinders flat, and serviceable for masticating the food.385

Posted by saeid at 10:46 PM | Permalink

Koch

Of course, this is not to argue that motion of the body, eyes, limbs, and so on, isn’t important in shaping awareness. It is! Yet behavior is not strictly necessary for qualia to occur. 10

Note: a system has emergent properties if there are not possessed by its parts. There are no mystical, new-age overtones to this. 10

 

Individual neurons themselves are complex entities with unique morphologies and thousands of inputs and outputs. 10

 

Although consciousness is fully compatible with the laws of physics, it is not feasible to predict or understand consciousness from these. 11

 

How can consciousness be approached in a scientific manner?

 

NCC: the goal is to discover the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept. 16

 

I assume that consciousness depends on what is inside the head, not necessary on the behavior of the organism. 17

 

These conflicts arise because conditions are difficult to precisely replicate when dealing with intricate organisms. (note: 21)

 

• Explicit neural representations are essential for the NCC.
• Multiple forms of neural activity exist. Properly looked after, both ideas reap enormous benefit in terms of being able to interpret neuronal behavior.

 

 

Even though the brain looks to the causal observer like a mushy, overcooked cauliflower, it is exceedingly differentiated. … sensory systems handle an almost infinite variety of images, scenes, sounds, and so on, and react to them in detail with remarkable accuracy. They are highly evolved, are considerably specified, and can learn a great deal from experience. 22

 

The organism that takes its time to figure out the optimal solution may be eaten by faster competitor working with a so-so result. 22

 

The main function of the sensory cortex is to construct and use highly specific feature detectors, such as those for orientation, motion, and faces.22

How are feature detectors formed? In a broad sense, neurons do this by detecting common correlations in their inputs and altering their synapses (and perhaps other properties) so that they can more easily respond to them. (note: 22)

 

Democratic elections analogy for neuronal competition

 

Our first guiding principle is that the NCC require(s) explicit neuronal representations. Cells that encode information in an implicit manner are not sufficient for a conscious precept, although they may influence behavior.

 

 

The concept of logical depth of computation

 

TV news provides an analogy. The pattern of colored dots on the screen contains an implicit representation of the newscaster’s face, but only the brightness of each individual picture element (pixel) and its location are explicitly represented on the television screen. A machine vision algorithm would have to infer laboriously the presence of a face from these pixels, a nontrivial task. 26

 

All of the visual information that the brain can access is implicitly encoded by the membrane potentials of the more than 200 million photoreceptors in the two eyes. This ocean of data is of little use, however, until higher processing stages have extracted meaningful features. The logical depth of retinal activity is quite shallow. 26

 

An explicit coding for small, twisted pieces of wires was discovered by the electrophysiologist Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues, working at Baylor College in Texas, following a proposal by the MIT theoretician Tomaso Poggio.

 

Our notion of explicit and implicit can be formalized by demanding that the existence of the to-be-represented feature or object must be inferred from a suitably weighted linear or nonlinear combination of cells. Thus, an explicit face representation is one in which a single-layered neural network can detect whether or not a face is present in the firing activity of a pool of neurons. This way, an explicit represenation must be grounded in an earlier, implicit stage. (note: 26)

 

As a general rule, the deeper one proceeds into the cortex, the less the neurons care about the exact location, orientation, or size of the stimulus, the more information will be discarded, and the bigger the neuron’s logical depth of computation. 27

 

Of all the trillions of cells found in the human body, only a tiny minority have this amazing ability to explicitly encode important aspects of the outside world. 28

 

I am not implying that all explicit representations participate in conscious perception, Rather, an explicit representation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the NCC.28

 

 

Neurons are not haphazardly arranged within the brain but assemble according to orderly principles that neuroscientists are uncovering bit by bit. 29

 

There is no logical reason why neurons that explicitly code for say, motion, have to be arranged in a columnar fashion. 28

 

Distributed representation vs Sparse representation

 

A more common form of neuronal representation is population coding, in which information is encoded by the spiking activity of a large group of more broadly tuned cells. Taken on its own, the firing of any one cell says little. Yet if interpreted appropriately, the firing pattern of the entire population expresses a wealth of detail. 30

 

Distributed representations have one principal advantage over sparse ones: they can store more data.

 

(Illusory Kanizsa Triangle, although no triangle exists on the paper itself, you clearly perceive one. For every such direct experience, there will be one or more groups of neurons explicitly representing the different aspects of the percept. This is our activity principle. ) indeed, neurons that get “fired up” to illusory edges are found in the visual cortex

 

 

for example, a region in the fusiform gyrus contains an essential node for the perception of color, a more anterior part of the amygdala is needed for perceiving fearful facial expressions. 34

 

consider achromatopsia, the loss of color perception following localized trauma to the visual cortex that leaves other visual abilities intact. …given that the essential node in the other hemisphere is intact, objects appear with their normal hues in that portion of the visual field. 34

 

conscious perception is synthesized from activity at many essential nodes. 35

 

keep in mind that the loss must be specific to a particular aspect of perception. For example, the whole of V1 is not an essential node for motion or color because elimination of V1 effectively entails loss of all normal visual perception. 35

 

how else but with spikes can the highly peculiar character of any one subjective experience—a subtle shade of pink or a rhapsodic waltz tune—be communicated across multiple cortical and subcortical regions?36

 

let me illustrate the daunting problem faced by the intrepid neuroscientist trying to understand how neurons talk to each other, with the help of an analogy. Think of huge, open-air soccer arena with a game in progress.

 

Gamma oscillation can be routinely observed in the local field potential and, less frequently, when recording multi-neuron activity (that is, the summed spikes of neiboring cells). Detecting these rhythms in the spiking pattern of individual neurons has proven to be more problematic, different laboratories reporting quite disparate results. 41

 

Problems

How information is coded?

What are those spontaneous activities, for example, in resting state?

 

How does the brain “know” which firing activity distributed in the multifarious maps throughout the cortex corresponds to which attribute of what object?

 

The magnitude and probability of synchronous firing is inversely related to the distance between the cells (the farther apart they are, the smaller the degree of synchronization). 44

 

The relationship between synchronization and oscillation is a thorny one. In principle, both could occur independently.

 

Today, Francis and I no longer think that synchronized firing is a sufficient condition for the NCC. 46

 

A function role more in line with the data is that synchronization assists a nascent coalition in its competition with other nascent coalitions. As explained in Chapter 9, this occurs when you attend to an object or event. … once a coalition has established itself as a winner and you are conscious of the associated attributes, the coalition may able to maintain itself without the assistance of synchrony, at least for a time. 46

 

The NCC involved temporary coalitions of neurons, coding for particular events or objects, that are competing with other coalitions. A particular assembly—biased by attention—emerges as the winner by dint of the strength of its firing activity. The winning coalition, corresponding to the current content of consciousness, suppresses competing assemblies for some time until it either fatigues, adapts, or is superseded by a novel input and a new victor emerges. 47

 

A feature is made explicit if a small set of neighboring cortical neurons directly encode this feature. The depth of computation inherent in an implicit representation is shallower than in an explicit one. Additional processing is necessary to transform an implicit into an explicit representation. Examples of explicit representations are stimulus orientation in V1 or face encoding in IT.47

 

Neural activity can take diverse forms. Key to all is the rapid propagation of information across the brain via action potentials. 48

 

Others assert that the devil is in the details. No matter who is responsible for the minutiae of reality, science is undoubtedly about details, gadgets, and mechanisms. 49

 

It is to quantitatively correlate the receptive field properties of individual neurons with the subject’s perception. If the structure of conscious perception does not map to the receptive field properties of the cell population under consideration, it is unlikely that these neurons are sufficient for that conscious percept. In the presence of correlation between perceptual experience and receptive field properties, the next step is to determine whether the cells are, by themselves, sufficient for that conscious percept or whether they are only incidentally linked to perception. To prove causation, many additional experiments are needed to untangle the exact relationship between neurons and perception. 57

 

Discrepancies between what ganglion cells encode and what you consciously perceive include the dramatic decrease in spatial acuity away from the fovea, the existence of a mere two photoreceptor types at the point of sharpest seeing, the paucity of color representation in the periphery, the blind spot, image blur during eye movements, and transient loss of visual input during blinks. 67

 

While the eyes are necessary for normal forms of seeing, the NCC are most certainly not to be found in the retinae, 67

 

This must be taken as a general principle, that the cortical substance…imparts life, that is, sensation, perception, understanding, and will; and it imparts motion, that is the power of acting in agreement with will and nature. Emanual Swedenborg 69

 

The cortex is the ultimate substrate of perception, memory, speech, and consciousness. 69

 

Cortex divided into

• Phylogenetically old olfactory and hippocampus cortex
• More recent neocortex

 

Cortex is found only in mammals

 

Any plausible theory of consciousness must be based on neurons. 70

 

During the course of evolution, the amount of cortex has increased several hundredfold from simple primates (such as prosimians) to human, but the types of cortical cells have not changed commensurately. 70 …the sole exception, so far, are spindle neurons, a class of giant cells restricted to two neocortical regions in the frontal lobe. Found in high densities in humans, they are much sparser in the great apes and altogether absent in monkeys, cats, and rodents. A few tantalizing hints point toward their possible involvement in self monitoring and self awareness. 70

 

Notefoot: Spindle neurons …are charectrized by elongated and large cell bodies in the lower part of layer 5, the output layer of the cortex. Absent in newborn infants, their numbers stabilize in adults at about 40000 neurons in the anterior cingulated cortex and 100,000 or so in FI, another frontal area. These regions are involoved in self-evaluation, monitoring, and attentional control. 70

 

 

One the whole, the cortex is remarkably homogenous. This universal or “unitary” viewpoint assumes that most of the differences between, say, visual and auditory cortex, arise due to the distinct nature of the input—a stream of images versus sounds…. Layer 4 in the motor cortex, for instance, is poorly developed, whereas layer 4 in the primary visual cortex is particularly thick. Specializations make sense, because the main job of the motor cortex is to control muscles (an output function) while V1 requires high-resolution visual input. 72

 

Even if two neurons look alike, they may be situated in different layers and send their axons to distinct target zones, and their spikes may convey different messages. 72

 

The amazing molecular specificity of proteins reveals itself even at the behavioral level. A bit more than half of all men possess a gene for the visual pigment in their long-wavelength sensitive cone photoreceptors that codes alanine at the location. This tiny difference at the molecular level shows up in hue perception when screening men on the basis of their performance when matching reddish colors. 103

Why should neurons be any less specific than proteins? Nerve cells, like biomolecules, have been shaped by the blind forces of natural selection over hundreds of millions of years, giving rise to as yet unfathomable heterogeneity in their shape, form, and function. 103

 

The specificity that is a hallmark of molecular and cellar biology suggests that the correlates of consciousness are based on equally particular biological mechanisms and gadgets, involving identifiable types of neurons, interconnected in some special way and firing in some pertinent manner. But the NCC might also encompass large cell assemblies. 104

I will argue that the NCC are not to be found among V1 neurons. 104

 

Surprising conclusion: although V1 is intimately involved in vision, many—if not all—V1 cells do not directly contribute to the content of visual consciousness. 105

 

You should care because this finding implies that not just any cortical activity is automatically associated with consciousness, and also for the methods used to establish this claim.( because V1 neurons do not send their output to the front part of the cortex, Francis and I predicted in 1995 that V1 cells can’t be directly responsible for conscious vision.105) (we stated this hypothesis before most of the data presented here were known)

 

 

The cortex contains a hierarchical structure

Ehat is the exact relationship among all of these areas? Do the interconnections among different regions reveal anything about the large-scale architecture employed? After all, cortico-cortical fibers make up the bulk of the white matter beneath the cortex. 120

 

The hierarchy revealed by these laminar rules does not look perfect. In the words of Felleman and Van Essen, various irregularities:

Raise the issue of whether the cortex is inherently only a ‘quasi-hierarchical’ structure that contains a significant number (perhaps 10%) of bona fide irregularities and exceptions to any set of criteria that can be devised. Alternatively, the visual cortex might contain an essentially perfect anatomical hierarchy that has been imperfectly studied using inherently ‘noisy’ methods of anatomical analysis.121

 

Astonishing hypothesis

“a person mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them”

 

you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules

 

consciousness has at least four main ingredients

1.     P. 249) crick and you postulated the idea that each level of visual processing is coordinated by a single thalamic region, thus making the thalamus a key player in consciousness

2.     Consciousness and short memory need the activity of reverbratory circuits to maintain them

3.     In the case of the primary visual cortex (V1) there are 5 to 10 times more fibers going back to the thalamus from layer 6 of the cortex than those coming to the entire visual cortex from the thalamus. Crick and you argue that it is these interconnections which provide the basis for the reverbratory circuits

4.     Awareness requires the activity of various cortical areas as well as the thalamus, which raises a problem in that the major visual area of the thalamus (the lateral Geniculate Body) projects almost solely to V1. Thus if layer 6 is so vital to consciousness in its interactions with the thalamus, where do the layer 6’s of higher visual area, such as V4 and V5, do their interacting with thalamus? Crick and you suggest that the Pulvinar nuclus might be a site but the evidence indicates that its projections to higher area are not strong.

 

How the brain “binds” the activity of all these different neurons together to produce a coherent visual perception. (oscillation may cause the binding(wrong))

 

Consciousness explained

 

The neuroscientists are right to insist that you don’t really have a good model of consciousness until you solve the problem of where it fits in the brain, but cognitive scientists are right to insist that you don’t really have a good model of consciousness until you solve the problem of what functions it performs and how it performs them—mechanically, without benefit of Mind. Dennett P. 256

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Consciousness emerges from neuronal features of the brain

 

 

 

how can a physical system have qualia?

 

How meaning arises from electrical activity in the vast neural

networks making up the brain remains a deep mystery.

 

Consider the strange case of the neurological patient D.F. She is unable

to see shapes or recognize pictures of everyday objects, yet can catch a ball.

Even though she can’t tell the orientation of a thin mail box-like slit (is it hor-

izontal?) she can deftly post a letter into the slit. By studying such patients,

neuropsychologists have inferred the existence of zombie agents in the brain

that bypass awareness; that is, they don’t involve consciousness (recall that in

the second footnote to this chapter, I equate awareness with consciousness).

