I know quite a few people who read this blog are either experts in cognitive science or at least have more than a passing interest in it. (Chris, of Mixing Memory being the cognitive science uber-blogger) I know Chris picked up Peirce's Reasoning and the Logic of Things, perhaps due to my review of it. It's an excellent book but really not the best introduction to Peirce. It's rather mathematical in places where I suspect people would prefer simplicity. I'm pretty convinced that Peirce is relevant to cognitive science but I know little cognitive science to really be able to argue this claim. (It's mainly a gut reaction, although I discussed Peirce in our Tomasello reading club) Anyway there actually is a very new book that is basically information theory and cognitive science as done through a Peircean prism. The book is Cybersemiotics by Søren Brier. I've not read the book so I can't really comment too much on it. Although the author does post on Peirce-L occasionally. It does look rather interesting and I'm thinking of putting it in my Amazon queue.
Here's a summary from Brier's home page.
The current cognitive science information processing paradigm is criticized from a phenomenological and ethological point of view as being an insufficient foundation of information science because it lacks an evolutionary theory of embodied first person experience and signification.
As a constructive alternative is formulated a new trans-disciplinary framework (Cybersemiotics). This is based on an integration of a modernized version of Peirce’s semiotics in the form of biosemiotics, which is integrated with Luhmann’s communicational systems theory. elements from embodied cognitive semantics, ethology and language game theory are also used. The theory development is embedded in an ongoing philosophy of "science" reflection on the possibility of a non-reductionistic Transdisciplinarity. Opting for a transdisciplinary framework, after ALL postulates a sort of unity of sciences at a metalevel distinguishing the natural and social sciences as well has humanities from other symbolic generalized media such as politics, art and religion.
I should note on a similar theme that I'm in the midsts of reading Wheeler's Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step which appears to do something similar but from a revised Heideggarian approach. (Enowning quoted from a review last week)
To add, a summary of Brier dissertation, which I suspect the book may be an expansion of, can be downloaded here.
because it lacks an evolutionary theory of embodied first person experience. While I would readily agree that one of the main problems with AI and cognitive science is that it lacks a theory of embodied first person experience, I don't see why it has to be evolutionary. I also don't see how it can be done evolutionarily. Evolutionary theory is fundamentally an objectification of all species, including humans, with no room for an account of subjectivity. At least as I see evolutionary theory.
I don't see how evolution leaves no room for the first person. Could you expand a bit?
I obviously can't speak for David Clark, but I've heard similar lines of thought before. Basically, from an evolutionary standpoint, subjectivity/consciousness seems a bit superfluous, at least on certain, rather troublesome conceptions of subjectivity/consciousness. What's the evolutionary 'function' of consciousness? What evolutionary benefits do we gain from consciousness which couldn't just as easily be obtained without its addition? The argument boils down to a variation of the zombie conceivability argument against physicalism. If we can conceive of beings identical to us save consciousness, then consciousness is non-physical. If consciousness is evolutionary unnecessary, then it is non-physical. I think both arguments fail in assuming that consciousness is something which can be removed with a snap of the magician's fingers. That is, the concept of consciousness is a conflation of a mass of processes, much like the concept of health. No one believes that it's possible to remove the health of an athlete without doing physical damage to her, why believe it's possible to remove consciousness without doing the same?
I don't think that the objections that Collin raises are even valid objections to an evolutionarily based account of first person/subjective experience. Consciousness would have evolutionary advantages because it give an organism self knowledge which is very valuable for self preservation. Given an appropriate mating strategy this could be a benefit to propagation of the species, and hence evolutionarily beneficial. The zombie argument doesn't fly for the simple reason that zombies don't exist, so there is no real way to analyze them evolutionarily, so they don't pose a roadblock to an evolutionary account of first person/subjectivity.
I have several objections.
First, the data is lacking and I don't see how you are going to get it. While the fossil record and genetics are good at following general trends over long periods of time. The development of human first person hood is recent, meaning the traditional sources of evolutionary data will not have much to say. Any evolutionary account will most likely lead to an account of neuronal structures, brain patterns, as I don't know where else you are going to find first person-ness. This further limits objective data to comparing humans with living species and each other. Few species exhibit any evidence of first person/subjective experience and the cognitive gap between us and them is too large in my opinion to provide much meaningful data.
My second objection is that an account of first person/subjective experience is logically prior to any evolutionary account, because it is a being with first person experience which creates/discovers any evolutionary account of first person/subjective experience. I think Husserl was correct in arguing that there needs to be an account of consciousness and subjectiveness which grounds scientific accounts, not vice versa.
My third objection is that an evolutionary account would necessarily bring in many assumptions that limit explanatory options which in my opinion would doom the account. As a simple example, if you provide an evolutionary account of first person/subjective experience you immediately have taken libertarian free will off the table as any evolutionary account would necessarily be compatibilist. Perhaps there are evolutionary accounts of libertarian free will, but I have not seen them (granted I haven't looked very hard) and they would have to be extraordinarily creative to work.
My fourth objection is that it can't answer the "What is it like to be a bat?" question. An evolutionary account will necessarily be objective and third person. It will never be able to give an account of what is the experience of first person-ness like. That is a fundamental part of subjective/first person experience.
I don't have time to answer in depth. Hopefully later tonight.
I'll just quickly say that evolution is important because the brain evolved in some sense and that has to be accounted for. Take this as a kind of opposition to a form of Cartesianism.
