ThinkBlog

See the Slashdot post here.

Props to grammar fascist for the report:

“The AP wire reports that Japanese medical researchers have developed a DNA-based vaccine that reduces the brain plaque beta amyloid without the severe brain inflammation that plagued successes in 2002. From the story ‘The deposits have been cut by between 15.5 percent and 38.5 percent in mice, with no major side effects, researchers said Monday in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences […] If all goes well, this type of treatment might be available for people in six or seven years, [lead researcher Yoh Matsumoto] said.’”

(The head scientist in the psycholinguistics lab in which I’ve been working for the past year and a half is in the midst of some major studies on Alzheimer’s and language processing, so this is a topic near and dear to us all in the lab. Not to mention that I’m more scared of Alzheimer’s than I am of Parkinson’s.)

Thomas Nagel’s question that is the title of his 1974 article, “What is it like to be a bat?” is a foundational problem for philosophy of mind. Where is consciousness located?; wherein does it consist? What is it like to be a human being? Are beings with physical constitutions identical to ours imaginable sans consciousness? These are compelling questions; this is where science and philosophy meet, and sparks inevitably fly. (See my post from the second of May 2006 on Chalmers’ evaluation of the options for philosophers of mind.)

But it seems to me that this is a fundamental question for all of us to answer, if we’re being honest. The obvious question implied here is about humans—materialistic accounts of reality don’t account for consciousness satisfactorily (at least, so goes the claim).

It’s a question we all have to answer for ourselves, though, is, “What is it like to be myself?” See, consciousness is defined by experience insofar as the debate between materialism versus all the other approaches are concerned. This, to me, seems to be analogous to the difference between popular psychology, literature, and even pop culture—and the truth of one’s own experience as themselves. I struggle with this; though I am not a materialist, I have been guilty of committing what I see as an analogous error: of believing that people are constituent units of whole stereotypes that make up an entire whole. This whole is not unique, not really. If you are an ESTP, I know something about you, if I know something of Jungian typology; if you were born in Minnesota, I know something about how you are, where you come from, insofar as I know about Minnesota and the way people there interact; if you are a brother, a sister, a husband, a wife, a runner, a swimmer, a biker, a writer, a lover, a drinker, a smoker—all these labels tell me something about you. I am discouraged, often, by my falling into a trap of believing that the set of { ESTP | born:MN | non-smoker | occasional-drinker | passionate lover | climber } tells me all, or nearly all, of what I need to know to nail that person down.

It’s really uncanny, though. Ask an iNtuitive [Jungian] type who also scores high on Feeling to predict what someone is like. They’ll usually nail it, right down to the propensity toward rhinestone belts and the cowboy hats (for example), if he or she is really intent on the request.

Now, there’s something to that. You know something about me by knowing I am a male in my twenties who was born in South Carolina, an enjoyer of fine wines, cigars, cyberpunk novels, and concertos by Bach; you know something more about me by knowing my height, my weight, my ethnicity, my marital status, and the fact that I’m an INTP according to the MBTI, IPTI2, and KPI. But do you really know me, knowing all that?

No, you can’t. There’s an element of uniquity in everyone because of, if nothing else, the circumstances surrounding his or her life: the historicity of his or her being, the fact that this person at this point in time has never existed before or since, regardless of similarities shared in terms of ethnicity, aesthetics, cosmetics, personality, and all the rest.

But that means the onus is on each one of us to find out what it really means to be an “us,” an Ego. You share so much with other people; what defines you as apart from them? What separates you from others in such a way that allows you to connect and serve them in a way that is not identical to your own? It’s here that we find identity; and that’s why Christ’s admonition that “whomsoever seeks to save his life shall lose it; but whomever loses his life for My sake shall find it.” While we merely dwell in what can be described by stereotype, delimited by rules, we never own our sense of identity as placed here, in time, just in this moment, to do precisely what we were meant to do.

You are not unique: you can be defined in any number of ways. And yet you are unique in this, that the infinitely dynamic image of God resides in you, and that there are no others precisely like you in the ways you can serve others, and be a help to others. Aye, and to hurt others; but this is a part of life, and part of the responsibility that comes with consciousness, with uniquity, with life. What is it like to be who you are?

On Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, by David J. Chalmers

1.
“Russell pointed out that physics characterizes physical entities and properties by their relations to one another and to us. […] At the same time, physics says nothing about the intrinsic nature of these entities and properties. […] So this is one metaphysical problem: what are the intrinsic properties of fundamental physical systems?”

2.
In the eleventh section of his paper, Chalmers reintroduces one of the fundamental problems with a materialistic view of consciousness in a way that sets the stage for an answer in what he calls type-F monism. This passage is particularly interesting because of this question regarding the intrinsic nature of that which is functionally described by physics. It is usually taken for granted in the empirical sciences, including psychology, that physics is complete where we can accurately measure data, infer conclusions, and test hypotheses. But, taking a cue from Bertrand Russell’s The Analysis of Matter (1927), Chalmers points out what’s missing in physicalism as a viable theory of consciousness—and the viability of something more than reductive materialistic explanations of the mind—by pointing out the deficiencies of physics itself. He does this by pointing out, what physics does describe, viz. the relations of entities within physical systems. We know what a quark is by the way it relates to other physical entities; likewise with all the elements of atoms. We know how to define mass in terms of resistance to acceleration (from another entity having mass), but we do not have a substantive explanation of the “intrinsic properties associated with mass,” or of the intrinsic physical constituency of a quark itself. If we cannot deduce or observe the intrinsic properties of fundamental physical systems, then there is a gap precisely there in the explanation of consciousness which, claims Chalmers (with Russell), provides enough ontological gap for there to exist something intrinsic to the nature of the physical for which relational, dispositional physics cannot account.

