Patricia Churchland
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 ConsciousnessThe 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 awareness2- 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.