My view on these matters is virtual 180 degrees from David Clark's. In the first place, one needs to distinguish between primary perceptual consciousness and human self-consciousness, the former being a neurally embedded system and the latter an effect of language and social interaction, though, of course, there must be high-order brain processing that sustains language and social interaction and thus "houses" self-conciousness and first person selfhood. And I think that primary perceptual consciousness can and will be explained in realistic, i.e. non-reductive, but causally materialist and evolutionary-emergentist, terms. The first point to realize is that perception involves categorization, not simply the registration of sensory inputs: unless inputs are categorized, or in more physicalist language, bound and labeled, perception does not occur. Hence organisms must evolve categories and store them in various forms of neural memory. And the significant features by which categories are formed and organized from sensory inputs will be value-weighted for salience in accordance with the needs of the life-process of the organism, such that there will evolve some degree of pattern-matching between the statistical regularities of the environment and those of the organism's own functioning. When all the sensory modes are integrated into a kind of simultaneous screen of representation and connected up with value-categorical memory, then there is the emergence of a neural primary consciouness system: consciousness is a remembered present. Note that one could have perceptual integration without a systematic connection with value-categorizing memory, or a value-categorizing system without perceptual integration, and there would be no consciousness. Given the high energy-budget and developmental costs of increased neural complexity, a sufficiently compensating evolutionary selection advantage must be adduced. A reasonable generalized guess at that advantage is that a consciousness system endows the organism with an increased profficiency in integrating perception and motility, improving the organism's proprioceptive orientation in its environment. But the main point would be that consciousness, at least in a rudimentary and rather undifferentiated form might be a fairly widely distributed mental capacity amongst terrestrial animals. A lobster would not be conscious, but a lizard might be, and, given the need for orientation in flight, I'd guess that birds are at least minimally conscious. Under naturalistic, evolutionary norms of explanation, it would be inexplicable, akin to a miracle, if humans were conscious and other prior and collateral species were not, though human primary consciousness would be orders of magnitude greater in terms of differentiation and complexity than the systems of other species. And under a realistic premise, consciousness would not have evolved unless at least some of the organic behavioral decisions or selections of the organism were not processed through it. At any rate, it's nowadays a fairly well established matter of empirical biological fact, not speculation, that brains map their bodies and proprioceptive processes, that they develop embryologically partly through selectionist processes, ("internal Darwinism") in conjunction with the bodies to which they belong, and that they "wire" themselves in interaction with bodily processes through selection through frequencies of neural activity, ("neuronal group selection"), such that each brain is, indeed, exactly fitted to its body, and the distributed anatomy of no two brains is exactly alike. (Brains process or mediate the relation between organic metabolisms and their environments, but it would be a gross exageration to say that they are just another kind of membrane, assilimating environmental resources and eliminating wastes and toxins: I am reminded however of a phrase from Nietzsche, "the soul, as thin as if stretched between two membranes".)
This gets into the issues of embodiment and the organism/environment relation as necessary to an understanding of "mindedness" that was raised in an earlier post here, with respect to cognitive psychology or science, and the temptation to what might be called "Berkeleyan materialism" with respect to brain processing. The relation of an organism to its environment is partly modal: the organism exists as a function of adaption to its environment, but what the environment is is partly a function of the selection of its salient features for the life-process of the organism. An elephant and an ant standing side by side are not in the "same" environment, not just because of the difference in scale, but because of the difference in features oriented to. An eco-system is not a single Platonically objective space, but a series of linked organism/environment relations, (such that the ant might feed off of the elephant's dung in some fashion, in the process recycling organic nutrients that fertilize the plants that the elephant eats). The organism/environment is not an either/or opposition, but a both/and synergy. Mental properties and capacities, consciousness, and mindedness, (which are distinct issues, language-processing, for example, being mostly mental, but mostly unconscious), can not be understood by abstracting them out from the complexes from which they emerge. I would also add that mental properties and capacities are not necessarily all-of-a-piece or singularly integrated and that there are no clear lines of demarcation between the mental, the behavioral, and the physiological, but likely the three interact in generating what we tend to think of as mental phenomena. (Importantly, following a rule is as much a behavioral as a mental phenomenon).
But I claimed that self-consciousness and a sense of personal selfhood were the effect of language and communicative interaction. Again, assuming naturalistic evolutionary norms of explanation, human natural language, digitally encoded, syntactically organized and semantically relatively self-stabilized, emerged and developed out of pre-linguistic analog systems of animal communication, (which are still present after a fashion, since human natural language is simultaneously a digital and an analog system, with most of the modal-relational or illocutionary components of meaning-constitution being conveyed in the analog stream, what linguists call "paralanguage", tone, rhythm, gesture, and the like, which also go to setting up contextual markers in spoken interaction). And language would presumably never have emerged, except on the basis of a long prior evolution of animal sociality and of the analog communication which mediates and is mediated by it, (whether or not that involved group selection). It's tempting to think of consciousness as a cognitive phenomenon and of cognition as a direct function of adaption to the environment, such that increases in cognitive-instrumental intelligence emerge as a "tool" for adaption. But I tend to think that the relation is more round-about, and that increases in brain size, neural complexity and the differentiation of consciousness systems were primarily driven by adaptions to social complexity, (and I would explain the evolution of emotions as relational responses), though the two factors need not be conceived as mutually exclusive, but could have looped into each other, with increased cognitive-instrumental capacities increasing the problems of social complexity and increased social complexity and cooperative behaviors amplifying cognitive-instrumental capacities. At any rate, primates as an order are characterized most of all by an intensification of animal sociality, (though other groups, such as elephants, cetaceans, some canines, show marked sociality).