3.
In order to understand how Chalmers reaches this conclusion and somewhat strange hypothesis for the nature of consciousness, it is necessary to evaluate his project in this article. He gives a sweeping overview of the problems that have traditionally beset discussions of the metaphysics of consciousness from an admittedly anti-materialist viewpoint. Distinguishing between the “hard” and “easy” problems of consciousness, Chalmers claims that problems of empirical investigation, those things readily accounted for in a physicalist system, are “easy”—we can see how there can be eventual neurobiological explanations of the “easy” problems of consciousness. Stimulus discrimination, internal state monitoring, and information report are examples of these problems. The so-called “hard” problem of consciousness, as Chalmers continues, is that of experience. There is something that it is to be like a human being, to have a conscious experience, which (Chalmers argues, though disputable to some materialists) is unaccounted for by a purely physicalist view of consciousness. Even if we are able to explain cognitive functions and systems in terms of structure and dynamics, we will nevertheless not have explained the subjective experience that is tied inextricably to consciousness. In the third section of his paper, Chalmers sets forth three arguments against materialism to which he refers in later sections. Specifically, the “explanatory argument” is tied explicitly to the distinction of the hard and easy problems of consciousness: physical theories of consciousness can account for structure and function and no more; but this is insufficient to explain consciousness; therefore, physical theories of consciousness are inadequate. This is a part of what Chalmers seeks to answer in his proposal of type-F monism, or what he calls panprotopsychism, by offering a theory that postulates precisely that “the natural world contains more than the physical world.” The second broad argument against materialism is the “conceivability argument,” involving the thought experiment of zombies—that is, beings with the exact and comprehensive physical constitution of human beings which nevertheless have no conscious experience—to provide the hinge of the debate. Specifically, since it is conceivable that zombies exist, it is metaphysically possible that they do exist; hence, consciousness is nonphysical. Finally, there is the “knowledge argument,” which states that there are facts about conscious experience that cannot be deduced from physical facts. This argument is favored by epiphenomenalist Frank Jackson, as exemplified in Mary the neuroscientist who from a black and white room learns everything there is to know about the workings of the human brain and all the physical facts about what constitutes the structure and function of consciousness—only to learn something genuinely new when she actually leaves the room and experiences “red” (and so forth) for herself. Again, this is the proposal of Chalmers’ panprotopsychism, that there are intrinsic properties of which physical entities are constituted that account for phenomenal, subjective experience in a way that purely physical science cannot. All of these arguments amount to one crucial underlying argument against materialism: that there is an epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths, which implies the existence of an ontological gap—and therefore, materialism is false.

Chalmers goes on to explain the positions of what he sees as the three broad views that materialists tend to take in arguments about consciousness. The first are whom he calls type-A materialists, who deny that there is an epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths. For the type-A materialist, either consciousness does not exist as such, or by explaining fine neurobiological detail along with the functional state and the environmental position, we have thereby accounted for phenomenal truths and conscious states. For Chalmers, this denies the obvious, and I am inclined to agree; there is something to phenomenal, subjective experience—and in the light of a lack of extraordinary evidence, type-A materialism does not seem to be adequate. This is a different problem than that of “vitalism” to account for life, or the reduction of chemistry from physics: there is conscious experience that remains unexplained by the explanation of neurobiology, &c. The second type of materialism holds that while there is an epistemic gap, there is no ontological gap: type-B materialists, then, deny that from the premise that there is an epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths it follows that phenomenal reality is somehow greater than or removed from a full explanation of physical reality. In the same way that water and H2O are identical, but are different concepts, so for the type-B materialist are physical states identical with conscious experiences. Chalmers argues at length against the type-B materialists, claiming that this epistemic gap is different than the epistemic gap that has existed in other, hard sciences, and that a type-B materialist essentially gives up a reductive explanation of consciousness.

Eventually, through a nuanced argument in section six, Chalmers reaches the conclusion that materialism is false—or that type-F monism, panprotopsychism, is true. This will be revisited momentarily. Type-C materialism concedes that there is presently an epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths, but that it will be closed eventually. According to Chalmers, this position is either untenable or collapses into one of the other forms of materialism, or into a kind of Cartesian dualism, or again, into type-F monism. The basic argument against type-C materialism that makes it untenable for Chalmers is as follows: “physical descriptions of the world characterize the world in terms of structure and dynamics”; from these descriptive truths one can only deduce more truths about structure and dynamics; those sorts of truths are not truths about conscious experience.

