waka waka waka

According to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, fascinating things are afoot at the University of Reading. Researchers are growing little biological brains made of rat neurons, and training them to control robots by way of a Bluetooth connection.

The scientists have in fact created several of these wee brains, which even seem to have their own personalities.

“It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains,” said [professor Kevin] Warwick. “This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”

It is still early days, and the homegrown brainlets, however boisterous, are nonetheless capable so far of only the most rudimentary mentation, roughly equivalent to a record-company executive, Biblical literalist, or member of Congress. But the project shows great promise. Learn more here.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work by Daniel Dennett, that the regress argument might not block a suitable naturalistic account. This led to a long discussion in the comments thread, with over a hundred entries. Toward the end, philosopher Peter Lupu offered some extensive criticisms of my position, which I would like to begin to address here.

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I’ve long been puzzled by ambiguous figures, ever since I saw the famous Necker cube as a boy. What changes in the brain when the perception “flips”? (There had better be something.)

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Before I forget, here is another item on the subject of improving the memory: it’s just one of those breezy little magazine-style top-ten lists, but some of the items merit a closer look.

An awful lot of people attach tremendous importance to the notion that our decisions are somehow the uncaused product of our consciousness: that they happen not amongst the deterministic web of brain tissue, but impose themselves on that tissue, somehow, from without. I’m not one of them.

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Last Tuesday’s New York Times carried a tragic and fascinating story. It was about Anne Adams, a scientist who was sticken by a degenerative and ultimately lethal brain disease called FTD, which is an acronym for frontotemporal dementia. The disease attacks particular portions of the brain only, with the effect that as the damaged parts atrophy other parts grow and thicken to pick up the slack. Because of the functional differention of different brain regions, this means that as deficiencies develop in some abilities, for example speech or mathematical reasoning, other talents may emerge, in some cases remarkable musical or artistic creativity. In Dr. Adams’ case, the disease gave her a gift for painting.

But the strangest part of the tale has to do with Dr. Adams’s growing fascination with the music of Maurice Ravel. Go and read about it here.

I’ll be on the road this evening, so won’t have any time for writing. Meanwhile, though, reader Andrew Staroscik has brought to our attention an interesting discussion about consciousness over at Sandwalk. We’ll take a closer look here when we are back in harness.

My lovely wife Nina has alerted me to a TED-conference video I might otherwise have missed: a talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor on the astonishing effects of a debilitating stroke: her own. This is an extraordinary presentation, with profound implications.

Have a look here. I have a few things to say about it all, but would rather wait until you’ve seen it.

We’ve added a new link to our sidebar: the website Brains, which describes itself as “a forum for discussing the philosophy of: mind, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science.” We’ve neglected the subject a bit lately in favor of political and cultural topics, but as you know this is right up one of our alleys. Do have a look.

In a recent post we linked to a paper by William Lycan that argues that both dualist and materialist mind-body philosophies are equally unsupported by evidence. As I mentioned, this is surely heartening to Cartesians, who must weary of having their views dismissed as so much nonsense. But is it right to conclude from Lycan’s paper — as his dualist readers are likely to do — that one might as well plump for dualism as materialism? Not so fast. Lycan doesn’t think so, and neither do I.

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In a recent post Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, called our attention to a 2006 paper entitled Giving Dualism Its Due, in which philosopher William Lycan acknowledges that there is really no compelling evidence either for or against mind-body dualism.

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It’s “all Pinker, all the time” in our little corner of the blogosphere at the moment. Kevin Kim, who has among his many interests the puzzle of consciousness, directs our attention to a sally by Pinker against the dualists. Here.

I have been busy this weekend with a two-day Iron Wire seminar (which is turning out to be one of the most interesting and esoteric experiences I’ve had in 32 years of kung-fu training), so for tonight I’ll just leave you with an engaging little diversion. It’s an online test of your ability to perceive and remember musical tones.

A tip: pay attention! Here it is.

A few days ago we made passing mention of the Oxford philosopher of science Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, which makes the claim that we are probably living in some sort of Matrix-like computer program. This dismal notion, which we looked at a bit more closely back in May, was also the subject of a brief article in last week’s New York Times.

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Yale’s David Gelernter, the well-known computer scientist, has written an article in Technology Review on the problems that bedevil AI research. He has some interesting things to say — not only about AI, but also about consciousness itself — and it’s well worth your while to read it.

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I make no secret of my admiration for the philosopher Daniel Dennett. His intellectual interests coincide nearly exactly with my own: the puzzle of consciousness, the theory of evolution, the phenomenology of religion, and the question of human freedom in a world apparently ruled by a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws. He has tilled and seeded these fields for decades now, yielding a bountiful harvest of books, academic papers, lectures, and philosophical insights for the nourishment of interested laymen like me. One needn’t always agree with him — in particular, his “eliminativist” account of consciousness has many harsh critics — but agree or not, there is no denying the unusual fecundity of his intellect, and his remarkable ability to cut away the conceptual underbrush that often surrounds these persistent philosophical conundrums, and to bring what is unclear about the questions themselves sharply into focus.