But if it's the modal relation to the other and processes of communicative interaction within and across the world that "fold" consciousness into itself and form high-order self-consciousness and the self-relation organized into personal self-hood, then, though consciousness, mentality, motivation, and organic function are underlying conditions sine qua non of language and meaning, they do not, of and by themselves, constitute the phenomena of language and meaning, even if they feed into them. And much of what we attribute to "mind" is neither individual, nor internal or intra-cranial, but rather is an internalization of processes of communicative interaction in and across the world. (Call that a post-materialist, a forteriori post-idealist version of Hegelian "Geist", if you will). And my thesis is that "meaning" is generated through such processes, whereby organisms modally relate to and interact with each other, in such wise that the stance of one organism does not "cause" the state of the other organism, nor vice versa, but such modal stances mutually condition each other, such that the "spark" of meaning is generated, with its relations of inferences that, again, are as much behavioral as mental. If there is a dualism at issue here it is not that between mind and matter, but between causality and irreducible meaning. But again that dualism is not an either/or opposition, but a both/and complementarity. In other words, there is a basic distinction to be made between rule-governed behavior/activity and causal processes, whether lawful or not. And there is not an explanatory gap between first and third person perspectives, because that is an incomplete grammar and misses the crucial dimension and role of the second person perspective.
One of the points that Wittgenstein makes in his remarks on rule following in PI, with his odd and seemingly implausible examples of delinquent counters, is that rules don't apply themselves and that there are no rules for the application of rules, on pain of infinite regress. I don't recall that he really brings out the point that there is no such thing as following just one rule, that if one is following a rule, then there are also other rules in force as well, that constrain the following of that rule. In other words, rules always come at least minimally as quasi-systems. But the deeper question he is inquiring into is what it means to understand, and the implied answer seems to me to be that understanding occurs at a conjuncture of rules. Hence rule-governed behavior is the fore-court of understanding. (If a pride of lions, when it hunts, pursues cooperative and variable strategies, then that implies that they grasp the following of rules, and the lions can be said, albeit very minimally, to understand what they are doing). But also rule-governed behavior is the fore-court of human agency, "freedom". I don't think the objection that a neuro-biological,- and thus canonically evolutionary,- explanation of "mind" forecloses a "libertarian" account of "free will" counts as a valid objection. That's begging the question, and it's not clear why "free will" should be at all criterial for such an explanation. But I'll make two basic comments on the matter. One is that I don't like the expression "free will", which evokes an old problematic of "free will vs. necessity" most signally articulated by Kant, but going back to, I think, to Augustine, which I don't think formulates the issue well, but obscures it behind an exclusive binary opposition, and the dubiousness of both the terms of the opposition. And further, I basically buy Heidegger's critique of the subjectivist metaphysics of the will. The second comment is that I don't care for the way that arguments over "agent causation" are staged in analytic philosophy, wherein the "first" question to be addressed is how the phenomenon is intelligible at all, which strikes me as a residual philosophical foundationalism, rather than the more "phenomenological" question of what the real phenomenon in question is or how it is to be identified, if it is to be at all in some sense explained or rendered intelligible. The three basic options of determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism strike me as flawed, precisely because, as Levinas makes clear, they continue the tradition by which "freedom" is implicitly measured against causality and its mastery, instead of in terms of the relation to the other constitutive of meaning. Though my own surmises would be closest to compatibilism, I don't see why prior causality should "necessarily" be projected as future possibility, such that the two must be somehow construed as "identical", aspects of the same "thing". My crude explanation of human agency is simple: only when there is language with its recombinant symbolism, is there the possibility of interpreting states-of-affairs in the world counterfactually in terms of the possibilities of specifically altering them and deliberately selecting an intervention in the causal chains of the world to bring about the desired and chosen "end", the alteration in the state-of-affairs. Animals already constitute a separate organization of causality that delimits itself from environmental chains of causality and selectively intervenes behaviorally in those state-of-affairs. But animals only exist in a specious present and only respond to environmental states-of-affairs or cycles of such. The problem of agency is not the peculiarly estranged question of how does my brain move my arm. That is just animal motility and is to be explained neurophysiologically. Agency instead is something "built" over animal motility, and works with and through causal processes, rather than somehow completely surmounting them. Now language, as a finite set of elements and rules that can generate a potentially infinite number of sentences or utterances, is a structured phenomenon, a rule-governed activity, such that the rules of language are at bottom constitive of it, and one can say a great many things in language, but only through submitting to the structural constraint of its rules. Something of the same goes for agency, partly by direct overlap, partly by analogy. Agency is a constitutively constrained phenomenon, a rule-governed activity, which renders it finite and limited, but also renders it possible and hence "real". Agency, "freedom", is something like optimal constraint, with too much as too little constraint being a default of agency. Again, agency is more of a collective than an individual phenomenon, with the possible rules of agency being generated out of processes of communicative interaction within the socio-lingustic group, such that the absence or refusal of the recognition of agency can do actual damage to the existence of agency and the sense of self that it sustains. But it's the relation to the other, that generates the surplus or excess of meaning over its distribution to states-of-affairs in the world, beyond any rules in force, that points beyond any processes reducible to just "mind", that also allows for the possibility that we can come to grips with questions of "mind" and mindedness. But in terms of the alleged opposition between agency and causality, as far as I can see, the only requirements for the acceptance of agency as a real, if limited, phenomenon is a certain underdetermination of agency by causal processes that "corresponds" to a certain openness of the causal brain processes that underlie mentality and consciousness; in other words, an explanatory logic of open systems.
As to the fourth objection, I've never understood exactly the issue of the supposed irreducibility of qualia as a problem of mindedness. Why is it more than a second or higher order reflection of sensory contrasts? And why are, e.g. colors, secondary qualities and therefore purely mental? If one wants to explain the motions of physical bodies, then their colors are irrelevant and mass, volume, velocity, shape and the like are the relevant criteria. But if one wants to explain the absorption or reflection of radiated heat by a body, or its attractiveness to birds and bees, then color is a relevant criterion and just as much physically real. So why is the case of the echo-location of bats so different from the case of blind persons, whose brains tranfer certain sensory-categorical discriminations from the "normal" reliance on sight to other senses, such that, e.g. touching a face yields personal recognition in a way unfathomable to a sighted person? And it's been shown that congenitally blind persons can understand at least the syntactical function of color terms. Why should we assume that our inferential and analogical capacities stop at or are limited by the given form of our senses? And why should we assume that our own forms of mindedness are the limits of the physically real? Hence that our own inevitably local and finite mindedness "constitutes" all possbilities of intelligibility?