Having dispensed with reductive materialism, Chalmers argues that we must expand our conception of what constitutes natural reality, to either take consciousness as a fundamental aspect of universal constitution or as necessitated by something fundamental—hence the proto- in panprotopsychism, which holds to the first position. Essentially, if arguments against materialism are substantial enough to knock them down, physics cannnot fully explain consciousness, and we must look to the most viable alternatives, viz. dualism (types D and E) and type-F. Type-D dualism is the position that microphysics is not causally closed, that “[p]sychophysical principles specifying the effect of phenomenal states on physical states will also play an irreducible role” alongside physical principles. This view of consciousness includes Descartes’ substance dualism, in which there are two distinct substances working on one another, as well as property dualism, which holds that there is a fundamental substance which includes physical as well as phenomenal properties. Answering the strongest objection to this theory of consciousness, viz. that it flies in the face of Newtonian physics, Chalmers counters that in fact, quantum mechanics suggests a kind of type-D dualism itself, and that the objection from contemporary knowledge of physics is only a kind of appeal to authority. On the other hand, Chalmers says, we can accept the causal closure of microphysics such that no phenomenal properties play any kind of role whatsoever in determining the nature of physical reality as such. On this view, referred to as epiphenomenalism, especially according to Frank Jackson, consciousness is an evolutionary appendage having no effect on the natural order but simply arising from it. This means that there is no causative mental process working on the physical body in any circumstance; the flow of causation is one-way. Jerking away from a flame would then not be due to the pain, but merely concurrent with it; seemingly rational decisions that end in physical actions are actually not causing those actions, and so forth. Chalmers is more willing than I to concede that while it is counterintuitive, it is still a contender for an explanation of reality. The sixth and final option that Chalmers is willing to consider as a viable explanation of consciousness is the aforementioned panprotopsychism. With this type-F monism, Chalmers draws deeply on scientific ignorance of the intrinsic nature of physical entities to propose a system in which phenomenal characteristics are intertwined with the physical by nature, instead of relationally or structural-dynamically in the conception of contemporary physics. Phenomenal properties, then, play a causal role along with physical properties in a causally closed microphysical schema, but would constitute the intrinsic nature of physical properties instead of being defined relationally. This is what Chalmers is doing in the above quote, challenging notions that physics alone as we know it today is able to explain consciousness. Chalmers claims that it is reasonable to expect that there are neutral protophenomenal elements of the natural world which by their relation with one another constitute what we understand as the physical world, while each of the has phenomenal properties in itself because of its intrinsic nature. Objections to this, other than the obvious about physics not constituting the basest understanding of the natural world, include that of counter-intuition and what is called the combination problem for panpsychism itself. The combination problem is that, if there are phenomenal properties intrinsic to some protophenomenal properties, then it still must be shown how these various phenomenal elements combine in each human being to make one coherent, rich, differentiated structure. Resorting to higher-level processing arguments to answer the combination problem, says Chalmers, turns type-F monism into type-D dualism. In conclusion, Chalmers briefly mentions Berkeleyan idealism (type-I monism) and overdetermination (type-O dualism), but does not treat them as the most rational or coherent alternatives to materialism.

4.
Type-F monism is an attractive alternative to materialism if for no other reason than it seems so strange yet coherent. Invoking Russell is perhaps not the best course of action for Chalmers, though, in introducing panprotopsychism: for all the respect he deserves as a critical thinker, Russell could not have known certain things about the nature of science. On the other hand, physics has not given us any more knowledge about the intrinsic nature of things, so there is no direct evidence contradicting type-F monism in the same way that Chalmers says occurs with all three broad types of materialism. The idea that each particle, each of the underlying intrinsic properties of natural reality has its own “what it is like to be,” its own conscious experience in a sense, its own phenomenal actuality—this seems very close to animism, the idea that all things have spirit, and are alive. This seems untenable, but only because it is so counterintuitive in light of modern philosophy. Brentano (1995) and Chisholm (1957), for example, held that intentionality was the mark of conscious experience—but nowhere in their systems does one find metaphysics of consciousness explained in terms of intrinsic phenomenal properties. Still, this seems a much better alternative to Jackson’s (1982) epiphenomenalism, which I see as untenable because it makes us simply conscious observers of the deterministic march of reality. We could have held to this perhaps in pre-Socratic Greece, before we knew how rich and complex the psyche was, before we were able to infer relationships between cognitive, neurobiological processes and physiological, bodily actions. But today it seems ridiculous, a step backward from materialism itself for no other reason than to try to have the metaphysical schema both ways: a causally closed microphysics along with qualitative experience. The idea that physics does not provide a fully comprehensive explanation of reality, however, is compelling. Cartesian dualism has been largely rejected these days for what I think should be similar reasons to reject epiphenomenalism; but the spirit of Descartes may be preserved in panprotopsychism. Certainly Ryle (1949) and Putnam (1968) would dismiss it outright as mysticism in relation to a clear-cut explanation of cognition in terms of behavior. But it seems that nevertheless there remains a gaping hole in the behavioristic account of consciousness, viz. the existence of qualia, especially Nagel’s (1974) “what it is like to be” problem—there is no account of what it is like to be a human being in describing “psychology in physical language” (Carnap, 1932). Panprotopsychism should prove a fascinating jumping-off point for research as advancements are made in quantum physics; there is still hope for a non-materialistic account of consciousness if it ultimately fails, but overall panprotopsychism seems the most compelling and, in a sense, most cutting edge option to philosophers of mind today.

References

Brentano, F. (1995). “The distinction between mental and physical phenomena.” In Psychology from an empirical standpoint. D. Terrell, A. Rancurello, & L. McAlister, Trans; L. McAlister, Ed. New York: Routledge.