These agents are dedicated to stereotypical tasks, such as shifting the eyes or

positioning the hand. They usually operate fairly rapidly and don’t have access

to explicit memory. I’ll return to these themes in Chapters 12 and 13.

Why, then, isn’t the brain just a large collection of specialized, zomb

 

why is consciousness needed at all? What is its function? In

Chapter 14, I argue that consciousness gives access to a general-purpose and

deliberate processing mode for planning and contemplating a future course of

action.

 

Consciousness is an intensely private matter.

 

This, then, is the charter for our quest: To understand how and why the

neural basis of a specific conscious sensation is the basis of that sensation rather

than another, and rather than a completely nonconscious state; why sensations

are structured the way they are, how they acquire meaning, and why they are

private; and, finally, how and why so many behaviors occur in the absence of

consciousness.

 

 

The provisional approach I take in this book is to consider first-person

accounts as brute facts of life and seek to explain them.11

 

While the audacity of endowing

all systems that represent information with experience has a certain appeal and

elegance, it is not clear to me how Chalmers’s hypothesis could be tested sci-

entifically. For now, this modern-day panpsychism can only be accepted as a

belief.

 

Operationally, consciousness is needed for nonroutine tasks

that require retention of information over seconds.

 

Consciousness takes many forms, but it seems best to begin with the form that

is easiest to investigate.

 

Core consciousness is all about the here and now, while extended consciousness requires a sense of self—the self-referential aspect that for

many people epitomizes consciousness—and of the past and the anticipated

future.

They are. Aphasics, children with severe autism, or patients who have

lost their sense of self are severely impaired, confined to hospitals or nursing

homes.

 

As I emphasized a few pages earlier, our

approach is preconditioned on observations that consciousness depends on

what is inside the head, not necessarily on the behavior of the organism.

 

 

Using the NCC in this way implies that if I am aware of an event, the NCC

in my head must directly express this. There must be an explicit correspondence between any mental event and its neuronal correlates. Another way of stating

this is that any change in a subjective state must be associated with a change

in a neuronal state.28 Note that the converse need not necessarily be true; two

different neuronal states of the brain may be mentally indistinguishable.

 

 

But whatever the correlates are, they must map directly, rather

than indirectly, onto conscious perception because the NCC are all that are

needed for that particular experience.

 

As I shall argue in Chapter 14, it is quite unlikely that consciousness is a mere

epiphenomenona. Rather consciousness enhances the survival of its carrier.

This means that the NCC activity must affect other neurons in some manner.

This post-NCC activity influences other neurons that ultimately cause some

behavior. This activity can also feed back to the NCC neurons and to previous

stages in the hierarchy, significantly complicating matters.

 

 

the question of the exact

relationship between neuronal and mental events needs to be resolved.

 

 

The character of brain and phenomenal

states appear too different to be completely reducible to each other. I suspect

that their relationship is more complex than traditionally envisioned. For now,

it is best to keep an open mind on this matter and to concentrate on identifying

the correlates of consciousness in the brain.

 

 

My approach is a direct one that many of my colleagues consider naive or

ill-advised. I take subjective experience as given and assume that brain activity

is both necessary and sufficient for biological creatures to experience some-

thing. Nothing else is needed. I seek the physical basis of phenomenal states

within brain cells, their arrangements and activities. My goal is to identify the

specific nature of this activity, the neuronal correlates of consciousness, and to

determine to what extent the NCC differ from activity that influences behavior

without engaging consciousness.

 

Similar to the quest to

understand life, discovering and characterizing the molecular, biophysical, and

neurophysiological operations that constitute the NCC will likely help solve the

central enigma, how events in certain privileged systems can be the physical

basis of, or even be, feelings.

It would be contrary to evolutionary continuity to believe that conscious-

ness is unique to humans.

 

As Lao Tsu remarked many years ago, “A

journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Now that we have started, let me acquaint you with some key concepts that

will guide our quest. In particular, I need to flesh out the notions of explicit

and implicit neuronal representations, essential nodes, and the various forms

of nervous activity.

 

 

The first clue to find these NCCs is the way they represent the external world. All body cells are, to some extent, influenced by what happens to the body, but only a minority of the body cells represent external stimuli in an "explicit" manner: Koch and Crick believe that one is only conscious of features that are encoded "explicity" by some neuronal assembly.

 

 

The other way to find them is to listen to the way they oscillate. The electric potential of the brain as a whole exhibits oscillatory behavior in different frequency bands: the dominant rhythm for resting individuals is in the "alpha" band (8-12 Hz); the rhythm for normal cognitive activity is in the "beta" band (15-25 Hz) or, for more complex operations, in the "gamma" band (30 Hz or higher); sleep is in the "delta" band (1-4 Hz). Each of these "oscillations" is caused by some synchronous behavior ("firing") of many neurons.

 

Christoph von der Malsburg originally proposed that synchronization could be the solution to the "binding" problem: the neurons working on one object are synchronized, and they are not synchronized with other populations of neurons that are working on other objects.

 

There is one oscillatory behavior by neurons that seems to be associated with awareness, and it is in the 30-70 Hz range, with a peak around 40 Hz: Koch and Crick claimed in 1990 that this oscillation accounts for consciousness (the set of those synchronized neurons "is" the NCC for the current state of awareness).

Koch and Crick believe that several such "coalitions" of neurons exist at every point in time, and a sort of Darwinian selection determines which one (and only one) wins and results into awareness.

 

Another clue to finding the NCC is the cholinergic system: consciousness only occurs when there is an adequate supply of acetylcholine neurotrasmitters, which are regulated by the brainstem (people whose brainstem is damaged lose consciousness).

 

 

The brain has a convoluted structure, and the way it represents an experience is even more convoluted, but we perceive an experience as a sequential of events. Koch thinks this has to do with the fact that, at every point in time, only one coalition is the winning one. It may change all the time, but we perceive an ordered sequence of events, because every other coalition that is active at the time is suppressed. We don't perceive the convoluted activity of the brain, that is analyzing an overwhelming amount of data, but only those events that correspond to the winning coalition.

 

Koch elegantly divides short and long term memory based on the underlying mechanism: long-term memory is caused by a physical rewiring of the brain (strengthening of connections), whereas short-term memory is caused by a sustained firing pattern by an assembly of neurons. Koch proves that consciousness depends on the latter, not on the former.

 

 

any being that displays a working memory is likely to be conscious.

 

 

Thus our consciousness resides at an intermediary level. We are not conscious of the homunculus that is making decisions for us, and we are not conscious of the real world. We are only conscious of our mental representation of the world.

 

The only area that Koch's book does not treat in detail is the story about neurotrasmitters. Other than a short introduction to the cholinergic system, Koch does not analyze the reason that so many different kinds of neurotrasmitters exist, and how they coexist.

 

 

 

The so-called central nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord. All other nerves in the body comprise the peripheral nervous system. Efferent nerves carry messages from the central nervous system to all parts of the body (the periphery). Afferent nerves carry information such as pain intensity from the periphery to the central nervous system. There are two types of efferent nerves: somatic, which go to skeletal muscles, and autonomic, which go to smooth muscles, glands and the heart. Messages in the form of electrical activity are conducted along the nerve fibers or axons. Between the terminus of the axon and the muscle or gland that the nerve controls (innervates), there is a gap called the synapse or synaptic cleft. When the conducted electrical impulse (action potential) reaches the nerve terminus, it provokes the release of chemicals called neurotransmitters. These chemicals diffuse across the synaptic cleft and react with a specialized structure (receptor) on the postjunctional membrane. The receptor is then said to be activated or excited, and its activation triggers a series of chemical events resulting ultimately in a biological response such as muscle contraction. The processes involving neurotransmitter release, diffusion and receptor activation are referred to collectively as transmission. There are many types of transmission, and they are named for the specific neurotransmitter involved. Thus, cholinergic transmission involves the release of the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, and its activation of the postsynaptic receptor. Things that bind to and activate receptors are called agonists. Thus, acetylcholine is the endogenous agonist for all cholinergic receptors.

 

 

Until the problem is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both. If this seems evasive, try defining the word "gene." So much is now known about genes that any simple definition is likely to be inadequate. How much more difficult, then, to define a biological term when rather little is known about it.

 

Holy Grail

 

Koch integrates evidence from

electrophysiological data, imaging and psychophysical studies, computational models,

and clinical observations in a comprehensive account.

 

Today, thanks in large extent to Crick and Koch’s major contributions to the field, as well

as to their successful cheerleading efforts, most neuroscientists and cognitive scientists

are receptive and familiar with the idea of a neurobiology of consciousness, previously

despised by “serious” neuroscientists.

 

Although he admits that philosophers have often

formulated questions that challenge scientists, Koch believes that scientists should forge

ahead, and ignore philosophical constraints.

 

For instance, except for some brief, thought-

provoking discussion of how the neurons in the penumbra (i.e. neurons that are not part

of the NCC proper yet are influenced by the NCC) may give rise to qualia, a

neurobiological account of qualia is purposely avoided. In Koch’s words: “Why qualia

feel [Koch’s italics] the way they do remains an enigma”

 

 

Visual illusions,

especially bistable illusions (in which the same stimulus can be perceived, at different

times, in two mutually exclusive ways) are promoted as powerful devices to isolate those

neurons, circuits, or brain areas that respond to non-perceived stimuli, and therefore can

be ruled out as part of the NCC.

 

One of the main strengths of the book is that it

pinpoints conflicting evidence (i.e. from different techniques or approaches) and

identifies the major gaps in our current knowledge of the NCC.

 

Another major contribution of Koch’s framework is the distinction between

explicit and implicit representations. An explicit representation of a stimulus attribute is a

set of neurons that represent that feature without substantial further processing. In an

implicit representation, the neuronal responses may account for certain elements of a

given feature, however the feature itself is not detected at that level. For instance, all

visual information is implicitly encoded in the photoreceptors of the retina. Koch

proposes that there is an explicit representation of every conscious percept. The neuronal

substrate for such explicit representations is the columnar organization of the cortex.

Thus explicit representations of conscious attributes will usually be organized in cortical

columns (a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the NCC).

 

 

For instance, their earlier assumption that gamma

oscillations are one of the necessary components of the NCC has been softened, and

replaced by the thought that neuronal synchrony (which may or may not be oscillatory)

might be a necessary component of the NCC.

 

The question should not be “how else but spikes?” but rather “How in the world can spikes possibly produce qualia

 

“How else but with spikes can the highly peculiar character of any one subjective experience—a subtle shade of pink or a rhapsodic waltz tune—be communicated across multiple cortical and subcortical regions?”

 

oretical. In the last few years many well-motivated and well-

designed experimental studies have been published, made

possible, in part, by the rapid development of neuroimaging.

One of the best things about Koch’s book, and one that distin-

guishes it from the many previous books on the neural corre-

lates of consciousness, is that many of these experiments,

particularly those relating to the visual system, are discussed

in some detail.

One of the discoveries that motivated the search for the

neural correlates of consciousness is that so much informa-

tion processing goes on in the brain in the absence of con-

Koch makes only superficial attempts to use the data he

presents to derive a detailed account of the neural correlates

of consciousness. For example, in his discussion of short-

term memory, he cites the evidence for a major role of the

medial temporal cortex. Damage to the region, he says, as in

the case of patient CW, can lead to a severe loss in the conti-

nuity of conscious experience. CW writes repeatedly in his

notebook, “I have just woken up.” This observation would

suggest to me that the medial temporal cortex might be an es-

sential node for this particular aspect of consciousness. Koch

concludes, however, that medial temporal regions “are not

strictly needed for consciousness,” since people like CW are

conscious.

 

Koch is confirming the suspicion that it is so much easier to develop theories of consciousness

 

One of the discoveries that motivated the search for the

neural correlates of consciousness is that so much informa-

tion processing goes on in the brain in the absence of con-

sciousness. Koch refers to these processes as “zombie

agents.” First observed in neurological patients (syndromes

such as blindsight, neglect, and visual agnosia), this uncon-

scious processing has now been observed in many neuroim-

aging studies. A key comparison for neural correlates of con-

sciousness studies is between conditions where the same

information is processed with and without awareness. Such

comparisons have led to the novel concept of essential nodes.

Essential nodes are circumscribed brain regions (or systems)

that are necessary for consciousness of certain features or ob-

jects in the world. For example, an area of the fusiform gyrus

(V4) is essential for consciousness of color. If this region is

damaged, the patient will be unable to perceive color. If the

region is directly stimulated, then the subject will perceive

color. However, neural activity in this region is not sufficient

for awareness of color. Interaction with other brain regions,

in particular the frontal cortex, is also required.

 

Behavior alone is not sufficient to determine whether or not the subject is conscious.

 

This report need not be verbal and often involves simply

pressing a button to indicate that a stimulus has been seen.

Nevertheless, there are many problems with such reports.

How do we know if the subject is simply guessing?Greek ideas and advancing through the major 20th-century

philosophers. There are also humanitarian themes, including

“third wave” and existential schools, beginning with Vives

According to Koch, both halves of the brain are conscious and, by the way, both show binocular rivalry.

 

John Searle ["Consciousness: What We Still Don't Know," NYR, January 13] points out, rightly, that so far brain and cognitive science is merely studying the correlates of consciousness (where and when in the brain does something happen when we feel something?), but thereafter the goal is to go on to explain how those correlates cause consciousness (and presumably also why). Koch (and Crick) seem to think it's a matter of finding out when and where the bits are put together ("the taste of coffee in our mouth, the slight headache, and the sight of the landscape out the window"), whereas Searle thinks it's a matter of finding the "unified field"—but either way, it's correlates now, and the explanation of how only later.