One of the implication of Dembski's work on the No Free Lunch theorems, which culminates in what he calls the Law of Conservation of Information, is that intelligence is not reducible to matter.
evolution is important because the brain evolved in some sense and that has to be accounted for. Agreed. However, all of my objections still hold.
john: Brevity is the soul of wit. Please keep it pithy next time, I'm pretty busy and generally respond to comments while I wait for code to compile on my machine.
In any event. Your first paragraph basically states that consciousness has evolutionary advantages and that other organisms posess a more limited form of consciousness. I agreed to all of that in my post.
Your second paragraph seems to say that evolution is a product of a complex relationship between organism and environment. Yes, Biology 101.
I couldn't make much out of the third paragraph. It's pretty incoherent. Especially this part: human natural language, digitally encoded, syntactically organized and semantically relatively self-stabilized, emerged and developed out of pre-linguistic analog systems of animal communication, . Are you really saying that human language is digitally encoded and that animal communication systems are analog? Last I checked all animals, humans included, are analog based (no digital systems of any kind involved). Or do I have a hidden microchip in my brain that I don't know about? Analog/digial distinctions will get you nowhere and don't explain anything as both are equally powerful computationally.
Fourth paragraph: Sorry, couldn't make much of the fourth paragraph.
Fifth paragraph: I don't think the objection that a neuro-biological,- and thus canonically evolutionary,- explanation of "mind" forecloses a "libertarian" account of "free will" counts as a valid objection. That's begging the question, and it's not clear why "free will" should be at all criterial for such an explanation. O.K. I'll lay my cards on the table. I think humans have libertarian free will. Evolutionary accounts leave you with at best compatibilist free will or no free will at all. Hence I think evolutionary accounts don't explain one of the most fundamental aspects of first person human experience. The rest of the paragraph basically states that you think the free will debate is crap and you don't like the terms I use (or Kant or Augustine). As I was reading this paragraph I was waiting and waiting for the redefinition of agency. Too many arguments in philosophy center around simply redefining terms by the way. It took a long time, because this is a very long paragraph, but sure enough you said: Again, agency is more of a collective than an individual phenomenon. Sorry, agency is all about the individual and has zilch to do with "the collective" (when did we become Borg?, I guess resistance was futile so I didn't notice). You can pretend it isn't but then we can't really have any conversation or debate on the matter since we can't come to an agreement of terms.
Sixth paragraph: So why is the case of the echo-location of bats so different from the case of blind persons, whose brains tranfer certain sensory-categorical discriminations from the "normal" reliance on sight to other senses, such that, e.g. touching a face yields personal recognition in a way unfathomable to a sighted person? Oh I don't know, maybe because bats are completely different than humans. If you are going to go on and on about how consciousness is derived from language (and you did go on and on about it), then you have to allow that different types of languages produce different kinds of consciousness. Hence an account of what it means to be a human and use human language will be totally different than that of a bat. Hence my objection.
Clark,
I realize that this is just going to end up being an argument about the nature of science, which you and I have rehashed continuously on your blog. We'll never come to an agreement about it, so don't feel compelled to respond to what I say. You can of course if you want, you have free will after all (actually, maybe you don't; Kant, Augustine, and I are pretty dim witted folk).
In any case I sense I have jacked the thread so I will discontinue commenting here. My apologies.
Jared, most are rather unconvinced by Dembski. I don't have time for a tangent on that unfortunately. Lots of folks have blogged about it and the problems though.
David, note that my only really answer was regarding why some feel cognitive science has to address evolution. It's akin to why discussions of cell biology often have an evolutionary component. To answer the question of "what" entails evolutionary questions.
Now one can debate how solid of evidence for such matters one can provide. In that I actually agree. I tend to see Evolutionary Psychology as a lot of hand waving, for instance. But I think the questioning is useful. Indeed most of the most interesting cognitive science books and papers I've read have a strong evolutionary component. I find, for instance, the debate over the rise of language rather interesting. Especially when it gets into morphological discussions of the throat and related discussions of genes that differ between humans and apes and potential uses. Then neural structures. There's still a long ways to got but I think one always has to keep such matter in mind when inquiring into issues of mind.
To your other points I'm still time limited but will try to address them later today.
OK, I'll do these in segments. First David's comments in #5.
1. Lack of data. This is true only up to a point. One thing we can do is comparative studies with various kinds of primates and look at the differences. Often we can see how the change of a few genes changes things. While this still produces at best limited data, it can be quite interesting. Indeed Tomasello's book we'd discussed does this. So do many debates (such as between Pinker and others on language) do this. Now new information is always coming out. (Which falsified Tomasello's thesis although perhaps not the general approach) So I think things are much better than you suggest. I'd add that studies about whether various animals have beliefs about other animals, have self-recognition and so forth are also compelling.
2. Logical priority of consciousness. I think that this would be true only if one philosophically adopts foundationalism. For any anti-foundationalist this simply isn't that compelling an argument. Further I'd note that an ontological logical priority need not imply an epistemological priority. Given the hermeneutic circle I think our knowledge of one will improve our knowledge of the other and so on. So I don't think what you say is true here.
3. Reduction of commitments. I don't quite understand this one and would love to see you clarify it. Even if our evidence points to rejecting certain metaphysical commitments such as Libertarianism I don't see how that is an argument against them. Quantum mechanics suggested certain prior metaphysical commitments were wrong, although some (like David Bohm and Einstein) tried to maintain them. I suspect the same would happen in cognitive science. Oh, regarding consciousness and Libertarianism. Many proponents suggest a kind of emergence often tied to chaotic systems. (Blake endorses this view) In this case they can point exactly to how both Libertarianism and consciousness evolve. Admittedly in a speculative fashion but there's certainly no incompatibility. I'd note that, outside of folks endorsing Thomist souls or Cartesian minds for religious reasons, most people take the need to have a potential explanation of evolution and consciousness seriously.