Carnap, R. (1932). “Psychology in physical language.” In Erkenntnis, 3:107-42. Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Chalmers, D. J. (2002). “Consciousness and its place in nature.” From Blackwell guide to the philosophy of mind. S. Stich & T. Warfield, Eds.

Chisholm, R. (1957). “Intentional inexistence.” From Perceiving: A philosophical study. New York: Cornell UP.

Jackson, F. (1982). “Epiphenomenal qualia.” From Philosophical quarterly 32:127-136.

Nagel, T. (1974). “What is it like to be a bat?” From Philosophical review 83:435-50. New York: Cornell UP.

Putnam, H. (1968). “Brains and behavior.” From Analytical philosophy: Second series,
in Blackwell, 1968.

Russell, B. (1927). The analysis of matter. London: Kegan Paul.

Ryle, G. (1949). “Descartes’ myth.” From The concept of mind. In Hutchinson, 1949. Oxford: Oxford UP.

All citations taken from:

Chalmers, D. J., Ed. (2002). Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings.
New York: Oxford UP.

On Conscious Experience, by Fred Dretske

1. “[S]uppose S sees a speckled hen on which there are (on the facing side) 27 speckles. Each speckle is clearly visible. Not troubling to count, S does not realize that (hence, is not aware that) there are 27 speckles. Nonetheless, we assume that S looked long enough, and carefully enough, to see each speckle. In such a case, although S is aware of all 27 speckles (things), he is not aware of the number of speckles because [that] requires being aware that there is that number of speckles (a fact), and S is not aware of this fact.”

2. This passage is talking about the possibility that we can be conscious (that is, aware—for Dretske the terms are interchangeable) of things in a way that is fundamentally different than our awareness of facts. When S looks at this visible side of the hen, his attention is not directed toward the fact that there are twenty-seven speckles on this particular hen; but he is nevertheless aware of all of the speckles simultaneously—aware of their existence as things to be perceived. This becomes a crucial distinction for Dretske in his argument against higher-order thought processes—i.e., introspection—as being meaningfully explanatory of consciousness.

3. In order to understand what Dretske is trying to do with this article, it is important to know what he is arguing against. He objects to the idea that consciousness can be explained by a higher-order mental state that is directed at lower states: it is this theory of introspection as constitutive of consciousness that leads, e.g., Rosenthal, to argue that conscious states are those of which we are conscious. Dretske insists this is not the case, and sets up his argument in the following way.

In the introduction to the article, Dretske argues that while it sounds odd to the aforementioned higher-order theorists of consciousness to say that it is possible to have a conscious experience that one is not conscious of having, there is nothing contradictory about this claim. The first distinction he draws in fleshing out this conclusion is that distinction between awareness of facts and awareness of things. For Dretske, awareness of things is that which occurs in us when we become perceptually aware of items in our environment: the stereo, the computer, the music; and awareness of facts is a kind of “awareness that”—taking the form of my being aware that the computer is playing music through the stereo. This kind of awareness takes form in the statement, (1) “S sees (hears, etc.) x (or that P) => S is conscious of x (that P),” but goes on to differentiate between awareness of facts and of things, such that in the case of awareness of facts, one is by definition able to speak about that thing in one’s awareness. Thus in the above quotation, S sees (becomes perceptually aware of) the speckles on the hen, but is not aware that there are 27 speckles. It is for this reason Dretske introduces statement (2), such that for all concrete objects x, “S is conscious of x =/> S is conscious that x is F.” From this foundation, Dretske goes on to argue that the intransitive sense of “consciousness” is implied by, and indeed given rise by the transitive sense—that is, for any x and P, (3) “S is conscious of x or that P => S is conscious (a conscious being)” and therefore, (4) this means S is in a conscious state. Consciousness, then, is not directed toward things, or toward our awareness of our perception of things; rather, our perception of things makes us conscious of the world around us. Furthermore, Dretske uses a couple of examples from the realm of visual perception to illustrate the point: in looking at two slightly different pictures or objects, he says, people are thing-aware that there is a difference; but they are not aware of the fact that actually makes two objects or pictures differ. From this point, he says, we can deduce that one can be conscious of a thing without having transitive (metacognitive, introspective) consciousness of it. After two visual examples, he argues this point from experimentation with monkeys, in which they were thing-aware of different sized boxes, but only fact-aware of the abstraction “INTERMEDIATE IN SIZE” after learning to discriminate more carefully between the boxes. After tying up some loose ends in the fourth and final section of his article, Dretske concludes that fact-awareness (belief) is conscious not because the person is metacognitively aware of that fact, but because the belief is “a representation that makes one conscious of the fact (that P) that it is a belief about.”

On Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap, by Joseph Levine

1. “When we imagine a possible world in which a phenomenon is experienced as pain but we have no C-fibers, that is a possible world in which there is pain without there being any C-fibers. This is so, argues Kripke, for the simple reason that the experience of pain, the sensation of pain, counts as pain itself. We cannot make the distinction here, as we can with heat, between the way it appears to us and the phenomenon itself.”