 

Now what about the "how"? How does a pattern of brain activity generate feeling? This is not a question about how that pattern of brain activity is generated, for that can be explained in the usual way, just as we explain how a pattern of activity in a car  or a kidney is generated. It is a question about how feeling itself is generated. Otherwise the feeling just remains something that is mysteriously (but reliably) correlated with certain brain patterns. (Stevan Harnad
Chaire de recherche du Canada)

 

It is important to understand that he is not lamenting our present neurobiological ignorance. He thinks even if we had a perfect science of the brain, we would be unable to answer the how/why question. I am not convinced. Suppose we knew in exact detail all of the neurobiological mechanisms and their mode of operation, so that we knew exactly which neuronal events were causally necessary, or sufficient, or both, for which subjective feelings. Suppose all of this knowledge was stated as a set of precise laws. Suppose such knowledge were in daily medical use to help overcome human pain, misery, and mental illness. We are a long way from this ideal and we may never reach it, but even this would not satisfy Harnad. (Searle)

 

 

seriously, as a brute fact that needs to be explained.

The first-person perspective, feelings, qualia,

awareness, phenomenal experiences—call it what

you want—are real phenomena that arise out of

certain privileged brain processes. They make up

the landscape of conscious life: the deep red of a

sunset over the Pacific Ocean, the fragrance of a

rose, the searing anger that wells up at seeing an

abused dog, the memory of the exploding space

shuttle Challenger on live TV. Science’s ability to

comprehend the universe will be limited unless

and until it can explain how certain physical

systems can be sufficient for such subjective states.

Second, I argue for putting aside, for now, the

difficult problems that philosophers debate—in

particular the question of why is it that it feels like

something to see, hear, or to be me—and concen-

Perhaps so, but there is no credible alternative

to understanding consciousness by searching for

the NCC. Experience has shown that logical

argumentation and introspection, the preferred

methods of scholars throughout all but the past

two centuries, are simply not powerful enough to

crack this problem. You can’t reason your way to

an explanation of consciousness. Brains are too

complicated, and are conditioned on too many

random events and accidents of evolutionary

history, for such armchair methods to successfully

illuminate the truth. Instead, you have to find out

the facts. How specific is the tapestry woven by

axons among neurons? Does synchronized firing

play a critical role in the genesis of consciousness?

How crucial are the feedback pathways crisscross-

ing cortex and thalamus? Are there special

neuronal cell types that underlie the NCC? Qualia. The

elemental feelings

and sensations

making up conscious

experience, such as

seeing a face or

hearing a tone.

Percept. An

impression of an

object obtained by

 

 

This failure

is rarely talked about in polite, academic company.

Philosophers, however, excel at asking conceptual

questions from a point of view that scientists don’t

usually consider. Notions of the Hard versus the

Easy Problem of consciousness, phenomenal versus

access consciousness, the content of consciousness

versus consciousness as such, the unity of con-

sciousness, the causal conditions for consciousness

to occur, and so on, are fascinating issues that

scientists should ponder more often. So, listen to

the questions posed by philosophers but don’t be

distracted by their answers. A case in point is

the philosopher’s zombie. of computations and actions that underlie such a

seemingly simple behavior.

So zombie behaviors are reflexes, only more complex?

Yes. Think of them as cortical reflexes. Reach-

ing for a glass of water by extending your arm and

automatically opening the hand to grasp it

constitutes a zombie action that requires visual

input to control the arm and hand. You carry out

thousands of these actions daily. You can “see” the

glass, of course, but only because neural activity in

a different system is responsible for the conscious

percept.

Posted by saeid at 10:36 PM | Permalink

Conceivably scientists might discover that there is insufficient information in the genome to specify any innate circuitry, or no known mechanism by which it could be wired into the brain. The first bridge between biology and culture is science of mind, cognitive science. The second bridge between mind and matter is neuroscience, especially cognitive neuroscience. …Francis Crick wrote a book about the brain called The Astonishing Hypothesis, alluding to the idea that all our thoughts and feelings, joys and aches, deam and wishes consist in the physiological activity of the brain. The third bridge between the biological and mental is behavioral genetics, the study of how genes affect behavior. All the potential for thinking, learning, and feeling that distinguishes humans from other animals lies in the information contained in the DNA of the fertilized ovum. The forth bridge from biology to culture is evolutionary psychology, the study of the phylogenetic history and adaptive functions of the mind People sometimes fear that the genes affect the mind at all they must determine it in very detail. That is wrong, for two reasons. 1. The most effects of genes are probabilistic . …behavioral geneticists estimate that only about half of the variation in most psychological traits within a given environment correlates with the genes. 2. The second reason that genes aren’t everything is that their effects can vary depending on the environment. Our personalities differ in five major ways 1. Introverted or extroverted 2. Neurotic or stable 3. Incurious or open to experience 4. Agreeable or antagonistic 5. Conscientious or undirected All five of the major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes.

Posted by saeid at 10:35 PM | Permalink

Descartes’s error 1994, avon books, new york The strategies of human reason probably did not develop, in either evolution or any single individual, without the guiding force of the mechanisms of biological regulation, of which emotion and feeling are notable expressions. Moreover, even after reasoning strategies become established in the formative years, their effective deployment probably depends, to a considerable extent, on a continued ability to experience feelings. Xii I suggest only that certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use. Xiii I propose that human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center. Xiii edifice |ˈedəfis| |ˌɛdəfəs| |ˌɛdɪfɪs| noun formal a building, esp. a large, imposing one. • figurative a complex system of beliefs : the concepts on which the edifice of capitalism was built. Not by design but by necessity Feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts. Xv In attempting to shed light on the complex phenomena of the human mind, we run the risk of merely degrading them and explaining them away. But that will happen only if we confuse a phenomenon itself with the separate components and operations that can be found behind its appearance. I am not suggesting that. Xvi The mind exists in and for an integrated organism…. The mind had to be first about the body, or it could not have been. How is it that we are conscious of the world around us, that we know what we know, and that we know that we know?xvii The soul breathes through the body, and suffering, whether it starts in the skin or in a mental image, happens in the flesh. Xvii At the outset I made my view clear on the limits of science: I am skeptical of science’s presumption of objectivity and definitiveness. Xviii But skepticism about the current reach of science, especially as it concerns the mind, does not imply diminished enthusiasm for the attempt to improve provisional approximations. Xviii Perhaps the complexity of human mind is such that the solution to the problem can never be known because of our inherent limitations. Xviii Another important aspect og Gage’s story is the discrepancy between the degenerated character and the apparent intactness of the several instruments of mind—aatention, perception, memory, language, intelligence. 11 Language is then “dissociated” ability. We can now say with confidence that there are no single “centers” for vision, or language, or for that matter, reason or social behavior. There are “systems” made up of several interconnected brain units; anatomically, but not functionally, those brain units are none other than the old “centers” of phrenologically inspired theory; and these systems are indeed dedicated to relatively separable operations that constitute the basis of mental functions. 15 All we knew about Gage’s brain lesion was that it was probably in the frontal lobe. That is a bit like saying that Chicago is probably in the United States—accurate but not very specific or helpful.18 Gage lost something uniquely human The impairment in language became known technically as aphasia. 20 Hanna Damasio began by considering the general trajectory of the iron, a curious exercise in itself. Entering from the left cheek upward into the skull, the iron broke through the back of the left orbital cavity (the eye socket) located immediately above. Continuing upward it must have penetrated the front part of the brain close to the midline, although it was difficult to say where exactly. Since it seems to have been angled to the right it may have hit the left side first, then some of the right as it traveled upward. The initial site of brain damage probably was the orbital frontal region, directly above the orbital cavities. In it travel, the iron would have destroyed some of the inner surface of the left frontal lobe and perhaps of the right frontal lobe. Finally, as it exited, the iron would have damaged some part of the doral, or back, region of the frontal lobe, on the left side for sure and perhaps also on the right. 23 He was still physically capable and most of his mental capacities were intact. But his ability to reach decisions was impaired, as was his ability to make an effective plan for the hours ahead of him, let alone to plan for the months and years of his future. 37 He did not learn from his mistakes…. It is appropriate to say that his free will had been compromised and to venture, in answer to the question I had posed concerning Gage, that Gage’s free will had been compromised too.38 The damage was thus confined to prefrontal cortices. …the damage to Elliot’s brain, though, was more extensive on the right than the left.39 Their altered behavior often had been attributed to defects in memory or attention. Elliot would disabuse me of that notion. 40 Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. 40 The problem here lies with the tests, not with the patients. The tests simply do not address properly the particular functions that are compromised and thus fail to measure any decline. 41 I realized I had been overly concerned with the state of Elliot’s intelligence and the instruments of his rationality, and had not paid much attention to his emotions, for various reasons. 44 I found myself suffering more when listening to Elliot’s stories than Elliot himself seemed to be suffering. In fact, I felt that I suffered more than he did just by thinking of those stories. 44 Disaffectation He seemed to approach life on the same neutral note. I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning. I learned that his behavior was the same in his own daily environment.45 In no time he would be his usual new self, calm and without grudges. 45 I became intrigued with the possibility that reduced emotion and feeling might play a role in Elliot’s decision-making failure. 45 Was he still in possession of the knowledge but no longer able to conjure it up and manipulate it? Or was he able to gain access to the knowledge but unable to operate on it and make a choice? 46 Would [you] steal if given the opportunity and the virtual guarantee that [you] would not be discovered? Ethical judgment is sound Financial decisions sounded reasonable Social convention ok Moral value ok Awareness of consequences ok He was aware of how social conventions applied to the problems. In one segment, the protagonist cashes a check at a bank and is given too much money by the teller. The subject is asked to describe how the scenario might evolve 47 Means-Ends Problem-Solving procedure, concerned the ability to conceptualize efficacious means of achieving a social goal. 47 The results strongly suggested that we should not attribute Elliot’s decision-making defect to lack of social knowledge, or to deficient access to such knowledge, or to an elementary impairment of reasoning, or, even less, to an elementary defect in attention or working memory concerning the processing of the factual knowledge needed to make decisions in the personal and social domains. The defect appeared to set in at the late stages of reasoning, close to or at the point at which choice making or response selection must occur.50 Keep a cool head, hold emotions at bay. Do not let your passions interfere with your judgment On the basis of the historical documentation and of the evidence obtained in our laboratory, we reached the following provisional conclusions: 1. If the ventromedial sector is included in the lesion, bilateral damage to prefrontal cortices is consistently associated with impairments of reasoning/decision making and emotion/feeling. 2. When impairment in reasoning/decision making and emotion/feeling stand out against an otherwise largely inact neuropsychological profile, the damage is most extensive in the ventromedial sector; moreover the personal/social domain is the one most affected 3. In cases of prefrontal damage in which the dorsal and lateral sectors are damaged at least as extensively as the ventromedial sector if not more so, impairments in reasoning/decision making are no longer concentrated in the personal/social domain. Those impairments, as well as the impairments in emotion/feeling are accompanied by defects in attention and working memory detected by tests in which objects, words, or numbers are used.61 Anosognosia: the inability to acknowledge disease in oneself. (oblivious to the entire problem).62 Someone unacquainted with anosognosia might think that this “denial” of illness is “psychological”62 Anosognosia, then, occurs systematically with damage to a particular region of the brain, and only that region, in patients who may appear, to people unfamiliar with neurological mystry, more fortunate than those who are both half paralyzed and language-impaired. The “denial” of illness results from the loss of a particular cognitive function. This loss of cognitive function depends on a particular brain system which can be damaged by a stroke or by various neurological diseases. 63 One of our most intelligent anosognosics consistently says, “I used to have that problem,” or “I used to have neglect.”63 The news that life is not likely to be the same, ever again—is usually received with equanimity, sometimes with gallows humor, but never with anguish or sadness, tears or anger, despair or panic. It is important to realize that if you give a comparable set of bad news to a patient with mirror image damage in the left hemisphere the reaction is entirely normal. Emotion and feeling are nowhere to be found in anosognosic patients, and perhaps this is no surprise that these patients’ planning for the future, their personal and social decision-making, is profoundly impaired. Paralysis is perhaps the least of their troubles. 64 When one’s own self-image is so compromised, it may not be possible to realize that the thoughts and actions of that self are no longer normal. 64 A pertinent case: On December 31, 1974, while on vacation in the Bahamas, Douglas suffered a debilitating stroke. Severely disabled, Douglas nevertheless insisted on continuing to participate in Supreme Court affairs, despite his obvious incapacity. Seven of Douglas's fellow justices voted to put off any argued case in which Douglas's vote might make a difference over to the next term. At the urging of his friend and former student Abe Fortas, Douglas finally retired on November 12, 1975, after 36 years of service. He said to press, “walking has very little to do with the work of the Court.” … Douglas replied to a visitor who asked him about his left leg, “I’ve been kicking forty-yard field goals with it in the exercise room.”68 At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections. William O. Douglas …there appears to be a collection of systems in the human brain consistently dedicated to the goal-oriented thinking process we call reasoning, and to the response selection we call decision making, with a special emphasis on the personal and social domain. This same collection of systems is also involved in emotion and feeling, and is partly dedicated to processing body signals. 70 the passivity in her face and body was the appropriate reflection of her lack of mental animation.73 Francis Crick has drawn on my suggestion that volition was preempted in patients with such lesions, and discussed a neural substrate for free will. 73 The reasoning strategies revolve around goals, options for action, predictions of future outcome, and plans for implementation of goals at varied time scales. 84 Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuits mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought. 89 The number of brain structures located between the input and output sectors is quite large, and the complexity of their connection patterns immense. The natural question is: What happens in all those “interposed” structures, what does all that complexity buy us?94 …there is no single region in the human brain equipped to process, simultaneously, representations from all the sensory modalities active when we experience simultaneously, say, sound, movement, shape, and color in perfect temporal and spatial registration.94-95 it is perhaps more fruitful to think that our strong sense of mind integration is created from the concerted action of large-scale systems by synchronizing sets of neural activity in separate brain regions, in effect a trick of timing. 95 we all have direct evidence that whatever we recall a given object, or face, or scene, we do not get an exact reproduction but rather an interpretation, a newly reconstructed version of the original. In addition, as our age and experience change, versions of the same thing evolve. None of this is compatible with rigid, facsimile representation, as the British psychologist Fredric Bartlett noted several decades ago, when he first proposed that memory is essentially reconstructive. 100 these recalled images tend to be held in consciousness only fleetingly, and although they may appear to be good replicas, they are often inaccurate or incomplete. …the activation results in topographically organized representation.101 in the condition known as achromatopia, described above, local damage in the early visual cortices causes not only loss of color perception but also loss of color imagery. If you are achromatopic, you can no longer imagine color in your mind.101 tactile and spatial properties of objects how do we form the topographically organized representations needed to experience recalled images? I believe those representations are constructed momentarily under the command of acquired dispositional neural patterns elsewhere in the brain. …Dispositional representations exist as potential patternof neuron activity in small ensembles of neurons I call “convergence zones”; that is, they consist of a set of neuron firing disposition within the ensemble.102 what dispositional representations hold in store in their little commune of synapses is not a picture per se, but a means to reconstitute “a picture.” 102 innate knowledge and acquired knowledge by experience after a busy conversation involving several people, a word or statement that we did not hear during the conversation suddenly surfaces in our mind. 106 albert einstin: the words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The point, then, is that images are probably the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated and regardless of whether they are about a thing or a process involving things; or about words or other symbles, in a given language, which correspond to a thing or process. 108 …the brain’s systems and circuits, as well as the operations they perform, depend on the pattern of connections among neurons and on the strength of the synapses constituting those connections. 108 how are the connection patterns and the synaptic strengths in our brains set, and when? Are they set at the same time for all systems throughout the brain? once set, are they set forever? There are no definitive answers to these questions yet. 108 many structural specifies are determined by genes, but another large number can be determined only by the activity of the living organism itself, as it develops and continuously changes throughout its life span. 109 the picture I am drawing for humans is that of an organism that comes to life designed with automatic survival mechanisms, and to which education and acculturation add a set of socially permissible and desirable decision-making strategies that, in turn, enhance survival, remarkably improve the quality of that survival, and serve as the basis for constructing a person. 126 at birth, the human brain comes to development endowed with drives and instincts that include not just a physiological kit to regulate metabolism but, in addition, basic devices to cope with social cognition and behavior. 126 w. james: if we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. 129 now, it may be asked, why would anyone need to become cognizant of such a relation? Why complicate matters and bring consciousness into this process, if there is already a means to respond adaptively at an automated level? The answer is that consciousness buys an enlarged protection policy. 133 …feeling your emotional states, which is to say being conscious of emotions, offers you flexibility of response based on the particular history of your interaction with the environment. Although you need innate devices to start the ball of knowledge rolling, feeling offer you something extra. 133