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By way of my friend Eugene Jen comes a remarkable story: a civil servant with practically no brain. Have a look here.

I’ve heard of cases like this before. What I’m curious about — and I hope someone is going to look into this — is how the various functional parts are represented, how such a brain actually works. A study using a PET scan or fMRI would be most interesting, I would think.

There’s a quirky little item in the science news today: some researchers in Germany have been studying fruit flies, and have observed that their behavior seems surprisingly flexible.

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One of the advantages of being a well-connected Internet sort is that people are constantly sending me interesting tidbits. From my friend Nick, who also provided yesterday’s Polka Floyd item, is one I hadn’t run across before (don’t know how I missed it, as it is right in amongst all the sorts of things I am always nosing about in).

It’s called the “simulation argument”, and it makes the case that there is a very good chance that we are living inside a computer program. This is not the same as the Matrix, exactly, because that is a trick being played on existing physical brains, whereas the claim here is that we may be nothing more than conscious programs running on a vast computer. It’s a fairly simple argument. We are given three propositions, and the author (Nick Bostrom, of Oxford University) asserts that at least one of them ought to be true. Here they are, as given in the abstract of the paper in which the argument was originally presented:

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Here’s an interesting item. It seems that neuroscientists are getting around to a more detailed study of attention, a topic that, as I’ve previously mentioned, has been known to be central for inner work in meditative traditions for a long, long, time. (It is also a sort of universal human currency, as I argue here.)

The researchers studied subject trained in Vipassana meditation, and found that the capacity for attention is not fixed, but can be increased with practice. This is not news, of course, to students of Eastern disciplines; in my own schooling in such matters, effort directed toward the control of the attention was always the most important part of the work.

Anyway, it’s good to see that Western science is taking up a rigorous examination of these phenomena. Attention is closely linked to consciousness, and an empirical examination of how the brain organizes itself to direct our attention is likely to be a useful angle on the deeper problem of what consciousness is, and how the brain creates it.

I’ve finally had a chance to get back to considering Titus Rivas’s paper, in which he and Hein van Dongen argue that the mind-brain model known as epiphenomenalism — which says that subjective mental phenomena are indeed ontologically real, that they are “irreducible” to physical processes, and that they exert no causal influence on the physical world — is false. In a previous post I agreed that their principal objection, which has to do with how the brain might ever come to express a belief in subjective mental phenomena in the first place if epiphenomenalism were true, is a good one. But if we are to discard epiphenomenalism, what alternatives are we left with? Rivas and van Dongen see only two alternatives: eliminative materialism and interactionist dualism — but I think they narrow the field unnecessarily. I’d like to go over the paper in some detail, and see where there might be implicit assumptions that could be leading us astray — a job that will require several posts (and which, given my lack of free time at the moment, may unfortunately be a slow go). Readers can find the original here.

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In remarking on a recent post, commenter Titus Rivas offered a link to a paper he and Hein van Dongen wrote in 2001, in which they launch an assault on the mind-body model known as epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism is the view that the subjective, conscious mind is a causally impotent byproduct of the physical activity of the brain — that it only witnesses our cognitive processes, without having the ability to influence them in any way.

I’ll admit that I have found epiphenomenalism attractive myself; it squares nicely with, to pick one example, the experimental results of Benjamin Libet, which seem to show that we act on our decisions before we are conscious of them. But it has its difficulties, too, and I think Rivas and van Dongen have mounted a successful refutation, which I will summarize here, of this philosophical position. It’s also worth mentioning that they stand in agreement on the insupportability of epiphenomenalism with philosopher Daniel Dennett¹, and when you have two committed dualists in firm agreement with Dennett that a particular mind-brain model doesn’t work, you have good reason to be skeptical of it.

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1. see Consciousness Explained, 1991, pp 398-405  

In the last three posts in this series on mind-body interaction, we looked at some of the more serious objections to what is known as “interactionist ’substance’ dualism”. After laying out a litany of difficulties with this model, I ended the previous entry by asking why anyone would defend such a view.

There are several reasons. Let’s look some of them over.

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In the two previous posts (here, and here) in our ongoing examination of mind-body dualism, we looked at the “interaction problem” — the question of how an entirely non-physical Mind might push the necessary neural buttons and levers to get the body to do anything.

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In the previous post in this thread, we were considering the causal linkage between my observation of a falling flowerpot and my stepping out of the way, and how a dualist account of such a chain of events might differ from a materialist one. Although the immaterial Mind of the dualist is considered to be not of the physical world, and therefore outside the purview of the natural sciences, that is not necessarily the case, as we shall see.