2. Here Levine is referring to the difference between statement (1), “Pain is the firing of C-fibers” and statement (2), “Heat is the motion of molecules.” There is a certain way of conceiving of heat that is purely empirical; it is that phenomenon in the world which causes certain events (expansion and excitation of molecular clouds, boiling of water, &c.), on the one hand. On the other hand, heat feels to us in a certain way. There is, however, a way of explaining away the difference between what heat is and how it feels to us, by virtue of the fact that heat or its lack causes sensations in our physical bodies in a certain, predictable way—indeed, in the same way that it causes expansions of gases, and so forth. This is not the case with (1): that we could explain pain in terms of the firing of C-fibers tells us nothing about the subjective experience of pain as such, and because we can imagine a possible world in which the firing of C-fibers is not necessary for pain to exist, pain itself can exist apart from C-fibers. The differentiation between the sensation we call pain, and pain itself, is null: when we have begun talking about the one, we necessarily talk about the other. For this reason, there is an explanatory gap between the materialist way of explaining consciousness and the way in which we subjectively experience pain. Statement (1) seems contingent to us intuitively, whereas one can be disabused of the notion that (2) is contingent by explaining that the same thing that is explained by the motion of molecules is that which causes the sensation of heat to us.

3. Levine’s starting point in this article is Kripke’s argument that, firstly, all statements of identity in which both sides are true are necessarily true in all possible worlds; and secondly, that since a world can be conceived of in which statements of physical activity and psychological activity (viz., consciousness) are different, we must deny the materialistic necessity that psychological activity is reduceable to physical claims. Levine thinks that Kripke’s argument does not so strongly support a metaphysical claim as to the nature of consciousness, but that it does present a troubling epistemological problem. For the sake of argument, Levine essentially accepts a materialistic premise for the nature of the mind, but says that there is an explanatory gap between objective, empirical statements about neurophysiology and how we conceive of and subjectively experience what those statements purport to describe. He goes on to explain that this is a problem not only for strictly physical materialists, but also for functionalists as well, citing Ned Block’s argument that it is conceivable that for statement (3), “To be in pain is to be in [functional] state F,” an organism or even an entire nation of people, could corporately realize state F without actually being in pain. That this is logically possible is, for Levine, a strike against the abstraction of functionalist descriptions; as is the hypothesis that two people could share identical functional states but experience different sensory qualia, the so-called “inverted spectrum” hypothesis. None of this, even the functional description of states, helps us to understand the way something feels subjectively. Indeed, even if we restrict “pain” to being that which is subjectively felt when there is that sort of experience as C-fibers firing, that “makes the way pain feels into a brute fact,” and doesn’t tell us anything about why pain actually feels the way it does. In answer to this problem, Levine suggests that it is only highly organized physical systems that exhibit this kind of ambiguity; nevertheless, since the human mind is one of those systems, that (1) could be metaphysically factual while remaining epistemologically inaccessible. In the addendum to the article, Levine merely reiterates the dichotomy between physical description and subjective experience.

On Epiphenomenal Qualia, by Frank Jackson

1. “We find out perhaps that Fred’s cones respond differentially to certain light waves in the red section of the spectrum that make no difference to ours and that this leads in Fred to a wider range of those brain states responsible for visual discriminatory behaviour. But none of this tells us what we really want to know about his colour experience. […] We have all of the physical information. Therefore, knowing all this is not knowing everything about Fred. It follows that Physicalism leaves something out.”

2. Jackson is arguing against the Physicalist, materialistic account of consciousness by saying that there is something fundamentally different between a physical account of consciousness and what we, as individuals, know subjectively to be true insofar as our own experiences are concerned. This so-called “knowledge argument for qualia,” as the first section of his article is entitled, is that there is something left unaccounted-for in the traditional physicalist account of consciousness. Jackson also wants to argue that this will remain the case, regardless of what scientific advances are made in the empirical investigations into consciousness. In order to make his point, Jackson uses the example of aforementioned Fred, whose discrimination of colors serves as a thought experiment. There is for Fred as much difference between two different shades of red as there is for most human beings between blue and yellow; the colors themselves are utterly distinct. Therefore, to Fred, we are colorblind. We can analyze the frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum in which those reds—red1 and red2—fall, and we can even have an absolutely detailed description of the optical apparatus in Fred (e.g., extra cones, &c.), and how his brain, his optic nerves, his eyeballs, and the colors red1 and red2 are all interacting. But, says Jackson, we nevertheless do not thereby have all of the information about Fred’s “color experience.”

3. Continuing in this first section of the article, Jackson puts forth his knowledge argument by continuing with Fred. He makes the further point that, upon Fred’s hypothetical donation of his body to science, and upon the transplantation of his optical system into another, it can then be said that we know more about Fred’s experience than the physicalist picture of what was occurring in his brain and body could take into account. He then develops this with a further example of Mary, a woman reared in a black-and-white room, who has learned everything there is to know (factually) about the physical account of the world and the way human beings are constructed to interact with it. Jackson’s position is that, upon Mary’s leaving the room and being exposed to all the rich colors of the world, there will be something that she learns that she did not know before. Jackson points out in the addendum to Epiphenomenal Qualia that “what Mary did not know” is, by virtue of the what, the important question—and not the type of knowledge that Mary had, since she had all necessary knowledge as described by the physicalist schema. Jackson then differentiates his argument from the modal argument and Nagel’s “what it is like to be” argument—the former being something like the Cartesian deduction that we can imagine a consciousness outside of body and therefore must be more than body, along with the more modern idea of zombies, physiologically operative beings that nevertheless lack consciousness; and the latter mostly by merely calling into question whether having enough imagination to conceive of the way it is to be a bat is really a challenge to physicalism at all. In the final section of his article, Jackson defends the claim that there is nothing about qualia that make a difference in the physical world—and thus escape the purely physical account of consciousness. On the first case, taking a cue from Hume, Jackson argues that possibly, both qualia and that which is behaviorally explainable are due to “happenings in the brain,” but are not causally linked. On the second, qualia come about via evolution as inconsequential appendages, irrelevant to survival, as resulting from the crucial develpment of rationality. Thirdly, Jackson mentions the problem of other minds, and that we can infer qualia from others’ behavior, just as we link behavior and qualia in ourselves. Ultimately, says Jackson, it is altogether too optimistic to believe that physicalism accounts for consciousness altogether—even though its appeal is obvious, in giving us an account of our place in the grand scheme of things.