Posted by saeid at 10:32 PM | Permalink

One of your strategies is to avoid falling into the conceptual fight over the definition of consciousness. Because the concept of consciousness is convoluted by many imaginary thought experiments, false definitions, fictions, myths, misusages, and metaphorical or allegorical explanations, it is reasonable to “ignore niggling debates about the exact definition of consciousness.”  But if we are progressing, every step that we are moving ahead in this “thousand mile journey” must inevitably give us a clearer picture of the destination than before.  That should allow us to redefine, reformulate, or modify our previous definition.  For example, Antonio Demasio modifies his definition of emotion while he is progressing in his research.  But it seems that Searle’s definition for consciousness, which you’ve endorsed, neither plays an important role in your practical framework, nor are you willing to modify it.  Can you tell us why?

 

Science vs. Intuition

Question:

You write, “I assume that consciousness depends on what is inside the head, not necessarily on the behavior of the organism.” This assumption echoes a

development in the history of science where chemistry proceeded to establish a rich body of knowledge by isolating it from the newly emerging science of

physics. The consequence was that, in order for physics to be unified with

basic chemistry, it had to undergo fundamental changes; as Werner Heisenberg

put it, “ physics had to free itself from intuitive pictures of the world.”

It seems that neuroscience today is dashing out some of our intuitive

pictures of the mind. An extreme example, which you’ve mentioned in your

book, is the neurological patient known as D.F.. Her ability to catch the

ball without seeing it or recognizing it cannot be understood by intuition.

Can you tell us why you think that your practical framework for

consciousness should remain in isolation from our intuitions and

behavior? And in the case of the patient D. F., what are the mechanisms

involved that enable her to post a letter into a slot, for example?

 

(Experience has shown that logical argumentation and introspection, the

preferred methods of scholars throughout all but the past two centuries, are

simply not powerful enough to crack this problem. Koch)

 

 

 

Evolution

Question:

Evolution, by natural selection, answers many of our questions about living

things, although no satisfactory explanation about the evolution of

cognition has been given so far. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin

concludes—forcefully—that the evolution of cognition is “simply beyond the

reach of contemporary science.”  In the absence of such a satisfactory

explanation, a group of philosophers and physicists are leery of believing

that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Some favor a dualistic form

of pansychism, and others think that there must be quantum physics involved.

On evolutionary grounds, can you tell us why you think consciousness is a

biological phenomenon?

 

 

 

Mechanism

Question:

One of the difficulties in developing a comprehensive theory of the mind on

biological grounds is the complexity and messiness of the biological

structure of the brain.  Some believe that “It is impossible for a human to

have the same thought or feeling, the same intentional state, more than once

because no event can ever recur identically.” That by itself makes it hard

to believe that biological systems of the brain act as a machine. But you

write, “Even though the brain looks to the casual observer like a mushy,

overcooked cauliflower, it is exceedingly differentiated. … sensory systems

handle an almost infinite variety of images, scenes, sounds, and so on, and

react to them in detail with remarkable accuracy. …Neurons are not

haphazardly arranged within the brain but assembled according to orderly

principle that neuroscientists are uncovering bit by bit.”  Can you tell us

why the mechanisms of such differentiated systems and orderly organized

cells cause our mental life to be in flux—no consistency in what the brain

produces?

 

Problem vs. Mystery

Question:

A conceptual distinction that Dr. Chomsky makes between mystery and problem

is adapted by us for this documentary.  Chomsky believes that our biological

limitations yield the distinction between what we can comprehend or discover

and what we cannot.  Mysteries lie beyond our cognitive capacities, and

problems are within the scope of our faculties.  He argues that this is an

empirical question whether a phenomenon is a mystery or not, but the

conceptual distinction remains necessary.  In the case of the mind, Demasio

echoes a similar belief, writing, “I am skeptical of science’s presumption

of objectivity and definitiveness. … Perhaps the complexity of human mind is

such that the solution to the problem can never be known because of our

inherent limitations.”  Crick and you are undoubtedly pioneers in this

emergent science of mind.  You know better than anyone else whether the mind

must be considered a mystery or a problem.  If you had been asked

which part or parts of our neurobiological ignorance is or are mystery,

which we will never know, what would your answer have been?

 

NCC: A Framework For Consciousness

Question:

Dennett has seemingly endorsed Oliver Selfridge’s model for neuronal

competition, namely the “Pandemonium model.”  Although Selfridge’s model was

primarily suggested to be a model for a pattern recognition system in the

brain, and it was too crude to be a model of consciousness,  Dennett uses

the model to illustrate that there is no particular location in the brain

that plays the executive role—no homunculus.  Your model of neuronal

competition, as you suggest, is a “Democratic one.”  Your analogy of

democratic election fairly illustrates that.  Can you explain how your model

of neuronal competition works? And why do you think that “it would be

surprising if [the hypothesis of the homunculus] did not reflect in some way

the general organization of the brain”?

 

Question:

Recalling images, which “tend to be held in consciousness only fleetingly,” is

not essentially reconstructive, as British psychologist Fredric Bartlett

proposed several decades ago. Demasio believes that “…although [recalled

images] may appear to be good replicas, they are often inaccurate or

incomplete.”  Although long-term memory is unlikely to be essential for

consciousness, it plays a role in some aspects of consciousness. First of

all, based on NCC, why are recalled images from long-term memory in the

stage of consciousness reconsolidated, modified, or even distorted? And why

are you forcefully advocating the idea that “consciousness depends crucially

on some form of rather short-term memory and also on some form of serial

attentional mechanism”?

 

Question:

The unity of consciousness is a classical concept in philosophy.

Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has taken this idea seriously. Therefore he

thinks, “The neural machinery for the unity of consciousness is likely to be

widely distributed throughout the cortex and thalamus.” As result of his

hypothesis, he concludes, “It is unlikely that we will be able to find

consciousness through a simple set of neural correlates.” First of all, it

seems that neuronal binding is a key to understanding the unity of

consciousness. Using perceptual unity as an example, can you tell us what

your proposal is for the binding problem? And why do you think that Edelman’s

hypothesis is wrong?

 

Question:

Based on the study done by Roger Wolcott Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga, Crick

and you conclude that “some of the information associated with consciousness

can traverse the normal corpus callosum. …such information, with the

exception of some emotional states, cannot be transmitted from one side of

the cortex to the other by the subcortical pathways that remain intact in

this operation.”  It seems, so to speak, two conscious minds in a

split-brain patient are contrary to the idea of a unified mind.  What can we

learn from this disconnection between two hemispheres, which may help us to

understand at least some aspects of consciousness?

 

Question:

The article that Crick and you wrote together focused on a possible function of the claustrum. During the last days of his life, he told Ramachandran, one of his friends, “ Rama, I think the secret of consciousness lies in the claustrum—don’t you? Why else would this tiny structure be connected to so many areas in the brain.” It seems that Crick and you believe that “A key feature of almost all neuronal theories of consciousness is the need for continuous interactions among groups of widely dispersed pyramidal neurons that express themselves in the ongoing stream of conscious percepts, images, and thoughts.” It is very interesting that you have suggested that this tiny layer may play a conductor role, “coordinating a group of players in the orchestra, the various cortical regions.” It seems that this idea rejuvenates the “Cartesian theater” that has been ridiculed by Dennett. Can you tell us what we know about the claustrum? And why do think that this structure may be responsible for what Searle called the “conscious field”?

 

Posted by saeid at 10:29 PM | Permalink

Question:

Churchland believes that “Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw.” Given that neuroscience is in its infancy and neuroscientists admit that their understanding of neural networks and its mechanisms is very limited, Churchland argues, “from that vantage point of ignorance, it is often very difficult to tell which problem is harder; which will fall first, what problem will turn out to be more tractable than others.” In absence of that knowledge, how can you speculate which part of the problem is harder than others?

 

 

Question:

Dennett adamantly believes that we wrongly fall into the trap of our own intuition when we’re thinking about the hard problem. Intuitively, it seems that there is something more than function that needs to be explained. But don’t you think that intuition per se may be misleading?

 

Question:

The center of the hard problem is “experience,” and your central argument is that there is something to be like me, for example, which is private, intangible, and ineffable. This is why the hard problem is hard. Dennett believes that “once the concept of qualia is so imported in question, it turns out that we can either make no use of it in the situation in question, or that the questions posed by the introduction of qualia are unanswerable precisely because of the special properties defined for qualia.” Is that a fair assessment?

 

Question:

Dennett argues that “suppose the Hard Problem—whatever it is—can be solved only by confirming some marvelous new and irreducible property of the physics of the cells that make up a brain.” He compares neurons with yeast cells, concluding that “The differences in functionality between neurons and yeast cells are explained in terms of differences of cell anatomy or cytoarchitecture, not physics. Could it be, perhaps, that those differences in anatomy permit neurons to respond to physical differences to which yeast cells are oblivious?” (Sweet Dreams, p. 10) Does he have a valid point here, or has he missed the point?

 

First-person & third-person

Dennett claims that heterophenomenology is neutral in examining both the first-person data and the third-person data. But the method is tough on the first-person data because of its fallibility. You argue, “having a phenomenological belief doesn’t involve just a pattern of responses, but often requires having certain experiences.” Dennett responded to this, saying that “heterophenomenology permits science to get on with the business of accounting for the patterns in all these subjective beliefs without stopping to settle this imponderable issue (2005, p.46).” Why do you think that Dennett’s method is inadequate for investigating consciousness? What is going to be left out in his formulation?

 

Zombie

 

Question:

Functionalism vs. natural dualism

Philosophical Zombie has been disputed between functionalists and you. The question here is not whether it is logically or physically possible, but that if we were able to create a zombie identical to us, would it be conscious or not?

 

 

Question:

You’ve defined zombie in your book, stating that it would be “molecule to molecule identical to me,” and you even allow him to have internal content. Meanwhile, you claim, “The justification for my belief that I am conscious lies not just in my cognitive mechanisms but also in my direct evidence.” Dennett has argued, “…how does [your] justification lie in this ‘direct evidence’?”

 

 

On Your Theory

 

Question:

You disagree with John Searle over the causality of consciousness. Searle believes that brains cause consciousness. Searle’s common-sense strategy is very clear when he says, “my continuing introspection of my feelings allow me to report, truthfully, that an experience of painful finger exist ‘now’.” Why do you think that this statement is “simply a statement of the problem, not a solution”? And why do you think that consciousness is a “nonphysical feature of the world”?

 

Question:

Some believe that you come short in your theory to clarify your position on whether consciousness is physical or non-physical, arguing that in your dualistic position, consciousness (nonphysical) and awareness (physical), led you “to some ‘implausible’ consequences.” If consciousness is non-physical, then as you have noted, “there is no room for consciousness to play a causal role.” Searle suggests that to avoid falling into the trap of epiphenomenalism, you must connect consciousness to the physical aspects by a “causal connection in both directions.” Doesn’t it concern you that your theory may lead you to epiphenomenalism by considering consciousness as a fundamental? (1996, p. 150)

 

Question:

One of your views about consciousness is its universality. Consciousness is everywhere in the universe. John Searle characterizes your position as panpsychism. How do you respond to that?

 

Question:

Some argue that your strategy is bait-and-switch because you didn’t solve the hard problem in your theory while you seem not to reject the causal closure. Your analogy of Newton’s theory of gravitation seems to have come short in explaining what the cause(s) of consciousness is (are). Because Newton himself believed that his principles of gravity are just principles, it does not explain what the cause of gravity is. “To derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and Actions of all corporal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy,” Newton wrote, “ though the Causes of those Principles be not yet discovered.” How do you respond to this?

 

Question:

You write, “…in some ways a theory of consciousness will have more in common with a theory in physics than in biology. Biological theories involve no principles that are fundamental in this way, so biological theory has a certain complexity and messiness to it; but theories in physics, insofar as they deal with fundamental principles, aspire to simplicity and elegance.” One of the problems that theories in physics may encounter is ambiguity—they do not provide a complete satisfactory basis for their claims. For example, how can two descriptions of a phenomenon like light, WAVE and PARTICLE, equivalently be right? As some historians observe, “Chemistry proceeded to establish a rich body of doctrine; ‘its triumphs [were] built on no reductionist foundation but rather achieved in isolation from the newly emerging science of physics.’” In order for physics to be unified with basic chemistry, it had to undergo fundamental changes. Don’t you think that you have made your case on ambiguous grounds like physics?

