Some notes
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?
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