4. Irreducibility of First Person Accounts. I guess I don't understand this either. Why does evolution of consciousness need to explain what the experience of first person accounts is. This seems an odd criticism to me. Evolution needn't do that. It need only explain how consciousness is possible not the content of that consciousness - although perhaps that's possible as well. The problem Nagel brings up is, of course, just as much a problem for "Other Minds" as well. So if it turns out (as I suspect) many primates are conscious then the fact we can't say what it is like ought imply nothing about what we can say. In the same way that my understanding of cognitive science need not imply I can say exactly what it is like to suffer from a particular form of mental illness.
David Clark:
I apologize for my prolix ramblings. I'm just poaching byte space and picking my feeble brain. I do have some sense of where I'm going and like to have some sense of having roughly completed my case. You are, however, certainly under no obligation to read my incoherencies.
To say that something is digitially encoded means that it operates through discete units and their combinations: in the case of natural language, the units are phonemes and morphemes. I didn't mean to imply that either brains or language operate in any way like a digital computer; to the contrary, my general view is fairly strongly that neither is computer-like much at all, and the the computer is a misleading analogy. The distinction between digital and analog is a bit complicated; in general systems theory, any demarcation of a boundary is a digitalization. Animal communication systems, to the extant that they exist, which is a species specific question, are generally held to operate analogically, that is, through and as a specification of relationships, and their acceptance or rejection, without any syntax, and hence any "aboutness" and any negation. That is one of the reasons that social groups of animals operate with relational hierarchies; with out the relational hierarchy, the communicative system couldn't exist.
The 3rd and 4th paragraphs of gibberish are in the first instance just flat-out Hegel: self-consciousness exists only through its mediation with other self-consciousnesses. Hegel did not recognize his insight as an "effect" of language, since he still held to the traditional primacy of thought over language. So I was attempting to supply something of that missing premise about language, not as a synchronic system of terms, but as a relation to the other and communicative interaction.
I simply don't understand your point about "becoming borg". This strikes me as a binary opposition, in the perjorative sense, whereby if not A, then B, where B is defined simply as not-A without attending to any further features of B, such that through a paradigmatic idealization of A and an inattention to B, an excluded middle is set up, when likely any "true" or adequate answer is to be searched for in that area of the excluded middle. As Wittgenstein put it, don't think (in idealized "pictures"), look ( at graded examples)! I'll admit that I have communitarian leanings, that I don't think that an unsocialized individual exists, that I think socialization and individuation go together, and that I think human beings only really flourish in community with others. Aristotle believed something similar. I also don't understand the claim that agency is either individual or zilch. That seems to ignore the force of the so-called "private language argument". I tend to see the ability to sort and attribute intentions as basically tied to interaction, wherein organism X connects acts A and C through organism Y performing act B, and Y connects act B and D on condition of X performing A and C. At any rate, even if there is such a thing as purely individual agency, (which would involve issues of definition and construal), our capacities as agents are greatly amplified through sociality, and we accomplish much more through cooperation with others than we could individually. I only state such an embarrassingly obvious commonplace, because I think such amplification is already involved in the evolutionary emergence of animal sociality, and one of my main conjectures/theses here is that the evolutionary emergence of more complex and differentiated forms of mentality is tied to the evolution of animal sociality, (which mostly does not occur).
"If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him." Why?Bbecause the body-plan, sensorium, drive-organization, and relational attitudes of a lion are so radically different than those of human being that, unlike the cases of cannibals and missionaries, even if we could recognize and decode his vocalizations as words, they would strike us as so deranged as to be unintelligible. The lion would say, "Yes, I bite that concept." But how can one "bite" a concept? Well, how can one "grasp" a concept?
Like I said I've never understood the problem of qualia as indicating something mysteriously and irreducibly mental. In the first place, I view red as a physical property and in the world, not in the mind. But the apparent question "what is it like to experience red?" strikes me as like "what is it like to compare soething with itself?". I think it's probably more fruitful to take an actual comparative approach and look into issues of pattern-matching. At any rate, the more complicated case of intentional action would be a better point on whcih to rest one's case.
I have plenty of respect for Kant, but you might look at some of the complications of his account. He, indeed, holds to a libertarian account of "free will", but he also holds that the phenomenal world, including "inner sense", so any possible psychology, is subject to a strict causal determinism, so he has no evidence or direct argument for "free will" and is in fact on one side a skeptic about "free will". "Free will" is strictly noumenal for Kant, and the only "evidence" we have for it is the sense of painful compulsion we feel when submit to the moral law that we have autonomously given to ourselves. And then a lawless will is a contradiction in terms, according to Kant, so the will must be determined by law-like necessary properties, after all. And so his account of the exercize of "free will" involves the determination of the will through following a maxim. And what is a maxim? Whatdya know, it's a kind of rule! But Kant finds any worldly or embodied motive for action "pathological", and thereby only acts strictly determined through the moral law, itself purely formal in nature, count as truly "free". Well, I find the extreme internalism and intentionalism, as well as, the formalism and sollipsism of Kant's account of agency, action and ethics troubling and problematic.