 

 

 

On Reductionism

Question:

Churchland argues, “If you want to argue that consciousness cannot be explained neurobiologically because conscious phenomena are intrinsic, and what intrinsic means for you is it doesn’t have any parts and so can’t be explained… you’re arguing in a circle.” How do you respond to this?

 

Question:

Churchland claims that those who are rejecting reductive approaches to the problem of consciousness are making “a huge prediction.” Is your claim just a prediction or based on the facts?

Posted by saeid at 10:28 PM | Permalink

Question:

As you mentioned in the preface of your review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, the review was a general critique of behaviorist or empiricist tenets. One of those tenets was their Lockean notion of the mind, believing that individual human beings are born with no innate mental content; it is a blank slate, Tabula Rasa. But your Cartesian skepticism led you to believe that the brain cannot be tabula rasa because of some logical flaws in Locke’s tabula rasa. Can you explain what is wrong with this proposition? And why Descartes believed that the only thing that we cannot doubt is our “thinking matter,” Cogito Ergo Sum?

 

Question:

Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate, writes, “[although the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior] …our work showed that in the brain as in bacteria, genes also are servants of the environments. They are guided by events in the outside world.” Bates and Elman in their articles, Rethinking Innateness, suggest, “No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa.” First of all, why do you think that the word “learning” is misleading in terms of child’s acquisition of language? And secondly, we know that the brain evolved to interact with outside world efficiently, productively, and safely. What would be the roles of external forces that are impinged upon us?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mystery vs. Problem

Question:

You have suggested that our ignorance of anything can be divided into the problems and the mysteries. Dr. Patricia Churchland believes that “Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw.” Churchland argues that there was a time that vitalists thought that life is a mystery, but it turned out to be a problem, which was unraveled by the discovery of the structure of DNA. What are the basis or bases of your argument about the mysteriousness of the mind, particularly consciousness and free will?

 

 

On the Mind-Body Problem

Question:

In several of your essays, you turn to the history of science and, in particular, to the way in which Newton demolished the “mechanical philosophy.” Based on that development in science, why do you think that the traditional mind-body problem had no coherent formulation and was “no longer tenable”?

 

Question:

The new version of the mind-body problem was apparently resurrected by Bertrand Russell. His thought experiment of a blind physicist has recently been re-invented in many forms by other philosophers. He asked us to imagine “a blind physicist who knows all of physics but doesn’t know something we know: what it is like to see[, for example,] the color blue.” His conclusion was that what the natural sciences are seeking is what he called “the causal skeleton of the world,” despite the fact that “other aspects of the world of experience lie beyond their reach.” A group of philosophers have endorsed this view, believing that subjective experience has no reductive explanation. What is your position on this?

 

 

 

Evolution

Question:

Daniel Dennett, in his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, believes that “the origin of the human mind must be attributed to some process firmly anchored on the solid ground of materialism and natural selection.” It seems that you’re leery of believing that FLN, faculty of language in the narrow sense, is “an adaptation for ‘communication.’” Dennett criticizes your position on FLN as a “Saltational view of the mind”. Why do you think that this “powerful recursive mapping capability by definition” in human language is unlikely to be formed by natural selection for enhancing communication? And why is Dennett wrong in his characterization of your view?

 

Posted by saeid at 10:27 PM | Permalink

Here is the segments of the film:

Segment 1: A brief history of the topic of consciousness
 
Segment 2: An introduction to "the problem of consciousness" 
Segment 3: A review of Cartesian dualism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)
 
Segment 4: A review of Empiricism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)
 
Segment 5: Behaviorism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)
 
Segment 6: Fight over Qualia
 
Segment 7:  Scientific attack on the problem of consciousness
 
Segment 8: Experiments: questions (whether consciousness is a property of the brain or not; whether consciousness is an epiphenomenon or not; whether consciousness is a process or not; and whether Libet's experiments explain convincingly the discrepancy between the occurrence of an event in the brain and the appearance of that event in the stage of consciousness)
 
Segment 9: Conclusion
 
Here are the names of those whom I hope to interview:
 
1- Daniel Dennett
2- Noam Chomsky
3- Steven Pinker
4- John Searle
5- Antonio Demasio
6- David Chalmers
7- Richard Dawkins
8- Christof Koch
9- Thomas Nagel
10- Ted Honderich
11- Patricia Churchland
12- David Glanzman
13- Suzanne Corkin
 
Sources:
Chomsky, N. 1959. "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior
Crick, F. and Koch, C. 1990. "Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, Seminars in the Neuroscience
Damasio, A. R., "Descates' Error: Emotion, Reason,and the Human Brain.
Descartes, R., "Discourse on the Method,"
 
Descartes, R., "Meditations,"
Dawkins, R. 1976. "The Selfish Gene."
Dennett, D. C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.
Dennett, D.C. 1996. Facing backwards on the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:4-6."Brianstorms" & "Intentional System in Cognitive Ethology: The 'Panglossian Paradigm' Defended,"
Dennett, D. C. 2001. The fantasy of first-person science. Forthcoming.
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmersdeb3dft.htm.
McGinn, C. 1996. Review of The Conscious Mind. Times Higher Educational Supplement, April 5 1996
Baars, B.J. 1996. Understanding subjectivity: Global workspace theory and the resurrection of the observing self. Journal of Consciousness Studies 
 
Fodor, I. 1988. "Connectionism and Cognitive Arthitecture: A Critical Analysis."
Freud, S. 1962. "The ego and the Id." Hobbes, T. 1651. "Leviathan."
Honderich, T. 1984. "The Time of a Conscious Sensory Experience and Mind-Brian Theories." & "On 
Benjamin Libet: Is the Mind Ahead of the Brian? Behind It?"
Jackson, F. 1982. "Epiphenomenal Qualia,"
Libet, B. 1965. "Cortical Activation in Conscious and Unconscious Experience."
Locke, J. 1690. "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."
Nagel, T. 1974. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
Pinker, S. "The Blank Slate" 
Russell, B. The Analysis of Matter
Searle, J. 1980. "Minds, Brians, and Programs" & The Problem of Consciousness
Kandel, R. Eric 2006. "In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind"
Ridley, Matt. (2006). Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. Harrper Perennial, New York.
Chomsky, Noam. (1975). Language and Responsibility & Reflection on Language. The New Press, Canada
Chalmers, J. David. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.
Chomsky, Noam. (2003). On Nature and Language. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.
Chomsky, Noam. (2000). New Horizons in the study of language and Mind. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.
Pinker, Steven. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Viking Penguin, USA.
Pinker, Steven. (1997). How the Mind Works. W.W. Norton, New York, London.
Dawkins, Richard. (2006). The God Delusion. A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York.
Alper, Matthew. (2006). The God Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God. SourcebBooks, Naperville, Illinois.
Doidge, Norman. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books, USA.
Chalmers, J. David. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.
Chalmers, J. David. (?). On the Search for the Neural Correlate of Consciousness
Darwin, Charles. (2004). The Origin of Species. Barns & Noble Classic, New York
Huxley, T. 1874. On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history. Fortnightly
Review 95:555-80. Reprinted in Collected Essays. London, 1893.
Watson, D. James. (2006). DNA: The Secret of Life. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 
Churchland, P.S. 1996. The Hornswoggle Problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:402-8 
Churchland, P.S. (2002). Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy Bradford Book/MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Churchland, P.S. (1996).?#060;I>The mind-brain continuum: sensory processes , edited by Rodolfo R. Lli�as and 
 Patricia Smith Churchland. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Jackson, F. 1982. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly
Edelman, G. Wider than the Sky” The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Koch, C. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Denver, Col.: Robert, 2004.
Lewontin, R. Biology as Ideology: The doctrine of DNA. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Lewontin, R. Human Diversity. San Francisco: Scientific American, 1982.
Lewontin, R.The organism as the subject and object of evolution. Scientia. 1983.
Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1690/1947.
Gazzaniga. M. S. The Mind’s Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
 
Gazzaniga. M. S. Cognitive Neuroscience: A reader. Malden, Mass: MIT Press, 2000a.
 Galileo, G Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1632/1967.
Foder, J. A. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 
Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene (new ed). New York: Oxford University Press, 1976/1989.
Leibniz, G. W. New Assays on Human Understanding: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1768/1996.
And Many More…
 
 

Posted by saeid at 10:02 PM | Permalink

From his homepage:

 

Born in the American Midwest (Kansas City), I grew up in Amsterdam/Holland, Bonn/Germany, Ottawa/Canada, and Rabat/Marocco where I graduated from the Lycée Descartes with a French Baccalaurèat (Section C) in 1974.

I studied Physics and Philosophy in Tübingen, Germany. I was awarded a Master of Physics in 1980 (writing my Master Thesis under Prof. Mario Del Cin) and my PhD from the Max-Planck-Institut for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen in 1982. The eye-catching thesis title was Nonlinear information processing in dendritic trees of arbitrary geometry. I had two Doctor-Fathers (thesis advisors), Prof. Valentin Braitenberg and Prof. Tomaso (Tommy) Poggio.

Subsequently, I followed Tommy to Boston, where I spent four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT.

In the fall of 1986, I joined the California Institute of Technology's newly started Computation and Neural Systems PhD program as an Assistant Professor. Caltech, in beautiful Southern California, is an oasis, an ivory-tower dedicated to educating the best and brightest in the way of science and the pursuit of the truth.

Posted by saeid at 08:12 PM | Permalink

From his homepage:

 

My laboratory is interested in the cell biology of learning and memory in simple organisms. In our research we use two animals, the marine snail Aplysia californica, and the zebrafish (Danio rerio). Work on Aplysia: This invertebrate has a comparatively simple nervous system (~ 20,000 neurons) that provides a valuable experimental model for understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie simple forms of learning, such as habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning. Another experimental advantage of Aplysia is that sensory and motor neurons that mediate specific reflexes of the animal can be placed into dissociated cell culture where they will reform their synaptic connections. These in vitro sensorimotor synapses are extremely useful for cellular and molecular studies of short- and long-term learning-related synaptic plasticity. Currently, my laboratory is investigating the modulation of AMPA-type glutamate receptors during learning in Aplysia. We have found that serotonin, an endogenous monoamine that plays a central role in learning, modulates the efficacy of AMPA receptors in the motor neurons. Our current evidence indicates that serotonin modulates the trafficking of AMPA receptors in the motor neurons, causing additional receptors to be delivered to postsynaptic sites via exocytosis. We also wish to know whether long-term learning in Aplysia involves changes in the expression of glutamate receptors. We have cloned and sequenced ten AMPA-type and one NMDA-type glutamate receptor from the CNS of Aplysia. Currently, we are using the techniques of in situ hybridization and quantitative RT-PCR to examine whether long-term sensitization and long-term habituation are accompanied by changes in glutamate receptor expression. Work on the zebrafish: The zebrafish has been used extensively in studies of development. It has not been commonly used in behavioral studies, however. This is unfortunate, because the zebrafish has significant advantages for genetic and molecular studies of behavior, including studies of learning and memory. The zebrafish is amenable to both forwards and reverse genetics. Furthermore, although it is a vertebrate with a complex vertebrate nervous system, it possesses reflexive behaviors that are mediated by relatively simple neural circuits in the spinal cord and brainstem. One such reflex, the startle reflex, is under the control of a pair of large command neurons in the brainstem, the Mauthner cells. Finally, zebrafish larvae are transparent, which facilitates the use of imaging techniques to study learning-related neural activity within the intact animal. We are interested in the neural basis of nonassociative and associative behavioral modification of the startle reflex. In particular, we wish to know what changes occur in the Mauthner cell circuit during learning. In our current experiments we are using electrophysiological, genetic, and imaging techniques to analyze the mechanisms of habituation and sensitization of the startle reflex. In future experiments we hope to investigate the neural basis of classical conditioning of the reflex.

 

Posted by saeid at 08:08 PM | Permalink

 

 Source: Wikipedia.org

Chalmers was born and grew up in Australia. Before he moved to the Australian National University in 2004, he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Prior to his stay at Arizona, he taught at UC Santa Cruz. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Adelaide, obtaining his Bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science. He then briefly studied at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before studying for his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program, directed by Andy Clark, at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993-1995.

He is the author of the book The Conscious Mind (1996), which discusses consciousness and its relation to the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind. In the book, Chalmers forcefully and cogently argues that all forms of physicalism (whether reductive or non-reductive) that have dominated philosophy and the sciences in modern times fail to account for the most essential aspects of consciousness. He proposes an alternative dualistic view that has come to be called property dualism. The book was described by The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year".

 

Saeid's notes from Chalmers' works:

Chalmers has not yet fallen in either of these traps--not quite. He understands that he must show how his strategic proposal differs from these, which he recognizes as doomed. He attempts this by claiming that consciousness is strikingly unlike life, and unlike the features of perception misconstrued by Crock: when it comes to consciousness, the hard problem is "almost unique" in that it "goes beyond problems about the performance of functions." Almost unique? He gives us no other phenomena with this special feature, but in any case, what he says in support of this claim simply repeats the claim in different words: "To see this, note that when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience . . . there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open." Our vitalist can surely say ask the same dreary question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by life? Chalmers says that this would be a conceptual mistake on the part of the vitalist, and I agree, but he needs to defend his claim that his counterpart is not a conceptual mistake as well.