Roderick M. Chisholm, “Intentional Inexistence” (1957)

1.
“It would be an easy matter, of course, to invent a psychological terminology enabling us to describe perceiving, taking, and assuming in sentences which are not intentional. Instead of saying, for example, that a man takes something to be a deer, we could say `His perceptual environment is deer-inclusive.’ But in so doing, we are using technical terms…. And unless we can re-express the deer-sentence once again […] as a nonintentional sentence containing no such technical terms, [the sentence] will conform to our present version of Brentano’s thesis.”

2.
Chisholm is attempting to make a nuanced defense of Franz Brentano’s thesis that the characteristic shared by all mental phenomena, and by no physical phenomena, is intentional inexistence: that when referring to mental acts, we must refer to them as intentional, and not merely in physiological terms. Not only is behavioristic language about reinforcement and physiological processes in the mind too technical for Chisholm, it is also inaccurate because of its deficiency in explaining how perception actually works from a the standpoint of the subject to whom mental phenomena are being presented.

It seems to Chisholm that the only way around using intentional language, especially when describing something about how a person perceives an object in his or her environment, is to use needlessly complex and technical phraseology that does not capture the full meaning of what it is to perceive something. Furthermore, an explanation of perception that does not include intentionality is crippled, according to Chisholm, when explaining how we can take an efficient cause of a presentation to be something that it is not—as in a case, for instance, wherein the man mentioned above could mistake the deer for another animal.

3.
Chisholm begins his article by asking whether Brentano’s intentionality thesis with regard to mental phenomena can also be true of assumptions, and then proceeds to (at least rhetorically) attempt to disprove Brentano’s theory using other peoples’ objections and examples after explaining more fully the terminology Brentano himself was using. For Brentano, as for Chisholm, attitudes and beliefs and other sorts of mental phenomena “intentionally contain an object in themselves,” such that the object presented to consciousness need not exist in real life: I can have a belief about unicorns, or the state of a substance on Twin Earth, or a wish for something that never comes to pass. However, physical (nonpsychological, as Chisholm says) phenomena cannot intentionally contain objects: in order for me to kick a ball, there must necessarily be a ball for me to kick, and so forth.

Chisholm argues that we can talk about states of mind or psychological “directedness” by way of certain types of sentences; in this way he clarifies and re-states Brentano’s original thesis through statements such as, “We may now say that a compound declarative sentence is intentional if and only if one or more of its component sentences is intentional.” Various psychologists and philosophers have tried to re-state the ways of talking about mental phenomena apart from intentionality in various ways, one of which is exemplified by Ayer’s objection that “to think of” something is “to be conscious of the symbols which designate” that thing, but Chisholm says that even this is intentional, since by saying X is designated by Y, we posit nothing about the ontological status or nature of X. Other objections, according to Chisholm, always inevitably refer back to intentional bases, and so assumptions, being mental, must also be intentional.

The overarching point for which Chisholm is attempting to build a case is that in order to describe psychological phenomena, we must use sentences and language that is necessarily intentional, lest we confuse the issues with overly technical language, or by not capturing all there is to a mental act. We can, and according to Chisholm, should, describe physical phenomena from the standpoint of non-intentional sentences; but this is insufficient for psychological language, since intentionality is not reducible to the physical. Therefore, intentional language is the only kind of language adequate for discussing matters of psychology and of the objects of cognition.

Reference: Chisholm, R. M. (1957). “Intentional inexistence.” From Perceiving: A Philosophical Study. New York: Cornell UP.

On Franz Brentano, The Distinction between Mental and Physical Phenomena (1874)

1.
“All the data of our consciousness are divided into two great classes—the class of the physical and the class of mental phenomena. […] But what we have said is not sufficient. […] [S]ensation and imagination are distinguished by the fact that one occurs as the result of a physical phenomenon, while the other is evoked by a mental phenomenon…. But … what appears in sensation does not correspond to its efficient cause. Thus it turns out that the so-called physical phenomenon does not actually appear to us…!”

2.
This passage from Brentano’s book, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is the beginning of his delineation of the problem that had been troubling psychologists and philosophers for years on the nature of how the individual consciousness contains conceptions of and understand relations of things within the world at large. From the first premise, that all conscious data are divided into two classes, Brentano goes on to set out the problems that had theretofore afflicted scientists and philosophers of mind that had attempted to defend such a position. An example of this problem is the contradictory statements that scientists had been forced to make regarding imagination and sensation: though the two were purported to be separate phenomena, one physical and one mental, it had been shown that the efficient causes of sensations—objects in the world—did not always correspond to what was actually perceived, and that indeed things could be mistaken for other things—the sensations admitted to confusion.

Brentano goes on to talk about the different possible answers to this question of the fundamental difference between mental and physical phenomena, until finally settling on the notion that mental phenomena are characterized by “intentional inexistence,” that is to say, by being about something else.

3.
Beginning with a statement of purpose to clarify the difference between mental and physical phenomena by making the definitions and descriptions of each more specific instead of (what he seems to think would be) taking the easy way out and making the descriptions even more generalized, he posits that the idea or “act of presentation” to the consciousness an object of experience in the world is a mental phenomenon. That is, not the object in itself, but that which the mind takes from the efficient cause of a sensation. Furthermore, judgments, beliefs, all emotions, and all recollections are examples of mental phenomena; whereas, physical phenomena are colors, figures, and other such “sensible” objects of experience.

From that point, seeking a more “unified definition” of the difference between the two types of phenomena, Brentano brings up the idea that Descartes, Kant, and others put forth, that the defining feature of mental phenomena is that they do not share with physical phenomena being extended into space and having location. However, he notes, people object that some physical phenomena have no extension, and others that mental phenomena do in fact.

Ultimately he arrives at the Scholastic notion of the intentional inexistence of mental phenomena, their being about something. This aboutness characterizes mental phenomena, argues Brentano, is never shared by physical phenomena: colors and figures, chords and states of heat or cold are not “about” anything in the way that judgments, beliefs, and emotions are. He answers the objection that feelings of pains, like cuts and burns, are not intentional by saying that there are always presentations to our minds, even when we are dealing directly with stimuli within our own bodies. There is always a presentation involved, when the mind is involved; the mind is always directed toward something, and thoughts are always about their objects, even if they do not correspond perfectly with external objects (efficient causes of the presentations).

Brentano goes on to defend other aspects of this theory, such as that mental phenomena can occur simultaneously whereas physical phenomena can only occur serially; and that mental phenomena are only conceived of in the inner consciousness, not externally. Later psychologists would contest various aspects of Brentano’s theory, but it remains highly influential in the field.

On The Extended Mind, Clark & Chalmers (1998)

1.
“The moral is that when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and skin. What makes some information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the relevant role can be played only from inside the body.”

2.
Clark and Chalmers are saying here that, in the ongoing discussion about how cognition originates and where it takes place, there is no reason that scientists and researchers must delimit the mind as only the brain, contained within each person’s physical body. Behaviorists and materialists have attempted to show that there is nothing to the mind outside the body—there is not a soul in the mystical sense, separate from but somehow coinciding with the brain. Clark and Chalmers imply that in the zeal of those (behavioral materialist) writers to show that the mind is contained in the body and, indeed, is merely the name laypeople give to the collection of neurons in the brain, they have gone too far and have put a dogmatic limitation on a person’s cognitive processes being contained solely within each person.

Even outside of strict materialist circles, beliefs are traditionally viewed as being held solely within one’s own mind, unexposed and inaccessible to anyone else except when explicitly given through verbal or written communication. Viewing the body and mind as comprising the functional unit of a person, Clark and Chalmers posit the view that the different roles that different bits of information (and, additionally, some forms of computation) play makes them what they are—in this case, that certain types of information are beliefs because they play the role of beliefs, not that the definition of belief must necessarily include “being contained within the person’s body.”

3.
The claim that the mind can be extended into the world, including beliefs and computations, is a radical one in light of the vast majority of the history of philosophy of the mind. Clark and Chalmers are not content to accept the claim that whatever is outside of the body is outside of the mind; nor are they satisfied with the claim that meaning can be outside of the body and, therefore, the mind must be extended into the world. They claim, instead, that the functional interaction of the body, including the brain, with the outside world, can also constitute mind, or contain it, in a way that allows for the mind to act directly on the objects in the world.

Clark and Chalmers reference investigations in the differences between epistemic and pragmatic actions: while pragmatic actions change something in the world because of physical necessity or desirability, epistemic actions are changes in the world in order to augment cognitive processes (as in the case of physical versus mental rotation of blocks that fit certain sockets, as in, e.g., Tetris). This distinction allows them to distance themselves from the passive externalism of Putnam and Burge, by claiming that epistemic actions engage the world directly in the cognitive loop, and are not merely “dangling at the other end of a long causal chain.” Thus, flipping blocks in Tetris to aid judgment-of-fit of a given block, or rearranging the letters on a tray in a game of Scrabble, are both examples of extended cognition. This, Clark and Chalmers go on to say, is much simpler than the “needlessly complex” explanation of inputs, mental connections, and actions that characterize most cognitive-behavioral speech.

In this way, too, are beliefs and other traditionally “inner” pieces of information given external cognitive existence. Clark and Chalmers point to the case of a man with a peculiar sort of amnesia, who remembers to check his notebook for things he needs to remember; his beliefs about the placement of things and places in the world are contained in that notebook, and are a part of his cognitive processes, even though they are contained physically outside of his head. Their point is that what is important is the role being played by a series of actions or by an external source of information, not by the locations of these sources in space or in relation to the body, whether inside of it or outside.

From the old-dog-new-tricks dept.

Color video running at 30 frames per second, with audio, on an original 4.77MHz 8088 IBM PC Model 5150 with 640K RAM, CGA video, 10MB drive, and Sound Blaster Pro.
No tricks, this is for real! This kind of speed is only achievable using text mode (!) and 8088 assembler.
Programmer: Jim Leonard

That’s right, that’s six hundred forty kilobytes of RAM. Right. The video is great.

