Rich has made an interesting interlocutor the past few months. About once a week he makes a comment over in the Heidegger and the Other thread from March. I was going to just put an other comment there but figured I'd break out an other post. The issue is why worry about externalism at all? There are two issues. One is linguistic. That is whether our mental terms can really be done justice by just talking about what ultimately is neural states or types of neural states. While that's interesting and perhaps where there's the most philosophical focus there is an other issue. The more "pragmatic" one. That is what is ultimately helpful for our understanding.
Now it goes without saying that most psychology and cognitive science adopts a fairly Cartesian approach to the subject matter regardless of their particular stances. Roughly one considers input states and then output states and asks what happens in between. The input states can typically be seen as a kind of representation or quasi-representation of the outside world. But what is really happening outside doesn't matter. All that matters is current and past inputs and perhaps predictions about future inputs.
Don't get me wrong this can be useful and certainly tells us a lot. But only up to a point.
That's because actions aren't merely about inputs and outputs.
Consider an analogy. On a network if a computer is failing I can replace the computer and put similar software on it and expect it to work. But consider taking the brain of some famous musician like Eric Clapton. If we put his brain in my body we wouldn't expect him to be able to play the way he does right now. That's because the action of playing music isn't just about input and output but how the brain relates to particular bodies. So in that fashion brains are unlike computers. Further to understand the kinds of actions we engage in we have to include more than the brain. At a minimum we have to include the body and most of the time we have to include the environment.
An other example might be the ARPANET project of developing an AI that will drive a car across the Mojave desert. (Of practical important given the roadside explosives that are the weapon of choice of insurgents and terrorists in Iraq) However clearly the task and action of driving isn't merely about the program running on the computer. If one changed something about the car then most likely the program couldn't engage in the action. Both have to be developed together. Further to understand the computer program one has to understand the vehicle and vice versa.
I recognize this is ultimately a trivial point. But it is, I think, an important one easily overlooked. While one can always talk about brain actions and that is very useful, if we talk about the actions of persons we are almost always talking about more than brain.
And of course this returns us to the linguistic issue since the kinds of words we use (belief, intent, etc.) are about usually actions and not just mental states. If I intend to go to the store, am tranquilized and put in the Matrix with a false store I go to, clearly I've not fulfilled my intent. Our mental topic words often include an essential externalist aspect to them. Philosophers have attempted to deal with these in various ways. (Which I'll not get into - although they are the status quo right now) However I'm simply not convinced by them.
It probably goes without saying, but I agree with you. I disagree that it's a trivial point. It's not, and many debates in cognitive science and philosophy of mind have centered around it. I also disagree that it's been overlooked. There is, of course, the whole embodied cognition paradigm, which has unfortunately been dominated by unscientific hacks (like George Lakoff) and less hackish people who are averse to working out the details to a sufficient extent to make their work productive (like Gilles Fauconnier). And within mainstream cognitive science, particularly in robotics, where output-to-action relationships are important -- 'cause you can't make a robot kick a soccer ball without getting its legs to move in the right way -- serious attention is paid to embodiment.
When functionalism was fully dominant in philosophy of mind (it's still pretty dominant, really), cognitive scientists tended to overlook embodiment because they were more interested in figuring out what sorts of processes were operating on input to produce output (for example, given sentence as input, what processes lead to the brain comprehending the sentence?). For a long time, these processes were viewed as amodal, and it was just assumed that if you could figure out the types of symbols, and the rules for manipulating them, in the brain, you could reproduce the processes in a computer. A debate is currently raging over the importance of embodiment at that level of explanation. Is embodiment important in explaining how the brain understands sentences? That is, does embodiment affect the rules for manipulating the input to produce the output? Does it affect the structure and/or content of the input? I think yes, of course, but there are strong arguments on both sides, and it's a debate that's likely to rage for a long time.
Well I'm just not up on all the figures or movements in cognitive science. So when I said it was trivial and overlooked I was more thinking of people I talk with and maybe, to a far lesser extent, philosophers of mind. (Of course there are externalists in philosophy of mind, but they are definitely the minority)
Ah, OK. For a long time, it was overlooked in cog sci, but over the last couple decades, it's become a major issue. Which, for the reasons you note, is a very good thing.
To add I should note that outside of one book on symbolic methods in cognitive science edited by Umberto Eco in the early 90's, I'd actually never read any cognitive science books until you suggested it. I've been bitten by the bug and have quite a few on the shelf here waiting to be read. But I really need a general reader that can point to the broader issues in the field, the major names, and the controversies. I know of quite a few for philosophy but if you have any good suggestions for cognitive science I'd be quite interested.