Dennett

What impresses me about my own consciousness, as I know it so intimately, is my delight in some features and dismay over others, my distraction and concentration, my unnamable sinking feelings of foreboding and my blithe disregard of some perceptual details, my obsessions and oversights, my ability to conjure up fantasies, my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears by a vivid recollection of the death of a loved one, my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself, and so forth. These are all "merely" the "performance of functions" or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions. In the course of making an introspective catalogue of evidence, I wouldn't know what I was thinking about if I couldn't identify them for myself by these functional differentia. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of "qualitative content" bereft of all powers to move us, delight us, annoy us, remind us of anything. Dennett

 

 

A Catalog of conscious experiences

 

1. Visual experiences
2. auditory experiences
3. tactile experiences
4. olfactory experiences
5. taste exp.
6. experienes of cold and hot
7. pain
8. other bodily sensation
9. mental imagery
10. conscious thought
11. emotions
12. the sense of self

at the root of all this lie two quite distinct concepts of mind. (conceptual distinction)

1. phenomenal concept of mind = conscious experience (mind is characterized by the way it feels) (consciousness)
2. psychological concept of mind = causal or explanatory basis for behavior (mind is characterized by what it does) (awareness)

 

varieties of psychological consciousness

1. awakeness
2. introspection
3. reportability
4. self-consciousness
5. attention
6. voluntary control
7. knowledge

consciousness involves reportive activity

awareness is not necessary the same

 

awareness as I have described it need not be accompanied by consciousness

 

once empirical investigation shows how the relevant causal role is played, the phenomenon is explained

1. technical complication:
2. ambiguity of casual concepts
3. many casual concepts are partly characterized in terms of their effect on experience

problem with reductive explanation

1. does not usually go all the way to the microphysical level
2. conceivably maybe phenomenon does not have reductive explanation
3. local logical supervenience
4. learning vs. heat (learning is explication)(heat is explanation)

 

I will argue that conscious experience does not supervene logically on the physical, and therefore cannot be reductively explained

To make the case against reductive explanation, we need to show that consciousness is not logically supervenient on the physical.

 

Posted by saeid at 08:06 PM | Permalink

 

1928–, educator and linguist, b. Philadelphia. Chomsky, who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, developed a theory of transformational (sometimes called generative or transformational-generative) grammar that revolutionized the scientific study of language. He first set out his abstract analysis of language in his doctoral dissertation (1955) and Syntactic Structures (1957). Instead of starting with minimal sounds, as the structural linguists had done, Chomsky began with the rudimentary or primitive sentence; from this base he developed his argument that innumerable syntactic combinations can be generated by means of a complex series of rules.

According to transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to “deep structures,” a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., “John saw Mary”) into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning (“Mary was seen by John”). Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children. In the 1990s Chomsky formulated a “Minimalist Program” in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility.

Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view. Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (1982) [this is actually a book on linguistics, not politics --www.chomsky.info], Manufacturing Consent (with E. S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s controversial bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”

See biography by R. F. Barsky (1997); interviews with D. Barsamian (1992, 1994, 1996, and 2001); studies by F. D’Agostino (1985), C. P. Otero (1988 and 1998), R. Salkie (1990), M. Achbar, ed. (1994), M. Rai (1995), V. J. Cook (1996), P. Wilkin (1997), J. McGilvray (1999), N. V. Smith (1999), A. Edgley (2000), and H. Lasnik (2000); Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (film by P. Wintonick and M. Achbar, 1992) and Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (documentary film dir. by J. Junkerman, 2002).

Saeid's questions for Dr. Chomsky:

 

Saeid's notes from Chomsky's works:

Chomsky has until recently seemed rather indifferent as to how his universal grammar might be represented in the brain.  Steven Rose

 

‘I would like to discuss an approach to the mind that considers language and similar phenomena to be elements of the natural world, to be studied by ordinary methods of empirical inquiry’ (p. 106).

 

The initial state of the language faculty, fixed by genetic endowment, can be thought of as a ‘language acquisition device’

An I-language is a generative procedure that determines a set of structural descriptions.

Indeed, Chomsky is quite explicit that naturalistic theories will fall short of providing a full account of human action such as the

communicative use of language (p. 28).

Bertrand Russell asked, “How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?”

Answers:

1. Aristotelian lines: the world is structured in a certain way and that the human mind is able to perceive this structure, ascending from particulars to species to genus to further generalization and thus attaining knowledge of universals from perception of particulars. A “basic of pre-existent knowledge” is a prerequisite to learning.
2. a more fruitful approach shifts the main burden of explanation from the structure of the world to structure of the mind. What we can know is determined by “the modes of conception in the understanding. What we do know, then, or what we come to believe, depends on the specific experiences that evoke in us some part of the cognitive system that is latent in the mind.
3. conformity of objects to our mode of cognition, the mind provides the means for an analysis of data as experience, and provides as well a general schematism that delimits the cognitive structures developed on the basis of experience. (Kant’s idea)

Chomsky’s answer to that question:

Or systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct. We interpret experience as we do because of our special mental design. We attain knowledge when the “inward ideas of the mind itself and the structures it creates conform to the nature of things.

It is generally assumed that in these domains, social environment is the dominant factor. The structures of mind that develop over time are taken to be arbitrary and accidental; there is no “human nature” apart from what develops as a specific historical product.  According to this view, typical of empiricism speculation, certain general principles of learning that are common in their essentials to all (or some large class of) organisms suffice to account for the cognitive structures attained by humans, structures which incorporate the principles by which humans behavior is planned, organized, and controlled. I dismiss without further comment the exotic though influential view that “internal states” should not be considered in the study of behavior.

Why has it been so causally assumed that there exists a “learning theory” that can account for the acquisition of cognitive structures through experience?

No doubt what the organism does depends in part on its experience, but it seems to me entirely hopeless to investigate directly the relation between experience and action.

If we are interested in the problem of “causation of behavior” as a problem of science, we should at least analyze the relation of experience to behavior into two parts:

1.      relates experience to cognitive state

2.      mechanism, which relates stimulus conditions to behavior, given the cognitive state

the proper way to exorcise the ghost in the machine is to determine the structure of the mind and its products.

 

Body and mind are two substances, one an extended substance, the other a thinking substance. The first falls within mechanical philosophy, the latter not.

 

Galileo forged a new model of intelligibility for human understanding,

 

When mechanism fails, understanding fails.

 

Alexander Koyre: Newton demonstrated that “a purely materialistic physics” is “impossible.”

 

Early in the seventeenth century Rene Descartes proposed a mechanistic approach to physics, asserting that all causal influence is transmitted by direct contact between material entities. Like Aristotle, he rejected the idea of vacuum, believing that there can be no space (extension) without substance. In accord with his philosophy, Descartes denied the intelligibility of weight as a primitive quality of matter, and argued that material bodies are impelled toward the Earth by the impulse of particles of a “second species of matter” continually arriving at the Earth from all directions.

In the second half of the century, Isaac Newton deduced from a combination of terrestrial and celestial phenomena that every two particles of matter are compelled toward each other with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. This “universal gravitation” provided a unified account of a wide range of phenomena that had previously seemed inexplicable and unrelated, but it was apparently contrary to the mechanistic precepts of Descartes, because it implied that widely separated bodies exert forces on each other directly, without explicit reference to any intervening substance. In private correspondence, Newton (on at least one occasion) disavowed the notion of direct action at a distance, but at the same time he allowed for the possibility that the means by which the action of gravity is transmitted may not be material – in which case the Cartesians would still regard it as unintelligible action at a distance. Indeed, Newton’s overall approach was much more consistent with the view of the ancient atomists, i.e., that nature consists of atoms moving according to abstract mathematical laws in an empty void, and he frequently stated that gravity might be a primary attribute of matter, with no material intervening mechanism.

 

 

Question:

 

You noted in one of your books, On Nature and Language, different reasons of why Descartes was proven wrong, can you tell us for what reasons?

 

Julian Jaynes argued to the contrary, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, that for consciousness to arise in a person, language needs to have reached a fairly high level of complexity. According to Jaynes, human consciousness emerged as recently as 1300 BCE or thereabouts. Many philosophers, including W.V. Quine and neuroscientists, including Christof Koch, contest this hypothesis, as it suggests that prior to this "discovery" of consciousness, experience simply did not exist.^[13] Ned Block argued that Jaynes had confused consciousness with the concept of consciousness, the latter being what was discovered between the Iliad and the Odyssey.^[14] Daniel Dennett argues that consciousness is like money in that having the thing requires having the concept of it, so it is a revolutionary proposal and not a ridiculous error to suppose that consciousness only emerges when its concept does.
We may say that humans are innately endowed with a system of intellectual organization, call it the “initial state” of mind. Through interaction with the environment and maturational process, the mind passes through a sequence of states in which cognitive structures are represented.
What I have called elsewhere “the creative aspect of language use” remains much a mystery to us as it was to the Cartesians who discussed it, in part, in the context of the problem of “other minds.”
Two ways to construct a theory of learning

1.      to postulate a schematism, innate to the mind, that is refined and further articulated by experience

2.      to suppose that the mind is a blank tablet, equipped only with ability to record impressions and retain faded impressions, to match impressions, to generalize along dimensions that are innate or constructed, to modify the probability of response in terms of contingencies of reinforcement defined in terms of the stimulus space, and so on

 

Polyarchy

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In modern political science, the term Polyarchy (Greek: poly many, arkhe rule)^[1] was introduced by Robert A. Dahl, now emeritus professor at Yale University, to describe a form of government that was first implemented in the United States and gradually adopted by many other countries. According to Dahl, the fundamental democratic principle is that, when it comes to binding collective decisions, each person in a political community is entitled to have his or her interests be given equal consideration. A polyarchy is a nation-state that has certain procedures that are necessary conditions for following the democratic principle.
Does the doctrine mean that a theory of mind should be “continuous and harmonious with today’s physic?

Saeid's Questions for Dr. Chomsky 

Questions about consciousness are problems or mysteries.
Behaviorism Question: As you mentioned in the preface of your review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, the review was a general critique of behaviorist or empiricist tenets. One of those tenets was their Lockean notion of the mind, believing that individual human beings are born with no innate mental content; it is a blank slate, Tabula Rasa. But your Cartesian skepticism led you to believe that the brain cannot be tabula rasa because of some logical flaws in Locke’s tabula rasa. Can you explain what is wrong with this proposition? And why Descartes believed that the only thing that we cannot doubt is our “thinking matter,” Cogito Ergo Sum? Question: Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate, writes, “[although the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior] …our work showed that in the brain as in bacteria, genes also are servants of the environments. They are guided by events in the outside world.” Bates and Elman in their articles, Rethinking Innateness, suggest, “No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa.” First of all, why do you think that the word “learning” is misleading in terms of child’s acquisition of language? And secondly, we know that the brain evolved to interact with outside world efficiently, productively, and safely. What would be the roles of external forces that are impinged upon us? Mystery vs. Problem Question: You have suggested that our ignorance of anything can be divided into the problems and the mysteries. Dr. Patricia Churchland believes that “Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw.” Churchland argues that there was a time that vitalists thought that life is a mystery, but it turned out to be a problem, which was unraveled by the discovery of the structure of DNA. What are the basis or bases of your argument about the mysteriousness of the mind, particularly consciousness and free will? On the Mind-Body Problem Question: In several of your essays, you turn to the history of science and, in particular, to the way in which Newton demolished the “mechanical philosophy.” Based on that development in science, why do you think that the traditional mind-body problem had no coherent formulation and was “no longer tenable”? Question: The new version of the mind-body problem was apparently resurrected by Bertrand Russell. His thought experiment of a blind physicist has recently been re-invented in many forms by other philosophers. He asked us to imagine “a blind physicist who knows all of physics but doesn’t know something we know: what it is like to see[, for example,] the color blue.” His conclusion was that what the natural sciences are seeking is what he called “the causal skeleton of the world,” despite the fact that “other aspects of the world of experience lie beyond their reach.” A group of philosophers have endorsed this view, believing that subjective experience has no reductive explanation. What is your position on this? Evolution Question: Daniel Dennett, in his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, believes that “the origin of the human mind must be attributed to some process firmly anchored on the solid ground of materialism and natural selection.” It seems that you’re leery of believing that FLN, faculty of language in the narrow sense, is “an adaptation for ‘communication.’” Dennett criticizes your position on FLN as a “Saltational view of the mind”. Why do you think that this “powerful recursive mapping capability by definition” in human language is unlikely to be formed by natural selection for enhancing communication? And why is Dennett wrong in his characterization of your view? On Neuroscience Do you hold any hope that the collaboration between neuroscience and molecular biology along with linguistics and philosophy would eventually become a new emerging science of the mind? /p>

 

Occult qualities

 

Reductionsim: inquiry into the matter leads to empirical hypothesis about biological endowment, interactions with the environment, the nature of the states attained, and their interactions with other systems of the mind (articulatory, perceptual, conceptual, intentional)

 

A related problem is to explain what are “philosophical accounts of our minds, our knowledge, our language, and how they differ from scientific accounts”

 

Baldwin (1993: 171) he opens by noting that “A prominent theme of current philosophy is that of the “naturalisation of philosophy

 

Dennett: one of the happiest trends in philosophy in the last twenty years has been its Naturalzation”(p:171)

 

Baldwin found two different types of naturalization at work in current philosophy
1.      Metaphysical
2.      Epistemic(Dennett: “philosophical accounts of our minds, our knowledges, and language must in the end be continuous with, and harmonious with the natural science
Naturalistic approach:
Seeking to construct intelligible explanatory theories

 

Saeid's questions for Dr. Chomsky: Behaviorism Question: As you mentioned in the preface of your review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, the review was a general critique of behaviorist or empiricist tenets. One of those tenets was their Lockean notion of the mind, believing that individual human beings are born with no innate mental content; it is a blank slate, Tabula Rasa. But your Cartesian skepticism led you to believe that the brain cannot be tabula rasa because of some logical flaws in Locke’s tabula rasa. Can you explain what is wrong with this proposition? And why Descartes believed that the only thing that we cannot doubt is our “thinking matter,” Cogito Ergo Sum? Question: Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate, writes, “[although the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior] …our work showed that in the brain as in bacteria, genes also are servants of the environments. They are guided by events in the outside world.” Bates and Elman in their articles, Rethinking Innateness, suggest, “No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa.” First of all, why do you think that the word “learning” is misleading in terms of child’s acquisition of language? And secondly, we know that the brain evolved to interact with outside world efficiently, productively, and safely. What would be the roles of external forces that are impinged upon us? Mystery vs. Problem Question: You have suggested that our ignorance of anything can be divided into the problems and the mysteries. Dr. Patricia Churchland believes that “Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw.” Churchland argues that there was a time that vitalists thought that life is a mystery, but it turned out to be a problem, which was unraveled by the discovery of the structure of DNA. What are the basis or bases of your argument about the mysteriousness of the mind, particularly consciousness and free will? On the Mind-Body Problem Question: In several of your essays, you turn to the history of science and, in particular, to the way in which Newton demolished the “mechanical philosophy.” Based on that development in science, why do you think that the traditional mind-body problem had no coherent formulation and was “no longer tenable”? Question: The new version of the mind-body problem was apparently resurrected by Bertrand Russell. His thought experiment of a blind physicist has recently been re-invented in many forms by other philosophers. He asked us to imagine “a blind physicist who knows all of physics but doesn’t know something we know: what it is like to see[, for example,] the color blue.” His conclusion was that what the natural sciences are seeking is what he called “the causal skeleton of the world,” despite the fact that “other aspects of the world of experience lie beyond their reach.” A group of philosophers have endorsed this view, believing that subjective experience has no reductive explanation. What is your position on this? Evolution Question: Daniel Dennett, in his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, believes that “the origin of the human mind must be attributed to some process firmly anchored on the solid ground of materialism and natural selection.” It seems that you’re leery of believing that FLN, faculty of language in the narrow sense, is “an adaptation for ‘communication.’” Dennett criticizes your position on FLN as a “Saltational view of the mind”. Why do you think that this “powerful recursive mapping capability by definition” in human language is unlikely to be formed by natural selection for enhancing communication? And why is Dennett wrong in his characterization of your view? On Neuroscience Do you hold any hope that the collaboration between neuroscience and molecular biology along with linguistics and philosophy would eventually become a new emerging science of the mind?