I do think, however, that a certain problem of freedom is at the root of philosophy and that all philosophers worth their salt are in some way responding to its puzzle and its ramifications. Philosophy begins with the recognition of the transcendence of Being, that the world exists and moves of itself independent of anything we can do or say about it. But by that very token, there arises a quasi-sysematic rational implicature by which all beings in the world can be construed as a part of a necessary order. And the being that can recognize that necessary order must in some sense be separate from it, hence "free". But at the same time, for both ontological and epistemic reasons, that being must be participant in that order and the broader movement of the world and subject to its necessity, the very necessity it freely recognizes. So that being, let's call it "the soul", is at once part of and subject to the necessary order of the world and a disturbance in that order. It's as if the movements of the microcosmos of the soul lay hidden within or behind the macrocosmic movement that so transcend and overpower it. If that puzzle about human freedom in the world and its connection to human understanding is at the root of philosophy, philosophy is not going to disappear simply because adequate explanations of the causal substrate of mental properties and capacities are arrived at, and reductionist dangers needn't be feared. Care for the world is not eliminated by causal explanations.
But I do think that causal explanations of mental properties and capacities will one day be arrived at and that that is basically a matter of neurophysiology in an evolutionary framework, (rather than psychology, which I think of as descriptive, not causal, or specifically philosophical). Comparative molecular genetics has already transformed cladistics and is bring about a new synthesis of developmental biology and evolutionary theory, so I don't think that a lack of evidence of various kinds will be a problem. Just wait a hundred years! But that also involves examining the phenomena themselves closely to figure out what sorts of "things" might go for means of explanation, which would involve interaction of levels and the belonging-together of disparate elements into aggregates, which emerged and evolved gradually and contigently. The point I was trying to emphasize was that this must be so, not because all causes are necessarily physical,- ( though I'm not averse to such physicalism, only it doesn't tell us much per se),- but because it's necessary to understand the embdiment of mental properties and capcities, the embodiment of mindedness, in order to properly understand their intentional properties.
most are rather unconvinced by Dembski. I don't have time for a tangent on that unfortunately. Lots of folks have blogged about it and the problems though.
Strangely, I have found very few who have either read, or understood, Dembski's work. I tend, as a matter of course, to discount blogs, and look for published reviews. Then I look to the responses.
But if you're not familiar with his work, then I'll shut up and go away.
Wow. I don't know when I'll be able to answer everyone. As I said I'll answer one comment at a time when I time. I'll do your two comments later John, since they are rather long and I want to think about them.
Regarding Dembski, I'll fully admit that I've not read his book and have only read defenses of him by proponents and critiques by various mathematicians. From what I've read the critics have the upper hand. (The talk.origins response probably summarizes a lot of them) Now it may be that the critics do not get him right, as you suggest. And I've just not gone through the detail to be that useful a critic myself. However it seems undeniable as a fact that Dembski isn't exactly convincing people of his views.
Neither did Jesus convert many. Truth is not a popularity contest.
However, if you're interested, here's a link to the latest update of the foundation of his work: Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence
Straight from the horse's mouth.
I think the difference is that in science or mathematics one's evidence ought be convincing to many if one is on the right track. In this it is different from exhorters like Jesus who gave no real justification for his exhortations.
When one has significant commitments to a particular paradigm, one finds it easy to find justifications to reject challenges to its foundations. If you agree that Fisherian hypothesis testing can eliminate chance hypotheses, Dembski's work follows straightforwardly.
The justifications appear to be pretty serious mathematical flaws from what I can see. As I said, I'm just not well enough versed in the debate to be able to debate it. But I've read debates and it seems to me that the anti-ID folks definitely have the strong hand here.
John, first my apologies for the delay in responding. That's quite a lot to chew on. I've had limited time. So my responding is largely in place of writing a post.
Regarding John in (#6)
Like you I think we can reject simple reductionism of the form a lot of popular analytic philosophy of mind has engaged in while still remaining naturalists. I think emergence is the best approach, although I'm deeply skeptical of radical emergence. (i.e. that an ontological difference emerges) I think emergence entails that there is something like proto-mind or proto-consciousness inherent in matter. So I move towards a kind of substance dualism.
Regarding consciousness as a remembered presence I think that hinges upon what we mean by remembrance. I think we can have unconscious memories. Indeed I think it obvious that folks behave due to unconscious memories without realizing what they are doing. Especially due to smells. Now one might argue this isn't really memory that for a memory to be a memory one has to be conscious of this. But this then leads to a kind of unfortunate circularity.
Your other points in (#6) I agree with, although I don't see them impacting upon the issue consciousness. (Beyond saying how consciousness develops but not telling us much about how consciousness emerges or what it emerges out of) At least up to where you say self-consciousness hinges upon language. Depending upon what you mean by language I just can't agree with this. But once again it may depend upon how you define self-consciousness. If consciousness as a possibility were already "there" then I'd agree with you but I just don't see you answering the question of consciousness. Rather I see you address how, given consciousness and its possibility, it develops into the kind of consciousness we have. (This is, I take it, David's point of invoking Nagel - we can talk about how a bat and a human are different but that doesn't address consciousness as such)
The invoking of Hegel is interesting but I think ultimately undermines you approach since of course Hegel was an idealist. He took consciousness as simply inherent in existence. (Well there are some narrower readings that are more nuanced, but the point being that I don't think it resolves much)
Regarding Heidegger I think we agree. (Indeed I was just reading Heidegger on this last night)
Regarding qualia and so forth. If one allows for scholastic realism of a sort then this problem disappears. While Heidegger never invokes this I think he ends up moving in that direction if one reads him as a realist rather than an idealist. Certainly Peirce is a realist of that sort. There are others, such as Armstrong famous kind of realism. If one rejects realism then qualia really poses a big problem. (Even Jaegwon Kim has come to acknowledge this problem)
Regarding David in (#8)
As I may have mentioned (too lazy to look it up) I just don't see evolution entailing compatibilism. I don't. If you think the only way to get agent libertarianism is with some sort of dualism then perhaps I could understand why one would feel that way. But outside of people arguing due to religious commitments it seems to me that most folks arguing for Libertarianism assume it is something inherent in nature.