It's not that what really happens outside that doesn't matter. It is we have no access to what really happens outside. The environment as noumena is not accessible to us. The environment is only accessible as phenomena. We take sensory information and convert it into perceptions. However, as creatures of evolution we also need to understand the survival significance of these perceptions. The significance of perceived events is done by tagging the neural codes of these events with an affective marker. It is estimated that this is done by neurons from the amygdala intersects neurons running between the rhinal cortex and the hippocampus. I think the left amygdala tag positive affective markers and the right tags negative ones. This is done for future reference. Now, in the future, all events that are perceived to be similar to this event will trigger a particular affective marker which will in turn trigger a preset survival behavior.
It is like an if-then situation. If the perceived event is similar to previous event then the affective marker associated with the previous event will call forth specific behavioral codes which, when enacted, will initiate certain behaviors. Of course, I'm describing this in gross oversimplification.
We don't have to wait for perceived events to initiate these behavioral codes. We can initiate them ourselves. If we want to walk, we initiate the walking behavioral codes and the proper sequence of commands are given to our muscles to initiate walking. Where there are no codes there is no walking. Of course there are limitations to this. For example one must have muscles and neurons that can respond appropriately to these codes. If the neurons aren't firing correctly or the muscles are not strong enough to obey the codes there is no walking.
What is critical in all this is not the input and output neural codes but rather the affective tagging and the development of behavioral codes. Our genetic make-up and the major affective events in our lives becomes the core of who we are. Thus we are not rationally grounded but affectively grounded. This is not all that unusual. All animals work this way in so form or another. To be an animal is to be an affective being. This includes man.
We do not respond to the environment as noumena but only as phenomena. The body has three functions. The first is procreation. The second is to provide sensory information about the environment. Third is to carryout the behavioral codes sent by the brain. The body thus becomes an extension of the brain. As such we should not make a sharp distinction between the two. The sensory information provided to the brain is screened for information deemed important to our survival and tagged, positive and negative. This information is stored for future reference. Similar future events can now quickly call up, because of affective tagging, stored behavioral codes. This saves processing time The aggregate of this information determines, in great measure, who we are. This expresses out animal nature.
What about reason and logic? Both represent processes but are grounded in different foundations. Reason is a process by which we resolve conflicting issues of personal significance. We weigh theses issues on the basis of significance. (I know these are a bit vague as I’m still trying to flesh these thoughts out.) Having gone through this process, we feel confident that the result is “rational”. That is, they are based on sound judgments. While the significance that is being weighed is affectively determined, the result is viewed as rational because of the process the brain went through to determine the result.
This is how we process personally significant information. However, we can approach the perceived environment as perceived environment. This is what we do when we manipulate the environment for our personal needs. A shelter for example, our survival depends on having shelter. How we built that shelter is not personally significant. Only the fact that there is shelter is personally significant. Logic is the process by which we manipulated the environment. Here we are reacting to the environment as environment. By logic I mean “this followed by that followed by that.” Clark your probably cringing at that definition but it gets across what I’m trying to say. Logic in linear. When we process environment as personally significant, the brain processes the information by parallel processing. When we process the environment as environment we process it linearly. Where Aristotle made his mistake is when he assumed that the tool we use to process the environment as environment is the same tool we use to process the environment as personally significant. They are both processes but their foundation is very different.
We are affective beings who use logic to manipulate the environment in order to meet our affective needs. This doesn’t address the issue of language but perhaps I can address that issue on your posting on Deconstruction and Speech Acts. Be patient, I think slow. :)))
Rich
It's not that what really happens outside that doesn't matter. It is we have no access to what really happens outside. The environment as noumena is not accessible to us.
I agree. But for a third person account that attempts to understand the processes that outside is known and is important. Now if one demands foundationalism and absolute knowledge of a sort, then of course one demands a focus on input and output and those being fully defined. I'm enough of a fallibilist to think we never have that. That is that not only do we not ever fully know the outside but we don't fully know the inside. We can talk about input and output but where we put that line of demarcation is somewhat arbitrary and that signals from this point don't function in a fully determinate way.
Once you allow for that then thinking in terms of input and output loose the absolutist value that once had. Since we have a relationship to them that is very similar to our relationship to the outside.
That's not to deny that as a pragmatic matter they aren't important. But then I've tried to be clear that I don't deny the value of such analysis. I just find them incomplete.
In my opinion the only way to analyze in terms of input and output is via a third person approach. But at that point you have just as good access to the environment itself. So why discount it? I think we have to keep somewhat separate cognitive science and phenomenology. Phenomenology is helpful to give data to cognitive science. It is perhaps not as helpful as a way of grounding cognitive science inquiry. Various modes of Cartesian foundationalism are even worse (IMO).