Posted by saeid at 07:58 PM | Permalink

We are currently working on the script and some of scenes simultaneously. It is weird, I know. But some parts of the script are unchangable therefore we have decided to work on those while making the script better and more colorful

Posted by saeid at 06:19 AM | Permalink

In attempting to define consciousness, two groups of philosophers and scientists have tried two different methods. On the one hand, the view of the old Aristotelian tradition of Holism in philosophy and in science as well is held by those who believed that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." Today, those who have endorsed the holistic view of the mind argue that for ontological reasons, the mind can't be analyzed merely by studying the parts of the brain.

Posted by saeid at 06:02 AM | Permalink

The unity of the mind was one of the reasons that Descartes thought that the mind has no parts, therefore the principles that account for the mind are not mechanistic. He averred that when I am conscious of a thing "I can't distinguish in myself any parts." Therefore the principles that can be applied to the body can not be applied to the mind.
CUT TO:
INT. QUOTE
DESCARTES
When I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
(Rene Descartes (Descartes, 1641, p. 196)

Posted by saeid at 04:45 AM | Permalink

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.
(Franz Brentano)

Posted by saeid at 04:32 AM | Permalink

DR. CHURCHLAND
Subjectivity has been highlighted as one of those things that it is forever beyond the reach of science. That is the prediction. Although there are many things we don't understand about subjectivity. It does involve having points of view that is having a perceptual perspective of the world that is dependent on where my perceptual system is in the world.
FADE OUT.
FADE IN:
EXT. ON A BUSY STREET
RENE (V.O.)
Many philosophers believe that the hardest problem of consciousness is the question of why every conscious state comes with qualitative and subjective feeling.  Why should the brain processes give rise to those qualitative feelings that are seemingly unique to every individual? Philosophers call these qualitative feelings Qualia, the sensation of redness when we see red, the feeling of pain when we have pain, the funniness of humor when we feel, hear, or watch humorous things.

Posted by saeid at 04:29 AM | Permalink

CASE STUDY
One of mental conditions caused by brain disease or brain damage is anosognosia. In such cases, patients deny their disability.
DISSOLVE TO:
INSERT - the picture of Douglas

One of the famous cases of this disease is the case of William Orville Douglas who had served in the United States Supreme Court as Associate Justice for almost 36 years from 1939 to 1974. During the last year of his life, he suffered a right hemisphere stroke, which disabled him. But he was oblivious about his disability. He insisted that nothing was wrong with him. He believed that he was mentally and physically ready to go back to work. When he was asked, "how is your leg?" He replied, "I've been kicking forty-yard field goals with it in the exercise room."

Posted by saeid at 04:27 AM | Permalink

When he(Libet) stimulated their hand's skins, he realized that a certain duration of stimulation, about 500 ms, needed to elicit a certain conscious experience. He called this "neuronal adequacy." The most disputable finding that he observed during his experiments was "a substantial delay before cerebral activities ...achieve neuronal adequacy" when the skin stimulation applied 200 ms after the beginning of a direct stimulation. In that case, subjects felt the skin stimulation before the direct one. Subjects had reported similar experience when those two stimulations were applied simultaneously, suggesting that mental events are ahead of physical ones. Libet concluded that there is "a disassociation between the timings of corresponding 'mental' and 'physical' events," which "raises serious but not insurmountable difficulties for [psychoneural] identity theory" that suggests: All mental events are identical to the brain's processes, and they are also simultaneous. Although Libet's findings are very controversial, they raise serious challenges to those who believe that some of the brain processes involve consciousness causatively.

Posted by saeid at 04:23 AM | Permalink

Given the fact that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and given the "agreed propositions" of Darwinian evolution by natural selection, one may wonder why we haven't been able to produce any plausible evolutionary explanation for human cognition. Most books and articles that have been written about evolution of human cognition are largely storytelling, as evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin suggests. Even Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher and a staunch advocate of Darwinian theory, admits that “Unlike most explanations in science, evolutionary explanations are essentially narratives,....” ... Historically, we are permanently in this disadvantageous position of not being able to rewind all the processes and all the modifications that had been made during the aeon of evolutionary time to see what happened. And also, in the beginning of life, "nobody was around to see what happened," as Richard Dawkins, British biologist points out.

Posted by saeid at 04:05 AM | Permalink

After a disappointment in the mechanistic view of the mind in Galilean terms, a new version of that view has emerged from Alan Turing, Hungarian-American Mathematician, who introduced the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He suggested in his paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," that if a computer engaged a conversation with a human being, and the human being didn't realize that he was talking to a computer, that computer would be considered an intelligent device. Although Turing didn't claim that such a computer would be conscious, Dennett and some other functionalists claim that in such a situation, that computer is conscious. Turing's test provoked a wide range of pro-and-con debates over whether a computer would be capable of doing whatever a human could do or not.

Posted by saeid at 04:03 AM | Permalink

After carefully investigating  human thought and language, Descartes began doubting the idea that our thought processing is a result of mechanistic interaction among the parts of the body. He wrote, "The fact that [machines] do better than we do, doesn't prove that they are endowed with mind."

Posted by saeid at 04:00 AM | Permalink

Dr Koch (unedited): 

We've held this deep intuition about space, time and causality, and we have them because it is proved to be evolutionarily useful for us and our ancestors. But maybe the universe is not quite simple as it meant or ought to be-certainly not at the scale of, for example, quantum mechanic fields. So we have to learn over the last hundred years that the laws of cause and effect are very complicated. If you go to microscopic, things get entangled, and things really become very strange. And intuition ... just no guide to those sorts of things. And same thing with the brain, the brain is very complicated machine, enormously complicated machine, we don't really deal with such complicated things, and we have a very simple intuition about it.

 

 

 

Posted by saeid at 03:48 AM | Permalink

Mahyar Alahyari is an undergraduate student in Film at Cal State University, Fullerton.  He is our assistant director. We are very grateful to have him on our team because of his dedication to his responsiblities. His talent in this field is limitless.

 

 

 

 

 

Mahyar's Works:

Posted by saeid at 03:42 AM | Permalink

Dr. Paul M. Culton

Here is his VITA

Posted by saeid at 03:16 AM | Permalink

Despite the progress in understanding the origin of life on the Earth, the question of how the evolution from organic molecules to a self-replicating cell happened remains unanswered. And more astonishing than that, how did cells manage to gather themselves into chunks of intelligent matter, namely brain? How can few million sensory nerve fibers enable us to think, to understand, and to decide?

Posted by saeid at 02:26 AM | Permalink

 

Project: "The Mystery of Consciousnes "
Interviewee: Professor Patricia Smith Churchland
Date: March 7, 2008
Reported by: Saeid Bagheri Moghaddam

When I was reading Patricia Smith Churchland’s articles and books as part of my preparation for this project, her approach to tackle the most difficult problems of philosophy, such as consciousness, freewill, and mind-body, interested me in many ways. I wanted to know: If, in fact, consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and in principle, it must be answered scientifically, then wouldn’t the philosophical arguments over the issue of consciousness seem to her irrelevant? What does she think about human experiences that many believe cannot be fully understood in terms of mechanical processes? What does she think about the claim that consciousness can be causally reducible to neural activities, but it can not be reducible to anything that has a third-person ontology? And there were many other questions that I wanted to ask. When I met her at the University of California, San Diego, March 7, 2008, she answered those questions eloquently, forcefully, and to some extent cautiously. For she believes, although neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding the brain at the level of neurons, it is too early to draw a solid conclusion about consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland

Patricia Smith Churchland (born July 16, 1943 in Oliver, British Columbia, Canada) is a Canadian-American philosopher working at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) since 1984. She is currently a professor at the UCSD Philosophy Department, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and an associate of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (Sejnowski Lab) at the Salk Institute. She won a MacArthur prize in 1991. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Oxford (B.Phil.). She taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is the wife of philosopher Paul Churchland.

Churchland has focused on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy. According to her, philosophers are increasingly realizing that to understand the mind one must understand the brain. She is associated with a school of thought called eliminativism or eliminative materialism, which argues that folk psychology concepts such as belief, free will, and consciousness will likely need to be revised as science understands more about the nature of brain function.

She was interviewed along with her husband Paul Churchland for the book Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore, 2006.

She attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium on November 2006 and November 2007.

Patricia and her husband are noted for their attempts to apply their philosophical positions in their daily life. Emotions and feelings, for instance, are eschewed in favour of more precise formulations, such as the following which describes the state of Patricia after a hectic meeting:

"Paul, don't speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren't for my endogenous opiates I'd have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting."^[1]

Saeid's notes and questions (unedited):

First part: Neurophilosophy and Consciousness

 

The Background of the Question one:
Neurophilosophy is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy. Work in this field is often separated into two distinct methods. The first method attempts to solve problems in philosophy of mind with empirical information from the neurosciences. The second method attempts to clarify neuroscientific results using the conceptual rigor and methods of philosophy of science.
The pair of philosophers who have brought wide attention to this field (in both of these forms) are Patricia and Paul Churchland.

 

Question 1:

 

Let begin with the term “Neurophilosophy” that you’ve coined, what do you mean by that?

---------------------------------------------------------
The Background of the Question two:

 

Question 2:

 

The Background of the Question two:

It is hard to imagine how long would take philosophers to come to a unified conclusion about what consciousness really is. Most of theories of consciousness suggested by philosophers have not produced a significant fruit by which scientists could rely on, for scientific approach is, in the first stage, to deal with the simplest features of a phenomenon in the hope to gather concert data on which they may draw a universal conclusion, and those findings may shed light on the problem from which scientist may understand other complex features of that phenomenon.  These days, it seems that there is a huge gulf between what scientists try to achieve and what philosophers try to theorize.

 

Question 2:

 

Consciousness is not like ghost or wraith, which is the product of imagination. Rather, it is a very salient phenomenon in us; it is real.  It seems that philosophical approach to the problem of consciousness is to tackle the macro phenomena, despite the fact that scientific approach to the problem of consciousness is to deal with the micro phenomenon. It is true that both approaches are two sides of the same coin, but ultimately it is imperative to see the problem of consciousness to be resolved by solid scientific data. If, in fact, consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and in principle, it must be answered scientifically, then what would philosophy bring on the table?

 

---------------------------------------------------------

 

The Background of the Question three:

 

“It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not; what is the difference between them?” This is the question that Crick asked in his book, Consciousness and Neuroscience. Crick’s framework for studying consciousness was to tackle simpler features of human consciousness that are similar to animals’, such as visual consciousness. He highlighted the studies on a patient by Milner, Perrett and their colleagues (1991). The Patient’s brain has diffuse damage produced by carbon-monoxide poisoning. She is able to see color and texture very well but is very deficient in seeing orientation and form. In spite of this, she is very good at catching a ball. She can "post" her hand or a card into a slot without difficulty, though she could not report the slot's orientation. He postulated the idea that this might imply that all activity in the dorsal stream is unconscious. The ventral stream, on the other hand, they consider to be largely conscious. “An alternative suggestion, due to Steven Wise (personal communication and Boussaoud et al., 1996), is that direct projections from parietal cortex into premotor areas are unconscious, whereas projections to them via prefrontal cortex are related to consciousness. Crick came to a conclusion that “many actions in response to sensory inputs are rapid, transient, stereotyped and unconscious. They could be thought of as cortical reflexes. Consciousness deals more slowly with broader, less stereotyped aspects of the sensory inputs (or a reflection of these in imagery) and takes time to decide on appropriate thoughts and responses. It is needed because otherwise, a vast number of different zombie modes would be required.” I give you (Paul) this information because by that conclusion, Crick indirectly suggested that all activities in the brain do not necessarily involve in consciousness. More important of all is that this is the brain that generates consciousness not something metaphysical.

The goal of this question is to know whether neurophilosophy can define consciousness.

 

The basic idea of the explanatory gap is that human experience (such as qualia) cannot be fully explained by mechanical processes; that something extra, perhaps even of a different metaphysical type, must be added to "fill the gap". The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate.

 

 

 

Question 3:

Neuroscience is going to figure out how the brain works at the level of synapses, neurons, and the system of pathways. But it is true that neuroscience is in its infancy. Some philosophers argue that neuroscience is incapable to address some complex aspects of consciousness that have to do with subjective account of human experiences. They argue that there is an explanatory gap, and that can not be filled by merely mechanical processes. What is your answer?