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We’ll get right back to our look at causal interactions in mind-body dualism, but meanwhile I want to call everyone’s attention to a new link on the waka waka waka sidebar. It’s a website called Conscious Entities, and is maintained by an Englishman by the name of Peter Hankins. Mr. Hankins is, like me, an amateur fascinated by the questions and problems of consciousness, and he has done an impressive job of presenting them. He writes exceptionally well, and his site is inviting, extensive, and well-designed. This appears to be an outstanding resource for those of us who are curious about the philosophy of mind, and I look forward to exploring it in detail. I invite our readers to do the same.

Well, having got the boot for badgering dualists about their view of the world, I might as well carry on. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say. So for the next couple of posts I’ll discuss what all the fuss is about.

As I’ve said, there are some good-sized humps any dualist account has to get over, and the one that comes up most often is the problem of causal interaction. Let’s have a look.

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There were two excellent articles in the science section of today’s New York Times, and I encourage all of you to go and read them.

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As I mentioned recently, I’ve just read John Searle’s book The Mystery of Consciousness. Searle holds a sort of middle ground among philosophers of mind: he is a card-carrying physicalist, meaning that he rejects the idea that our minds are non-material entities that interact with the body in some ghostly way, but he also takes issue with functionalist philosphers who argue that consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex information-processing systems. Searle’s best-known salvo against functionalism is his famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment, which I won’t recap here, but which has been a source of lively dispute ever since it was published in 1980.

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As so often happens, there is an interesting conversation underway over at The Maverick Philosopher. In this case the topic is the recurring theme of mind-body dualism, and in particular how a non-physical mind might causally interact with a physical body. (The original post has to do with a rather arcane metaphysical system known as “hylomorphic” or “Thomistic” dualism, but a lively chat ensued.)

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Yesterday I picked up The Mystery of Consciousness by John R. Searle. Searle is perhaps best known for his long-standing wrangle with Daniel Dennett; they have clashed often over the years, with Dennett running roughshod over Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment, and Searle excoriating Dennett (quite fairly) for his rather extreme position as regards the subjective ontology of consciousness.

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Readers will probably be familiar with one Deepak Chopra, who has made a handsome pile over the years by peddling pseudo-scientific New Age pablum to legions of credulous and uncritical admirers. Now, in an item at the Huffington Post, he swivels his intellectual popguns to bear upon Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, and does about as little damage as you might expect. If you enjoy seeing intellectual justice in action, visit the website eclexys, where blogger “gordsellar” gives Chopra’s gormless review, which is a basinful of the purest hogwash, the fisking it deserves, in a satisfying post entitled Deepak Chopra: Who Is This Idiot?

Thank you Kevin Kim for linking to this post, which I might otherwise have missed.

Yesterday’s post was about “ring species”, both as interesting natural phenomena in themselves, and as a reminder that the persistent human tendency to impose discrete categories on continuous phenomena can lead us, if not to outright error, at least to an inaccurate model of the world. Keeping in mind that we are all inclined toward this prejudice — Richard Dawkins calls it the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind” — can help us to avoid not only taxonomic pitfalls, but philosophical ones as well.

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We’ve all heard of the “out-of-body experience” (”OBE”), in which a person has the sensation of detachment from the physical self. These are often reported in situations where a subject hovers close to death; people will recount, upon returning to normal consciousness, that they were floating near the ceiling, looking down upon themselves and others in the room (who are often doctors and nurses struggling to keep the patient from dying).

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an interesting report of some new neurological observations of this phenomenon.

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In my previous post, I mentioned my alarm at seeing so many people taking antidepressant medication. My friend Jess Kaplan, in an email, points out that I have rather glibly lumped together an entire spectrum of mental disorders. He is quite right, and I should address his criticism.

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An item in the news yesterday raises once again the stubborn puzzle of consciousness. A 23-year-old British woman who has been in a “vegetative state” for five months has been shown by a sophisticated scanning technique to exhibit, in response to verbal stimuli, patterns of brain activity that are indistinguishable from those occuring in normal, conscious volunteers.

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In an ongoing discussion over at Maverick Philosopher, one of the interlocutors has made the assertion, in defense of dualism, that the human mind must be more than the physical activity of the brain, because the brain is a finite physical system, and the mind of Man, allegedly, is infinite. To quote from the thread over at Dr. Vallicella’s place:

Because the human mind is not bounded, it cannot be physical.

Sounds good. We all have the feeling that we can accommodate any new concept that comes before us (though, on reflection, a peek at contemporary political discourse might be sufficient rebuttal), and adjust our behavior with limitless flexibility. But why do we think so? What makes us so sure?

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One of the topics in which there is keen interest around these parts is the infinitely perplexing question of consciousness - what it is, whence it arises, and just where it fits into the Big Picture.

The hallmark of consciousness is subjectivity; the existence of an awareness that experiences are happening to. Many belive that this subjectivity is ontologically irreducible; that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the objective phenomenological world we all share and our individual conscious experiences of it. The only consciousness we can know confidently to exist is our own; we assume that others are conscious as well (if nothing else, it seems unsociable not to), but we have no way to be sure. Is there, in fact, any objective way to detect consciousness? At Princeton University there is a group who are investigating this question from a new angle.

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The rate at which we learn is such a limitation. People are generally at least moderately intelligent, and if we were all able to comprehend the various things that everyone else is working on, I’m sure that so many helpful suggestions would be offered that the rate of progress in almost all fields of endeavor would increase exponentially. But it is simply impossible to get people “up to speed” as it were, with any reasonable investment of time or effort.

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Dr. William Vallicella’s website, The Maverick Philosopher, will of course be familiar to readers of these pages (in fact many of you will have come here in the first place as a result of our occasional cross-linking). Bill is a professional philosopher - the real McCoy, as opposed to the loquacious amateurs who drive taxis and cut hair here in Gotham - and his site is a fascinating forum for discussion of philosophical topics. He attracts interested laypeople like me as well as his academic colleagues, and the discussions are always at a high level both of erudition and civility. I have learned a great deal by reading and participating, and have been persuaded to rethink many of my own opinions as a result.

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Those who prefer a dualist account of mind sometimes raise the objection that if our mental acts are simply the result of material chains of events in our brains, then there is no room for creativity, for our apparent ability to think original thoughts. But what does “creativity” mean?

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As it happens, the featured article on the front page of Wikipedia today is Philosophy of Mind. In the article we find the question:

“How can the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties be explained in naturalistic terms?”

Small world.

One of the knottier topics in philosophy of mind is intentionality. The term refers to the way our thoughts are about their objects, and intentionality is often considered to be an exclusive hallmark of the mental. A thought can be “about” Paris, but a stone, or a lampshade, cannot be.

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My lovely wife Nina was just reading to me some excerpts from an article about one Allison DuBois, who is the real-life sibyl behind television’s popular series Medium. The magazine article gave examples of Ms. DuBois’ abilites; for example, DuBois once told a woman that she saw her recently deceased father sitting nearby, wearing a clown nose - when, as it happens, a box of clown noses had in fact been purchased for the father’s wake. What are we to make of this sort of thing?

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In a previous post about C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles we began to look at his treatment of the Natural vs. the Supernatural. In Chapter 3 Lewis rolls out the argument that serves as the necessary underpinning for the rest of the book; he calls it The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.

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In the mail yesterday came an envelope from my good friend Jess Kaplan, who is, due to his sharp and perpetually curious mind, a constant source of fascinating material. Inside was a printout of a lengthy essay, by one Arthur M. Young, on the subject of science and consciousness. I am embarrassed to say that I had not heard of the man, because when I looked him up I discovered him to be, quite obviously, one of the brighter lights of the twentieth century, a restless and productive polymath who, among other accomplishments, invented the magnificent Bell helicopter - a task he apparently set himself simply as an exercise for the training of his mind and the growth of his wisdom.

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I’m sure we have all, at one time or another, had the experience of being dazzled by a bright light. The other day it happened to me, and I noticed something quite surprising about it.

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I’ve finally taken up Daniel Dennett’s latest effort, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The book is an attempt to apply the methods of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology to a critical examination of the possible reasons for our fondness for religion. It has unsurprisingly ruffled a few feathers, something Dennett always seems to relish.

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One difficulty in developing a coherent philosophical account of consciousness is that the foundation upon which it rests - our subjective experience itself - is not as solid as we take it to be. We tend to think that the features of our inner life - our representation of the world, and the qualia that compose it - are stable and beyond dispute, and that our conscious “now” is a definite, pointlike event - as if there is an inner screen upon which consciouness plays, with Us as the viewer, and that whatever goes up on that screen is a matter of unambiguous fact.

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My good friend Jess Kaplan has just sent me a link to a transcript of a 1985 lecture by the late Julian Jaynes. I’ve been meaning for a while to mention his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and now seems as good a time as any.

I first came upon this book many years ago, in early days of my own interest in the question of consciousness, and was drawn in by its lengthy and mysterious-sounding title. I thought it would be a summary of mainstream research, but it it turned out to be quite the opposite. It is, instead, a detailed and closely-argued brief for a radical theory of human history and development.

Jaynes, who died in 1997 at the age of 77, was a professor of psychology at Princeton University. But he is best remembered now for his claim, fantastic at first hearing, that our consciousness - the ordinary self-awareness that we are accustomed to - is in fact a very recent acquisition, and that within historical times humans were quite unconscious.

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