Regarding John's comment about agency being collective I think he's suggesting that one shouldn't see agency or freedom as something an atomistic entity has. Admittedly that's a common way it's been construed - primarily due to the way Cartesian minds/spirits and Thomists souls are construed. But there's no good reason to assume that in my mind.
Now you may believe that and this may be why you are taking the stances you are. Just be aware that there are lots of other perspectives in the literature - many of which appear to have more strength. (A Cartesian mind/spirit is just inherently problematic in my view - the Thomist soul less so I'll admit)
Regarding John in (#11)
Regarding phenemes and morphemes. I admit that I'm dubious about these except as having pragmatic utility. i.e. so long as we don't push them as being real and lawlike in their nature they're useful to talk about. However I think trying to make them absolute units of language is inherently problematic. I just don't have time to discuss that though.
I completely agree with you about Kant. He tries to have it both ways. The tension ends up making him a de facto compatibilist. Especially given that mechanics and the "outer world" was Newtonian determinism at the time. So he talks a lot about Libertarian free will but can't realize it. I've never understood why people keep appealing to him on this issue.
Clark:
Sorry for throwing everything and the kitchen sink there. Like I said, I tend to want to "round out" my accounts, rather than providing a nice "linear" ordering. But I was basically presenting a garbled version of the theory of neurophysiologist Gerald Edelman, mixed in with my own philosophical confusions, derived mainly here from Whitehead and Wittgenstein, who are touchstones for me rather like your combinations(?) of Peirce and Derrida. (You've convinced me that I need to get much better acquainted with Peirce, though it's not that I've not signally taken note of him before. Derrida, I dunno?)
So I should clarify that "remembered present" account, which desciption I think Edelman lifted straight from Whitehead, tricking it out with empirical explanatory mechanisms. Of course, there are many kinds of neural memory, many of which have nothing to do with consciousness, and even what we think of as conscious memory is never entirely conscious, nor voluntary, as trying to remember something you've forgetten attests. And obviously, the substrate of consciousness is not itself available to consciousness. Further, neural memory is a system property, which means that the adding of further memories changes the system and hence the prior memories: memory is nothing like a photographic record of past events. Edelman speaks of "concepts", as well as, categories structuring consciousness-systems, defining the former as any relation between percepts that is not a percept, and explaining their "value" in terms of allowing some degree of generalized control over interaction with the environment, which is purely a matter of statistical regularities, not necessarily of any "true" causal relations. Both the categories and concepts underlying and structuring a consciousness-system are not conscious because they give rise to consciousness. So I think you misunderstood the point of a "remember present", in that it doesn't involve a conscious comparison of ongoing inputs to categories, but rather the processing of inputs, (which organizes them into various parameters of perception unconsciously, i.e. prior to entry into the level of conscious processes), and their integration with the other sensory modes, and the matching of such inputs with value-categorical and value-conceptual memory, giving rise to conscious "experience". One implication of consciousness being a "remembered present" is that conscious states are always a bit behind real time, and that they tend to deal with ongoing inputs a bit conservatively. The other, still odder implication is that the value-memory basis of consciousness could change, and thereby the consciousness would change, but such change would never be consciously registered. But I think the strength of the Edelman account is that he does't say whether the value-categorical/conceptual structuring of consciousness is anatomically innate, or derived from neural learning/interaction with the environment. I'd conjecture that, as more "sophisticated" mentalities form, the instinctual programs structuring behavior/environmental interaction increasingly come to be internested with neurally/experientially learned behaviors, such that the evolution of fixed instincts come to presuppose the acquisition of neurally learned experience. That goes part of the way toward explaining why I think explaining mentality in neural terms requires an evolutionary background account: the "shape" of such explanations and the explanation of how they came about "must" accord with what "we" experience of and as the mental, and of how that, in turn, shapes our mode of being in the world, of how "we" are, just as such explanations might modify our sense of the mental. (Edelman would latter develop an account of consciousness in terms of a "dynamic core hypothesis", drawing his phenomenological account from James, though I think that that is an extension from further research of his previous conception rather than a complete replacement.)
My attempted account of self-consciousness and the personal sense of self was not an attempt to reduce it somehow to the lingusitic,- (which would form an odd account, in that something equally or more complex would explain something already complex), but rather the point was to differentiate the physical explanation of mentality from the account of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is not, so I claim, just a reflexive consciousness of consciousness, in continuity with the former account, as is often claimed, but a distinct system "housed" in the brain, which is oriented and routed through interaction and communication with others. There are various empirical evidences of a minimal sense of self in other species, such as the mirror recognition test, which suggest some minimal sense of self in other species. But those species that pass the test seem to be mentally advanced and highly social species. (There are counter-examples to my association of mental complexity/"sophistication", such as orangatans, bears, and most felines. Orangatans can be rationalized as on off-shoot of prior primate evolution, isolated for ecological reasons, but not unsociable, but the other cases pose difficulties for such a generalization, if it's not to be anthropomorphic). But this is a matter of "flow charting" the genesis of self-consciousness, and I think the point could be put this way: in advanced social species, (as opposed to gegarious or herd species), the individual organism maps itself onto the hierarchy of the social group, which yields a minimal sense of self, but only with language/communication, and the resort to a relation with others qua other, is it possible for the individual to map the group back onto itself. And that is socialized "self-consciousness". I have no desire to reduce it somehow to a linguistic phenomenon, as if the capacity to process language did not already presuppose high-order mental capacities. But I would emphasize that there is a certain split between socialized self-consciousness and embodied primary-perceptual consciousness, such that we have some difficulty in imagining the latter without the former, and some difficulty in dealing with our embodied selves, as different from just our conscious "mastery" of the same. Though I'm a bit surprised that you don't seem to recognize the Levinasian point that we are always already pre-occupied by the other and others, and that that is part of how we come to be ourselves, as unique or individuated. "The self is a relation which relates itself to itself", yes, but not as "absolute inwardness", but through its "exteriority", through the mediation of its relations with others in and across the world. I think of that as just a primordial fact about the intentionality of our mindedness. Capt. Ahab cursed human interdependency as an evil, but I think of it just as a troublesome fact of life.