Clark: In my opinion the only way to analyze in terms of input and output is via a third person approach. But at that point you have just as good access to the environment itself. So why discount it? I think we have to keep somewhat separate cognitive science and phenomenology. Phenomenology is helpful to give data to cognitive science. It is perhaps not as helpful as a way of grounding cognitive science inquiry.
To begin with, I’m using phenomena as the conscious end result of the interpretation of neural inputs by cognitive processing. I also view affection as an integral part of the cognitive process. This is simply how the brain presents the external to us. I think it is important to realize that what we know about the external is a creation of the brain and not the external as it actually is. It helps to explain a wealth of hard to understand behavioral actions. Having said that, I agree with you that analyzing inputs and outputs can only be done via the third person. And, this ties into Foundationalism. As I understand it, foundationalism basically states that all knowledge rests upon a foundation of noninferential knowledge. Inferential knowledge is an extension of noninferential knowledge by the use of logic. It seems that some form of foundationalism explains how we acquire third person knowledge.
It does not explain the acquisition of first person knowledge. First person knowledge is that knowledge that the individual entity uses in order to survive in the environment. It is knowledge that has personal significance for the entity itself. Knowing exactly where to find honey is first person knowledge because it has personal significance for the entity. Knowing the chemical makeup of honey is third person knowledge. First person knowledge is establish through linking of perceived external events to affection. The linking seems to occur where neurons of the amygdala intersect neurons going from the rhinal cortex to the hypocampus. Events which are interpreted as positive events, meaning it helps in survival is imprinted by the left amydala and events which represent danger to the entity are imprinted by the right amygdala (or maybe vise versa). The imprinting is necessary for establishing long-term memory. It also seems to call forth behaviors commensurate with the nature of the affection. It turns information into actionable knowledge for the survival of the entity.
This kind of knowledge is the product of parallel processing. For example, the thalamus detects an unusual sound which might represent a threat. Signals from the thalamus are sent to the amygdala to prepare the body for either fight or fight. At the same time the thalamus sends the signal to frontal cortex for analysis. These actions are performed at the same time making it parallel processing. Thus first person information processing is parallel processing.
Third person processing, since it uses logic, is linear processing and is performed in a separate part of the frontal cortex. Thus, first person knowledge processing is done through parallel processing and is affective in nature. Third person knowledge processing is linear processing and is logical in nature. All animals process external information through parallel processing. So far as I know, man is the only animal which has the ability to also processes external information through linear processing. This would make linear processing a latter addition grafted onto the older parallel processing system. Since our personal history makes us who we are (within limitations) and since personally significant past events are processed by parallel processing, who we are, individually, is established through affective imprinting and not logic. Aristotle got it wrong. Man is not a rationale animal but rather an affective animal (like all other animals) to which linear processing has been grafted. It is this linear processing which allows us to have a third person perspective.
Thus foundationalism as a theory of how man acquires knowledge is incomplete. It only tells part of the story. We actually acquire two different types of knowledge based on whether the information is processed as first person knowledge or third person knowledge. That knowledge which determines who we are rather than what we know is affectively grounded.
These two different ways by which the brain processes external information is essential to understanding, I believe, why you think processing in terms of inputs and outputs by the brain is somehow incomplete. Third person processing is done at the symbolic level. We can envision many of the components involved and over time it begins to form a pattern. It may be incomplete, but it is a pattern nonetheless. And because it is symbolic it is easier to detect where there are missing pieces. First person processing is at the non-symbolic level. That is, we cannot look within us and gain a symbolic representation of affective imprinting for example. We know that information goes in as somatic sensations. And, we know that signals go out in the form of behavior. But when compared directly the two don’t seem to match up. We are left with the feeling of incompleteness. Unfortunately, third person knowledge can not be translated into first person knowledge. So as much as it might help us at understanding symbolic processes, non-symbolic processes cannot become symbolized for the first person. Thus we are left with a feeling of incompleteness. So while we may someday have a complete understand of the process symbolically, that is in the third person, we never will at the non-symbolic or first person level,
As I mentioned above, we should probably not look at the brain and body as two completely different entities. The body exists in order that the brain may survive. In order for the brain to survive it must know about the environment. Thus the body becomes an extension of the brain, its information gathering extension. Without this sensory input the brain cannot respond to external threat and becomes cognitively unstable. The brain needs to be nourished, kept safe, be entertained etc. The body becomes the extension of the brain’s needs through being directed by the brain to obtain these needs. Thus we can look at the body as extensions of the brain existing to meet the needs of the brain. We do not have one without the other.
Rich
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble