Consciousness

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