The point about Nagel/bats is just that I do think that we possess inferential and analogical capacities, so as to be able to roughly imagine and account for, if not exactly identify with,- (partly because those inferential and analogical abilities are part of what constitutes the mental)- other forms of mentality, and that I don't see how the example constitutes some absolute or irreducible barrier to understanding the issues of what might be involved.
As to Hegel, I do think his conception of recognition, only dimly anticipate by Fichte, and the ensuing "master/slave dialectic" resolved through its internalization as free and equal citizens, is an original and striking conception. But equally, Hegel loses track of that thread by virtue of his systematic imperative to develop his thinking as a conceptual-reflective dialectic, which abstracts from and assimilates the relation to the other. But I wouldn't take his "absolute idealism" in its apparently overblown form. Just as Kant claimed that transcendental idealism is an empirical realism, the corresponding Hegelian claim is that absolute idealism is an objective realism. I think it's useful to look at Hegel's philosophy as an attempt to reconstruct Aristotelian philosophy, in an inevitably somewhat Christianized and modernized/historicized form, precisely on the basis of Kantian "critical" strictures and delimitations.
As for your move toward, "substance dualism" once again, you've lost me. As I noted in a previous thread< I think it broadly reasonable to characterize as "mental", in however stretched a sense or extension, anything that could reasonably be characterized as making a decision. That would require a complex or aggregation of disparate elements into a process and an interaction between different levels, such that something "decides" upon something else. I don't see why that would require different "substances", though I'd guess that I'm following Whitehead's "reform" in thinking in terms of processes rather than substances, which latter would be something of a "grammatical" illusion, though one useful enough in many instances for our purposes to explain its enduring temptation or appeal. I'd hesitate to get involved in any sort of metaphysics, except for heuristic purposes and under faillibilistic premises.
I'm also not sure about your comment or criticism of describing language as digitally encoded in phonemes and morphemes, which is commonplace enough. That's certainly not the whole "story", as I already indicated, in implicit criticism of linguistics. Perhaps it's that any such item actually operates and is only identifiable through fairly complex and emmeshed sets of rules, and that those emmeshed sets of rules must be "ultimately" responsive to the applications of sentences/usages of words in communicative interaction within and across the world. At any rate, I've never been a big fan of the French structuralists, and I've found Wittgenstein's largely implicit account of how language is rule-governed/"structured" far more congenial, especially in its attention to particular complications and in its realistic "spirit", as opposed to grand theoretical overgeneralizations.
I don't have time to respond to everything. So I'll just make one point. I think we have to distinguish between the mental (or reasoning, choosing) and consciousness. Our subconscious is, I believe, fully mental. But it clearly isn't consciousness. I'm not at all satisfied by Peirce's solution to this (which is, I think, a kind of wishful thinking). But I think that consciousness as a kind of clearing for the external world is distinct from thinking.
Now they are related of course.
The figure I find most interesting in all this despite his, many, many, problems is Leibniz. If you've read Heidegger's interesting descontructive reading of Leibniz in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic you'll know where I'm headed. The monads, for all their problem in Leibniz, end up being elements of openness. Since you brought up Whitehead (whom I make no claim of understanding) you'll recall that his metaphysics can be seen as windowed monads - as opposed to Leibniz' windowless ones (with God ensuring that what is in consciousness matches what is outside in reality: the ultimate correspondence theory of truth).
Clark,
I've read nearly everything Dembski has published. I have degrees in related fields (mathematics and computer science); my impression of his work is quite different from yours.
Nevertheless, I go away now.
Jared, do you honestly think the only reason he doesn't get published in peer reviewed journals is because of bias against ID? (My guess is that you do - my feeling is that it is due to the nature of the work)
BIG CAVEAT: I am not a proponent of ID.
SMALLER CAVEAT: I think that evolution provides the best theoretical framework for explaining biological speciation. However two things about evolution trouble me. One, the constant reliance on just-so-stories. Two, the application of evolutionary theory to any domain possible on the thinnest of evidence, i.e. evolutionary psychology and its ilk.
The problem with Dembski is his big mouth. When he laid low and kept his mouth shut he collected a string of advanced degrees from prestigious universities. I would assume that awarding Ph.D.s from these institutions (University of Chicago, Northwestern, Princeton) provides some proof that he's not an idiot and can hold his own in an argument. His original work appears to be in quantification of randomness and design. Had he stuck to that and applied it to non controversial topics he would have done fine and published a lot (again assuming that the Ph.D.s mean something and he applied himself to publishing).
Assuming everything went his way and he was able to establish a non controversial and rigorous quantification of randomness and design he could have then applied it many years later to evolution. Had he done that in a quiet way he could have then had a scholarly and scientific exchange with those working in evolutionary theory. This kind of exchange would have resulted in either a more rigorous quantification of evolutionary theory (good thing) or a challenge to evolutionary theory forcing a re-evaluation/re-formulation/something else of evolutionary theory (good thing).
If things didn't go his way then he would have had to pursue another line of research (good thing).
However he opened his big mouth loudly and way too soon for any of this to have taken place (bad thing). For me, there are two lessons here. One, keep your big mouth shut. Two, unless you are Einstein, don't try to challenge established science unless you play by the rules of current working scientists, pay your dues, and have a rock solid body of non-controversial evidence backing you up.
David, I do agree about there being a lot of handwaving evolutionary explanations. What is speculative but plausible isn't necessarily good science. Unfortunately in some circles there is a lot of this. (cough) Evolutionary Psychology (cough)
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