Can humans likewise expand our mental capacities or acquire new habits in this kind of dynamic way? I’m becoming less cynical on the topic. Gradually.

read more | digg story

“What is mind?  Where is it located?  How can we understand mind in a physical universe?”  These are the questions my PHIL 520 class purports to address.  So far we’ve covered dualism and are beginning this week into behaviorism.  Now, I’ve battled dualism, and behaviorism is a necessary evil, a stepping stone in the history of psychology; but I’m looking forward to plugging away at these so as to get to the good stuff.  More later, but suffice to say I can’t wait to work with this a little more as the semester progresses.

Meanwhile, do you have answers to any of the above questions?  What leads you to your answers?  What questions do these bring up?  I’m thinking: what if the presupposition of a physical universe (qua materialistic) is fallacious to begin with?  But do I have reason to even raise that question apart from my own assumptions about Christian ontology?

Actually, I do, and it rests on the constitution of the physical.  But that’s certainly for another time.

http://thinkblog.org/media/papers/PhillipsMC_2005_ContextAdverbs.pdf

Phillips, M. C. (2005). On-line lexical decision testing of contextual fit of adverbs prior to and following verb presentation. Unpublished manuscript.

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Final paper from the culmination of the work of the semester. Results aren’t significant statistically, but numerically suggestive. Download the 95.5 KB PDF file here or in the title of this post. Let me know what you think; girlfriend and others who are already bored to tears with the title are exempt.

I designed a presentation on a series of papers to give the class Tuesday. Next Tuesday is another presentation, but meanwhile, check this one out: PSYC572 presentation (220.7KB PDF).

The thesis is, if psycholinguistically we interpret objects of subject-verb pairs more quickly if they fit in context than if not—then do we interpret adverbs in the same way? Hmm.

References:

McKoon, G., Ratcliff, R., & Ward, G. (1994). Testing theories of language processing: An empirical investigation of the on-line lexical decision task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1219-1228.

Nicol, J. L., Fodor, J. D., & Swinney, D. (1994). Using cross-modal lexical decision tasks to investigate sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1229-1238.

Nicol, J. L., & Swinney, D. (1989). The role of structure in coreference assignment during sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 5-20.

Sharkey, A., & Sharkey, N. (1992). Weak contextual constraints in text and word priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 543-572.

Now that I have BBClone up and running, I can see who’s hitting my site for what again, and I tell you, this is some fun stuff. Let’s see what I can do here. First off, Serbian queries are consistently odd (no need to go into details), but that’s probably just me. I’m sure “libz.a” is odd to some people, too. Nevertheless, here are some things with which I can help!

• Aaron Beck has done a great deal of work on developing his “Automatic thoughts” theories. One of the best books I’ve read on how this can play out in relationships–and what to do about them–is Love is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Problems.
  

  

• “men and why they lie” is one of the funniest queries I’ve seen yet, and one of the most honest. Men lie for the same reason women lie. Actually, I’d like to know “why women lie” in this context, but when it comes right down to it, it’s pride, worry, selfishness, self-protection, or some other devious motive. I think that about sums up the reason anyone does anything wrong, though, don’t you?
• You can find loads of details on how human reproduction works here.
• In the movie the Passion of the Christ, there was spoken Aramaic, a “slang” Latin, and Greek.
• For my Brazilian reader, the English verb “to realize” along with any other verb can be conjugated automatically at this site (note that I do not endorse anything else they’re about, just found it through a Googling).

That’s it for now. Thanks for querying, and I hope you (all) come back often!

In the introductory paragraphs of the seventh chapter of Friedman & Schustack’s Personality (2003), the authors make another reference to evolution as the end-all, be-all of psychology:

Although philosophers have long been concerned with the nature of the human mind, it was not until Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution liberated thinking about human nature that cognitive psychology could begin in earnest. That is, only after the human mind came to be seen as a biological organism rather than a fixed creation from the divine being could scientists begin to explore how thinking changed as a child developed […].

Now, there’s nothing wrong with hypothesizing certain things about what the theory of evolution did and did not allow scientists to conceptualize, but some of the assumptions here are as preposterous as the ones I’ve already addressed.

There seems to be this conception throughout this book–which might as well have been written by popular culture for all its spiritual depth and philosophical rigor–that Christianity and indeed all so-called “Western” religion is static and all its adherents are thus as well.

It isn’t that the concept of “fixed creation” doesn’t do justice to the concept of creation, it’s that it has nothing whatsoever to do with it! There is no sense in which the Judeo-Christian notion of the individual is unstudyable, unanalyzable, impenetrable. This is patently untrue.

This is something that I come across time and again: Christians don’t believe that they can benefit from psychology (and other related fields) because the majority of its professors espouse materialistic atheism; and likewise, thinkers in many scientific fields believe they cannot find faith because they would have to sacrifice their reason and intellect.

We may know that there are limits on what we can see into ourselves (i.e., metacognitive limits) and others (i.e., extrapolation of motivation, &c. from others’ actions), but one of the great joys of being a Christian psychologist or a Christian philosopher is not having all the right answers, but starting with better questions. Don’t let pop psychology, narcissistically obsessed with its own latest and greatest findings and hypotheses, distract you from the great questions that knowledge of God opens up for you.