 

The Background of the Question four:

 

Here are features that William James attributed to consciousness:

1-                Consciousness is a form of awareness
2-                Is a process (not a thing)
3-                Is individual or personal
4-                Is continuous but changing
5-                Has intentionality (but does not exhaust all aspects of things with which it deals)
John Searle’s view of the features of consciousness (he believes, all forms of consciousness are qualia)
1-    Every conscious state has a qualitative feeling
2-    All conscious states are subjective
3-    All conscious states come to us as a unified conscious field
4-    Some conscious states have Intentionality(another name for aboutness, including desire, belief, fear, hope, lust…)

Here are some features of consciousness from materialitists’ point of view, which may Dr. Churchland may point out

1-      ontological objectivity

2-      quantitative measurability

3-      no intrinsic intentionality

4-      has spatial

5-      location(s) dimension

6-      force, mass, gravitational attraction and electrical charge

Question 4:

As you know, William James attributed some features to consciousness, such as being a form of awareness, being a process rather than a thing, being private, being continuous but changing, and of course having intentionality. Also, John Searle attributes four features to consciousness, including qualitative feeling, subjective account, a unified field, and intentionality. What are the features of consciousness from neuroscientists’ point of view?

 

The Background of the Question five:

 

 William James wrote, “How what used to be the soul has gradually been refined down to the “transcendental ego, …[which] attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experience is known.” That attenuation has been continuing as to now reductionists consider this phenomenon to be a series of neural and biochemical activities in the brain. However, some, such John Searle, believe that consciousness is ontologically irreducible, but it can be causally reducible to the neural activities.

 

 

Question 5:

John Searle believes that consciousness can be causally reducible to neural activities, but it can not be reducible to anything that has a third-person ontology.  Do you disagree? Why?

 

The Background of the Question six:

From idealists’ point of view, mind is reality and body is an evil dream; on the other hand, from materialist point of view, body is the reality and mind is a mere property of protoplasm. Of course, Churchland is a card-carrying materialist. Reductionist refers to those who think that there is no such thing as the Subject, those very complex aspects of consciousness, such as subjectivity and intentionality, can be reduced to neural and biochemical activities.

 

Question 6:

 

One of the entailments of reductionist proposition about mind is that when consciousness is reduced to neural and biochemical activities, then, the Subject inevitably has to be left out of the equation. Some philosophers believe that the randomness of human behavior cannot be explained in this view. They think that a human being in this formulation is bland, robotic, and, to some extent, scary—for example, like the Virginian man with pedophilia tendency.  How do you respond to that?  

 

The Background of the Question seven:

 

 

Francis Crick was among many scientists who believed that "We think that most of the philosophical aspects of the problem [of consciousness] should, for the moment, be left on one side, and that the time to start the scientific attack is now." They believe that the philosophical aspects of the problem are so difficult to be tackled on this infantry stage of scientific approach to the problem of consciousness. Instead, they are attempting to find the neural correlate(s) of consciousness (NCC). What Churchland, Dennett, and many others suggest that our complex behaviors, such as reasoning, emotion, thought, knowledge, and so on, are purely the products of neural activities in the brain. However, Churchland calls the Crick approach as “direct approach” as oppose to “indirect approach”, which she suggests. In hypothesis of direct root, the stimulus is present in the brain and you aware of it, and the stimulus is present in  the brain and you are not aware of it. In indirect root suggested by Churchland, it does not just tackle the issue of the presentation of stimulus in the brain or sensory awareness, but it tackles the difference between being sleep and being awake, between a person in comma and a person in vegetative state.
Question 7:
 

Eric Kandel, an American neuroscientist and a winner of the Nobel Prize, believes that neuroscientists have made “a considerable progress in understanding the neurobiology of perception and memory without having to account for individual experience. For example, cognitive neural scientists have made advances in understanding the neural basis of the perception of the color blue without addressing the question of how each of us responds to the same blue.” Although neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) may tell you something about the phenomenon, it is not going to be the whole story. Let suppose that we know neural basis of the color blue, does that knowledge lead us to understand the subjective account of that color, which everyone of us may have?

 

The Background of the Question eight:
Question 8:

In one of your essays, WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS?, your answer to the question of “should we expect consciousness to go away”, is no, because?

 

The Background of the Question night:

 

Proof of the Identity of (at least some) mental events and physical events

 

Premise 1. At least some conscious mental events cause bodily movements. E.G. My present intention-in-action causes my arm to go up.

 

Premise 2. Anything that causes my arm to go up (in that way) must have certain electro chemical properties, for example, the secretion of acetylcholine in the synaptic clefts of motorneurons.

 

Conclusion 1. some conscious events have electro chemical properties

 

Premise 3. Any event that has electro-chemical properties is a physical event.

 

Conclusion 2. at lease  some conscious events are physical events

 

How is this possible? Different levels of description of one and the same event.

 

Question 9:
Although Cartesian dualism is incoherent, it can be used metaphorically to address the fundamental problem of consciousness, subjectivity. Let suppose that conscious events do have electro-chemical properties, it is emerging because of activation of some neurons in the brain,. If that is the case,  then neurons should be more than on-and-off switchs—they must be an intelligent and independent cell, which are capable to marshal the body.  The problem that arises from this is the relationship between agent and client. Dualists may argue that the damage in the frontal lobe of the brain certainly changes the pattern of patient’s behavior because the homunculus does not have the necessary tool to function, it is like to say a baseball player does not have bat or baseball. From neuroscientists’ point of view, when my present intension-in-action causes me to raise my arm, who is the agent and who is the client?

 

On Reduction:
Background 1:
"I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels." (Descartes, Treatise on Man, p.108)
His scientific work was based on the understanding of all natural objects, including not only billiard balls and rocks, but also non-human animals and even human bodies, as completely mechanistic automata. Descartes' dualism was, in no small part, motivated by the fact that he could see no place for the soul or for freedom of the will in his thoroughly mechanistic understanding of nature.
Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between what he considers acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to, greedy reductionism comes when the thing we are trying to understand is explained away instead of explained, so that we fail to gain any additional understanding of the original target.
For example, we can reduce temperature to average kinetic energy without denying that temperature exists, so this is good reductionism. In contrast, when we consider the question of why clicking on a hyperlink takes us to one website and not another, any answer that says that it all comes down to electrons and that hyperlinks don't really exist anyhow is a greedy attempt to explain away the problem without solving it.
B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism has often been criticized as greedily reductionist, due to a perception that it denied the existence of mental states such as beliefs. Notably, Skinner himself characterized his views as anti-reductionist: in Beyond Freedom and Dignity and other works (e.g. About Behaviorism and chapter 19 of Verbal Behavior ^[1]), he wrote that while mental and neurological states did exist, behavior could be explained without recourse to either. Thus, from the Skinnerian standpoint, it is mentalism which displays greedy reductionism, as human behavior is explained away by mental processes which occur in an ambiguous "mind" while ignoring the importance of the study of behavior for its own sake. This example is particularly relevant because Dennett himself can be categorized as a type of behaviorist.^{[citation needed]}
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett argued that, without denying that human consciousness exists, we can understand it as coming about from the coordinated activity of many components in the brain that are themselves unconscious. In response, critics accused him of explaining away consciousness because he disputes the existence of certain conceptions of consciousness that he considers overblown and incompatible with what is physically possible. This is likely what motivated Dennett to make the greedy/good distinction in his follow-up book, to freely admit that reductionism can go overboard while pointing out that not all reductionism goes this far.

You have said that you are “inclined to stick with word ‘reduction’”.   It is plausible that “the power of sensation or perception and thought” are properties of “a certain organized system of matter” as the natural philosopher Joseph Priestley put it.  But the one thing that makes it hard to understand is that our limitless and infinite ways of feelings, thoughts, language use, and so on hardly can be explained by reductionist approach. For example, Cartesian mechanical philosophy attributed the quality of conservation to neither inorganic nor organic thing.  In that case, you can eliminate a part of the system to see what would happen. In Newtonian mechanical philosophy, he at least attributed some conservation to inorganic thing, such as motions.  Now, evolutionary biology tells us that the evolutionary process are considered to be conservative, meaning that organic objects are also conservative.

Daniel Dennett, in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, draws a line between a greedy and an acceptable reductionism. 
Question1
It seems to me that the ways of thinking about the problem of consciousness philosophically has become similar to that of mechanical and non-mechanical philosophy.  Galilean’s view was to exorcise the ghost and to leave the machine intact.  In contrast, Newton’s view was to exorcise the machine and to leave the ghost intact.  He wrote, “It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”  The dilemma that Newton encountered was the inadequacy of his two or three general principles of motion to explain the cause of gravity.  Does occur to you such a Newtonian dilemma?
Background 2:

 

As you know Mountcastle’s hypothesis is famous as an astonishing hypothesis, He claims that “things mental, indeed mind, are emergent properties of brains,” though “these emergences are not regarded as irreducible but are produced by principles that control the interactions between lower  level events—principles that we do not yet know. Even evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin has come to the same conclusion, believing that evolution of cognitive is beyond the reach of contemporary science.

 

Question 2:

 

 

 

Background 3:
Question 3:

One of criticisms that has been leveled against reductionism as a theory rather than a framework is that any data or phenomenon that refutes the theory is considered to be wrong or irrelevant.  One example is the fight over qualia.  Is it an unfair criticism?

 

 

First two: Neurophilosophy and Free Will

 

Background 1:

The processes of conscious rationality are such an important part of our lives, and above all such a biologically expensive part of our lives, it would be unlike anything we know in evolution if a phenotype of this magnitude played no functional role at all in the life and survival of the organism

Question 1:

If free will is real, and it is not an illusion, it must have a neurobiological reality. Do you think that free will is manifested in consciousness, which has a neurobiological reality? How can we treat the problem of free will as a neurobiological problem?

Background 2:

1-      Consciousness, as caused by neuronal processes and realized in neuronal systems, functions causally in moving the body.

2-      The brain causes and sustains the existence of a conscious self that is able to make rational out in action

 

Question 2:

To deal with free will from neurobiological account, it seems, it is imperative to identify the rational, volitional self in term of the brain functions. How does the brain create a self? How is the self realized in the brain?

 

Question 3:

 

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the pioneers in the development of cognitive neuroscience, believes that “Brains are automatic, but people are free.”  It seems to me that the notion of two entities can be understood from his words. 

 

Posted by saeid at 02:22 AM | Permalink

Masoud Allahyari :

Masoud is our cinematographer and has helped us in effective ways to make sure this project comes out successfully. He has been one of our invaluable crew because of his experience, knowledge, and work ethic.  

  

Camera and Electrical Department:

1. The Scent of Harvest (2001) (first assistant camera)
   
   
2. Ziafat (1995) (camera operator)
3. Khomreh (1992) (camera operator)
   ... aka The Jar
4. Majnoon (1990) (first assistant camera)
5. Naghsh-e eshgh (1990) (first assistant camera)
   ... aka Portrait of Love (USA: review title)
   
   
6. Shakhe-haye bid (1988) (camera operator)
   ... aka The Branches of Willow (International: English title)
7. Ansuyeh Meh (1986) (first assistant camera)
   ... aka Beyond the Mist
   ... aka The Other Side of Mist
8. Bibi chelchele (1986) (first assistant camera)
9. Pedarbozorg (1986) (first assistant camera)
10. Bahar (1985) (first assistant camera)
    

Posted by saeid at 01:56 AM | Permalink

This educational documentary film that we have been working on for almost three years is about consciousness largely with philosophical and neuroscientific bents. The goal of this film is to explore Francis Crick's framework for consciousness, which is the neural correlate(s) of consciousness. We believe that the question of consciousness is an empirical one and has to be unraveled objectively, but we are wondering whether neuroscientific frameworks and discoveries can give us (a) clue(s) about the subjective aspects of consciousness. Many are leery of believing that neuroscience can solve this mystery, saying the problem of consciousness "lies outside our cognitive capacities." Although, a philosophical definition of consciousness is broader than a clinical one, it is very useful to know what happens in the brain when we feel the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the funniness of a funny joke, and so on. No one has produced any plausible theory or explanation about how subjective experiences arise from over a trillion neurons.

here are the segments of the proposed film:

Segment 1: A brief history of the topic of consciousness

Segment 2: An introduction to "the problem of consciousness"

Segment 3: A review of Cartesian dualism (the  theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)

Segment 4: A review of Empiricism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)

Segment 5: Behaviorism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical  of this theory) Segment 6: Fight over Qualia

Segment 7:  Scientific attack on the problem of consciousness

Segment 8: Experiments: questions (whether consciousness is a property of the brain or not; whether consciousness is an  epiphenomenon or not; whether consciousness is a process or not; and whether Libet's experiments explain convincingly  the discrepancy between the occurrence of an event in the brain and the appearance of that event in the stage of consciousness)

Segment 9:   Conclusion

Posted by saeid at 01:16 AM | Permalink

It matters because we are definitely conscious organisms that can feel, see, experience, enjoy, suffer, initiate, and so on. We are conscious of some of our internal events, and being conscious of them is "a primary phenomenological aspect of our human existence" as Benjamin Libet an American neuroscientist averred. In that regard, every one of us has his or her own first-person data about what they experience. As Bertrand Russell argued, this is a kind of data that we are the most confident of. Therefore if understanding human nature at the deepest level is the most important pre-requisite to forming the fabrics of any social contract, it is imperative to have an accurate comprehension of it.

Consciousness matters because we are conscious observers and thinkers who are capable of observing external events and concluding their meanings, their recurrences, or their causal stories. Being conscious of those renders us capable of judging or decreeing, rewarding or punishing, praising or defaming, or rescuing or killing. Therefore our consciousness is a solid ground to conclude that we have ethical, moral, and legal responsibility. In this regard, studying consciousness appears not only to be necessary, but to have also social and survival value.

 

Consciousness also matters because some of our conscious states are identical to the brain's activities. There are a number of neural, chemical, and cellular activities in the brain that suggest some forms of association between those events and consciousness. By studying some neurological cases, by observing the brain's activity by MRI and fMRI, and by experimenting with drugs to alter behavior, scientists have accumulated a great number of third-person data about consciousness that are begging for scientific explanations. Having known that, a natural question arises: What do those activities buy us? If science is to explain things in the world, finding an answer to this question is one of the most urgent and important tasks of modern science because of its clinical and moral implications.

Also, there are many theological questions that can be answered by better understanding the phenomena of consciousness.

Posted by saeid at 12:39 AM | Permalink